January Movie Reviews

*****  Exceptional

****    Great

***      OK

**        So So

*          Blah

Before I Fall was about a high school girl who dies...and then she lives the same day over and over again until she learns how to right all the wrongs in her life. Not too long ago I saw a movie with a similar theme, but this one the relived day changes every time which made it more interesting. I love the message to live each day to the fullest, loving those around you and not taking anything for granted because that one day will last forever in the memories of others. I really like the lead actress Zoey Deutch. She's been in a couple great films lately and always gives outstanding performances. ****

The Cakemaker is a Israeli-German film about a baker, Thomas, who has an affair with Oren, a married man who is in Berlin once a month on business, flies back home to Jerusalem to his wife and son. This goes on for a while and then Oren gets hit by a car and killed, disappears out of Thomas's life for a time until Thomas finally figures out what happened. He heads to Jerusalem and gets a job at Oren's wife's cafe. All the performances were good, the lead actor was exceptional. At times it was a little slow, some of the scenes unnecessarily long which tends to be a German style. ***

The Country Doctor is about a country doctor in France who finds out he has a brain tumor. He is sent a young woman doctor to be his assistant and/or replace him should he decide to take his doctor's orders and rest. But he doesn't.  It was a sweet movie filled with great characters and a doctor who loves his work and his patients. Yeah, it was a fantasy. ***

The Good Doctor is about an intern (Orlando Bloom) at a hospital who seems to be very by the book and appropriate. He has a young woman as a patient and I'm not sure what happened but he kinda-sorta falls for her, gives her sugar pills, and she ends up back in the hospital at which time he starts screwing with her meds so she gets worse. I think he wanted to keep her at the hospital, but instead, she dies. One of the orderlies (Michael Pena, who I always love in every movie he's in) finds her diary and although nothing inappropriate happened between the doctor and the patient, the orderly blackmails the doctor for drugs, but refuses to give him the diary. So the doctor laces some drugs with cyanide and murders the orderly...anyway...it was a movie about the true nature of doctors. LOL. Very slow. Even when it gets weird it's not that interesting. **

Homeless is about a teenage boy whose father is in prison and he's lived with his grandmother taking care of her until she died. He's now homeless, living on the streets during the day, staying at the shelter at night until he is kicked out for using his cell phone. It was depressing and frustrating. He didn't seem very smart or resourceful. For instance, he knows the rules of the shelter, but he uses his cell phone anyway and gets booted. That was just stupid. He spends what little money he has on a new hairdo...really? He gets a job holding an ad sign for a restaurant and when a co-worker invites him to sleep on her couch, stashes his savings in one of her couch pillows? Really? He couldn't find a better hiding place? She finds it, steals it, and kicks him out. He starts hanging out with a girl who clearly likes him, but he never asks her if she knows anyone who needs a roommate or can offer him a place to stay. Instead he goes apartment shopping with her. He can't afford anything but he's looking at two bedroom apartments. Hmmm...Maybe I expect too much from an eighteen-year old and I'm overestimating what should be his survival instincts, but I would think even desperate kids would try to find a way to live in the world and be safe. It's got to be frightening in a city alone at night. I kept wanting to scream JUST ASK FOR HELP!  I liked he was very honest. I think the writers could have had him so desperate he'd be shoplifting or stealing from people. And he was adorable...I'm surprise they didn't include a scene where someone was trying to recruit him into the sex industry. And I'm a little miffed at his dead grandmother for not finding him a home before she died...they don't give a lot of details on his background. If I knew a homeless kid was honest, I'd invite him or her to come live with me. Regardless, it was sad. ***

Jasper Jones has got to be the absolute weirdest coming-of-age movie I have ever seen! It's about a kid, Charlie. Late one night Jasper Johns knocks on his bedroom window and says he needs help and Charlie is the only one he can trust who will believe him. Charlie doesn't even know the kid and has been told he's dangerous. Even so, he climbs out his window and followed Jasper into the woods. Really? Hmmm...where they encounter a dead girl hanging from a tree. Jasper says he just happened to find her. Really? But because he thinks the police will blame him for her death, asks Charlie to help throw her body in the pond. And the kid just goes along with it. Really? Anyway, the whole story is pretty stupid and gets more bizarre. Toni Colette plays Charlie's mother. Great 1960s costumes. **

Logan Lucky is about two West Virginia brothers who pull a very well-thought out heist at the big NASCAR race where they use money tubes to transport their money into a safe. All-star cast with Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Katie Holmes, Riley Keough, and Hilary Swank. It was good. ***

The Measure of a Man is about a teenage boy who is the quintessential bully target: insecure, overweight, geeky. Every summer he is forced to go on vacation with his family their cabin at some kind of resort where he's expected to hang about in a bathing suit and be tormented by the town bullies. This year he gets a job working for a rich guy (Donald Sutherland) doing the landscaping for his acres of lawn. I was a little disappointed because it seemed to have so much potential. Sutherland attempted a very upper-class accent but it came out very unnatural and his character was more irritating than mysterious. Near the end he flashes a number tattoo on his arm but with just a hint of his past they never really address it. Unfortunately. **

