The Name of the Star and Boyhood
Jul. 26th, 2014 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThe Name of the Star by Maureen Johnson is tons better than her Blue Envelopes books. It sounds as though it would be terrible - American teenager goes to a fancy private school in London for a year and gets mixed up in a series of supernatural murders based on the Jack the Ripper killings.
But, despite the bobbins plot, the book is peopled with a set of really likeable and interesting characters. I was particularly pleased to find at least four great male characters, all of whom are quite different, after the appalling ones in the Blue Envelopes sequel.
There's a small amount of teenage romance involved, but it's mostly action-packed paranormal mystery, with secret police squads, ghosts on both sides of the conflict, and some fun American-in-London misunderstandings and cultural observations.
The narrator was also hugely better than the Blue Envelopes narrator - perhaps even a little too much so. She managed all the required British accents admirably, but went a bit too far in assigning distinctive accents to nearly all the characters, even those whose accent wasn't mentioned in the book. Still, tons better than the often terrible accents you get on audiobooks.
The story was complete, but had a hook to lead into the next book in the series, and I'm quite keen to find out where it goes next, so I have downloaded the next one already.
Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a labour of love and a work of art. It stands up on its own as a lovely, understated story of one boy's journey through childhood, but the added layers brought by knowledge of how it was made turn it into something so much more. Linklater obviously inspires tremendous loyalty, in that the same cast members came back every summer for twelve years to film the next section of the movie, and having the actors actually ageing on screen gives the story real credibility. He really lucked out with Ellar Coltrane, too, who gives an excellent performance at all stages of the story, from the age of six to the age of eighteen.
Linklater's daughter, Lorelei, is the only slightly weak link in an otherwise fantastic cast. The only other slight problem I had with it was that the development of the mother's relationship with her two different husbands wasn't given enough time to make their descent into drunken assholery convincing.
All in all, though, I loved the film - and would happily watch twelve more years of it!
But, despite the bobbins plot, the book is peopled with a set of really likeable and interesting characters. I was particularly pleased to find at least four great male characters, all of whom are quite different, after the appalling ones in the Blue Envelopes sequel.
There's a small amount of teenage romance involved, but it's mostly action-packed paranormal mystery, with secret police squads, ghosts on both sides of the conflict, and some fun American-in-London misunderstandings and cultural observations.
The narrator was also hugely better than the Blue Envelopes narrator - perhaps even a little too much so. She managed all the required British accents admirably, but went a bit too far in assigning distinctive accents to nearly all the characters, even those whose accent wasn't mentioned in the book. Still, tons better than the often terrible accents you get on audiobooks.
The story was complete, but had a hook to lead into the next book in the series, and I'm quite keen to find out where it goes next, so I have downloaded the next one already.
Richard Linklater's Boyhood is a labour of love and a work of art. It stands up on its own as a lovely, understated story of one boy's journey through childhood, but the added layers brought by knowledge of how it was made turn it into something so much more. Linklater obviously inspires tremendous loyalty, in that the same cast members came back every summer for twelve years to film the next section of the movie, and having the actors actually ageing on screen gives the story real credibility. He really lucked out with Ellar Coltrane, too, who gives an excellent performance at all stages of the story, from the age of six to the age of eighteen.
Linklater's daughter, Lorelei, is the only slightly weak link in an otherwise fantastic cast. The only other slight problem I had with it was that the development of the mother's relationship with her two different husbands wasn't given enough time to make their descent into drunken assholery convincing.
All in all, though, I loved the film - and would happily watch twelve more years of it!
