Day 2 Day radishes

August 24 Back from camp

A week last Saturday was PICK THE KIDS UP FROM CAMP DAY plus a birthday thrown in. There were a total of five children from two of our families getting off the boat that brought them from their Puget Sound Camp Fire camp. We waited in the hot sun for an extra 45 minutes while the boat made its way back through the Seattle boat locks. The two and four year old grandsons entertained us and the adults caught up on the news. We were anxious because there was one letter from camp from the most unlikely of the group saying how sad she was at camp. One grandson is shy, and we worried if he would find friends. Everyone got off the boat happy, having had a great time, and the shy grandson says next year he wants to go for 10 days. It was a grandparent day seeing everyone arrive home happy.

Parents and grandparents started along with the first kids who attended camp being snowed by how easy and well organized the camp was. We thought all that singing and clapping was very cleaver to divert the children from home sickness. But the oldest two grandchildren have now gone to camp for six years. Each year they come home with a little more information, and each year we become a little more savvy. This year however, we received phone calls about lice infestation, would Thing3 take the boat home, where was she to stay between sessions, counselors being fired, and the mental health of the children because of the firings.

The older campers had been building structures to fit 15 campers, and one leader brought his car into the meadow and allowed all of his 15 charges to get inside the car. This councelor did not get fired as he had asked his superior. But his immediate superior was fired on the spot. All of the counselors wanted to quit. Two left then and there, but most quit in advance but would wait until after the camp session was over, and this was the last session. The adults here at home are not totally understanding this. But we all now know more than we cared to know. All organizations seem to have their problems starting with the government and the church down to the “who is eligible to pass through the gate to the beach, down to why my husband will not tidy the chest that is always supposed be tidy.

Yet all seems to have worked out. There seemed to be something for everyone to talk about back at the dinner table at home. Most want to go back to camp.

****

I confess that no one but moi has proof-read this article going against my pledge to have someone do it. But the proofreader left, and Mr. Radish is working hard at getting his new fishing boots ready; I really do not like to ask him.

April 28 maybe/movies

On my continuing stretch of movies, I have two more.

Both are movies about boys needing fathers.

The first Dear Frankie, a Scottish film about a boy whose mother has made up facts about his father living on a ship. Then the ship actually shows up in his town, he wants to meet his Dad. While it is a good movie on it’s own, it is a five star when it comes to men. Very, very sexy male lead. It reminds me of being in high school and thinking you could save all those very naughty boys.

The other movie is actually a Masterpiece Theater piece, Goodnight Mr. Tom. It is the story of a boy who was sent to the country during WWII while the Germans were bombing London. He is deposited with an old man, and it is their story. It is an excellent family movie for those with kids eight and over as there is child abuse. Mr. Radish liked the movie. But then we actually know one man from London who was sent to live in the country during the war and have heard his stories.

April 4/ Chick flick list and more

Today I heard a woman on the radio and the discussion was worry.  She said that she had been in a bad car accident several years ago, and while she was laying on the pavement waiting for the ambulance, she thought about all the time she had wasted worrying about breast cancer. 
*******

While my husband has been gone, it has been a festival  of chick flicks, plus a few others.  Two were seen on the airplane.  Some I picked out myself. 

Enchanted: A true fairy tale.  It was on the airplane, and I was a little disgusted  with myself for watching it.  But on a subconscious level I must have liked it, as I thought about it for a while.  Must have been Patrick Dempsey. 

La Vie En Rose:  not a chick flick. This is a true story about the voice of a nation, Edith Piaf of France.   This is serious stuff with the actress performance, Marion Cotillard that is on my A+ list. 

August Moon:  Definitely a family movie.  It starts out slooooow.  The romance part of the story is really over the top, but the young actor, Freddy Highline ? is talented.  And the parts in the movie about music are interesting. Keri Russell is beautiful. But that can not save her character. 

Something to Talk About: This is an old Dennis Quaid/Julia Roberts movie.  Dennis is his old sexy darlingish self. Poor thing left by Meg Ryan.  I like Julia in the movie.  And as an extra bonus there is Robert Duval and Jena Rowlands.  I saw this about ten years ago, and will see it again before ten years are up. 

Golden Door:  A Martin Scorsese movie.  I highly recommend this.  It is a love story, but not a chick flick.  It is about people coming from Sicily to America and the  ship ride, and going through Ellis Island and their dream of a better life.  The movie has won many awards. 

Sweet Land:  I went to Hollywood Video yesterday and picked up three movies, which I discovered when I got home, that I had already seen two of them .  This is a charming movie.  Not as good as the above, but the love story is so tender.  And there is not so much as a kiss in the whole movie.  A mail order bride comes to a god forsaken farmland to wed a farmer, but because she is German the town does not like her and the Minister will not marry her. 

