Summer movie fun . . . or not so much

It's summer movie blockbuster season. That means I get to see lots of superheroes and explosions and car chases.

Actually, that doesn't sound fun to me. I'll try to skip that as much as possible. 

What's more fun for me is seeing depressing movies based on real life. Well, maybe fun isn't quite the right word to describe that either, but it's how I've been preferring to spend my time this summer. Here are the last three movies I went to see:

Fruitvale Station. A young black man goes out to celebrate New Year's Eve and on the way home, he gets killed by a cop for no good reason.

Blackfish. An orca kills three people during the course of its captivity at Sea World, and he and his fellow orcas remain in captivity for no good reason.

Lovelace. A young woman is forced to make porn and gets famous for it, all the while being abused horribly by her scummy manager/husband who has no good reason (except for money, and control, and . . . well, whatever things seem like good reasons to awful human beings).

I recommend all three movies strongly because we all need to take a step back and see the enormous consequences of treating minorities, women, and animals as inferiors or as playthings. No one is anyone else's inferior. No one else is anyone's possession, and no person or animal exists for anyone else's whims and pleasures, or to make us feel better by making us feel superior. 

These seem like such simple concepts to grasp, and yet . . .

I'll Keep You In My Heart for a While (Forever, Actually)

In June 2012, I wasn't at the top of my game. I was dealing with trauma brought about by some abuse in my history, and although I was in therapy and working on being emotionally functional again, I had a lot of work to do on my self-esteem and my ability to find joy in things.

My luck was about to change, though, because I am a librarian and hence I scored a ticket to the final Rock Bottom Reminders at the 2012 American Library Association conference in Anaheim. When you read Hard Listening and the authors tell you about what a perfect night that was ("especially the mistakes" -Dave Barry), believe them, because I was there too and I can confirm it from the audience perspective. It was only the month after Kathi Goldmark passed away but she was there at that concert. You didn't even have to believe in anything supernatural to know that Kathi was there, unless you consider love something supernatural.

I found joy again at that concert and I haven't lost it.

So now it's 2013 and this year the annual ALA conference was in Chicago. I had Hard Listening loaded on my Kindle for the flight and I couldn't put it down the whole time. Stephen King's essay "Just a Little Talent" about his mildly skilled guitar-playing is profound. Amy Tan's "50 Shades of Tan" is another gem. I love her exploration of the evolution of feminist tropes in pop music and the line about her dominatrix "These Books Are Made For Walkin'" act: that it was for all the early rock-era girls whose Princess phones never rang! It was interesting to learn that Matt Groening based the early Simpsons character country singer Lurleen Lumpkin on Kathi Goldmark.

Ridley Pearson's "Green Room" essay offers a loving profile of each member of the band - this is/was a really extraordinary collection of people. At the end, he describes that final concert in Anaheim and mentions a "sobbing girl in the front row." Well, that was me.

The drummer Josh Kelly was kind enough to give me his drumsticks and the set list from the concert at the end of the night. They are now among my most prized possessions (and yes, those are what I'm holding in my photo). I hope they all know how much they healed me. Because I can't be the only one.

By the way, all proceeds from the e-book are donated to covering the late Ms. Goldmark's medical bills.

Being a librarian, now I'm just wondering how libraries could possibly purchase this e-book for their collections so patrons could borrow and enjoy it . . .

Some scattered thoughts on Les Mis (the movie)

I was a true Les Mis freak as a teenager. I was so obsessed with it it probably annoyed my family at times. I've come to terms with the idea that I needn't be so obsessed with any one thing now. But I've seen the stage version five times and underlined my favorite passages in the novel a few hundred more. Not for a while though. Until now, when we finally have the movie musical.

Well, I loved it. I loved Les Mis to death as much as I ever have (and that's a huge freakin' lot). In fact I fell in love with it all over again. And I almost made it to the end but then . . . bam, thank God for my mom's foresight in packing the Kleenex.

It had a couple of nice nods to fans of the stage version and the novel. Colm Wilkinson created the role of Jean Valjean on the West End and Broadway and in the movie he plays the Bishop - cool meta-reflection on the theme of paying good deeds forward. The character of Marius's grandfather, Monsieur Gillenormand, is entirely missing from the stage version (but he did have a duet with Marius in the original French arena version). The novel goes quite a bit into the political conflict between the royalist grandfather and the student rebel. He's still a complete cipher in the movie and anyone who's not read the novel will understandably not really pick up on him, but it was just cool to me that he was there at all. And I don't think anyone's going to argue that the film needed to be any longer. Really, I don't think any other three-hour adaptation in history has ever left out as much from the book, about which I read a critic once claim contains nearly everything a novel can hold. Which it really does. It's a glorious, flawed everything-and-the-kitchen-sink attic treasure trove of a novel.
Anyway, you can probably sense I could go to much greater lengths than this. I'll stop now. Except to say I don't think Russell Crowe was nearly as terrible as everyone's saying he is (and I wasn't pleased when I first heard about that casting). Also, after seeing it on stage five times it's weird that in the movie Jean Valjean doesn't have a beard the whole time. Not that a beardless singing Hugh Jackman is anything I would ever dream of complaining about.

Oh, also, I liked that the film medium allowed the sewers to be so realistically gross. That would have been terribly unkind to a stage crew.