The Switch

Directed by Josh Gordon
Bona Fide Productions



The Switch is getting a lukewarm reception, unless of course you count Capone's review over at AintItCoolNews.com, which makes the film sound like the culprit behind most major World Wars. Others found it sweet but lacking depth, and as usual in the case of movies that don't land with mainstream audiences, I loved it.

I liked the fact that The Switch wasn't all about gross-out sperm humor, which is what the marketing campaign made it seem like it was going to be, focusing entirely on the moment in question of the actual titular switch. The marketing campaign made it seem like the movie was going to be a Farrelly Brothers movie or something more akin to, The Back-Up Plan. But it wasn't.

This is a movie about what happens after a wacky mishap, the human fallout. It's more about the resulting child and less about the night he was conceived. Maybe it's because of the age I'm at, 28, and my thinking about having a family of my own soon that made The Switch the kind of story I could really grasp onto.

The film operates under what Ebert calls, "an idiot plot," where the entire film hinges around one secret that, if revealed, would essentially fix everything or ruin it forever. But unlike the frustration that typically comes with movies like this, as an audience member, I was rooting for the secret keeper and not wanting to ring his neck like I so often do. What's the difference this time? It's not really a secret. The two main characters already love each other, and we know that early on. They are simply too afraid of messing up their friendship and too frustrated with each other to say anything about it. Sounds less and less like the movie that was advertised, doesn't it? That's because this felt like a small film, maybe even an independent. But it was marketed to mass audiences.

Usually, movies like this play relationships oh-so-very-coy, and the main character seems totally oblivious to the fact that her male best friend is in love with her. I hate that. So, Aniston's portrayal of a character with mixed emotions, in love with her best friend but believing she deserves someone who will actually speak up for her and behave in a mature way, is refreshingly different. It helped me keep my patience with Bateman, who plays quirky and verklempt very well—so well that if it weren't for Aniston's more down-to-Earth portrayal, he would've driven me crazy. It's as if we have a romantic comedy where the woman is unwilling to participate in the traditional structure, refusing to wait on the man to resolve his feelings before moving forward in her own life without him. The trouble is, there's still that pesky problem of being in love. Yes, every romantic comedy is the same.

If you've been on the fence and you like movies about what happens after the seemingly "happily ever after," then give The Switch a try, eventually. Yes, there's a happy ending. Yes, at it's core, it's a populist movie about family and how we have to overcome the mistakes of the families we were raised in to build our own. But every once in a while, and with a cast like this, what's so wrong with that?

Review by Audrey M. Brown

Excerpted from Born for Geekdom

Blame

By Michelle Huneven
Picador

Michelle Huneven’s Blame spans twenty years in fewer than 300 pages but avoids any frantic pacing or strange leaps. Patsy MacLemoore, the main character, is an alcoholic. A young academic, her scholarly accomplishments initially help to balance negative effects of her alcoholism. Huneven’s protagonist has a professorship at a at a small liberal arts college. She had a small but sunny house, friends, family nearby, and was pretty, with long blonde hair, long tanned legs and a dazzling smile. At the county jail, the regular inmates call her “Professor” when she wakes up there after having had too much to drink.

When Patsy wakes up in jail—again—she assumes she’d simply had too much to drink; perhaps she’d driven even though her license had been revoked. She tries joking with the officers, the lawyers. She’d blacked out—again—and doesn’t know what she’d done to land in jail. “What is it?” she asks, “I really don’t remember. Did I kill someone?” She’s joking. Then they read her the police report. A mother and daughter, killed in her driveway, hit by a car.

Patsy pleads guilty and goes to prison. Huneven’s depiction of prison is sobering and not heavy-handed. She doesn’t romanticize Patsy’s prison experience, but neither does she withhold from her readers the moments of grace Patsy does experience there. In prison, Patsy sobers up, leaves prison and returns to town.

