Three sentence movie reviews: The Sapphires

Just what the doctor ordered for a summer afternoon.  Good songs, solid story, mostly female focus and excellent performances by all.  It was also interesting to find out at the end of the movie that the actual people the story was based on were pretty big activists for aborigine rights.

Cost:  $3.00
Where watched:  Laurelhurst, with mom.

Three sentence movie reviews: 2 Days in New York

Aside from Julie Delpy being the bomb, I wanted to see this because the trailer led me to believe that Chris Rock was the straight man and that was a rather intriguing concept to me.  And he was the straight man, standing up mightily to the comic turns of Delpy’s family.  I found this amusing, though not laugh-out-loud; and I also discovered by watching the commentaries that this is a follow up to an earlier film which I’ve now also placed on reserve at the library.

Cost:  free from library
Where watched: at home.

Essay: 20 year.

Summer of 1991, I was working the register at my first job.  It was afternoon and my shift almost over when I rang up the guy.  He was older, had a mustache and a full head of hair and looked very tired, but he had a certain glow about him. 
“How are you?” I asked the universal opening customer service question, reaching for his check.
His face brightened and he broke into a smile.  “I’m great!” he exclaimed.  Even at that early stage in my career, I knew that this level of enthusiasm is rather unusual answer in the customer service world, so I made further inquiries.  “I went to my 20 year high school reunion last night and it was so much fun.” he told me.
“Really?” I asked.  I hadn’t given much thought to reunions, being mid-high school career at that point, and also not really loving my school.  At the time, high school was just something to get through.
“Oh yeah.” the guy continued, “the ten year reunion was okay, but this was great.  Everyone had dropped the pretension of pretending that they were doing anything amazing and we all just caught up.  It was fun.”
I smiled at him, half wrapped up in the past and half wrapped in the present.
“So you should go to your twenty year.” He told me again. “Don’t miss it.”
I told him I would, and we parted, but honestly, that particular reunion was more years away than I had yet lived, so who really knew?  I made a mental note though.
About a year ago, thinking about the reunion that would happen next summer, I realized with a start that I was almost as old as that glowing guy with the beard.  And I knew there was no doubt I was going to the reunion.
So I went.  And it was incredibly fun.  After a tour of my school—perhaps my favorite event—my friend and I stopped by the pool across the street from my high school so she could have a mini-reunion with people in choir.  It was hot—the temperature hovered in the high 90s—and I was happy to see the snow cone shack from my childhood was still in existence, though now it was tricked out with air conditioning and higher prices.  I stepped up to order, because in that heat, ice and flavored sugar water is exactly what hits the spot.
The girl working the shack was beautiful in that way that teenagers never really realize they are.  She had black curly hair and big blue eyes and was incredibly tiny.  She inquired about my day and I mentioned I was in town for a reunion and had just taken a school tour of my high school.
“I go to Borah!” she told me after she established that the school across the street was the school I just toured. “I love Borah.”
As she packed the “snow” into a Styrofoam cup, we chatted about her life.  I asked what sorts of things she did at Borah and she smiled shyly and said that she had run for junior class president and so she would be doing that next year.  She also had plans for college and had done some college tours.
We talked about my college years as she poured the flavor onto the ice and she handed me my grape flavored snow cone.  I wished her luck at Borah and in college and wandered back to my friends to eat my snow cone.

A few days later it hit me that I had recreated my own 16-year-old experience, but with me on the “old person” side of things.  I wonder if she will remember our encounter 22 years later when it’s time to attend her reunion and I wished I had the presence of mind to tell her how fun it was to catch up with everyone and how grounding to see people I spent so many years with.

45RPM: “Misunderstood” by Wilco.

Where I match a song to a specific memory.

I did well in college, but had a terrible transition to full-fledged adulthood.  There were so many missteps in the years after college; bad job choices, bad “boy” (and “bad boy”) choices, bad substance intake choices, bad mental health in general.  This album, “Being There” hit me just right during that time, and this song probably best captures the sturm und drang of that period.  At the time, I worked for Whole Foods and was house-sitting for a coworker.  I could walk to his house from work, which was much better than the hour train ride it usually took me to get home.  One night after work, I had yet another crappy encounter with one of my not-good boy choices, walked home in the Cambridge darkness, ranting all the way, and blew in the house full of fury. Slamming this into the CD player helped, but not as much as moving across town–which I would do later that month–or moving across the country, which wouldn’t happen for a few years, but was on the horizon.

Three sentence movie reviews: Stories We Tell

Sarah Polley has been on my “to watch” list since I saw the movie Go, so I was going to see this documentary anyway, even if it didn’t have a very intriguing premise.    Polley did a great job of giving us glimpses of the key players without revealing too much information early on which paid off in that she kept pulling me further into her story as more details were revealed.  I feel conflicted about the “footage” of her mother, but not so overly so that it detracts from this very, very good movie.

Cost:  $4.00
Where watched: Laurelhurst Theater w/S. North.

