Harriet the Spy by the late, great Louise Fitzhugh is my favorite young adult/children’s book of all time. I was also a huge fan of Sandra Scoppettone’s young adult novels.

How ’bout you?

What are some of the films that you find too painful — or almost too painful– to watch, and why?
It’s an interesting question. Here, in no particular order, are the first fifteen painful movies that come to mind for me:

1. I can’t bring myself to see “United 93″ yet. I’m just not ready.
2. “Men Don’t Leave” is one of my favorite movies starring Jessica Lange as a mother struggling to be there for her two sons after their father’s sudden death in a construction accident. But it somehow reminds me so much of the time immediately following own father’s death that I can barely get through it.
3. I certainly won’t watch “Schindler’s List” again. Not only was it too painful, I felt that Speilberg was absolutely invested in artistically bludgeoning his viewers with the obscene spectacle of human cruelty. That approach always leaves me feeling manipulated and suspicious. “Saving Private Ryan” felt exactly the same way; it’s a film I won’t see again, either.
4. “Sophie’s Choice” — the scene where Sophie faints in the library while trying to obtain a book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the ending scene both destroy me. “Ample make this bed/make this bed with awe…”
5. “Breaking the Waves” was an exquisite film featuring one of the most incandescent performances I have ever seen by Emily Watson. I own the DVD but I can’t bring myself to watch the film again because it is so shattering.
6. “Kramer Vs Kramer” - another Meryl Streep film. Love it, can’t bear it. I first saw it in the theatres as a teenager when my own parents were separating and wound up crying my eyes out. It’s a knife twisted in the guts.
7. “Terms of Endearment” — the scene where Aurora (Shirley McLaine) loses it in the hospital, running around yelling for a nurse to give her daughter (Debra Winger) her pain medication. It gets more unbearable to watch as I get older and more experienced with the ravages of cancer.
8. “The Great Santini” — Robert Duvall as a military version of my dad. Such a great film; so painful.
9. “Monster” — again, I own the DVD but probably won’t be able to ever view this film again. I own it mostly so I can loan it to others. One of the most agonizing depictions of human suffering and evil I have ever seen.
10. “Cold Mountain” - Maybe I should appreciate the irritating, campy performance by Renee Zellweger for distracting me from the sickening brutality that makes the rest of the film such a depressing reminder of America’s open wounds.
11. “The Accused” - - the rape scene haunts me to this day.
12. “Beloved” — the scene in the barn when the slave Sethe (Oprah Winfrey) is mauled for her breast milk by the two sadistic white teenagers — too horrific to ever see again. Another reminder of the terrifyingly creative ways humans find to express their depravity.
13. “Dead Man Walking” - sobbed throughout it, couldn’t ever watch it again. The murder flashbacks are the worst, but there’s also Susan Sarandon’s heart-achingly real performance as a nun who has no idea how to minister within this situation but who manages to show up and stay present to it.
14. “Brokeback Mountain” - Heath Ledger’s performance is devastating. God, the loneliness, the stifled life, the poverty of spirit, the unexpressed anguish, the unrequited yearning.
15. “Boogie Nights” — Julianne Moore’s performance at the end of the film as the tender, maternal, emotionally broken porn star Amber Waves makes my heart hurt too much.

(Emily Watson as Bess in Lars Von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves”)

So, now you!

I’ve seen the musical many times on stage since then (it won the Tony for Best Musical when it debuted in 1969 and was revived successfully in New York not long ago) and try to watch it on DVD every year on or around the 4th. And NOW, thanks to the wonder of the internets, I can share this marvelous show with you! Here is a clip from the Ed Sullivan Show that features some of the opening number, “Sit Down, John” (interesting that Adams’ written lyrics, “GOOD GOD!” have been changed to “Good Lord” in two cases and “What the devil” in one other case — obviously a concession to those tough 70’s era TV censors) and the powerful diatribe against Northern self-righteousness over the slavery question, “Molasses to Rum To Slaves,” sung by Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. If you only know John Cullum from his work as the endearingly mild character Holling Vincoeur in “Northern Exposure,” here he is at his pinnacle of Broadway Super-hunkdom. And oh, what a hunk he was. It’s an amazing and disturbing number about the triangle trade which ends with the mock salute, “Hail Boston! Hail Charleston! Who stinketh the most?”

