by Richard Subber | Oct 31, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
slow-moving lava love…
Book review:
The Bridges of Madison County
Robert James Waller (1939-2017)
New York: Warner Books Inc., 1992
171 pages
The Bridges of Madison County was a notably popular new book. However, I’m aware that not everyone is a fan.
If you’re looking for highly stoked eroticism and high-rolling lives that throw off sparks when they touch, look elsewhere.
Frankly, for lots of tastes, good advice is: look elsewhere no matter what you’re looking for.
For me, Bridges documents the chance intersection of the putatively unremarkable lives of Francesca and Robert with all the heat and dazzle of slow-moving lava, without its destructive power. They come together, they permit each other to nourish their beautiful personae and they generate a passion that consumes without burning.
Robert likes to talk in philosophical kinds of ways, and Francesca likes to listen.
Francesca and Robert come together too late in their lives, after unbreakable commitments have been made to other cherished persons who, regrettably, are not like themselves.
I am drawn to the unsounded depths of their love and their absolute, cascading, undeniable recognition of each other as the unforgettable objects of their burgeoning desire.
They understand that they must be content with the short lifetime of their dalliance. They honor their love by deeply understanding its nature, and by accepting the permanent separation that their unyielding integrity requires.
Robert whispers to Francesca: “…this kind of certainty comes only once…”
The Bridges of Madison County is a love song, a courtship, a delicate primer on yearning, a too brief opportunity to know how it feels to be in love like that.
Give it a try.
p.s. Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep made the movie version with the same title in 1995 (rated PG-13, 135 minutes). You’ll love it if you like the book.
Waller’s book and the movie equally reveal the ethereal bond between Robert and Francesca. There is frank eroticism, with different physical and philosophical elements in the film and book, and a shared electric vitality.
The film and the book offer stylistically divergent life dramas that converge to a singular powerful love, and a perpetual loneliness that Robert and Francesca cannot minimize.
Give the film a try.
* * * * * *
Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: A Cold Welcome
The culprit was global cooling,
500 years ago…
by Sam White
–
As with another eye: Poems of exactitude with 55 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Oct 3, 2024 | Book reviews, Books, Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
bergin makes it worse…
Play review:
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A 1962 play by Edward Albee
New York: Scribner Classics, 1962, 2003
243 pages
It’s not a feel-good play.
After you start to move again after you finish reading it, probably you’ll end up thinking that your life is better than you thought it was. George and Martha do a pretty good job of proving that hell on earth is possible.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is almost a non-stop exaltation of how to be mean, sad, vicious, heartbroken, desperate, delirious, murderous, inhibited, ignorant, ambitious, empty, and longing, more or less all at the same time.
George and Martha, an aging couple on a rundown college campus, stage their terrible show for the benefit of a young professor, Nick, and his young wife, Honey, in the wee hours of a morning when each of them has something better to do, but isn’t doing it.
None of them make you think of the Cleaver family.
Arthur Hill was George and Uta Hagen was Martha in the first stage presentation in October 1962.
In the gritty 1966 film version, Richard Burton was George and Elizabeth Taylor was Martha.
Both of these productions are slam bang downers, just like the play.
No production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will make you think of the Cleavers.
* * * * * *
Play review. Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: Shantung Compound
Really, you see, they didn’t care much
about each other…
by Langdon Gilkey
–
Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Aug 13, 2024 | Theater and play reviews
wholesome, believable, nice…
Movie review:
Starman
1984
Rated PG
115 minutes
Break the egg labeled Close Encounters of the Third Kind and break the egg labeled Jane Eyre, and scramble them with some special sauce, and you get Starman.
You mix your basic alien lands on Earth story line with love at a slow burn, and then give Jeff Bridges (the “Starman”) a chance to theatrically show how hard it is to learn the English language after you crawl out of the spaceship.
Several characters rise to the challenge of answering the obvious question: how do we deal with a being from another planet who visits Earth with no obvious threatening intent?
The good guys win in this story, and Jenny (Karen Allen) learns a lot more than anyone else about a different kind of life out there in space.
The story is wholesome, there’s some action, Bridges and Allen make a believably nice couple, and you don’t have to wonder too much about how the story is going to end.
* * * * * *
Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
–
Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Jul 16, 2024 | Theater and play reviews
“Wolverines!”
Movie review:
Red Dawn
Red Dawn is more than a shoot ‘em up movie.
Red Dawn (1984, PG-13, 114 minutes) is all-American stuff—the mountaineering teenage heroes, with Boy Scout gear and some guns, prevail over the invading Russian paratroopers. It makes you want to shout “Wolverines!” It was still a Cold War environment in 1984, just sayin’.
Jed (Patrick Swayze) and his friends try to talk out their issues of patriotism, humanity, privation, and growing up. There is death, and triumph, and betrayal, and pride, and growing up.
It helps that the Russian soldiers are by-the-book brutal characters, not too smart, and they can’t seem to beat a small gang of teens (“Wolverines!”) who are “hiding” in the mountains.
There’s another Red Dawn film, done in 2012 (PG-13, 93 minutes), with a similar story line. It’s a remake, but it’s not fully baked, it’s mostly action and shooting. Don’t bother with it.
* * * * * *
Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Go Down Together…Bonnie and Clyde (book review)
they were violent criminals
–
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | Jun 18, 2024 | Human Nature, Theater and play reviews
jungle story
Movie review:
Medicine Man
1992
PG-13
106 min
Medicine Man is a completely predictable story about a man and a woman chasing each other as they close in on finding a cure for cancer in the deep jungle. You can guess how it ends.
The real treasure of Medicine Man is watching Sean Connery create the very believable Dr. Robert Campbell character: a quirky, endlessly earnest, and somewhat sloppy bachelor who gets a bit mixed up when Dr. Rae Crane (Lorraine Bracco) shows up in his jungle laboratory to be his assistant.
Campbell has discovered—and mysteriously lost—the chemical component of a cure for cancer. Crane wants to help him find it again, but she’s “a girl” and that complicates the quest.
Campbell can’t escape the private and professional windmills that he fruitlessly charges, repeatedly. Crane very gradually realizes that adapting to a humanitarian mission in the deep jungle is not completely out of the question.
At the end, they’re happy about the way things turn out.
* * * * * *
Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
–
In other words: Poems for your eyes and ears with 64 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
by Richard Subber | May 21, 2024 | Human Nature, Reflections, Theater and play reviews
doing the right thing…
Movie review:
Arrival
2016, 116 min, rated PG-13 (brief strong language)
Arrival is a reflective experience of first contact with aliens who are not like us. These are aliens who, ultimately, want to do good, but the humans have to learn how to deal with this reality.
Amy Adams plays the linguist Louise Banks, and Jeremy Renner plays the physicist Ian Donnelly. They combine their robust talents to learn how to communicate with the aliens, and to try to convince their human superiors to do the right thing.
Banks and Donnelly fall in love. She saves the world. The aliens depart in peace. Her life is changed.
It’s a movie you can enjoy, no matter how many times you watch it.
* * * * * *
Movie review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2024 All rights reserved.
Book review: “The Gentle Boy”
The Puritans had a dark side…
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
–
My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 53 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
* * * * * *
