Category: aging

Granny’s a Bitch
Grandma. A film by Paul Weitz Elle (Lily Tomlin), the title character of Grandma, is almost unbelievably grouchy. Within the first twenty minutes of the movie she has broken up with what seems to be a perfectly nice and quite lovely girlfriend (Judy Greer), made a spectacle of herself in a local coffee shop and purposely ...
Read more
Xtreme Oldster
The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed out the Window and Disappeared. A film by Felix Hengren The audience at the oldster movies is starting to get out of hand. There wasn’t much of a crowd in the Asheville multiplex where I saw this movie, but I might have been the only one under 70. We ...
Read more
No Shit, Sherlock
Mr. Holmes (2015) A film by Bill Condon It is the dream of every author to create a great iconic character, someone that people recognize just by the name. Cervantes, our first novelist, created two. In a way he was just writing about two aspects of the human mind, or the human personality. He could as ...
Read more
I Believe the Word is Entropy
Molloy from Three Novels by Samuel Beckett. Grove Press. 407 pp. $15.95. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a stranger book than Molloy, the first novel in the famous trilogy that Samuel Beckett published in his early forties. It makes no sense whatsoever, especially in its first eighty-five pages. It concerns a man—the eponymous narrator—who has ...
Read more
Gilead
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Picador. 247 pp. $16.00 This novel has an almost irresistible premise for me: an older father writing to his son about the past life that he’ll never have a chance to discuss with him, since he expects to have died by the time then son gets interested. My own father died when ...
Read more
Two Quick Reads
Lila by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 261pp. $26.00 It’s odd that I even read this book. I’m one of the few people in the world who didn’t like Housekeeping, Robinson’s first novel, and I am a renegade from Protestant Christianity and fiction about it. I haven’t read Robinson’s much beloved books Gilead and Home, ...
Read more
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Assisted Living Facility
The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. A film by John Madden. We seem to have entered the age of Oldster Movies, and if Maggie Smith can just hang on this could go on for quite some time. We’ve had the First Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Second, and according to the trailers there’s an upcoming Maggie Smith ...
Read more
Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
Read more
Too Much Faux, Too Little Mystery
The Big Seven: A Faux Mystery by Jim Harrison. Grove Press. 341 pp. $26.00. Jim Harrison is my favorite novelist, probably of all time; I’ve read many of his books multiple times and would happily read most of them again. He has a unique style, marvelous powers of observation; he tells a great story and is ...
Read more
Everyman Wants Every Woman
Maybe not Every Man, but Every Philip Roth Protagonist Everyman by Philp Roth. Vintage. 182 pp. $12.40. **** The novel opens in a startling way, with the unnamed protagonist’s funeral. That opening is apt, because the novel’s focus is an unabashed look at the fact of our mortality, with no blinders on and no consolation. In that sense ...
Read more