Super 8

I just watched Super 8, literally, it ended 10 minutes ago.  Super 8 is an excellent, excellent film.  The story of a group of middle schoollers trying to make a movie for an amateur film competition.  In the course of the filming they witness an epic train wreck and a military secret escapes.  One of the boys, Joe Lamb, is living life in the shadow of his mothers death.  The girl of the hour, Alice, also lives alone with her father after her mother left.  Alice's father works in the local steel mill, Joe's is the sheriff's deputy.  It is revealed, as the movie moves forward that it was Alice's father's shift that Joe's mother covered on the day she was killed in an industrial accident.

There is a distance between Joe and his father, his mother, Elizabeth, had always been the bridge between the two of them, the compassion and the outlet and the soft, affectionate rock upon which they could build a family.  In her absence a wedge takes her place as neither Joe or his father know how to reach out to one another so they go on being who they are:  different.

I heard a commentator say something to the extent of Super 8 is a collage of The Goonies, E.T., and Transformers (the collective minds behind the film are J.J. Abrams and Steven Speilberg) and they are right.  There is all of the visually striking action that Abrams is known for but, as well, a gripping and compelling story about the bravery of children faced with hard choices and real life.  The story is excellent in it simplicity and the characters are as deep as the plot line is simple. 

Super 8 is authentic and I found myself relating, at different times, with each of the characters as they struggled with misunderstanding, fear, loss, abandonment, and hope.  It is a heart warming adventure story compelling to the end and absolutely entertaining.

The Riders, a Novel by Tim Winton

Some time books can capture the nature and experience of edgy pop culture and still retain a modicum of literary integrity.  Authors like Chuck Palahnuik and Charles Bukowski exemplify a gritty paradigm of writing and literary prowess as their work is exceptionally strange-evocative-offensive-intentional and authentic.  Others write powerful works that fuse metaphysical and spiritual symbolism to with the characters experience in order to show them in the presence of a life greater than themselves, Leif Enger's Peace Like a River and Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses are works of this nature, the characters experiencing life changing events in the context of a world outside of their control.  These are, obviously, not exhaustive lists and I could go on and on and on about the successes of gritty, spiritual, authentic writers who achieve something exceptional in their work.  When the components come together and the reader is able to experience the characters world the works of authors like those I've mentioned is profound and effective.  However when they fail, even slightly, the work becomes self indulgent prattle.  The Riders by Tim Winton is self indulgent prattle.

The novel is about an Australian, blue collar, expatriate, Scully, who has recently finished a two year stint living, working, travelling Europe with his beautiful wife, Jennifer, and their young daughter, Billie.  The opening chapters of the novel are about Scully remodeling an ancient gardener's cottage in the country side of Ireland, preparing a place for his family to finally settle.  Jennifer and Billie are in Australia wrapping up wrapping up their affairs before they join him to start a new life.  In anxious anticipation Scully works, drinks, and befriends a couple of locals, in the process he sees the spirits of a group of horse riding warriors who inhabit the ruined castle on the hill above his new home.  When his family arrives it is just Billlie, en route to Ireland Jennifer abandoned her daughter and disappeared.  The novel is Scully's quest across Europe to find his wife.

Winton doesn't ever take the time to flesh out the spirits of the riders who haunt the castle, they appear as gypsies in the middle of the novel and again as warriors at the end but nothing about them is ever resolved.  Scully is an "everyman" character with whom it is easy to identify but he becomes at one to resourceful and to stupid and by the end of the novel I was completely indifferent about him bordering on contempt.  As a reader we should really become endeared to his daughter Billie or have something beyond "great legs" for his phantom wife but they become static and lifeless as the book degrades into an author writing for the sound of his own voice, as it were, and failing to be authentic to his story.

Misfortune, a Novel by Wesley Stace

Misfortune, a novel by Wesley Stace, is set in late 1700's and early 1800's England.  It is a story about a boy, found on a trash heap -- discarded by a frightened mother abandoned by the death of her husband -- and rescued by Lord Loveall and raised as a girl (until puberty and family ruin and corruption) in vain attempt to reincarnate the spirit of the young lord's deceased sister, killed after falling from a tree at the age of five.

I am not usually one to go in for novels dealing with gender identity and, in truth, references to classic Greek myth and literary tradition go straight over my head.  However, Stace brings to life a novel of incredible clarity; tasteful and daring in his language and the unfolding characters as they all fumble from deceit to revelation to metamorphosis to revenge and death.  He portrays so clearly the frustration of puberty magnified by the gender confusion, the sexuality of an adolescent boy conflicting with the reality of being raised a girl.

Stace's novel is clear and sprawling and he takes his time in letting the novel unfold without becoming self indulgent.  Until the end.  Sometimes the story requires the end a chapter earlier than the author allows and some time epilogues are a tedious waste of space and time.  If the ending does not infer what the author had in mind without further explanation the ending needs to be fixed, not added to.  But to be fair to Misfortune this is nit picking as the novel is well written, wholly engaging, and thought provoking.  The evocative nature of gender confusion aside, Misfortune is well worth the time.