Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. The culture vulture is back with us. April Wallace, how are you? April?
Wallace: I'm great. How about you?
Kellams: Very good. You make recommendations. You also make us think about something every time you visit.
Wallace: I do. Sometimes I give you a heads up, sometimes I don't.
Kellams: That's right.
Wallace: This time I think I did.
Kellams: You did?
Wallace: I'm curious about a book that you thoroughly enjoyed as a child, and it could be one that impacted you or just one that you reread a lot or that you would even read now.
Kellams: So two answers. One from when I really couldn't read yet, and that's "Go, Dog. Go!"
Wallace: I love that book.
Kellams: So good. Yeah. And I can still look at it today and be charmed by it. And then when I could read, I think we were assigned maybe in third grade, "Black Beauty."
Wallace: Oh, yeah.
Kellams: And it was the first time I realized a novel or a book could be, you know, could transport you. Because when you're learning to read, we read about Dick and Jane and Spot, and that helped you get words, but it. I didn't really care if Dick or Jane.
Wallace: It didn't transport you.
Kellams: It didn't. But "Black Beauty" did. And I remember being in the middle of that book. Thinking, I want to know what happens next. And that initiated, I think, my love of reading. How about you?
Wallace: Oh, it's such a Sophie's choice. But there are a few. There are a few that really impacted me. My kids do love "Go, Dog. Go!"
Kellams: So good.
Wallace: It is. Some that always stuck with me were, well, anything by Roald Dahl, but especially "James and the Giant Peach." I think that got me into such a fantastical world. That it was kind of like magic. It was amazing that suddenly words could be, you know, your ticket to an alternate universe.
And I really liked any author that did not talk down to kids, even inadvertently. They don't. The ones that don't shield you from emotional pain or deeper feelings. So I think Roald Dahl does a good job of that. But also Lois Lowry, "Number the Stars."
Kellams: Lois Lowry, okay.
Wallace: And especially "Tuck Everlasting." I think some school teachers make you read this now, but I don't think that was the case when I was going through school. And it was probably the first that gave me a, like more of a chance to think about your mortality, but in a more thoughtful way, not just being dead is bad, you know?
Kellams: "Old Yeller."
Wallace: So those open doors for me.
Kellams: It sounds like we had similar experiences.
Wallace: I think so.
Kellams: And I still enjoy that with books now that will transport or bring the fantastic or make you think about things like mortality.
Wallace: Yeah, absolutely.
Kellams: What have you got for us for recommendations?
Wallace: Well, you know, this is my favorite time of year to go to the movies. Like, I think it's better even than going to the movies in winter, because in winter it's kind of hard to leave your house.
Kellams: Mhm.
Wallace: It gets really comfy there, you know, in summer, everywhere is hot. And except for the movie theater.
Kellams: That's right, that's right.
Wallace: So this weekend, I took my kids to see "Minions & Monsters."
Kellams: This is part of the franchise, right? The "Despicable Me" franchise.
Wallace: Yes. And you know, I'll be honest, I don't usually look forward to the times that I take my kids to movies. It's the only time they can drink soda. I mean, for one. But also, like kids movies just don't do it for me the way it used to. But this one totally did.
I mean, maybe it's partly because I did love the "Despicable Me" franchise. As a recap, you know, it's about a super villain who inherits a few kids. So he has to be both evil and also snuggly. You know, it started in 2010 and I was living with one of my best friends and she had a toddler. So we watched a lot of "Despicable Me." And the first one Gru tries to steal the moon, right?
Kellams: I've seen that one.
Wallace: Yes, came out in 2010. And the second one, he tries to stop a mutating serum from being unleashed, but he also falls in love and gets married.
Kellams: I see.
Wallace: And then in the third, he and the wife are fired from the Anti-Villain League. But they fight to get there.
Kellams: Yes, indeed.
Wallace: Yes. They fight to get their jobs back while Gru meets his long lost twin, Dru, and they fight a supervillain together. Try to get back the diamond, but he has to teach Dru how to be bad.
Kellams: I see.
Wallace: while also being a father. Well, this is not about Gru. This is one of the Minions spinoffs. So the first Minion spinoff came in, I don't know, 2015. And it was the history of those adorable yellow creatures that helped get the evil done.
Kellams: Okay. And I think their minions, because they're his lackeys.
Wallace: Yes.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: "Minions & Monsters" is all about the minions. No Gru. Only at the credits. Don't tell your little people, but Gru appears in the credits. And he doesn't appear before that because it's set before he was born.
Kellams: Oh, it's a prequel. Okay.
Wallace: BG. Before Gru. It's like in the 1920s and I think you'll understand why I loved it so much when I say that it's a movie about making a movie in which also another movie is made. So they meet a filmmaker, they get hired for a movie set. The minions. And of course, they almost immediately get fired. And by some weird happenstance, they get rehired and then they get fired again. You know, classic slapstick minion stuff.
But I knew this would be a little different because the opening montage has pioneering films in it. Like minions are imposed onto these films that we, if you took like a film course, right?