Megan Leavey is about a directionless woman who joins the Marine Corp for something to do. She ends up being a bomb detection dog handler with a dog named Rex. Great story. ****

Memento is about a man (Guy Pierce) who is searching for his wife's rapist and murderer, but during the incident he was injured and left with a brain injury that prevents him from short term memory. He uses polaroid photos with written notes on them and tattoos on his body with facts to help him remember things. It works backwards, from the end of the movie to the beginning in snippets. Bizarre or maybe clever, but great mystery as your brain has to work really hard to piece together everything - very much like his experience. ***

The Middle Distance is about a man who's father dies so he leaves Los Angeles and goes back home to the Midwest, or the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter. His brother and brother's fiancee are there and they plan to get the house ready for sale. The brother is called away for work leaving him alone with the woman. I'm not sure the point. Wasn't much to the story...typical "can't go home again" theme with no redeeming message. Kinda boring. **

Night Comes On is about Angel who gets out of juvenile detention on her eighteenth birthday. Her goals are to find her father and kill him for killing her mother. She locates her ten-year old sister in hopes of getting his address, but her sister wants one day of fun to celebrate her sister's birthday so tells her their father is living at the beach. It's very heartbreaking on so many levels. Excellent performances. ****

The Quiet Place was a really creepy alien movie where the aliens are blind but have really great hearing. So this family has somehow survived by being very quiet. And then the mom gets pregnant. OK, so who is so incredibly stupid they don't know sex results in screaming babies??? Really? Is it worth the risk? They risk death to have sex. Maybe this is a commentary on how stupid humans are? The movie was very nerve wracking. I don't like jumping out of my skin every five minutes, but it was good for a thrill. ***

Return to the Hiding Place is about the Dutch Resistance who were a group of college students working through the Ten Boom safe house. It was very Christian-focused so cleaned up for PG-13 audiences. Good story. ****

Rumble Fish I can't believe I've never seen this movie, but now I know why. It's horrid. Bad script, bad story, and bad acting from a very young Matt Dillon, Nicholas Cage, and Diane Lane. They all look like they are about 15 years old. Mickey Rourke is also in it, very young as well. It was like some kind of noir film for the 1930s, very melodramatic, about gang wars. Kind of like West Side Story without the music, but this was made in the 1980s. Not sure the point. Lost interest right away. *

The Tale  I had no idea what this movie was about since the writing on the DVD cover was so small, but it had an all-star cast that was intriguing. It was about a journalist-professor (Laura Dern) who's mother (Ellen Burstyn) finds a story she wrote when she was thirteen years old and she begins to unravel her childhood recollection against the actual experiences she had at a riding school she attended one summer.  Her riding instructor was the "most beautiful woman in the world" who pimped her out to the track coach (John Ritter) who grooms then sexually abuses her under the guise of love.  Teenage girls who feel invisible, unloved, and unimportant are so easily manipulated. It was so disturbing and creepy. Excellent movie and superb performances, but so disturbing. I really think some men need to be castrated. ****

The Ticket is about a blind guy who regains his sight and his whole world opens up. He begins living the life he always wanted, gets promoted at work, buys a new wardrobe and a new car (learns to drive), and begins making decisions on his own much to the dismay of his wife who has taken care of him all his life and now thinks they should be making decisions together. He feels he was held back by her and his disability. He leaves her for a co-worker and becomes driven and self-centered. Then he loses his sight again....oops. It was a little slow. **

The Twelfth Man is a World War II movie about a group of Norwegian resistance fighters who go on a secret mission to create havoc, blow up a few German things. When their contact is dead and they are left vulnerable, a Norwegian Nazi sympathizer reports them and their boat is attacked by a Nazi ship. Eleven of the twelve are killed or captured, tortured for information, and promptly executed. They know from documents the twelfth man escaped but after they shot him and chased him into the below zero degrees fiord, they assume he didn't survive. He did. Good god! Crawls out of freezing water, crawls and stubbles across the snow with a bleeding foot half shot off. The Nazi commander (Jonathan Rhys Meyers - who makes an outstanding Nazi monster) doesn't believe he's dead and has a reputation to uphold so the man hunt begins. The whole of Norway assists this guy to escape as a national resistance effort. It's quite an amazing story based on a true story. It's a bit unbelievable everything he endured starting with the fiord swim. Then there is getting buried in an avalanche. Wow. A very COLD movie! ****

The Ultimate Gift was a sweet movie about a spoiled rich kid who's wealthy, but absent grandfather left him nothing but a game of challenges for him to get an inheritance and his encounter with a smart-mouth little girl who is dying. A little sappy, but tolerable. ***

January

The January rain drapes the sky in grey

And hides away the sun.