Go thee and get the movie. Yes, it takes some time getting used to seeing the original delegates to the Second Continental Congress bursting into song. However, the performances are delicious (look for Gwyneth Paltrow’s mom, Blythe Danner — a phenomenal movie and Broadway actress in her own right — as a blushing and bouffanted Martha Jefferson), and the book by Peter Stone absolutely riveting. Yes, there are some historical inaccuracies, but they are obviously not the result of ignorance, but used for dramatic purpose to illustrate something about the characters or to condense actual history for the purpose of moving the plot along. Watch it with your kids and get them hooked on history! Happy Independence Day!

And that’s an hour and a half I’ll never get back.

This movie is worse than merely bad, it’s a genuine Golden Turkey. The script is preposterous and full of black holes of emotional and plot-related inconsistencies (like, what father would leave his 8-year old daughter with friends to head to a city that had very likely been hit by a terrorist attack in order to find his wife?). The dialogue is bad enough to groan over, and groan we did. The acting is so bad I was glad I had a shawl with me because I needed to twist it over my head and peek through it when Mark Wahlberg went up the Overacting-O-Meter from “Embarrassing” to “May Never Work In This Town Again.” The direction and editing were bad. The score was bad (”We can’t make this scene work through acting, writing or directing, so let’s just make it REALLY LOUD right here”). The make-up and costuming were bad. The extras were really bad (and when are extras noticeably bad??) The silly deep South hillbilly accents given to rural Pennsylvanian characters were bad. Everything about this movie was bad at best.

SweetieBang is a devoted cineast and has a pretty good poker face during all movies, but I felt him wince more than once (and can my next boyfriend be someone who will at least exchange a grimace with me when movies are this terrible? C’mon, that’s half the fun!!). I admit to being one of the many sickos in the audience who let out a huge whoop of laughter during a scene showing an act of suicide-by-tiger committed at the zoo (”What kind of terrorists are these?” moans the woman in the scene as she watches the horror unfold by video). I’m guffawing into my popcorn as the guy staggers around with one arm missing, having fed it to the tiger. Know why? Because it was just so bad. That’s not a spoiler, either. I promise you that I haven’t given away anything about the precious few genuinely eerie or effective moments in the film.

Watch for Betty Buckley in what is sure to become a cult classic cameo as the deranged religious fanatic Mrs. Jones (you know she’s a fanatic because she has tastefully framed artwork of JESUS all over her bedroom wall and is seen wandering in the garden murmuring the 23rd psalm during a windstorm). Betty Buckley, best remembered as the groovy mom Abigail in “Eight is Enough,” is also a whizbang Broadway diva and I have to think that she read the script, hooted with derisive scorn, called her agent and said, “GET ME ON THIS!” knowing that she’d earn a fat paycheck and camp it up with one of the most unintentionally funny death scenes in all movie history. Again, not a spoiler. The only thing spoiled will be your evening if you waste your money on this gargantuan disaster.

“Alma, you’d better stay safely in the car while I try to find the guy responsible for my really humiliating performance.”

*SweetieBang and I are hanging out as friends until he moves back to Florida in July. We had great fun and I certainly don’t regret the wonderfully romantic risk we took — but alas, we are a perfect example of the old saying, “Opposites Attract… And Then Drive Each Other Crazy.” In the end, I get custody of my baby beagle and a good friend, and all is well.

You’ll allow me a little rant, then, won’t you? I was, after all, the one who broke into applause at the first marvelous shot of Indiana Jones’ back. I was that excited to see him again.
But rant I shall, because in Lucas and Spielberg we have two of the great movie-making talents in the world, and for them to inflict such dreck on us is inexcusable. This film is a perfect example of what happens when you’re so rich, famous and well-respected in your field that no one will dare critique your ideas or your rough drafts. I imagine Spielberg’s pals viewing the first cuts and nervously backing their way out the door,

Oh, it’s great Steve, really great. I love the whole self-referential thing, it’s subtle and ironic. Harrison Ford looks great. Blanchett, great casting. Her, uh, hair is genius. It’s brilliant. And that scene with the waterfalls? That is SO the next big ride at Universal Studios. Gotta run, friend. Have an early shoot tomorrow.