Kellams: Just like "The General" with Buster Keaton or "The Phantom of the Opera?"
Wallace: So yeah, it's got like, it starts with Eadweard Muybridge's "The Horse in Motion," which is a late 1800s. I mean, that it literally is a horse galloping.
Kellams: Yeah.
Wallace: Yes. Lumière brothers. "Workers Leaving the Factory." "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat" and Georges Méliès' "A Trip to the Moon."
Kellams: Yeah.
Wallace: So when I saw that, I immediately knew, like, this is going to be a little different minions movie. But as we go along in the storyline, more references crop up and I just kept leaning over to my husband like, oh my gosh, did you catch that one? There's a Cyclops. So it echoes "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" from 1958.
Kellams: Ray Harryhausen.
Wallace: Mummies and creatures from the Universal horror library.
Kellams: Go on.
Wallace: Like "The Mummy" and "Creature from the Black Lagoon," which was 1954. There is a primary monster antagonist who has a bunch of eyes and is called Irene, and it's a nod to the 1958 sci-fi "The Blob."
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: And "Citizen Kane" and "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Matrix."
Kellams: It's okay. "Minions & Monsters" getting a big thumbs up.
Wallace: Something else that I watched this weekend was "The Four Seasons," Tina Fey.
Kellams: Uh, huh. It's based on the Alan Alda movie from the early eighties, I believe.
Wallace: Really? Okay.
Kellams: Yeah. Alan Alda, Rita Moreno, Bess Armstrong, Carol Burnett.
Wallace: Very good. I'll have to go back and watch that now. I enjoyed it very much. You're right. Tina Fey is kind of the main central character. Everyone's connected to her. There's three couples. Will Forte plays Jack. Her husband, Steve Carell is Nick, who is more like we were talking about the other day, the character that you are not going to like.
Kellams: Right.
Wallace: But you're not supposed to like him.
Kellams: Right.
Wallace: He's married to Anne. And the first episode, they're celebrating 25 years of marriage, but it implodes in the first episode. And there's Danny and Claude, a gay couple. And then there's Ginny, who is Nick's affair, who becomes his new relationship. Ginny is a dental hygienist. She's 32. Squats are her personality. She loves yoga. She doesn't quite fit into the friend group, but she's trying very hard.
So it has a lot of the drama of a bunch of couples who get together. Three of them are connected because they all went to college together, so they have a rapport that you cannot replicate just by meeting and coming in. And so it's a lot of scenarios in which like, you're not quite sure how to work through this in your marriage, but you just can't help but tell your best friend what you're dealing with, you know? Shenanigans ensue.
Kellams: And it's four seasons. So every couple of episodes is the friend group doing something either in summer or spring, winter or fall. And things happen. Life happens to these characters.
Wallace: It does. I don't want to ruin it for anyone who's not been into season two, but yeah, things change a lot.
For a book this week, I am deep into "Whistler" by Ann Patchett. She is one of the rare authors, I think, who does both fiction and nonfiction equally well. She writes more fiction than non. But the pandemic did bring a beautiful set of essays from her personal life called "These Precious Days." Some other essay styles that she did before, like "This Is a Happy Marriage," were fantastic. She wrote one about her best friend, Lucy Grealy, another really amazing author.
And "Whistler" is fiction. And if you've seen it on the bookstore shelf, it has a beautiful painting of a horse. And just know the horse doesn't have a huge role in the book. It has maybe 10 or 15 pages of airtime, but honestly, it moved me to tears. And I do not cry for every book. I really don't. So it's a very effective small part of the book.
It's really about a woman named Daphne who is, you know, an English school teacher for girls prep school. And she has reconnected with Eddie Triplett, who is her second stepfather, a very brief role in their family's life. Eddie is kind of like an old school publishing book editor. And he was the stepdad who was closest to her heart. They just got along the best of any of them, but they were also similar to each other. They both wanted to be writers. They both just connected on an emotional level. But he was a very small, calm chapter of her life.
And suddenly as an adult in her 50s, she happens upon him again and they start to work out a family mystery. They had been involved in a car accident when she was young, and it was at the same time that her little sister had an appendectomy. After everyone got out of the hospital, her parents divorced. This stepfather and her mom divorced, and for the rest of her life. Until we meet Eddie again, she assumed that it was her fault. Which is a very common thing for kids to feel. But it was a lot more direct. Like her mom had told her, it was because Eddie got you in that accident. I can't have him taking care of you and your sister. Something to that effect. But when we reconnect, we learn a lot more.
Kellams: Any book with her name on it is worth picking up, but it sounds like she's done it again.
Wallace: I think so.
Kellams: So we are in the dog days of summer now, and you've got children who will probably be going back into school pretty soon.
Wallace: Yes.
Kellams: Does that change anything for you with reading habits?
Wallace: Oh, I get to concentrate a lot harder.
Kellams: Very good. April Wallace is our culture vulture. Thanks for coming back.
Wallace: Thank you.
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