Beginners (2009) - Raymond Carver

My reading plans typically go in chronological order, but I’m taking a big leap in my Carver plan to talk about Beginners.  It’s the first official publication of Carver’s original manuscript for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  I read this book in tandem with What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and I think that’s the way these books should be read.  Carver’s stories here are longer, sometimes extremely so, and it’s typically a toss-up which version of the story is better.  A lot of times you’ll find that Carver’s versions of the stories are, while still quite bitter and sad, somewhat more compassionate.  If It Please You, for instance, is the original version of After the Denim and they’re both really great.  But If It Please You continues past the bitter ending of After the Denim to follow the main character into his room at night and lets us eavesdrop on his pained prayers in the darkness.  It’s still brutally sad, but it has a kind of poetry that After the Denim doesn’t.  The most obvious example is A Small Good Thing, Carver’s original version of The Bath.  The Bath is a great story and it has a brilliant, Alfred Hitchcock Presents style ending, but A Small Good Thing is its own kind of intense masterpiece.  It continues a good ten to fifteen pages past the ending of The Bath and it achieves a really transcendent beauty and empathy which is kind of shocking.  It’s Carver’s best story to that point and easily his most redemptive.  There’s still deep sorrow and longing, but the title says it all.  Sometimes we find a measure of redemption in just a small good thing; the smallest acts of kindness or connection offer a tiny bit of hope and sometimes even the tiniest bits are worth a lot.  Anyway, I think it’s best to read this book right in conjunction with Lish’s version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.  I recommend reading each individual story first out of What We Talk About and then out of Beginners; then go back to What We Talk About for the next story and so on.  Beginners is a raw, powerful masterpiece with an entirely different tone and style from the version of it that was originally published.  Considered on its own, it’s a masterpiece; in tandem with the final version, it becomes both a masterpiece and a fascinating exploration of literature and creativity.  4 stars.

tl;dr – breathtaking collection of stories finds Carver allowing more empathy than in his prior works, though sadness and isolation still rule the day; a beautiful, deeply powerful work.  4 stars.

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War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) - Matt Reeves

No matter what you say, eventually you’d replace us.  That’s the law of nature.  What would you have done? 

It would be tempting to say that Reeves has finished this new Planet of the Apes trilogy with a bang, but that would misrepresent the film, which is actually pretty quiet and almost entirely somber.  Let’s just do away with the clever phrases and state things plainly: this is the best of the trilogy and essentially a perfect ending.  Where things are headed next for the franchise is hard to guess, but whatever happens we have one of the most finely crafted and unlikely trilogies of modern times in this new Planet of the Apes trilogy.  This trilogy has always gone in surprising directions.  I argued that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was a real accomplishment, a genuinely anti-violence summer blockbuster.  This movie is also surprising.  The title hints at epic battles and sweeping conflict and then dials the focus down to a simple story of revenge.  You could call it an adventure film; much of it is taken up with a journey through wilderness and the quest of a hero to, more than anything else, refuse to become the villain.  But this is too somber really for even that designation.  It’s almost a revisionist western of a type, morally complicated, focused on deconstructing even its heroic characters.  It’s a brilliant film, full stop, with great scripting and a surprising focus on characterization down to even pretty small roles.  Serkis delivers, in my opinion, his best performance of the trilogy.  It’s as morally complicated as Caesar has gotten and Serkis is up to the task.  Word has to be given to the special effects team, of course, who get their fair share in terms of the deeply evocative performances from the ape characters, most especially Caesar.  With each film, the rendering of these characters in their environments has gotten only better which is really something when you consider how breathtaking it was right from the jump.  At this point, it’s nearly impossible to believe that these are computer generated creatures; it seems absurd, but you’ll find yourself thinking that, God knows how, they MUST have somehow gotten real apes to do all this stunt work.  A word for Harrelson.  I’m always kind of afraid when he’s going to be in a movie because I’m afraid he’ll fall back into his schtick and be tiresome; but he almost always proves me wrong and he absolutely does here.  He’s wonderful as the villainous Colonel; he dials back almost all of his tics in order to play the Colonel very minimally which works very well to make him more frightening than if he’d just gone full throttle.  Reeves’ direction is great as always; the film has a dark look to fit the dark tone.  I’m fairly certain that you only see the sun for about five minutes out of this entire two-hours-plus film; the starkness of the grey skies and the white snow and the cold grey metal of the military camp all add up to create a real atmosphere of wintery chill.  Ultimately, the Planet of the Apes pulls of another miracle.  Right from Rise, this franchise has been exceeding expectations and surprising me in all sorts of ways.  With this dark, somber, deeply emotional conclusion, they’ve done it again.  And this time I basically went in expecting a masterpiece on the level of Rise or Dawn.  But they got me again; this one is even better.  4 stars. 

tl;dr – a perfect ending to a brilliant film trilogy, this somber, morally complicated story of revenge is well-written, beautifully performed and a true masterpiece.  4 stars.

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