Julia Slaughter

Archive for October, 2009

If you’ve peeked at my Twitter you may have noticed vague references to a wedding – my sister got married over the weekend and I was in the wedding. My sister and I are six years apart (I’m older) and complete opposites. When we were kids I was most likely to be climbing a tree or curled up with a book, she was playing with dolls or ballet dancing.  My sister has also always been the fashionable one, where I’m the one most likely to be in jeans and a tee shirt.

Considering our differences I suppose it’s no surprise that at various points in my sister’s wedding planning I got calls that I found alarming. The first was to announce that I would be wearing a purple dress. I’ve never really considered myself to be a purple person, but I was determined to grin and bear it. The next shocking announcement was that my sister had chosen a SILVER wedding dress! (Jasmine T134 – if you’re into that kind of thing, you can see it below.)

The wedding was beautiful, my sister was gorgeous, and even though the colors were confounding at first – I have to admit that Purple and Silver seemed to be a great combination. I loved seeing family and old friends again, it’s my favorite part of any wedding and I have to admit I also love that it is over! I was so worried that I was going to trip, step on my Sister’s dress, or in some way damage my own dress that I was able to breath a big sigh of relief when it was all over, the dress was back on the hanger, and the bobby pins were all out of my hair. (Though I have to admit that I am *still* brushing hair spray out, days later!)

I have to say, it’s nice to see two people make that commitment to each other – it would be even nicer if I could’ve seen it while wearing flats but still it was a beautiful and memorable day.

I have always liked to read book that give me a little peek into another time or another culture. I admit that I like reading Jane Austen just because it amuses me to hear terms like “countenance” and talk of cousins marrying without a crack made about being from Alabama or Mississippi. (After all this was British gentry!) However, I have to admit that books set in faraway places are also intriguing to me, particularly the Middle East. I suppose it’s because an area of the world that I know so little about and that seems so different from our own.

In was my desire to get a peek into the Middle East that caused me to pick up – Reading Lolita in Theran which I was less than impressed with. I think that the book was trying so hard to be one of the great works of literature in discusses and dissects in the book that it failed to entertain me. I was very impressed by how smart the author was, but my understanding about things in Iran was hazy at best. The meat of the story – the women and their relationships, left me feeling empty and unfulfilled.

My next attempt was Kabul Beauty School which was entertaining but it was the voice of an outsider looking in, and so I still felt like I didn’t quite get the inside view I really wanted. (I also though the author was a little off her rocker – marrying a man she could barely communicate with who was married to another woman but that’s a whole different issue all together.)

Finally along came Mahbod Seraji’s Rooftops of Tehran, here is the book I waited for!

First off this book is Fiction so there can be no shocking expose later to reveal that characters were fabricated causing me to question what else might have been fabricated, (Ala Kabul Beauty School) but the story was beautiful. I lived on that alley, and I laughed at the rash of pranks that erupted amongst the kids there, I cried at the loss of innocence and the loss of love. I carefully considered my own culture as it was reflected to me through the storyteller. (Seriously there have been times I wanted to wail with grief, why is that frowned on here?)

I took my time and cherished this book, I savored the highs and I mourned the lows. I almost wish there was a sequel so I could find out what happened to these characters that I grew to love but the ending was so perfect that perhaps it’s best to leave well enough alone.

This is a book I will reread and every time I expect to laugh and cry, just the way I did this time. What a fantastic book!

This post contains spoilers, so if you think you might watch this Korean subtitled movie you might want to stop reading. If you’re like I am and knowing some of the plot doesn’t ruin the movie experience for you or if you just doubt you’ll ever want to watch it, feel free to read to your heart’s content. I’ll let you know when the spoiler is coming…

The first foreign, subtitled movie I had ever seen was Raise the Red Lantern – I loved it. Don’t misunderstand me, the story isn’t exactly a cheerful one but I loved that glimpse into 1920 China. It was a world that I had never seen before, a world I couldn’t even imagine and I was hooked. However, at the time it wasn’t quite an easy thing to get your hands on foreign films, you kind of had to take what you could get but now things are different.

I belong to Netflix, I love it. I was a bad movie renter, often getting stuck with late fees because it seems that nothing can entice my friends into making appealing plans like me walking out of the video store with a movie or two in my hand. Netflix fixed all of that and not only did they remove any concern about late fees but they opened a world of foreign films to me so I could find everything that my favorite Chinese director (Zhang Yimou), my favorite actress (Gong Li), and my favorite actor (Takeshi Kaneshiro) – I devoured those movies. After that I struck out on my own and checked out other foreign films, sometimes I would browse through and find something that seemed interesting and other times I would make selections based on what Netflix has recommended for me.

