What: Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot – a chance for bloggers to link up their posts that are related to fashion, DIY, food, and anything else that is family-friendly.
When: The link goes live Thursday nights at 9:30 PM EST/United States time.
Why: To connect with other bloggers and bring more traffic to your own blog.
My 9-year-old daughter wanted me to read my book—Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing to her a couple of months ago and then again this weekend. Since it is a very clean book, even with the mystery element, I started to read it to her. I didn’t think she’d be interested but she asked me to keep reading so I did.
This week she asked if she could use my old Kindle and she downloaded my book and began to read it on her own. I thought she’d get bored fairly fast but 20 minutes in she ran to me from where she’d been sitting on the couch in the dining room and declared, “I just got to Lucinda and I love her. She is my favorite character.” She then quoted something Lucinda had said and, in the most adult way, said “She is heeelarious.”
I can’t lie – the whole situation made me weepy. I imagined other people reading my book and enjoying it and always thought that would be so amazing but I never thought about how amazing it would be to have my own family like what I write.
Some might say that it is normal to have family and friends say they like what you have written, but I have not had one friend from high school, college, or in my adult years read my books or say one thing about them to me over the last five years I have been writing.
I have not been able to gush with them over my characters like I hoped I would be able to.
My mom and my husband have both read my books so I can gush a little with them, luckily.
My daughter is only 9 and I really didn’t think about her reading my books or even caring about them, but I am grateful that my books are clean so she can read them and not be shown things she shouldn’t be shown or exposed to at her age.
My dad is not a reader but he has now read both of my Gladwynn Grant books. He literally took the time to read a couple of my chapters of my books each night and that means the world to me. If you could see me right now you would see me with tears in my eyes, knowing that my non-reader dad took the time out of his day to read my books and even left me a review on my Facebook. Dad has not always been a supporter, exactly, of me writing fiction so I was shocked when Mom said he was reading my book.
Dad felt like I needed to have traveled more and experienced more to be able to write fiction and he may be right in some ways, but his comments were somewhat discouraging to me when I started writing fiction for fun in 2018.
Here is the review my dad left me:
I am not much of a reader at all and very seldom read fiction and I watch very few movies.
Like who wants to read about something that is not . Lol Evidently a lot of people.
Anyway I got into the first Gladwyn mystery and found it intriguing and starting this one I find it more so.
Sometimes I think wow, I never knew that lol ; you see Gladwynn Grant,a mixture of intelligent, ditsy curious, and almost cunning, was my mother’s name.
Okay off to store a few more clues and along the way of the town theater find out what happened to Samantha.
Well, anyhow, I just thought I’d share all that today because it was on my mind as I started to write this post today.
Now it is your turn to link up your favorite posts. They can be fashion, lifestyle, DIY, food, etc. All we ask is that they be family-friendly. You can link up posts from last week or even from years ago.
Also, please take the time to visit the other blogs on the link-up and meet some new bloggers!
The fire in the woodstove just would not cooperate Monday morning when I tried to get it to light. I am convinced something is wrong with our draft, like maybe it is stuck or something. I gently wiggled it a few times and the fire finally started to take off after burning up a ton of cardboard, papers, and even the box for some caffeine-free Diet Pepsi my son picked up the other day.
We will have to light a fire all week with the cold temperatures but soon we will be able to light a fire less and still turn the heat down. Having the fire helps us not to have to use as much heating oil and kept our heating oil usage down from mid-October through last week.
It is actually progress that my son purchased that soda I mentioned above since in the past he wouldn’t pick it up because it reminded him too much of his great-aunt, my aunt Dianne, who he loved immensely. She passed away in 2018. Talking about her was very painful for years but now he’s able to talk about her more, sharing the good and happy memories he has of her with his sister.
Buying the Pepsi was a chance for him to show Little Miss a version of Dianne’s favorite drink. Dianne drank Pepsi for years, partially because it was what she was used to since my grandfather worked for Pepsi in North Carolina for 30 years.
It’s Monday when I am starting this post and I have given Little Miss the day off from school since her brother had it off from the technical school he attends for President’s Day.
Tomorrow we will be back to our regular lessons.
This year she and I have been studying a lot of history through a variety of different ways, including a textbook through The Story of Our World. Like last year we are learning about history through historical fiction as well.
This week we will be starting a historical fiction book about Pocahontas.
I actually have two books about Pocahontas but decided that the one book may be for older children so have decided to go to one written by Jean Fritz, who we have read books by before, including The Cabin Faced West, which we finished a couple of weeks ago. The other book is written by Joseph Bruchac, who wrote Children of the Longhouse, which Little Miss absolutely loved, but seems to be written for teenagers. I am sure it is a clean book but it just seems a little older so I decided I am going to read it this spring and see if it is something Little Miss will like.
Reading historical fiction books helps us to branch out into other topics that are brought up in the stories, including information about historical figures or events. The textbook provides us with fairly dry facts only.
The subject I have struggled with the most this year for Little Miss has been science because I’m never happy with the science curriculum we have. I also never have the supplies we need for experiments. I always feel like I’m not teaching her enough science or the right science. She, however, has learned a lot of science from the educational shows she watches so I often find her correcting me when I am teaching her science from a book.
We really liked The Good and the Beautiful science but it is a bit expensive so I have decided to wait until we have that extra money to purchase curriculum and will probably purchase from there toward the end of our school year and then finish up the curriculum in our next school year. While their sets are expensive, they are nice and thorough.
