Film Review - The Joneses - By Director Derrick Borte

Starring David Duchovny, Demi Moore and Amber Heard. In The Joneses the story is based on a designer trend setting seemingly perfect family who have moved into an upper middle class suburb in the US.

The envy of their neighbours, they quickly become extremely popular in the neighborhood. When the truth finally comes out as to what they are really up to they are all forced to face some hard truths about themselves. Anne

Film Review - Mental - By Director P.J Hogan

From the same director as Muriel's Wedding and starring Toni Collette, Mental stars Shaz a hitchhiker with a shady past who is hired as a nanny to care for five teenage girls for Barry a philandering politician.

Their mother Shirley is on "holidays" at a mental hospital.
The girls are convinced they all have mental illnesses and the relationships of other family members and neighbours are explored with some hilarious consequences. This is a very funny and at times emotional movie.
Anne

Film Review - The Cobbler - By Tom McCarthy

Starring Adam Sandler, The Cobbler is a unique movie that centres around a bored cobbler who stumbles upon a magical family secret allowing him to literally walk in other peoples shoes and experience their lives.

Answers to his fathers mystery disappearance surface and he decides to please his mother with a special surprise. A very original movie with some great scenes. Anne

Book Review—The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

Benjamin and his three older brothers go fishing in the nearby river in Akure, the town where they live. Ordinarily Omi-Ala, the river where they have gone fishing, is off limits, believed to be cursed. But they have the freedom to go there each day after school thanks to their father having moved to a faraway city for work, leaving only their mother to care for them. But one day the boys encounter Abulu, the village madman who wonders around naked and has garnered a reputation for fatal predictions. His words strike Ikenna, the eldest brother, who is told that he will be killed by a fisherman, one of his brothers. This causes a rift in the family, with Ikenna wanting to distance himself from all of his family, with his health, faith, and mind slowly succumbing to the horrid madness and his family all becoming victims to the madman’s words.

Told by the adult Benjamin as recollections from his childhood, we gain a sense both of the fruitful potential and as well as the squandered promises, with the lives of the family mirroring the political disintegration of Nigeria after the annulled 1993 M.K.O. Abiola election. Where there should be hope and progress there is instead turmoil, squabbling, and biblical struggles between brothers, African superstition in evil places, and curses that invade these promises and send those involved into a cycle of madness and death. Nothing is secure, nothing is innocuous, in this country where words, like locusts, can transform “from harbingers of good things into the heralds of evil”.

The Fisherman is a striking debut of the turmoil of a family and the sorrow of a nation.
Andreas

Film Review - And so it goes By Director Rob Reiner

And so it goes stars Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Oren Little doesn't make it easy for people to like him, he is a difficult and an obnoxious realtor.

Hoping to sell his prized family home and retire in peace, everything is going to plan until his estranged son turns up with his granddaughter he has never met before to be looked after. He struggles at first and thanks to his kind and helpful neighbour Leah becomes a more loving and caring person. This is a funny and uplifting movie.
Anne

Film Review—Foxcatcher

Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum) is an Olympic Gold Medal wrestler struggling to make ends meat while preparing for the next Olympic Games. He trains with his brother David (Mark Ruffalo), a fellow gold medalist and coach, who raised Mark in the absence of their father. Mark receives an invitation from John E. du Pont (Steve Carell), of the wealthy du Pont family, who wishes to establish an Olympic wrestling team with Mark and David coaching. John and Mark form a strong bond, but this is overshadowed by John's overbearing mother, Jean, the Foxcatcher Estate matriarch, and his increasing jealousy of the closeness Mark shares with his brother.

The film’s strength is the performances by Ruffalo and in particular Tatum and Carell as the damaged duo seeking fulfilment. The mix of seeking both a father figure and a brother or friend marks their connection and explains the depth of the disconnection that occurs. The negotiations between friendship and dependency complicate the relationship, as do the need both Mark and John have for acceptance from their parental figures while at the same time trying to transcend the confines of those relationships. With both already having strong links with dependency they find themselves dragging each other with in their downward spirals, with personal hopes and dreams left on the wayside.

