Popular Posts

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Reel Book Club Members Will we have August meeting?

Hello Friends and Readers,
When I first thought of the REEL BOOK club, I never imagined all the sources of information on the Internet about this topic. I have been amazed, and genuinely grateful for the information.
Now that we have read/watched and discussed Water for Elephants in May, and some of us read/watched and slightly discussed The Help, we need to collaborate on what next to read/watch and discuss in the future.
What books have you been enjoying over the summer? Or what movies did you see that made you want to read the book? Or a book that you would like to see made into a movie—it was that good?
I’m sending you my blog address, so you can respond or reply to any of the above questions. No one reads my blog, so you don’t have to worry about your comments being blasted all over the world (unless my blog becomes super interesting to the world).
1st – let’s talk about when we can meet in the next two weeks—August 25-Sept. 12. We can discuss THE HELP book or movie, and what you have been reading and what you want to read or see in the coming months.
2nd – I’m copying or attaching (whichever works for me) some lists or websites that present books that are, have been or might be coming out in film.
Please let me know if you get this message, your suggested meeting times, places and books we might consider. Remember the books do not have to be a certain genre—western, Christian, romance, science fiction, non-fiction, short story, etc. Contact me.
Posted by at 2 comments:

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Plans Change. . . and Change. . . and Change.

One set of grandkids started school last week. Hubby starts teaching on Tuesday, and youngest son counts the days before he leaves for Seattle to college. Un-offically, summer is over, but I'm still preparing for family visits.

Visitors were coming in waves, starting next Saturday (the last of August), then the next week and then the week after. First change--family started shifting the dates. Byron's cousin who was coming 2nd week emailed that they can't come until a week later. His Uncle called and said he wouldn't be there until the cousins arrive. When Byron emailed and called back that everyone would be here on the same dates, Uncle Joe replied, "You will just have a houseful then."

Byron will be working; I will be volunteering and writing while Westley will be off to college, yet we will have too many people at one week to enjoy enough. But who knows, things may change again before they get here.
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Help movie was GREAT!

Saw the movie THE HELP twice! Both times I enjoyed it. On the second time around I started noticing the period props: I had a necklace like Skeeter's when I was fourteen (remember, the solo pearl hanging at the end of a diamond baggette), they were the trend in the 60s. I had a flowery dress just like Hilly's in the photograph (the one that Skeeter picked up just before typing commode in the newsletter rather than coats. Other scenes and props made me remember growing up in Oklahoma, not Jackson, Mississippi (Yes, Oklahoma is considered part of the South).

But we were poor but proud, so we didn't have any "help."
I learned how to cook all those dishes just like Minny, but I also learned how to kill a chicken with a flick of the wrist, not with an axe.

I, like Skeeter, wanted to "be a journalist, or a novelist, or both." I left my little home town after college, but I am still trying to be a writer.

Ah, loved the book--I want to read it again, just to see what Tate Taylor changed in his screenplay. I think I will.
Posted by at 1 comment:

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Missing those Grandkids

It has only been a month, but not seeing my eight grandkids for that long is terrible.
I'm missing all the funny moments, changes, discoveries and summer-time adventures.
So far in June and July, Brenan and Taher had birthdays, 3 and 6 respectively; now Ron will have his sixth birthday on Wednesday. I send presents and messages, but it's not the same.

School is starting, and now they will be back in a home-bound routine, and not able to travel or visit with grandparents until holidays.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Westley's Graduation - One Year later

Westley's Graduation - One Year later
Westley gets a hug from his mom the minute after he receives his diploma from Fruita Monument High School, Class of 2010.

He's BACK! Billy Crystal is 2012 Oscar Awards Host

Remember Bohemian Rhapsody Mountain Dew parody Ad

The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.