We have used their energy, birds, and ecosystem curriculum and enjoyed them all.
Homeschool for The Boy is more stressful for me these days because he will be a senior next year and I feel like I have taught him nothing this school year.
For him it’s English where I feel like I have really dropped the ball. We have bailed on almost every book we have started this year because it has either been too wordy, too old-fashioned, or just didn’t hold our attention. That will change next week because I have decided we are starting A Tale of Two Cities and plowing through the difficult beginning and flowery writing to get to the story.
That way I can at least feel like I have exposed him to some more classic writers.
We have already read books by George Eliott, J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen Crane, William Golding, and Mark Twain.
I hope before I am done with him (so to speak) we will read books by Dickens, Steinbeck, and maybe George Orwell. I’d really like to add Austen in there as well but we will see. We will be starting, or re-starting, A Tale of Two Cities next week.
For history I decided to purchase a book called A History of the Twentieth Century by Martin Gilbert. This has a comprehensive list of facts that will provide us a look at history that we can then use to jump off from with videos and further study.
The Boy will be a senior next year as I just mentioned and I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. He’s already checked out of schoolwork pretty much but I’m not ready to let him go. How is it possible he will be 18 in November? The thought has me weepy beyond belief these days. How does the time go by so fast? I should probably stop thinking about it or my computer screen is going to be soaked with my tears in a moment.
This is totally a topic shift again, but do you ever find yourself without a pen and paper or your phone and you have to remember something for like, say, your grocery list and you keep repeating what you need to add to the list because you’re afraid you’ll forget it?
Well, I have because for about half an hour this morning, I found myself repeating “maple syrup and hot dog buns” as I did other tasks around the house. I didn’t have my phone next to me to add it to my Instacart list.
I finally added it to my list but now I’m still singing “maple syrup and hot dog buns” to myself.
What I should probably add to that list is mouse traps, but I am hoping our hunter cats will finally get all the mice out of our house this week. A few months ago Scout (our youngest) had a mouse pinned in our heating vent but never got to it. This weekend The Boy reported a mouse ran across his feet while he was playing a video game because both cats were chasing it. He then watched them double up on this mouse with one of them hiding under the couch to scare it and the other one waiting at the end to grab it. Then they batted the thing around for a while and apparently lost it because they were more interested in toying with it.
Sunday we left them in the house together while we went to visit my parents and when we came back I joked with them that they had better have caught that mouse. I was saying all this while I was reaching for the light. It was dark in the kitchen and when I felt something squish under my boot while joking, I thought, “Oh, Lord, let that be a grape we dropped earlier in the week.”
It was not a grape and I was very glad I hadn’t kicked my boots off yet because it was indeed a dead mouse and my foot on it made sure it was even more dead – let’s just leave it at that.
That wasn’t the end of the story though, because yesterday Scout was chasing another mouse and it came running toward me, resulting in a lot of screaming from me because I didn’t want it to scamper across my bare feet like it had my son’s the other day.
I can’t believe it but the intrepid huntress lost this mouse too and as far as I know it is now hiding under our stove and The Husband has declared he’s searching the house this weekend to “find where these creatures are coming from.”
As I write this, the sun is pouring in our windows and the temperature outside is the warmest it has been in a week, but still at a chilly 40 degrees.
I’ll be lighting the fire before I get ready to take Little Miss to Awana at a church 20 minutes away to try to stretch what wood we have left into March, since Pennsylvania doesn’t believe in early springs no matter what the groundhog says.
So how is your week going so far?
I hope it is going well.
Let me know in the comments, even if it isn’t going well.
Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I had planned to write about our favorite movies this month and then she took a blogging break and it was a break that I realized I needed to because I’ve been spreading myself way too thin lately.
Erin has mentioned the movie Amelie a few times in the last year or so as being one of her favorite movies so this past weekend I suggested that I watch it since she was already watching it with her hubby and that we write about it today.
She, of course, readily agreed.
Amelie, for those not familiar, is a French film – so yes, I had to read subtitles because I am not fluent in French. It is about a young waitress who was raised by introverted parents who thought she was sick as a child and kept her inside most of her life. It was released in 2001 and the full name of the movie in France is The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain. Audrey Tautuo plays Amelie. It is directed by Jean Pierre Jeunet.
When she grows up she is very imaginative and begins to work behind the scenes to improve the lives of others. In the process, she might even improve her own. She begins to help others to combat her own loneliness.
This is a very quirky film with quirky camera angles and quirky writing and acting. Quirky is not a bad term in my book, in case you are wondering. I am a fan of quirky.
What is quirky about the film?
The writing, the camera angles, as I mentioned above and in how the narrator talks in present tense for part of the movie and then Amelie breaks the third wall to talk to us about her life in just one scene and then it is back to the narrator. I love when movies break “the rules” so to speak and breaking the third wall is one of those ways. If you don’t know what breaking the third wall means, it is when a character looks directly at the camera and speaks to the audience.
The movie features beautiful, vintage scenery throughout. The backgrounds are picturesque in an urban art style and the entire movie has a slight yellow tone like vintage film to give it a warm feeling. The main colors in the film (green, yellow, and red) are inspired by the paintings of the Brazilian artist Juarez Machado, according to IMDb.
Stories weave in and out of the main narrative of Amelie’s life, starting with her search to find the owner of a small box of mementos she finds in the wall in her bathroom and continuing when she works to return a book of photos from photo booths around the city so she can meet the man who collects the photos.