A portrait of the conflict between bonds and selfhood, Foxcatcher provides engaging performances and an arresting story.
Andreas

Film Review—Still Alice

Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), a linguistics professor at Columbia University, is forgetting words. These slips of vocabulary start to become one of many signs that she may be losing her memory, and she is eventually diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer's disease. As Alice comes to accept her condition she comes to realize that the ramifications will spread to everyone in her family.

The performance of Moore is fantastic. In every scene there is a little bit less Alice, a little bit less of the life, the career, the self. Her subtle, moving performance is alone worth seeing the film, and in fact the only reason to see it. The material feels as though its lifted from a Hallmark 'disease-of-the-week" TV drama. The rest of the cast is uneven with the characters being types rather than people with predictable development reserved only for a select few. And despite Moore's heart wrenching performance, the script does not fully utilize the various aspects of Alice's ever receding life, with details like her career as a linguist used more as short hand for memory loss than engrossing exploration.

Although overly sentimental and over worn material, Still Alice has a solid, moving performance that overcomes the films shortcomings.
Andreas

Book Review - The Giving Quilt by Jennifer Chiaverini

This is a gentle novel but it doesn't shy away from serious and difficult topics. This is the second of the Elm Creek Quilts novels I have read. They don't need to be read in any order as they all involve people coming and going from a quilting centre – some of the stories are about ongoing characters and some are not. They are female in their concerns and orientations although an open minded male would no doubt enjoy them also. This setting is a quilt retreat for Thanksgiving where women come together to learn and share quilting techniques and to create quilts for charity. It is common for there to be a charitable element in any gathering of crafty people as we see in Camden with our Wrap with Love blankets, our Christmas stocking for the Hospital auxiliary etc. Each of the women who come to the retreat has their own story and we explore a couple of them including the cheerleader who has had a critical fracture, the wife who became a coach to help the school's team in a challenge where other teams cheated and the woman who didn't get a job at the Elm Creek centre when she applied some time before. Life events are often upsetting but there is comfort in helping each other through them. Wendy

Book Review - Perfect by Rachel Joyce

This is by the author of 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry' which I totally adored. This is good .. perhaps not as good for me as Pilgrimage was. The stories are not connected but what does link them is the author's consideration of what can happen when a life is derailed by a single incident, especially for people who are detached from a close social circle for whatever reason. Her descriptions of place and her uncanny use of each character's voice are superb, as are her gentle and penetrating observations. "It occurred to Byron that over the summer holidays Diana had become someone else. She was not like a mother anymore. At least not one who told you to clean your teeth and wash behind your ears. She had become someone who was maybe more like a friend of your mother's or her sister; if only she'd had either of those. She had strayed into being someone who understood it was not always pleasant or interesting to keep cleaning your teeth or washing behind your ears, and turned a blind eye when you chose not to do them. It was a gift to have a mother like this. He was lucky. But it was also unsettling. It left him feeling slightly out in the wind, as if a wall had fallen down that was something to do with why things kept going. It meant he wanted to ask sometimes if she had remembered to clean her own teeth or wash behind her ears." Wendy

Book Review - Tempting Fate by Jane Green

Gabby has a satisfyingly normal suburban life which she thinks is enough and more than she ever dreamed she would have until she meets someone and has a fling. This careless action has consequences that affect everyone in her life. The fallout is handled believably but the ending maybe a little too convenient? Not up to her usual standard but a well-realised set of characters were pleasant to spend some time with. Wendy

