{"id":664,"date":"2011-11-14T21:25:29","date_gmt":"2011-11-14T21:25:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/?p=664"},"modified":"2011-11-14T21:25:29","modified_gmt":"2011-11-14T21:25:29","slug":"glen-husers-movie-and-book-picks-for-november-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/2011\/11\/14\/glen-husers-movie-and-book-picks-for-november-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Glen Huser’s Movie and Book Picks for November, 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>My Book Pick: How It Happened in Peach Hill<\/h1>\n

The Young Adult Book Club I belong to here in Vancouver is reading two novels by Marthe Jocelyn for our early December get-together \u2013 Would You<\/em> (Tundra, 2008) and How It Happened at Peach Hill (Tundra, 2007). Both are excellent reads. For Would You, the story of a teenage girl whose older sister is in a coma following a road accident, you will need to keep a box of Kleenex close at hand.<\/p>\n

How It Happened in Peach Hill<\/em> \u2013 my book pick for this month \u2013 is also the story of a teenage girl with a problem. In this case, though, the problem is her mother \u2013 a self-centered con artist who knows how to whip up a great s\u00e9ance, complete with bells and other special effects, or conduct a public forum featuring her expertise as a mind-reader. The only tissues you might need while reading this novel, would be to dab away a tear or two if you end up laughing too hard.<\/p>\n

On the run from their last stint of fleecing the public, Annie and her mother land in the small town of Peach Hill, where Mom comes up with the ruse of having her daughter appear to be a slobbering, cross-eyed idiot. This allows Annie to eavesdrop wherever she wanders, and to report back tidbits of information invaluable for reading palms or conducting visitations with the dead. But Annie decides to take her fate into her own hands when she sees the boy of her dreams \u2013 on a daily path to school that takes him past her yard \u2013 and orchestrates a miraculous recovery from her idiocy. Sammy Sloane is duly impressed and his interest in Annie grows as she seizes opportunities to display her own prowess as a clairvoyant. She has Mom\u2019s tricks up her sleeve \u2013 and a few of her own.<\/p>\n

Into the mix of all this, Jocelyn introduces a cast of great supporting characters including a barefoot, back-alley thief, the daughter of a revivalist preacher peddling booze as a spiritual elixir; a no-nonsense truant officer; and a housemaid who, while easily hoodwinked, has the true instincts of a nurturing mother \u2013 instincts that are sparse indeed in Annie\u2019s actual parent.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of Richard Peck\u2019s novels featuring Blossom Culp, a teenager from the early years of the 20th<\/sup> century who actually does have the gift of second sight. Peck introduced Blossom in The Ghost Belonged to Me,<\/em> back in 1976, beginning a series that focused on the adventures of the irrepressible clairvoyant over the course of four novels. Like It Happened in Peach Hill,<\/em> Peck\u2019s novels are a great deal of fun \u2013 and I love the fact that they offer today\u2019s young readers glimpses of a world back in the days when their great-grandparents lived (something I\u2019ve attempted to do with my most recent young adult novel, The Runaway<\/em>).<\/p>\n

My Movie Pick: Paper Moon\"\"<\/a><\/h1>\n

Another novel I couldn\u2019t help thinking about as I read How It Happened in Peach Hill<\/em> was Joe David Brown\u2019s Addie Pray<\/em> (Simon & Schuster, 1971; republished as Paper Moon,<\/em> Thunder\u2019s Mouth Press, 2002), which I picked up some thirty years ago and fell in love with. Peter Bogdanovich filmed the novel, retitling it Paper Moon,<\/em> in 1973 \u2013 and the movie, my pick for this month, is one that I think will prove ageless in its appeal. I would be hard pressed to count the number of times I\u2019ve watched it.<\/p>\n

Set in the dustiest days of the Great Depression, the story recounts the adventures of nine-year-old Addie Loggins (Tatum O\u2019Neal) who, after the death of her mother, hooks up with a con artist \u2013 Moses Pray (Ryan O\u2019Neal) — she is convinced is her father (after all, people say she \u201chas his jaw\u201d) although he adamantly denies the relationship. Pray accepts two hundred dollars from the man who caused the death of Addie\u2019s mother in a car accident, money in trust for the little girl along with a commission for delivering her to the home of her aunt.<\/p>\n

The journey barely underway, Moze manages to run through the money and ends up resorting to scams that have served him well \u2013 such as selling Bibles at greatly inflated prices to recently-widowed women and hoodwinking slow-witted farmers into trusting him with their bankrolls. When Addie reveals herself to be a quick learner and a valuable adjunct in the scams, any urgency to get her to her aunt\u2019s disappears. Riding high, Moses adds to their entourage a stripper, Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn) and her African American maid (P. J. Johnson), but Addie \u2013 seeing their hard-won winnings disappearing \u2013 engineers a plan for getting rid of the two.<\/p>\n

Paper Moon<\/em> is probably Bogdanovish\u2019s best movie following his classic The Last Picture Show.<\/em> The picture was filmed on location in Kansas and Missouri in black and white by master cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, who used special filters to capture the feel of rural America during the dirty thirties. But the picture really rides on the slim shoulders of Tatum O\u2019Neal, who takes on the mantle of the tough-as-nails Addie as if it had been cut for no one but her. Tatum won the best supporting actress Academy Award \u2013 the youngest performer to ever take the prize (interestingly she\u2019s on screen for pretty well the entire picture \u2013 making one wonder about the criteria for \u2018supporting\u2019). Madeline Kahn was in contention for the same award (and she is very good as the carnival dancer who manages to captivate Moses Pray). Ryan O\u2019Neal is in top form too in a cast that is bolstered by characters Bogdanovich seems to have plucked out of the backwaters of the Midwest.<\/p>\n

The sound track is pretty well made up of music from the 30\u2019s \u2013 something that I, as a fan of music of the period, found a special pleasure. We get to hear Ozzie Nelson\u2019s \u201cAbout a Quarter to Nine\u201d, the Boswell sisters singing \u201cI Found a Million Dollar Baby,\u201d Hoagy Carmichael tinkling the ivories with \u201cGeorgia on My Mind\u201d\u2026.to mention a few of the pieces. And then, of course there\u2019s the title tune, \u201cPaper Moon.\u201d\u00a0 When Bogdanovich (who didn\u2019t care for the book\u2019s title) was running possible alternate titles by his friend Orson Welles, the aging director responded by saying, \u201cThat title is so good, you shouldn\u2019t even make the picture. Just release the title.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Book Pick: How It Happened in Peach Hill The Young Adult Book Club I belong to here in Vancouver is reading two novels by Marthe Jocelyn for our early December get-together \u2013 Would You (Tundra, 2008) and How It Happened at Peach Hill (Tundra, 2007). Both are excellent reads. For Would You, the story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-glen-huser-movie-and-book-picks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":674,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664\/revisions\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.glenhuser.com\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}