Each story is a life that Amelie touches and improves and each time she feels more alive and less isolated. Each character she interacts with is also strange and a bit eccentric, and the camera angles exaggerate these facts and the intricacies of Amelie’s imagination. She works to improve the lives of everyone around her, including her father who she encourages to travel the world by sending him photographs of his gnome in different locations around the world.
Eventually, helping others will inspire her to bring happiness to her own life.
There is only one person whose life she sort of messes with as revenge, but he deserves it. Trust me. And harassing him helps to improve the life of another person so it sort of evens out.
According to a couple of sources online, Jeunet said he originally wrote the role of Amélie for the English actress Emily Watson. Watson didn’t speak strong French, however, and then she started shooting Gosford Park instead. Jeunet then rewrote the screenplay for a French actress. The film was shot in Paris for the most part with some studio shots filmed in Germany.
Tautou was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Actress for her role. She was 24 when the film was released.
Trivia on IMbD states that graffiti and trash had to be cleared from shots in Paris to keep the film’s fantastical feeling. This was sometimes a difficult task for staff.
Amelie has a 90 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a good thing if you don’t know. People love it, in other words. The movie was made into a musical on Broadway in 2015 and it was rereleased this year in theaters for Valentine’s Day. I have no idea if the musical was any good or not.
The movie is definitely fantastical – and a bit bizarre in places, to me, but not so bizarre that it’s creepy. More like whimsical bizarre. Not sure if that makes sense to some but it does in my brain.
One review I read of this on Rotten Tomatoes summed up some of my feelings about the movie: “I feel like it’s a beautiful love letter to the introverts out there with wonderfully magical imaginations who find it hard to connect to people in real life.”
This was a unique film that I don’t think I would have watched on my own, or discovered at all if it wasn’t for Erin’s suggestion. I will warn anyone offended by some sex and language, that this is a rated R movie. Neither is extreme but it still resulted in a R rating.
The year was probably 1994 (I don’t know. I’m a bit old. I can’t remember.) when my brother took me to the Mecca of video rental stores – Blockbuster. It was actually amazing we had one near us since we grew up in a very tiny town in Pennsylvania. It was about half an hour from us, but not such a bad drive really. It was located in a strip mall that now has seen better days with most of the stores gone and the parking lot a pothole haven.
(Not me in the photo *wink*)
If I remember right, I wanted to find a romance and he was probably looking for an action movie or maybe a foreign film. He watched a few foreign films and made me watch them at times. They were pretty good but I wasn’t a fan of reading subtitles back then. I’m better with it now.
Back then we would never have imagined we’d one day be able to download or stream our movies right from our TV. I mean, we didn’t even have cable at our house because the cable company refused to come to us since we were “in the middle of nowhere.” We had four channels brought into our TV by an old-fashioned wire hanger-style antenna on the back porch that Dad had to shift sometimes to get a better signal.
Yes, I am that old. Okay, I’m really not, but we were that poor.
Walking into Blockbuster back then was a bit overwhelming for this sheltered country girl but I loved walking up the rows and looking at all the different movies.
I’m not definite about this but I think the first time I watched the Irish movie Into The West was from a Blockbuster rental. Did you ever see that movie? It’s about two Irish boys who travel with a horse across Ireland after their dad, who is grieving their mother, hits rock bottom and tells them they have to get rid of this horse they found. That’s a very short version of what the movie is about, of course, but it is very good.
I also think it might be where my brother rented The Princess Bride for us to watch for the first time.
The movies weren’t the only thing that was tempting at Blockbuster. They had candy, sodas, and stuffed animals. I’m sure I bought some candy but never the stuffed animals because my mom always said I had enough and my brother said I was too old for such things by then. Little did they know that even as an adult I was buying stuffed animals and still cuddle many of them to this day.
Blockbuster sold all its corporate-owned stores in 2014. It no longer grants franchises to anyone but at one time there were 50 privately-owned stores. As of today, there is only one official Blockbuster store left open in the United States and it is in Bend Oregon, and is a popular tourist attraction, selling more merchandise than video rentals.
Do you remember renting videos at Blockbuster back in the day? What movies were you looking for when you visited?
It’s time for our Sunday morning chat. On Sundays, I ramble about what’s been going on, whatthe rest of the familyand I have been reading and watching, andwhat I’ve been writing. Some weeks I share what I am listening to.
After I wrote my post yesterday about how nice the weather was this past week and how we finally had some sun, the sky opened up yesterday afternoon and it started to rain. Not a ton, but still, it put an end to our sunny streak. That was sad but I was grateful we actually had sun last week. The people in our area are super pale and sad from the lack of sun right now. Some day I am going to write an autobiography and that will be in the running for the title: Super Pale And Sad. Other candidates are Lost in The Corners of My Mind and Always on the Edge of Chaos.
I stole that last one from our local library director who looked at me with empty, glazed over eyes last week when I picked up my books and asked a question and then said to me, in a very spaced-out tone of voice. “I don’t know. We’re always on the edge of chaos here.”
I really want to make t-shirts up and give them the librarians down there. I wish I was an artist. I’d draw them all hanging in the sky off of a bookcase with the bookcase tipped and books falling all around them and with that quote emblazoned at the top of the shirt.
Right before I finished writing this post I also learned that we are supposed to get a major snow storm on Tuesday so. . . winter is not done with us yet.