No, Steve, it’s not great. The acting is atrocious, for one thing. It’s patently obvious that you never bothered to rehearse with your cast. But who has the time to rehearse when you’re overseeing a ridiculously bloated production and thinking up more racist stereotypes for all the brown-skinned extras to enact? I bet you just got your actors together to map out the action sequences and worked out all the character development over lunch at the commissary. It shows, Mr. Spielberg, it shows. Harrison Ford isn’t playing Indiana Jones, he’s stumbling around in a fedora trying to feel his way back into an archetype he hasn’t inhabited for twenty years. You could have helped him a bit there, dear — he seems angry and confused throughout the entire picture. And because of you Mr. Spielberg, Karen Allen, who was enjoying a richly deserved anonymity, will most definitely never work as a film actress again (not that she likely cares, but still… she should have been left with her dignity intact; an impossible thing now that she’s been forced through another entire action film in the hideous Marion Ravenwood Wig and made to shriek “Innnnndy” in exactly the same tone she used over twenty years ago when she charmed our pants off in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”). I want to meet the person responsible for that wig. I want to stare daggers into their eyes and simply ask WHY.

As for the brown-skinned extras, isn’t your penchant for characterizing indigenous peoples as the “ooga-booga primitives” getting tired? At least in the previous installments of the Indiana Jones series there was a non-white sidekick character who had a few brains in his head. Not so in this latest chapter: here, we’re all about White People Running and Ruining the World and the “native wisdom” comes from crystal skulled aliens who communicate by staring really hard at John Hurt, a fine British actor who manages to keep a straight face throughout this ludicrous role. I imagine him sharing the script around at a luncheon of British stage peers and saying, “Laugh all you want, you rotters, I’m making more money for this idiotic film than any of us could make playing King Lear for thirty years.” Carry on, John. We understand.
When all else fails your screenplay, plug in a distinguished old Shakespearean to redeem it. He’ll be able to deliver lines like, “Actually, they’re interdimensional,” without causing the audience to snicker uncontrollably.

Cate Blanchett is too good an actress to be this bad. She should have been sent to the Meryl Streep School of Dialect Mastery before stepping foot on the set; her Ukranian-Russian accent too often descends into something closer to Yiddish-Puerto Rican. She, too, appears unfocused and confused throughout the picture, wildly overplaying it in some scenes and obviously wandering about entirely undirected. Not fair for our marvelous Cate.

Shia LeBeouf, the lad who plays Indiana Jones’ greaser sidekick has been identified in the entertainment press as the new young hope for the franchise. Well, I can see why: he’s unattractive, unappealing and untalented. I cringed with embarrassment as he swung through the trees on vines a la Tarzan and straddled two jeeps in an overly-long shoot-em-up-in-the-jungle-scene that would have been cute at five or six seconds but became I-have-to-look-away-bad at forty seconds or so. He’s simply awful but has been named the new It Boy, so we’ll be seeing lots more of him — more’s the pity.

I won’t bore you with the plot details here but will say more about how sloppy, lazy and cheap this movie feels. One reviewer wrote that after the first action sequence (memorable to me mostly for Harrison Ford’s pronunciation of the word “nuclear” as “nuke-ular” — what, has he been taking diction classes from George Bush?), he felt as though he was being hit on the head with a lead pipe. I couldn’t agree more. The film isn’t paced, it’s slammed at you — one arduous action sequence after the next, sound and fury signifying nothing. And while Indiana Jones the archeologist once seemed to care about the treasures he was seeking, he now bashes about with a rock desecrating ancient graveyards and ripping open mummies with his switchblade. There’s no reverence in his discoveries anymore, just crass smash-and-grabs for a chance at the next clue or simply to further the plot. A perfect symbol for America in 2008, this new, wantonly destructive Indiana Jones. The screenplay provides a grabby double-agent played by Aussie Ray Winstone who’s supposed to be a villainous foil for Indy and his noble friends but that’s a smokescreen; when all is said and done, you realize that they’re all tomb raiding thugs.

As for the crystal skull of the title, prepare to stifle your derisive snorting. My God, I waited in line with my father for opening night of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in 1980-whatever and left the movie theater full of awe at the mysteries of the ark, as did my father (who was exactly as old as I am now when he saw that film). Back in the day, Indy was searching for the ark of the g–damned covenant!! From the Bible! And later he was looking for the Holy Grail! As SweetieBang pointed out, there was nowhere to go from there but down. And in the Crystal Skull (a prop that looks like a hunk of plastic filled with tin foil and is tossed around as though it weighs about as much as a whiffle ball), Indy and his creators have indeed gone down, right down the road to Schlocksville.

