Reviews: Film & Fiction
You might not believe it, but there will come a day when you don’t want to go skiing this winter. Either your quads will be too blasted or the thermometer won’t crawl above zero, but you’ll spend one day entirely in your sweatpants, promise. And when that day comes, here’s some choice media for your big day in.
Watching Connect (Confluence Films, $30) is like participating in a round-the-world fly-fishing excursion while dosed with Viagra—each new location brings more love and excitement for fishing and, before you realize it, you’re fully aroused and already planning your next outing. Yellow Dog Flyfishing Adventures founder Jim Klug and Warren Miller Films cinematographer Chris Patterson start the journey in Japan, where streams near Tokyo house the ultra-technical yamame (masu trout), and end in the wild rivers of the Tanzanian bush, casting for tiger fish with jaws as big as a bear trap. With five more incredible locations you’ve probably never heard of, this film isn’t just eye candy for anglers—it’s a travel-planning seminar. Providing lush cinematography and great music to match, Connect serves to remind us all of the reasons we fish in the first place. confluencefilms.tv.
It’s always a trip to read about your home in a book. Doc (Skyhorse Publishing, $13) is a series of tales that take place in rural, mid-twentiethcentury Montana, mostly following the intimate—and sometimes gruesome—details of folks’ health in (then unpaved) Ennis. But the autobiographical stories told by Dr. Ron Losee are more than emotional recollections about Montana; they’re a reminder of what Montana is. While today we’re drowning in the politics of health care and pharmaceuticals, this book is a heartfelt reminder that health and life in the place we call home doesn’t have to depend on money or status. It’s the caring, adventurous, honest people and wide-open spaces that make Montana alive and healthy. And that’s what Doc does best—it helps us remember. From doctors to teachers to town drunks, we love what we do because we love where we live.
Pushcart Prize–winner and MSU professor Glen Chamberlain makes her literary debut with Conjugations of the Verb To Be (Delphinium, $12), featuring a dozen bite-sized short stories, published primarily in Montana Quarterly over the last ten years. Detailing small-town life in the fictional “dot on the map” town of Buckle, MT, Chamberlain builds a world filled with genuine Montana personalities while ruminating on life, love, birth, and death. With recurring themes and characters, she provides stories that intertwine into a pseudo-novel, but could also stand on their own as independent tales. Standout pieces include “Horse Thieves,” describing a mare foaling under the stars; and "Twin Bridges, Montana," detailing a young man frozen in an ice-skating pond behind an orphanage.
All titles are available at Country Bookshelf in downtown Bozeman.