What I/we’ve been Reading
I find it ironic that I complained a bit last week about a book I was reading not really having a plot when I read tons of no books without actual plots. Little House books, the books in the Anne of Green Gables series, the Cat Who books (Their plots are often very loose and the mysteries they are supposed to have sometimes aren’t even really mysteries!) Yes, the irony was lost on me but it isn’t now.
Currently Reading:
If I have more than one book listed here, that means I am switching back and forth and reading whichever one fits my mood at the time.
The Cat Who Went Into the Closet by Lilian Jackson Braun
Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson
(I have to be honest that I might not make it through this one. It’s heavy. Very. And I am not that far into it yet. I may need to skip ahead to the next one because The Husband says this is if of the darkest ones in the series)
Nellie by Amy Walsh
The Borrowers by Mary Norton (reading at with Little Miss. We’re almost finished)
Lost Names:Scenes from a Korean Boyhood by Richard Kim (reading with The Boy off and on)
Do the New You by Steven Furtick (reading this here and there to get ready for a Bible study at the end of the month)
Recently Finished:
The Bungalow Mystery (A Nancy Drew Mystery)by Carolyn Keene
Up Next or Soon:
Hidden Figuresby Margot Lee Shetterly
Bury Your Deadby Louise Penny
Bats Fly At Duskby Erle Stanley Gardner
The Thief of Blackfriars Lane by Michelle Griep
The Husband is reading Fields of Fire by Ryan Steck
What We watched/are Watching
This past week we watched a few episodes of Miss Scarlet and The Duke.
The Boy and I watched a few episodes of Psych together and that was nice because we don’t always like the same kind of shows.
I watched the latest episode from Forgotten Way Farms
And
The latest episode from Just A Few Acres Farm
What I’m Writing
I am working on Cassie still. If you’re curious what it is about, here is a rough description:
It’s 1995 and 32-year-old Cassie Mason is an actress who made it big on a sitcom in the mid-1980s but hasn’t been able to find a job since the show ended five years ago.
After being fired by her talent agency, Cassie takes her sister Bridget up on her offer for Cassie to come back to their hometown for an extended visit to unwind and regroup.
While there Cassie finds out her younger sister – the one with the handsome husband and three kids and running a farm – is going to open a café and farm store in the small town they grew up near. Cassie decides to stay long enough to help with the grand opening of the local community center, though she isn’t sure what she can do since she doesn’t know a thing about cooking like her mom and sister and isn’t great at organizing either.
In fact, Cassie isn’t sure what’s she is good at other than acting. Bridget hasn’t been able to help out at the Berrysville Community Center like she’d like to with all that has to be done to open the business so she asks Cassie to fill in for a couple of volunteer opportunities. That’s when Cassie finds out that her sister’s neighbor, Alec, isn’t only a small farmer – he’s also someone who knows how to cook and showcases those talents in a weekly cooking class at the community center.
During her visit home, Cassie struggles to figure out not only where she fits in and feels most at home but also to figure out if acting is all she is meant to do with her life or if there is another way God wants to use her talents.
And God? There’s someone else she needs to learn more about on this break from the career she thought she’d always have.
It will be released in August of 2024.
I hope to have the rough draft finished by the end of the month, set it aside for a bit, and then start the third book in the Gladwynn Grant series.
I’ve been listening to an Audible version of In This Mountain by Jan Karon.
Now it’s your turn
Now it’s your turn. What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.
Today I am taking part in the 10 on 10 with Marsha In the Middle as host.
Here are the questions we are supposed to answer and the answers are below the graphic:
I looked at this one for a bit and was grossed out with both ideas but then decided that I’d rather have the potato chips dipped in chocolate because, well, it’s chocolate. I could eat almost anything dipped in chocolate except crickets and, well, other gross things one shouldn’t eat, but you get my drift. (Looks like Gertrude Hawk actually makes this product!)
2, I would definitely prefer to recite an original poem to my husband than sing anywhere, let alone in front of a bunch of people. I don’t write poetry but I come from a family of poets so I think I could pull that off. I could not pull of singing or singing in front of a bunch of people. I’d probably giggle while reciting the poem and my husband would probably make funny faces to make me laugh, but it would be a lot better than doing anything in front of a bunch of people.
3. Oh gosh – this one was a little hard. I think both of these singers would be interesting to have dinner with but I guess I would choose Dolly because I want to see how old she really looks close up. I mean, the woman is 78 but has so much makeup and plastic surgery done, she’s got to really look old close up right? I just can’t imagine a human’s skin can stretch that much through plastic surgery and not rip somewhere. I’ve got to see for myself how wrinkled she really is. Plus I think she’s hilarious and I’d crack up at her jokes while she’d probably crack up if I told her I want to see how old she looks close up.
4. This one was easy – I would love to have only one red rose. I love red roses the most and I’m also not a huge flower person. I like them but I can take them or leave them. If my husband came home with one rose and said “We’re going to sit tonight and watch a mystery together tonight” that would be a better gift than a dozen roses and chocolate. I kid you not. I’m very, simple like that. If he threw a book I wanted in the midst of all that I’d be even more over the moon. Not that I’m hinting because he does a fine job with gifts for birthdays, holidays, and Valentine’s Day, etc.
5. I’m going to pick the pink with purple hearts because those are my favorite colors. As long as the hearts aren’t too big and I don’t look like a clown. Hopefully, it can be a comfy cotton dress that I can just lounge around the house in. *wink*
6. Uh, can I have both? I mean, both sound cool. This is “would you rather” though so I will go with the carriage ride in the Scottish Highlands because my ancestors are from Scotland and I absolutely want to visit there one day. On the list is Grant Castle because my family members were Grants (hello…why do you think the main character in my book series is Gladwynn Grant. One, it was my grandmother’s name, but two, to keep the Grant name alive in my family.).
