Jane: Here, there, everywhere

Hugh Dancy and Maria Bello in Robin Swicord’s film version of “The Jane Austen Book Club.”

So much of Jane Austen's work revolved around finding men of means to marry young women whose families were in fairly desperate financial straits. Rather than spinning in her grave at the knockoffs of her books, Jane must be smiling at the number of women who have profited from marketing their own takes on her stories.
Are you a secret Jane Austen fan? Did you love Alicia Silverstone's well-intentioned meddling in the movie “Clueless”? Is Bridget Jones one of your guilty pleasures?
The first is a hilarious contemporary Beverly Hills update of Austen's Emma, and Bridget is a direct descendant of the young Austen heroines longing for love above their social station. Amy Heckerling wrote and directed Clueless; Sharon Maguire directed and Helen Fielding wrote the novel and the screen play. A guy, Guy Andrews, wrote time-traveling Lost in Austen, but two women produced the mini-series for Britain's ITV. It's available on DVD and worth seeing for the fun of watching a modern Austen devotee suddenly transported to the plot of Pride and Prejudice, and trying to manipulate the outcome.
Karen Joy Fowler's novel The Jane Austen Book Club captures the Austen spirit beautifully, gleefully. The Davis author considerately provides an appendix guide to the Austen novels for the non-devotee. You don't need it to appreciate this sly and charming tale of six months with a California Central Valley book club that's "All Jane Austen, all the time." Robin Swicord directed and wrote the screenplay with Fowler.
Relationships end and begin, strawberries and margaritas are consumed in the summer heat, and the five women and one man reveal themselves in their reactions to the novels.
Bernadette, at 67 the oldest member, (and the funniest)has officially given up on romance; she wears mismatched socks and pulls off a surprising coup. Allegra, the lesbian, focuses on Austen's writing “about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Jane Austen in the horror section." Jocelyn, the never-married dog breeder and born match-maker, finds herself captivated by an unexpected match and by science fiction/fantasy (which Fowler also writes).
Veteran book-clubbers will appreciate the intimacy and loving support that triumph over occasional exasperation with each other.
There's a superficial resemblance to that other novel of Central Valley women, How to Make an American Quilt, but this is far richer, as post-modern meta-fiction should be.

If those don't satisfy your Austen hunger,there is always the 2007 Becoming Jane, an imagining of a possible romance gone awry. Jane (Anne Hathaway) has already decided to earn her living by writing when she meets dashing young Irish lawyer Tom Lefroy (James McAvoy), who takes a far bolder and more direct approach to romance than typical Austen suitors.
It's great fun to watch a fine cast-- especially Maggie Smith -- shape-shift into the memorable Austen characters. Just don't take it too seriously.

Hiatus

No update this week -- instead I'd like to refer you to a very interesting column from the Santa Barbara Noozhawk, a favorite independent site.

http://www.noozhawk.com/conklin_wayman/article/012410_cinema_in_focus_15th_anniversary/#comments

What do you think of their approach?

I'm having back problems, hope to be back soon.

Weeds running rampant

In Weeds' first season on Showtime, Jenji Kohan took an offbeat look at marijuana in Agrestic, an upscale Southern California subdivision of pseudo-Spanish houses. A suddenly widowed young soccer mom, Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker), plunges into dealing so she can keep herself and her family of two boys in the affluent style to which they have been accustomed.

Her customers include an accountant and city councilman, Doug Wilson (Kevin Nealon), his attorney pal Dean Hodes (Andy Milder), and students at nearby Valley College.

Nancy's adventures with her supplier and expanding her business share the spotlight with the consumerism and competition of a town where everybody seems to be friends and enemies simultaneously. Celia Hodes (Elizabeth Perkins) supplies much of that melodramatic energy as PTA president and a very mean-spirited mother.

It was Showtime's highest-rated series in its first year. If only it had quit then.

By the time the fifth season ended, it had become very dark, a series of murders, rapes, shootouts and intrigues of violent rival cartels and Mexican politics.

Nancy, who had earlier married a DEA agent who was soon killed, now has had a baby by and is married to a Mexican drug kingpin and politician, Esteban Reyes. played by Demian Bichir, who's known as the George Clooney of Mexico. He's the mayor of Tijuana and running for governor. His glamorous woman campaign manager has threatened to have her older two sons killed, because "we don't need them for our pretty pictures." One of those sons promptly bashed her in the head with a croquet mallet and we last saw her face down in a swimming pool, blood spreading.

Season six is due to start airing in July. Can it possibly still be funny when we know that 18,000 people have died in the drug wars since the end of 2006 when Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war against cartels? When we know the violence is no longer confined to the border towns? It has escalated, just as the Weeds plot and sub-plots have.

For a comedy, it has become seriously not funny. There doesn't seem to be any logical way to end this saga except operatically, with corpses littering the screen.

Saludes, San Patricio!

