La La Land Review

Right off the bat, there was something that I loved about this film: a long dance number done in a single take.  I absolutely love it when films do complicated stuff like this in one take.  It's a dying art.  On the subject of cinematography, La La Land also had a painter's eye for lighting, and filled its scenes with the most wonderful colors.  So as it happens, I'm really rooting for this film to win Best Cinematography.

The other conspicuously obvious Academy Award that it's up for is Best Original Score, and this is the aspect of La La Land that I'll pay the most attention to, seeing as it's a musical, which makes it a special kind of film that's subject to a different kind of critique than the average film.  A musical is to be judged as a musical, and has different standards for quality than everything else you'll be seeing in theatres.  Yes, characters and story are important, but that's only a part of the whole.  It should be worth noting that I think that the characters and story for Oklahoma! are terrible, but it's still a good musical.

Yes, it does emulate a classical musical from the 40's and 50's, set in the modern era.  It has a familiar storyline about two performers who are trying to land their dream careers, which very much fits this genre.  The artistry in the editing does a lot to evoke these old films.  There's spontaneous dancing, including tap dancing, and people wearing flamboyantly colorful outfits that make me think of the old days when Technicolor was a huge gimmick that every director wanted to take advantage of.  All these things are wonderful.

However, at the same time I should note that La La Land focuses more on its characters than its music at times.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that since this is a musical, the characters should have expressed themselves through singing and dancing on a few more occasions than they ultimately did.  Near the end of the film, they didn't have as many dance routines, and ultimately, they didn't use as many songs as they could have.  There's an upside and a downside to this, and I'll get to the upside later.  The downside is that this movie doesn't take full advantage of its medium to express the stories and feelings of its characters.  It's a musical, but only part-time.  It isn't as immersed in its genre as Singin' in the Rain was back in the day.  There are times when it feels just like any other film that you might see, using the same contemporary storytelling techniques, albeit with much better cinematography.  I'm personally not sold on the balance in-between the musical portions of the film and the "normal" segments, although this got nominated for Best Editing, so it definitely warrants a second watching before I really make up my mind on that.

Let's look at the upside to this, though: because there are only about five or six original songs, they're much more memorable.  They actually reuse much of the music from some of these songs, a lot, so certain key songs really stick in your mind after leaving the theatre.  And it's not as if songs are the only things that make this a musical: there are several segments where there's just instruments playing, without any lyrics.  Because La La Land makes frequent use of not just its songs, but its score, I'm willing to believe that it will take home the Oscar in that category.

Two of my favorite pleasures in a film, when done right, are its cinematography and its score, and La La Land definitely did them right.  It was an experience for me.  Unfortunately, since my expectations were subconsciously very high, it let me down somewhat, but not too much.  It is indeed the favorite nominee for Best Picture that everyone has been talking about.

Night Review

Quick show of hands: who hasn't read this book?  I'm just curious.  Where I come from, this Nobel Prize winning book was required reading in my freshman year of high school, but maybe that isn't so in other states and other countries.  Of course, even if it is required reading, perhaps you haven't got to high school yet, so you haven't read it.

In my opinions, everyone should read this historic book, and they shouldn't wait until high school to do so.  Parents should read it to their children when they're still in elementary school.  I don't think someone should withhold Night from someone just because "they aren't old enough."  It's an important book to be familiar with.  It affects your worldview when you immerse yourself in its contents.

As someone who appreciates literature, I also should note that on top of this being a moving true story about one of the most significant events in the twentieth century, but it is also written by a master of storytelling.  Elie Wiesel tells his story not just as an historian, but as an artist.  He speaks with a rare and special voice that one can only have if one has gone through and been permanently affected by his experiences.  He manages to succeed in expressing his suffering through his words, which is very hard to do.  It is quite fortunate that of the few Jews who survived the Holocaust, at least one of them should have his ability to speak as clearly as he does on the subject of that long, long night.