7. This one was easy. The Rock, but not for the reason you think. I don’t agree with him politically and I want to give him a piece of my mind. Ha! That and I think we probably agree on more things than I think and I’d like to ask him some questions about WWE and if he thinks Vince McMahon did all those things he is being accused of.
8. I think Satin sheets are pretty slippery so I’d go with the flannel sheets with Teddy bears on them. This question doesn’t tell us what season we would have these sheets in, but I think even in the summer I’d rather have the flannel sheets. I’d simply not have a top blanket and put the fan on me so I wouldn’t get too hot. Yes, I thought of this way too long. I may have issues.
9. I will go with the box of chocolates with my least favorite fillings. I have dealt with some pretty bad allergies before and they affected my breathing so I’d rather not like chocolates than not be able to breathe!
10. Oh dear, my husband might read this and I don’t want to offend him but he likes surprise dates and I don’t. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed the surprise places he’s taken me but I like knowing where I’m going and what we’re going to be doing. I have anxiety and if I can plan for contingencies like how I’m going to be able to escape if I feel anxious or if I’m going to get carsick or not because it is a long drive, then I prefer to know ahead of time. If I planned the date then I’d know everything that was going to happen and that would help my control freak tendencies and my highly-prone-to-anxiety brain.
I’m so glad I was able to remember to do the 10 on 10 this month. I usually forget about it until I see Marsha post about it but this time, I remembered the day before. I simply didn’t write about it until after I saw Marsha post about it. *snort*
At the end of 2023, Little Miss and I finished the book of The Black Stallion (1941) by Walter Farley and then watched the 1979 movie based on it.
There are movies that stick with you from childhood to adulthood. The Black Stallion was one of those movies for me. A longtime horse lover, I was infatuated with horses, but knew I could never have one.
“They’re too much work,” my parents always said.
I had two childhood friends who had horses so I knew they were right. I also knew we didn’t have the space for the horses. Still, I loved to watch them, look at photos of them, and read about them. Enter Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind and My Little Ponies and – The Black Stallion.
If you don’t know what The Black Stallion is about, it is about a young boy (Alec Ramsey) who is on a ship sailing back to the United States from visiting his uncle in India when the ship is caught up in a storm. The ship sinks and the boy is rescued by a black Arabian stallion who was brought on board at a port along the way. The boy and horse live on a deserted island for twenty days before they are rescued by a fishing ship. They then return to Long Island where Alec fights to keep the horse, even though they live in a fairly populated area. His parents agree to let him keep the stallion because he saved Alec’s life, but they find a place for him in a neighbor’s barn (so this isn’t a super, super urban area, clearly.)
I will say right at the start here that we enjoyed the movie more than the book, only because we felt the book was a bit slow as in repetitive at times, and overly descriptive, especially when it came to the scenes of Alec riding The Black (the name of the stallion).
A good quarter of the book could have been cut by just trimming those scenes down. We already read about how it felt for Alec to run the black on the island. I don’t think it was important to describe that feeling every single time he rode the horse after that.
Despite not liking the slow parts, we did like the book overall and Little Miss was anxious to see the movie to see how similar it was. I watched the movie when I was around her age and was completely enamored with it and knowing she loves horses as much as I always did, I couldn’t wait to show it to her. I insisted we finish the book first, though, because I had never read it and I thought it would be good to compare the two.
She was fine with that, as long as I skipped over some of the overly descriptive parts with the running and the very repetitive and mundane dialogue in some places.
There were parts of the movie that were similar but there were also some very big glaring changes between the book and movie.
For one, in the book, Alec Ramsey is a redhead with freckles. I don’t remember him being given an age in the book, but I guessed him to be around 14 or 15.
In the movie, the boy looks about 10 or 11 and he has freckles, but very dark hair. (I looked this up and the actor was actually 11. Maybe Alec is supposed to be that young in the book. I may have missed his age when we were reading.)
In the book, Alec’s parents are waiting for him at home but in the movie, Alec’s father was on the ship with him.
So there is definitely a different dynamic from the book to the movie.
The action, of course, moves a bit faster in the movie. The imagery in the movie, especially when Alec (portrayed by Kelly Reno) and The Black are on the island and Alec is learning to ride him is gorgeous and mesmerizing. The riding scene is one of the most enchanting and relaxing scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie. When I was a kid and watched that scene, everything around me faded away and it was almost like I was on that beach, riding a horse across the sand and through the waves. It was the same watching it again as an adult. My heart pounded, my skin tingled, and I leaned forward as if I was the one holding on to the mane of the horse, my body crouched low as the horse picked up speed.
I felt the same during the race scene. The way they weaved in the scene on the beach with the race itself. Mind blowing cinematography.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if watching that movie is what lit the spark for my passion for photography.
In the movie, Henry, the man who ultimately ends up helping Alec train The Black to run in races, is portrayed by Mickey Rooney. Little Miss said he didn’t look anything like she imagined Henry to look and, though I had grown up only knowing Henry to look like Mickey Rooney, I sort of had to agree. I pictured someone completely different in my mind when I read the book.
Still, I think Mickey does an amazing job portraying Henry – a slightly grumpy, retired jockey and horse trainer. He was even nominated for an Oscar for his performance.
