If you are an action/adventure film enthusiast I’m not sure if The Lost Daughter is right pick for your Saturday night viewing pleasure. Whereas James Bond movies open with a large landscape panning of a dramatic ski slope decent, this film meanders along an oceanside road for as long as it takes the sun to set. Whereas Bruce Willis navigates amongst hundreds of frantic bystanders taken hostage, this film has the camera angle so tight to the lead and her children that you can’t help but smell Johnson’s baby shampoo. Whereas the violence in action adventure is noisy, loud and explosive, the violence of the female sort is gut wrenchingly mean.
This is a movie about women. Women as mothers, as wives, as cheaters, as power brokers, as party goers, as needy. There are many layers to how all the players are set in motion. And of course, the femme fatale is a bushy bearded male who steals away the lead knowing she is easily baited by the public recognition he lavishes over her professional work.
On a first viewing I just want to enjoy the surface layer, with all the beautifully framed shots. But my subconscious is signaling there is more there to be seen, and to plan on a review at a later date. Though not heavy on action, there is intrigue. The movie starts slow but builds and with the help of an unreliable narrator, one discovers a need to learn more about Leda’s story.
Walking Around Money – Short Story Review
I started liking short stories when I first found Flannery O’Connor, probably because that was her preferred genre. Then I picked up The Best of American Short Stories because the volume had been edited by David Brooks- and then I was sold on short stories as a way of sampling a new author over an afternoon on the couch. The first selection in a volume called Transgressions (edited by Ed McBain) is Walking Around Money by Donald Westlake who is just one more prolific writer who was not familiar to me.
He’s a crime writer. This sixty-page caper is full of great language for his less than brilliant partners in crime. Take this description, for example.
Dortmunder and Andy Kelp and the man called Querk sat in silence (shoosh) a while, contemplating the position Querk found him self in, sitting here together on these nice wire-mesh chairs in the middle of New York in August, which of course meant it wasn’t New York at all, not the real New York, but the other New York, the August New York.
In August, the shrinks are all out of town, so the rest of the city population looks calmer, less stressed. Also, a lot of those are out of town, as well, replaced by American tourists in pastel polyester and foreign tourists in vinyl and corduroy. August among the tourists is like all at once living in a big herd of cows; slow, fat, dumb, and no idea where they’re going.
This is language I appreciate and enjoy. The plot is tight and fresh. Now that I’ve bumped into him, I’ll have to find more pages written by Mr. Westlake.
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