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Yesterday, Dan and I spent the day at Easton Town Center at the AMC Best Picture Showcase.  I decided to do a review of each movie on video.  So, today, I spliced them together for your viewing pleasure.

P.S.  The last clip was taken in the car and I didn’t realize that it was totally black.  You can still hear my voice though!

This week’s challenge was to watch some old movies from childhood.  In the end, I settled on three.  On Thursday, we watched Harry and the Hendersons.  On Friday, we watched Flight of the Navigator and on Saturday, we watched The Neverending Story (which I can never say without singing… The Nevereeeending Stooooooryyyyyy!  Lalalalalalala).

Harry and the Hendersons-

I don’t think I have seen this movie since we went to the theater to see it when I was about 6.  We didn’t go to the movies too often, so I remember this being really exciting.  I thought Harry would look pretty crappy 20+ years later, but I have to admit that I was still thoroughly convinced that he was really bigfoot.  I had forgotten about the little boy in the movie, but he really cracked me up, especially when he swore (awwwwwwe!  That was that kind of awe that gets progressively higher pitched.  You know the one you do to someone in first grade when their in trouble?  That one.).  I for some reason distinctly remembered when Harry ate the teenage daughter’s fifteenth birthday corsage and she yelled at him.  I like a tough girl, I guess.  Overall the movie wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was going to be (but don’t ask Dan about it).  It was decently well made and I liked all of the characters except for the bigfoot hunter that had a really bad french accent.  The thing I didn’t like about it was that it was 2 hours long!  I don’t remember it being that long and I’m kind of surprised a kids’ movie was so long.  I had to stop it before it was over and save the rest for another night because I was too tired.  Ha.  I’m old.  My favorite part when I got to the end though, was the baby bigfoot that came out of the woods when Harry went home.  Aww, baby things.

Flight of the Navigator-

As a kid, I think I only saw this movie a few times on television, but I remember thinking that it was so cool that the main character was taken away for 8 years and didn’t age (when he was found they asked him who the president was and he said “Jimmy Carter” and I was like who?  Wait, we’re gonna have a different president someday?).  I remembered each of the scenes pretty well once the movie got going, but I didn’t remember that he was sort of quarantined by NASA and then escaped (with the help of Sarah Jessica Parker, no less) and went on a joy ride in the spaceship.  Dan and I loved the awesome old green screen computers at NASA and the fact that they hooked his head up to the computers and someone shouted, “He’s communicating with the computers in binary code!”  I know I thought that the spaceship was awesome because the stairs magically melted out of the back of the ship (the graphics were definitely crappier than I remember though).  And, I also forgot that the voice of the spaceship was Peewee Herman.  Ah, it was pretty funny (Hey blimpo!  Too many twinkies!  Oink oink!).  On a crazy side note, years later when I went Disney World with my dad in college, the spaceship from the movie was relegated to a site to see as you waited for a ride.  It was looking a little less shiny.

The Neverending Story-

This was by far the best movie of the week!  I remember visiting the movie rental store and I knew exactly where this movie was because I wanted to rent it every time we went there.  It was in a little three-sided cubby, on the left hand side, two shelves up, right in my eye line, resting on a tiny plastic shelf and the wood-paneled wall.  I would pick up the box and look at the picture of the empress on the front and turn it and turn it and hope that one of my parents would ask if I wanted to rent it.  I loved that movie.  And, it was just as good as I remembered too.  Who doesn’t love a movie where the boy, instead of going to take his Math test, sneaks up into the creepy, cob-webby attic of the school and reads a book all day?  Although, no school attic I know has a wolf head on a stick in it, but whatever.  I loved all of the fantasy creatures in the story, the rock-biter, the racing snail, Valcor the luck dragon, and all the crazy creatures of Fantasia that went to the empress for help.  I also loved the idea of “the Nothing.”  “Was it a hole?” “A hole would be something, no, this was nothing.” Oh, and I loved Atreyu, who was much younger looking than I remember (ha).  And, I was so sad when Artex, his horse, got sucked into the swamps of sadness.  And I loved when he got to the Southern Oracle and the little funny people helped him.  And I was scared when the gamorck came after him.  Man, it was just such a great movie.  If you’ve never seen it, you should.  When I was looking it up, it turns out it was originally a German film.  That totally makes sense.

Looking back on all of these movies, I realize that they all had a fantasy element… a bigfoot, a UFO, a whole fantasy world.  Currently, I claim to like documentaries best and movies about “real events”.  I don’t know why I gave up on fantasy and imagination.  It’s sad, really.  Maybe I should reconsider.

