I'm back from a wonderful weekend with some close friends, and a long, intimate acquaintance with airport security and the new regime against all forms of cream, gel and liquid. I'll have some more thoughts on that later. But for now, the most important thing for you to know is that my brother, Ryan, has made it safely to Africa, where he'll be deployed for the next seven months. I'll have a mailing address for him soon, so for anyone who wants to send him a care package full of items likely to survive the triple-digit heat, leave me a comment and I'll let you know when I've got the address. For now, join us in thanking God for Ryan's safe travel and praying for an equally safe time in Africa.

On this fine Saturday morning, I have about a dozen errands to run, and I'm pretty much ready to go. I've had some coffee, showered, made a list and generally am prepared to conquer the world. But here I sit at 11:30, in my house. And do you know why? Because my keys are currently sitting inside my car, which is in the driveway, locked. Dan, who is at an all-day radio-controlled car race, has the other key in his pocket.

We set ourselves up for this last night, when we were trying to be smart. Dan, knowing that he would need to be sure to have all of his RC car related paraphrenalia in his real car (and believe me, there's a lot of paraphrenalia associated with this hobby) in time to leave for the race early this morning, decided to load it all up in his car last night. However, since that meant his car was now full of a lot of relatively expensive hobby equipment, we didn't want to leave it parked in the driveway. So we decided to put it in the garage before we went to attend a going away party for some friends from church who are moving in a few weeks. Thus, I got into my car, using my keys, and backed it out of the garage. Dan then parked his car in the garage, using his keys with my spare key attached to them, and came and joined me in my car.

After the party, Dan drove home using his set of keys, so I did what I always do with anything that I'm holding and don't need to use right at the moment, and dropped my keys on the floor of the car, where they stayed as we got out of the car, locked it (since it would be sitting out in the driveway all night and all) and went to bed, secure in the knowledge that we had outsmarted all manner of would-be car thieves.

Dan's bringing me his keys right now, taking a break from his races to come and rescue me from calling a locksmith yet again (this is not the first time this has happened to us, but that's a long story). And the only reason I'm telling this story is because as I was standing at the window a few moments ago, pondering what I should do, I glanced up and saw our two college degrees, which sit proudly on the top of a bookshelf in our office, and I felt like I should probably just mail mine back to my alma mater with a note reading "Thanks for the excellent education in literature and writing. Too bad you couldn't teach me any common sense."

Good morning, folks. I didn't realize this until Aaron sent me a link to an item on the Mississippi State University web site, but he was asked to speak at a September 11 memorial service yesterday. There's a photo of him and a write-up on the ceremony here. So if you want to see my handsome brother, go check it out.

Tonight, I had a transcendental experience. Dan and I were sitting on the couch, when the first preview I've seen for the motion picture version of All the King's Men played on television. I almost cried.

I probably should not go and see this movie. It's almost certainly going to break my heart to see the elaborately constructed plot and characters of Robert Penn Warren's absolutely masterful novel broken down into anything that would fit into a marketable movie length. But I'm going anyway, because they've sold me with the casting. Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and Kate Winslet. I can't resist, and I've been looking forward to seeing it ever since I found out it was being made into a movie in Louisiana. The movie was supposed to be released almost a year ago, but I've heard the schedule was thrown off by Hurricane Katrina. It's out on September 22, and I've decided it's a congratulatory present to me from the entertainment industry for getting through a massive work deadline that falls that day.

The rest of you have two weeks to read the book if you want to know why you, too, should be geekily ecstatic about the movie. I'll loan you my copy. Call me.

Now if someone could just recognize what a fantastic family drama Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter" would make.

Because you and your spouse will both fall asleep and have extremely weird dreams for seven hours, at the end of which you will wake up while it is still dark and go to the bathroom. Which would be fine except that about 30 seconds later, your spouse, thinking you are still in bed, will get up and also go into the bathroom, and when he or she (OK, he) rounds the corner and finds you there, he will scream like a little girl, and so will you.

Not that I know this from personal experience or anything.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to watch one more episide of this cursed show before I go to bed and dream of the jungle.

At long last, Dan and I saw "All the King's Men" this Saturday night. I am pleased to report that the movie did not make me want to write anyone an angry letter accusing them of dishonoring the memory of Robert Penn Warren.

