some good works, and a film
Spending a little time looking at Adelaide blogs, not very successfully, I’m impatient at the slowness of my computer and I wish I had a computer geek permanently resident on my shoulder explaining to me about links and things. It seems all these bloggers talk to each other or something. The most annoying thing though is when I click their recommended blogs and end up somewhere in America, not that I’ve got anything against your everyday Yank it’s just that they dominate the waves and I prefer to hear from otherwheres. Or I end up with teens or youngsters raving about Resident Evil. And it seems that photo-filled blogs (probably the best ones) are the ones that take an eternity to open, I just haven’t that sort of patience.
Did some of the right stuff today, as a carer. That’s to say, I rode my treadley up the steep Prospect hill to the supermarket, and shopped for a recipe. And cooked, a variation on something from the Hot Food Cool Jazz recipe book. Fishy noodles, with snapper pieces, onion, matchstick carrots, egg noodles, bean sprouts, fish sauce, soy sauce, tomato sauce, oyster sauce and Worcestershire sauce, and some curry paste, and capsicum, and spring onions and lettuce from the garden, and bean sprouts. Quite a feast, certainly Nat appreciated it. The noodles were a bit overdone-limp but apart from that…
And afterwards, hopped on treadley again, uphill again, to rent a DVD for the night, at Sarah’s request. My choice, and I picked on Thirteen. Hey, a great choice for Sarah, all about mums and daughters and taking drugs and almost falling apart. Still, she seemed absorbed enough, mollified by a magnum. A little different from your average teen flick, more about family dysfunction, even foster caring got a guernsey. Nat’s final comment was interesting – after the final scene in which the teenage heroine screamed on a swing, scream of release, frustration, fear, excitement, Nat said the film’s unclear ending reminded him of some of the short stories he’d read (presumably for school), which so many of his school friends ‘didn’t get’. ‘Like, you have to use your imagination,’ he said scornfully. Generally the film covers teenage fears, pressures, ambitions better than most, while also trying to capture the pace of actual life and the half-baked decisions made out of a haze of hormones, drugs, reactions to parental pressure, identity struggles and such (one of the techniques for creating this sense of barely-controledness was the notorious hand-held, which sometimes worked, sometimes irritated). The heroine’s friend, a girl under more or less inappropriate foster-care, is at turns manipulative and vulnerable, seeking to make the most of an abused past, one which is probably very real, but which we find impossible to assess through the lies, exaggerations and contradictions. The film does a good job of presenting this girl as a victim at the same time as being thoroughly unlikeable, just as most victims of childhood abuse so tragically are. The heroine herself is not much more appealing – to many parents, the early teen period is a horror stretch, especially for girls, and you just have to try and hang on through a bumpy ride.
Did some of the right stuff today, as a carer. That’s to say, I rode my treadley up the steep Prospect hill to the supermarket, and shopped for a recipe. And cooked, a variation on something from the Hot Food Cool Jazz recipe book. Fishy noodles, with snapper pieces, onion, matchstick carrots, egg noodles, bean sprouts, fish sauce, soy sauce, tomato sauce, oyster sauce and Worcestershire sauce, and some curry paste, and capsicum, and spring onions and lettuce from the garden, and bean sprouts. Quite a feast, certainly Nat appreciated it. The noodles were a bit overdone-limp but apart from that…
And afterwards, hopped on treadley again, uphill again, to rent a DVD for the night, at Sarah’s request. My choice, and I picked on Thirteen. Hey, a great choice for Sarah, all about mums and daughters and taking drugs and almost falling apart. Still, she seemed absorbed enough, mollified by a magnum. A little different from your average teen flick, more about family dysfunction, even foster caring got a guernsey. Nat’s final comment was interesting – after the final scene in which the teenage heroine screamed on a swing, scream of release, frustration, fear, excitement, Nat said the film’s unclear ending reminded him of some of the short stories he’d read (presumably for school), which so many of his school friends ‘didn’t get’. ‘Like, you have to use your imagination,’ he said scornfully. Generally the film covers teenage fears, pressures, ambitions better than most, while also trying to capture the pace of actual life and the half-baked decisions made out of a haze of hormones, drugs, reactions to parental pressure, identity struggles and such (one of the techniques for creating this sense of barely-controledness was the notorious hand-held, which sometimes worked, sometimes irritated). The heroine’s friend, a girl under more or less inappropriate foster-care, is at turns manipulative and vulnerable, seeking to make the most of an abused past, one which is probably very real, but which we find impossible to assess through the lies, exaggerations and contradictions. The film does a good job of presenting this girl as a victim at the same time as being thoroughly unlikeable, just as most victims of childhood abuse so tragically are. The heroine herself is not much more appealing – to many parents, the early teen period is a horror stretch, especially for girls, and you just have to try and hang on through a bumpy ride.
posted by Stewart at 11:02 am
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