At school the other morning, as Eli and I were saying good bye to Ben, already settled into a drawing project, a boy walked over and pushed Ben off his chair. Ben was too surprised to talk and even I needed a moment to gather myself before speaking gently to the child, who somehow, in the clueless, bulldozing way of some kindergartners, just hadn’t seen Ben. Ben and I talked about it later, cuddled cozily on the couch, with Eli dancing around us recalling the drama: “Dat boy pushed Benno,” he recounted wide-eyed, the surprise still fresh in his voice. “No push people. Push swings.”

It’s so simple right now, as perhaps a rule-bound two year-old can convey best; and when the rules of polite society are tested by its youngest members, it’s easy enough for a parent to intercede. This week, it was just a rambunctious boy who didn’t see my kid, but I worry about the day someone does see my kid and pushes him anyway. Oh, I know, the world generally treats blonde boys very well, thank you very much, so I teach my boys to wear their privilege respectfully. And yet, Ben’s a smart boy in a culture that doesn’t really pride itself on intelligence; a vegetarian in a meat-eating society; an awkward body in a world that expects boys to run gracefully and handle balls fluidly. He’s a quirky bird, and like any parent, I want to help my child learn to be himself regardless of how the world reacts to him.

My thoughts about Ben were cast into sharp perspective when I watched the beautiful and moving new Persepolis (Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, 2007). Based on Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis is a memoir of her childhood in Tehran during the Revolution, and her lonely adolescence, exiled without her family, in Vienna. The film is largely in black and white (and a thousand gorgeous shades of gray), animated simply, and in French (depending on where you live, your theater will play a subtitled version like I saw, or one with an English voice-over track), all of which, I know, screams “Art-y!” But instead of being distancing, those often off-putting elements combine to create a film that’s so funny and real, of such quiet beauty and emotional resonance, I didn’t want to move after it was over, lest I break its spell.

Read more of my latest column over at Literary Mama!

Atonement: There was one moment in this otherwise too-dramatic-for-me film that I found moving, when the wrongly imprisoned young man, about to head to France to serve the rest of his jail term fighting in World War Two, meets with his young love and reaches a trembling hand out to touch her hand. That was it. At the end of the movie, when Vanessa Redgrave shows up to play the aged writer, the woman whose story had sent a man to jail and to war, I caught a glimpse of how interesting the novel must be. But I didn’t think the film was, very.

Winter Passing: The premise of this sounded so intriguing. An editor contacts the grown daughter of two esteemed writers, offering her $100,000 for publication rights to their love letters. The daughter, who is down and out, grieving the recent death of her mother and estranged from her father, thinks this might be an easy way to make some money, and goes home to collect the letters. Her father is a drunk and mired in writer’s block; one of his students, a woman somewhat younger than his daughter, lives with him as his cook and housekeeper (she’s thankfully not too fawning, nor does she seem to be sleeping with him — which would have been a tired old eww!), while Will Ferrell works as his handyman and security guard. If you love Will Ferrell, then maybe you could get past Ed Harris as the annoying cliche of the wild alcoholic writer, because Ferrell’s performance is compelling and nuanced. But I don’t love Will Ferrell enough. This is one of those movies that referred to, but did not tell, the story that interested me: the mom! What did she write, and what was her relationship with her daughter like, and what was her marriage like, and what did she write? What did she write?!? Oh, well.

My Kid Could Paint That: Oh, this one kept Tony and me up talking way past our bedtime! This is a documentary about Marla Olmstead, a child who paints. Because her father is a painter, and he wanted to get some work done one day, he gave her a canvas, some paints and brushes, and got to work while his daughter covered her canvas with a bright, abstract, typical preschool painting. Except, you know, on a proper canvas with quality paints, so it looked really, really good. A friend saw it and asked to hang it in his cafe, where a gallery owner saw it and asked if there were more, and before long, four year-old Marla Olmstead had a show. And then buyers. And then another show. And then some press. And then some very big sales. And then of course came the skeptics, led by 60 Minutes, to suggest that her daddy was really directing, if not in fact just doing, the paintings himself.

But the “Is she or isn’t she?” question wasn’t really the question that interested me so much. First, there’s the problem of abstract art (which we happen to be fans of in this house), and people’s strong reactions against it: It’s too easy; anyone can throw paint on a canvas and say “It’s a painting!” It doesn’t tell a story. It’s impossible to evaluate its quality (because of its refusal to represent “reality”). It thumbs its nose at the viewer as if to say, If you don’t like me, it’s because you’re not smart enough to get me. In the documentary, the strongest voice against abstract art happens to be the gallery owner representing Marla, a photo-realist painter who devotes months to a single painting and is peeved at how quickly she produces work. But not peeved enough to avoid making a buck on it.

But what made Tony and me both really sad was one tiny moment toward the end of the film, when Marla is painting and asks her dad to paint with her. And because of the skeptics, and because of all the money involved, he has to say no. The minute he kneels down to paint a picture with his little girl, the whole structure of her career collapses. But it seemed to me that their family had collapsed in some important way already, without their even noticing.