Teri Garr portrayed Alec’s mother in the movie. It was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Caroll Ballard.
I always found the scenes with the horse amazing. Like how did they get the horse to film the scenes where he was getting used to Alec? And the race scenes were amazing. The movie was filmed before CGI, which makes it all even more amazing.
Wikipedia is not the most reliable source for information at times, but if what they shared about the horses used in the film is true, it is very interesting.
“Cass Ole, a champion Arabian stallion, was featured in most of the movie’s scenes, with Fae Jur, another black Arabian stallion, being his main double. Fae Jur’s main scene is the one where Alec is trying to gain the trust of The Black on the beach. Two other stunt doubles were used for running, fighting, and swimming scenes.
El Mokhtar, an Egyptian Arabian racehorse, was the producers’ first choice to portray The Black, but they were unable to secure his services for the film from his owners, who declined any offers. He does appear in The Black Stallion Returns, alongside Cass Ole, by which time the studio bought out the syndicate of owners to secure El Mokhtar’s services.
Napoleon was portrayed by Junior, who previously appeared in National Lampoon’s Animal House as Trooper, Niedermeyer’s horse.”
I also found it interesting to read on IMBD’b that Kelly Reno, who played Alec (as I mentioned above) did his own stunts in the movie because he was the son of a cattle rancher and was used to riding horses. He did have a stand-in part of the time but for the most part, the stunts were his own when he was riding The Black.
Kelly was injured in a very bad truck accident involving a semi-trailer after he graduated high school, which ended his acting career. He became a cattle rancher, like his dad, and then a truck driver and lives in Colorado from what I could find out online. There is not a ton of information available about him online since he no longer works in acting, but I did find this really interesting interview from this past year on a site about Thoroughbred Racing.
“It was a friend of the Reno family who noticed an ad in the Denver Post calling for young riders to audition for a role in a movie,” writer Jay Hovdey writes in the article. “I wasn’t trying to be an actor,” Reno said recently. “For me, it was a day off from school, so why not?”
The article is also where I learned that the shipwreck scenes in the movie were filmed in Italy. The beach scenes were filmed in Sardinia. Reno and his entire family were flown there to film that scene. When we see him shivering from the cold rain and the waves crashing over the ship, that was real because they were using fire hoses to create the illusion and he was very cold.
I’ve always wondered how they got The Black to follow Reno around on the beach and he answered that in this interview.
“There was a pocket in my shorts with oats I’d feed him,” Reno said, “so when I’d take off running across the beach, he knew where those oats came from and follow me around.”
He also said the horse bit him in the shoulder, lifting him up and shaking him like a rag doll the one time he didn’t feed him fast enough.
““He picked me up and shook me like a rag doll. I reared back and punched him right in the nose. The director yells: ‘Don’t be punching the horse!’ But I’m 11, a ranch kid. I think he was mad because the horse was the star.”
Reno said Rooney was amazing to work with and only got “mad” at him once when they were at a horse race and he bet on a horse that won 50-1 and Rooney lost.
About the movie, Hovdey wrote: “As for the legacy of the movie, which was produced by Francis Ford Coppola of The Godfather fame, the Los Angeles Film Critics honored Caleb Deschanel for his cinematography and composer Carmine Coppola for his music.
In 2002, the National Film Preservation Board added The Black Stallion to its list of significant films, then in 2005 a poll published by the American Film Institute placed the movie at No. 64 among America’s 100 Most Inspiring Movies, ahead of Cool Hand Luke, Thelma & Louise, and The Ten Commandments.”
There was a sequel of the movie made, The Black Stallion Returns, which was the second in Farley’s 21-book series that featured the stallion.
Kelly and Teri Garr were both in the sequel. They were not in the television series that ran from 1990 to 1993 and starred Mickey Rooney and Richard Ian Cox.
So my final thoughts on the book and the movie is that the book is worth a read if you are okay with skimming over some of the scenes that drag a bit.
The movie is worth a watch because you won’t want to fast forward past any scene since it is beautifully acted, filmed, and `presented.
Have you read the book or seen the film?
What was your impression of it or them?
Here is an interview about the making of The Black Stallion and the trailer that ran in 1979 for it.
For additional reading about the movie and the making of it and the book and author, visit Tim Farley’s site here:
For the month of January, Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I watched a movie adaptation of Jane Austen books for our link up for Jane Austen January (you can find the link to our past posts at the top of the page).
Erin has been unable to participate the last two weeks so this week I watched Miss Austen Regrets (2007) by myself.
I enjoyed this movie over any of the others we watched. The movie was the semi-biographical (biopic) story of Jane Austen — not the polished, proper, and fantasy versions we see in her books (though there is a great deal of realism in them as well). Of course, there was a lot of fiction in this movie as well, since there isn’t a ton of information known about Jane’s real life.
This movie follows Jane later in life, exploring why her chances at love like she wrote about were never fully realized. Those chances either slipped away or she pushed them away according to the movie and other accounts. Taking creative license, mixed in with some truth, the movie weaves in the story of Jane’s niece with her own. Fanny Knight a wide-eyed young woman who has romanticized love partially because of her aunt’s books.
Through Fanny and Jane’s interaction, we are led through a bittersweet journey that carries the viewers through a series of regrets by Jane, that she may or may not have really had in life.
The story was beautifully presented, not because of beautiful settings or scenes, though there were those too, but because of the emotions, we lived with a woman we know very little about other than what we read between the lines of fictitious prose. That prose within novels she wrote became so popular there is now a new cinema adaptation of her work every other year and thousands upon thousands of fan fiction based on the books she wrote and released in her short 41 years.
