July Film/Fiction Recommendations

So it's August. Bear with me.

The book of the month is Anna Karenina. I know the Russian names are a pain in the butt (Stepan, Stiva, Oblonsky, and Stepan Arkadyich are all the same guy) but it's worth wading through the first 100 pages until you figure out who the major characters are. It's beautiful. Its great strength is its realism, especially internal realism, the interpersonal emotional details Tolstoy chronicles. Highly recommended.

And in film:

I'm only going to name films I think are worth renting: Divided We Fall is a remarkable movie about the Nazi occupation; Happy Times is a very original Chinese film about all kinds of things, human kindness foremost; and Little House on the Prairie. We began with the first season of LH and are somewhere near the end of season three. I never watched these as a kid, but they are excellent television, an attempt to portray a truly loving family, and sometimes they actually preach the gospel. Worth your time if you haven't been watching re-runs since the 70's.

And if you never saw Royal Tenenbaums you should. Life as a House is also good. My final selection I saw years ago, but I'd see it again: Requiem for a Dream. Another intense and fairly adult drug movie, but worth the time if you can handle the darkness.

The thing is I'm so sick of Hollywood tripe I don't even go the theater much anymore (though I'm a Bourne fan; the first was better). Hence many of the films I pick here are foreign or simply different in some way. At my age, you look for new vision when you can find it. And my wife is the netflix guru in our house; almost all of these she found.

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