Three sentence movie reviews: My Own Private Idaho.

This is not my favorite Van Sant film and watching it today it’s easy to reflect on so much that has been lost:  River Pheonix, gritty Portland, Keanu Reeves’ youth.  It’s a fun movie to watch from the perspective of glimpses of Portland past, and it’s gleefully weird in places.*  But overall, I find it to be a so-so story.

*That scene where River Pheonix dresses as the little Dutch Boy and cleans for/before his “date” comes to mind.  Also:  Flea!

Cost:  Free due to remodeled Baghdad promotion.
Where watched:  remodeled Baghdad, which looks and sounds terrific.

Baghdad Refurbished.


Before seeing a free showing of My Own Private Idaho, I heard the end of the lecture on the history of the Baghdad Theater.  I arrived for the lecture during the period when the Baghdad was going through a transformation to a “multiplex” which meant walling off the balcony for a separate theater and shoehorning a third theater, called the Back Door Theater, behind the main theater space.  All McMenamin’s movie screens show slide shows before their movies begin, and interspersed with the slides for the many McMenamin’s products are historic pictures.  I have been seeing the picture of the Back Door Theater for years and wondered about it.  Now I know.

This picture was a poster for a premiere that happened at the Baghdad:  They Live.  Among other things, this  forgettable movie had the involvement of the man who invented the propeller beanie.  Thus the explanation of the strange juxtaposition of these two pictures.

The history of the theater was quite interesting and I was sorry I didn’t prioritize listening to the entire lecture.

Three sentence movie reviews: Havoc

I came away from this movie thankful that I’m not wealthy and don’t have an over-privileged daughter who only finds “real” while slumming in the ghetto.  I can’t say I enjoyed this film; Anne Hathaway was good–she often “brings it”–but something was off. It may be that she didn’t look or talk like a teenager, yet many of her character’s motivations supposedly stemmed from being a teenager.

Cost: $2.75 from Videorama
Where watched:  at home.

Channing Tatum screen time report:  approximately 3 minutes, in the background.  And yes, that was why I picked this movie.  Only one more to go and I will have seen every feature-length film he is credited with on IMDB.  Unfortunately, that one is Supercross: The Movie.  It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 6%.  I watch them so you don’t have to.

Postcards from Virginia and Germany


Fill in the blank!  This is from Sara.  She reports improvement, which is always good!


This is from Arlette in Germany and she drew it for me.  It is made using a technique called “Zentangle.”  Each of the patterns has a name and she picked out four that spell my name:  PAradox, TRIpoli, CIceron, Aura-leah.  I love it!  Arlette reports the following facts about her:  drawing relaxes her, she loves hot chocolate and sometimes books make her cry.

I was interested in Zentangle and did a bit of research and discovered that not only did the library have books on the subject, there are three upcoming classes.  How about that for kismet?

Postcards from Belarus & Kauai


This is from Luyana and she is studying in Minsk. She told me how beautiful Belarus is.  This isn’t even my first postcard from Minsk.  People from Belarus love Postcrossing.

My Aunts are in Hawaii for their annual trip and Aunt Pat reports that “we have a nice cottage and a lovely view of the ocean showing a hammock tied to two palm trees.”

45RPM: 59th St. Bridge Song

Where I match a song to a specific memory

Sometimes I fall in love with a song, associate that song with a person and then because that song is imprinted on the person, I have a special place in my heart for that person.  I think the first time this happened with with Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th St. Bridge Song”, also known as “Feeling Groovy”

I had never heard it until a talent show in fifth or sixth grade.  But B., a boy who was (and is) a really good singer, wanted to sing it for the show and he recruited four or five other girls to sing it with him.  I was not one of them, though I wanted to be.  I loved a lot about this song, the nonsense melody ending in “feelin’ Groovy”, I loved how simple it was, and sweet.  The group even did some choreography to fit the singing and it looked great.  When I hear this song today, or sing it myself, I can still picture some of the choreography.

B. has grown up to be an outstanding guy.  And I will always remember him as a 12-year-old boy singing, “slow down, you move too fast.”

Snow in November. Or: How I learned that film people are annoying.

Across the street from my school, prop cars were parked in the lot and by the end of the day it looked as if snow had drifted all around.  It was pretty cool.  At recess that day, a guy with an earpiece came over and asked when the children would be outside and we told him the schedule.  “Okay,” he said, “We’ll try to work around that, but we really need to make this movie.”  Maureen and I shrugged.  It didn’t make a difference to us whether or not the movie got made.

The next morning the cars and the snow were still there.  But now they were intermittently making it snow.
 

I caught several pictures of the massive amount of standing around that is movie making.
 
Though it’s pretty cool to see the snow.
 
The trouble started at morning movement, when the phone rang and some guy from the production company explained that they were making a movie and could the children not have recess today.
Nope.
What about if we give a donation?
That would have been something to talk about before today.  Today is happening.  Schedules are set.
Can’t you just push back the recess?
Nope.
 
A man appeared at the door.
What if we donated $500.00 to the school?
At this point, I turned it over to my boss, who ran around to see if people would be okay with that.
Nope.  One teacher was hugely insulted by the offer.  And one class wasn’t there to say, either way.
So 4/5 recess was indoors, but 2/3 and K/1 gleefully ran about, while people with earpieces held their index finger over their lips and looked vaguely disgruntled.
 
The thing I find hard to believe is that they could plan ahead to take down the Absolute Vodka advertisements that are usually in the windows of the bar across the street, but missed the fact that a school and a playground were 20 feet away from their location. It’s not like this is the first time we’ve had the industry within a stone’s throw of our school.  Television films down here all the time and, aside from poaching all the parking spaces, they aren’t much trouble.

So if you see the movie Wild and come across a scene where Reese Witherspoon is shoveling “snow,” know that it was a lovely November day, where not 20 feet away children were having recess.

Postcard from Russia


This is from Elena in the city of Novosibirsk.  She sent me this quote “Let it be as it will be, because somehow, be done.  Indeed, there was never so that there was no way.”

She also writes “I am a student at the Institute of the lawyer.  Engaged in playing tennis and I love to create beautiful things with his hands.”

I love Postcrossing.