Bookpusher

Give me another week; my hell should be over by then.

In the meantime, I ran across this article in today’s Kansas City Star. My advice would be to have this article ready at hand when your boss catches you reading “Deathly Hallows” in your cubicle at work.

What’s your favorite method of procrastination?

Me? I’ve read two books (the Chabon and Lee Child’s “Running Blind”) while my summer semester assignments are looming.

The blog’s suffered, as I’m in the middle of summer semester at school (taking classes on back-to-back weekends was a bad idea) and the in-laws are in town. Somewhere in the middle of all this I got a hold of Chabon’s newest and have been tearing through it at roughly the same speed that Paula Abdul goes through a bottle of Vicodin. Admittedly, this is a bit of a mistake, because Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a book that one should absolutely take their time with.

This is an excellent murder investigation in the true tradition of Raymond Chandler. YPU is a alternate-history novel; in this world, the state of Israel was not created after WW2. The world’s Jews were allowed to settle on the island of Sitka in the panhandle of Alaska, but only for sixty years; the territory then reverts back to America. As the novel opens, Sitka’s about two months away from not existing anymore, and this state of affairs colors everything that happens. The Jews are without their homeland and forced to live at the whim of a nation who doesn’t want them, living in a city that they will have to soon give up. Sitka comes off like the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner” – a place transient and holy and doomed, all at the same time.

I’ll write more about it in a bit – I’m still digesting.

You know, in different hands this film would have been barely viewable for the midnight to two slot on the Hallmark Channel, but thanks to the talent involved, “Evening” actually worked for me. When you have a murderer’s row of talent on set like Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Toni Colette, Glenn Close, Miranda Richardson, Patrick Wilson, and Barry freaking Bostwick, the actors could read aloud an IRS audit and it would be worth the price of admission. They needed all that talent, because the screenplay’s blah.

This is a breathtakingly beautiful film – it involves a present-day woman on her deathbed reminiscing to a handful of nights back during her post-college days in the 1950s. Vanessa Redgrave plays the present-day version, Claire Danes the old-school version. The movie’s flashbacks are because the Redgrave character is dying, suffering from dementia, and can’t tell the present from the past – the film slides between the two quite nicely, which is rare since Hollywood loves to smack us over the head with a two-by-four when it comes to shifts is time or perception. The actors do a great job across the board, with the exception of Gap song-and-dance man Patrick Wilson, who is the object of everyone’s lust but doesn’t ever get the chance to demonstrate why he’s so life-changing aside from the fact that he looks pretty.
But: the movie’s long. Bring an extra bladder or two. And it’s a chick flick of biblical proportions, so have mercy on your boyfriend or husband and have him go to the theater across the hall to watch the “Die Hard” sequel.