The past few days, I’ve been watching a lot of movies and while I watch those movies, I’ve been crocheting.  Dan canceled cable while we were out in Arizona.  We finally decided that through hulu and Netflix, we had enough to watch for the rest of our lives.  It’s been kind of nice, choosing what to watch and seeing some really good movies.  It’s been relaxing too.  Plus, when the movie is finished, my house is quiet.  It ends.  Usually, I just let the TV run and run and remain noise in the background.  This is different.  I think I might like it.  Wednesday night I watched After Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise.  I liked the sequel just as much as the original and the end left me just as curious.  Thursday I had to work all day, but that night I came home, grocery shopped, and then watched Paper Moon.  It was really good and I think Tatum O’Neal really did deserve that Oscar.  I picked up Dan late last night.  He was pretty dismayed that the airline had lost his luggage.  I think it was a flight attendant conspiracy.  I had to work again today, and then tonight I wrapped gifts, and then Dan found a two hour and forty minute Ken Burns documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright!  So, here I sit, crocheting and watching another movie.  I like breaks.  Here’s the result of my movie-watching thus far:

Bicolorful!

Today, was another great lazy day in Phoenix.  I walked to a nearby theater to see The Princess and the Frog.  It was alright.  It was good as Disney movies go.  I was afraid that they were going to completely ignore the plight of African Americans in this country.  They didn’t, but still, getting to 2009 without a black princess is pretty insane.  Although I’m not so keen on the princesses in general, there should be equity in anti-feminism at the very least, right?

Heading home tomorrow… better get to bed.

Today, I had my last official class.  I had to talk for a few minutes about my final and I think I was pretty terrible at articulating what I had done, but hopefully when my professor reads it, she will not think I’m so inarticulate.  Darn nerves.  It felt good to be done though and tonight I sat around crocheting and watching documentaries on Netflix on demand.  I watched America the Beautiful, which was about our obsession with beauty, and Go Tigers!, which was a whole documentary about Massillon Tigers football (a town next to the one I grew up in).  I had no idea that this documentary existed and it was filmed the year I was a senior in high school.  But, I probably didn’t know because I don’t pay attention to football too much.  The movie showed how much the town and the school were focused on football while the school district was doing pretty poorly academically and couldn’t get a levy to pass.  Sweet.

Oh, and good news, while I was watching those documentaries, I received two emails that both of my poster presentations were accepted at a qualitative research conference in the spring. 

Even though I have less to read for next week (one class is canceled due to Veteran’s Day), I’m still feeling anxious about getting work done.  Probably because I assigned myself extra work to “get ahead” which I of course couldn’t get to, so now I’m getting nervous about the extra work that doesn’t really need to be done this week (but very soon, and it would feel great to be ahead, but now I just feel nervous because I am behind).  I’m stupid.

So anyway, Thursday after class I went to see bell hooks.  She wrote Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics.  She’s pretty famous and she was inspiring and funny.  The auditorium was standing room only.

Friday, I was at work all day, but at lunch we got to go see a canon fire on the statehouse lawn for Veteran’s Day.  Who doesn’t like to see a good canon every now and then?

And then last night, we finally got to see Where the Wild Things Are (Spoiler alert).  Overall, I thought the movie really sucked you into the world of the wild things, but it was a bizarre, sad world and I was hoping for something a little more joyful out of a children’s book turned movie.  I mean, did Carol really have to rip off Douglas’ arm?  And did KW really have to talk like an angsty teenager?  So weird.  Vicki wrote a really great review about how the movie sucked the joy out of the book.  I agree.  However, I did leave the theater in sort of a trance and I like that because it means that I was really in the world of the movie and, like Coraline, I really wanted to write a story when I left.  Did I?  No, but I was in the mood.  I also loved Max (he was a good little actor) and the music (Dan liked it too, so that probably means it’s actually decent).  I think it’s worth seeing, but not if you want to be uplifted and not with kids (some of it’s downright scary… see arm comment above).

Last night, I finally got to see the movie Julie & Julia.  I had been dying to see it because it is about two things that I love, blogging and cooking (in that order).  Dan and I had a buy one get one free ticket at the Drexel Theater, so we went there, not that we need a buy one get one free to go to that theater, since it’s just about the cutest theater I’ve ever been too, but the buy one get one free did sweeten the experience.

