Travel prep

In the middle of figuring out suitcases & proper travel underwear (by far the funniest I've come across are these Stash It Wear If you have a moment, do check out that page & esp watch the youtube demo of the undies. On the left, near the bottom of the page.), we've been getting in the mood by watching a selection of movies.

Apparently I'm prone to yelling out "I've been there!" or "I'm going to be there!" or better yet, "I've been there & I'm going again!"

Roman Holiday (Rome, of course. you can follow in Audrey Hepburn's and Gregory Pecks footsteps on a self guided walk)
How to Steal a Million (Paris. Audrey again with Peter O'Toole in a wonderfully lighthearted art theft romp. The  fictitious Musée Kléber-Lafayette is the real Musée Jacquemart-André)
A Room with a View (Florence & English countryside. Did you know you can stay in the actual hotel in Florence which was used for filming? We're not staying there but maybe we'll go walk by it.)

We are missing a Venice film. Thought maybe we'd do an old Bond & then remembered it's Moonraker that's in Venice. Not sure if it's worth seeing the entire thing for a few boat explosions.

We also saw Enchanted April for the transformative power of travel & esp Italy, though we're not actually going to the Italian Riviera. (did you know this was filmed in Portofino? And the castle they used was the one the author of the original book stayed in when she wrote it.)

Ok, back to picking out suitcases & underwear.....

Romance - geologist style

 

'Cause what is more romantic than riding underground railway cars in yellow hard hats???!!!

Is it when the ancient drill is started up and manfully pressed against the earth? Is that the romantic part? (wait, just realized I missed the opportunity for a pun! "Is that the romantic bit?" There. That's for the drillers. I <3 puns, btw.)

I think this the silliest, most unromantic thing imaginable. I've been to Brittannia Mine. Dudes, just because a place is dark, it does not make it romantic. Cellars, crawl spaces, the shed out back - also dark, & Hello? Not romantic. Similarly, underground mines - not romantic.

Nor, for that matter, are open pit mines.

Diamond mines? Hmmm. Maybe.

Is it just me? What do you think? Would you say "oh darling! Wonderful idea!" when presented with tickets to this event?  Or would you think "I knew I should have steered clear of men with old itchy tweed jackets with elbow patches....."

(Full disclosure: Roo is a geologist.
No, we're not going.
Oh & he used to have an itchy jacket. I can't remember if it had elbow patches. I've blocked out many things....
If you ever go to an exploration or mining conference - btw, go, if you like to drink & consume vast quantities of barely cooked beef. I don't, so it's all wasted on me - it's a veritable sea of ill fitting tweed. There's a generation of exploration geologists especially, who apparently bought one jacket, of the itchiest wool available, preferably with suede elbow patches, when they graduated. They spend the rest of their lives in their functional, outdoor "picking up rocks gear", and when they go to the annual conference in the city, they pull out their antique jacket, give it a shake & they're set to go.)

& on a side note, we actually just watched Romancing the Stone a few days ago & I wished once again that I liked Kathleen Turner more. It is a fun movie but I never really saw any chemistry between her & Michael Douglas (incidentally, another actor I wish I liked more) & so at that level the entire thing seemed forced.

the late birthday movie

For the last number of years we, en famille, have gone to a movie to celebrate Amelia's birthday. This year we're several weeks behind, but finally we went yesterday to see The King's Speech (no, I won't link to the official site because the previews are so extensive these days that they give away the entire film. So there. Consider this my little protest.)

I was going to tell you all about how great it is, & how much we enjoyed it & how it's not at all your typical historical costume drama (not at all), but I've now got distracted over its American rating.

R?

R??!!!


Oh fer crying out loud. So it's ok to blow off people's heads, to have violence and gore and jump scenes to terrify kids and those films get PG or maybe PG 13. But say "fuck, fuck, fuck, shit and tits" and it becomes R for language? (Oh dear, I hope I didn't wreck it for you by letting you know that people swear in it. They do.)

Sensibly & reasonably, in BC it's rated PG.

It is a slow moving film, not a lot of action and might not keep the interest of young ones who've been reared on ADD tv. On the other hand, it's about an interesting time in history. Plus any child who has learning challenges etc would definitely benefit from seeing it. My bottom line is: show it to your older (10+?) kids. They need to see that people in absolutely privileged circumstances can still have lives that suck big time (including a truly evil nanny story), and that people of all ages often have to struggle to achieve things. Add brilliant acting, nice pacing, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter & a fab supporting cast, and it all makes a wonderful package.

Still works

All the Presidents Men




Kids hadn't seen it yet & with all the WikiLeaks and whistleblowing in the air, I thought it would be topical.

This movie still works, the story still captivates. Corruption, deceit, dirty tricks at the highest levels of American government. Still shocking if you just let yourself sit with the story and consider the types of people we elect to run our countries.

Depending on how much American history you've studied with the kids, you may need to do a quick review of the characters & timeline just to get folks up to speed. It's a pretty slow, in your head type of movie. Mostly it's just guys with big hair sitting around typewriters, dialing for 10 painstaking seconds on rotary phones, and scratching their heads about how all this adds up. Oh yeah, there's swearing - so if your kids fall over when someone says fuck, that might be amusing for them. There's not a lot of visual action and I suspect younger than 10-12 yo will tune right out, unless they've been raised on machiavellian radio plays, but older than that should be able to handle it. Sit on them if you have to & hiss "our leaders are sometimes conniving, immoral creatures. You need to know this!"

You know what else is shocking? The journalism. We rarely see real journalism any more. Most news stories are cut & pasted press releases from government and corporate PR drones. What seems to pass for analysis is a reporter questioning a few party hacks and corporate shills who proceed to regurgitate the same press releases in strident tones.

