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    Girls - Season 4

    Girls - Season 4

    (0 Ratings) Rate It

    TV Season

    Lena Dunham returns for the fourth season of Girls, the Emmy®- and Golden Globe-winning comedy...

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Lou Grande (148 KP) rated Latter Days (2004) in Movies

Jun 20, 2018  
Latter Days (2004)
Latter Days (2004)
2004 | Comedy, Drama, Romance
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Rating Watch
Contains spoilers, click to show
I saw this movie back when it was released fourteen years ago, when I was still young and had faith in things. I picked it up again to see if it held up, and you know? It's not bad. Usually romantic comedies don't do much for me, gay or straight, but I have a thing for Mormons--what can I say?

So Christian is a gay party boy livin' it up in LA, but ultimately lacking in purpose and drive. Aaron is a Mormon missionary from Iowa, who experiences culture shock and desire for the first time, because of course they become neighbors and hijinks ensue. Fun fact! This movie also stars Joseph Gorgon-Levitt as a total butt, which is quite a contrast to his role in Mysterious Skin, another gay-themed movie which came out in the same year.

The acting is actually not as horrible as you would think from the production value/budget, and the story is typical romantic comedy fare. Still, I think it would strike a chord with anyone who is queer and was brought up in a religious household. It doesn't shy away from how agonizing it can be to be betrayed by family, especially fourteen years ago. And you know, some of the dialogue is actually really poignant. If you can get over the vaguely "afterschool special" feeling of this movie, it's definitely worth a watch.

(It has a happy ending!)
  
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Phil Leader (619 KP) rated Ghosts of Winter (Grey Areas #2) in Books

Nov 13, 2019  
Ghosts of Winter (Grey Areas #2)
Ghosts of Winter (Grey Areas #2)
Brad Carl | 2015 | Crime, Romance, Thriller
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Following his flight from Gable, Iowa after getting inadvertently involved in a drug war, Barrett Grayson is determined to stay on the run from the FBI. However some bad news from home makes him re-evaluate his actions. Back in Gable the fallout from the fateful night of Chum's party continues with the local police and DEA determined to track down the missing drugs and the cartel prepared to stop at nothing to get hold of them instead. Meanwhile Claire can't shake thoughts of 'Henry Fields' from her head.

The first book in this sage was good; this second is even better. Carl is a very talented author who can move seamlessly between emotional and romantic to crime drama without missing a beat. As with the first book, despite a large cast of characters each one is depicted with incredible realism.

The thrust of the saga is that black and white don't exist, that everyone has shades of grey and has to make decisions which may be compromising or morally questionable, and that is brought into sharp relief here with what would normally be 'good guys' and 'bad guys' both blurring a lot of lines and meeting in the middle.

Despite being the second in a sequence of four books this does have its own plot which moves to a satisfying conclusion but obviously leaves all the main players in place for the next book. Anyone who picks this up and reads it will not be disappointed.
  
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James Wood recommended Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador in Books (curated)

 
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador
Horacio Castellanos | 2021
(0 Ratings)
Book Favorite

"The Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya (who was born in Honduras, grew up in El Salvador, and now lives in Iowa City) should be much better known in the United States. Every book of his I have read in English has been differently original, differently demanding. He is an intense writer, whose short novels take fierce satiric hold of a fictional concept and squeeze and squeeze. His work is political but intimate, and no more so than in this early book, a work of homage to the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Edgardo Vega, a Salvadoran professor living in Canada, returns to El Salvador to attend his mother’s funeral. In a bar, he sits and rants, for hours on end, to an interlocutor who has the author’s own name, about everything he finds detestable in Salvadoran life, from the country’s beer to its writers, from its food to its politics. It’s not the book I would recommend to a reader who had never encountered this unusual writer—that would be his great novella “Senselessness”—but it’s an interesting exercise in both imitation and self-exorcism (Castellanos Moya has said that he wrote it, in part, to rid himself of the influence of Bernhard); and if, like me, you are drawn to novelists who are bloody good ranters (Philip Roth being our great American example), you will be likewise drawn to this peculiarly compulsive novel."

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