Growing Pains
Coming of age flicks are usually soirées into sex and drugs. Rarely do they get teenagers exactly right. Lady Bird (2017) is an exception, rising way above its political correctness. I watched it last night courtesy of Netflix. Rising star Saorise Ronan added another top notch performance to her impressive resume. She plays a Sacramento high school senior who dreams of going to college in NYC. Like many teens, she swings between sweetness and cruelty in rapid succession, learning how to navigate the rocky road that is life. The film has many things going for it. The three I enjoyed most were the genuineness of the characters, the contentious relationship between mother and daughter, and the absence of stereotypical of nuns and priests. Greta Gerwig, who has 40 titles listed under her name at IMDb as an actress, wrote and directed the movie, only her second time at the helm. It will be interesting to see where her career goes from here. Lady Bird received five Oscar nominations, of course one for its star, and for Laurie Metcalf’s wonderful supporting performance as the mother; and for best pic, direction and screenplay. And it was also a huge hit at the box office, returning $70 million worldwide on a budget of $10 million. 169,000+ users at IMDb have rated it, forging to a consensus of 7.4 on a scale of ten. Anyone interested in realistic depiction of teens should give it a look. There is profanity and a very brief gay kiss. Here’s Ronan in the film’s final scene, alone on a street in NYC, obviously homesick, a feeling that recalled my own first few days away at college:
It will be interesting to see how the left reacts to Ilhan Omar’s skewering of liberal icon Barrack Obama. What would it mean if she got a pass on this as well?
There’s something interesting going on at my Amazon sales dashboard. I’m keeping my hopes in check in case it’s an error. On 2/27 someone ordered 20 copies of my latest novel, Inside Out. The sales have yet to affect the novel’s ranking, so I expect the copies either haven’t yet been paid for or haven’t shipped. I have this image of an intoxicated friend adding it to his/her shopping cart and mistakenly ordering 20. I doubt any of my nieces placed the order. Was it a librarian?
It was a beautiful day, warm enough so that I was able to take off my winter coat. And business was good. My thanks to the young man who bought Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortlessness and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity by Edward Slingerland; and to the young woman who surprised me by asking for books on WWII, and who purchased Pursuit by Robert L. Fish; and to Bill Brown, author of Words and Guitar: A History of Lou Reed’s Music, who selected Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady; and to the two gentlemen who bought seven thrillers in Russian between them; and to the woman who did a four-for-three swap of works in that language.
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