Saved

Hollywood Giant Walt Disney's 20-year chase to obtain the film rights to P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins books finally sees its end; meanwhile, the author finds herself having to confront her own childhood. If you're a girl and you adore your father, make sure you have a box of tissues with you when you watch this movie. I didn't have one handy, so I had to use the hem of my shirt.

There isn't much to be said about Tom Hanks's and Emma Thompson's acting; only that they were perfect. And damn that Colin Farrell guy for making me cry.

"You think Mary Poppins has come to save the children? Oh, dear."

Director: John Lee Hancock ("The Blind Side")
Year of release: 2013
Cast: Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Farrell, Ruth Wilson

Forgive me for I shall document

Aside from movies, books are my favorite things to snack on. In between my Oscars craze (3 titles left to watch: "Nebraska", "Philomena", and "Gravity"); a Woody Allen binge (close to half a dozen movies in the past couple of weeks--my favorite of the lot being the hilarious "Love and Death"); and hunting for Joaquin Phoenix movies (I had "Walk The Mile" for lunch yesterday), I also read.

These are the books I've read these past few weeks:

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto
Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut
The King of Nothing to Do by Luis Katigbak (all in all, I've read this collection three times)

I tried to restrain myself from listing down the books I read during the final months of 2013, but I lost. So, off the top of my head, here:

In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon
Poems (1962 - 2012) by Louise Gluck
The Double by Jose Saramago
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Here by Wislawa Szymborska

Right now, I'm reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods and 158 pages into the novel, I still can't decide if I like it, or not. Excepting Smoke and Mirrors, my feelings for Neil Gaiman's writing tend to be ambivalent. It took me a while to get the hang of Neverwhere, and it's taking me forever to finish this one.

As it is, I'm itching to move on to either Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Decisions have to be made.

Meanwhile, I shall nap.

Happy Birthday, Momsy

I've heard it said that if you want to know how a girl, or a woman, will look when she's older, the thing to do is to look at her mother. I do hope they're telling the truth. My mom's turned 61 today, and she doesn't look a day past 45. She has aged so gracefully, that I couldn't resist asking her, just a month ago, how it is that she manages to look so young. With a smile, she told me, "there's my secret", and pointed to my dad (who, I think, was scrolling down the news, that time).

Aside from my father (I am quite certain she'd given the best answer to my question), I think it's my mom's possession of that joie de vivre that has enabled her to ward off the "old woman" look. Laughter is one of the things she's not stingy with; it's quite contagious, too, her laugh. She has an innate ability to shrug stress and sadness away; she's an advocate of clean living (which she doesn't forget to remind us, her kids, about, by the way); and she seems to have that perennial twinkle in the eye for new things, undiscovered places. She's always loved to travel, go places; lakwatsera, as we call her. 

All in all, she's managed to maintain a certain sense of wonder for people and places and things, which is not something that I can say for myself, tsk.

Today, I raise a toast to my mom, and all the things that she is, most of which I continue to hope I could still become. 

But first, that youthful glow. I should ask her for more tips.

Like chopping garlic; or, Love in the Modern Age

It's been almost a week since I saw "Her" and I still think about it. I was putting up new curtains this morning, and I thought about Theodore and Samantha; I started to wonder what Spike Jonze's favorite color was, or if he preferred grapes to pears, like I did.

I guess it's one of those things that stay with you, or that would suddenly cross your mind while you're in the middle of doing something totally dissimilar, like chopping garlic, or putting your shoes on.

Like other great films, "Her" prods you toward introspection, pushes you to confront your own central beliefs (no matter that you have to chisel your way down to your own untraveled depths), dares you to ask questions you have difficulty constructing. In this case, you may start with "what is love?", a question that has seemed to acquire various elements of the commonplace--largely because it has so often been thrown out with so much familiarity, at times, even in jest--but is really, on closer inspection, one of this life's deals that have yet to be clinched, despite numerous attempts to do so.

So, "Her". And this documentary, "chronicling reactions to Spike Jonze's Oscar-nominated film, Her. The documentary, directed by Lance Bangs, features stories and reflections from writers, musicians, actors and contemporary culture experts, including Olivia Wilde, James Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis, on the film Her, and their thoughts on love in the modern age."



Thanks to Mr. K. for the alert.

Watch Conan visit a doll store

I was watching Conan O'Brien clips on YouTube last night, saw this, and cracked up.

photo from laughingsquid.com

I couldn't resist;  I just had to share it with you.

=)

Go talk to someone.

You're at the grocery store. A Lady Gaga song is playing, and you're trying to decide which brand of canned peaches to buy.

You remember a particular writing assignment one of your teachers had asked the class to do. This was from ten years ago, and the exercise had nothing to do with a grocery store, Lady Gaga, or peaches.

You find yourself wishing you could have a chat with that teacher. You wonder where he is now, and if he does his own groceries, like you do.

And the nominees are...

"Sometimes, I feel I'm fighting for a life that I just ain't got the time to live. I want it all to mean something."