And the pattering can be maddening

But I'll wait until it's done.

For I can't chase the clouds away

And I can't stop the falling rain.

It's out of my hands, it's out of my hands

There's nothing that I can do.

And sometimes I know that life doesn't go

The way that I want it to...

from "Out of My Hands", Vagabond, Spencer Day

The Mosaic Show

Mosaics are fascinating, and new, and strange. Unlike most art forms, there are different "compositions" for each mosaic: 1) What one sees on the surface if place upon a white background. 2) What one sees when it hangs in the window with light reflecting through the glass.  3) For mosaics with black grout, what one sees when the mosaic is hanging in a dark window at night. For instance, the moon on the mosaic below is grouted with white and the remainder of the composition is grouted in black. This is the "surface" photo. The mosaic is laying on a white floor. You can see the white moon, the purple frame, and a little of the colored glass pieces.

The photograph below is the same mosaic in a window with light showing through. The white grout of the moon shows gray, but the glass pieces are vibrant with the black outlines reminiscent of stained glass windows. The frame virtually disappears to black in the brightness, however, most of my frames I painted to match the glass colors when light is showing through so the purple of the tree is the same color as the frame.

Here is the same mosaic hanging in a dark window although the flash of my camera did brighten it up a bit. As you can see, the purple frame is dominant and if it wasn't for the white-grouted, but clear moon, the composition practically disappears! So weird.

Everything I read says black grout is the way to go as it serves as outlines although some prefer gray and even other artists prefer colors like rust or dark purple. They say white grout tends to be too bright and stark, but given these various lighting examples, I prefer it. It shows dark gray with light reflecting from behind and maintains the composition at night. I'm not sure I like a window decoration to black out at night.

Black grout is also scary when one has white tile floors! Grouting is messy. It's like slinging mud all over and I'm doing it in my kitchen. In the middle of grouting the above mosaic which was my first black grout experiment, I realized if I dropped just one little piece of grout on the floor it might stain the floor! Eeeww...I'm growing more fond of white grout every day, although I am still experimenting with various colors.

My Very First Online Mosaic Show

All mosaics are photographed with a white background which allow one to see the frame color, grout color, and basic glass shapes and for some I included the view through light.

"Sunflower"

"Daffodils"

"The Fall"

"Mt. Rainier"

"America"

"Blue Rose Window"

"Medicine Wheel"

"Heart-Broken"

"Love Grows"

"Dandelions and Dragonfly"

"I'd Rather Be Dead than Decaffeinated, or
Caffeine-Induced Depression"
Because this is abstract and the frame
is unusually thick and wide,
I decided to decorate the sides:

...with coffee cups.

"Paradise" (or "My Garden")
If you are wondering why it has four hangers
I couldn't decide how I wanted to hang it, horizontal or
vertical. I couldn't put only two hangers so I just added
one to each side. (Think of them as vines or stems....)

"The Final Frontier"

I have one more to finish, but it's a big one, and many more ideas and plans! So fun.

Women's March 2019

Love the pink. Lots of pink. We took our patriotic parasols to the Women's March again. This year we opted to stand on the outskirts which was much healthier, definitely less toxic stink. Last year I think I had to move three times to get away from perfumes and scented products. We also assessed our location based on how easy it would be for someone to drive into the crowd. It amazes me this is the state of America these days.

Our umbrellas received lots of compliments, oohs, aahs, giggles, even screams, "OH MY GOD I LOVE THOSE UMBRELLAS!" LOL! People were very cheerful and happy. We became umbrella models as we were constantly asked if it was OK to take photos. Several people asked if I had a website or Etsy account. Hmmm, no, but they are for sale. Oddly enough, no one seemed interested in buying them on the spot. One man offered $20. I told him thanks, but that wouldn't even pay for the supplies. He attempted to make me feel guilty stating I shouldn't expect to get paid for the time it takes to do the art, but I clarified, THAT WOULDN'T EVEN PAY FOR THE SUPPLIES never mind the time. Even though I had vowed I'd sell them for nearly any price and I was tempted, he was so rude and pushy I just couldn't.

As we were leaving to start the march two women came running up behind wanting to know about the umbrellas. They bought both! Although I enjoy money, what was most wonderful is then watching my umbrellas out in the world marching down the street. I must have taken one hundred photos of them with their new owners:

I was so proud. Before the buyers left I warned them about all the attention they would get. Be prepared to model! At the end of the march I watched them from afar as people crowded around taking photos. It was funny. I was a bit relieved to hand over the attention to someone else and be anonymous.

But the real highlight of the day was a woman walking around with a bag of pussy hats she knitted herself - giving them away for FREE!!!! I finally have my very own pussy hat! It's a pretty one.

GO GIRLS (and guys)!!!