This holiday weekend the kids have Friday and Monday off, so my wonderful in-laws took them Thursday night and gave us a three day vacation. We decided to stay home and put monies we would have had to use on lodging toward eating well and enjoying being home. We ate well today and caught a matinee of Jumper, which was a lively but substanceless film.

Last night, we watched one of the best films I’ve seen in a very long time, After the Wedding. It starts off a little slow, and you think you can see the whole plot coming, but you are completely wrong. The film upsets convention in some great ways, and the ultimate resolution of the film was very very satisfying. Try not to read too much about it before seeing it. I like the Netflix blurb, because it didn’t really give anything away. The filmmaking style was also very interesting; handheld cameras most of the time, a lot of CLOSE-ups on faces, and an interesting way of showing memories. I’ve been thinking about the characters all day.

One of the authors I like reading is Ron Hansen, and recently one of his novels was made into the film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I saw the film last week with my brother-in-law, and it was great. You can tell the film was based on a thoughtful novel, and a lot of the dialogue in the film is straight from the text. It’s a brooding, quiet and tense film, punctuated occasionally by violence, but mainly marked by being so constantly near to it. The film deals with the charisma of the outlaw, isolation, and the natures of celebrity and fear. It also struck me as likely being more true-to-life than most westerns, and the starkness of the landscape in the film lent a significant presence that was bigger than most of the actors.

Part of the true-to-lifeness had to do with how similar the film’s criminal culture seemed to more contemporary gang life, not the glorified one, but the one we get to see in some better films. The in-fighting, the social isolation, the long periods of relative inaction, the brotherhood that can end at a moment’s notice. It actually made me think a bit of the film Brick, which I also enjoyed. So check this film out if you are up for it. It’s a better movie than 3:10 to Yuma (if there are more important things than action scenes), and the brutality is low-key enough to tolerate, nothing like I expect The Proposition to be. And plus, Nick Cave is in this film as a cowboy minstrel, and you don’t want to miss that, right?

I actually took some time out this week to read a book. Normally I’m trying to squeeze in an audio-book here and there, but since Wendell Berry’s books never make it to Audible.com, I decided to read my copy of Hannah Coulter, which I’ve been wanting to do for a couple of years now. I’m just about finished, and it’s golden. It is the fictional autobiography of a woman growing up and spending her days in her community. She loses her first husband to WW II, and remarries a few years later. She has three children. The book is a meditation on what community means, what love encompasses, and the weight of grief. There are many sharply beautiful paragraphs, and I haven’t wanted to read it too quickly: I don’t want it to end.

Lastly, we’ve been listening to Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma. A fascinating book about the food industry, farming and national agriculture. It’s told as an exploration, in journalistic narrative style, including interviews with different farmers and players in the agriculture industry/lifestyle. Read it or listen to it. You’ll never think about food in the same way. I should note that the book is not a jeremiad or a tedious case against bad practices. It really is an exploration with a narrator you can trust, in pursuit of answers and willing to listen to a lot of different voices. The light he shines is strong and bright.