Beasts of the Southern Wild: Magical Realism in the American South

I actually tried to see Beasts of the Southern Wild while it was still in theaters; my friend and I actually got together to go and the theater was sold out. We ended up seeing Celeste and Jesse Forever, so it was not a total loss by any means, but one of my biggest regrets about this awards season was having seen so few of the nominees before the ceremonies, particularly this show. It's odd to cheer for a film you haven't even seen yet. I can't completely blame the sold out theater, though--I did get the DVD from Netflix before the Oscars and I still didn't watch it in time.

After all of that anticipation, of course Beasts was not exactly how I expected it to be in my head, but it was a fantastic movie. Much has been said about star Quvenzhané Wallis' Oscar nominated performance, making her the youngest actress nominated for the award. (I find it very interesting that Emmanuelle Riva's nomination this year also made her the oldest person nominated for Best Actress--there seem to be far fewer Best Actor nods at such far ends of the spectrum, and I wonder if it isn't telling that really juicy roles for actresses come with roles when women are not seen as romantic interests as much, but I digress.) Beasts is proof positive that waiting for the ideal people to make a film can make or break it.

BASS 2012: "North Country" by Roxane Gay

I've been reading a lot of short fiction lately, and am only holding out until March to get my hands on some more (I cannot resist the lure of Karen Russell, particularly after Michael Shaub called Vampires in the Lemon Grove "magnificent" and "flawless.") and I am loving it. I've never gorged myself on short fiction, but I've always enjoyed it. I think one of the things that really strikes me is that with good short fiction, I can get everything I get out of a good novel, but in concentrated form. Perhaps this is why, as a huge Stephen King buff, I love the novels but adore the short fiction. The last novel I read of his was Under the Dome, and I was massively impressed as usual by his talents as a world builder, but there is something to be said about a writer who can spend a few hundred pages setting up an elaborate literary ecosystem and can also do it in a single-serving chunk.

Currently I'm working my way through The Best American Short Stories 2012, which gets me out of my comfort zone a little since I'm not picking and choosing authors, or even subject matter--I pretty much go into the stories blind, with the exception of a couple that have since become title stories in anthologies of other works by their authors.