The Magic of Ink: rated PG-13

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Village

2004
Rated: PG-13 for a scene of violence and frightening situations
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Genre: Drama/mystery/thriller
Starring Bryce Dallas Howard and Joaquin Phoenix

Ivy Walker lives in a small isolated village during the late 1800’s, where the color red is forbidden; the elders believe it attracts the beasts living in the surrounding forest. No one can go outside the little haven without danger of being taken by the strange “Those We Do Not Speak Of” creatures. There hasn’t been an attack in a long time, until when Ivy’s friend Lucius Hunt asks the elders for permission to go beyond the village and into the unknown. That’s when the monsters become more menacing—strange marks are found on doors and skinned livestock is left along the paths. Still, Lucius is determined to go Outside, in hopes of buying medicine to might cure Ivy’s blindness. His plans are wrecked when an angry Noah mortally stabs Lucius. Now it’s Ivy who begs to be allowed to travel for medicine, if she wants to save her love’s life. After much consideration the elders allow it, although only after telling her a secret. When and if Ivy arrives at her unknown destination, she has no idea what will she find when she gets there.
I think The Village is a perfect introduction to scary movies, as the setting—being far removed from our modern world—gives the viewer a little distance. There’s lots of suspense, but no nasty gore, making a dramatic, romantic movie with great cinematography.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Lady in the Water

Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Genre: Fantasy/mystery/thriller
Rated PG-13 for some frightening sequences
Starring: Paul Giamatti and Bryce Dallas Howard

Cleveland Heep (Giamatti) is the janitor for The Cove, an apartment complex inhabited by quite a few eccentric characters. For the past few nights, Cleveland has been hearing splashing in the pool, but he has never caught anyone, until one night when he sees a young woman. A young woman who is afraid, but one who needs to help the human race before she can leave. Story (Howard) is a narf, a nymph-like creature from the Blue World, an ancient place of magic, and she needs to return there. Led by a fairytale told by old Mrs. Choi, will Cleveland be able to find the members of the guild—the Healer, the Guardian, the Interpreter, and so forth—in time to save Story and the human race? Gradually, each strange apartment dweller—the man who exercises only the right side of his body, the woman who loves animals, the man who seems to live in his bathroom, and more—becomes involved because, as Story says, “every being has a role to play.” But the parts they first fell into might not be the ones they stay with....
Lady in the Water is an amazing blend of aspects anyone can enjoy in a movie—wisdom, humor, sorrow, truth, and suspense—that will keep you enchanted throughout the entire film.

Thoughts on Novels, Books, and Reading

“So many people I know say they hate reading. What they seem not to get is that a book is an alternate universe, where you can go anywhere, or choose to just set the book down and leave that universe alone.” –Zeke Willey

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” –A.C. Grayling, in a review of A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel

“Read in order to live.” –Gustave Flaubert

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” –Logan Pearsall Smith

“Books have a sense of honor. If they are lent out, they will not come back.”

“Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.” –Jim Bishop

“Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them all.” –Henry David Thoreau

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” –Carl Sagan

“Book-love...never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” –Holbrook Jackson

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.” –Annie Sinclair in Annie, Between the States, by L.M. Elliott

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” –Emily Dickenson

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” –Jane Austen

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” –Henry Ward Beecher

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” –Virginia Woolf

“When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” –Marie de Sevigne

“A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.” –Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” –G.K. Chesterton

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” –Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.” –Albert Camus

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” –Jorge Luis Borges

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” –Francis Bacon

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.” –W. Somerset Maugham

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.” –Christopher Morley

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” –Vincent Starrett

“I cannot live without books.” –Thomas Jefferson

“Books allow you to travel wherever you like. And no ticket is required. No toothbrush, even. Just pick your century, your continent, your character—and go.” –T.A. Barron, in an interview with WORD for Teens

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” –Henry Tilney, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

“...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings fromher mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”
—Ian McEwan (Atonement)

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” —Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” —Holbrook Jackson

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
—Paul Sweeney

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!”” —Christopher Morley

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Village

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Lady in the Water

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