Persepolis: I thought the books were very good, though they didn’t knock me out (they’d been built up too much, I’m afraid). But at the risk of building up anticipation for the film too much, I thought it was spectacular. Here’s a rare instance when translating a book to film opens it up and deepens it; rather than the flat black & white images on the page (which are quite moving in their simplicity), the film gives you black & white and a thousand shades in between, moving subtly on screen, with incredible depth and beauty. Yes, the story’s been simplified a bit, but the film tells such a compelling story, I had to sit in the theater a while after it had emptied out and collect myself before I could leave.

My, there’s quite a lot of ink being shed on this film! And my little column doesn’t cover all I could say about it, either, but here’s an excerpt from my contribution to the conversation:

The best thing the new movie Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) achieves as it traces the impact of one teenager’s unplanned pregnancy is its refusal to shy away from the complexities and odd juxtapositions of life; in fact, it embraces them, insisting that we look at the messiness of relationships, the rapidly shifting peaks and valleys of emotional intelligence, so that we can begin to understand how a smart girl could have sex without birth control and how a sensitive girl could give a child up for adoption. When sixteen year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) discovers she’s pregnant, she puts her head in a noose — made out of licorice ropes (she frees herself by taking a savage bite). When she contacts a clinic to arrange an abortion, she makes the call on a hamburger-shaped telephone. Her boyfriend, the father of her child, sleeps in a racecar-shaped bed. As Juno responds when her dad asks where she’s been, “Out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level.”

You can read the rest of my column here at Literary Mama. And while you’re there, check out some of our other columns and a new book review, too!

Thanks for the suggestions on the Amazon boxes! I have written Amazon customer service to suggest that they could have used one less box, and broken down the boxes (all too big to mail my PIF books, alas; I need to be giving away more and bigger books, apparently). We didn’t build a fort with these, but will save them in case one of the birthday boys this spring wants a rocket or train-building party.

And thanks even more for the words of sympathy and concern about Eli’s encounter with the new book case (this is what we get for unpacking all our books from the nice, soft, cardboard boxes). Ten of Eli’s stitches came out last week. He was stoic, saying only afterwards that “the teeny-tiny scissors hurt a teeny-tiny bit.” One of the dissolving stitches has dissolved, and one’s still hanging on, like an umbilical cord stump that won’t drop.

And, finally, as for my movie-watching binge, I wound up writing a column on Juno. Look for it at Literary Mama next week.

Edited to add: I try to write the column without giving away anything about the plot for those of you who haven’t seen the film yet!

The guys and I traveled east for Thanksgiving, to my parents’ cozy Connecticut home deep in the woods. I spent the weekend surrounded by family and food — my favorite way to spend a few days. Occasionally my dad organized a work party to move a pile of wood; he cuts and splits the trees that fall in the woods, and we all work like a bucket brigade to move the logs from the woods to various spots on the rough-mowed lawn, and from there to the garage, so that my parents can heat their home all winter. The rest of the time, this time of year, we stay inside reading, writing, cooking, eating, talking talking talking.

So it’s a sharp contrast, indeed, to think about Into the Wild, the film I wrote about for Literary Mama this month. Its subject, Chris McCandless, decided to abandon civilization for a while and trek deep into the Alaskan back country. When I posted a draft of the column to the Literary Mama columnists’ group, it generated a great discussion about “guy” movies and “chick flicks,” and whether men are more likely to head into the wild than women. In my experience, among my friends and my own family, it’s the men who have stayed relatively close to their families and the women who, for various reasons, have moved away. I traveled from New York to California for grad school, met Tony, and never moved back. Hence my cross-country journey to visit my family.

It’s hard for me to imagine my boys ever having an independent life, let alone an independent life cut off from mine, but this movie made me think sadly about that. To distract myself from that line of thought, I focused on the sibling relationship, as depicted in the film and as I see it in my family. I hope that if my boys do ever choose to leave me, that at least they won’t leave each other.

Here’s a blurb from the column:

At home [months after Chris’s disappearance], his parents’ anger softens into pain and [his sister] wonders why he doesn’t get in touch with her; “the weight of Chris’s disappearance,” she says, “had begun to lay down on me full length.” Her words rocked me out of my Alaskan reverie to think about my own family. I’ve got two older brothers living 3,000 miles away. We may not talk every week or even every two, but I know that when I call, they’ll call back. We’ll connect. I thought about Carine McCandless and how I’d feel if one of my brothers just . . . left. Nothing on the surface of my life would look much different, but I’d walk with a persistent ache no doctor could ever heal.

And then my thoughts turned to my boys, young brothers who wriggle like puppies together in the oldest one’s bed each night. I thought about Eli, who from the time he could talk has called Ben “Buh-buh,” for “Brother Ben,” the sharp urgency in his voice now when he calls out “Ben!”, about how bereft he’d be if that call went unanswered one day. I thought about how Ben runs to give Eli a hug before we leave his kindergarten classroom each morning, and then bends down gently to give Eli a kiss on the cheek. I can’t bear to imagine them losing each other. To move into adulthood having lost the shared history and understanding created with a brother or sister would permanently cloud one’s days.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest, and let me know what you think.

