Lordy, I read all these reviews and wonder what I missed. This clever little thingie just didn't hold my attention, and I stopped watching after about 35 minutes. Sorry, folks, but whatever is so allfire wonderful about this, um, movie-cartoon-animated whatchimacallit just sailed right over my head.

In Portland, Maine, last week with 4 friends from college days who wanted 'to shop,' I ducked into the nearest bookstore, bought this book, settled into a worn old leather chair, and nearly finished the book by the time my friends returned to find me. Thank god for the salvation of a good book!
It's difficult for authors to write about sex. Most of the time, they come off sounding either like a Victorian maiden or a sly pornographer. But Deborah Joy Corey has written a book with a goodly amount of sexual interaction - and not a single line comes across as crass, voyeuristic, prurient, or sophomoric. It's absolutely beautiful writing.
The central story is Elizabeth's, a girl with parents both frustrated by their own demons. Tragedy is something they can't cope with, and soon Elizabeth find herself living alone and going rapidly downhill in a small town on the coast of Maine. She falls into the arms or clutches (depends on your viewpoint) of a much older man, an architect from New York. He's running from his own demons and finds a kind of warped salvation in his relationship with Elizabeth - but he, too leaves her.
I won't say more - but there's redemption, temptation, salvation - and a quiet love overriding everything in this lovely book.

For today's readers, the gushing language of Edna Ferber's classic, Giant, will read as a bit overblown. Even in the 50s, I don't believe intelligent young women from Virginia would have spoken as Leslie speaks to her husband or his friends and their wives. But for all its flaws, Giant is still a heck of a good story, and if you don't skim some of the wordy stretches, you'll find yourself getting a good lesson in Texas history and culture.
Cattle barons, instant oil millionaires, lavish entertaining, family intrigue, the Mexican immigrant situation - it's all here, seen through the eyes of a young and naive bride from the gentile state of Virginia.
And it's worth a read. Not great literature, but a great story.

I'm a writer, and occasionally I write a sentence or paragraph - or even several pages, now and then - that I think read quite well. But then, when I read the writing of someone like Normal Maclean, I consider throwing in the towel in recognition of the fact that, no matter how long I try, I'll never write that beautifully.
Of course, the title story in this rather small book, A River Runs Through It, is known to the majority of literate people in the US, and not just because of the marvelous movie made from the novella. But this book has other stories as well. Maclean used his teenage experience working for logging operations and the US Forestry Service as the foundation for a couple of the other loooong stories included in this collection. And, get this: even the Acknowledgments section is worth a careful read; it reads like another essay, in itself.
Normal Maclean, to me, seems to have some of the attributes of E. B. White, specifically the ability to take something concrete and mundane, like fly fishing or packing mules for a 3-day walk into the Montana mountains, and, with the lyricism and beauty and skill of his writing, make it soar into the ethereal world of Universal Truth.
Don't believe me? Read it and see for yourself.

Beautifully cast with Nicholas Cage as the reluctant biochemist and Sean Connery as the only man ever to have escaped from Alcatraz teaming up to defeat Ed Harris, playing a psychotic who is holding San Francisco virtual hostage. Before long, all the players are in place and viewers are treated to an action-packed couple of hours of bullets, bodies, explosions, close calls, harebrained 2nd guessing, near misses, near hits - and I don't care how many of these over-the-top movied you've seen: this one keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Sean Connery, of course, plays himself - and that slight Scottish lisp and raised eyebrow are both firmly in place; he's simply terrific. So is Cage, whom I don't usually enjoy watching - he's just too pathetic and conflicted looking. But he's perfectly case in The Rock. It's obvious that the actors had a ball during the filming. Viewers will too. Don't miss it.

The Book Lust lady says to subtract your age from 100 and if you're not engaged in a book after than many pages, set it aside and start another one: there are too many books one must read to waste time reading one you just can't get into.
Well, if I'd followed that advice, I'd have quit reading Max Tivoli at about page 40. I loved the writing, but I thought the story idea (a child who ages chronologically with regard to emotions and mental capacity, but who lives life in reverse: born old, he becomes progressively younger and is destined to die as an infant in 1941) far too contrived and ridiculous to hold my attention thru a whole book. It smacked of sci-fi, a genre which I don't read.
I was wrong. On approximately page 41, I was captivated and held in thrall thru the rest of the book - and sobbed sloppy tears at the end.
Max falls in love at about 16 (when he looks like an elderly man) with 14yo Alice - and she is destined to be his lifelong love. Alice becomes his wife when they are both in their 30s, and it's the only time in his life that Max's real age and apparent age are in synch. But the marriage ends and they go their separate ways. Then, 20 yrs later when Max appears to be a boy of about 12, circumstances arrange for Max to become Alice's son and the brother of his own son.
Throughout this convoluted tale is Max's lifelong friend, Hughie, who sees thru to who Max really is and accepts him as just Max - but there's more, much, much more to this story. The meaning of the memorable first line, We are each the love of someone's life, becomes crystal clear about  thru the book, and then it's repeated again just a few pages from the end, just in case you somehow missed it. A simple chronicle of the events in this book does not begin to do justice to the brilliance of the writing, the heartbreak of Max's situation, and the beauty of the awkward, delicate relationships - hinted at in that opening line - which must be kept in perfect balance for this all to work.
And it does, oh how well it does.
Don't miss it. And if, like me, you're not in love after 40 pages, just trust me: Keep reading.

