Recommendations

I recently enjoyed two books and a movie enough to share them with you.

First, A Discovery of Witches.  I once stumbled into Diana Gabaldon's Outlander and loved it.  This reminded me of that but with a totally different premise.  I was totally transported. 

Next, the Informationist.  Think Jack Reacher, only in female form. 

And finally, the movie.  I pick all sorts of random movies to watch and many times they're nothing special.  But this was.  It was based on a real story of a man who threw his funeral party before he died and attended it.  Of course, where else could this happen but  in the South?  Robert Duvall.  Sissy Spacek.  Bill Murray.  Need I say more?

If you read or watch these, let me know what you think.

That's Entertainment

So.  I'm on vacation this week, the kind the term 'staycation' was coined for.  I'm liking it. I'm filling  with things I wish I could do during a work week.  So Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, I went to the movies.

First, I saw The Last Station.  Anyone know much about Tolstoy?  I didn't recall much.  The film is about the last year or so of his life when his devoted Tolstoyans were trying to get him to give his life's work 'to the people' instead of letting his heirs inherit.  Helen Mirren was fabulous, and Christopher Plummer has succeeded in replacing my previously permanent mental image of him as Von Trapp.

Next was Crazy Heart.  I was a bit dubious about this one for the same reasons I avoided The Wrestler last year.  But this one won me over.  The music was just great, and it seemed the picture it portrayed of an aging, alcoholic troubador was realistic. 

This next one was the one I intended to see all along.  Billed as a smart thriller (no on screen violence) and Hitchcock like, I was really looking forward to it.  The last movie I was surprised by was No Way Out, which was out when I was in college.  The ending to this one was equally surprising to me, but completely reasonable.  The only thing I took exception to was the premise behind the thing, which I won't go into because you really should go see this. 

The only problem is that this movie thing has become a lovely mid day escape.  I'm going to have to look for some more to go see while I can. You know, it's surprising how many people are in a theater during a weekday afternoon, too.  A colleague told me that we had an executive that would go to the movies, get a hotdog and sit in the movie for an hour or so before going back to work.  I always wondered how he could stand missing the end of the movie.

The Farmer's Wife

A few? Some? Several? years ago there was a series on Frontline/PBS called The Farmer's Wife. Okay, so it was 1998. Time's slipping up on me. Wanna make something of it? It was a documentary of the life of a farm family. In Nebraska I believe. It showed how hard they worked and how little they had even after all that work.

I was fascinated. Captivated. I would rush home from work on those days to see each week's episode. I'd watch it again on the second or third public tv channel available on cable. Their life was so different from anything I encountered. I had no idea that you could work so hard and still have so much left to get to. And these were family farmers. The heart of America.

There were the farmer, the farmer's wife and their daughters. They were the sweetest family. Not perfect but all trying, every day, to overcome the market, the bank, their shortcomings and the weather.

The farmer's wife needed some orthdontia and one of the viewers wrote to offer, she never asked, to treat her for free. She was able to complete her night courses to get a college degree and got a better job to help bring in money. The marriage went through a period of stress, and on the show at least, survived and seemed to thrive.

This was before "reality" tv. It was real reality tv. It was raw, and unscripted. It was their life.
What struck me was that this family was willing to share their lives with constant filming so that Americans could understand what many family farmers were going through.
That family had so much grace.

Of course the series came to an end. But I still think about them from time to time, and wonder what things life had in store for them. What their girls are doing now. How the famer and his wife got through, if they got through.

So I wrote this blog on what I remembered, and then I went google-ing. And now I know what happened.

I highly recommend it if you are interested in family farms and the folks who feed America. Netflix has the dvds if you are a Netflixer.

One of the things that drew Juanita to Darrel was his extraordinary passion for farming, and she is driven to help him achieve his dream so he can once again be the man she fell in love with. "Darrel lives and breathes ... farming," says Juanita. "There's a connection to the land that I know that most people don't understand. If somebody like that has to quit farming and do something else ... there's a love that's no longer there. And, to me ... a part of the identity of America is to have somebody so much in love with what they do ... that they're willing to doso much for it." From The Farmer's Wife

Cinema Paradiso

I realized early this year that I was falling behind in popular culture, and resolved to see more movies.

I have met the challenge but haven't exactly gone mainstream. Today's recommendation is called Cinema Paradiso. Yes it's in Italian. Yes there are subtitles.

But it's so much more than a foreign film with subtitles. Here's the IMDB description:

A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.

This doesn't even begin to do it justice. There is a little boy. A scamp. There is a censoring priest-it was just after the war. There's Alfredo who tries to be curmudgeonly and fails. I won't tell you anymore except you just need to watch it.

Welcome the magic to your living room.

The Lives of Others/La Dolce Vita

I have watched several movies over the past few days. Last night it was The Lives of Others which is a German film about life in East Germany and the Stasi. It was compelling despite the lurid yellow subtitles. It is the story of a Stasi agent and interrogator and the artists he is assigned to bring down. The lack of overt violence helps create more tension, I think and a great deal is left to your imagination mine is always happy to oblige. It seems to be all the more terrifying due to its focus on all the small intrusions and indignities the GDR forced on its citizens.

Because it is a film icon, I watched La Dolce Vita. The story is of a journalist who takes himself off the sidelines and inserts himself into the middle of the shallow, empty society life he covers. Two interesting things - Under the Tuscan sun refers to La Dolce Vita by inserting a character complete with fountain scene in it (don't tell me you didn't see Under a Tuscan Sun). The second is that there is a character in La Dolce Vita who must have provided Mike Myers his schtick (sp?) for Austin Powers. That's all I could think about as this guy pranced around. He was a friend to the actress who ultimately gets in the fountain and is echoed in La Dolce Vita. Again, this one had the lurid yellow subtitles, but it's surprising that they work. I guess it's to keep you from forgetting to read as you get caught up in the scenery.

So, two doses of "culture". It's been interesting to see that foreign films are telling the same stories we tell in our films, on tv and in newspapers. I'm sure that's the point - we're not all that different from each other.

Mamma Mia I'm slow!

Okay - I must be one of the last few women in America or the world for that matter to see Mamma Mia. But see it I did this weekend. LOVED it.

I have downloaded the soundtrack, pieced it with the broadway soundtrack where it left out songs from the movie, and that has been the soundtrack for my Labor Day weekend.

It made me remember how much I loved ABBA's music, and I could remember where I was and what I was doing when Mamma Mia, Waterloo, Winner Takes It All, Fernando (not in the movie), Dancing Queen all were part of the pop culture.

I want to share that with you, so click on Mamma Mia the movie and enjoy a synopsis of the movie.

And if for some reason, you haven't been to see it: take a girlfriend and Get thee to a theatre pronto. And if you have seen it, go again - the sing along version is coming out.

Mamma Mia it made me feel good!