Was God On Vacation? Review

A while back, an Iowa state representative by the name of John Kooiker gave me a book after church.  He was an old friend of mine, an elder I looked up to and regularly talked with after services had convened.  I meant to read it right away.

Around ten years later, I finally got around to it.  It's a shame that it took me this long.  I should be far more eager to complete a book when someone gives it to me.  It's the polite thing to do.  And anyway, I didn't read it because I remembered John Kooiker.  I read it because my father read it in my stead when I first took it home.  All these years, my old man has been asking me if I've gotten around to reading that book.  He really wanted me to read it, because he loved it, which is no surprise.  The book is about a Dutchman who did amazing things during World War II.  My father's a Dutchman, so the story was relevant to him.

Like the judge giving in to the persistent widow, I listened to him after a while.  A decade later, I finally picked the book up and put my nose to it from start to finish.

Overall, it was an interesting account.  It's the true story of Jakobus "Jack" van der Geest, who was a teenager when the Germans first invaded the Netherlands.  That much I knew from what John Kooiker had told me when he handed me the book.  The first few chapters is about how he fought in the Dutch underground, got reported on by his neighbor named Reita, ended up being shipped to Buchenwald, was mistaken for a doctor and forced to help the Nazi doctors with their experiments, became so thin that eventually he got away with faking death, being thrown into a pile of dead bodies, and eventually crawled out at night and killed the Nazi officer patrolling the pile, at which point he took the officer's clothes and sneaked out of the concentration camp.

This is non-fiction, so I don't think that it's a big deal to give away spoilers.  However, I'm not going to write up a summary of Jack van der Geest's story in this review.  I very well could.  After all, I knew most of the things that were going to happen in this book because my father told me about several of Jack's stories.  However, perhaps you want to read this for yourself instead of just getting a brief description of his adventures from me.  I don't want to take away your reason for going out and buying this book.

What I will say is that Carol Ordemann, who transcribed the story for Jack, didn't necessarily do the best job.  I noticed several typos, among other things, which is an objective flaw in its writing.  A published book shouldn't have any typos.  It's extremely unprofessional to have them.  That's the other complaint that I have about Ordemann's writing, that it isn't very professional.  The story is in the first person, which makes me wish that van der Geest didn't seek out someone else to write the book for him.  I'm not expecting him to have the writing ability of Elie Wiesel, but I still would imagine that he'd have enough of a knack for storytelling to write this book himself.  As it stands, Ordemann's first-person writing doesn't feel very personal and doesn't put me in his skin.  It feels emotionally distanced.  Also egregiously, there are times then Carol writes a person as having said something "while smiling" or some other expression, and it's really frustrating because it sounded to my ear like she was creatively filling in the blanks of various scenes in order to make them feel more like first-person recollections and not like they were actual memories of van der Geest.  This book could have felt a lot more reliable, but I didn't trust the illustrator when actual scenes were being illustrated.  Did I trust the overall story and the events therein?  Yes, but not the details of the conversations, which in the meantime were flat.

Another problem that this book has is the title.  van der Geest briefly implores if God is on vatation while in Buchenwald, but but he then figures that God is on his side when he escapes, and the subject isn't explored again.  Once more, I bring up Elie Wiesel, author of Night and God On Trial, who brought up the death of one's faith beautifully, poignantly, and personally in his memoirs, and does a good job of making the reader feel very invested in the question of God's goodness.  Was God On Vacation? doesn't explore this question and give a lot of insight into just what van der Geest was going through spiritually, or if he thought that much about his spirituality at all.  There are brief mentions of God throughout the book, but they aren't brought up with a lot of conviction, or a sense of urgency that says that says that the Divine is an important subject for conversation.  It isn't thematic of the book.  It's just a small detail, which makes me think that it doesn't belong in the title, especially when Jack van der Geest only struggles with the question in one of the early chapters.

It's frustrating, because the story truly is a good one.  However, I think I'd rather retell it myself in my own way, as a folk tale, to my children.  It's a story that's better told than read.