Lovely Shining in the Sun review

Cassie at Joyfully Reviewed has done a lovely review of Shining in the Sun.  She says

I wasn’t sure how I would feel about Shining in the Sun, given that Alex Beecroft is primarily a historical writer.  After reading it, I can only say I hope Ms. Beecroft decides to write another contemporary soon, because Shining in the Sun was excellent!

Which makes me very happy indeed   As does her description of the characters and the plot.  I’m curious to find that people seem to like Alec more than Darren, in general, though, because I like Darren more than Alec.  It’s interesting to know that author partiality doesn’t come through

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Saw Inception last night

and I may have a new fandom   What an excellent film!  I do like a film where I come away from it with a head that feels as if it’s been stuffed full of new and interesting things to think about.

I’m not a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio, and this hasn’t really changed that.  He’s a good actor, but I’ve yet to like one of his characters, and the only drawback to Inception was that I didn’t like him – and he’s the hero.  A lot of the emotional punch of the thing must come from his attempts to get over his wife’s death and make his way home to his children.  So the fact that I loved the film even without caring about the hero’s quest must mean that if you did care about him, it would be even better.

His not-quite-dead-enough wife was a fantastic character, though, and wonderfully scary.  Also the inception, which had – as a side effect – the healing of a man’s relationship with his unloving father, was touching and involving enough to make up for the fact that I didn’t care about Leo and his guilt issues.  Cillian Murphy played a blinder as the young businessman whose father’s last word to him is “disappointed.”  Is it kind of sad that I cared about the mark more than I cared about the hero?  I don’t know – it may just show that the film works on lots of different levels.

But what’s making me feel really fannish about the film is the performances of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy as the team’s point man (Arthur) and identity forger (Eames).  Not only do they hit my competence kink fair and square, being extremely clever and good at what they do, but Arthur is a slender zero-gravity action hero in a smart suit, and Eames is an amused, slightly cynical but soft at heart, gender-bending con man.  And he’s English, without being evil!  Marvel of marvels!  I was waiting, all the way through, for him to betray everyone, and then he didn’t, and I was amazed (and grateful.)

They clearly have this lovely,  longsuffering relationship with each other that I badly want to see slashed.  And surely the fact that at one point Eames turns himself into a woman (it’s a dream-world, and turning himself into other people is his speciality) and attempts to pick up the mark must mean there’s an infinite variety of interesting possibilities to play with there.

There’s a lovely little Eames & Arthur moment at the end of this trailer which provided me with one of the biggest laughs of the film.

Here is a much better review than mine, if you are wondering what on earth I’m waffling on about.

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