When this movie ended, I actually had to pause to process it all and to stop crying over the ending.
There is way too much about Jane’s history to share in one blog post or in one movie so this movie specifically focused on Jane’s later life and this blog post will do the same. One thing I should mention is that we don’t know a lot about Jane’s personal life because her sister burned tons of letters Jane sent to her. Some historians believe Jane wrote thousands of letters to her sister Cassandra over the years, but in the end, only about 150 survived and many of those were redacted or cut apart to keep certain information out of the public eye.
Some historians surmise that Cassandra wanted to protect the privacy of her sister. Jane was known to be very blunt and straightforward in her commentary and it is possible she was a bit opinionated about some in the family or others the family knew and Cassandra didn’t want people to see those comments. Or she might have wanted to protect Jane’s love life from a curious family and public.
Either way, some vital information that would have shed even more light on who Jane was in her personal life is no longer available.
What we have in Miss Austen Regrets is a fictionalized telling of what Jane may have been like, what may have happened between her and her family, and how she may have felt as she became ill.
I think that Jeremy Loverling who directed it and Gwenyth Hughes, who wrote the screenplay, did an amazing job weaving an imaginative story with a bit of historical facts that we do know mixed in.
One of the biggest messages of this movie, starring Olivia Williams as Jane, is that we shouldn’t confuse fiction with real life. This point is driven home several times but first when Jane tells her niece, portrayed by Imogen Poots (that’s an unfortunate last name, right?), “”My darling girl. The only way to get a Mr. Darcy is to make him up.”
The other message is that a woman should marry for love not for protection and wealth, like when Jane tells her niece, “Fanny, do anything but marry without affection.”
She tells Fanny this when Fanny asks Jane for advice on a man who she feels will propose to her – John Plumtre, who was played by a curly-headed blond Loki – er, I mean Tom Hiddleston. That was a bit shocking to me because I’m used to an older Tom with darker hair but here he was – all in his young, blond glory and totally out of character for me as an anxious 17th century man.
Jane tells her niece she likes to flirt and that’s why she never married. Viewers can tell there are a variety of reasons Jane never married and one of them is because she’s afraid she will no longer be able to write if she is married and taking care of children.
Later Jane runs into a man – Rev. Brook Edward Bridges, played by Hugh Bonneville — who reminds her that he wanted to marry her and would have cared for her, her sister, and her mother. He’s such a tender character and he becomes even more tender when he sees she is not feeling well later in the movie. It is clear that he has always loved her and still loves her, even though he is now married to someone else.
I had to find out more about him so I did a deep dive online and found this article about letters between Cassandra and Jane that hints Edward did propose at one time. It also mentions Edward’s wife who Jane wrote: “for her health, she is a poor Honey—the sort of woman who gives me the idea of being determined never to be well—& who likes her spasms & nervousness & the consequence they give her, better than anything else”
She used Edward’s wife as the basis for the sister of the main character in Persuasion – a woman who used her supposed illnesses for attention.
Ironically, Edward Bridges passed away five years after Jane at the age of 46. His wife lived another 40 years, despite all her “ailments”.
If rumors are true and similar to what happened in the movie, Jane didn’t have an easy go of it with her difficult mother who always held a grudge against her for not marrying someone wealthy to take care of them.
Watching this movie gave me an entirely different impression of the woman whose books I have resisted because of her fans who have what I saw as a silly obsession. Whether some aspects of the movie are true or not, I can now see that there were most likely many elements of Jane’s own life that she used for her books. Some of those were joyful moments, some heartbreaking, but all made up her life and allowed her to give readers a tiny glimpse into her life through her novels.
If some of what was shared is true, I think Jane believed that someday she would find love like she’d written about before her death. Before she could, though, she became sicker and too weak.
I have to agree with what Walter Scott wrote in his diary in 1926 after rereading Pride and Prejudice for the third time.
“That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
We really did lose her too soon.
If you want to read about where this made-for-TV movie (which I thought was better than most movies on the big screen) was filmed you can read the post from Joy from Joy’s Book Blog. This concludes our Jane Austen January. Thank you to everyone who participated in it! I hope you will check out the links at the link up above. The link party closes on Saturday.
Have you seen this movie? What did you think of it?
This month Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are watching movie adaptations of Jane Austen’s books for Jane Austen January. We are also offering a link-up for anyone who wants to discuss the movies, or anything else Jane-related, on their blogs.
I feel like Erin and I batted maybe not zero but around five this week by choosing to watch Emma. Both of our choices really weren’t very good and both of us agreed we didn’t want to see the 2020 version at all. We did want to watch the 2009 BBC miniseries but it would have been about four hours long. It might have been worth it to not to have to see the fifteen minutes of the 1996 televised version that I had to suffer through, however.
The 2009 version stars Romola Garai and to me it is very well done. Mr. Knightly is a mix of charming and playful, Emma is still a brat but shows a transformation more so than in the Paltrow version, and the characters are better developed. Of course, they had time to develop characters since they had two hours more than the other movies.
(Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that I have not read the book so I can’t say if any of the movies keep in line with the book or not.)
So, as I mentioned, Erin and I both abandoned our first choice of the 1996 televised movie with Kate Beckinsal after only about 15 minutes for me (maybe less for Erin. Ha.)
My word that version was so dull – in the acting and in their outfits. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie where everyone wore brown and white against a set of more brown and white. Ew.