Patsy loses many friends, but miraculously (isn’t friendship and forgiveness always a miracle?), she is not left completely alone. Her ex-boyfriend visits her every week, becoming one of her most faithful and loyal friends. Her parents are gentle with her. Her brother looks out for her. When she leaves prison, she comes home to an apartment lovingly appointed by her best friend and his boyfriend. She meets an older man in AA and remains sober, gets married. Many years later, Patsy learns what happened when she blacked out in the car that night. That new information changes Patsy’s new and hard-won self-perception.

I didn’t want this book to end. The story isn’t incomplete, not by any means. Huneven’s feel for just the right bit of detail was wonderfully effective. I felt attached to these characters, their lives and stories, their back-stories, and their private moments very early on and simply wanted even more by the time the book ended. I loved them. I loved the depth with which Huneven wrote them. I am a sucker for stories depicting people who are deeply flawed but who are nevertheless very much loved. This was one of those stories and I hope to find another one like it again.

Review by kristina grob

Get Him to the Greek

Directed by Nicholas Stoller
Universal Pictures



Aldous Snow (Russell Brand)—the uber-sexual, tongue-in-cheek (and anywhere else you’ll let him stick it) Brit-rocker introduced to audiences in 2008’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall—is back in the latest film from yet another member of the Apatow Film Club for Boys. Based on characters created by Jason Segel, and written and directed by Nicholas Stoller, Get Him to the Greek is an often-comical, always offensive satire of the music industry, rock ‘n’ roll culture, and America’s reverence for all things celebrity.

Capitalizing on the fervor ignited by Brand, Get Him to the Greek succeeds in blurring the line between reality and fiction through inclusion of an original soundtrack and videos (performed by Brand and co-star Rose Byrne) and cameos by more than one recognizable pop artist and media outlet. Brand is refreshingly genuine as a privileged star struggling to gain control of his life, while Byrne offers hilarious support as Snow’s ex-wife and musical partner, Jackie Q. Effortlessly, she rivals Brand with her own sincere wit as she admits on Showbiz Tonight how bored she is with her husband’s sobriety.

I expected to like this film, and I did. Stoller bravely explores intimacy among men and, similar to I Love You, Man, his manuscript explores the complex dynamics of male relationships by offering glimpses of sincerity, vulnerability, and affection, elements often ignored in favor of more acceptably masculine attributes. However, as is often the case in Hollywood, without being well-versed in feminist values, what is meant to be ironic instead reinforces stereotypes and makes it that much harder for girls to be in on the joke.

Some attempts at humor are more problematic than others. While attempting to wrangle Snow in Vegan and escort him to New York City, music intern Aaron (Jonah Hill) is ordered by his boss Sergio (Sean “P Diddy” Combs) to have sex with a woman he’s just met, Destiny. Actually, Sergio commands Destiny to “[t]ake this man into the bedroom and have sex with him," and she readily complies. What follows is a pointless scene in which the petite Destiny forces the hefty Aaron to have sex with her. He says, “No.” He “protests.” (In reality, he could have easily tossed her off him.) Finally, he returns to his friends and announces, “I think I was just raped.” They laugh, and so does the audience. Gross.

In a perfect world, we can laugh about anything. Considering the world we live in, however, perhaps the more appropriate question is "who is allowed to laugh about rape?" When victims speak out with humor about their own lived experience, they are ridiculed or shamed, but when white men in Hollywood poke fun, its satire. Satire, by definition, is an exaggeration that is so far from reality that it is ridiculous to even consider. (The punchline to this joke being how ridiculous and non-threatening rape is for men – that men can’t be raped.) Unfortunately, this moment in Get Him to the Greek reinforces cultural myths surrounding the acceptance of rape. Instead of calling attention to the cultural, systemic, powerful epidemic of sexual violence, the "joke" nullifies its severity by applying it to the most powerful social group (white men).

The film industry is a site where creative potential can be harnessed to provoke meaningful change, and this band of brothers has the ability to lead the way for other Freaks and Geeks. But if we don’t start getting some feminist minds in on the action, these bright men are headed straight for the John Mayer Celebrity School of Shame.