I was badly burned by Netflix recommendations once. I had some Chinese movie that I hadn’t watched at home and my Pastor mentioned his cable was out and he was movieless. I told him that I had a few at home I could lend him until the cable guy came around the next day or so. I did preface all of this with the comment that I hadn’t watched any of the movies yet and they were Netflix recommendations. When he brought me back the movies the next day he gave me the oddest look. In retrospect, he was probably trying to determine WHAT I had watched to get that particular movie recommended to me. I’ve forgotten the name of the movie but it was about a girl whose family made their fortune on Opium, she falls in love with a scoundrel and has “relations” with her cousin to try to become a more suitable match for the scoundrel. I can’t tell you how confused I was by the movie, and how embarrassed I was that I had lent it to my pastor! Apparently once you are interested in anything that falls into the Foreign film genre, Netflix recommends anything Foreign to you. A lesson learned the hard way.

I’ve since licked my wounds, and gone back to watching Foreign films from Netflix, however I’ve learned another valuable lesson – one that I had forgotten but Netflix was so kind to remind me. I don’t really think that the people who write the movie descriptions for the Foreign movies ever actually watch the movies, I once selected a Chinese “comedy” that ends when a character tragically gets hit by a bus! (The first fifteen minutes or so were quite funny.)

This is the description that Netflix gave me about the movie :

Sisters Jin and Bin must fend for themselves when their mother abruptly packs her things, leaving the girls in the care of their alcoholic aunt  without a word as to when she’ll return. In a tale of innocence lost, the sisters try to make sense of their mother’s absence. But in the meantime, 6-year-old Jin will be forced to mature far beyond her tender years.

But after further investigation I discovered a more accurate description:

When their mother needs to leave in order to find their estranged father, six-year-old Jin and her younger sister, Bin, are left to live with their Big Aunt for the summer. With only a small piggy bank and their mother’s promise to return when it is full, the two young girls are forced to acclimate to changes in their family life. Counting the days, and the coins, the two bright-eyed young girls eagerly anticipate their mother’s homecoming. But when the bank fills up, and with their mother still not back, Big Aunt decides that she can no longer tend to the children. Taken to live on their grandparent’s farm, it is here that Jin comes to learn the importance of family bonds in this beautiful, meditative, and thought-provoking second feature from So Yong Kim.

!!This is where the spoilers come in so you might want to skip this and come back and see me later!!

I watched this entire movie with my seat back in its upright position and my tray table locked, braced and ready for impact. The children acting in the movie are beautiful and endearing, they tugged on my heart strings and I wanted desperately to protect them.  However, here’s the thing there was really no one to protect them from a negligent mother who drops out of the movie almost immediately, an Aunt who is not an alcoholic though she is certainly not kind, but at the end of the movie just as I was braced for it to get worse – it did something unexpected, it got better.

The girls get sent to live with their grandparents and the movie ends with a sweet hopeful song. I released my breath when the credits started, I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath but I was. I just knew the tragedy was waiting to strike and instead the girls seem in a much better place than they ever where with their aunt or mother.

Oh Netflix, you’ve got to do better than this on these foreign movies – you’re going to give me a stroke!

TREELESS MOUNTAIN: Movie Trailer – Watch more amazing videos here

It’s funny how my moods are tied to the weather, because when I opened the door and the hot air hit me in the face – I felt myself deflate. I suppose this is Indian Summer. The temperature is rocketing towards the upper 80′s and the humidity makes the air feel like a hot wet towel. Sadly,  the weather was at its nicest while work was at it’s busiest, but I’ve had a taste of Fall and I’m hopeful that more is coming soon!

Yesterday I retreated from the heat to my local bookstore, but the clock was ticking as Rascal was at home waiting to be let outside. I wandered among the aisles and picked up a book, but on my way out I spied this sitting on a table:

At first I thought that surely it was a joke, but upon further investigation I find that it’s not a joke, per say, but rather a parody. See, Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain which means the copyright has expired, it’s why you can download a copy of someone reading it for free from Librivox, so someone decided what Pride and Prejudice really needed was, of course, zombies.

I had rather mixed emotions about this book, see I like Pride and Prejudice. I’ve read it half a dozen times and listened to it about a dozen times, so I wasn’t sure how I felt about anyone messing with Miss Elizabeth and Mr.Darcy but I have to admit – I’m intrigued. I read the plot summary on Wikipedia and I think I might actually buy it.

What is so tantalizing to me is that the author managed to right a few wrongs. There are some characters that I always felt that Austen let get off too easily, but not so now that Seth Grahame-Smith has interceded. It looks like the dastardly Wickham is going to get his just desserts! (Even more so than just by virtue of marrying the flighty, superficial Lydia!)

I have another stack of books on their way from Amazon, but once it starts to dwindle – bring on the undead!