My movie-watching continues to be pretty minimal.  Though this is partly because I’ve had the bad habit of misplacing my netflix dvd’s, thinking I’ve already mailed them, and then finding them days later when I’m wondering why I haven’t had anything in the mailbox lately.  I’ve also had several foreign films lately.  Well, that’s not right.  Actually, I’ve accumulated several foreign films over the last several months that I haven’t gotten around to watching yet.  Right now, sitting, waiting to be seen are Persona, Grand Illusion, Battle of Algiers, and a few others.  I just never feel quite in the mood for them.  My netflix queue promises relief, though.  Miller’s Crossing, the only remaining Coen brothers film I haven’t seen, and The Killing, which is up next in the Filmspotting Classic Heist film marathon.

My netflix queue amuses me.  Coming up now for the most part are movies I put in the queue ages ago.  Next week I’ll probably get In the Name of the Father and My Beautiful Laundrette, both put in months ago when I saw A Room With a View a few months after seeing There Will Be Blood and decided I needed more Daniel Day-Lewis in my diet.  Last month I went through several old noir films when I thought it might be fun to throw some in the queue.  It’s actually kind of a cyclical thing.  I put those noir films in months ago, then after watching The Big Sleep, I went back to the queue and added some more Bogey and Bacall.  So in a few more months I’ll get around to those.  It’s a long queue.

I’ve been doing plenty of reading.  I’m still at work on The Unconsoled.  I believe I’ll finish, but I’m pushing through mostly just to see if Ishiguro’s going to pull a big reveal at the end.  I admit, if he doesn’t, I’ll feel somewhat cheated.  It’s one of the more surreal reading experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m worried that might be all he meant by it.  It feels like a dream.  The main character, Ryder, is a famous pianist coming to an unnamed town for a show.  Except he doesn’t remember coming, he doesn’t remember anything.  He plays along when he talks to people.  And gradually he’ll remember he knows someone, he’ll remember specific things about them.  But it took several chapters for me to realize one of the women he’d encountered was his wife.  I say it feels like a dream because it has so many dream-like qualities.  Being somewhere that is simultaneously unfamiliar and yet you know where you’re going, meeting people you’ve already met but not remembering them, coming up with a backstory in the middle of doing something else, starting in one place and suddenly ending up in another, forgetting what you’d been doing moments before, always being led but never knowing where you’re going.  In some ways things are much clearer now, and yet I still feel mostly lost as I read.  Having read a few other Ishiguro books, I’m banking on the reveal.  There were big reveals in When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go.  In some ways, even The Remains of the Day is one big reveal.  But I’m still skeptical the whole thing is a very long exercise.

I just got through Duma Key, the new Stephen King.  I enjoyed it and made it through pretty quickly.  Lisey’s Story, which I read a couple years ago, remains his best.  I was pretty floored by that book and I didn’t expect Duma to measure up.  It didn’t.  But it does show how far he’s come.  It contains many of the things that bug me about King’s books.  Characters who all share the same little verbal tics and jokey asides, often a total lack of character development.  But I enjoyed how he used art as a device in the book, I loved how he put the pieces together, and you’ve got to give it to the man: he knows suspense.  He did an impeccable job of building so you felt gradually more and more unnerved.  I wouldn’t recommend reading it in the dark.

I read another piece of fluff before that, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult.  I called this research.  Because I’m thinking of comparing myself to Picoult in the eventual query letters I’m hoping to send out should I finish the novel.  (Finished Chapter 7 today.  It was a long time coming.  I’m now at 30,000 words, which means I’m about a third of the way through.)   Her books often involve female characters, she has kind of a formula, inserting multiple parties into controversial situations and covering them from all sides.  I’m planning to get through a couple more of hers, and it’s helpful to see where I fall on the spectrum with her and others like Laura Lippman.  I get annoyed with Picoult’s twists (this is only the second book of hers that I’ve read, but both shared an annoying last-minute twist).  I saw this one coming about a mile away.  Or rather a couple hundred pages away.  One throw-away sentence and I immediately knew what was really up.  Maybe I’m getting too good at this?

Happily, I’ve heard Tana French’s new book is out in the US now.  She wrote In the Woods, which may remain my favorite book so far this year.  Just everything a mystery should be.  I doubt the library will get it in before our vacation in a few weeks, but I can hope.

At my last library trip, I also picked up some Evelyn Waugh and Hunter S. Thompson.  Trying to broaden my horizons and I’ve never read any of either of them.  Another Brian Morton, too.  Hopefully I’ll make some good headway this week.  It’s always a little hard to move into something more substantial after you’ve been playing in the fluff.  Wish me luck.

Right after I finished my last post I immediately felt guilty for not including Lush Life as an obvious candidate for my Best Books list.  So I have to make up for that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been reading a good deal.  I’m realizing I may exceed my goal of 100 books this year by a lot.  It’s looking like I’ll hit 150.  And if you consider that I was working the first few months this year and reading less, well, it may get higher.  This means that my biggest problem is keeping up a list of things to read.  So far I’ve been doing okay.  I’ve added a couple book blogs to my rounds, though, since the NYTBR is sadly lacking in fiction these days.  And they have one reviewer that I just don’t pay attention to at all.