Review by Alicia Sowisdral

Le Code a Changé (Change of Plans)

Directed by Danièle Thompson
IFC Films



The French comedy of manners conjures up for me, an Anglophone, a bitchy Restoration drama rather than Molière. Jean Renoir’s heavy 1939 film The Rules of the Game, the iconic update of the genre, greatly dilutes the comic elements. Now, Change of Plans offers a lighter brew with only a dash of melancholy. The aristocracy is replaced by the bourgeoisie, the country house and servants disappear as a more modest yet comfortable life appears, a weekend becomes a dinner party, and women (and men) have real jobs. Nobody gets murdered, though there is an “accident” and a death from cancer. Importantly, the central characters—and there are quite a few of them—emerge relatively unscathed, as do the “rules” underlying the genre. In short, as director Danièle Thompson wished, I went away happy.

Because I tend to upending rules than deftly observing them, life has taken me, thankfully, to almost as few dinner parties as on full-fledged dates. This film might change my mind, since this dinner party includes a surreptitious kiss by the bathroom door rather than a strained date. A dinner has functioned before as a plot device for getting things moving (think David Hare’s Wetherby). In the current film, the characters knew each other at school and do not roll around on a stair landing, at least not on camera. Here, the dinner sets off quite a display of romantic fireworks, though miraculously only one divorce.

ML, a high-powered divorce lawyer, has people over partly to show off her new kitchen. Six of her guests are married couples, and her sister and the sister’s older co-worker are another, though ML doesn’t know it. Besides the kitchen designer, the other single guest is ML’s flamenco dance instructor, invited at the last minute because ML is down a woman. (No gay couples at this soiree.)

During the year after the dinner, ML’s unemployed husband—who makes bigos, a Polish meat stew, for the meal—starts working with the kitchen designer. A gynecologist-oncologist couple is headed toward the marital rocks way before the get-together. The wife is already having an affair and her irritation with her Jewish husband, the archetypal mensch, takes an ethnic turn in a conversation with the host, who drives her home from the party. Lucas, another attorney, who has driven his wife to dysfunction, comes to the party to recruit ML into his firm to beef up its divorce practice, and ends up “changing plans” for the good of all.

Some viewers will take away the message that innate humanity that can still emerge in capitalist relations, traditional marriage, and the economy’s privileged class, here more professional and managerial than haut. For me, the fun of this film comes from guessing which of the relationships survive and how this comes to pass. Just enjoy the mash up of professional discretion, romantic relationships, white lies, and intergenerational conflict.

I could have done with less self-referential film industry stuff—Roman Polanski’s recipe for bigos appears in the film credits. The film’s director, daughter of film director Gérard Oury and actress Jacqueline Roma, wrote the screenplay with her son Christopher Thompson (who plays Lucas), so maybe they are entitled. And, the film fulfills the critic Kenneth Burke’s criteria for the “comic frame,” which tells the viewer: “What he should try to get, how he should try to get it, and how he should ‘resign himself’ to a renunciation of the things he can’t get.”

Review by Frances Chapman

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Review by Lisa Rand

Molly Fox's Birthday

By Deirdre Madden
Picador

The fact that Deirdre Madden's tale takes place all in one day, as a calm reflection of the narrator’s relationships, does not take away from the fantastic insights to human nature that the author reveals. It may be Molly Fox’s birthday, but the real gift is for the playwright who hangs out in Molly’s house in Dublin while the eponymous character is away.

Molly Fox’s Birthday is told from the point of the view of the playwright, who revisits the memories of how she met Molly and their careers. She later expresses her feelings for another character, Andrew. The playwright is very good at pinpointing the motivations behind the actions of people she associates with; however, she comes to discover that maybe she doesn’t really know Molly at all. Madden puts into words what is universal to the human psyche.

One of the more interesting aspects of Molly Fox’s Birthday is how the playwright's brother, a Northern Ireland raised priest, maneuvers his way through cosmopolitan Dublin and London, maintaining a rather secretive relationship with Molly. He appears to be much more self-accepting and tolerant than our storyteller, who lies to others when she feels insecure.