Beach at San Patricio-Melaque

Maybe you're waiting until Wednesday to celebrate St. Patrick's Day, but they've already started the annual week-long party in San Patricio, Jalisco, on Mexico's Pacific coast. This year they may be listening to the new Chieftains album San Patricio, a fusion of Irish and Mexican music.
http://www.irishcentral.com/IrishAmerica/The-March-of-the-Forgotten-87237152.html?page=1
The visiting gringos are certainly drinking Jamieson's and getting misty-eyed as they retell the story of the brave Irish martyrs who fought with Mexico in the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848. Like so much of conventional wisdom, quite a bit of it is wrong, or at least questionable.

“No, the San Patricio soldiers couldn't have settled in the town. None of them survived,” a Mexican scholar told me. But some did,escaping the fate of being hanged as deserters by the United States Army. There may have been only a handful, but a few of them accepted the Mexican government's offer of land grants and quietly settled into the country.

The popular story, as recounted in the movie One Man's Hero, is that when the Irish soldiers entered Mexico with the U.S. Army they found themselves fighting people just like themselves: Catholic villagers. And so they defected to the Mexican Army, which would be led by General Santa Anna, who had conquered the Alamo 10 years earlier.

And why were there Irish in the U.S. Army? They had come to America to escape famine at home, booking passage on a ship to New Orleans because the fare was cheaper than to other ports such as New York. There was little work available, and much resentment, and so they joined the Army in Texas.

The deserters weren't all Irish. The Saint Patrick's Battalion (Batallón de San Patricio) included Canadians, Scots, English and several European nationalities, as well as some African-Americans who had escaped slavery in the South; one of the issues in that war was the Texan desire to maintain slavery and the Mexican ban on it. Mexico offered more incentives than sentimental attachment to villages and religion – citizenship, higher pay and promises of land. There may have been as few as 175, or as many as several hundred. (There's that slippery history again.) Mexico has long honored the battalion in ceremonies in Mexico City's San Jacinto Plaza on September 12, the anniversary of the executions. In 1997 then-President Ernesto Zedillo commemorated the 150th anniversary of the executions.

Besides the truly awful One Man's Hero,there are a few other page and screen sources of this little-known chapter of history. Some claim the story was suppressed by the United States government,which may be true.

Among them are Mark Day's documentary The San Patricios (1996)-- that's a still from the documentary at left.

The Irish in America, a History Channel production available at Blockbuster and Amazon.
PBS also did a series called the Irish in America. Unfortunately, the site has been retired.
Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick's Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War, author Robert Ryal Miller, history.
50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: by Mickey Z, political history.
Saint Patrick's Battalion, by Carl Krueger, historical novel.

The only San Patricio in Mexico (which tends to give many towns the same name), it's properly known as San Patricio-Melaque-Barra de Navidad. The three towns face the Bahia de Navidad and are deservedly popular as a destination for snowbirds and Mexican tourists, for their natural beauty and great variety of accommodations and restaurants.

Melaque also seems to be the only town of its name in the Republic. Some say it's a derivation of malarkey, slang for nonsense, probably a British origin. (And maybe it's from a pre-conquest indigenous language.) Some also say that gringo is derived from the song Green Grow the Rushes, O, by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, sung by the surviving soldiers as they marched along the beach. More on that theory at http://celtic-cadences.blog.co.uk/2009/07/17/green-grow-the-rashes-o-lyrics-robert-burns-texas-scotland-mexican-gringo-american-ancestry-genealogy-6535224/

A pretty story, isn't it?

If you're looking for more light-hearted Irish movies, check the January post Irish spring some surprises.

Who should we celebrate this month?

You've probably heard that March is International Women's Month. In the United States we are invited to a lot of events celebrating that and urging more attention to women's rights and accomplishments, but maybe we need to look at some other things.
 "We don't want a bigger piece of the pie.  The pie is poisoned," author Kate Millett told a gathering of California feminists in the early 1970s.  Meanwhile, out in the halls, noisy wrangling was going on over whether the group was dominated by middle-class white women and ignoring women of color, the working class and lesbians.  It was.

Around the world, women don't seem to be trying to crack the glass ceiling in politics and corporations; too many are just trying to survive. Several of their stories are told in the 2004 documentary film The Corporation. The filmmakers have generously posted the entire film at http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=FA50FBC214A6CE87 and it's available from Netflix or for purchase or lease from http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/ both for private use and for public showings. It's also on Hulu, with limited commercial interruptions, http://www.hulu.com/watch/118169/the-corporation

In India, women have led the fight to end laws against saving crop seeds. Dr. Vandana Shiva, a physicist, is a leader in that effort to preserve an ancient and money-saving tradition and in making water available without corporate control. See her interview with Bill Moyers at www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_shiva.html

In Canada, Maude Barlow has been leading the water fight for many years and opposing free trade agreements which let global corporations control the necessities of life. Grit TV has a good recent interview with her: http://www.grittv.org/2010/02/24/maude-barlow-water-on-the-brain/

By far the most compelling interviews in the film are with the teenage girls who work in sweatshops for U.S-based corporations making our clothes for pennies a day. In 1996, when a human rights organization visited a Honduras sweatshop owned by actress Kathie Lee Gifford, intimidating company security men watched the interviews. The girls surreptitiously gave their pay stubs to the visitors, which led to a federal investigation. Whether Gifford is still exploiting child workers is in dispute, but there's no question that many clothing manufacturers continue to do so.