Manny & Lo is an old favorite of mine, a film I used to teach in my Women’s Studies classes and the occasional film class, too. I listed it in my original column pitch to Literary Mama, and it took me a year and a half to get around to it. And then of course, by the time I sat down to write about it, all the stuff I used to focus on when I taught the film — in my prior life, before I had kids — flew out of my head and I saw it a completely new way. So here’s what it makes me think about now:

When I was first pregnant, I dreamt my baby was a girl. She was beautiful in my dreams, with my husband’s blonde hair and blue eyes. But, nightmarishly, she was also a teenager, one of the popular ones. I woke in a cold sweat at the thought of producing a “mean girl,” like those that had so intimidated me in high school. I ended up having a boy, but I still think sometimes about what a daughter of mine might be like, about how I’d mother her. And I think about that particularly when I watch a movie like Manny & Lo (Lisa Krueger, 1996), about two tough girls who could use some mothering.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest.

It’s not been the easiest couple days, so tonight Tony offered to take the boys/kicked me out of the house, and after a happy hour browsing some downtown stores, I found myself buying a ticket for Gone Baby Gone, the new film directed by Ben Affleck.

Now, I was frankly too scared to see Mystic River, the last movie based on a Dennis Lehane novel, so it’s not like I thought this latest, about a child’s abduction, would make for a fun evening. But the reviews had intrigued me, and I thought it might be column fodder.

Well, the problem is, I can’t really write about it until every last one of you goes to see the movie. So go, now, watch the movie. It’s dark (of course), and subtle, and thought-provoking, and offers two of the best performances, by Casey Affleck, as an investigator, and Amy Ryan, as the child’s mother, I’ve seen in a while. It’s not going to give me nightmares, like I’d feared, but it is keeping me thinking.

So go, see the movie, and then let me know so that we can talk.

My Literary Mama column this month is about Barbara Kopple’s documentary, Shut Up and Sing. Here’s a blurb:

Four years ago, I nursed my first son with over one thousand other nursing mothers at a world-record breaking Berkeley “nurse-in.”

This year, my boy hops down the sidewalk into kindergarten.

Four years ago, the war in Iraq was in its infancy and President Bush’s approval ratings were sky-high.

This year, a growing and non-partisan chorus criticizes our involvement in Iraq, while the president stubbornly limps toward the end of his misguided term.

Four years ago, the Dixie Chicks began a world tour with a number one hit single, “Travelin’ Soldier,” about a girl who longs for her beau to return from Vietnam. The single dropped off the charts when lead singer Natalie Maines remarked in concert, “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”

This year — just days ago as I write this column — Sally Field accepts an Emmy award saying (in a line bleeped from the American telecast, but heard on Canadian television), “… if the mothers ruled the world there would be no goddamn wars in the first place.”

I am a mother who hates war and violence, and loves movies and music. Shut Up and Sing (Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck, 2006) gives me a lot of what I care about in a film. It’s no date-night romance, true, but this documentary, which details the impact of Natalie Maines’ remark on the Dixie Chicks’ music, their families, and our culture, has me singing its praises.

Read the rest at Literary Mama. And while you’re there, check out the new Literary Reflections essay, Little Finch, as well as the beautiful new column, Me and My House, by my Mama, PhD co-editor, Elrena Evans.

This month I watched (and wrote about) My Neighbor Totoro and Whale Rider, two movies worth watching with the kids. Here’s an excerpt:

When my book deadline led to my inevitable crash, Tony took the boys out to the zoo and I hunkered down on the couch with Eli’s blanket, a cup of tea, and the remote control to see what Tivo had been watching for me. I went for comfort, first, with My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988), a film I’ve seen before, and then followed it up with one I’d missed when it first came out, Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002), creating an inadvertent and completely coincidental absent-mother double feature.

You can read the rest over at Literary Mama.

Christopher Walken is my new favorite movie dad.

The creepy actor best-known for playing villains and psychopaths nearly steals Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2007) away from the radiant Nikki Blonski (playing his daughter Tracy) and John Travolta, sadly underutilized in a gender-bending role as his wife, Edna. It’s Walken’s Wilbur, the only character not swathed in a cotton candy haze of makeup, sequins, and hairspray, whose strong presence gives Tracy and Edna the foundation for their helium-balloon performances.

Hairspray opens up in the clouds, and with a long, swooping pan the camera sails down into Baltimore and through the window of Tracy Turnblad’s bedroom. As the soundtrack thumps a steady beat, we see a shape wiggling in the bed, two bright eyes pop open, then two tapping feet emerge and slide into bunny slippers. This is the only time the camera looks at Tracy so closely, feature by feature; then it pulls back, and for the rest of the film, stays back so we can really appreciate the whole fabulous singing and dancing shape of her. She’s an Energizer bunny of a girl who belts out her first song before breakfast. I wondered if the film could maintain its high-octane opening; its energy flags only when it pauses for dialogue, but happily Hairspray is an unapologetic musical, taking few breaks for conversation.

Click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest of this month’s column, and let me know what you think!