Vacation Day
I’m on vacation for the next two weeks starting today. My great plan is to bum around the city, haunting museums and movie theaters (anywhere with a better air conditioning system than mine), while making a dent in the pile of books to-be-read on my night stand. I kicked off vacation yesterday night by watching The Good Shepard. Its a great movie, with plenty of melancholy music and long silences from Matt Damon.
There were a lot of great performances (Alec Baldwin’s character was a lot like the one he played in The Departed without the Boston accent; Deniro is a toned down version of his characters in Meet the Parents and Analyze This; and Matt Damon could have stripped off his glasses and tie to fight an evil agent without raising an eyebrow like he does in the Bourne movies). Now I’m left with the urge to revisit books like Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (I went through a phase early last year reading 20th century American novelists—blame it on the English major in me).
I’m not sure if The Good Shepard makes it into the favorites column yet or one that gets watched when I’m bored with absolutely nothing else to do. The pacing is uneven, Angelina Jolie’s character needs developing and the film gets caught up in being atmospheric to the point of being unnaturally self conscious of itself. Still, I’m in love with the spare starkness that each character has and I like the way the story is laid out. This is clearly a fence movie—the kind I flim flam about liking or disliking depending on my mood. Its one of those that I dream of going back and recutting so the quality of each character stays intact while moving the story along, much like The Usual Suspects does. Still, it’s worth watching at least once.
Of course this is all a prelude to the two books that I’m getting ready to dive into: Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror, by Carlo Bonini and Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner. Now I’m not usually a history/politics reader, but something in these caught my eye (plus both were recommended to me by a friend I trust who knows my reading tastes). Check them out and let me know what you think.
Caren Johnson Estesen
3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
Sounds like your summer vacation is also a great education--which is so wonderful. It keeps you on the cutting edge and inspiring so many writers, myself included. Thank you, Erika
Happy vacation. If you make it to Dallas, look us up.
Rob Preece
Have a fabulous vacation. Hope you'll stay away from working. :)
We have "The Good Shepard" in from Netflix for tonight, and I'm really looking to seeing it. Matt Damon is so good, no matter what he plays, isn't he? Glad you mentioned the silences part. There's so much nuance that can be breathed into those voicless pauses through slight body/face movements.
The complexity of the characters and the actors' ability to show how one character's personality affects the other makes "The Usual Suspects" for a fab drama in my books. I always tend to glom onto those interlocking jigsaw puzzle type films.
Have you seen "Death and the Maiden"?
I'm going to look into "Collusion." With the end of the cold war, the term "international espionage" lost some of its dashing quality. :) I'd like to know what Bonini has to stay about its current state.