What is this film that's so difficult to stick a label onto? Is it a thriller? A mystery, a romance, horror, social commentary...? I think I'd call it a thriller with a heart and soul, and it all begins with a hotel clerk finding a human heart stuck in an overflowing toilet.
The setting is London, the characters are primarily illegal immigrants trying to stay one step ahead of deportation. Some of them are so desperate to get legal that they're willing to trade their body parts for a passport. Okwe, the hotel clerk, was a doctor in Nigeria before some secret that's not revealed till the end of the film forced him to flee. Shenay, Audrey Tatou (she of Amelie fame), is a Turkish maid at the hotel and Okwe's friend. There's a rogue of a doorman who is an opportunist with a good heart; there's a hooker with an even better heart; and there's without a doubt the best villain ever created, Juan, the manager of the hotel. He doesn't have a moustache, but he's so slick and smarmy and smiling that you can just see him in a top hat, twirling his moustache and plotting the maiden's downfall in return for her virtue.
Ordered by Juan to ignore the disembodied heart, Okwe does the opposite: he digs into the soft and smelly underbelly of blackmarket body organ trafficking. And when desperate Shenay appears to be headed down that road, things get really, really, really interesting, complete with quirky, brilliant denouement.
You'll love it.

My adult son had the opportunity to go to Sundance, where he saw this film; he came home raving about it, so I was glad to finally be able to rent it on DVD. It's weirdly quirky in its attempt to ask the film's central question: What is love? Is it spiritual or hormonal, metaphysical or chemical?
Here's the deal: There are these 3 guys who have spent what, like 3 years? working to create an interactive computer pet, a bird named Koi-Koi (at least, that's how I'd spell it), who will respond appropriately to voiced emotion-laden conversation. They take it into a classroom of pre-schoolers to test it out, and Rand, one of the computer guys, falls in love (but there again, What is love?) with the teacher. Both of them are struggling with major loss of significant other people in their lives.
The settings in San Francisco, the hills, the distant vistas, the bike rides thru the Presidio and the views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Angel and Alcatraz Islands...they all lend authentic sense of place, and speaking as one from Oakland, the 'other' Bay Area town, I appreciate that accuracy.
Nice little film. Not great, but very, very nice.

There's a small area, not more than 2+ blocks, in North Berkeley that years ago someone - perhaps Herb Caen - dubbed The Gourmet Ghetto. Clustered around centrally located Chez Panisse Restaurant are many small stores and purveyors of specialty items, and these stores have become iconic, synonymous with Good Quality Food. They began in the 70s with The Cheese Board, Bruce Aidell's Poulet, Pig by the Tail, and of course Alice Medrich's Cocolat, dangerously close to Black Oak, a terrific bookstore.
During an era when most of us knew nothing more about chocolate than whether our preferences ran to milk chocolate or dark chocolate, when Hershey's ruled the chocolate-loving country, Medrich opened the eyes of the small nation of Berkeley, CA, to the eye-popping and palate-pleasing enchantments of Really Good Chocolate. French, Belgian, Swiss, German...and we all said Wow! More, please!
In Bittersweet, Medrich acknowledges that we, her devotees, have grown up in our taste appreciation, so these recipes offer sophisticated (but definitely not daunting) information about cocoa bean content and such things that alter the outcome - how one can 'play' with the composition of different chocolates to achieve a desired result.
Those of us who drifted into her store on Shattuck Ave. all those many years ago can now create some of those memories of yesteryear right in our own kitchens.
Superb addition to the library of a serious and sophisticated chocoholic.

Rarely does a sequel to a smash movie rise to the same level as its predecessor - but perhaps Jewel of the Nile is the exception (along with some of the Indiana Jones follow-ups).
This sequel to Romancing the Stone, a rip-snorter adventure/romance with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, set the stage for this 2nd one. They've been together since the end of the 1st movie, living on his yacht. She is on assignment in the Middle East when she's abducted, and it's up to Douglas and of course Danny DeVito, to rescue her.
Good stuff, but not quite 5-star.