May I tell you how it all ends? I’m going to, so if you want to see the movie and be (not very) surprised, stop reading now.

The film ends with a WEDDING SCENE, of course — the wedding of Indiana Jones and his irrepressible lady love with the big toothy grin, Marion Ravenwood. At which point my jaw dropped and I groaned. Please tell me no. Please tell me that Marion Ravenwood, the woman who could run a tavern in Nepal and drink men twice her size under the table, smash Nazis over the head with perfect precision, escape from burning buildings and jump off of moving vehicles, and get pregnant before marriage in the 1940’s would need to wear a white gown to her second wedding as a middle-aged woman? Marion was WAY too much a free spirit for that! But this is a Boomer generational fantasy, of course. We can go out and have our big, cataclysmic adventure, blow up an entire Peruvian village and then go home and have a pretty, white wedding with all our friends. Because really, it’s all about saving the world from the bad guys and setting free the Cosmic Truth at whatever cost to the third-world folk, and restoring the fantasy nuclear, white, heterosexual family by the closing reel.

(”Were we going to rehearse this scene, or should I just get in there and slash at valuable ancient paper-mache artifacts with my knife?”)

This is the story of Gallagher’s struggle with whether or not to become an Episcopal priest. It begins with the death of her brother Kit and takes her through a discernment process with a lay committee of her church, to a year of field education, and back out the other side of the sausage factory to yet more uncertainty about her sense of vocation to the priesthood. I was left with two very strong impressions:
1. Them Episcopalians sure do require a LOT of discernment and mentoring on the path to priesthood!! Part of me applauds this heartily and wishes that Unitarian Universalists offered half this support to the aspirants to our ministry. Another part of me says Wow, with all that process to go through, who wouldn’t have a near nervous-breakdown thinking, praying and talking about their call for that long and that intensely?
2. Bay Area California Episcopalians sure do go on a lot of retreats! To really, really nice places! I put down Gallagher’s book thinking that being an novice to the Piskie priesthood in her diocese was a pretty sweet deal, what with all those retreats up in the mountains with ocean views and everything. All of which begs the question: is discernment something best done at a distant, serene hideaway from the world? I think of Sara Miles’ wonderful book, Take This Bread, about finding her ministry while establishing a food pantry at her church, and I conclude that it is not.

Gallagher’s book almost tries to do too much, weaving into the central story of her vocational conflict the related story of her gay parish priest and her congregation’s struggle to deal with his coming out (and deciding with the vestry to bless same-sex unions), her grief at the loss of her brother, her marital problems, and her desire to communicate the ways she finds God in the natural world. It is this last task that weighs the book down, ironically enough, since it is obvious that the “nature bit” is intended to be the most transcendent aspect of the narrative. But it isn’t. It feels tacked on, a bit contrived, and a rather strained bid for the loyalty of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” crowd who might balk at the overtly Christian content of Gallagher’s inner life and religious community.

Gallagher is at her most sure-footed and finest when describing conversations between people and reporting the intricate dance of lay and ordained religious leadership doing the work of the church together. She has a gift for remembering dialogue — unlike Elizabeth Gilbert, whose sentimental and narcissistic voice taints the authenticity of conversations she claims to have had, you never doubt that the words of wisdom coming from Gallagher’s characters are their own, and not her fantasy version of them. If you are a person who already loves church life, Gallagher will make you think fondly on all the peaks and valleys you have endured with your own beloved community. If you are not a church-goer, Gallagher’s book may make you consider what you’re missing.

This would be a great gift for a seminarian or for a cherished lay leader, or for family members of clergy who have no idea what we do all day!

Just leave lots of room to think about everything that happens, and leave time to go back and replay certain scenes. I’m not a fan of horror movies but this was wonderful.

So maybe you should just read the Rolling Stone review here and hie yourself to a theatre to see it yourself as soon as you can.

What I loved best about this film was that it featured eminently decent people living through a crisis with no gratuitous scenes of sex or violence designed to manipulate the viewer’s emotions and raise our blood pressure to create the sensation that the movie is something more than it is (”The Brave One,” I’m talking to you!).

Richard Jenkins, the wonderful character actor you’ll remember as the father from “Six Feet Under,” has the role of a lifetime as Walter Vale, a widower whose life is changed by an encounter with a Syrian and Sengalese immigrant couple. You definitely want to see this on the big screen; it’s a film about faces, eyes, small shifts in expression that communicate depths of emotion that can never be spoken.
Hiam Abbass, as the mother of the Syrian man arrested in the subway and held in detention, will break your heart with her feminine dignity and ordinary-wife-and-mother beauty.