Now, as for our decision to shift our choice to the 1996 big screen version with Gwyneth Paltrow, I want to say up front that I am not always a fan of Americans doing British accents – especially in period pieces.
I don’t know what that is about but I guess it takes me completely out of a story knowing that the actress is really from California and not Sussex. It seems less refined somehow, which is funny since people from Sussex aren’t necessarily all refined either.
I have also been taken out of a story when a British actor is doing a Southern accent and I know there isn’t one Southern thing about him.
With that one complaint about Gwenyth not actually being British behind us, lets get to the rest of the movie.
First, the story of Emma.
Emma is about Emma Woodhouse, a young woman who is constantly meddling in the love lives of other people. She lives with her hypochondriac father and they are both often visited by their good friend Mr. Knightly.
Emma’s meddling sometimes is successful and leads to marriage, but other times, it leads to heartache, confusion, and people being hurt. It also keeps Emma from focusing on her own love life, which is beneficial to her because she doesn’t have to commit but hurtful to the men who fall for her.
Emma uses various schemes and tactics to keep some couples apart and bring other people together. She’s actually very manipulative and it takes most of the story and her being told by Mr. Knightly – a man who is a close friend of the family and almost like a brother to her – that her schemes are ruining people’s lives.
Like Pride and Prejudice, this movie had a lovely dance scene between Emma and her friend, Mr. Knightly. One of those where their attention is on each other and no one else. It was a lovely scene.
Unlike Pride and Prejudice (2005) the scenery isn’t as pretty in this movie to me. For example, at one point Emma and Mr. Knightly are shooting arrows and the pond behind them is covered in algae. The director couldn’t have set the shot up better to remove that from the background or had the body of water treated? I felt completely shallow, but I couldn’t even pay attention to the argument happening between the two because I was staring at the dirty, green water.
The movie was directed by Douglas McGrath.
He wanted Gwyneth Paltrow, according to Wikipedia, because, “she did a perfect Texas accent. I know that wouldn’t recommend her to most people. I grew up in Texas, and I have never heard an actor or actress not from Texas sound remotely like a real Texan. I knew she had theater training, so she could carry herself.”
Um..okay? I guess that’s a good reason to cast her?
Anyhow, it did not surprise me at all that Harvey Weinstein the co-chairman of Miramax at the time gave the movie the greenlight but said Gwenyth had to be in the movie The Pallbearer first.
She then had a month to herself while recovering from wisdom-tooth surgery to research for the part by studying horsemanship, dancing, singing, archery, and dialect.
If you don’t know the story behind Weinstein, you can look it up online but needless to say he was a big jerk who manipulated and physically attacked women but also controlled actors and actresses careers.
I thought it was interesting to read that the characters of Mrs. Bates and Miss Bates in the movie were played by an actual mother and daughter – Phyllida Law and Sophie Thompson.
Thompson revealed that it was a coincidence that she and her mother were cast alongside each other, as the casting director had their names on separate lists. She was actually one of the funnier and more refreshing characters to me.
I had to giggle when I saw Ewan McGregor as Frank Churchill and apparently, he cringes and giggles a bit as well for the same reason – his hair.
He told The Guardian that he chose to star in Emma because he thought it would be something different from his previous role in Trainspotting (a movie about a heroin addict).
“My decision-making was wrong,” he said in the interview. “It’s the only time I’ve done that. And I learnt from it, you know. So I’m glad of that – because it was early on and I learnt my lesson. It’s a good film, Emma, but I’m just… not very good in it. I’m not helped because I’m also wearing the world’s worst wig. It’s quite a laugh, checking that wig out.”
When I looked online for reviews of this movie, I found that most people generally liked it, including Roger Ebert who called it “a delightful film–second only to “Persuasion” among the modern Austen movies, and funnier, if not so insightful.”
Back in 1996, though, some college students called the film obnoxious. I had to laugh at the review of the review by Ebert when he wrote that the young student’s review was “posted on the Internet.” Ah, the early days of the Internet.
The college student wrote: “a parade of 15 or 20 or 8 billion supporting characters waltzes through the scenes. Each is called Mister or Miss or Mrs. Something, and each of them looks and acts exactly the same (obnoxious).”
I don’t know if I agree that the movie was that bad, or that there were really that many characters to keep track of.
I do agree that some of them were obnoxious – including Emma herself but we also have to remember that Emma was supposed to be young (21) and still learning about herself and how not to meddle in the lives of other people.
Ken Eisner, writing for Variety, said of Gwyneth that she shone “brightly as Jane Austen’s most endearing character, the disastrously self-assured matchmaker Emma Woodhouse. A fine cast, speedy pacing and playful direction make this a solid contender for the Austen sweepstakes.”
Ebert also liked Gwyneth in the role, writing, “Gwyneth Paltrow sparkles in the title role, as young Miss Woodhouse, who wants to play God in her own little patch of England. You can see her eyes working the room, speculating on whose lives she can improve. “
If you want to read about the different versions of the Emma adaptations yourself, you can see some comparisons at the following sites:
This was the last of our book adaptations. Next week we will be watching Miss Austen Regrets, which focuses on the life of Jane Austen.
Erin didn’t get a chance to write about Emma today as she isn’t feeling well, but if you want to share your thoughts on the movie(s) or book Emma, or anything else related to Jane Austen, you can add a link to our link-up HERE.
Have you seen this version of Emma? Or the 1996 television version?