At the used book store the other day, Eric brought in a few boxes and I got to walk away with The Rainbow and Women in Love for free.  I’d been holding out on The Rainbow because I got a copy at a used book store a couple years ago, but I haven’t been able to find it.  I have finally caved, though, with my goal to read more serious literature.  Lawrence is a good place to start.  I shouldn’t really have been as surprised as I was when I read Sons and Lovers and just about fell over.  I’d always heard it was that good, but for some reason I held Lawrence at bay for a long time.  I have a tendency to do this with many things I end up loving dearly.  (Like my Anne of Green Gables books which sat dormant in my teenage room for a good five or six years until I finally read them and kicked myself for taking so long.)

The thing that struck me most about Lawrence was the way he managed to write about women.  More and more lately I’ve been annoyed at the way men write about women or from their point of view.  They so rarely seem to get it at all.  (A recent example, Night Train by Martin Amis was horrifically off.  I’d think the man had never met a woman, only heard about them in books.  She was also supposed to be American but had no grasp of American-isms at all.  I think Mr. Amis should stick to what he knows.)  I’m looking forward to the two I have, though I don’t know how long it will take me to read them.  I read Sons and Lovers on my lunch breaks for a week or so.  (I should say I devoured it.)  I remember how much I looked forward to shutting my door and propping my feet up with that book.

I also read the quite short Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall, which was interesting and dystopian.  I’m a fan of dystopic novels, but they often seem to miss the point.  I think Hall may have had a bit more going on than I had the strength to really delve into, but I enjoyed the book nonetheless.  Today I had another quick one with Curse of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz, which I found on the new book shelf at the library.  It’s a sequel to The Spellman Files, which I read earlier this year and liked.  She’s so peppy and funny, most authors attempting to be snide and funny don’t really nail it, but she does.  Word is there’s a movie, and I just hope they let her do the screenplay.

I am still trudging through the Sopranos.  Or at least attempting.  Technically I have less than two episodes left.  But it feels like so much work just getting through a single episode anymore.  I expect it to take quite a while.

As for the movies, we’ve been going quite a lot.  A nice extravagance since things are a little less tight money-wise these days.  And both Eric and I enjoy the actual act of going to the theater.  I’ve been letting Eric make our picks, as you can tell from my Movie List link.  (He did NOT accompany me to see Miss Pettigrew.  That was girls only.)  The summer is a rough time for the arthouse patron.  Not much good stuff comes out since they have to squeeze into the multiplexes and are usually shoved out.  So far, none of it has been too terrible, though most of it hasn’t quite been good.  To be fair, Eric was going to see Redbelt with me, the new Mamet film, but we didn’t get a chance to.  Today we wanted a little night out but didn’t want to see any of the big films.  Instead, we went to The Fall, which I’d heard was good but didn’t look much like my thing.  I thought Eric would like it, though, since it looked very visual.  We both liked it more than expected.  I’m usually not much for big visual grandeur movies, I get bored.  But this one managed to get me.  Largely on the strength of the two main characters.  (The little girl got me so bad that now I want all my children to have cute little Russian accents and speak in pidgin English.)  I knew the man’s name right away, I’d looked him up on IMDb for something else and it bugged me the whole movie.  Now I know that it was the guy from Miss Pettigrew, who I found quite charming, and that he was also in Infamous, my preferred Truman Capote movie.  Goodness.  And he’s also the main guy in Pushing Daisies, which everyone has been trying to get me to watch and which I’ve held off on because I’m not much for whimsy, but now I think I’ll have to do it.  He’s quite good.  (His name’s Lee Pace, btw.)

Now I must get back to trudging my way through The Unconsoled, an Ishiguro I’ve meant to read for ages but that’s turning out to be a bit of a slog.

I finally finished Ada !  One thing I noticed as soon as I started reading it was that I started seeing it referenced all the time, and generally in a negative way.  And yeah, I kind of have to agree.  I could tell Nabokov imagined this whole world, that in his head it was something massive.  But on the page it feels like you keep missing the rest of the story.  Like the whole thing is connected to some other book that you never read, or like Nabokov is in on some joke that the rest of us don’t know.  It, more than any other book of his I’ve read so far, definitely betrayed his style: to plan his books on hundreds and hundreds of index cards.

