Wow, good questions, and I'm not sure what to answer. As to the dream home, I'm a western New Englander, and I love the landscape and climate there - it's home. But I also lived for three years in England and Europe, and there are things about that lifestyle that are much better and saner than our American one. For one thing, it's much more human in scale, and you don't have to depend on cars so much. So - as compromise, I think maybe a college town like Northampton, MA. It has public transport, there's a lot going on in the center of town itself, the landscape is quite lovely, and it's not too isolated. I'd need to be in a place with lots of trees and gardens and easy access to real countryside, but also with some real cultural life. My sister and I loved Cambridge when we were there, actually, but I would miss having hills around.
As for books and films, I think everyone who knows me knows I was enormously impacted, as a child, by A Wrinkle in Time and The Lord of the Rings. But I think I should mention the one Spielberg film I truly love, in spite of (and perhaps because of) its flaws - Empire of the Sun. At the heart of that film is an astounding performance by young Christian Bale, and considerable honesty about the amorality of the child's imagination. What a lot of people who panned the film didn't understand is simply this: it's all happening in the child's head. And it gets at the difference between the innocence of childhood - which is, as I said, essentially amoral and self-absorbed, but which is still innocent - and the innocence of Grace. Being a Spielberg film, it's sentimental in places, but I really think it may be the most honest and least sentimental film he ever made. My two cents-
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Date: 2009-10-23 07:51 pm (UTC)As for books and films, I think everyone who knows me knows I was enormously impacted, as a child, by A Wrinkle in Time and The Lord of the Rings. But I think I should mention the one Spielberg film I truly love, in spite of (and perhaps because of) its flaws - Empire of the Sun. At the heart of that film is an astounding performance by young Christian Bale, and considerable honesty about the amorality of the child's imagination. What a lot of people who panned the film didn't understand is simply this: it's all happening in the child's head. And it gets at the difference between the innocence of childhood - which is, as I said, essentially amoral and self-absorbed, but which is still innocent - and the innocence of Grace. Being a Spielberg film, it's sentimental in places, but I really think it may be the most honest and least sentimental film he ever made. My two cents-