Snowcake (2006)

This film is successful because of two remarkable performances by Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman. She plays Linda Freeman, a high-functioning autistic woman living in a rural Ontario town called Wawa. With her face scrubbed clean of makeup and exhibiting expressions that shift between childish delight, unrestrained panic, and flatly delivered truths, Ms. Weaver gives a technically accomplished performance. Her character is so far from anything she has ever played that it takes a while to recognize her, but it is indeed Sigourney Weaver.
She meets Alan Rickman because he picked up her daughter, Vivienne, as a hitchhiker and she was then killed in an accident that he is blameless for. This is of note because he has just gotten out of prison for manslaughter--he killed a man unintentionally. It is hard to say how much this influences Mr. Rickman's character because he is a bit of a handful emotionally. He is a scowling, humorless, baggy-eyed misanthrope whose grumbling tone and suspicious gaze convey defeat and despair. He is occasionally capable of sardonic self-deprecation: “I don’t have baggage; I have haulage,” he remarks. And he is not exaggerating. Or at least not by much.
They are thrown together by the accident, and they stay together for reasons that are unclear to Rickman, but he sees that he needs the time out. Linda is perfect--she tells him truths that he can't face and no one else will verbalize. She has her impossible phobias, but he doesn't much challenge them, and she allows him to work towards a better place. He takes over the funeral for Vivienne and really does a fine job. It assuages his guilt, this stop over, and allows him to move on to his next guilt. A peaceful look at healing.

The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

This is a remarkable book, regardless of what your relationship to cancer is. Mine is close--my youngest son had a medulloblastoma, diagnosed in 2000. The prognosis for his tumor has changed remarkably over the 25 years since I graduated from medical school and this book covers some of that territory--the science of how cancers work and how we might treat and prevent them with that knowledge. I am very grateful for the oncologists and patients who went before him, who contributed to the knowledge that has allowed him to live this last decade. My interest in the subject is perhaps above average, but 1 in 4 Americans will dies of cancer, and 1 in 3 will be diagnosed with it, so the disease will touch us or someone we know at some point in our lives.
The book is part story, part science, and is written warmly. It is a joy to read, even at the point where one might be struggling with the science. There are plenty of personal tales within the volume to give the reader a sense of what patients face, and how it affects the health care professionals who take care of them as well. I recommend this as a modern treatise on an old disease.

The Things We Lost in the Fire (2007)

This is not a movie that garnered a lot of positive press when it came out, but I thought it was emotionally complicated in a way that made me think. Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro are strong actors who give good performances here, and Susanne Biers is one of my favorite all time directors (I fell for her when I saw 'Brodre', but 'After the Wedding' was the deal sealer for me). The slam that this movie has taken is that it is too formulaic, but I disagree.
Brian is a smart, successful man married to a beautiful wife, has two great kids, lives in a nice neighborhood--and he has a heroin addicted best friend from childhood that he maintains a life long relationship with. His wife is appalled. She thinks he is someone that everyone else has given up on, and her husband should follow suit. She doesn't get the connection that Jerry gives Brian, nor how important the connection to their shared past is to each of them.
Then Brian gets killed. His wife, Audrey is set adrift. She is frozen, numb, unable to cope with just about everything, and wearing this veil of disengagement, she invites Jerry to live with them. She suddenly can't find anything more connected to Brian than Jerry and she doesn't understand where that need comes from, and it certainly isn't rational, but she decides to go with her gut over her head.
The arrangement works out a lot better than it probably would, but there are episodes of screaming and anger that you rarely see in a film. There are all the stages of grief portrayed, and the unique way out that this story portrays is worth thinking about.
There are lots of things I would have edited differently, but this movie is worth seeing. It has Benicio Del Toro doing a great job getting inside the head of a smart junkie. It shows some of the stability that helps kids overcome loss. That they sense someone's real interest in them, and are willing to accept the less than savory parts. Drugs scare them but Jerry doesn't. Not a light movie, but a though provoking one.

Mekong River Restaurant, Austin, TX

I love 70 degree weather with sunny skies, and even though the winter in Iowa has been remarkably benign, I still enjoyed being in a warm sunny place and walking outside. Austin is primarily a music city--you can figure that our in the airport, because the bar in the terminal that I landed in had live music. But the food was quite good as well.
My favorite food to eat when I travel is ethnic food that is hard or impossible to get where I live, so off I went to the Vietnamese restaurant closest to my hotel. I stopped at the ever-helpful concierge desk to get a map, and the first thing they told me was that there was no such restaurant--possible, because you never know when something will close, but there were reviews as recent as last week, so I was willing to risk it. Then they looked it up, and declared that I indeed was correct and they were wrong--oh, and could I report back to them on what I thought. Happy to do some restaurant reviewing for future Hilton guests--I certainly have benefited from the kindness of strangers. I knew it would be okay when a woman saw me looking at the menu outside, and stopped to give me her recommendations. It is that kind of place. People feel compelled to pull you in.
The Mekong River had mixed ratings on Yelp, but there were several reviews that resonated with me--one guy in particular who waxed eloquently about menu option B6--a grilled pork vermicelli dish with eggrolls. Sounded perfect--and it was. There are several elements of Vietnamese food that I love. The first is that restaurants have a bottle of hoison sauce and a bottle of Sriracha on the table--those are condiments that I can work with. But best of all is the volume of fresh vegetables and herbs that are served alongside of hot food. I love the complexity of the flavors--the marinade for the pork was complex and delicious--but when taken with a mouthful of lettuce and mint, it was exquisite. The whole meal was $7.00 and I took half of it back to the hotel with me. Highly recommended.