Denial opens up to truth as the book winds down, not that it ever moves at a fast pace. It is, instead, rather tranquil. The narrator mentions and revisits one small memory from her relationship with one of the male characters, which she has lied to Molly about. It only takes a knock at the door to bring emotions from twenty years ago back into the front of her focus. Time can’t erase what she still feels, and tries to bury under silent hemming and hawing.

The ho-hum nature of describing what a wonderful actress Molly is, and how beautiful her belongings are could be replaced with more detail about the two women's undergrad years at Trinity, since this is the time that forms the foundation of all of the relationships in the book. Another aspect that should have been further explored was the behind-the-scenes details of life behind the stage (the actors, writers, directors), a life about which we only get hints.

One of the struggles that is universal to the human experience is the choice of whether to conform to family and community expectations or step into the role of the black sheep. Madden explores this through the narrator, who has trouble returning to the embrace of the family. She also makes a point of inserting the tensions between Molly and her mother. These examples, like the other memories, further the view that the past directs our present. Molly Fox’s Birthday is a nice, short, quiet trip.

Review by Nicolette Westfall

The Spare Room

By Helen Garner
Picador

Many of us love our friends just as much as our family members. We often believe we would go to great lengths to protect them, as does Helen, the narrator of The Spare Room. Garner's novel is the story of a fifteen-year-old friendship between two women in their sixties, a period that is perhaps the busiest in a woman’s life with competing familial, social, and in many cases, professional demands.

Nicola, an artsy bohemian who turned her back on mainstream culture in the 1970s, goes to stay with Helen in her spare room in Melbourne so that she can undergo alternative Vitamin C treatments for her stage-four cancer. Selfless Helen, who initially does whatever is necessary to accommodate her friend, quickly butts heads with Nicola’s coping method of choice: denial. As Helen puts her life on hold caring for Nicola for a mere "fortnight," which turns into three weeks, she quickly becomes overcome with fatigue. Her exhaustion stems not only from the constant care she feels her friend needs, but also from having to hold her tongue in the face of money-grubbing charlatans and her much-loved friend’s magical thinking regarding her disease.

It may be difficult to imagine this as light reading. However, Garner is a master of concision, and it is difficult to find even a single superfluous sentence in her 175 pages. In addition to shedding light on the limits of friendship, she also celebrates key aspects of friendship between women: the validation of thoughts and feelings, the understanding, and the laughter. In fact, it is Garner’s use of rich, dark humour that knocks the stuffing out of death and illness in this book and keeps the narrative rolling.

Although many young women will feel this scenario is still a long way off, Nicola’s harsh look back on what she made of her life will cause some to realize just how insidious and powerful mainstream culture is. Our strong and seemingly invincible bohemian mothers and aunts who chose their counterculture lives in the 1970s have not always been immune to the pervasiveness of the status quo and how it still manages to creep in and colour their basic personal views. The Spare Room gives us all a much needed reminder of the work that we as women still have ahead of us, not only in striving for equality in material terms, but also in acknowledging and validating our own personal struggles with mainstream culture as we head down the road less traveled.

In short, The Spare Room should be read not only for the quality of the writing but also for the situation that everyone will be pushed one day to consider. This is a perfect book for an intergenerational book club.

Review by Heather Leighton

The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship

By Jeffrey Zaslow
Gotham Books

As I became immersed in The Girls from Ames, I started to view it as a collective memoir of eleven women who have been friends since they were young girls in Ames, Iowa. While I expected to find the book a worthwhile read, I was pleasantly surprised to find how much I could relate to in this book. I found the story of these women both touching and humorous as I read it, prompting a reflection on my own female friendships over the years. The older I get, the less I take my friendships for granted, and I felt somewhat envious that these women, who were all born in the early 1960s, had maintained such a strong bond of friendship throughout marriage (sometimes more than one), children, cross-country moves, joy, heartache, and tragedy.

What takes this book beyond the memoir genre is that Zaslow has approached the topic of female friendship with the zeal of a journalist and sociologist, and the heart of a father of three daughters. In addition to telling the story of the way the friendships evolved over decades, he provides added context in the form of research that has been done on the struggles women face at different stages in their life (i.e., teen and college years, young mothers, mothers of teenagers, divorce, midlife changes, and stages of grief) and how female friendship can be an antidote to the trials and tribulations we all encounter as we progress through life. Some of the women reflect on their own "mean girl" tendencies as teenagers now that they see their teenage daughters dealing with mean girls and other complexities young girls face in today’s world.