I think Richard Jenkins should get a big, fat Oscar for this performance. I would double vote for him because not only is he brilliant in this film (I will always love Walter Vale), he was the artistic director for the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Rhode Island for years, and that’s just plain cool.

“To Wong Foo,Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar” (1995) was released very close to the break-out drag queen hit “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” and I know I’m in the minority in believing that “To Wong Foo” was by far the better picture. To me, “Priscilla” was a wonderful road story but an overly-mincing performance by Guy Pearce and unbelievable casting in Terrence Stamp (I love the man, but he can’t move, and drag queens — especially legendary ones — have serious moves) made it impossible for me to buy his character).

“To Wong Foo,” first of all, totally gets the aesthetics of big American drag right, and exquisitely so. The three actors playing the key characters (John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez, Wesley Snipes as Miss Noxeema Jackson, and Patrick Swayze as Miss Vida Boheme) were unbelievably good together, and threw themselves into the roles with total abandon. Given the three “girls” differences in economic class, culture and race, this is a great movie about America itself, land of the free and the brave, where we are free to recreate ourselves in whatever image we can afford emotionally and financially. The dialogue is wickedly funny and mean, such as when the Latina “baby drag queen” Chi-Chi starts to run away from the car in the middle of the night in a fit of pique and Wesley Snipes, the African-American Amazon goddess Noxeema Jackson, calmly watches her from the back seat and says, “Look at her, lookin’ like she runnin’ for the border.” The script is full of this kind of racial and class tension dealt with through affectionately biting sarcasm, which makes it true to the American experience and to the drag community.

Yes, the hetero men in the movie are mostly macho, dumb stereotypes (watch for the sweet Arliss Howard trying to persuade us that he’s a drunk wife-beater — bad casting, there!) and some have complained that they didn’t appreciate the whole “It takes a man dressed as a woman to teach a woman how to be a woman,” but I loved it. I loved it because it can be true. Just as it can take a woman to teach a man how to live more fully into his masculinity, so can the opposite be true.

I remember when I moved to Massachusetts from Maryland, having lived as a sexless frump for three dateless years and having totally subsumed my sense of femininity in the work of ministry. My friend Nathan, a drag queen, took me shopping in the summer of 2003. He coaxed me into more fitted jackets than I would have purchased, a sexy skirt that hugged my hips, and a pair of Nine West pumps that I first refused. “I don’t wear heels, Nathan, I’m too fat!” “HONEY,” he replied, from his full height of well over 6″ with one hand on a not-at-all slim hip, “If I can wear 4″ heels, you can wear these little 2″ things. GET THEM.” I did, I woke up to the fact that I was hiding myself behind layers of fat and big, shapeless clothing and I began to consider why I was doing this, and how it served neither myself nor my ministry. I started working out, I started dating, I started integrating my identity as a minister with my femininity, and I have never looked back. Thanks, Nathan.

And thank you, Patrick Swayze, for your marvelous creation of Vida Boheme. I wish you well in your cancer treatment, and want to say now that to me, you will always be immortalized in that great lady; a performance underappreciated by critics and by the general public.

Maybe it’s a French thing. I was absolutely riveted by “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows,” the wonderful bio-pic about our own American version of Piaf, Miss Judy Garland, played in the film by Judy Davis. Aside from one really bad fat suit, Davis got into the heart and soul of Garland and made her a force of nature you cared about, whereas with Piaf’s character I just felt she was a rather boring gal who happened to have a really distinctive and strong voice. Yes, we got the whole Svengali scene in “La Vie En Rose” where an abusive mentor breaks Piaf down and gets her to use her arms and her full heart and soul to express l’amour and such, but in the end I felt her a shallow woman, not much there, just a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing but the will to survive. That isn’t to discredit Miss Cotillard’s exquisite work, but perhaps a critique of the screenplay or the direction.

I think I’ll watch “Me and My Shadows” again soon, just to revel in the amazing performances by Tammy Blanchard (who doesn’t impersonate so much as reincarnate the young Judy) and Judy Davis, and to get all the wringing-hankie dramatic pay-off at the end that I had hoped for from “La Vie En Rose” but didn’t get.