"i only married him"

I don't write about lit enough ... actually, seeing as this is my second post this month, I'd say I don't write enough period. Things are busy, what can I say. And my computer has been down. I came home one night and it sounded like Mothra was battling Godzilla in there. Needless to say, getting and keeping an appointment at a Genius Bar in New York is not an easy thing. Hopefully I will have some clarity after tomorrow.

I have, though, been reading with satisfying regularity. I think it's the daily Park Slope to Manhattan subway routine, which allows me to plow through novels and actually stay current with the New Yorker. I recently finished Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, her thinly veiled biography of soon-to-be-former First Lady Laura Bush.

I'm generally not a fan of Sittenfeld. The buzz around Prep still mystifies me; I thought the book was glorified chick lit. Yeah, it's readable, but there's no substance. American Wife has a similar, Lifetime-ready feel (she has sex with her dead boyfriend's brother, she has an abortion, the future president goes down on her). Here, at least, we get a mildly amusing heroine. It's fun to see Sittenfeld attempt to understand and rationalize Laura Bush, a woman who still appeals to the American people, even those who find her husband utterly toxic. Sittenfeld paints Bush (oh, excuse me, Alice Blackwell, as she's known here) as a bookish, sensible librarian who is never the same after she accidentally kills her high school beau in a car accident. She ends up with George W. (oh, excuse me, Charles), a boorish, dimwitted politico's son who downs booze, does lines, and runs companies into the ground before an inexplicable rise to the presidency.

Sittenfeld aptly handles Alice's inner turmoil, and the first two thirds of the book, which cover her childhood and the rocky early does of her marriage to Charles, are fairly intriguing. But she loses us when the Blackwells make it to the White House. It's a jarring temporal shift - we go from Charlie hitting his political stride on the state level straight to being a lame duck in the White House. We're spared the gory details of the campaign, and that's a shame. Sittenfeld is noticeably uncomfortable talking politics, what we get is the AOL home page version of the 2000 election and the war in Iraq. It's ham-fisted, sloppy, and anti-climactic (though I did like the moment when the Karl Rove stand-in manipulates Alice into getting a face lift and follow-up botox procedures. That was a hoot).

Vicky Christina Penelope

I had time to write another review!

Even a seasoned Woody Allen fan might mistake the auteur’s latest film, Vicky Christina Barcelona, for the work of another filmmaker. That is, until the characters open their mouths.
Allen’s latest sparkles with sumptuous, sure-footed visuals as few of his previous films have. While nothing can be compared to Manhattan’s arresting black and white cinematography, this is his most compelling work in color. He captures Barcelona in all its sun-soaked glory. But when his characters begin talking, and falling in and out of love, it’s unmistakably an Allen film.
The film follows two Americans, the engaged, sensible Vicky (The Prestige’s Rebecca Hall) and the impulsive, unmoored Christina (Match Point’s Scarlett Johansson), as they spend a summer vacationing in Barcelona. Their reasons for traveling are dubious at best (Vicky is getting her doctorate in Catalan studies, but inexplicably speaks not a word of Spanish), but that’s not the point. It becomes achingly clear that they are in Spain to fall in love, whether they like it or not.
Seduction comes in the form of the painter Juan Antonio (No Country for Old Men’s Javier Bardem). The girls don’t get through their first day in Spain before being whisked off to a rural village with Juan Antonio, where he attempts to seduce them both. As he pursues both women, and they pursue him to a sometimes surprising effect, Allen explores the various maddening effects of attraction.
Madness and love become inseparable when Maria Elena (Volver’s Penelope Cruz), Juan Antonio’s ex-wife, joins the film. Cruz blasts in and out of scenes with a primal voracity, brimming with unstable passion and jolting the sleepy film into something that demands attention. Every time she leaves a scene I wanted to follow.
Cruz turns out to be the film’s most apt performer. Johansson has never looked so uncomfortable on screen, and it’s impossible to know why Allen keeps on casting her in his films. She’s awkward and clumsy, and can’t seem to convey any of Christina’s restlessness or terminal dissatisfaction. Conveying emotion can be difficult, I suppose, when one’s lips and bust line are doing the heavy lifting.
Hall fairs better. Vicky is the type of role Diane Keaton would have played for Allen in the ’70s, a sophisticated, sometimes brash know-it-all who projects superiority to mask crippling insecurity. Hall has great comic timing and imbues the character with relatable false confidence and vulnerability.
Bardem’s role plays up his screen idol appeal, and completely wipes away of his creepy psycho-killer from No Country for Old Men.
While Allen has fun exploiting some of the romantic entanglements, the film ultimately becomes too convoluted to be worth the trouble. Allen gets this, too, as the many bizarre revelations and outlandish plot elements in the third act scream desperation.