The Drexel in Bexley

The theater has a sweet old style from about the twenties, I’d guess, red velvet curtains, exit signs that look like they could be above a French metro station, old time music that makes you feel like putting your hair in an s-curl and smoking a cigarette at the end of one of those long plastic holders, you know, that kind of style.  The theater was lacking in patrons though, probably because the movie came out two weeks ago and, well, people like to go to mega-movieplexes for whatever reason, so Dan and I found ourselves sharing the theater with about twenty couples, most looking like they were born about the same time the Drexel opened.

As the trailers began, I knew I was going to like this movie.  As previously explained, Dan and I give a thumbs up or thumbs down during the trailers and for this movie, I was giving a lot of thumbs up, which means that I’m the target audience for this film (me and the old couples).  During the actual film, I found myself just sitting there with a goofy smile on my face.  I loved it. I loved how Julia was living in France in the forties and I got to see how beautiful Paris might have looked at that time.  I loved Meryl Streep as Julia Child, she was absolutely hilarious and made her come alive in a way that made me wish I could be her or be just like her, full of life and fearless.  I loved how Julie aka Amy Adams (though I don’t think this was her best performance) lived in a tiny apartment in Queens and created an adventure for herself.  I even loved how her blogging, like mine and many others, was a negotiation between what to share and what not to share.  I loved that it made me feel that I should enjoy life a little more , take pleasure in food, the company of others and each day as a small part of a fantastic journey.  And okay, I loved that it had a triumphant ending, I’m a big fan of triumphant endings.

So after it was over, we shuffled out of the theater behind what could have been my Grandma and Grandpa Richards, and headed over to a quaint old Graeter’s to experience a little of our own joie de vivre.

Savor it.

Last day of class, lalala, last day of class, lalala (I’m skipping right now).  Not that that means I’m finished with my work, but I’ll take what I can get.  To celebrate (sort of), Dan and I went to a movie tonight at the Arena Grand Theater.  We saw Up and it was a great movie.  When the bird was introduced and when the dog was introduced, Dan and I were crying laughing.  I won’t ruin anything for you, but it was good and you should go see it.  We walked to the theater and it was such a nice night.  On the way home, we stopped for coffee and here’s the view from there.

Downtown from the Short North.

Life is good.

First, a mom update: She’s up to 10 platelets per whatever unit, but she needs to be up to 50 before she’s allowed to leave the hospital.  They have her on a steroid I don’t know how to spell and are hoping that that continues to work.  Me too.  I talked to her twice today, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.  She still feels fine and has been doing lots of reading.

This morning, I walked to work again.  It was such a nice day and the sky was so blue.  Here’s a shot of the capitol building with some reflections from the windows on the building across the street.

The capitol building in the morning sun.

Work was uneventful and then I had to hurry home to meet Ben so that we could squeeze a run and shower in before we went to see a free movie.  Dan and Ben are pros at finding free movie events online and tonight Terminator Salvation was showing.  I wasn’t that excited about the movie, but I guess I can’t sit at home and read every night.  Plus, I remember going to T2 back in the day and thinking it was pretty amazing (but I think I was 12), so what the heck?

When we got there the line was really long and we were afraid that we might not get in (it’s first come, first serve).  Here’s Ben, Matt and Dan waiting in the long line.

Ben, Matt and Dan

This movie was at the AMC right near our house and what I especially love about the AMC is that you are allowed to bring in your own food.  So, I stuck some cans of pop in my purse, popped some popcorn and put it in a ziplock bag.  Dan was embarrassed, but I saved us like six bucks!  I’m not ashamed.

Saving money!

We did end up getting into the movie and it lived up to my unexcited expectations.  I wouldn’t recommend paying for it, but it was alright as a freebee.  Oh, and they did use the line “I’ll be back.”  Sweet.

I think everyone should have a day like my Thursday in their week. Free until 1:30, so I run, read leisurely, do laundry, etc. Then, class from 1:30-4, which gives me enough time to run some errands before I come home to be leisurely some more. I was in such a mellow mood and it was such a beautiful day that I barely got worked up over not being able to find a parking spot and being one minute late for class.

Tonight, Dan and I hung out while I did some school work and then we watched Rachel Getting Married. It was really good. It was shot sort of like a documentary, I loved the feel of the scenery (big old house in New England), and I loved the music especially during the wedding reception. It was sort of a depressing movie, but in a way that made you feel awake and maybe a little happy about it. I’m not sure how to describe it, but I liked it… a lot. Rent it.