Moonshine Mini Mart

 The second of three things of no real value that I can’t let go of in my wallet is a card for the Moonshine Mini Market.  My family would stop here on the drive from Boise to Portland and back.  My parents would buy us scratch lottery tickets (at the time Oregon had scratch offs and Idaho didn’t) and a treat, usually a candy bar or an ice cream sandwich.  Then we would pop up the street to get gas and be on our way.  Unfortunately, the day came when we drove up for our mid-trip pick-me-up only to find that the Moonshine Mini Market was no more.
 
It was as good as the rest.
 
I think Keith Moon and I share the same customer service philosophy.
 
I drove past the site and parked so I could walk back and take a picture.  And what should I spy but the sign!  The road is one way, sending traffic in the opposite direction, so the new owners of the site must have just replaced the side of the sign that the cars would see, leaving this a nice time capsule for me to discover.
And thus ends the record of my wonderful vacation.

Books read in June, 2013

There are a lot of picture books (6) padding out this list.  It was a great month for picture books–thank you librarian book group–and a big slog of a month for YA fiction.  Three of four YA books I found hard to get through.  But the one I liked is a damn fine example of YA literature.

Read
Tiger in my Soup
Kashmira Sheth & Jeffery Ebbeler
Read for Librarian Book Club
Great story for anyone with siblings. The illustrations are wonderful.

My Father’s Arms are a Boat
Sein Erik Lunde & I.M. Torseter
Read for Librarian Book Club
I loved the art in this; it was stark and beautiful.  The story was sparse and not the usual American picture-book fare. Probably because it’s not American.

The Museum
Susan Verge & Peter H. Reynolds
Read for Librarian Book Club
Very fun.

The Steadfast Tin Soldier
Cythia Ryalnt & Corace
Read for Librarian Book Club
I’ve always been disturbed by this story and this time was no different.

Ash Wednesday
Ethan Hawke
So the problem of being a recognizable actor who has also written a novel is that it’s hard to seperate the screen persona/actor from the main character, especially if the main character occupies the same general demographic as the author.  With Hawke’s first novel, I never successfully separated the two people actor/author and main character, which detracted from my enjoyment of said novel.  In this novel, I spent the first portion picturing Jimmy as Ethan Hawke, but eventually was able to discard this and wrap myself in the story.  Having said all that, I loved the “voice” in this story. It was hard-driving  and descriptive, took no prisoners and just kept rolling along until the end came.

The Summer Prince
Alaya Dawn Johnson
Read for Librarian Book Club
There were a lot of things of interest in this book: futuristic setting; matriarchal society; strange ritual; love affair; art; drama; social commentary.  But somehow, it didn’t hold together for me and I had trouble finishing it.  I think the problem stemmed from the fact I never had a really good picture of the setting. How did that pyramid city work, anyway?  Also, the ritual, which is the crux of the book, was explained in such vague and piecemeal ways it took a long time for me to understand it.  I found “the Aunties” to also be confusing.  There were a lot of them and it was hard to distinguish one from the other, plus they went by different names depending on who they were talking to.  The overall effect for me was a gem of a story glimpsed here and there through muddled execution.

The Different Girl
Gordon Dahlquist
Read for Librarian Book Club
This was one of those books to delight over, rip through and recommend.  It has an astounding opening chapter and the masterful storytelling kept dropping things here and there like breadcrumbs, pulling me along.  The prose was also quite pretty too, sparse and affecting.  Very well done.

A Long Way Away
Frank Viva
Read for Librarian Book Club
When I was little, my mother gave me a small book I could read to the end, flip over and then the last page of the book became the beginning of a new story.  It was delightful, and I’m pretty sure I still have that book kicking around somewhere.  Given my past with forward/backward reading, you won’t be surprised to find that I loved this picture book which can be read from front to back, or back to front.  There’s a lot to look at, making repeated readings necessary.

The Lucy Variations
Sara Zarr
Read for Librarian Book Club
Things I liked:  It was a window into the world of child piano prodigies and it’s been a long time since I’ve read a book with a main character who was very wealthy, which made for a nice change of pace.  Things I didn’t like:  as the novel wore on, I found it hard to care about anything happening and I felt the main dramatic device came too late and too abruptly in the story.

Flora and the Flamingo
Molly Idle
Read for Librarian Book Club
No words and pure delight.

The Whole Stupid Way We Are
N. Griffin
Read for Librarian Book Club
I didn’t like this book, though in discussing it with the book group I was reminded about some rather charming elements of the book that had gotten lost in my annoyance.  So there are good things and the overall feeling by the members in the group was that it was very, very good.

I was initially put off by the huge amount of profanity spoken by the main characters.  However, at about the same time I was reading this book, I also began reading my journals from late junior high and observed that the swearing level in the book was pretty much spot-on.  I had forgotten how much we swore at that time.

I felt like this book was a (too) long, (too) slow build to a climax that was then a brief flash and it was gone.  Aside from that problem, the author also threw in a confusing sentence or two in the last few moments of the book that left me wondering just what happened with one of the characters. This annoyed me too.

Three sentence movie reviews: The Heat

What I can I say, it was hot.  I was tired of driving and this was the next movie playing so I went.  It wasn’t a laugh riot, but was amusing and the two leads worked well together.

Cost: $10.00
Where watched:  Edwards theater in that funnily named place in downtown Boise.