“An Englishman’s sense of humor is in the drawing room, a Frenchman’s is in the bedroom, and a German’s is in the bathroom.” I forget the actual origin of that quotation; I got it from Robertson Davies, I think.

If it’s accurate, this quotation, then this movie is actually very German. While there is a bit of drawing room fun like a coffin tipped over and burst open by an accidentally drugged Alan Tudyk (this is not a spoiler; that situation is seen coming almost from the opening credits. Not foreshadowed; brandished and used as a bludgeon. A FUNNY THING IS GOING TO HAPPEN WITH THE DRUGS, PEOPLE. BLAM!), most of the pivotal scenes take place in the bathroom. And rather intimately involve things people do in bathrooms, played for very broad gross-out laugh.

There is some attempt at analyzing a brother relationship and a family dynamic in which one member is not who everyone else thinks he is, but mostly it’s the bludgeon.

There are some genuinely moving bits, mostly involving Peter Dinklage, who acts his heart out and almost steals the movie, or at least picks its pockets while Alan Tudyk runs away with the serious loot.

And yeah, in the end Tudyk is what saved this movie for me. Gotta love Wash cavorting naked around the grounds of a beautiful old English country house, and he does a virgin tripper nicely.

All in all, well, it’s a rental.

I have put off starting on this because I decided to delay this gratification until I finished/won NaNoWriMo this year. So, ok, November isn’t over, but I only have 4200 words to go and three days in which to get them written. Maybe I’m being cocky, but I started on this last night.

So far, three chapters in, it’s a worthy reward.

I did my senior project in college on a work that is actually a spiritual ancestor of this film!

Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son concerns a Victorian youth growing up as a member of what is most likely the Plymouth Bretheren, an extremely Puritan sect. The difficult circumstances of his birth lead the Bretheren to regard him as an especially holy, consecrated child and his strict (yet oddly, natural scientist) father to raise him with even greater strictness than usual. Alas, lil Gosse winds up being seduced by the blandishments of mainline Christianity and, later, the literary world, and grew up to be a well-known critic and literary gossip—and inventor of a whole new form of writing biography.

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda sort of picked up this same narrative, transplanting it to Australia and throwing in gambling, a glass factory and a girl. The film with Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett captures some of this flavor but the book goes into much greater depth.

These are two works that are very dear to my heart, to which I now add, strangely, well, this one.

The boy hero of Son of Rambow is being raised under similar circumstances to those of Gosse and Oscar (except by his widowed mother instead of a widower father) in 1980s Britain and this time instead of the Anglican church or the gambling den it is the VCR that leads him from his path. Well, the VCR and a chronic discipline problem who, naturally, becomes his best friend.

This line of descent amused me well enough, but… it’s not nearly the source of the charm of this film. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages (I can’t believe this is made by the same guys responsible for that colossal dud of a feature version of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), very imaginitive (the animated dream sequence in which the little 11-year-old hero is furnished with a full set of bulging rubber muscles is worth the rental alone) and, yes, slightly heartwarming, it just can’t be helped.

This film gets compared to, or at least mentioned in the same breath with, Be Kind Rewind only because both concern people making their own, low-budget and goofy versions of “classic” films, but Son of Rambow is by far the better film. From flying dogs to broken families to nail scissors up the nose, there’s something for everybody!

I can’t recall ever having been so sad to see a book end. Especially since, with this volume’s appendices and extensive Arban glossary, it looks like the reader has a while yet before reaching the end and then BOOM suddenly the glossary is staring her right in the face from the facing page. Ah, me!

Like all Stephensons, this will be a book I read over and over again. There is always and ever only one first time, which makes this bittersweet.

It was worth waiting for, though, this book. Most assuredly.

This movie has a lot of charm—bright colors, quirky characters, surrealist effects, wonderful actors, and a sense of humor all its own. I would not call it a comedy the way, say, Juzo Itami’s stuff is comedy or anything Hollywood tries to shove down our throats at the multiplex is (allegedly) comedy, but there’s a lot to make the viewer smile, not the least of which is Tadanobu. He chooses some interesting projects, that guy. I first noticed him in Last Life in the Universe, another dreamy, trippy meditation in the countryside, and while his character here is totally different there is a family resemblance in the two films, which means I loved them both.

