LIGHT FARE
With hurricane Irma on our minds and the strange anticipation of not knowing what its track will be—will we just get rain or will we be wiped out—it’s time for some diversion. Here are two recommended films, one fun, the other sobering, and two books, both easy on the brain.
BIG SCREEN
Watching this film is an emotionally battering experience. It’s excellent, but challenging. Told mostly from the perspective of an individual unnamed soldier, it lacks a traditional narrative arc. Instead, the film focuses on three fields of battle, the beach or mole where 300,000 British troops are hemmed in and trapped, the air following three fighter pilots, and the sea with endless scenes of watery graves, fires, and a desperate struggle to survive. There is one story line that epitomizes what made Dunkirk especially memorable and that is the father and son, ordinary citizens, who were among the volunteers who took their personal boats and bravely rescued soldiers from the sea.
The title of this film was almost enough to put me off seeing it, but it got such rave reviews, we did go. It’s a very good film. Kumail, an aspiring stand-up comedian, who happens to be Pakistani, meets and falls in love with an American woman. Meanwhile his mother keeps inviting potential Muslim wife candidates to drop by at family dinners. When Emily ends up in the hospital, Kumail must interact with her skeptical parents. I don’t care for stand-up comedy and found the first fifteen minutes of the film not to my liking, but then got into it. It’s funny, believable, and complex all at the same time.
ON THE PAGE
The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis
This is a fast-paced coming of age story set in Manhattan at the famed Barbizon Hotel for Women. Darby arrives there in 1952 from small town Ohio while in 1916 Rose lives there in a refurbished condo with her successful and rich boyfriend. Darby is a Katie Gibbs “girl”, but through a strange twist of events ends up never marrying and is still living there. A journalist, Rose has had career issues. When boyfriend Griff decamps back to his ex-wife and kids, she is stuck and becomes obsessed with the mystery surrounding Darby McLaughlin. The period detail is great, the story fanciful with attributes of a fairy tale, but overall, it’s great escapism! (~JW Farrington)
Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler
Thanks to my friend Bonnie who reads a different Anne Tyler novel every summer, I purchased this new one. It’s a contemporary re-telling of The Taming of the Shrew and is humorous and fun. The writing sparkles and you can’t help but be caught up in this eccentric family and its detailed rules for living. Scientist father Louis Battista routinely forgets his lunch and expects it to be delivered to his lab, younger sister Bunny is light on brains, but attracted to Edward, her supposed Spanish tutor, while prickly, blunt-spoken Kate makes a week’s supply of meat mash for their nightly dinners. When her father cooks up the idea that Kate should marry his foreign lab colleague, Pyotr, so he can stay in the U.S., their joint campaign tests her mettle. This book is one in the Hogarth Shakespeare series of his plays retold by noted novelists of today. (~JW Farrington)
Cover photo: Sunrise over the bay ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).