It’s a sign of how things have gone so far this year that Ada will not make my Top Books of 2008 list.  But one that will is one I just finished, Popco by Scarlett Thomas.  The recommendation came from Bookslut, a book blog I frequent. Sometimes their taste is a bit too obscure for me (the one that comes to mind is The Thin Place, which I read on their recommendation a couple years ago and didn’t like much) but this one was a joy.  It’s like someone sat down and thought of a book that would make me turn my head and go, “Oo, that sounds interesting.”  They had no other purpose, just to make me very involved.  Me, no one else.  Popco is about a woman who works for one of these new-age toy companies and it involves, among other things, codes and ciphers, secret treasure, neat ideas for toys that I would have loved, crazy marketing campaigns, intrigue and secrets galore, and also manages to look really thoroughly about the strangeness of what it’s like to grow up as a girl.  While I think the ending tied things up a bit succinctly, I do have to admire that there’s a bibliography with a bunch of other books to read about codes and such.  I am kind of thinking I may start leaving Eric coded messages now that I know bunches of different ways how, some of which involve rather complicated math.  So far, it is one of the few guaranteed to make my end of year list.  (The only other sure-things are In the Woods and Howard’s End.  Also with a good shot is A Clockwork Orange, which I just read for the first time.  Turned out to be very easy in audio form, I’d never been able to get through the slang otherwise.  But having a reader made it much easier to understand.)

I’m not quite sure which big challenging book I will tackle next.  There are so many to consider.  I may also wait until my next class starts.  Reading Ada in small chunks was helpful.

I am still trudging towards the end of The Sopranos.  I am so looking forward to it being over.  I have 3 episodes left, so I feel like I’m too close to quit now.  But still.  Last episode there was a car accident.  These people have more car accidents than anyone ever.  Whenever things get boring, there’s a car accident.  And then, wait for it, let’s have Tony tripping on peyote for 15 minutes.  What are these people thinking?

I’m about to watch the third Prime Suspect, which I like quite a lot.  I went in search of other Brit tv only to find that 99% of it is mysteries.  There were too many and I eventually quit looking.  Overwhelmed.

I waited for the end of the season to start Gossip Girl, so I could get through it quickly.  Blah.  It has so much potential, but they really blow it.  I expected it to be much more scandalous, but instead it plays out like a teen drama from the suburbs half the time.  So boring.  And then they take plot lines with great potential and drop them flat.  (Hello?  You gave us the reason Nate’s trust fund was drained way too quickly and easily.  Don’t you people know how to really work this stuff?  Goodness.)  I want way more nastiness.  And less adults.  Unless you make them slightly more dimensional.  (Exception was the episode with Blair’s dad and his gay lover.  That one I liked.)  Very disappointed, especially with all the talk I’d heard.

Should be more movies soon.  I’ve got bunches of good ones waiting.

I actually followed through.  I have started reading Ada, and have made enough headway that I am confident I’ll see it through.  It’s very strange to read Nabokov again after such a long hiatus.  He has so little of what I generally look for in modern fiction.  He cares much more for specific little things than the bigger bits of fiction.  For example, the main plot in Ada involves an incestuous relationship.  And I read an interview where Nabokov said this wasn’t because of any particular interest in sex, but in the potential words he could use and their relationship.  Sibling, sable, bloom, etc.  This is typical, I suppose, but still something to get used to.  I’m not the type to really fall into these wordplays.

I also haven’t read most of Nabokov’s fiction.  So my view is definitely slanted.  But there are things I definitely like.  I am often annoyed at the portrayal of women by men in fiction, particularly women they love or lust after.  Everything is beautiful to them.  But a beloved girl in Nabokov, well, she doesn’t have cute bad habits but actual bad ones.  And not one that has to do with a plot at all.  Nabokov’s women and girls read like actual women and girls, which is one thing I’m always picky about.  Still, I know a lot of women have a hard time with Nabokov.  It’s hard not to with Lolita.  But now that I’m reading Ada, which also involves a sexual relationship with a young girl (the boy is quite young as well) I think there’s something he addresses through these relationships.  Basically, that innocence is not the same as sexual innocence or experience.  That there is something separate and different between the two.  And in the playful child scenes in Ada, that certainly seems to be true.  Lolita, of course, was about a girl who was never innocent, even before she was involved in anything sexual.  (Or at least, that’s what Humbert thinks.)

Nabokov definitely seems to court trouble with his subject matter.  Then again, I don’t know that this is really his goal.  While it’s still early in the novel, I have figured out that the narrative structure is quite crazy.  There seem to be two authors who occasionally trade off and will leave notes for one another through the text.  And it’s in a parallel universe without electricity and where there’s this weird US-Russia conglomerate.

More to follow when I actually get through it.  But I just had to pat myself on the back.  It wasn’t easy to start.  (The first few chapters, I have now found from a quick internet search, are deliberately difficult.  Made me feel better because I was very lost.)

I wanted to write another random what-I’m-doing-now post and in considering the title I thought, “I bet miscellanea is a word and if it is, it would be the right title.”  Turns out it is a word with the correct definition.  Love the internet.

I think I’ve referenced a few times that I’ve made efforts to get into The Sopranos and it’s never really worked out.  I finally made it through Season 1 and now I’ve finally settled in.  The first season is pretty slow, there’s not a lot of arc from episode to episode, but near the end stuff actually happened, which was a nice change.  Now I’m on Season 3 and I’ve figured out why people like it so much.  Each season some random new characters enter the show, and it’s up to you to figure out which of them will get whacked and why and when before the season is up.  This doesn’t mean it’s my new favorite show.  It still has many of the same problems.  For example, I still don’t know the name of one of the main characters even though it’s been three seasons.  It took me the whole first season to figure out the other one was named Paulie.  And it only gets worse when they introduce a handful of new mobsters each new season.  Where did these new guys come from?  How come I never saw them before?  Why don’t you just tell me what their names are and how they fit in instead of making me spend all season figuring it out?  At least the FBI has a nice little map with pictures and names, that would be helpful.  I must say, though, one of the recent episodes I watched, Employee of the Month, may possibly be the most affecting hour of television I’ve ever seen.  (Partly because it wasn’t all about the mobsters.)