- Ron Woodroof, Dallas Buyers Club

The wee hours after the Golden Globes have ushered the Oscars season in. Here are my one-and-a-half-cents' worth:

"Captain Phillips" bored me. I think I dozed off somewhere in the movie. Maybe it's just me.

Michael Fassbender shines in "12 Years a Slave". Vicious like the villain that his role is, his presence is both loathsome and commanding, as expected. Or maybe I'm simply biased. After all, how can someone as good-looking as he is not be brilliant everywhere else? Ugh, yes, maybe I am biased. But, think Daniel Day Lewis. 

photo from collider.com

"Her" is a beautifully rendered rumination on consciousness and being; on loss and the emotional debilitation it often entails; on ennui and confinement; and on how, in this age of volatile, fragile relationships and, even with so many ways to connect to and with people, loneliness really--and still-- stems from the inability to communicate, if by the term "communicate" we want to highlight being understood. Spike Jonze is one of this generation's best screenwriters; he's a genius in my book. And why doesn't Joaquin Phoenix have more movies? Or maybe I just haven't seen enough.

"The past is just a story we tell ourselves."

- Theodore Twombly, "Her"

"The Wolf of Wall Street" is one prolonged, graphic paean to sex, drugs and alcohol. Or maybe I'm missing the point, perhaps somewhere along the lines of how a life of excess will, eventually, come snowballing down on he who lives it, yadda, yadda, yadda. I must be, for the phrase that comes to my mind, where this movie is concerned, is sensory overload. Though Leonardo DiCaprio's acting is superb, Scorsese's seat may have been a little too hot, as his instructions came out just a tad overblown. If we were on more intimate terms, I just might be tempted to tell him to google "restraint". Ah, well. Maybe I'm just getting old.

My money's on "Dallas Buyers Club". Matthew McConaughey disappeared into the character, the movie evaporated into the story, and I was entirely drawn in. And don't even get me started on how luminous Jared Leto is. There are no movie actors in this film, just people. Well, maybe except for Jennifer Garner. But what am I doing, making bets this early?Maybe I should watch the others first. 

"American Hustle", "Nebraska", and "Philomena" are still, and next, in my bucket, so maybe I ought to shut up and stop being stupid. "Blue Jasmine" wasn't nominated for Best Picture, but I'm watching it, anyway, just because it's a Woody Allen film, and Cate Blanchett bagged the Best Actress (Drama) award at the Golden Globes. For some reason, I don't at all feel inclined to watch "Gravity".

But maybe I should.

Highway

Dusk, the highway. The drone of cars speeding past drowns all possibility of conversation. Not that there will be much, given their track record at exchanging ideas. She glances at him and takes in the all-too familiar, semi-permanent frown, the set of grim lines that make up his mouth. His eyes are on the road, his left hand resting on the wheel.

She keeps her mouth shut, wondering how long the ride home will take.

"Try to be quiet out there. I'm tired, and it's gonna be a long drive." He, after turning the ignition on, several minutes earlier.

So there she sits, an obedient puppy. Glued to her spot, counting billboards.

Almost everything you want to read about

is in The Best of Brain Pickings 2013

Here's a sample:

"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble."

- Bill Waterson

and another one:

"Though “about” a cat, this heartwarming and heartbreaking tale is really about what it means to be human — about the osmosis of hollowing loneliness and profound attachment, the oscillation between boundless affection and paralyzing fear of abandonment, the unfair promise of loss implicit to every possibility of love."

- Maria Popova

Lost

Red liquor, a warm breeze, orange-tinted chairs. The evening has turned into a slow dance. People are asking for ice.

She is tipsy and drowning in a pool of music and low, inaudible chatter, still mildly conscious that what she is doing is trying to keep afloat in the crowd of twenty-somethings she had so unceremoniously found herself, some hours earlier.

Loud cheering erupts at the first strains of a popular rock song, and she turns to look at the band. Her eyes meet his and they both smile. She remembers watching his fingers fly, light and sure, over the guitar strings, and realizes she'd lost track of him when the alcohol started quickly working its way through her nerves.

He nods, and she wants to believe she knows what that nod means. They are both anachronisms here, after all; both lost, in some shared, unutterable way. The bench he's sitting on seems too short for him, somehow, and she giggles and raises her glass to him.

For a moment, her head feels clear, and her smile creeps from her lips to her soul, and she is asking, could I, perhaps now, risk my silence for your keys and strings? A promise of other moonlit conversations gleams from afar; in the muted distance, soft music waits.

Ah, but the moment, like most other moments, darts into a blur of bygones. A waiter asks if she wants a refill, and she hands her glass to him. While he's pouring the drink, she looks down at her hands. Still slightly intoxicated, she finds herself back in the subdued safety of obtuseness, where questions so often get lost in tangents, and answers, though found, are seldom ever the ones to the questions we ask.

By the time she raises her head again, he is no longer looking.