Friends With Money

• Jennifer Aniston
• Joan Cusack
• Catherine Keener
• Frances McDormand
• Directed by Nicole Holofcener Full Screen 88 minutes

Explores the long friendship between a group of adult women and the changes in their relationships that occur as their financial situations fluctuate.
Genre: Feature Film-Comedy
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-NOV-2007
Media Type: DVDWith her third feature, Friends With Money, writer-director Nicole Holofcener continues to develop one of the most distinctive voices in American independent filmmaking. While not as purely satisfying as her previous films Walking and Talking and Lovely and Amazing, Holofcener's third feature is admirably ambitious in establishing a diverse and dynamic range of relationships among long-time girlfriends, their spouses (for better and worse), and the way in wh! ich money (or lack of it) affects them all. The have-not of the group is Olivia (Jennifer Aniston), a teacher-turned pot-smoking housecleaner in the upscale neighborhoods of West Los Angeles. She's drifting, uncertain of her future both professionally and romantically, while her friends Franny (Joan Cusack), Christine (Catherine Keener), and Jane (Frances McDormand) cope with the relatively enviable problems of wealthy discontentment. They've all got personal crises to resolve, and while Olivia juggles the affections of a likable louse (Scott Caan) and a lonely slob who's secretly rich (Bob Stephenson), Holofcener taps a rich vein of humor and melancholy as these women go about their daily routines, attending benefits, chatting over meals, and doting over Olivia as the "needy one" in their closed circle of friendships. All of this is richly observed and wonderfully acted (with male costars played by Greg Germann, Jason Isaacs, and Simon McBurney), but reaction to Friends! With Money is strictly a matter of personal taste. Holofc! ener isn 't telling a story so much as examining lives in various states of disarray, and she offers no false comforts or simple resolutions. Like life, Friends With Money just continues on its way, with some friends happier than others. There's plenty of truth to be found, if you know where to look.--Jeff ShannonJennifer Aniston, Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand and Joan Cusack star in a film the New York Times hails as "a bittersweet comedy about the drama of being alive . . ." - Manohla Dargis. FRIENDS WITH MONEY - the story of four best friends whose comfortable lives are thrown off balance as the realities of early middle age set in. It paints a painfully hilarious portrait of modern life in the class-sensitive west side of Los Angeles. Written and directed by Nicole Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing), Friends With Money was the Opening Night Selection at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and is being hailed as "Smart, witty and alert." - Peter T! ravers, Rolling Stone, "Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted" - Allison Benedikt, Chicago Tribune.

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Girl with a Pearl Earring, Deluxe Edition

• ISBN13: 9780452287020
• Condition: New
• Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!

A Deluxe Edition of the National Bestseller with Over 2 Million Copies Sold:
• Eight Pages of Full-Color Plates Include Every Vermeer Painting Discussed in the Book
• French Flaps
• Rough Front
• Larger Trim Size
• Premium Stock
• With a New Foreword

Celebrate Tracy Chevalier’s modern classic Girl With A Pearl Earring, featuring a gorgeous new edition illustrated with eight pages of Vermeer’s masterworks. History and fiction merge seamlessly in this luminous novel about artistic vision and sensual awakening. The story of Griet, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with a genius as she herself is immortalized in canvas and oil, is new a! gain.With precisely 35 canvases to his credit, the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer represents one of the great enigmas of 17th-century art. The meager facts of his biography have been gleaned from a handful of legal documents. Yet Vermeer's extraordinary paintings of domestic life, with their subtle play of light and texture, have come to define the Dutch golden age. His portrait of the anonymous Girl with a Pearl Earring has exerted a particular fascination for centuries--and it is this magnetic painting that lies at the heart of Tracy Chevalier's second novel of the same title.

Girl with a Pearl Earring centers on Vermeer's prosperous Delft household during the 1660s. When Griet, the novel's quietly perceptive heroine, is hired as a servant, turmoil follows. First, the 16-year-old narrator becomes increasingly intimate with her master. Then Vermeer employs her as his assistant--and ultimately has Griet sit for him as a model. Chevalier vivi! dly evokes the complex domestic tensions of the household, ru! led over by the painter's jealous, eternally pregnant wife and his taciturn mother-in-law. At times the relationship between servant and master seems a little anachronistic. Still, Girl with a Pearl Earring does contain a final delicious twist.

Throughout, Chevalier cultivates a limpid, painstakingly observed style, whose exactitude is an effective homage to the painter himself. Even Griet's most humdrum duties take on a high if unobtrusive gloss:

I came to love grinding the things he brought from the apothecary--bones, white lead, madder, massicot--to see how bright and pure I could get the colors. I learned that the finer the materials were ground, the deeper the color. From rough, dull grains madder became a fine bright red powder and, mixed with linseed oil, a sparkling paint. Making it and the other colors was magical.

In assembling such quotidian particulars, the author acknowledges her debt to Simon Schama's classic study! The Embarrassment of Riches. Her novel also joins a crop of recent, painterly fictions, including Deborah Moggach's Tulip Fever and Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue. Can novelists extract much more from the Dutch golden age? The question is an open one--but in the meantime, Girl with a Pearl Earring remains a fascinating piece of speculative historical fiction, and an appealingly new take on an old master. --Jerry Brotton

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