In reading news, I’m motivated to read more and am going to the library today to pick up some new blood.  And probably to finally drop off a couple I haven’t managed to get through even though it’s been a few months.  Before I go, though, I’ll have to finish Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron, simply because I’m only 20 pages from the end.  I haven’t liked it, though.  I heard that it was one of the great mid-century novels, but I guess I forgot that mid-century novels have this tendency to be all about depression and suicide and melancholy and alcoholism.  And it is.  Very little happens, though a suicide starts the book, and then the main character spends the whole time thinking back to other times in his life, but it turns out he wasn’t happy in any of those times, either.  I got it because I read Sophie’s Choice, also by Styron, a couple years ago and loved it insanely.  But Sophie’s Choice actually had a plot, it wasn’t just about some guy in some kind of existential crisis who then through his misery made everyone else miserable.  But I’m going to finish it because I’ve invested too much time for it not to make my book list.

As for audio books, I recently finished Goodnight, Nobody by Jennifer Weiner.  I have never read any Weiner and it turns out I had a good justification for doing so.  I read this one because it’s a mystery and I thought it may be the kind of fluff that you want in between the big heavy stuff now and then.  Turns out, no.  Definitely fluff.  But fluff usually has a main character who you actually like.  I hated the main character.  She was always way over the top clumsy and awkward, so much so that it made no sense.  I could tell it was just Weiner trying to be “funny.”  Didn’t work.  She was this mother whose husband had moved the family out to Connecticut in one of those rich suburbs.  And she didn’t seem to like her children, didn’t seem to like her husband, and had the most obnoxious best friend ever.  And again, Weiner seemed to think we’d all find this best friend charming and awesome.  Wrong.  She met the main character because they were both taking a proofing test for a job and the friend kept talking and wouldn’t shut up and convinced our heroine to ditch the job interview.  And later after best friend slipped a guest some Ecstasy at our heroine’s big party, instead of our heroine getting really mad at her, she just got upset about how her party was ruined and sat there while her husband yelled at her for ruining the party.  Made no sense.  The husband also seemed like a gigantic jerk who she never should have married in the first place.  I thought, you know, I guess a book can be about anyone, I like books about different kinds of people and there are definitely people with miserable marriages.  However, they don’t belong in fluff.  Save it for the big important books.  It isn’t jaunty enough for the light stuff.

Now that I’m through that, I’m on my last audiobook from this round of library checking out.  It was a risky gamble, but my library doesn’t have many audiobooks and if you don’t reserve any you’re stuck with what’s there.  So I got The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.  Even though I read about a hundred pages a few years ago and hated it.  I have this unnatural hatred for Franzen and I thought finally getting through it would help me either have merit for my hatred or get over it.  The first disc was very tough.  But I think I’ll get through it.  Partly I got it because Dylan Baker was reading it and I know from a previous audiobook that he is an excellent audiobook reader, even when the text is quite complicated and there are many characters.  I’m several discs in now and Franzen has laid off a little bit.  But still.  He’s just so excessive.  He’s overly descriptive and he always sounds condescending, even when read by someone as non-condescending as Baker.  I don’t mind books that use big words I don’t know, Michael Chabon does that often and he’s one of my favorite authors.  But his books are good and I learn from them.  With Franzen I can’t help but feel like he sat there and threw in a bunch of nasty words on purpose to be snobbish instead of because they were the best descriptions.  He seems especially fond of the word “corpuscular” and it never seems to be used in just the right way.  And his similes are really pushing it.  Similes can really bug me in a novel, they’re the reason I hated Memoirs of a Geisha, the narrator would make these crazy similes that didn’t even make sense and were far beyond her experience or education.  The only one that sticks out in my mind from Franzen right now is something like, “She ran her tongue along under her upper lip like a cat beneath blankets.”  What??  This does not give me a more full view of what’s happening.  And I’ve found this to be true of most of his similes.  And then there’s the fact that I hate all the characters.  Again, forgivable, and much more allowable in a big ambitious book.  But still, it’s hard for me to see what this is driving at.  Yes, it’s certainly big, ambitious, and intelligent.  But I think it could have been such a tidier novel.  It’s too big and too intelligent, it is as snobbish as its characters.  I don’t really get why everyone loves it so much.  I’m going to finish it and we’ll see if there’s some masterful ending that finally convinces me to sing its praises, but for now I’ll stay in the minority of anti-Franzen-ites.

My trip to the library is this afternoon and hopefully I’ll stock up on some better stuff.  I need it.  My book list is pitiful and needs some help.

