01-20-09 The End of an Error

Margot at the Wedding

Jen must have said "These people are nuts!" 2-3 times during our time watching this movie on dvd. I think that statement sums up this film quite well.

The second effort from Noah Baumbuch whose first feature was THE SQUID AND THE WHALE; another excellent film. This movie dealt with one of my all-time favorite subject matters for films and books: broken people and the connections that they try to make. Although it is mainly a character piece, you had this sense of anxiety that you didn't know what the hell was going to happen and I absolutely LOVE that feeling when it happens since it seems that at least half the crap that comes out is aimed at the lowest denominator. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh were fantastic as these estranged sisters that get together for a weekend wedding between Jennifer and Jack Black. Yes, I know, but don't be scared. As god-awful as Jack was in King Kong, he is pretty good here, though he is playing a bit of an annoying asshole, so maybe it's not much of a stretch?

This is the first movie in a while that still has me thinking about it days later. Check it out if you love great films.

BTW- You can google to find out about any movie, I am not going to write a plot synopsis for a movie that I blog about!

Check it out....

http://www.margotatthewedding.com/site/index.html

Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences

I had off for President's Day, so we decided to go to a museum that we had nevr been to before and had my dad (Pap to Zoe) come along with us. It is located in center city Philly diagonally across the street from the Franklin Institute. It was difficult to walk past that one since they apparently have a cool "The Tech of Star Wars" exhibit there right now and cool 2 story high banners with the Death Star, TIE and X Wings on it and Darth's helmut in the stairs (the part that you don't walk on), so it had a cool optical illusion look to it. But Zoe is a little young (YET) for that so we moved on.

The Academy was pretty cool. It turned out to be bigger than it looked from the outside with exhibits on 4 levels. At first I was a little leary since the first section we visited was animal diaramas with stuffed moose, tigers, etc. and Dad and I joked that it looked like the Zoo of the Future ala Soylent Green. This is what animals used to look like!

As we discovered the museum, Zoe loved the life-size T-Rex and other dino skeletons as she loved this picture book (with no text) about a bird that visits a dino museum and imagined the dinos coming to life. There was also a butterfly room that you could walk through that was really cool. A few of the big ones were bigger than some birds. All in all, a good day and the almost 6o degree temp made for a nice, albeit weird feeling day to be walking around in un-typical Feb weather.

The Acadeny of Natural Science's Website
http://www.ansp.org

PostSecret

One of my favorite websites. "PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mailin their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard." Jen and I visited the Reading Art Museum a few years ago and they had a huge installation of hundreds of post cards from Post Secret. The site gets updated every Sunday and i always check it out since I am 2 cheap to buy the books they publish. Check it out.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Zoe and I sat and watched the last 25 minutes or so of the 1971 Willy Wonka film and surprisingly with no animated Dora, Diego or Kai-lan ( newest Dora-like clone from China) to be found, she sat still and watched Viloet turn violet and the Oompa Loompas sing a few songs. I got to hear my 2 favorite quotes including, "We are the musicmakers and we are the dreamers of dreams."

I liked the newer Depp version where Depp plays him so oft-kilter and even got it as a freebie for HD-DVD where it looks stunning, but the sentimentality and the nostalgia factor of the 1971 version keeps me coming back. I read the Dahl book to my classroom every year and we usually watch both versions throughout the year.

Wilder just makes the movie for me and even as a children's movie from the early 70's, it is still pretty tweaked. I mean the riverboat section with Wonka manically singing:

"There's no earthly way of knowing / Which direction we are going / There's no knowing where we're rowing / Or which way the river's flowing / Is it raining? / Is it snowing? / Is a hurricane a-blowing? / Not a speck of light is showing / So the danger must be growing / Are the fires of hell a-glowing? / Is the grisly reaper mowing? / Yes, the danger must be growing / 'Cause the rowers keep on rowing / And they're certainly not showing / Any signs that they are slowing."

That ends with Veruca's great line; "What is this, a freak out?" is just classic.

C'mon.............April 1st!!

Obama '08

You're gonna need a bigger boat

Roy Scheider passed away at the age of 75. I don't think a year goes by that I don't watch JAWS. I have always been quite the movie freak and self confessed Star Wars geek, but when I am asked what my favorite film is; my gut reaction is always JAWS. I think it is a near perfect film based on a book that frankly was not that great. Scheider's other amazing films include All That Jazz, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups ( one of the best car chases ever filmed), 2010 ( I don't even think it's cool to like the sequel to 2001, but I did), Blue Thuner ( ditto) Sorcerer, and many more. He will be missed by film fans everywhere.

K.

Do you believe in Crake?

I just finished this book last week and I can't stop thinking about it and that hasn't happened for a while with a book. Last year I was obsessed with The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Oryx and Crake is an astonishing look at an apocalyptic future ravaged by bio-engineering gone astray. It has remarkable characters and tells a dual story; one being the story of Snowman, a survivor trying to eke out a meager existance after the fallout of the world and the second are Snowman's recollections of the dystopian past and what led up to this future reality for the world. this book will stay with you for a long time.

In looking for a pic of the book's cover for this post, I found this artist's website that had a couple of really cool illustrations from the book. He calls them a "personal project" and I think they are great. The artist's name is Jason Courtney. Check out his website at http://www.perdador.com



Here are the 2 that I loved the most (left click for a bigger image):

Lancaster Science Museum

Zoe and I went to check this out on Friday afternoon after hanging out with Jenine in my classroom. I tried to stay away from home to give Jen some valuable painting time since my mom is visiting Karen down in FLA until 02/19.

The Science Museum consisted of mainly one very large open factory like space. It was free for me being a teacher and Zoe was free due to her age, so that was nice. Zoe liked the Blue Man instruments and the ball trackes that you could move around. She also enjoyed this section that had air in tubes and little styrafoam balls that would shoot out if you put your hand over the holes. Pretty cool. I will probably take my LSS classroom sometime in May.

K.

Here Zoe calculates the trigonometry data needed for her experiment to be a success.

Fun with gravity.....

First Post

So, I thought, what the hey, why not just start my own blog? How original, right? Jen's gotta bunch of them now ( I have linked them here) and even Zoe has one, so I thought I would start one as well.

As most everyone knows, I watch a lot of dvds, play a lot of games, and read as much as I can, so I thought it would be fun to start giving mini-reviews of all the input that I take in, etc.

I will post pics of Zoe and other random musings and I am hoping that by starting this blog, I can stay in touch with my friends a bit better. I am sorry , throwing a pig or whatnot at a friend on FACEBOOK just doesn't work for me. An although I signed up for a mysopace account about 3 years ago, I rarely visit it or update it. What is it about myspace that makes me feel so unclean when I visit it? I am not entirely sure. Ok, I gotta go. I will try to post a few times a week and will invite some friend to check it out soon.

Later.