Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

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Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

Vita and Virginia (5/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 110 minutes

R.

This is the story of the two women of the ‘20s who were involved in what might euphemistically be called a “literary love affair,” Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) and Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki). Although Vita was ten years younger than Woolf, at the time of their meeting she was the more successful writer. Even so, she worships the ground Virginia walks on, for some reason.

Vita is the aristocratic wife of a diplomat, Harold Nicolson (Rupert Penry Jones), who demands an open marriage with Harold and intentionally creates a scandalous reputation by having affairs with women. According to the movie she idolizes the relatively retiring and psychologically troubled Virginia, attracted by novelist’s eccentricity, genius and allure.

Written (with Eileen Atkins, based on her play) and directed by Chanya Button, while the acting is OK, the script is woeful. Much of the dialogue comes across as dramatic acting rather than real people speaking real words and expressing real thoughts. Of course it is also the story of the dubious morality of the Bloomsbury Group, a bunch of elites that included English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists, including Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, most of whom were bisexual at least.

The casting is dismal. If you look at pictures of them, Sackville-West and Woolf were two of the least physically attractive women of the era. Yet Arterton is gorgeous and Debicki is at least attractive, something that could not be said about Woolf. Maybe it makes for more of a visual feast, but it destroys verisimilitude.

Apparently, according to history, there was not a lot of wild sex between the two women. It is said that they only had actual sex twice, but they were intellectually deeply involved, exchanging steamy love letters while apart, which was often. So this has a lot of dialogue and quotes from a lot of the letters; in fact some of the dialogue is apparently from the letters which is probably why it sounds so stilted.

Eventually, Sackville-West was the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Woolf’s most famous book, “Orlando” (1928).

The ambience of the period is outstanding, but the film itself is slow and tedious, especially if you don’t give a fig about either of them.