I don’t do as well these days at keeping up with the news. So it was only by chance that I found out that Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri has decided to publish Nabokov’s last unfinished novel. I’d been keeping up on the story from some articles on Slate about the ongoing crisis. (In the little summary of links I just linked to, the author then boldly tries to take credit for getting the guy to make up his mind, which strikes me as incredibly presumptuous.)

The news has finally become official and I’m very pleased. It was quite the dilemma. Nabokov had specifically asked that the novel be burned. And while I understand the sentiment, I can’t help but want more Nabokov.

However, this inevitably makes me feel guilty. I haven’t even read Ada, which I’ve often heard is his best work. And since it seems like everyone these days puts Lolita on their best-books-list, it’s not like that’s enough to really get Nabokov anymore. Though, in my defense, I have read Pale Fire, Speak Memory and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. I must get on that. It’s going on my library reserve list right away. Perhaps I’ll be sufficiently guilted into reading it.

I read In Cold Blood in college, without any understanding of its place in the literary pantheon or who Truman Capote was. I remember not having much of an opinion about it, my guess is that I went through it relatively quickly waiting for something that wasn’t there. But recently I’ve wanted to re-read it, now that I actually know something about the context. I especially thought so after seeing both Capote and Infamous, which came out a couple of years ago.

I ended up listening to the audiobook of In Cold Blood during my drives for a couple of weeks. This time I felt a much deeper connection with the book and liked it immensely. I tend to fill my time with a lot of books involving crime in some way, and I rarely come across one that covers the subject so thoroughly or leave such a heavy impact. (I must also say that I am relieved that our legal world has moved forward in the last 50 years. These days, preaching a sermon for a closing argument is an automatic reversal, no matter how backwater you are.)

After reading, I decided to do another revisitation and re-watch both the movies. They were released several months apart to try and relieve some of the Two-Truman-Capote-Movies tension. It wasn’t successful. Capote came out first, Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar, and by the time Infamous came out no one paid it much attention. My memory was that Capote was a mediocre film and Infamous a much better one, but I thought since a decent amount of time had passed I would do better judging them back to back.

Capote is a mediocre film. Granted, Hoffman’s Capote is a fuller portrait, more than just an imitation. There’s little to criticize in him, though his physical differences do leave something to be desired. I normally don’t mind having actors with different body types in biographical roles, but when the person is practically defined by their very small stature, it’s odd to have a burly guy like Hoffman, even when he’s lost a lot of weight. All the acting in Capote is lovely, Catherine Keener especially, but also Chris Cooper doing his stoic thing and Clifton Collins Jr., who plays Perry Smith. But it’s just so solemn. The score really doesn’t help, if anything I found it distracting in its imposed gloom. There are two main problems, though. The direction lacks, well, direction. It never finds a good balance. But I think the writing is the bigger problem. The script tries to incorporate this gigantic story, but to focus on how the whole thing really destroys Capote. Every bit of the plot moves towards that end. Sure, there are significant subplots, like the one where Capote has to convince Smith to tell him about the murders. But the script so wants to make Capote a tragic figure that everything else just falls by the wayside. I just want to yell at the screen, “I get it! He’s miserable! Move on already!”

Also this film had many substantial deviations from the real story. For example, two close friends of Nancy Clutter, the girl in the murdered family, play significant roles in the book. One is Bobby Rupp, Nancy’s boyfriend, and the other is her close friend Sue Kidwell. But the movie calls them Danny Burke and Laura Kinney. At first I thought maybe the book changed their names since they were only teenagers at the time, but a quick internet search shows that Capote used their real names. There doesn’t seem to be much of a point in changing them. And I can’t understand why they legally wouldn’t be able to use their names.

The largest change was one that bothered me a lot. The murderers, Smith and Hickock, both confessed shortly after their arrests, before they arrived in Kansas in custody. Their confessions were used in the trial, and I don’t doubt that they were covered in all depth. But the film makes a major plot point out of Capote trying to get Smith to describe the murders to him, and presents it as if Capote knows hardly anything about the actual events. In actuality, he would have known already what Smith said. His confession as given in the book is quite detailed. And while I can understand wanting to hear it again for your own purposes, it felt too heavy-handed, which was my problem with the film in general.

As for Infamous, I think it’s probably the film Capote himself would have preferred, though I doubt he would have liked much how both the films show him in a tragic light. There is a lot of overlap, and some scenes in the two films are nearly identical. But I always prefer the ones in Infamous when these similarities happen. Infamous is a very different film, and it takes some big risks with its style. They don’t always work, but I appreciate the effort. The film starts with Capote and a friend watching a song in a club, where Gwyneth Paltrow basically sums up the entire film in one minute. It shouldn’t work, but it really does. Throughout the film, Capote’s closest friends comment to the camera, documentary style. This is less successful in terms of continuity–the rest of the film isn’t a documentary at all–but it much better acquaints you with the man and those around him. He gets to feel more like a full person.

