![]() Moore made her name with catchy, charismatic short stories that she began publishing in her twenties-“the feminine emergencies,” she called them. Why else have you given us these naggingly suggestive patterns? Why else is your new novel, “ I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home” (Knopf), wallpapered with codes and clues? Barring these enticements, it’s enough to quote that novel: “There is no disenthralling a determined creature!” (The creature in question is a sow intent on rooting up buried bodies to consume, but let us not look too closely at the metaphor.) Let us talk extravagantly of your artistic growth or lack thereof let us shoehorn in biography. Let us stand on the shore and wave at you, Lorrie Moore. Is every new story here one for the ages? With a book this generous from a writer this gifted, we would be vulgar to ask.” Does the imaginative range seem limited? It is the same limited range Americans are so fond of calling Chekhovian. Reviewing a volume of Ann Beattie’s stories, she writes, “Do the characters sometimes seem similar from story to story? The same can be said of every short-story writer who ever lived. Wave at the boat.” Her clearest countermove can be seen in her decision to arrange the contents of her “ Collected Stories” (2020) alphabetically rather than chronologically as she explained, she wanted to avoid a “linear sequence that would tempt biographical and ‘artistic growth’ pronouncements.” She offers her own decorous, deeply accommodating approach as an alternative model. A collection of her reviews, “ See What Can Be Done” (2018), begins with a line from the jazz musician Ben Sidran: “Critics! Can’t even float. In the course of a long and celebrated career, she has maintained a cagey relationship with criticism, complicated by the fact that she herself is a frequent and accomplished practitioner. If I'd read half the reviews on here beforehand I probably wouldn't have bothered to watch this film at all, but I didn't and I judged it on its own merits, and to my great surprise it gets seven out of ten from me.Is it possible to critic-proof a work of art? To angle it just out of the reach of our blundering hands? To render it opaque enough to resist interpretation, or maybe just to obscure our view with a shroud of baffling public utterances? Lorrie Moore has tried each of these moves. Maybe if you are a chap who wants a movie to settle down and watch one evening in the company of a significant other, this would be a good choice with too much prior knowledge (and a cynical head on) it would be easy to dismiss it as formulaic and schmaltzy, but if you are in the right mood this is a heartwarming, life-affirming story, nicely told. The whole film is arguably similarly rendered, which hardly unusual and is the storyteller's prerogative, even though some folk might object to it. All movies paint a certain, usually somewhat unrealistic, view of reality, and this film is no exception for example I don't think the coastline is ever filmed at low tide, when it is somewhat less, er, photogenic. Maybe one or two expectations are OK that of the North Carolina coastline being beautifully photographed as a backdrop to this film, and a nice soundtrack, not too much in your face. Too bad watching a film is all about suspension of disbelief this film is no different to most in that respect, and I'd argue that this one is best approached with almost no prior knowledge or expectations of any kind. So my advice is that you should start watching this film with no prior knowledge and no expectations whatsoever however if you are reading this it may already be too late, you may have already been told the main plot points, that the movie is terribly formulaic, yada yada yada. I won't say I was hooked but I was sufficiently intrigued to watch it all the way through and to my surprise I was rather moved by it. However in this case, right from the start, I thought this was a well-crafted film, beautifully photographed and with a good soundtrack. To be honest when I usually do this, it is about 50:50 whether I bother to watch it at all quite a few films get deleted without ever being seen all the way through this percentage goes right up if it is what might be termed a 'chick flick' of merely average quality. ![]() Now, I stumbled on this film by idly setting it to record on a PVR (without knowing the slightest thing about it) and then watching it later on. ![]() Most of the film depicts the events leading up to this point. In the opening scenes of this film we see Travis (Walker) mulling over an unknown choice he has to make, en route to hospital, flowers in hand.
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