The giant six-year old is my personal favorite recurring visual, a weirdly effective visualization of what James Hillman and Michael Ventura call “the watcher”—that quiet, seemingly slightly older and wiser version of ourselves that each of us carries in our heads, a sympathetic presence that is sometimes a conscience but usually just an observer and recorder of our private behavior. Here the giant six-year-old is sort of a goad for her human counterpart to keep trying to master the goal she’s set herself and it totally works as an image, metaphor, what have you.

There’s also a giant, world-devouring sunflower, a dancer on the edge of a river, a demented and charming grandfather and a mommy trying to get back into her career as an animator of, yes, anime. It’s a strange mix of elements but it comes off as lovely and true.

I picked this up solely because some of my friends are fans of Keene and managed to get him to come out to Cheyenne, WY for a book signing. I was prepared to be amused as I always am by zombie stories, but am also pretty pleased thus far. I’ve always been vaguely annoyed by the mindless zombie undead trope, though it makes for great films (Shaun of the Dead, anyone?), but as handled by this guy, whom I christened the Louis L’Amour of Zombie Horror on the spot, these NOT mindless zombie humans, cows, crows, cats and DEER, zombie DEER who turn the tables on a couple of hunters with a pit trap, are positively delightful!

And yes, the guy is exactly as cool in person as you could hope/expect. Huzzah!

This is pretty standard ghost story fare - a haunted hospital in Copenhagen, a spiritualist breaking all the rules to figure out what’s really going on, lots of character drama that is more or less connected to the haunting - but it’s presented in a wacky Scandanavian way that makes it a little more entertaining. One of the main characters is Swedish and apparently has an incomprehensible accent when speaking Danish, which is of course lost on a simple ‘Murrican like me. Also, the subtitles are obviously British, so there’s lots of “jolly good this” and “bloody well” that, adding to the incongruity.

The best single thing though is the closing credits, in which the creater/director, Lars von Trier rehearses a series of retorts to criticisms he imagines might be leveled at his baby along with a small dose of amusing moral platitudes. He ends with warning that if you choose to keep watching the show, prepare to encounter the Good (and he makes a little sign of the cross) with the Evil (devil horns). I’ve seen it before and wonder if it’s some kind of standard European TV trope, but whatever its origin, it’s a gas!

Wow. So I originally picked this up at my library because they’d lost their copy of The Great Railway Bazaar and I wanted to see what Theroux was like in some fashion after having heard him talk about his newest book on NPR.

I’ve been reading this side by side with the Great Railway Bazaar (yay, Paperspine.com!) and I have to say… he’s a lot crankier in this book than in Bazaar. Really downright unlikeable on the subject of his traveling companions on the way to Turkey. Yucky!

So what made him so unhappy in between these two books?

I am deliberately taking my time on this and savoring every minute. A difficult task when it’s bursting with Stephenson’s mind-boggling way with mind-boggling concepts, very amusing characters (even though every book nowadays features basically new versions of Randy and Avi) and delicious laugh-out-loud dialogue like this:

“Our enemy is a spaceship with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.”

I picked this up solely on the strength of Robert D. Kaplan’s later work, An Empire Wilderness, one of the best books about travel in America’s heartland I’ve ever read. Balkan Ghosts did not disappoint!

I agree with the other reviewer that the first section, on the former Yugoslavia, had the least impact, but I think a lot of this is due to the power of the other sections; it suffers by contrast. It’s still a great probing into what a mess this part of the world really is, and why it is, and how it got to be that way, and why it’s a task beyond most if not all imaginations to ever satisfactorily tidy it up; Tito just clamped a lid down and let it stew and now it’s frothing over. How are we going to do it better or different (for another look at this area, I’d strongly recommend Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde).

The sections on Bulgraria and Romania pull off the difficult trick of de-romanticizing these places—and then making them romantic all over again in a new way. I fell in love with the same people Kaplan did, especially his friend Guillermo.

Strangely, I find the last section, on Greece, to be less engaging. I say strangely because he did live there after all - but the story here becomes much more of a dreary rehashing of recent Greek history. Still very informative - I’d always vaguely known Greece was another mess that had been glossed over but not to this degree. And he succeeds in making the argument that Greece is a Balkan country more than a Mediterranean one (though my Mom told me that decades ago—but I’ve an unusual mother).

All in all… this is a library book I checked out that I can just tell I’m going to end up hunting down in hardcover for my personal library because I’ll want to re-read it a lot.