The Secret Thread: Literature & Spiritual Life: Forthcoming stuff to watch for from Mutt

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Forthcoming stuff to watch for from Mutt

I was mellowing out on my way in to the office today to the sounds of a folk music mix called 'For Folk's Sake' made by my kid sister, known in the blogoshpere as 'the Runnin' Bookworm', who has done me the service, among other things, of ensuring that I will never like a single song by Joni Mitchell, no matter what. However, there was also a lot of great stuff on there, like Dylan, the great John Gorka, David Gray, etc. Hilarious title to the mix too! Folk music always has a place on this site in my mind.....as readers of the forthcoming 'Lonesome Traveler' article will soon find out........

Anyway, this post is to preview some forthcoming Mutt Ploughman posts for the literary types.......1) Shortly I will be posting a book review of Jose Saramago's recent novel 'The Double'; if you haven't read Saramago, hopefully this review will entice you to, as long as you can take dark and somewhat cynical stories......2) Soon I will introduce Mutt's 'Book of the Month' feature, highlighting the best book I have read in the last 30 days....might not be an easy choice.......and 3) Be watching this fall for my ANNUAL CHUCK DICKENS feature, a written companion to my 4th Annual Charles Dickens Novelfest. I make it a point to read one novel a year by Charles Dickens, possibly the greatest novelist in the English language. This year's selection is MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT, the only Dickens novel to be partially set in America (should be interesting to see our country get skewered by Dickens). Be looking for that sure-to-be exciting post. Let me make a general statement, sharing a lesson I learned far too late: if you like novels, and you aren't reading Charles Dickens, you gotta go back to that well and take a long drink. It took me years to appreciate his stuff, but if you can hang with the length, Dickens brings great, great rewards. No one could create characters or epic, sprawling plots like Charles Dickens. Not to mention the fact that you just feel culturally super-charged after reading one of his epic novels.

Happy reading, only a few weeks til Fall hits.......

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Duke Altum's Recommended Films

Monsters (2010) – As many have already said, calling Monsters a movie about an alien occupation of Earth seems to do this fascinating, original film a disservice. Certainly the fact that huge, bioluminescent squid-like extraterrestrials are running amok through the jungles of Central America is an important (and entertaining) element of the plot, but anyone coming into this one looking for non-stop, Aliens-style action or special effects eye candy a la the concurrent alien invasion flick Skyline is going to be sorely disappointed. Instead, what you have with Monsters is an intriguing and meditative hybrid of road movie, post-apocalyptic thriller and surprisingly believable human drama. Director Gareth Edwards wrote, edited and created special effects for the film on his own, which gave him the freedom to make exactly the kind of movie he wanted to make - that is, a love story that just happens to feature alien life forms ominously howling and lurking in the background (this approach, by the way, gives the film its pervasive suspense and intensity, as you are as in the dark as the characters are about when the next encounter with a pissed-off, tentacled alien might occur). The many scenes of unscripted, natural banter between the lead actors as they trek across the "infected zone" and get to know one another help you, crucially, to identify with them enough to care by the final act - which provides an unexpected, subtle twist that gives the entire story added poignancy and irony. I am sure that a great many viewers of this unusual film will come out feeling somewhere between perplexed and downright cheated, and Edwards does provide so little backstory about the aliens and what they might be up to that one may well wonder why they were in the movie at all (and, justifiably, why the film was ever called "Monsters"). But I found that their mysterious, vaguely menacing presence gave the entire story a kind of haunted and other-wordly atmosphere that reminded me a bit of the best bits of James Cameron's The Abyss. I guess you could say that early encounters with new life forms - like those with potential lovers - can be both exhilarating and weirdly disconcerting at the same time.