David Mitchell

REVIEW: I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

Forty-year-old single mum Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) produces doomed TV show until she casts twenty-nine-year-old Adam (Paul Rudd). As the show gets a new lease of life, so does she as they start to date but her insecurities about their age difference threatens to compromise their relationship.

I have a soft spot for films/shows that are about films/shows being made (Singin’ in the Rain and Hail, Caesar! for example) so for me, Rosie’s job was just as interesting as the family and romance stuff she has going on in her life. She’s a writer and producer of “You Go Girl” – a teen comedy show where all the teenagers are played by twenty-somethings – and there’s some great referential humour in that concept with interfering network heads, censors, and trying to make the cast look younger. Even though I Could Never Be Your Woman is fifteen years old, many of the problems Rosie faces in trying to put together the best show she can on a tiny budget are still applicable to TV shows nowadays.

Something else I very much enjoyed in I Could Never Be Your Woman is all the random British and Irish actors that are in this. Saoirse Ronan plays Izzie, Rosie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Yasmin Paige (of The Sarah Jane Adventures fame plays Melanie, Izzie’s best friend, while Sarah Alexander plays Rosie’s catty assistant. Then there’s Graham Norton who works in the “You Go Girl” costume department, David Mitchell is a co-writer on the show, Tracey Ullman plays Mother Nature (that’s a bit of a weird one), and Mackenzie Crook and Steve Pemberton also make brief appearances. I’d be somewhat fascinated to learn how all these people ended up on this film as it really is an eclectic bunch.

But I Could Never Be Your Woman has more going for it than just a cool job for the female lead and a load of British and Irish comedy actors making brief appearances, it is actually pretty funny and is a sweet romance. Rudd and Pfeiffer have great chemistry and while Rosie’s worries about their age difference is understandable, they do actually work well together. It probably helps that Paul Rudd looks ageless so me watching this for the first time now didn’t really see much difference between the two of the age-wise.

Rosie and Izzie’s relationship was also great. While Rosie is obviously the adult and her mum, she talks to Izzie in a mature way and they both give each other advice on their love lives with mixed results. I also liked Rosie’s relationship with her ex-husband and Izzie’s father Nathan (Jon Lovitz). They clearly are great co-parents and I always like to see examples of the non-“traditional” family done well.

I Could Never Be Your Woman is a good fun, 90-minute romcom. In some ways it feels a bit dated and very 2000s with the fashion and slang but it’s still a fun story and the various relationship dynamics really make the film work. 4/5.

REVIEW: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

One summer’s day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for ‘asylum’. Decades will pass before Holly understands what sort of asylum the woman was seeking….

The Bone Clocks had been sitting on my shelves for four years. I’d read, and enjoyed, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell but from that I knew his stories could be fantastical and epic and I was never really in the mood for the concentration I’d need to have to read a story like that. In the end, I got the audiobook from my library and that got finally got me to read this story. The audiobook I listened to was narrated by Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, Steven Crossley, Laurel Lefkow and Anna Bentinck, and I thought they all did a fantastic job at bringing the many characters to life.

The Bone Clocks is so much more than its two-sentence blurb suggests, but at the same time, I have no idea of how to give this story a concise and somewhat spoiler-free summary. The Bone Clocks is a story that spans decades, and while the story might not always be told from her point of view, Holly Sykes is always connected to the characters you’re introduced to in some way. It’s equal parts confusing and fun, especially in the first half of the book, seeing how this character you are now following is connected to Holly and how their relationship with her will unfold. While Holly is the central character that a lot of the big events and decisions revolve around, the other characters each have their own story and personality that’s usually just as engaging as Holly’s.

Holly Sykes is a character that grew on me. She’s young and naïve when you first meet her, and somewhat unlikeable too but seeing how her experiences, good, bad and unexplainable, affect her life, she becomes more sympathetic and mature. She suffers a trauma at a young age and doesn’t know how her life will be affected by granting the strange old lady, Esther Little, asylum. She becomes entangled in something much bigger than herself, and it take a while for everything to become clearer, and even then, there’s some events and characters that almost can’t be explained. The other characters are fully-formed with some being unlikeable while others are almost undefinable. Ed Brubeck was probably my favourite character as he felt the most realistic and relatable to me.

The Bones Clocks is well-written with some beautiful passages and engaging characters. It is weird and fantastical, but at its core there’s Holly Sykes and her very human life. There’s so much going on in The Bone Clocks, it’s hard to give it a definitive genre. There is magic, secret wars, family drama, death, and souls play a major role too. The Bone Clocks is an epic story, but it is an odd and sometimes confusing one too. You spend so much of the novel, not know what’s really happening or how everything is connected, that when things are explained, there is a lot of exposition.

Still, I did enjoy the audiobook and I think consuming the story that way helped me take it in and become more enthralled by it than if I was reading a physical copy. 3/5.

The Tome Topple Readathon

This readathon is hosted by ThoughtsonTomes from June 5th to June 19th and the aim of it is to read those huge intimidating books that are over 500 pages long that have been sitting on your shelves for ages.

There’s a few challenges you can try and complete which are below but really the main thing is to read some long books.

The challenges:
1. Read more than one tome (500+ pages)
2. Take a graphic novel break (doesn’t need to be over 500 pages!)
3. Read a tome that is part of a series
4. Read over 500 pages in one week
5. Read an adult novel

IMG_5175

I have four 500+ pages long books that I’m considering to read for this readathon. There’s no way I could or will read all four of them but I like to have some options when it comes to readathons. The four books are The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon which is 531 pages, American Gods by Neil Gaiman which has 635 pages, Last Man Standing by David Baldacci which is 548 pages long and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell which is a beautiful hardback book and has 595 pages.

Theoretically I’ll be able to complete all the challenges. All four books on my TBR are adult books, If I managed to complete a book a week then I’ll have read over 500 pages each week of the readathon, it turns out that The Angel’s Game is the second book in The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series which I didn’t realise when I picked it up from a charity shop, and I can definitely take a couple of graphic novel breaks as I have a few unread trade paper backs I’d liked to read including, All New Hawkeye, Black Widow Vol. 3, The Punisher Vol. 3 and Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier.

I really don’t know how this readathon will go. Hopefully it’ll go well but I am in a bit of a reading slump at the moment so who knows. To be honest, as long as I read one of these books I’ll be very happy.

I’ll probably be tweeting about my progress @ElenaM52 and you can find out more about the readathon and all the co-hosts here. Good luck to all those who are taking part!