Recommendations

I haven't recommended any books or movies in a good while. I don't know how I've resisted the urge, but I'm not going to do so any more. I've seen some good movies recently, and I've read some good books. And, of course, I have taste, and so it seems my duty to let you know about them.

First, not many of those Wow! reads come along anymore. They used to quite a bit, but now, I guess, I've read so much that I'm not a surprised by as much that I read. I always find myself enjoying things the things I read, but still, that sublime feel is rare. I guess it should be.

Recently though, I did happen across such a read in The Slave by the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Especially the first half of that novel just blew me away. It's a pretty basic sort of folk tale set in Poland sometime soon after 1648. The protagonist is Jacob, a Jewish man whose family had been killed in a massacre during a recent Cossack uprising. He had fled from the scene but was subsequently captured by some Pagan/Christians and enslaved in their village. Then, classically, he falls in love with his master's daughter and she with him, and they both struggle with all of those things dividing them: religions, cultures, social statuses, and personal histories. And, of course, God ends up deciding to play a bit of a hand in the story and make sure that nothing about it gets cliched or inauthentic. I'd recommend this to anyone.

So movies. I recently got on Netflix, so there's been a steady stream of really good ones this year:

1. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days - I'd actually never heard this story before. It's about Sophie Scholl, a young Catholic woman who was a member of the White Rose resistance group during World War II, who was executed by the Nazi government for her dissent. This was a really straightforward retelling of the story. In fact, as I watched it, I kept thinking that aspects of the film, especially the dialogue, seemed unmovielike. Eventually, I found out that most of the dialogue in the main scenes was taken word-for-word from the recently discovered transcripts of Scholl's interogation and trial. The film was all-the-more powerful for this authenticity.

2. Dear Frankie - This movie really sounded cheesy when I read about it, but it only sort of was. I remember reading somewhere, one time, that the best stories are the ones that almost reach sentimentality, that go right up to the border, but don't quite make it. This one is perfectly on that edge. The plot sounds silly. A mother, fleeing her abusive ex, moves from place-to-place with her young son who is deaf. Her son doesn't remember his father, and she tells him that her father is a sailor on the H.M.S. Acon (I'm pretty sure that's the wrong name, but it's something like that). She even goes so far as to forge letters for years from the imagined father, and the boy, of course, fantasizes about meeting his father. One day, fate steps in when the son sees in the paper that an actual ship named the H.M.S. Acon is coming into port. The mother has to take some fairly drastic steps to manage the situation. It's a far-fetched premise treated really realistically and really well. It doesn't end as you'd expect.

3. The Heart of the Game - I think the director of this documentary, Ward Serrill, has to be about the luckiest film-maker of all-time. He started out trying to make one-year-long documentary on a high school basketball coach's first year on the job. At the end of the year, he came back for more, and then, he came back again for a third year. This seems fairly normal. In that third year, though, a new player, Darnellia Russell, showed up, and once Serrill started filming the story of her high school basketball career, he had to keep going until it was done. Serrill, in Darnellia, had lucked onto one of the best stories I've ever seen. Honestly, its hard to believe that anybody could luck into filming a story that has the ending this movie has! It took seven years for Serril to reach that end. The film itself is a fairly straightforward documentary and a fairly classic story. It starts just following a basketball program, and the coach makes this fairly engaging. Once Russell shows up, though, the movie is all hers. She's a star basketball player who manages to overcome pretty extraordinary adversity to help the team become a success. It's pretty remarkable, and inspiring, seeing her journey.