Author: Elizabeth Bass (Liz Ireland)

I reread too much.  If I really like a book, it’s hard for me to resist reading it again.  When I pick up an old familiar, I tell myself that I’ll get something new out of it with another reading, or that I’ll analyse the language more carefully.  While this is sometimes true, usually there’s no more purpose to it than there is for a kid at Six Flags to jump on the Runaway Mine Train eight times in one afternoon.  It’s a matter of wanting to recreate the same experience.  It’s an addiction. For me, some titles are just crack with a dust jacket.

It wouldn’t matter except that I’m a relatively pokey reader and I’ve got a ton of new stuff I want to read, not to mention books I’m supposed to be writing.  (I re-watch movies, too, but a movie is just two hours down the drain instead of a day or several days.)  There are only so many hours in a day, and when I’m in the thrall of book crack, I let things go.  The dishes pile up, the cat meows pitifully for food, the husband becomes a book crack widow.

One thing I’ve learned is that there are certain books I cannot keep in my house.  The works of Jane Austen are the prime offenders.  If I read the first line of Pride and Prejudice, there’s no holding me back.   Jane Eyre is also verboten, although last year I managed to smuggle in a copy I’d found on the fifty-cent shelf at my local used book store.  I estimate I’ve lost entire months of my life to multiple re-readings of The Forsyte Saga.   Ann Tyler is crack, as are Nicci French books and the Tony Hill novels by Val McDermid.

This week, I realized I had to add The Testament (A Town Like Alice) by Nevil Shute to the list of no-no’s.   A battered copy from Goodwill is sitting on my shelf, tempting me away from work.  Must resist…

I used to get really worked up over the Oscars.  One of my first movie books was an old battered copy of Robert Osborne’s Academy Awards history, and I memorized it to the point that during my twenties I was a formidable opponent in a game of Silver Screen Trivial Pursuit.

I still spend as much time watching movies as I possibly can, but most of the time when I go out to the movies, it’s to my local theaters to see oddball, old, or independent features.   When I do venture out to the giant AMC multiplex with the stadium seating and escalators that make me air sick, I tend to get bent out of joint all over again by the ticket prices, the commercials, and the endless loud previews that either make me not want to see the movie, or convince me that I’ve seen it already.

Half the moviegoing I do during the year is to the international film festival.  In the course of a two weeks, I walk into dozens of films knowing little about them in advance besides the country of origin.  Many are not that good.  Some are dreadful.  A few are brilliant, and I’m always impatient for them to be released in North America so I can tell all my loved ones to run out and see them.  But with rare exceptions, these films are never are picked up here.  They flicker across festival screens and then disappear, and I’m left shell-shocked.  To love a movie that no one else sees almost makes you wonder if you dreamed it.  Especially when you ask people if they’ve ever seen, say, a Finnish movie called Dog Nail Clipper, and they gape at you as if you’ve gone off your meds again.

I don’t see a lot of Oscar-nominated movies, but I miss having my year of moviegoing boiled down to a few contenders and seeing them battle it out for the big prize.   So this year I’m making my own nominations.   My only requirement was that the film be one I saw on the big screen in 2009.  I might have enjoyed other films more as I was sitting in my theater seat, but  these are the ones that have stuck with me for some reason.

Le Trou (The Hole)— (1960)

How to make an hourglass: Le Trou

A new-to-me film I saw in the theater.   It’s about a bunch of French convicts digging their way out of jail.  I never thought I could be so riveted by guys hacking their way through a concrete wall.

Sita Sings the Blues— This is an animated feature of part of the Ramayana told through different styles of animation and punctuated by the songs of the 1920s chanteuse Annette Hanshaw.  I was so amazed by it that when I got back to my apartment I emailed the director, Nina Paley.  Unfortunately, because of copyright issues involving the Hanshaw songs, the movie film could not find a distributor.  The good news is, it can be viewed free of charge at http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/watch.html .  Go ahead–she wants you to.

Ce qu’il faut pour vivre (Necessities of Life)– A very moving and surprisingly entertaining Quebec movie about isolation and survival.  An Inuit with tuberculosis is taken by force from his home in the north to recover in a sanitarium in Quebec City.  Quebec has a thriving movie industry that the US knows practically nothing about.

An Education— It had me at the credits.  And if I were to expand the Lizes to include a Best Supporting Actor category, Alfred Molina would win.  

Last Train Home— A documentary about sweatshop workers trying to get home for the Chinese New Year.  I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I won’t forget the couple living in their little berth with a shower curtain for a door.  Or the squirmy moment when the Chinese man holds up the huge pair of pants destined for the U.S.A.  Ironically, I paid $13 to see this film, the most I’ve ever shelled out for a movie ticket.  That made it unforgettable, too.

Mein— In this German thriller, a May-December couple is travelling around Europe in a van.  He’s a cranky geezer and she seems brain damaged.  What’s going on?  Granted, part of what’s stuck with me from this movie is how slow on the uptake I am.  (It’s a shame I don’t like horror more, because I’m the model audience member for scary films: I never see anything coming, and everything terrifies me.)  Nevertheless, it has weird, haunting moments.

Lately the government of Quebec has been wondering how to market itself to Americans. It decided that the province’s biggest selling points are Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion. But wouldn’t the Americans who want to see Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion just go to Vegas? 

Meanwhile, Quebec has this:

Europe in North America.   France with training wheels.

Tonight I saw Helzapoppin’, a musical comedy from 1941 that I’ve always avoided. Seeing Martha Raye in the credits is usually a deal breaker for me. But the movie was playing at my favorite movie theater here–and I have a subscription, so it was free, or seemed free–so I braved it. It was funnier than I expected, with some fantastic musical numbers.