strange and random happenstance

War Horse
Based on the book by Michael Morpurgo
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson, Matt Milne, David Thewlis, Robert Emms, Tom Hiddleston, Benedict Cumberbatch, Patrick Kennedy, David Kross, Celine Buckens, Niels Arestrup, Nicolas Bro, Toby Kebbell, Julian Wadham, Liam Cunningham, Eddie Marsan, and Pip Torrens
Release Date: December 25th, 2011
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Young Albert Narracott's dreams come true when his father, drunken and surly, outbids their landlord for a young colt. The Narracott's were in desperate need of a plow horse but Albert has spent months watching the young colt grow, spying through the various fences of Devon, and knows that he can train him because they were destined to be together. Against all odds Albert succeeds only to lose his horse, Joey, because their crop failed and his father had no other recourse, drunk and bitter from the Boer War, he sells Joey. Another war has begun and Joey is sold to a Captain James Nicholls, an upstanding solider who promises to return Joey to Albert after the war. Albert begs to accompany Captain Nicholls but is too young to join up. Tearfully he promises Joey that they will be reunited. In France Joey a has steep learning curve, especially when it comes to being around other horses. But he quickly bonds with Major Jamie Stewart's black stallion and the two are inseparable, even as their riders are mowed down by German gunfire they remain together behind enemy lines. It is a long war and soon Albert is old enough and enlists and is stationed abroad. Will he find Joey or will they forever be separated?

War Horse, by it's episodic nature following Joey through all his adventures is reminiscent of Black Beauty. Therefore you could basically call this film Black Beauty Goes to War. The problem with this kind of storytelling is that you really have to be invested in the character of the horse. And while the horse who played Joey could easily be singled out as one of the best actors in the film, it still didn't make this film work. The main problem I had was that the film seemed to be taking it's subject matter too lightly. This could be seen in every frame with the overly perfect shutters and thatching on the Narracott's overly large farmhouse to the goose being used as comic relief. I don't think that Spielberg got the memo that England is supposed to be a little gloomy and run down. Instead he artifically lit most scenes, seriously, look at the two light sources in almost every scene! Oh, and that spotlight on Emily Watson when she leans out the window? What the hell? This was the best lit war EVER! The problem with this is that it literally felt like you were watching Babe or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, forever waiting for the animals to start talking or a Teletubby to wander by. I would also totally recommend those films before this one.

This overall stylization makes for a very sanitized Disneyfication of World War I. Yes, I know the lack of blood and the cunning use of windmill blades was to secure that ever important family friendly PG-13 rating to make this the holiday film of 2011, but still... why? Why the hyper exaggerated colors? Why this muted horror? Why tone down The Great War!?! This is an event that forever changed the world and this movie almost makes light of it. Yes, there are moments that pull on your heartstrings, but I don't think it gets across any important message that could be said about this war. If you wanted to really make this film right, don't pull punches. I mean, would you ever seriously imagine the director of Schindler's List pulling punches? This film could have opened up a dialogue with the younger generations who didn't know about the war and everyone could sit around sipping eggnog and discussing the atrocities. Instead it focuses on the more "romantic" nature of the war, wherein instead of soldiers putting down their weapons on Christmas and meeting in no man's land to have a sing-a-long and a game of football they all unite to save Joey from the barbed wire, even with comedic throwing of wire cutters. There shouldn't be comedic throwing of wire cutters people!

Speaking of the comedy... this film highlights the fact that comedy shouldn't be banned from the saga of war, just look to Blackadder! Comedy can be used if done right. Which is why I must hang my head in bafflement that this film was co-written by the co-writer of Blackadder! Richard Curtis! YES! I was just as shocked as you are, I'm assuming you're shocked here by the way. I couldn't believe that a man who handled the first world war with such insight, such nuance, could produce this schmaltz. SHAME ON YOU RICHARD CURTIS! You have let the schmaltz take over. Let's look to your IMDB credits shall we? Comedic and insightful genius through the eighties, I particularly love The Tall Guy and Rowan Atkinson's performance in that. The nineties are a little rockier, I hate Mr. Bean but my love of The Vicar of Dibley outshines anything because it's one of my favorite shows ever. The turn of the century started off strong with Bridget Jones's Diary and then it quickly went to hell in a handbasket. Love Actually, yes I know I'm alone in my hatred of that but I can't be alone in my hatred of the Bridget Jones sequel! Oh, and The Girl in the Cafe! You Richard Curtis have turned into some sort of romantic bleeding heart that has to have a "message" in their work. What happened to the quality of the work emphasizing the message versus the work being solely about the message? You have failed me sir, and you have failed War Horse.