It's not all bad news. Carpet manufacturer Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets is a convert to sustainability, and has called himself “a plunderer” of resources in speeches to other industrial leaders. He has also reported that the company is doing very well with its new environmentally friendly practices. We need to educate and encourage more men like him, help them to make better pies.

Director has her own rhythm

You may never have heard of Darnell Martin, but you've probably seen her work as director of several episodes of Law and Order and other popular TV shows.  Television directors just don't get the same attention as film directors, and women in the business rarely get much attention except as actresses. She's been working in the business since the 1980s at first as second assistant camera on  Do the Right Thing, and as a writer, learning her craft with hands-on experience.

A couple of things about Martin are striking. When she made her1994 feature debut, I Like It Like That, she was the first African-American woman to direct a studio feature - certainly an attention-getting distinction, and she didn't want a big deal made of it.  She told American Visions magazine "It pisses me off . . . I wasn't thinking about trying to do something politically correct. I was trying to follow the human beats. My foremost interest in filmmaking is about character, about the environment of my characters. I wasn't trying to do a film about Latinos or women or anything like that. I just tried to make a film about people." 

Her feature films seem (at least to me) to have a documentary flair. The 2005 Their Eyes Were Watching God, based on a Zora Neale Hurston novel, tells us almost as much about life in an all-Black Florida town in the 1920s as about one woman's search for love and respect. And of course the 2008 Cadillac Records is rooted in the reality of 1950s Chicago blues, with all its raunchiness and exploitation. Several reviews seemed particularly vicious and petty, with complaints like "Beyoncé Knowles doesn't look anything like Etta James."  (Oh, please!) It's the music that matters, and the music is great in this overview of Chess Records and the movement of "race music" into the mainstream. Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle gets it: "A good general rule is that if one performance is good, credit the actor. But if everyone in the movie is doing excellent work, this is no coincidence. This is the product of superior direction."

Martin is identified as a pioneer of black film, which has a 100-year history in the United States - kind of funny when you think that she was born in 1964 in the Bronx. "There would be no Denzel Washington without Sidney Poitier and no Sidney Poitier without Paul Robeson . . . no Gina Prince-Bythewood without Darnell Martin" writes Nsenga K. Burton Ph.D. at http://www.theroot.com/views/celebrating-100-years-black-cinema-0 which is altogether worth reading.

Martin has not announced any upcoming film projects, but has scheduled a couple of episodes of Happy Town  and one of Mercy for 2010.

The lovable horrormeister

There are several endearing things about Stephen King. When he suspects there's a monster in the closet he opens the door to face it head on. His stories, even when they focus on boys and men, often include a brave and resourceful woman, or a little girl, as in the 1999 The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. A few of his novels could well be considered feminist.

With a new book just out from Simon & Schuster,UR, first available only on the Kindle e-reader, and the Pocket Books re-issue of the 1980 Danse Macabre it's a good time to look at this very prolific and very successful author. UR expands his suspicion (shared by many of us) that our technological toys have a dark side - the e-book reader opens worlds we didn't suspect and don't much like. It's not a new idea; Lewis Carroll did much the same; Alice's adventures in Wonderland were not entirely pleasant.
He has done it before with cars (Christine and From a Buick 8), household appliances (Maximum Overdrive), the cell phone (Cell) and exercise equipment (Stationary Bike). (Why he hasn't treated the home computer as a possible source of unspeakable horror is beyond me.)

Danse Macabre, a long-time favorite of mine, explores the horror theme in folktales and mythology for a University of Maine class on "Themes in Supernatural Literature." Pocket Books will publish a reprint with a 2010 foreword on February 23. It's one of the most accessible and entertaining treatments of the subject, and certainly worth reading now when our television and movie screens drip with the gore of romanticized werewolves, zombies and vampires.

King has been derided by many critics and sneered at both by literary authors whose work wasn't doing so well and by timid readers who preferred romantic fairy tales with guaranteed happy endings.

He doesn't always hit the bull's-eye, and sometimes the quality is all over the place in the same book. His work often seems to be produced by two distinct personalities, one a kid enamored of ripping yarns, the other a thoughtful, even spiritual, adult. It's a topic he has dealt with in Duma Key, The Dark Half and in his autobiographical On Writing, in which he discusses his years of addiction to drugs and booze.

In The Dark Half his writer protagonist is forced to confront his own demons and darkness. In Duma Key a construction worker loses his right arm, and gains artistic and psychic abilities which would be surprising anywhere but in a King book. Both have mesmerizing sections on the sources of creativity, as well as passages I'd just as soon skip on horrors and creepy crawlies. That's not because they scare me – they don't, in fact, I usually find them pretty amusing – but because they seem shallow next to his explorations of relationships and the psyche.
The latter gives us much of the weight of the horrific history of a pioneer Florida family, and some far more cheerful little gems on creation, titled How to Draw a Picture. They could just as well be called How to Write, or How to Live. Samples:
I: “Start with a blank surface.
IV: “Start with what you know, then reinvent it.”
XI: “Don't quit until the picture's complete. . . . Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter.”

Find lots more at his website, http://www.stephenking.com/index.html