Toby Jones, who plays Capote in Infamous, doesn’t have the subtleties and nuances of Hoffman. But he doesn’t feel like a man trying to do a spot-on impression. Instead, he focuses more on Capote’s attitude and in some ways it feels more genuine. Often, though, it can get a little one-note. (I love Toby Jones, though. He was very good in two other films I enjoyed recently, The Painted Veil and The Mist. Totally different movies, but he’s solid.) Still, physically he is perfect for the part and has a strong resemblence to Capote. You really believe it when people call him “ma’am.”

Sandra Bullock plays Harper Lee, replacing Catherine Keener. I like both performances, though Bullock gets a lot more to work with and her accent is very soft and down home. You also get a slight peek at her own tragedy in Infamous, which is missing in Capote, where her successes are more of the focus.

The main risk of Infamous, though, isn’t a stylistic one but the plot. Reading In Cold Blood you cannot help but notice that Capote obviously cares deeply for Perry Smith. Hickock’s point of view comes up only occasionally. Smith and Capote had similar childhood sadnesses and you can see how the two would bond. Infamous takes it a step farther and posits a romantic relationship between them. It’s not that hard to imagine from the book. There are hints here and there about Smith’s indeterminate sexuality, and Capote’s was well known. The scenes between Capote and Smith sometimes feel over the top, but they’re vivid. Daniel Craig, aka James Bond, plays Smith in this film and gets just what the script is getting at. When their relationship settles down into friendship and longing, you really see it in both characters.

Infamous suffers from some of the same inconsistencies. The reenactment of the murders isn’t right at all. (In fact, they follow Smith’s first confession where he pins two of the shootings on Hickock instead of his second where he admits to all four, which the book proposes as the correct one.)  Smith’s family history completely omits that his mother was Native American and deliberately leaves out his sister who killed herself.  It also never mentions why he walks funny, but takes pains to show us how he walks funny.  Smith and Hickock are sent to prison before their trial, taking away some prime potential storytelling since Smith’s cell was in the Sheriff’s kitchen.  Like Capote, it really skims over any investigation and gives Capote himself far too much credit for interpreting clues at the crime scene. But it also opens up a wider door, showing how Capote took the facts and bent them to suit his needs.

Mostly, Infamous is more fun and more interesting. It manages to cover the same tragedy that Capote is so concerned with, but actually fully imparts it to you without having to resort to overtly sad music. The hanging of the killers, shown in both films, really hits the details in Infamous and is better (or worse, depending on your stomach for such things) for it. And Infamous gives a better look at Capote’s New York life. He had his own little circle of rich Park Avenue wives that he constantly gossiped with, and it’s his visits with them where you get to see Truman Capote as he presented himself to the world. It’s an essential part of the story. It’s up to the viewer to mix that part with the parts he exposes to his lover, his friend Harper Lee, and the killers themselves to see something of the full person and Infamous simply presents every one of those sides more fully. The story is ultimately about the conflict between those sides, so this is simply the better approach.

I shouldn’t play up Infamous too much. I definitely have quibbles and criticisms. It feels a little bit too jumpy between Kansas and New York. But ultimately I enjoy too much watching Capote chat with Sigourney Weaver, Hope Davis, Juliet Stevenson, and Isabella Rossellini to bother picking at the problems. Also, the jokes in this one are funnier.

I’m considering looking at some of Capote’s writing beyond In Cold Blood. Perhaps Other Voices, Other Rooms. Definitely not Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’ve never cared much for the movie and I’m not sure I could find the motivation to plow through the book. Then again, I’m having trouble with reading in general these days so maybe I should wait a while.

I posted about a day too soon last time. Not only did I get my filmspotting appearance, but yesterday my podcast was released on Books You Should Read. It’s run by Simply Syndicated, a group of Brits who put out a number of podcasts, including my favorite, Movies You Should See. BYSR is their newest podcast and it’s all listener contributions, meaning you can record your own podcast and send it in. Shortly after I started my new life of leisure, I decided it would be a fun thing to do. But I wasn’t pleased enough with most of the recent books I’d read to devote a bunch of time talking about them. Right around then I finished listening to I Am Charlotte Simmons, which I’d read before and enjoyed a lot. I thought that was almost a good podcast, but that for me, a girl who went to the Stone Cold Sober college to talk about a book all about college debauchery may not be the best fit. So instead I picked one I read slightly before that, also by Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full. Mostly I just think Tom Wolfe is overlooked by those who didn’t catch on in the 70’s or 80’s to how great he is. And A Man in Full may well be his best book. So I put together my podcast, which is more work than you’d expect, recorded it, edited out all the strange sounds I made, and sent it in. I was shocked when it was posted just the other day.

To check it out (it’s only 20 minutes) go to the Books You Should Read website to download the mp3. Also available through iTunes, go to the Podcast directory and search Simply Syndicated. On iTunes it’ll be easiest to find on Simply Hear, the Simply Syndicated podcast that has all their shows as they come out.