Because the thing is, everyone I know who has read the book or seen the stage adaptation has been moved by the brilliance of War Horse. This wasn't brilliant, unless you are talking about the lighting. You can kind of glimpse what made the book stand out if you look for it. What I did find interesting was that by tracking Joey's journey we get to see the war from both sides. It's kind of like he is a prisoner of war, yet the English, aside from the stalwart Captain Nicholls, are just as barbarous and uncaring to their animals as the Germans. So buried deep there is the message hidden from sight that despite their differences, despite being on different sides, both sides are the same, just young boys being killed by the great war machine that cares little for them or animals. So I guess I could say it was nice that this wasn't all one-sided? We saw not very nice Englishmen, and some very nice Germans. And that poor French girl and her grandfather did a nice job representing those caught in-between the conflict. So, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that all the pieces where kind of there, just put together in such a way that the whole didn't work. It was too jumbled, too scattered, too toned down, too saccharine. And the thing is, the movie has kind of turned me off ever wanting to see the play or read the book and what if they really are as brilliant as people say? Then I'm just losing out because of some misguided desire of Spielberg's to make another war movie, but this time for the whole family.

I also can not lie about the fact that I really had to see this movie eventually because of the Hiddles/Cumberbatch confluence. Now, I'm not trying to be biased here, there are performances of theirs I haven't liked so I'm not always fawning on them. Hiddles was in that awful A Waste of Shame and was in the abysmal Cranford sequel, and I can not forget the mess that was High-Rise. As for Benedict... avoid Tipping the Velvet, Starter for 10, Atonement, and all those "Hobbit" but not really The Hobbit movies. Oh, and Parade's End! So when I say they were a highlight of this film I'm NOT playing favorites. But their appearances were more bitter than sweet, because for just a second you could see what this movie might have been. They are true actors, they fully physically embody the characters they play. In fact Benedict's performance as Major Jamie Stewart was fabulous because I one hundred percent hated him. The brusque voice, the posture where it always looked like he had a stick up his ass. This wasn't Benedict in all his goofiness, this was Major Stewart, and he could have been an interesting character if given more screen time. As for the naivety that Hiddles brought to Captain James Nicholls, the ability of him to show the horror of the realization that he is about to die using just his eyes... perhaps the most touching and real moments in this entire film. And there's not much reality to be had here.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: A Fall of Poppies, Babe, Benedict Cumberbatch, Black Beauty, Blackadder, Disney, England, France, Germany, Horses, Richard Curtis, Rowan Atkinson, Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hiddleston, War Horse, WWI

Dead Heat by Patricia Briggs
ARC provided by the publisher
Published by: Ace
Publication Date: March 3rd, 2015
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Charles can count the people he loves and trusts on one hand. One of those people is mortal and is dying. Charles has known Joseph Sani for most of Joseph's life. He has seen him grow up, have a family, but it was too much to be around to see him decline. Though the time has come to face this hardship, to say goodbye. Charles and Anna set out for Arizona to visit Joseph and his family. The Sani's have made a name for themselves breeding Arabian horses and Charles plans to buy a horse for Anna for her birthday. But Charles encounters trouble in the Sani household. Joseph's dad is a werewolf and has been petitioning for his son the be changed, against Joseph's wishes it might be said. Hosteen views the argument still open until the day Joseph is in the ground and instantly harasses Charles on the subject. Yet this ongoing argument is put aside when Joseph's daughter-in-law is attacked by a powerful Fae and his grandchildren are almost killed. Charles and Anna look into the attack and come to the conclusion that a very powerful fairy is on the loose and children are in danger and it's up to them to stop it.

A new Patricia Briggs book is always a time to celebrate. To me she is the best writer currently of urban fantasy, the one who fills the hole in my heart left by Joss Whedon. Her books are the epitome of comfort reads, a time set aside to curl up with a good book, a cast of characters you love, and a warm blanket, with the world slipping away as you are drawn into the current mystery. And my, have I missed Anna and Charles! Having two years of Mercy back to back was lovely, but there's something about Anna and Charles that I just connect to. Not hearing from them in three years was hard to bear, like a friend who you've lost touch with. That incident in Boston, then nothing till now. Thank you for finally having the time to catch up with me.