Book Review - Suddenly by Bonnie Burnard

Three Canadian friends, Sandra, Colleen and Jude, have lasted through the years of childrearing, sharing their joys and their sorrows. Sandra is dying and her family and friends keep her company. Using Sandra's journals as a jumping off point, we learn of several crucial events in their shared history. The friends and their husbands try to make sense of their relationships, their needs and fears. I normally swallow books up rather quickly, but this one demanded a more considered approach. Perhaps knowing a shared history means much more than you might initially think. Wendy

Book Review - The Happiness Show by Catherine Deveney

Lizzie is a quintessential Aussie backpacker , ie loud, brash, funny and irreverent when she meets Tom on the Trans Siberian Railroad. They connect but their ways part and Tom returns to England. Deveney is strongest in showing how the relationship develops and how their shared sense of humour underpins their sexual attraction. Years later after they have both established and happy relationships including children, they meet and discover that sparks still fly and they have unfinished business. Neither of them can stop thinking about the other and wanting them. There is nothing new in this story but Deveney shows a sure hand and unflinching honesty in depicting the various relationships that propel the narrative. Wendy

Book Review - Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige by Kathleen Gilles Seidel

Don't you just love it because of the title? It doesn't disappoint. This is a dissection of a modern family by a penetrating but compassionate hand. The advice in the title is for a mother-in-law to be. The heroine finds that her main rival is not her future in-laws but her ex-husband's new wife. By turns funny, touching and dramatic, this is a lovely read. You may then wish to read her earlier novel 'Summer's End', another heartfelt story about blended families and what is really important about family traditions. Wendy

Review - Life, Death and Vanilla Slices by Jenny Éclair

Jean is hit by a car on her way back from the shop with a box of vanilla slices. She always buys them when she wants to celebrate but what is the event that she is celebrating? Her grown-up daughter Anne, comes back home to care for her and they both have time and space away from their daily routines to reflect on their shared history and how their family was formed. Anne was her father's favourite, her sister Jess was her mother's. But when Dad died it got a bit lopsided, Mum, and I know it must have been hard for you because I think you did love me, it was just you liked Jess more. I'm glad I don't have a favourite with my boys, though to be honest, I don't like either of them much at the moment. The reason your parents make decisions may be based on things you knew nothing about; and children have inner lives that their parents cannot fathom. Jenny Éclair is one of my favourite Grumpy Old Women and a noted stand up comedian and this is her third novel. Some of the words from the reviews on the cover include unflinching, brilliantly sharp, black humour, brave, angry, melancholy, rich and honest. I agree with all of them. It made me think differently about being both a daughter and a mother. Wendy

Songs Without Words

This latest book from Ann Packer is another gem about contemporary family life. You may have read her earlier novel 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier' and marvelled at her ability to get inside each character's head and tell events from different perspectives. Her lucid prose and telling descriptions are evident in this new book. Little touches like her description of a minor character, a real estate agent showing a house....."never a hair out of place. Today she stood at the dining room table with her smoked salmon and her flyers, in a tobacco-brown blazer over a high-collared gold silk blouse that was like a display stand for her impeccably made-up face."

Two friends, Sarabeth and Liz, their places in their relationship set by their shared history and separate choices. When Sarabeth was in high school, her mother committed suicide and Sarabeth lived with Liz's family. Liz has, by choice, devoted her life to her family - husband David and two children and has a routine of home making, yoga, and voluntary work; Sarabeth works part-time at a variety of 'arty' jobs and has had a long term unsatisfactory affair with a married man.

David on Sarabeth"...she's going to a gamelan concert tonight..you know those Indonesian chimes and gongs...Sarabeth was always doing something a little hipper than he and Liz would do on their own, and every third or fourth time, Liz would get a bee in her bonnet and they'd end up in some warehouse in Alameda , watching naked people write on each other or something. On the plus side, it gave him great stories for work."

Sarabeth and Liz don't quite realize that underneath their friendship, they regard each other's lives with 'scorn and envy' until a trauma in Liz's family is the catalyst for a re-assessment of their lives and relationships.
Wendy