As for how things have been going lately, I’m still not reading as much as I’d like. I feel like so far my year hasn’t had a whole lot of great new discoveries. Both my Tom Wolfe books were re-reads, so they don’t really count. I loved Richard Price’s new book, think it’s his best since Clockers. I just finished Then We Came to the End, which was the NY Times best book of 2007. I have to disagree. It’s a great book, really amazing for a first novel, and one of the only books I can ever remember that’s narrated in the first person plural. However, while it captured so much of the randomness of office life, I don’t know that I’d call it the best book of 2007. A good one, certainly, but I think it was a bit overpraised. For me it had the unfortunate distinction of being finished just after Howards End, which was just beautiful.

I saw the movie of Howards End, but my first introduction to the story was actually On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which is a giant homage to Howards End. I really loved the book, enough that I decided I needed to read Howards End… but then got distracted. I’m glad I finally got around to it, and I’m going to have to re-read On Beauty now to see how I feel about it after reading Howards End. It was funny to read because I remembered only a few important plot points and forgot most of them. I remembered most of the ending, and so I spent most of the book trying to figure out how on earth the characters would get from where they were to where they’d end up. But I did love it passionately. I listened to it as an audiobook and would always feel choked up when I listened, especially once I hit about halfway through. It showed the weakness of movie adaptations. In the movie, when Margaret decided to marry Mr. Wilcox, I thought she was crazy. But through the book I understood all her decisions perfectly.

I admit, I’m not quite sure what Forster is getting at. I can’t decide whether there’s legitimate societal commentary in the book or whether he’s actually decided to have none whatsoever. I tend to lean towards the latter. Mostly I enjoy his characters, who all feel very real and full of surprises. I suppose I’ll now have to read A Passage to India. (A Room With a View, which is what finally convinced me to read Howards End, as a movie is far too recent in my mind.)

When I’ll fit this in I’m not sure. Because not only do I have an ambition to read better fiction, I’m trying to squeeze in some non-fiction. In class I’ve been reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. It’s pretty massive, but I’m a good way through, we’re deep in the Civil War now and I’ve learned so much. Especially of interest was the crazy convention that got Lincoln elected against huge odds. And I thought politics today was nuts. It’s somewhat comforting to know there’s always been the craziness and backstabbing. Mostly I go back and forth from being hugely impressed by Lincoln to really frustrated that they have lost yet another opportunity to win the war. The book focuses more on Lincoln and his cabinet, and I wish there was a little more analysis on why Lincoln chose the generals he did, because they certainly seem to be gumming up the works as much as is humanly possible. Still, I guess there are about a million Civil War books out there if I really want to know.

After that, I finally got from the library My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams. It’s next on my list and I’m very excited to read it. Adams has always been my favorite founding father, with Madison in 2nd. While we were in San Diego our hotel had HBO and I watched a few bits of the John Adams miniseries, which mostly impressed me with how hugely boring it was. It just made me want to watch 1776, the musical about the Declaration of Independence. It’s one of my favorites of all musicals, but a lot of people haven’t heard of it and it’s always made me feel like a big dork that I like it so much. But I have been validated. The NYTimes review of John Adams also noted that they liked the guy who played Adams in 1776 better, too. Some wonderful soul has posted bits on youtube. So if you are unexposed, you can go here to watch a video of one of my favorite parts. I need to move 1776 up in my queue otherwise I’ll just be annoyed the whole time I read the book.

As for my netflix queue, it is steadily growing. Yesterday I watched The TV Set, a movie about making pilots in Hollywood, which made me think that I should re-watch The Player, another great Hollywood movie. Watching Goodfellas last week, which I found rather lacking given its hype, I figured I should watch Heat and Casino. At this rate, I will never get through them all. 68 and counting…

Lately I find myself unable to write posts about any one particular thing.  Instead I have to write about 10 things at once in little blurbs.  I’m not sure why this is.  But here’s what I’ve been reading and watching and thinking lately.

Last night Eric had a meeting that lasted so long that I was able to watch an entire Merchant Ivory film and have a little time to spare.  I watched A Room With a View, one of those movies I’ve postponed for no real reason for years.  And watching it, I got that feeling of nostalgia a lot like the one I got from I Capture the Castle.  The feeling that my sixteen-year-old self would have Adored this movie (Adored with a capital A).  That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy it as my current self.  I liked it quite a lot.  But I could see just how much younger me would have swooned over it.  And I wish I could have taken it back to her.  After all, it was around when she was only 6, it wasn’t like it wasn’t accessible.  Still, my sixteen year old self probably wouldn’t have found appropriate the scene where three naked men run around a pond over and over.  She found nudity very troubling and distracting from the story.  I have lightened up, though, and thought the scene pretty hilarious and while unexpected, fitting with the story.

And can I say how strange it was to see such a young Helena Bonham-Carter?  I’m so used to seeing her in her more recent roles.  I’m glad she still gets work, but she does tend to like the dark stuff, doesn’t she?  Here she was all scrubbed and sweet, like Daisy Miller or something.  (The whole thing was a lot like Daisy Miller, except British and romantic.)   Her voice was high and young and so different from that throaty voice she has now.  But I thought she was marvelous, I must say.  In looking through the various awards and nominations it received, I think she was criminally overlooked.

