Month: July 2013

Three sentence movie reviews: White House Down

I go into Channing Tatum movies with no expectation because sometimes he is very good and sometimes he gets all clenchy-jaw-declaiming-lines type acting.*  I’m happy to report that this falls into the very good category not just for CT’s acting, but for a very well-plotted action movie.  It was incredibly fun to see how the story kept the characters in the White House the entire time, plus the rest of the cast was quite fun too.**

Cost:  $7.00
Where watched:  Living Room Theaters (which seemed odd, they are very art house/foreign/independent.)

*He’s been much better, of late, but Side Effects was a return to his bad acting of yore.
**Maggie Gyllenhaal was a complete bonus, Herc from Friday Night Lights was one of the terrorists, I love that computer guy whenever I see him and Richard Jenkins is always a welcome sight.

Books read in May and June 1990

In the back of one of my journals are reviews of books read by me, written by my 15 year-old self.  I was clearly vacillating between the “greatest books everyone should read” list and the YA section of the library.

Here’s one page:

5/12/90
Salem’s Lot Stephen King
If you like vampires read this.  This also has about 40 characters and I could never remember who was who.  It was also very long. It didn’t hold my attention well. [3 stars]

5/29/90
Too Young to Die Lurlene McDaniel
Everything’s going great for Melissa until she gets cancer. [4 stars]

Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe
This is possibly the worst piece of literature I have ever read. Harriet Beech Stowe writes as though she is talking to a two year old.  Bleech.  I couldn’t finish it. [1 star]

6/10/90
East of Eden. John Steinbeck
Good book. [4 stars] Too hard to give a summary on.  Too much happening.

6/12/90
Angel Dust Blues. Todd Strausser.
I like this guy.  He makes things seem so real.  About a rich kid who becomes a drug dealer.  And who gets caught. [4 stars]

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.