The Things We Carry

Directed by Ian McCrudden
Lono Entertainment



The Things We Carry tells the story of two sisters coping with the death of their drug-addicted mother Sunny (Alexis Rhee). After leaving her mother and sister Eve (Catherine Kresge) to travel the globe, Emmie (Alyssa Lobit) returns home upon news of her mother’s death. The sisters are forced to confront both Sunny’s drug-addicted friends and each other while searching for a mysterious package.

The film is loosely based on the real-life experiences of sisters Athena and Alyssa Lobit; Athena produced the film, while Alyssa wrote the script and stars as Emmie. As Eve and Emmie, Kresge and Lobit execute their roles with a muted intensity that speaks to the internal struggles of their characters. Lobit’s nuanced turn as the rebellious Emmie presents a woman whose antagonistic exterior hides a sensitive interior. The rest of the cast's performances are largely forgettable, as the other characters are merely meant to serve as catalysts to Emmie and Eve’s introspection and confrontation.

The Things We Carry alternates between scenes from Emmie’s memory and the sisters' present-day reunion, illustrating how they reached the point of estrangement. These vignettes are artfully articulated, as visual cues from the present (such as an image of a jacket or a yellow cab) serve as links to Emmie’s past. Flashback sequences on film tend to come off as confusing or campy, so it’s a testament to Ian McCrudden’s direction and Alyssa Lobit’s writing that the flashbacks are so effective at enhancing the storytelling and building narrative tension.

The film is saturated in yellows and browns, and features unnaturally bright lighting that emphasizes Emmie's discomfort in returning to her hometown. These blown-out images are placed in counterpoint to the beautiful violin and bass compositions of Timo Chen, whose score ebbs and flows, entering moments of reflection and heightened emotion and serving as an aural bridge between remembered past and lived present.

What is perhaps most impressive about the film is its complete lack of didacticism. Emmie may feel morally superior to her mother, but the film does not necessarily agree. The Things We Carry does not make moral judgments about any of the characters' actions; though the film centers on the detrimental effects of Sunny’s drug use, she is not presented as merely a drug addict—she is also a mother, a wife, and a friend. Ultimately the film is not without its flaws, but The Things We Carry survives on its earnestness and engrossing narrative structure.

Review by Joanna Chlebus

The Opposite of Me

By Sarah Pekkanen
Washington Square Press

Lindsey Rose’s life is perfectly in order when The Opposite of Me opens: She’s hours away from being made a vice-president at a large advertising firm, she weeks away from owning a piece real estate in a tony New York neighborhood, she’s got a closet full of designer clothes, and, oh, she’s only twenty-nine years old. Sarah Pekkanen’s debut novel may sound like a familiar chick lit story, but over the course of nearly 400 pages, it wades into deeper waters.

At the book's beginning, the heroine is comfortable with being the successful, smart, and serious twin to Alex's breathtaking beauty, charm, and popularity. The two have orbited around each other since birth, but were never able to connect until an unexpected and catastrophic chain of events bring Lindsey back home to the DC suburb of Bethesda. Here, with her two hilarious and long-bickering parents, sister, and a childhood friend who’s always had a not-so-secret crush on her, Lindsey begins to discover and embrace her true self. Though The Opposite of Me is billed as being about sisters (and it is, in a way), the central theme seems to be identity, which even the four markers that divide the book suggest: “Success,” “Home,” “Jump,” and “Trading Places.”

Lindsey’s characterization of her twin was disturbing to me at first because the smart = ugly and pretty = dumb stereotypes for women are, generally, false. Because readers meet Alex first through Lindsey’s jealous eyes, I found the prettier twin to be unreal. Yet, I identified with the sisters. As the story unfolds and Alex is allowed to speak and feel and express herself on her own terms, readers see that there’s a lot more to her than meets Lindsey’s eye, including a devastating diagnosis that throws the entire trajectory of the novel a-plop.

As grown women, some of us would like to believe we were born with our personalities, that all of our little quirks were predestined by nature. But anyone with a sibling—particularly one of the same sex—knows that, as much as our DNA plays a part, our identities can also be formed by a desire to compete with or be different from our familial relations. In this regard, Lindsey’s extreme Type A personality juxtaposed against Alex’s seemingly carefree and lovable nature seems a lot more believable and relevant, as if years of rubbing against each other had molded polar opposite personalities.

The meat of this story involves many of the issues that engross twenty-somethings: career, family, and relationships. Both women are initially presented as perfect fodder for bragging parents, but as each begins to discover hidden talents, the sisters commit to the rough-and-tumble work of living lives of passion. Pekkanen successfully leaves many of the genre’s cliches in the trash, but that didn’t stop the writer from indulging in a few tried-and-true chick lit plot points, including The Makeover. After sexifying her image and going on a six page shopping spree, our heroine makes one last stop for new shoes.

"Your boyfriend’s going to love them," a salesperson tells Lindsey.

"Boyfriend?" I said, winking. "Don’t you mean boyfriends?"

"You go girl!" she said.

What’s not to love about that?

Review by Whitney Teal

Cross-posted from Uptown Literati