Tonight it is Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon in Rendition. 

February 25/ Oscars

Against my husband’s grunts and righteous sniffs, I watched the Academy Awards. It was reported that it was going to be the most boring Academy Awards ever, and that is just the way I like it. Just give me the facts and dresses. I grew up on Bob Hope, and after that I was done with jokes.

The dresses were beautiful. The wildest dress was worn by Diablo Cody, who wrote JUNO. I was happy to see what she looked like. I was wondering if her mammoth tattoo was permanent. It did go well with her dress. I was happy to see Javier Bardem , the son of Satan, kiss his mother. And she welcomed the kiss. I felt like my mother, Tilda Swinton should have worn lipstick. I wanted to cut off her sleeve. “This darling would look much better.” She did have an elegant haircut.

I do not know if there was a casting award, I tried valiantly to find it, but I give it to JUNO. That was the perfect cast.

I am not much into political speeches at the Academy Awards, but I liked Marketa Irglova’s speech. I felt she knew about which she spoke: art and suppression. She was charming, and out of her league in the glam department, but she carried on. Had she been given her time at the proper time, the speech might not have been important. But you knew that she fought back stage to say what she had to say. In this particular case, I appreciated it.

December 1/ Sin and the movies

Yesterday afternoon, I did go to the meeting for the week of contemplating sin, of the St. Ignatius study. There I convinced myself that my sins were pretty small. I was not thinking that I had much community sin either.

I came home and slapped a dinner on the table in 30 minutes. Then Michael and I sat down to watch the movie Amazing Grace. It was about William Wilberforce, and his efforts of many years to abolish slavery in Great Britain. There is a wonderful sub plot love story with Wilbur and the woman who became his wife. I had forgotten that the slave traders sailed ships to America with slaves, and returned to England with sugar from Jamaica. The dear wife did not have a cube of sugar in her tea from the age of 14. I highly recommend this movie. It is an interesting story, beautifully photographed, and well acted. The song, Amazing Grace still continues to connect. The movie shows how far reaching an act can be, or a sin.

Today my husband took me to the movie “Beowulf”, a movie I was not ready to see. I have never been interested in dragons. My husband had never read the poem, and I think I attempted it once, and it was like reading Greek. We saw it without benefit of 3 D glasses. I could tell that it would be really amazing with the glasses. A film is a great way to tell this old, long, epic, poem of ambition, desire, bravery and courage, right and wrong. Beowulf is a mighty warrior. It is the oldest tale in the English language. The dragon is designed very well. I do not think this movie got great reviews, but it is a story worth seeing, because it is a classic, digitalizations are getting better and better, and you will never read the poem. You are reminded that sins do have consequences. No kids.

September 22/Three ten to Yuma

Sunday we went to see the movie, 3:10 to Yuma.  A remake of  1950’s movie with Glen Ford playing the Russell Crowe character, and Van Hefflin playing the Christain Bale part. Peter Fonda  has a supporting roll and Luke Wilson has  a minute part.  A huge shoot’em up.

It is the story of a wounded soldier of the Civil War who has moved west with his family using up all of his  government wounded money to buy a farm.  But the weather is bad, the cows are thirsty and dying  and the railroad wants his property.  Enter bad guy  Russell Crowe and his band of killers.  By now he has robbed so many trains, and killed so many people, that Pinkerton is out to get him. Christian Bale takes the job of getting momentarily captured Crowe to the 3:10 train in Yuma, which goes to the penitentiary. Christian can claim the reward money and make payment on his land. 

I am a fan of Russell Crowe, regardless of how he treated Meg Ryan.  The fact remains that he can take any kind of a role, and make the character great.  This movie is no exception.   Crowe says that he assumed in this part that he was supposed to be the best bad guy, and he played it with confidence, and some pride. 

I had never seen Christian Bale,  but he was excellent as the farmer.  Equal to Crowe. 

I grew up in the era of cowboy movies and it is the sort of movie I go to regardless of how it is reviewed.  It was refreshing to have a cowboy shoot’em up to attend.   

Coming up, Russell Crowe is in the movie with Denzel Washington, AMERICAN GANGSTER.  Here Crowe plays the good guy, or at least the law, and Washington is the gangster.  It will be interesting to watch that chemistry.

Another movie was previewed, WE OWN THE NIGHT, with Robert Duvall, Mark Wahlberg, and Joaquin Phoenix.  Duvall has two sons, one a cop, one a gangster.  I am a little tired of  sons, good and bad,  plot line, but I like Robert Duvall, and the cast is very talented. 

My book club read the prize winning book, ATONEMENT, by Ian Mc Wean more than a year ago, and now the movie is coming out this fall.  I am really anxious to see it, as I am not sure what I read, the book actually being literary, and I was too lazy to dig deeply. The trailers are cinematographily  (which is apparently not a word) beautiful. Kiera Knightly plays a female lead.  And although I know the ending, I am not sure what it was. I am hoping the movie is more conclusive than the book. 