Mother and Child (2010)

This is a difficult movie that explores the relationship between mother and child--both biological pairs, and mothers who choose to raise other people's babies. Annette Benning and Naomi Watts are remarkable as biological mother and child. It is hard to say how much of their brittle personalities and emotional distance are related to genetics and how much is related to their having been separated at Watt's birth, or whether it is a combination of the two, but they have a heck of a time with intimate relationships. There is some progress as the film progresses for both of them, but the conclusion is somewhat tragic (and the ob/gyn needed to work a lot harder on the C-section option!).
The movie is painful one to watch, but I think it does speak to a lot of truths. Adopted children do struggle. It is not inevitable, but it is common. You can't ignore that as parents who choose that option. Then there is the fact that children change everything--in so many ways. The tough topics don't often get to the silver screen, and certainly not with this much star power behind them. This is worth watching.

The Bridge by David Remnick

"Race isn't rocket science," one of Barack Obama's mentors said. "It's harder."
Ain't that the truth. So this is a biography of our first African-American president, written through the prism of race. Early on in his massive new biography of Barack Obama, cryptically titled The Bridge, David Remnick quotes Bob Dylan on the president: “He’s like a fictional character, but he’s real”. This comes, of course, from a man who clearly knows a thing or two about (self-) mythologizing, and he’s right. There is something unearthly and unbelievable about our president, something that makes his allies and admirers want to lavish praises upon him but makes his opponents distrust him. Is his story too good to be true.
Remnick’s framing of the book is twofold: (a) he wants to deflate the myth by giving Obama to use through the eyes of his friends, family, and classmates; and (b) he wants to increase the power of the myth by presenting Obama as the spiritual heir of the Civil Rights movement—born, as it were, to be the proof of the freedom Martin Luther King and Malcolm X fought and died for--hence the title.
Remnick seeks to accomplish these two contradictory purposes by a single technique: Tell the whole story in all its magnificent, sweeping grandeur, and in all its minute, personal detail.
The aim is to present Obama’s presidency as the logical conclusion of all of these advances. Remnick accomplishes purpose (b) far more successfully than he does purpose (a). The way we know Barack Obama at the end of The Bridge is in the way we feel we know Odysseus or Huck Finn—it is the personal relationship we are able to have with a fictional character. The quotes from people who know Obama that are sprinkled liberally through this book can’t quite shatter our sense that he is beyond knowing; they are less likely to change the reader’s mind about Obama and more likely to prop up whatever his or her preconceptions were—good or bad. Great read.

Feed the Fish (2009)

“Feed the Fish is a feel good romantic comedy. Straight ahead. It is a sweet little story filmed in Door County, Wisconsin. The movie starts with our introduction to Joe Peterson (played by Ross Partridge), children’s book author of “Mr. Kitty Feeds the Fish.” Parents like its tough love message, kids love it because of the violence. Success is sure to come, and he gets an advance on his next project.
But not so fast. Joe is stuck.
He is uninspired by his current settings in SoCal and his abusive fiancé would wilt anyone's creativity, so he heads with his friend JP (Michael Chernus) to the middle of nowhere-northern Wisconsin. In winter.
The cinematography was almost a love letter to Wisconsin – from the framing the lake through a leafless tree to the attention paid to bring the beauty of the Door County night sky to the screen. “Does anyone live here?” Joe asks, looking down the small town street, not so much with scorn as with amusement at the fact that yes, people actually do. He soon meets Sif (Katie Aselton), a hockey-playing young woman home for the holidays (named for the “wife of Thor! God of Thunder!”), her grandfather Axel (Barry Corbin), and her father, Sheriff Andersen (Tony Shalhoub), who makes pop-tarts in a toaster plugged into his police cruiser’s power inverter (seriously? It does end up saying a lot about the sheriff, it turns out).
Humor comes from many places in this film. From Joe’s horrible kid’s book ideas, to slapstick scenes of JP “training” for the Plunge by running around half naked in the snow, to cultural references that may or may not get the same reaction outside of the Midwest (the Sheriff’s reaction to Joe calling 911 to report hunters in his yard ends with the exasperated pronouncement, “we shoot the deer. And then we eat them.”)
An amazing amount of people end up in the emergency room in the movie--but then, that is where some of the real 'aha' moments in the movie take place, and the ease with which charactes make hospital visits is also quite humorous. And it all ends well, like a good romantic comedy should. Quirky and enjoyable.

Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

This is a subtle and hopefull WWII novel. Not once does the author mention Hitler. Not once does he mention death camps. Not once does he put the word Nazi on paper.
Rather, he reveals the horrors of the Holocaust in an eerie, intense and very introspective way. He takes readers inside the minds of three main characters and provides a gripping psychoanalysis of what it was like both for a Jew in hiding and the couple who gave him sanctuary.
Originally published in German in 1947, “Comedy in a Minor Key ’’ is out in English for the first time. The novel, a dark comedy, is semi-autobiographical. A Dutch couple, Marie and Wim, agree to hide a Jewish man during World War II. The fugitive, who gives his name as Nico rather than his Jewish-sounding name, dies after a prolonged illness. Dead, the man is more dangerous to the couple than alive. They hide him under a bench, but Marie realizes she has made a tremendous goof: She dressed the dead man in her husband’s pajamas, which have a traceable laundry tag--don't worry, it all works out, but we get a real sense of the emotional inner lives of all three characters. The book’s strength lies in the artful way Keilson reveals the inner emotions of rescuer and fugitive--that is what makes this slim volume so powerful.
Keilson himself is German-born and fled to the Netherlands in 1936. A couple in Delft — the pair named in the book’s dedication — hid Keilson during the war. His parents fled to the Netherlands in 1939, but never went into hiding after the German occupation in 1940; they died at Auschwitz. Keilson, who had trained as a physician in Germany, became a psychoanalyst after the war and treated children traumatized during the Holocaust. Short but intense read.

Shut Up and Shoot Me (2005)

Shut Up and Shoot Me is an affable black comedy from Czech writer-director Steen Agro. It begins when Colin (Andy Nyman) is on holiday in Prague with his wife, when she is unexpectedly crushed by a statue. Which in turn crushes Colin. Unable to handle life without her, he tries to kill himself, but finds that it is harder than he thought, and he can’t go through with it. Instead, he hires Pavel Zeman (Karel Roden), a local man who’s already working at several jobs in order to keep his wife in cosmetic luxury, to do the job for him. Pavel at first tries to fob him off, but the lure of money is too strong, and soon things get complicated, with all the wrong people dying and the two unwilling partners attracting the attention of a local gangster known as the Butcher of Prague.
This isn’t the world’s first suicide-related comedy, and it probably won’t be the last, but it’s quite clever in its little twists and turns. Colin is a fairly standard anxious type, while Pavel is more down to earth and practical type, at first just trying to avoid having to deal with the Englishman or his situation. Actually, Pavel seems a bit heartless early on, and he also doesn’t seem to care when his wife has blown all of Colin’s money and he still hasn’t made good on their deal. He mostly just wants to be left alone, which is an understandable feeling, and it wouldn’t be a problem if Colin just seemed like a crank, but we’ve been with him from the beginning, and seen his wife die. However, as the pace picks up, this becomes less of an issue.
The film is nicely shot, with a contemporary soundtrack. It also displays a subtle suspicion of authority figures, as shown in an administrative screw-up with the wife’s remains and the fact that they never consider going to the police, which leads to a nicely subversive ending. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it is well-made, well-written, and very entertaining.

The Widower's Tale by Julie Glass

Percy is the widower sharing his tale in this deceptively simple and straighforward book. He has lived in Matlock for over four decades, raising two daughters mostly alont, after his wife drowned in a grievous accident more than 30 years ago. Now in their 40s, his daughters have children of their own.
Except for Percy's devotion to Robert (his grandson), there's little that has complicated Percy's daily life--until now. His older daughter, who recently abandoned her husband and two young children in Brooklyn, has returned home to Matlock without much of a plan. In response, Percy has agreed to lease his huge, picturesque barn to a local preschool called Elves & Fairies, with the provision that his daughter be given a job there--which is a certain amount of mayhem. through the preschool, he gets involved with a woman for the first time since his wife has died, only to find a lump in her breast, and refers her to his eldest daughter--an oncologist renowned for her care of breast cancer patients.
Fortunately, these complications and coindidences feel natural. His story would be engaging enough on its own, but there are many more stories here than just this widower's tale. In a typical Glass technique, the author weaves Percy's first-person narration in and out of several other alternating points of view. We hear from Robert, whose friendship with an impassioned environmental activist might compromise his brilliant Harvard career; Celestino, a Guatemalan gardener with a thorny past and a justifiable fear of deportation; and Ira, a teacher at Elves & Fairies who's conflicted about making a permanent commitment to his boyfriend, a high-end divorce lawyer.
Each strand of this narrative is surprisingly supple, offering a convincing illusion of lives roundly lived. The effect is one of remarkable expansiveness, in which a rather modest small-town story is able to incorporate all kinds of contemporary social issues, including illegal immigration, eco-terrorism, health-care coverage, divorce and gay marriage.
This is a remarkable book, easy to read and hard to forget.