The problem facing long running series is that you can get in a rut, you can get formulaic, and then Cousin Oliver happens. So far I continue to find Briggs's series both fresh and exciting, but there is something more compelling about the Alpha and Omega series. Yes, it could be that compared to Mercy it's newer and has less then half the books, but what I think it is is the way the series is set up to follow their story as they go to other locations then being confined to the Tri-Cities or Bon Temps or even Stars Hollow. Sometimes a change in scene is necessary to keep a story vibrant. I like how we start out and they're snug in their home then something happens and Anna and Charles are dispatched to the scene. Seattle, Boston, now Scottsdale! Plus with each location change we get a new set of characters to mingle with the old, providing a nice blend of the familiar and the strange.

But with each change in location we get a change in focus, and here, well, the focus was too much of the equine variety. I find it odd that in quick succession I have read two books that are very focused on horses. As I said in that other review, I've never been a horse person, but that doesn't mean that books featuring horses are a bad thing, they just have to be handled right. Daisy Goodwin's The Fortune Hunter handled horses right, in that she didn't become overly detailed and wrote the horses as characters so that you could connect to them. Goodwin did it right, Briggs did it wrong. I know Briggs is a horse enthusiast in the extreme, you can get that from her writing even if you didn't already know this, but she wasn't able to tamp down that enthusiasm to make horses accessible to those who aren't of her ilk. At one point in the book Anna gives up trying to figure out all the jargon spewing out of Charles and I think that if one of the characters in your book can't even keep up, well, you lost your readers a long time ago.

So much horse talk had a detrimental effect on the pacing of the book. At the beginning it was OK, the horses added atmosphere, but about three quarters of the way through the book when the bad guy is "caught" and everyone just pushes the horrors they've faced behind them and they all trot off to the horse show the book hits a deadly lull it can't recover from. There's still a quarter of the book left, so you know that something is going to happen, there's going to be a twist, but after a few hours with Anna and Charles in the bleachers at the horse show I couldn't care less what that twist was. This is right about the time Anna gave up too I might add. Yet it kept going. And going. And more horses. And yeah. I've been to state fairs, I've been to Dairy expos, I've been to events like this and never in my life did I think they could be written in a way that bored me almost literally to tears. All forward momentum left the book and I thought I'd be trapped with those creepy horse slash pageant kid combinations for all eternity. I never want to read about horses ever again.

But I really don't ever want to read about those creepy little kids that are dressed like western themed pageant kids, pink rhinestones and all, riding their horses. Shudder. Yet this version of children is just one of many, seeing as children are a big theme in this book. I was OK with Anna pressuring Charles about them having a child, this didn't seem out of place. The evil fairy that was the book's Big Bad and was kidnapping children for nefarious reasons, really really creepy and spooky and kept the plot ticking right along until the horses came and trampled all over it. And then the book shifted. Yes, there was a creepy kid vibe from the evil fairy but to couple that with this weird objectification of the children at the horse show? It went too far into the creepy. Add to that that Anna and Charles thought this was cute? Um, no. This kind of objectification leads to evil people preying on children. So in a book about bringing this kind of evil, though in immortal form, to justice while at the same time condoning cultural practices that can result in drawing the attention of evil... no. Just no. Yes, life is all about compromise, but let's compromise about having children or recovering from abuse, finding a middle ground where we can live with life's horrors, not finding a middle ground where the horrors are allowed to flourish.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alpha and Omega, Anna, ARCs, Arizona, Charles Cornick, Children, Daisy Goodwin, Dead Heat, Fae, Horses, Joss Whedon, Mercy Thompson, Patricia Briggs, The Fortune Hunter, Tri-Cities

The Fortune Hunter by Daisy Goodwin
ARC Provided by the Publisher
Published by: St. Martin's Press
Publication Date: July 29th, 2014
Format: Hardcover, 480 Pages
Rating: ★★★
To Buy

Charlotte Baird is a bit of an odd duck, even for an heiress. She would rather spend her time taking photographs and manipulating them then hunting for a suitable husband. That all changes when she meets Bay Middleton. This suave horseman sweeps her off her feet and steals her heart. But her brother and prospective sister-in-law are adamant to show her that Bay is an entirely unsuitable match. Charlotte could marry a Duke and to settle for the best seat in the county? It seems such a waste. Though Fred and Augusta's disapproval might not be so altruistic as to save Charlotte from a fortune hunter as it is to keep the wealth at their own disposal. For Bay's part he genuinely loves Charlotte but he is torn. He has been asked to pilot Sisi, the Empress of Austria, for the hunting season, and there's a connection between him and this royal that can not be denied. Yet, in order to win Charlotte, he must indeed deny Sisi.

