Beautiful Feet

Oh my lord, Maggie Smith is wonderful. In The Lady in the Van (dir. Nicholas Hytner, 2015), she plays Miss Mary (Margaret? mentally insert winky emoticon here) Shepherd with pathos and wit in this 'mostly true' tale, set in 1970s London. There is lots of subtext about certain classes of people being outside of the law—gays, the homeless—and those ostensibly living within social constraints—nuns, neighbours, classical musicians—but the film turns a lot of these assumptions on their heads. Alex Jennings plays the film-contained writer, Alan Bennett, with restrained wryness, although I found Jim Broadbent uncharacteristically underwhelming. Lest I provide spoilers, I will speak vaguely. The story contains  theological themes of absolution and ablution, and the van becomes her sepulchre, both as a living coffin for her sins and a literal one later, after she has experienced those sacraments. While the end would probably be difficult to create any less cheesily, there is enough g...

Mark Alpert’s The Orion Plan took me back to a large astronomy poster I had as a girl; I’d get lost in looking at its details for hours. This Wine and Cheese Award -winner gets my grudging Ebertian thumbs-up: I whinge because the reading went by too quickly, so gripping was the storyline. Unlike The Six , which was a YA-oriented novel (see my review ), this is an adult sci-fi thriller. (Although really, either book is equally readable by any age group, thanks to the lack of gratuitous sex in Orion .) But like The Six , there is non-saccharine treatment of characters with flaws or University-of-Life knocks; Alpert comments unapologetically about the notion of punishment and the breakdown of Western correctional systems, and he illustrates compassionately the issues around homelessness, grief, addiction, the call to ministry, ecological disasters and colonialism. But he is not preachy. As Terry O’Reilly said in a recent radio show , “Story matters” and this novel centrifugal-...

It just worked out that four works I encountered recently — in a movie, a foreign film, a video and a novel — all dealt with various aspects of death. Surprisingly, none of it was depressing. Book cover design by Kelly Blair; image from www.goodreads.com Well, okay, some people find the apocalypse depressing, but I LOVE it. Especially when it's presented as well as in  The Road or Station Eleven. The Dog Stars  was recommended by a fellow editor when I put out a social-media call for apocalyptic-read recommendations. Peter Heller's first fiction book takes place in the next few decades after a pandemic has killed most of the population and left many of the survivors with The Blood Disease, an auto-immune system threat. The protagonist is tortured by an act in his past, let alone trying to survive a new agricultural production system, murderous gangs and loss. But despite his flaws, we cheer and cry with Hig all along. Best of all, the book manages to have a satisfying e...

I have seen several pieces on screen lately that deal with using our heads. However, each discussed the head in conjunction with other factors.     Brit TV series, River , lives up to its acclaim. A one-off mini-series of six episodes, it managed to grip me immediately in its treatment of how grief not only affects the heart but also the head. Stellan Skarsgård and Nicola Walker are police officers in this crime drama but in the name of spoilers, I won’t say much more. Other sympathetic performances come from actors like Lesley Manville, but I didn’t really buy Georgina Rich as a police psychologist, at least in the way she chose to/the director asked her to act it. Anyway, the takeaway is that you can’t always use your head in exclusion of the contributions of the heart, either personally or sometimes even professionally. Encouraging symbiosis between the two can facilitate redemption, serenity or at least a sense of acceptance.           ...