Category: Movies

Chasing Ice

Valorie Grace Hallinan2 Comments

This is the memory of the landscape. That landscape is gone. It may never be seen again in the history of civilization.    James Balog

Ice Book CoverHe is a master photographer, an obsessed and possessed artist documenting our dying glaciers.

We sat with a packed audience Tuesday evening at The Little Theatre in Rochester watching Chasing Ice, a documentary about James Balog’s quest, which has become the quest of many others. After the movie, producer/director Jeff Orlowski (thoughtful, intelligent, thoroughly engaging) spoke with the audience via Skype.

Your first stop should be here, to listen to and watch this perfect marriage of music, image and theme: Scarlett Johansson singing “Before My Time”  to a montage of Balog’s magnificent work.

Chasing Ice is playing in selected cities around the country. You can request to host a screening by filling out a form on the Chasing Ice site. Let’s hope that it will be available on Netflix and other venues soon.

While you’re waiting for the documentary, visit the Extreme Ice Survey (art meets science) to see the official trailer, and then stop by the Earth Vision Trust.

Balog has just published Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers. His other books include Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest; Wildlife Requiem; Anima; and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife.

The filmmakers dedicated Chasing Ice to their children and their children’s children.

So stop by for a listen and a look. It’s the next best thing to seeing the movie.

Next up at Books Can Save a Life

At the moment I’m interested in nature, art, memoir, and fiction all rolled into one, so I’ll be featuring Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams, Winter Count, About This Life, and “Sliver of Sky,” a recently published essay in Harper’s Magazine); The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett; and When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams.

Arcadia, and what’s next

Valorie Grace Hallinan5 Comments

“The monster is peering in the window. The ice caps have melted, the glaciers are nearly gone; the interiors of the continents becoming unlivable, the coasts so storm-battered people are fleeing by the millions. New Orleans and the Florida Keys are being abandoned. The hot land-bound places are being given up for lost; Phoenix and Denver becoming ghost towns. Every day, refugees show up in the city. A family takes shelter in the lee of Bit’s front steps, parents with two small children, silent and watchful.”       from Arcadia, by Lauren Groff

Arcadia book cover

In the novel Arcadia, Bit and his family leave the dying commune they helped establish and move to New York City when Bit is fourteen. As an adult with a teen-age daughter, Bit is a good man who nonetheless feels guilty over what he calls his selfishness: his greatest concern is Grete’s survival in a world rendered dangerously unstable by climate change. No matter what happens, he says to himself and any greater power that may be listening, let Grete survive. That’s something I wonder about too, the kind of world my sons will inherit and the challenges they’ll face.

Reading this novel and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior   got me thinking about a symposium on the environment I attended in 2010, sponsored by the Rochester Zen Center. Rochester has many treasures, and the Zen Center is one of them. Founded by Roshi Philip Kapleau in 1966 and now one of the largest organizations devoted to Zen Buddhism in the country, it occupies one of Rochester’s stately old homes off of East Avenue near the George Eastman House.  It has been extensively renovated, and the zendo is a stunning space for meditation.

The symposium, called “Turning Toward the Earth,” centered on the Buddhist response to our environmental crisis. This was an intense and unsettling day, the kind of day that makes you want to take dramatic action, upend your life to make a difference – but just how do you do that? The name of the symposium came from “The Great Turning,” a term coined by Joanna Macy, one of the featured speakers that day. Her stance is explained in an article in the Zen Bow:

“The Great Turning is a concept developed by Buddhist philosopher and activist Joanna Macy to help us understand and engage with the momentous change in worldview that is required of us now, at the close of the modern age. Because our species’ enormous technological power is not matched by our spiritual development we have reached a crisis-point unlike any other in the history of humankind, one in which all other sentient beings and so-called inanimate things are irrevocably caught up.”

In her talk at the symposium, Macy encouraged us to act, regardless of any specific outcomes, no matter how overwhelming the challenges may seem. Author and Zen Buddhist David Loy also spoke. He, too, talked of the need for spiritual transformation on an individual level to save our earth as we know it. A tall order, but he seemed hopeful. Conservation biologist Michael Soule, also a speaker, is largely concerned with the dramatic diminishing of species. He believes humans must change their self-centered nature and overcome their selfishness to solve the the extinction crisis, but he is less hopeful. He wasn’t shy about saying he thinks it is already too late.

If you’d like to know more about the Buddhist response to the environmental crisis, take a look at some of the books authored by Macy and Loy. I have read Macy’s World As Lover, World As Self, and I want to read more of her work.

Buddha

Chasing Ice is a documentary about environmental photographer James Balog, who set up time-lapse cameras across the Arctic to record the melting glaciers. One of the trailers shows an astounding view of a glacier calving – breaking up into an immense iceberg. Once part of a glacier becomes an iceberg, it melts much more quickly.

We’ll be watching the documentary Tuesday evening at the Little Theatre.

Introductory quote from Arcadia, Lauren Groff, Hyperion, New York: 2012. Quote from Zen Bow: “It Goes Along With Everything Else: Mass Extinction and the Great Turning,” Sensei Amala Wrightson, Zen Bow, 23(1), 3 – 8.

Don’t tell Joel Stein I like The Hunger Games

Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

I was taken aback when I read Joel Stein’s essay in The New York Times, “Adults Should Read Adult Books.” He writes that the only thing more embarrassing than seeing an adult looking at pornography on his computer is catching him reading The Hunger Games.

How dare a grown-up read a “children’s book” in public! The least he can do is read it in the privacy of his own home!