I am adding this photo appropriate of nothing aside the fact that I like the visual. 

July 30/ Planet Earth 2

I must revise my comment on yesterday's post.  I do not like the sound on the series Planet Earth.  The narration is very hard to hear, and that could be deafness on my part, as the music covers the descriptions which are very interesting.  But the visual is so beautiful that it is worth watching.  Last night we watched the episode on Fresh Water.  A large segment of the program was filmed in Brazil.  As my daughter, NoName, had lived in Brazil and had traveled, it was amazing to see places that she had visited including Foz de Iguacu falls, widest falls in the world, and Pantanal, the world's largest wetlands. The Pantanal is an amazing place that I would have liked to seen as it is a delta of the Paraguay river and has the largest concentration of wild life in the world.  It is bigger than Florida. In this section of the series there are piranhas, teethy guys.  Here are pictures of my kids swimming with the piranhas at the Pantanal.

July 29/ Planet Earth

Thank God there is no news this month, because I would not know it, if I met it. Attempting to be a grandmother , takes precedence for the month of July. Today I open the AOL headliners and what do I do? I open up the Steve Martin gets married feature. He sported a mustache for the ceremony. My mind likes only mush. This action is the equivalent of following Paris Hilton, who I like a bit better than the Lindsay Lohan stories.

My husband ,for Father’s Day, received the CD set of BBC PLANET EARTH from his girls. Alone for several nights we started watching. It is a fabulous ,and astonishing piece of filming. The first part gives a review of animals mostly migrating from Pole to Pole. Helicopters fly over breathtakingly dangerous territory to capture images, while a ground crew can wait months to spot a snow leopard make a kill. Seeing the migration of the caribou overwhelms ones sense of numbers. The second episode is about mountains. We have seen many films of the Himalayas, but this shows a flock of cranes trying to fly over them to their new seasons destination. But the Andes, which I have not seen much, are equally as interesting. And it is shown how the mountains are interrelated.

Many of you may have watched the series on television, but if not, it is a good thing to put on your Christmas list.

April 2/Children of Heaven

Last night we watched the movie  Children From Heaven.  The story takes place in Iran in a big city, I guess Tehran. A nine year old boy loses his sister's  shoes and the family is so poor that they can not buy food, let alone a new pair of shoes.  The boy and girl trade his sneakers to go to school.  First she races to come home to give him the shoes and then he races to get to school.

The children actors in the movie are very dear,  and the little boy can spurt tears like a couple of my grandsons, where the tears just pop out of the eyes.  But in addition to the story, there is the setting.  This  I found so interesting. It reminded me of Mexico City where there is such a difference between he haves and have-nots. You may remember that for Lent I have been praying for George Bush and Armidinijad. George, because he needs the help, and Armidinijad because he is my enemy.

But I had no clue as to what Iran looked like. Nothing.  I imagined that the Iranians looked like the Muslin's I saw wandering the streets in Mr. Bianco, Sicily.  I had forgotten how handsome the Shah had been. This movie showed many people with the finer features of the Shah. What I have noticed is that Pres. Armininijad wears nice white suits,which is the best I can say about him. I had no idea what Tehran looked like.  In the movie, in the poorer sections, people lived around court yards with a fountain in the middle, the same as Mexico. The fields were green, at least at that time of the year which was early spring.   There were freeways and interchanges.  Not as many cars.  The rich houses were rich houses close to the street.  This movie gave Armidinijad a place. 

January 9/ Broken Trail

Our Television stores up  to 100 hours of programing.  This is mostly used for football games.  But because we go  to  bed early, we tape something which we might later want to watch.  The television show  "24" is going to  start again  soon,  and we have heard that  many of the questions that  people  had from the previous  season, start to be answered  in the new season.   So we are going back to brush up  on the final episodes.   

But going through the list of previous shows, we came upon an unseen, made for television movie:Broken Trail. I would like to recommend it.  It is the story of a couple of cowboys moving 500 horses from Oregon to Montana, who come upon 5 Chinese girls who have been sold into prostitution to be taken to a whore house in Montana.  Our cowboys, one of whom is Robert Duvall, rescue the girls, but then are left with being responsible for the girls to Montana.  I absolutely adore Robert Duvall, one of my favorite actor's, if not my favorite. The other cowboy is Thomas Haden Church one of the over-sexed friends from the movie Sideways. 

It has to be rated R, for certainly violence,and sex.  But it is a very positive movie. the country is wonderful, some excellent characters, and redemption . . . too often not happening in movies.  Robert Duval was born in 1931, and it is a pleasure to watch him ride a horse.