I was never the girl who wanted a pony. Girls of a certain age split distinctly along the equine obsession line. Me, I wasn't a horse girl. Oh, I had plenty of friends in grade school who were obsessed and spent every day at school talking about the weekend when they'd get to ride their ponies. Not me. I can literally count the number of times I have been on a horse on one hand. One delicate fragile hand that I was convinced a horse would love to bite the fingers off of. See, while I wasn't a horse girl, my grandparents did live in the country so I got to visit their neighbor's horse Dr. Pepper all the time and feed him grass and tremble with fear as his teeth chomped down on the stalks in that death clamp. I know he would never have hurt me, but that experience combined with my inane classmates practically guaranteed that I would never want a pony; a state I'm sure my mom was happy with having grown up in the country with seriously horse obsessed girls.

The reason for me mentioning this predilection of mine is that The Fortune Hunter, while ostensibly about romance and intrigue, comes down to horses in the end. Bay and his horse Tipsy, the Grand National, the hunting, Sisi and her riding ability, all of this adds up to a fair amount of horse for one book. Yet, despite not being a horse person, I did not lose interest. Daisy makes the subject of horses approachable and not alienating. They weren't just there to be another facet of our characters, they were a driving force of these characters.

Unlike my insipid classmates going on about their pretty ponies, Daisy has crafted this story so that when Tipsy is mentioned you don't tune out. She doesn't dwell on irrelevant details and what a pretty mane Tipsy has, instead Tipsy is elevated to a character just as important as Queen Victoria or Charlotte herself. I became invested in the horsier aspects of the story because the horses were integral to the story in a way that made sense. Daisy's writing made you feel that she knows what she's talking about but writes in such a way as to keep you interested, and for a subject I'm not invested in usually, I was drawn into this book.

The reason I liked Daisy's previous book, The American Heiress, is that not everything was wrapped up tidily with a bow in the end. Life isn't simple or easy, but complicated and messy, and sometimes I crave that reality in a book. Sometimes books can be a little too far fetched and focusing on the HEA, but how often does that happen to us? Yet in the case of The Fortune Hunter I found this looser ending not as satisfying. The main reason for this is the timeline brought about by the historical note at the end of the book. In The Fortune Hunter, Bay and Sisi's relationship is shown to flame and burn out over the course of one hunting season.

While I knowing conflating events is common to help the narrative, the fact that their relationship, whatever it actually was in real life, actually lasted for five years makes the season of passion ring false. Yes, Charlotte and Bay didn't marry until he had severed ties from Sisi, but this was a long five years later. I'm sorry, I just can't get beyond this five years. Five years means a lot more then what we saw and changes so much that the interpretation of events that Daisy has written would be drastically altered by the true timeline. While I enjoyed the story I would have liked it to maybe reflect reality a little closer, or at least left me ignorant of the truth unless I had searched it out... which, in fairness to my own predilections, I would have and we'd be having this same discussion. So, I guess we're stuck in a loop.

The photography interest Daisy "gave" to Charlotte is an aspect of the story I greatly enjoyed. Not only was this able to advance the plot and also show Charlotte the "truth" that she was blinding herself from, but it's logical historically, unlike those five years, grumble. During the Victorian era there were so few hobbies that were viewed as permissible to ladies of quality. Photography was one of these, though a little on the outer edges, mainly because of the damage it could do to your skin with the developing of the prints. But what I found most interesting wasn't so much Charlotte's photography, but her manipulation of the images, viewing people as animals.

While to some this might seem macabre, the truth is the most common and acceptable hobby for Victorian women was photocollage. I few years back I went to an exhibit at The Art Institute of Chicago called "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage." This show was of Victorian women's photo albums wherein they painted ducks and had photographs of their family member's heads on the bodies. Butterflies with cameos on the wings. The weirder the more likely they'd do it. Work that is so reminiscent of what Charlotte did that it struck a cord so true that Charlotte and I understood each other, which is the greatest thing a character in a book can do; connect with you.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bay Middleton, Daisy Goodwin, Empress of Austria, Happily Ever After, Historical Fiction, Horses, Photocollage, Photography, Sisi, The American Heiress, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Fortune Hunter, Victorian