DVD Review: 65

65
(DVD 65)

I’ll have to admit, I’m not really an Adam Driver fan, but that’s mainly because I couldn’t stand him in his Star Wars trilogy. But in pretty much anything else I’ve seen him in, my opinion has been dramatically changing. He certainly doesn’t disappoint in 65, a fascinating and exciting scifi time travel dinosaur film from 2023. Though there are some brief moments with additional actors, 65 is essentially a two-person film, with Driver playing Mills, a futuristic astronaut flying a cargo passengers in stasis, who’s awakened partway into his journey when a meteor storm damages his ship and forces him to crash on a primitive planet in its dinosaur age. Discovering that one of his passengers/cargo has also survived the crash, Mills has to learn to communicate with the young woman, Koa (played by Ariana Greenblatt), and then to travel several kilometers to where his ship’s “escape pod” has ended up. Their travel, by foot, through murky swamps and desolate rocky terrain, is endangered by multiple prehistoric life forms and by the environment itself. Can the two strangers come to rely on each other to reach possible salvation?

 

Both Driver and Greenblatt turn in excellent performances in 65, and the atmosphere of the film is well-created. If you like dinosaur action, you’ll definitely get it here. Attempts by the film to explain that the planet they crashed on is actually Earth in the distant past are muddled, and ultimately unnecessary, as this is a film about the experience of survival. Well done!

 

( Internet Movie Database entry for this film )

 

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you watched this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Alone by Megan Freeman

Alone
by Megan Freeman (jPB Freeman)

Remember Island of the Blue Dolphins? What if it were set in modern times in Colorado? This novel-in-verse may be quick to read, but the *thinks* it makes one think are bound to stay for a whole lot longer. Maddie, a young teen, must use her wits and imagination to survive on her own in spite of crushing loneliness. A quote that really stuck with me, was, when she was contemplating whether her parents had survived or not, she noted “It is always too soon (to lose someone you love).” That to me is a truth worth pondering. I also appreciated how her post-divorce families were described in a nuanced manner. I enjoyed the opportunity to imagine what life might be like for a young girl with no adults to direct her, and how even without other people around, she made choices about who she wanted to be. She used the library; looking for advice and truths from written voices that you probably know…What would you do if you were all alone? What do you hope to do with your one wild life?

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. During her time alone, Maddie finds comfort in the poetry she reads. Some of the poets she mentions are Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, e.e. cummings and Billy Collins.)

 

( official Alone and Megan Freeman web site )

 

Recommended by Cindy K.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Reprieve by James Han Mattson

Reprieve
by James Han Mattson (Mattson)

Reprieve caught my attention because of the setting — Lincoln, NE in the late 1990s — and the hook of a murder trial for something that happened in a full-contact haunted house business. I felt like I got more than I expected in terms of setting and less than I hoped for with the haunted house experience.

 

The setting has many references to Lincoln locations. I’m not sure the author has lived here, but he’s clearly familiar with the map and some of the common ways people talk about Lincoln. However, for the amount of time spent on UNL campus and some at Lincoln High, downtown is nearly absent with much more attention paid to Holmes Lake and Havelock. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all the details, but it was satisfying to see Lincoln as the backdrop throughout the bulk of this story. (With Bangkok taking 2nd place.)

 

As for the story structure, there’s the frame of a group of four young people making their way through the rooms of the haunt for a cash prize, plus some chapters that are trial transcripts from afterwards. In a typical horror novel, this would make up most of the plot with some quickly sketched backgrounds. In Reprieve, however, those character backgrounds feel like full-on novellas of their own that eventually intersect for the night of the haunt.

 

It was a lot like watching a horror anthology film where only the frame story is horror and the individual stories are realistic fiction on themes like alienation, misogynistic radicalization, and anti-Blackness among Asian people. Personally, I felt this provided synergy to the individual stories by giving them an interesting place to end up, but absolutely drained engagement from the horror frame story. Even *during* the scant time spent on the escape-room like haunted house challenges, characters frequently zone out to dwell on their earlier stories (which were already longer than they should have been). I have to restrict my recommendation to fans of realistic short fiction who have tolerance for horror, and pointedly not recommend it to horror fans.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones, which I reviewed here, which attempts a similar genre blend of realistic fiction and horror, but ultimately gives satisfying respect to both genres.)

 

( publisher’s official Reprieve web page ) | ( official James Han Mattson web site )

 

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

New Booklist on BookGuide: Into the Wild

Interested in stories about ill-fated expeditions into the unknown. Did you read Jon Krakauer's book, Into the Wild, about Chris McCandless and what led him to his tragic fate in the Alaskan wilderness?

If so, then you'll want to check out the recent Into the Wild booklist addition to the libraries BookGuide readers advisory resources. Carrie R., from the Bennett Martin Public Library downtown, offers up some recommended reading suggestions for those who are fascinated by this reading category!

Check out this new booklist on BookGuide at the following link:

Into the Wild

Book Review: All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes

All the White Spaces
by Ally Wilkes (Wilkes)

All the White Spaces is historical suspense set in 1919 and 1920 during the age of early expeditions to Antarctica. Jonathan grew up listening to his older brothers obsess about joining one of these expeditions, but they’ve both recently died in the Great War. Jonathan himself feels smothered by his family’s expectations because he was assigned female at birth, so he becomes an expedition ship stowaway.