At the end of chapter one, Jenny, whose father was an insurance executive who pored over actuarial tables and statistics on a daily basis, recalls how he warned her as she was about to leave for the University of South Carolina not to be surprised if her friendships didn’t survive the passage of time: “My guess is in fifteen years, one of you will be estranged from the group. Two of you will be divorced. One of you will still be single, one of you may be dead. You have to expect that. Because that’s how life works.” Zaslow writes that Jenny and her father still remember that conversation “where they were sitting, how her dad’s words hung in the air in the darkness, and how she sat there thinking he had to be wrong.”

I understand why The Girls from Ames has become a national bestseller and inspired women to form reading groups to discuss the book with their friends. Female friendship has the potential to be powerful, healing, and transformative. Zaslow has captured that sentiment in this book.

Review by Gita Tewari

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts

By Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles
Edited by Sandra Spanier
Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press

It's impossible to dislike a female protagonist who opines, fifteen miles south of the Italian front in the second-to-last year of World War II, "If there's anything I really loathe, it's a woman protector." Delivered by Annabelle Jones, war correspondent for the San Francisco World, in conversation with Jane Mason, war correspondent for the New York Bulletin, this line refers to one of the many well-meaning men who are the butts of the jokes in the play Love Goes to Press.

Longtime friends as well as colleagues, Jones and Mason are globetrotting journalists chasing after war stories when both improbably show up in the same tiny press camp in Italy. There, amid refrains of, "No, I am not a nurse," any time one of them places an intra-military call, each of the two women pursue dangerously-won exclusive stories and navigate surprise romantic encounters, the latter portrayed as considerably more perilous than the former.

The mostly-journalist ensemble draws an easy comparison to His Girl Friday, released six years before Love Goes to Press first appeared on stage. By contrast, the play's pacing and gender commentary read as tersely contemporary, and its production history as relatively dismal. First performed in the summer of 1946, audiences in London packed theaters to see it, taking advantage of the small luxury of cheap tickets, and in co-author Martha Gellhorn's estimation, eager to laugh amid grief, rationing, wide-spread destruction, and exhaustion in the first year of peace after the war.

American audiences, however, did not crave such levity. After only four performances in New York in the first week of 1947 (where, Gellhorn further recounts, the cast was ecstatic to shop and eat as much as they could), the play folded then disappeared. American reviews from the time reflect a limited range of emotions running from irked boredom to disgust: either the veteran lady war reporters who authored the play couldn't get war quite "right," for all of their experience, or they simply had the bad taste to profane such a sacred subject in a three-act comedy. From the distance of sixty-three years—perhaps as cushy as the distance between New York drama critics of the '40s and the European theatre of war—this self-important response seems a bit comical.

Editor Sandra Spanier does a fine job, in this expanded edition of Love Goes to Press, of providing historical and literary context for the play, which did not see a first printing until 1995. Her biographical focus remains overwhelmingly on Gellhorn, whose sixty-year career was comprised of relentless war correspondence, as well as fiction and travel writing. Co-author Virginia Cowles is comparatively unknown, despite being an experienced war correspondent and prolific nonfiction writer herself. (Gellhorn and Cowles met when both women were reporting on the Spanish Civil War—Annabelle Jones and Jane Mason are based on them, respectively.) I

n addition to Spanier's description of rescuing perhaps the only extant copy of the play, and her recovery and reprinting of deleted sections of Gellhorn's war reporting from the Collier's archives, Gellhorn's original introduction to the 1995 edition may be the most enjoyable historical work here. Good-humored but pitiless, Gellhorn's recounting of the more hapless accomplishments of the play's authors, which included fleeing stunned from cries of "Author! Author!" at the close of the play's premier, is like an authorial bow on behalf of both herself and Cowles, albeit regrettably late.

Review by Kaja Katamay