After watching it, I was so sad to see it was over that I went to the computer, pulled up the library catalog, and immediately reserved Howard’s End on audio.  I’ve seen the movie and wanted to read the book, especially since I read On Beauty last year and loved it so much.  (On Beauty is basically a big homage to Howard’s End.)  And since I’m going to need lots of audiobooks in the future, it seemed like a good one.  (My new job has a significant commute a couple days a week.  Lots of audiobooks will be heard.)

One of the podcasts I listen to, Filmspotting, is having an Almodovar marathon and I’m following along.  It gives me the chance to see some of his older films that I’ve never seen.  Last week I watched The Flower of My Secret.  I enjoyed it a lot, though it doesn’t quite reach the level of his later films.  The last 4 have been completely phenomenal.  This week is Live Flesh, another I haven’t seen.  I probably won’t re-watch All About My Mother, I’ve seen it several times.  But I will definitely rewatch Bad Education and Volver if they get into the marathon.  I may even pull out my old VHS of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! since most of his early stuff hasn’t made it to DVD yet.

My current audiobook from Audible is Lush Life by Richard Price.  I think Price is great, truly a master of the real gritty urban novel.  Normally I’m not much for grit, but Price’s characters are pitch perfect.  Clockers is most likely his best and most famous, though I liked Freedomland and Samaritan a lot, too.  Lush Life is his newest book and while it covers familiar territory–kids from the projects, cops, a murder investigation–it also takes a different look at things.  The book is in large part about gentrification of sorts, a neighborhood on the lower east side of Manhattan, near the projects, where young hipsters are starting to take over from the immigrants that used to make up the area.  Having never really been a hipster myself (hipsters don’t allow you to join their crew if you have an advanced degree in something practical) I am enjoying the knocks they’re taking in Price’s book.  It’s not that Price really seems to hate them, but he’s certainly harder on them than some of his other characters.  I read one criticism that said the book had too many characters, and I agree to an extent.  The audiobook requires strict attention.  If I tune out for a couple seconds, I could be in a completely different story than I was moments ago.  But I like all the different points of view Price offers.  I like how he doesn’t treat his cops as saints.  Another review I read compared him to Tom Wolfe, and I think it’s a fitting comparison.  They both have a real eye for people, places, and language.  Price doesn’t have the comedic elements that Wolfe does, his satire is much more reigned in, and their subject matter differs.  But I enjoy their books for many of the same reasons.

On a side note, the reader of Lush Life, Bobby Canavale, isn’t an audiobook reader but a legit actor.  The reader of my last audiobook, I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, was another actor, Dylan Baker.  Both are really great and I’m enjoying them thoroughly.  Sometimes the professional book readers get a little boring.  Both these guys have kept me very in the story.Hopefully my upcoming free time will give me time to read my big book, Team of Rivals, about Lincoln.  I need more nonfiction.  But I admit it’s intimidating when the book is so fat.  Definitely going to have to renew this one before I finish it.

Watched Half Nelson last week.  Expected to like it much more than I did.  Didn’t like it much.  I’m tiring of meandering Indies.  Also watched Syriana, which led me to the conclusion that Clooney won an Oscar for his beard and gut.  That and that everybody really liked Good Night and Good Luck.  The Academy has a tendency to reward people after the fact when they’re not quite as deserving.  (Case in point: Russell Crowe winning Best Actor for Gladiator the year after he lost for The Insider.)  The one thing that drove me crazy was that the subtitle weren’t working.  So I didn’t understand any of the many Arabic scenes.  I’m assuming this was our mistake, since I haven’t seen any references in reviews to the scenes not being translated.

I miss Veronica Mars.  Since ending, I’ve been stuck watching Dexter.  Also a good show, but not as consistently enjoyable to watch.  Sure, it’s better than 90% of what’s on tv, but I still think it has flaws.  Am looking forward to regular television coming back on.  If it weren’t for Lost, I’d be dying.
I’m about to have a lot of time on my hands and I’m not sure how I’m going to use it yet.  I’m not sure quite how I’ll be organizing my time and how much reading and watching will be squeezed in.  I guess I’ll start figuring it out soon.

I finished Priest, which was okay, and Pyres, which was better but got too violent and ended up not being all that character-driven.  Pyres is my favorite of the debuts I’ve read and Down River is my favorite of the Best Novel category.

Perhaps it isn’t such a good idea to read 4 mystery novels in one weekend.  Last night, after eating something that didn’t agree with me, I had very vivid dreams.  One of which involved Ulrich Muhe, the deceased German actor (he’s one of the non-bad guys in Funny Games), hunting down Eric and I and killing us.  And then doing it again the next day.  And the next.  I’m not sure how we managed to be reanimated each day, but we were.  And then he’d come back for us again.  Finally after several days of this I decided I may need to talk to someone about it, so I told my mother but she didn’t believe me.  I don’t know if it was the food or the books, but I think each one contributed.

Finally, Eric and I saw Salman Rushdie speak yesterday.  He was delightful.  It was a really intelligent conversation about literature, and he was frequently hilarious.  It made me want to go back to college and sit in my literature classes soaking up the words of a really excellent instructor.  Is it sad that this is what I think of as fun?

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