One of the first things I feel I must do is grade the major actors on their execution of Southern accents:
Jude Law: A minus, better than anyone else in the film. Lazy, unrushed, but articulate, it's pretty solid.
Sean Penn: C plus, often unintelligible and slurred. Not that that is not something you hear occasionally, just that it's disturbing should you care what he's saying. On another relatively shallow note, I know that the book is constantly noting that Stark's hair is wild and out of order, but Penn's hair looks like it's been blow dryed and gelled into defiance of gravity. It's distracting.
Kate Winslet: B minus. Kind of the genteel counterpart to Sean Penn's hick.
Anthony Hopkins: While in all other respects excellent, Hopkins is essentially doing an elongated British accent more than anything else. And not to harp on the hairdressers, but what's with his hair? He looks like the Vidal Sassoon chick.

Still, I give the movie overall a B+. If you care to know why, keep reading.

The movie was, on the whole, pretty true to the spirit of the book. For anyone who's not read "All the King's Men" it is the story of a man named Willie Stark, a small town lawyer who becomes the governor of the state of Louisiana. The character is modeled fairly obviously on the life of the notorious Huey "Kingfish" Long, governor, senator, and would-be president, who made his name in politics by insisting the the state must do things to support its poorest citizens, but made his plans reality through enough blackmailing, intimidation and general corruption to get him impeached by the legislature.

The story is narrated by Jack Burden, played in the film by Jude Law. Burden is a newspaper reporter who first meets Stark when he is a county treasurer being run out of office over his insistence that the county commission is acting corruptly by refusing to award a contract for the construction of a new school house to the firm with the lowest bid, and instead giving it to a construction firm owned by a politically connected friend of the commissioners. Burden becomes fascinated by Stark, even more so when, months after Stark loses his re-election bid, a fire escape on the school house collapses during a fire drill due to substandard construction, and three children are killed. Stark is suddenly looking like a prophet, and, therefore, an excellent politlcal candidate for any office he should choose.

"All the King's Men" is a very difficult book to adapt for film because so much of the tone of the story is decided by the narrating voice of Jack Burden, the newspaper reporter who eventually leaves newspapers to be in the personal employ of Stark. Burden is conflicted about whether Stark is a good man or pure evil and whether he should be doing the work he does for him, which turns out to largely consist of digging up secrets about politlcal opponents to use when persuading them to vote Stark's way. In portraying this, I felt that Jude Law did excellent work, playing Burden as an outwardly serene, but inwardly uncomfortable man who worries that his actions may be playing into some larger scheme of destruction. Burden's undoing is that he persists in soothing himself with the notion that as long as he never knows why he is asked to perform certain tasks for Stark, he can never be guilty of having contributed to anyone's downfall, even as he delivers his oldest and dearest friends into Stark's hands. The opening scenes of the film find Burden lying in bed, sleepless, with an introductory narration in his voice explaining that he attributes his success in life to one thing, and this is his belief in the idea that "What you don't know won't hurt you."
He turns out to be wrong, and that is what makes that a good place to start the film.

If the film is succesful, it is because they make good use of flashbacks to Burden's youth and use those times to interject narration in his voice detailing his ongoing struggle to work out in his mind the problem of the nature of good and evil and the question of original sin. Is it, as Willie Stark so staunchly proclaims, true that everything in the world including man is born in corruption, and that any good that exists in the world must be carved from that evil by any means neccesary?

Or is the world easily sorted into black and white, good or bad, as his friend Dr. Adam Stanton believes? Stanton, the son of a former governor, goes to work for Stark at Burden's urging, because he believes it's right to run the hospital that Stark envisions as a haven for the poor and sick. But he does so over his own convictions that Stark is an evil man, and that he is dishonoring the memory of his father by even associating with him. Burden is, essentially, caught between these two views, but fails to pick a side before it's too late to stop a chain of events that he himself has helped set in motion. The film was refreshing to me because my greatest fear was that the directors would shy away from this ethical meta-narrative, and instead make a movie run purely on the momentum of a fascinating plot. Instead, they give a good amount of screen time to establishing the moral questions the story struggles with, and I give them big props for that, because goodness knows that's not the stuff that sells movie tickets.

