Book Review: The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon

Rating: A-/ I can’t remember the last time I felt this emotionally drained after reading a book. It’s a tricky business to write a novel in an intentionally childish and grammatically incorrect style so as to capitalize on the narrator’s illiteracy, but I think this book pulled that off wonderfully.  Although that sounds like it would be difficult to read, I found myself getting pulled into the pragmatic and plain-spoken heroine, Mary’s world without too much confusion. Moreover, I fell in love with Mary’s voice and, withholding spoilers, it broke my heart that things didn’t work out better for her than they did.

Book Review: Imani All Mine by Connie Porter

Rating: A-/ Wow. This is one heartbreaking story. If you want to read this book but have doubts because the subject matter might be too hard to cope with, be forewarned, it only goes downhill from here. There’s so much pain in Imani All Mine, to the point where the moments of hope and redemption hardly seem worth mentioning. I knew that this was a dark book, but I didn’t see the tearjerker of an ending coming, it blindsided me. I think this book is a work of art. It combines dialect with lyricism to powerful effect, without feeling false or untrue to the character’s voice and education level.

Book Review: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Rating: B/ Celie isn’t a slave, but she might as well be. At the tender age of fourteen, Celie’s abusive father passes her off to an equally abusive man in an marriage the two have already arranged. Celie’s only joy comes from her younger sister, Nettie, so when Nettie is sent away and becomes a missionary in Africa, Celie is understandably devastated and writes her sister hundreds of letters in order to keep in touch. The Color Purple is written in epistolary format, and the narrative comes either in the form of letters Celie writes to God attempting to reconcile with her horrid living situation or notes that Celie and Nettie write back and forth to each other, attempting to provide comfort in sad and desperate times.

Book Review: Push by Sapphire

Rating: A-/  There is occasionally something cathartic about reading books that are real downers, if they are well done. A truly bleak book does something that a funny or light book can’t, which is to put the shittiness of the reader’s life into perspective. If nothing else, Push by Sapphire, an excellent book that was also made into an excellent movie called Precious, will make you want to hug your mom and buy her flowers. Whatever issues you might have had with her at the moment, by the end of this book you’ll probably be buying her free passes to the spa so she can treat herself.

Movie Review: Glassland (2014)

Rating: A/ From the title I thought this movie was about methamphetamine, since ‘glass’ is a synonym for crystal meth. It turned out to be about a young man’s mother with a pretty serious alcohol problem. In fact, Jean (Toni Collette) has hit the bottle so hard that she’s slowly killing herself, and her ever-faithful son John (Jack Reynor) both tirelessly cares for her and enables her.

Movie Review: Lilya 4-Ever (2002)

Rating: A-/ Prostitution is bad, okay, kids? Lukas Moodyson’s tale of a sixteen-year-old girl sold into sexual slavery will scare any man away from hiring a hooker much in the same way that Requiem for a Dream scared us away from heroin abuse. Much of it’s power relies on the performance of Oksana Akinshina as Lilya, a world-weary but somehow naive teen ekeing out an existence in a low-income Estonian suburb. Lilya’s mother (Lyubov Agapova) abandons her willful daughter at home to go run away with her boyfriend to a new life in the U.S., and her aunt (Liliya Shinkaryova) (a grade-a cunt if there ever was one) moves her niece into a complete shithole so she can live in relative comfort in Lilya and her mother’s apartment. In fact, Lilya’s only real lifeline is an abused adolescent named Volodya (Artyom Bogucharskiy,) who becomes her confidante and friend.

Movie Review: George Washington (2000)

Rating: B-/ Some Spoilers Ahead. Read at your own Risk. Eight years before he made the mediocre (and utterly mainstream) stoner comedy Pineapple Express, filmmaker David Gordon Green directed his first feature, a very different affair entirely. This movie, George Washington, is a very slow, abstract, and mysterious mood piece about a group of kids coming of age in rural North Carolina.It held me at a distance, I never fell irrevocably in love with it, but at the same time I appreciated it’s refusal to be anything but a true original. Twelve-year-old Nasia (Candace Eavanofski)’s lilting monologue drips off her tongue like honey; everything- the dialogue, the characters, the brooding atmosphere, is presented in a way that was both real and unreal; natural and absurd, almost dreamlike in  it’s unrelenting strangeness. In the end it is a movie that has kind of a idyllic quality in terms of how the characters see each other, yet it was very bleak at the same time. In the end, I can’t urge you to see this movie or advise you to stay away from it, you have to decide for yourself. You know what you like. It’s strange, that’s all, occasionally beautiful, but extremely odd in it’s execution.

Movie Review: Dope (2015)

Rating: B/ Puppy dog-eyed Shameik Moore plays geeky urban teen Malcolm, who lives in the Bottoms of Inglewood, California, where crime and desperation reign. With a setting like this, you’d expect Dope to be a depressing movie, but it’s not. It’s actually a very funny movie; not perfect by a long shot, but with some of the funniest, zaniest dialogue to come around in years. Malcolm is obsessed with 90’s Hip-Hop culture and plans to go to college, which makes him very uncool with the kids in his hood, who mostly end up joining gangs and dying young and never expect anything more of themselves.

Movie Review: Infinitely Polar Bear (2014)

Rating: B/ Filmmaker Maya Forbes’ heart tugging, affectionate autobiographical tale stars Mark Ruffalo as Cam, a perennial screw-up and the manic-depressive father of two little girls, Faith (Ashley Aufderheide) and Amelia ( Imogene Wolodarsky, the filmmaker’s own daughter.) When we first meet Cam, it is the winter of 1978, and he is in the midst of a manic episode, running around in the freezing cold in his skivvies and terrorizing his family, who then lock themselves in the car in fear. Later he is hospitalized and put on heavy medication that makes him shuffle, fat and complacent, around the halls of the mental hospital.

Movie Review: The Selfish Giant (2014)

Rating: B+/ Yes, this is ‘yet another depressing British movie,’ but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the world needs these stories just a much, if not more, than we need the candy-colored cathartic ones. The Selfish Giant gives us a unrelentingly real look into a world of poverty and deprivation, a working-class Northern English community where the kids run wild and the adults offer minors no support whatsoever as they eke out an existence of hard luck and toil.