Anyways, it seems most of these "chapter books" are aimed at little girls. Most of the series I saw featured girl characters. The boys seem to have to make due with generically illustrated pap about mouse detectives and dinosaurs. The girls on the other hand get awesome characters like Clarice Bean, the clever girl with the shifty eyes who is constantly mortified by the arbitrary stupidity of school, but who puts up a valiant resistance, thanks to her imagination, her turbulent friends, her excentric family and tips from superspy Ruby Redfort, her favorite heroine. This series is the best by far that I've read. Very clever and sensitive and humorous. (And British, unsurprisingly...) I had seen picture books by Lauren Child, the author, and never read them because I thought the illustrations were ugly. But now I see they are just right for these types of stories: a visual punctuation made of found images and typography and faux-clumsy drawings that are meant to look like the work of a child. I can understand why children would like them. They are quite artful but seem so immediate.
Also, I rented Tabloid, the Errol Morris documentary about a feisty young American former beauty queen who falls hopelessly in love with a mormon tool and ends up kidnapping him (in England, in the late 70's) to have her way with him and wrest him away from the farcical cult that controls him. The film is built around interviews with her and with people who either helped her or reported on her for tabloid newspapers. It is a wonderful film. The girl, who is now middle-aged, tells her story in a very engaging and lively way. It is the story of her great love affair. In it she comes off intense, slightly excentric but charming. And we, the audience, are charmed. We subscribe to her version of the facts: a naive but willful romantic young virgin, using her guile and the pied piper song of her blond pulchritude, innocently "kidnaps" her lover as a lark.
But then the first twist is revealed: she had actually worked as a glamour model and perhaps a sex worker in LA. And she was quite adept at getting men to do things for her, including helping to kidnap her lover at gunpoint. And indeed the kidnapping seems now actually more serious than she had let on. Sinister shadows and lies... The viewer understands that he has been fooled; that he has been seduced like the other men she has run into. It also becomes more apparent that she is not just a bit excentric but must be, as one of the interviewees puts it, "barking mad." It is a nifty trick, this sudden shift, this sudden revelation of a depth unsuspected.
But what is even better is that there is yet another surprising twist. In the third part of the film, she explains how she has never married or had another relationship after the dissapointment of her love affair with the mormon. (She was briefly imprisoned. He married someone else...) She has become an lonely older woman and we feel for her. She is very sympathetic. She tells the story of how she bought this guard dog to keep paparazzi away from her, but that the dog was poisoned and went crazy and attacked her, nearly mauling her to death, and that she was only saved in-extremis by the bravoury of her other dog, the little Booger. And it is again as if a trap door has opened, revealing a new abyss of suffering and loneliness this time. She heals with the help of Booger and when he dies, she flies to Korea to have him cloned...
So it goes 1) little weird anecdote, 2) we discover we have been fooled by her charm and liveliness but that there is something more sinister lurking and 3) but beyond that there is a suffering humanity that is deeply moving. Her story is weird, but she forces compassion and a kind of bemused admiration.
This is a very crafty, sad, wonderful film.
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