The series has been traveling downhill since season one concluded.  Not that I plan to stop watching, but the two-hour season opener Sunday night was…dare I say it?…a little dull.  I am starting to care less about these characters and feel like I’m watching them go through the motions on the medium-sized screen.  I used to feel more invested.  Sigh.  Maybe things will pick up as the season progresses.

I wonder if some suburban tweens might like this movie.  Adults will probably see everything in it as mediocre.  Feels dated, no magic, utterly predictable.  Of course, some people like that…

When I say that a film is didactic, I mean that it comes off like a dry, classroom lecture, and when I say it is polemical, I mean that it is more of a pointed argument than a story.  While important issues should be explored in a myriad of ways, including fiction, it is often hard to create a movie or book that serves up both information and entertainment.

I was afraid that Gus Van Sant’s film – from a screenplay co-written by stars John Krasinski and Matt Damon – about representatives from a natural gas company eager to get drilling (fracking) rights to a rural community would be a teachy-preachy borefest.

Promised Land, though not perfect, is a lot better than that, and a lot of the supporting characters, in particular, are fun to watch as the story unfolds.  I saw some but not all of the narrative twists and turns coming (a credit to Krasinski and Damon), though the plot points all make a lot of sense by the time the credits roll.

No, this film didn’t have the same effect on me that the first three-quarters of Gasland had when I saw it on HBO (the water really catches fire, and we all know that is wrong!), but for people who have not paid any attention to the fracking issue, maybe they will turn out to see the stars and decide to become more informed after seeing the movie.

I liked it more than I thought I might…even if I didn’t learn anything new and felt more relieved than moved by the resolution.

I had no intention of seeing Jack Reacher.  This time of year there are an abundance of films to see, and my threshold for Tom Cruise is pretty darn low after the whole jumping on the sofa with Oprah deal.

But, someone I respect said, “You should see it,” and I did.

Jack Reacher won’t make my top ten (or top twenty-five) list or anything, but I was surprised by its high level of craft.

Even before I saw Caleb Deschanel’s credit, I could see that the film was beautifully, thoughtfully photographed with superb moments of visual storytelling.  Similarly, the script was polished, which is always appreciated.

This is a pretty conventional, Hollywood picture, but nicely done.  The bonus is seeing Robert Duvall perform in the third act.  It’s hard to take your eyes off of him…another instance in which I thought, “I should watch Get Low again.”

Okay, I’ve thought about it a lot, and I just don’t like it.  Sorry.  I defend Quentin Tarantino’s right to make any film he wants and my right not to like it.

There is no ideological depth or coherence, which is a problem when the film is supposed to be about the evils of slavery.

Curiously, Django Unchained reminds me a lot of The Wild Wild West (1999), the film that precipitated “the sex talk” in my household when my son was a little boy, but that’s another story.

The Wild Wild West replaced a white actor from the television series (that I used to watch after school in syndication when I was a little girl) with an African American actor and dealt with race and slavery with a few offensive lynching jokes and a wink and a nudge.

It’s all so much more complex than that.

I’m switching to non-fiction now with a couple of biographies on my bedside table, but recently I have read four decidedly different works of fiction, each one with multiple things to recommend it.

Flight Behavior.  I have loved many of Barbara Kingsolver’s (namely The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, The Poisonwood Bible, and Prodigal Summer).  I put Flight Behavior up there with the best of them.  Some people may quibble that she has crossed the line into polemic with the climate change strand of the story, but I don’t think so.  The story works for me as a compelling examination of what happens when cultures collide, and Kingsolver presents both the perspectives of members of a rural, Tennessee mountain community and scientists who arrive there with understanding and tenderness; there is no condescension toward the indigenous folk and no exaltation of the scientists.  Dellarobia Turnbow is a woman who comes to have a foot in both worlds, and she is an exciting character, a woman who is meant to rise above her circumstances.  I love this (completely believable) story of female empowerment.

The Round House.  I’m not 100% sure I would have read Louise Erdrich’s latest book if it had not won the 2012 National Book Award.  I read Love Medicine years ago and liked it, but I read another of her novels after that (Tales of Burning Love perhaps?), was disappointed, cannot remember why, and can’t remember if that is for certain the book I read.  Whatever the source of my problems, none of them can be found in The Round House, which is a revelatory look at reservation life and a coming of age story for a 13-year-old boy whose mother is brutally attacked in 1988.  There are extenuating circumstances and complicated legal issues of jurisdiction that Joe finds out about as he and his father, a judge, investigate the crime.  Beautifully written and quite the page-turner.

Butter.  Anne Panning’s novel is a softer, gentler coming of age story, but it is also well-written and evocative.  Set in a small town in Minnesota in the 1970s, the details of Iris’s life remind me of my own tween and teen years because of some of the popular culture references.  Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with the lack of family stability that she encounters.  While the book is sad at times, there is a hopefulness that runs through the narrative, and the main character is brighter and stronger than she realizes.

This is How You Lose Her.  Junot Diaz’s story collection was also a National Book Award nominee this year.  Some of the stories work remarkably well for me, but others do not.  There are overlapping themes and characters but not as much unity as one might expect from such a collection.  Still, the final story, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” is powerful and feels so true that I’m glad I read all of the stories to reach that point in the anthology.

So, I’ve thought about this a lot, and what I suspected about Silver Linings Playbook but didn’t want to commit to immediately (when I wrote the first post) turns out to be true upon reflection.

The film made me feel profoundly lonely and sad, and any film that makes me feel something so deeply is worth considering.

I wonder if there is a bit of a gender gap here.  Anecdotally, I find women are much more engaged by the film than men.  I’ve heard some grousing, too, about the Hollywood ending, which I interpret in a different way.

Surely, there is a silver lining in most things in life when we look for meaning (how else could we keep going in the face of adversity?), but I don’t think there is reason to believe definitively that the characters have been able to invert the cosmos in perpetuity so that the lining becomes the cloud.  Silver Linings Playbook captures a series of moments – some transitional, some volatile, some painful, some cathartic, some small, some revelatory, some…well…lots of other things, too, including happy and joyful and companionable to a lesser degree.  You get what I mean.

There is one moment in the film that I keep thinking about more than the others and, not coincidentally, it seems fitting to discuss on New Year’s Day.  When Pat’s father (played by Robert DeNiro) says to him:  “You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back,” I was nearly moved to tears, though not the happy kind.

It’s not a total surprise to see this in the film – part of the line was featured in the preview trailer – but it is no less true for seeing this coming.  Especially because there are fewer of those moments and opportunities in life than we expect.  This, I think, is a big part of why the film affects me the way it does.