 

This book follows the conventions of gothic suspense where small things start to go awry, followed by increasing levels of disaster and hardship and unnatural strangeness. As a fan of naval stories and stories about danger and isolation, this was a perfect genre blend for me. If you happen to be familiar with Shackleton’s expeditions, this story is loosely modeled after his 1914 expedition but this is a slightly different world where there is no Ernest Shackleton and Antarctica holds an extra danger.

 

Be prepared for a tough read with lots of death and suffering, including for the sled dogs. It’s also a story that waxes poetic about this desolate winter country. If you weren’t already familiar with the three types of twilight, you will be after reading this book!

 

(Recommended to fans of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. If you enjoy this, another recent read-alike is The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister.)

 

( official All the White Spaces and Ally Wilkes web site )

 

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library — Public Service

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Hear the Wolves by Victoria Scott

Hear the Wolves
by Victoria Scott (j Scott)

Hear the Wolves by Victoria Scott is a middle-grade survival thriller that I picked up because of the striking cover and interesting title. I’m glad I did!

This is the story of Sloan, an Alaskan girl who experienced a traumatic event that left her half deaf and with the need to be close to a safe person at all times. She’s not keen on school, but she is an excellent hunter under her dad’s training and sees the world through an artist’s eyes from her mom’s influence.

When almost everyone in their remote town leaves one October morning to participate in an important vote, Sloan’s family leaves her behind in hopes she will see that she’s braver than she thinks.

And then the blizzard hits. And heating fuel is lower than expected. One of the few remaining adults is severely injured and needs surgery. To top it all off, the wolves of the area have had their food supply cut off from land mismanagement. The desperate wolves are getting closer to the houses and less shy about being seen.

It’s up to Sloan and a handful of others to cross the wilderness to the nearest river where a boat waits to take them to safety.

They will not all survive.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, or Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.]

[ official Hear the Wolves page on the official Victoria Scott web site ]

Recommended by Garren H.
Bennett Martin Public Library – Public Service

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Book Review: Becoming Unbecoming by Una

Becoming Unbecoming
by Una (741.5 Una)

Something about the cover of this graphic novel caught my attention and convinced me to read it, and I’m very glad I did. Most of my graphic novel reading tends to focus on narrative-driven adventure stories, so this autobiographical and philosophical look at rape culture, survival/recovery and societal trends related to the treatment of women, was a powerful and thought-provoking change of pace.

Author/artist Una was the victim of sexual assault relatively early in her life, and it was a defining experience for her — one that colored the rest of her life and affected both her interactions with others and how she viewed the world around her. She tells her own story, interspersed with facts, figures and statistics about sexual assault, and interwoven with observations on a famous case about a British sexual serial killer and how he got away with multiple killings or sexual assaults and was not identified or arrested for decades.

Una’s artwork has elements of extreme simplicity, but also features moments of detailed and compelling beauty. Pages can be jam-packed with intricate artwork, or can have one small image surrounded by oppressive white space. She approaches the horrors of her own assault, societal shaming, and the assaults on other women with stark and often emotionless realism. But her story is powerfully moving. The Kirkus Reviews quote on the cover — “A graphic manifesto for female empowerment and a punch to the gut of predatory males” sums up the content of this book with precise and accurate sentiment.

I particularly appreciated the way she ended the book — artistically representing what 13 fatal victims of male-on-female violence might have looked like decades after their assaults, if they’d survived.

This is not a “feel good” story, but it is definitely one that makes you think about the world around you. If you don’t feel a sense of outrage by the end of the book, you may need to re-evaluate your personal capacity for empathy.

[ publisher’s official Becoming Unbecoming web page ] | [ official Una web site ]

Recommended by Scott C.
Bennett Martin Public Library

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Into the Wild

Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer [917.98 Kra]

Chris McCandless, a young twenty-something from a well-off family in D.C., ditches his upper middle class life and hitchhikes into the Alaskan wild; four months later his body is found in an abandon bus used as a shelter in the middle of the Alaskan forest (this isn't a spoiler, it is known from the cover of the book). Krakauer does an amazing job of retracing Chris' final steps and putting together the pieces of his transient life. For as dark as the subject matter is, Krakauer adds his own personal experiences of being a young man with a knack for the outdoors, hiking, and climbing to paint a picture of McCandless as not some naive lunatic who wondered off to his own demise, but as an intelligent young man with a passion for the outdoors who died doing what he loved. Even more intriguing are the hauntingly relevant quotes from people like Thoreau, Twain, John Muir at the beginning of each chapter. Into the Wild is a warning to the over-ambitious, but at the same time a reminder to go out and do what you love – an overall metaphor for life. -- recommended by Jeremiah J. - Bennett Martin Public Library [If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Into the Wild (DVD), based on the Krakauer book; Into thin Air – also by Krakauer.]

[Also available in book-on-cd and downloadable E-book formats.]

[ Wikipedia page for Into the Wild ] | [ Wikipedia page for Jon Krakauer ]

Have you read this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewers recommendations!