Sean Penn as Willie Stark is very good, if somewhat over the top. He plays with conviction the role of a man who truly, sincerely beliieves that he is doing good even as he lies, cheats and steals his way through the process, and has come to believe that he is a prophet. Even thought that's a little overwhelming at times, I'm not sure it's inappropriate for the character, who is meant to be larger than life, explaining in part why Burden can't tear himself away from his fascination with the man. As I've mentioned, I think Jude Law does a fantastic job as Penn's counterpart, and I'm not really going to get into the other characters, because ultimately this is a story about Burden and Stark.

If the movie has one major failing it is in the ending. It's my understanding that the filming of this movie was plagued by troubles from the start, and that the film was far overdue by the time it was finally done, but the ending is horribly rushed. I could live with that if I didn't feel like they wasted precious time with an ill-advised, drawn out, black and white sequence that I'm sure was supposed to heighten the drama, but could have been done without since the events themselves are dramatic enough alone. I felt that the time could have been better used had there been some overarching narration from Burden (Jude Law's character) drawn from any one of the book's many passages that find the Burden trying to sort out the meaning of all the destruction after the fact. Instead, the film ends with a replay of one of Stark's speeches, which is not only repetitive, but fails to strike the appropriate tone, since it implies that you are somehow supposed to leave feeling that Stark really was a great man and that the story ultimately glorifies him and his ways. That is not at all what the book leaves you with, so it's troubling that the movie insists on ending with a conclusion that doesn't really exist in the book.

So, up until the last 15 minutes, the movie is good. The condensations of plot neccesary to keep the movie from being 8 hours long are acceptable, and the film does a good job of balancing the external plot lines with internal contemplation by the narrator. Mixed throughout are images of crosses on the side of the road passed at breakneck speed by the car carrying Burden and Stark, which is a nice way of reminding the viewer of the spiritual issues being struggled with in the story.

Generally, I'd say the film is worth seeing and does not dishonor the book for the most part. But you should still read the book if you want to understand the ending. Remember: What you don't know can hurt you. And you wouldn't want to make Willie Stark your personal hero without having all the facts.

It recently came to my attention that both Kandid Kiwi and Motherhood had tagged me to do a meme, and I didn't know because I've been woefully behind in my blog reading lately. So in an effort to be a good Internet citizen, here are my answers.

Three things I am doing right now: Trying to feel sleepy enough to go to bed after taking a ridiculously long nap this (Sunday) afternoon, resisting the incredibly powerful temptation to long into my work email account and get a head start on Monday’s inevitable landslide of concerns, and watching “Mythbusters” with my hubby, Dan.

Three nicknames: Tuna Tummy, Big Girl (both of those childhood names given courtesy of my dad) and Hales, which you are not allowed to call me unless you are one of two people. You know who you are.

Three people that make me laugh: My friend Liz, all my siblings (I know that's four people, but they all slay me and I can't pick one.) and my husband, who is never afraid to look ridiculous if it will make me smile.

Three things on my floor: Two framed pictures I’ve been meaning to hang on our wall for months now, Dan’s tennis shoes, and a box of instant oatmeal I’m going to take to work with me for snacks more healthy than what’s in the vending machine.

Three things I can do: I can write a little, I can wiggle my ears, and I can make a mean roasted chicken thanks to Real Simple magazine.

Three things that I love (things, not people): Good books, clean sheets, and a perfect cup of coffee.

Three people I’m tagging: Charity, Bryonie, and Rebecca. You knew it was going to come to this, ladies.

I've been meaning to blog for about a week now that Time magazine recently had an edition (Sept. 18) that seemed tailor-made to make me thankful that I subscribe. First, the cover story was about the resurgence of Health and Wealth theology in the American church. It seemed to me to be very well done, and included a great sidebar contrasting the scriptures used by both sides of the debate -- Yes, God does want you to be rich, and No, He doesn't. Good stuff, and very good to see a major magazine tackle an issue that could easily be ignored.

The second thing that made me happy in that edition was an excellent review of All the King's Men. It's shorter and easier to read than mine, so check it out, and raise your glass to Time magazine. You know you love the media.