Not that Stein has actually read The Hunger Games, mind you. This Stanford-educated guy doesn’t read “children’s books,” and he’s making no exception in this case, at least not until he’s read his way through the 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.

Let’s hope that will keep him so busy he won’t have time to write more inane essays.

It’s not clear to me if Stein actually believes what he’s written or if he’s trying to be provocative. It’s also not clear to me why an essay of this sort deserves to be in The New York Times unless, like many newspapers, they’re desperate for readers and looking to generate plenty of buzz.

I see nothing insightful about Stein’s comments, no fine sensibility or subtlety of thought, though Stein expects as much from adult literature. “Children’s books,” just aren’t up to the challenge of satisfying discriminating grown-up readers. (Stein appears to be unaware of the genre of Young Adult literature, or perhaps discounts it as bogus.)

Stein’s viewpoint (if it is genuine) surprises me because it demands that literature adhere to strictly defined boundaries when, in fact, its boundaries are shifting dramatically in terms of physical form, delivery, and content. That is something to be celebrated.

Hundreds of readers did, indeed, respond to Stein’s viewpoint, most of them defending the value of children’s and YA literature for everyone, young and old.  The other essays in “The Power of Young Adult Fiction,” written by a teen blogger, a librarian, a book reviewer, and three authors, are worth reading.

It seems as though extreme or obnoxious or edgy, in the manner of Stein’s essay, is now the way to rise above the crowd and be heard. Which brings me to the movie, The Hunger Games.

As violent and dramatic as the plot is, I found the style and tone of the movie to be understated. That, in my view, made it all the more powerful. One critic found Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss) to be detached, but I felt that, without carrying on or becoming hysterical, Lawrence radiated terror, courage, and determination. Cinna (Lenny Kravitz), Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), and President Snow (Donald Sutherland) delivered equally strong performances without going over the top.

The blood and gore were mostly offstage, which disappointed some, but I thought it kept the focus on the psychological terror (and made the movie palatable for younger audiences).

John Garder said that in great fiction the writer creates the illusion of a dream world. The reader enters that dream, but with just one false or inauthentic moment the dream vanishes and the connection to the reader is lost. I easily entered The Hunger Games dream and didn’t leave until (reluctantly) the closing credits.

Joel Stein doesn’t know what he’s missing.

Let’s Talk about Hunger Games, the movie

Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

“So what happens when we go back?”

“We try to forget.”

“I don’t want to forget.”

I read a review of The Hunger Games last night after I got home from the theater.

Sometimes I wonder if the critics and I are watching the same movie.

I’d rather hear what you think.

Let’s talk about The Hunger Games movie. Leave your comments below. Who wants to go first?

Someone is always watching in The Hunger Games

Valorie Grace Hallinan10 Comments

“The greatest multiplex in the universe is in your mind, and the only ticket you need is a good, well-written novel.” Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I agree with Zafon. But still, I can’t wait for The Hunger Games movie. If it’s good, that will be partly because it’s based on a fantastic young adult novel.

On March 23, Katniss, Gale, Peeta, Primrose, Cinna, Rue and the rest of The Hunger Games’ characters will come to life on the big screen, as will the world of Panem, the futuristic North American country that emerged after climate change and war.

As YA literature goes, The Hunger Games is controversial. Every year in this harsh dystopia, twenty-four teenagers, two from each of the poor districts that serve the ruling Capitol district, are chosen in a “reaping” to fight to the death. The last contender alive wins.

These teens, some as young as twelve, kill each other on TV to entertain the Capitol citizens; their families get to watch them suffer and die.

A New York Times reviewer observed that the reality show motif adds complexity to the drama of alliances made and broken for the sake of survival. In this “double storytelling,” Katniss and Peeta must put on a good show because the audience favorites may win a share of mercy from the unseen game masters.

We, the readers, are privy to Katniss’ innermost thoughts and feelings, while we watch her present a false self to the cameras. She and Peeta form a bond that, for Katniss, may or may not be love. They play up their romance to captivate their viewers while they play out their “true” relationship under cover. Except, for all concerned, it’s sometimes hard to tell which is which.

And, in the end, they both know one of them will have to kill the other.

The Hunger Games is, in part, a nightmarish look at a culture of reality shows taken to an extreme.

It strikes me that young people are always “on.” They have never known life without incessant friending and following and posting. I’m ambivalent, to say the least, about the constant staging of oneself that’s necessary now if you don’t want to be completely out of the mainstream. 

In fact, it’s getting harder to deliberately choose privacy and anonymity. Recently, in a nearby town, over a dozen teen-age girls developed an illness with symptoms resembling Tourette Syndrome. Reporters and television cameras have besieged the town in an unrelenting media storm.  The story has gone viral.

It’s not just news. It has become our entertainment.

For peace of mind, some of the girls have given up social media altogether, at least for the time being.

Back to The Hunger Games –  there is still time to read or reread it before the movie comes out. My niece, a soon-to-become librarian, is a big fan of The Hunger Games.  She wears a mockingjay necklace (a mockingjay is a bird that symbolizes liberation from the evil Capitol) and knows everything there is to know about the upcoming movie. In fact, I found out about the movie when she posted the trailer online.

I saw it because I’m her friend on Facebook.

What was your Hunger Games book?

Did you have a Hunger Games book when you were growing up? A sci fi kind of book about a different world, that made you feel alive on every page? With a heroic character so real you could step inside his/her skin?

Tell us your Hunger Games book in the comments. I’ll tell you mine in my next post. Hint: It’s the 50th anniversary of this book’s publication.