Carne Felize Redux

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Vacation Elation

Battle on the Pitch

Brazil loss to Netherlands produces melancholy in 10-year old US boy

Movie Review: Cry us a "CYRUS"

CYRUS (2010), is the kind of movie I hope to see when I hope to see a movie about real seeming people working their way through the awkardness of a tricky wolrd in which other people are both necessary for individual happiness and expertly complicating that happiness in each other's lives.  Written and directed by brothers Jay and Mark Duplass, the film quietly makes full use of its' actor's (John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei and Catherine Keener) capacity for acting real. This is a good thing.

I laughed out loud -- frequently and with unembarrassed gusto, and I am not the kind of movie goer who is often accused of being jovial, easy to mind-tickle or heart-pull. The film is a complex unpacking of difficult themes, such as:  old love lost and new love found;  parental expectation and disspointment; and the tricky paths we stumble down in trying to integrate other people's stumbling into a dance. Without giving anything away, CYRUS is about how everybody is freaking-out all the time. More importantly, despite our freaking-out, CYRUS suggests that we all work pretty darn hard to make it through the day, beacause, in the end we need each other.

One last note on the film:  it manages to work all of this out for the viewer in a far more satisfying and less obtuse manner than this response to it.

Movie Review: A Utopian Toy Story

I dug TOY STORY 3. Dug it in the third dimension with my kids on a lazy summer afternoon while noshing on fried pickles, corn dogs and gooey meat pizza at the local arthouse theater where waiters slip in and out of the dark with plates of comfort goodness.

I dug the short film, "Day and Night" that preceeded the feature with eye-bending digital graphics and a hopeful message about recognizing the generative value allowing the world to be seen and felt through multiple and sometimes conflicting lenses. I dug the precarious balance of the bulky black 3D glasses that teetered, yet clung, to the tip of my daughter's freckled knob of a nose. I dug my son's chortteling laugh and knotty elbow nudges that dug into my rib cage in his obvious attempts to clarify which parts of the movie were most clever according to his own refined sensibilities.

What I dug most, however, was that throughout the story's telling not once dig the economic valuing of the toys cost (some had to have cost their givers more money than others) ever sneak into the social contract of mutual interdependence that the characters operate in. In problem solving their collective usefulness, the toys never seem to wrestle with comparisons between their individual worth, never elevate the more costly to positions of power over the less expensive, and never stipulate social value on anything other than a willingness to be one friend among many. They are friends. They look out for eachother, act nice, helpful, supportive and worry about eachother's feelings. I dug that.


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