One recent exception is The Washington Post's (there they go again) Top Secret America. The latest installment, Monitoring America, was published yesterday.

Speaking of whistleblowing, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked The Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War, defends WikiLeaks & Assange.

In other journalism news, Reporters Sans Frontières has begun to mirror WikiLeaks .


Now for happier movies ~ Lee McKenzie (whom I've met! I get to hobnob with such wonderful authors in RWA!) asked her readers about favourite movies for the holidays.  It's a fun list & I added my own suggestion in the comments: Anne of Green Gables. Always puts me in a good mood & I try to watch &/or read it each year during the holidays.

Will you be watching anything special over the holidays?

p.s. I've had to go back & fix some of the links. Hope they work. It doesn't help that I have adblocker on my browser & it never shows my my amazon image links anyway.....

this & that

Sam Harris (author of Letter to a Christian Nation) has a new book. It's going in my TBR pile, looks like I won't get to it until December at the rate I'm going ......




Christopher Hitchens is dying. His cancer is stage 4 now & as he says, there is no stage 5..... He's still writing, as well as ever, as in this piece on Miss Manners & cancer. Curiously, the dateline is December 2010. Apparently the Hitch can bend time?



On the heels of my plug for Project Feeder Watch, important news that Bird Beak Deformities Show Big Rise.


And because this is all much too serious & glum, a plug for the Fantastic Mr. Fox



If you took the old Wind in the Willows stop motion animation & shook it up in a blender with Oceans 11 & laid on a smooth soundtrack (inluding the voices of George Clooney & Meryl Streep), Fantastic Mr. Fox is what you'd pour out. Lovely.

Reading and Watching

Amelia and I have been indulging our appreciation for period drama historically accurate film adaptations of important literary works.

Ahem. It's educational, people.

First, North & South. Amelia properly read the book first.

Elizabeth Gaskell's works are a part of any good survey of Victorian British literature.

I went straight to Richard Armitage.

Swooooooooon.

Then, Jane Eyre. Again, Amelia properly read the book first.

I've read it several times already & was happy to carry on straight to Toby Stephens.

Wonderful.

Both DVD's are 4 hour adaptations, with the North & South conveniently divided up into hour long episodes. Jane Eyre is on two discs & is not conveniently divided so you need to commit two hours at a time. NOT a hardship, I assure you.


For a fun diversion, if you've already seen North & South (because you don't want plot spoilers now, do you?) check out North & South summarized in motivational posters.

Feel free to chime in with recommendations. I'm thinking of Cranford and Wives & Daughters next .....

in which I shake my fist at DVD regions

One of the problems with the automatic amazon linkie thingie in my post about My Family and Other Animals is that both the American and the Canadian shops took you to different editions than the one I like.

I like the one with ISBN 0246132450. It was published by Grafton in 1987 and is an oversized hardcover, with a nice clear large font, some lovely old photographs of Durrell's family tucked into the text, and full page watercolor illustrations by Peter Barrett. The pages are thick and glossy, the binding is sewn, it opens flat nicely as your read. It's just a lovely edition, unlike some of the quick, whiz bang editions:  'let's republish this thing, it always sells well, print it on recycled toilet paper and stick a token photo of the author on the back' editions; yay! easy money!'

So there you go. If you want a nice edition, hunt that one. You'll need to go used, but it's worth it IMO. Search around on abebooks.com and there are a # of good copies with dust jackets available.

While I was looking up this edition, I discovered that in addition to the Masterpiece Theater adaptation which I mentioned in my previous post, there is a newer  250 minute BBC version which got rave reviews. In fact, in some of the reviews people  mentioned being relieved at how much better it was than the Imelda Staunton version which I adore! Shock.

I immediately said: I must have this! I must watch this! I must see if it's better!

And then I discovered that there is no North American edition. The BBC America shop doesn't have it. The BBC Canada shop doesn't have it. Zip doesn't have it. Amazon.com or .ca don't have it. It appers to not exist.

I could order it from the UK. Here it is. But since I don't have a Region 2 (or a region free) DVD player, I'm stumped.

This is the fist shaking part. WHY do they do this? What possible business sense does it make? Is it just to frustrate people?

So here I am, shaking my fist & yearning for a British DVD. If you have brilliant solutions, let me know.

may cause longings for Corfu

Hugo and I did Gerald Durrell's My Family And Other Animals as a read aloud a while back; then Amelia read it herself; now Roo is reading it. It is the (mostly true) story of a rather eccentric English family which moves to Corfu, told from the point of view of the youngest member of the family:  a boy named Gerald, who is fascinated with fauna and spends his days roaming around the country side acquiring specimens for his ever growing collection of live and dead animals.

It is also hilarious.

And this Masterpiece Theater adaptation is wonderful at accurately depicting the book.

Of course, as always when compressing a book into a film, some things are missing, and someone's 'best scene' is cut. But this movie really captures the feeling of the story, and through careful selection of dramatic events, truly conveys the world Durrell shared with us in the book.

Imelda Staunton as Gerald's mother is brilliant. In fact Mrs. Durrell is brilliant.

Spiro spices things up by sprinkling his conversation with the liberal use of the word bastards.

Lesley is always shooting things.

Margo lurches from one heart break to another.

And Gerry searches for specimens, builds his collections, and is given remarkably free rein to pursue his interests - kind of like unschooling at its best. And though he does have a series of tutors foisted on him eventually, the fact remains that Gerry was fascinated with fauna from a very young age, his interests were not only permitted but gently encouraged, and he became a renowned naturalist in adulthood.

At our home, this book and movie has become a source of numerous quotes and references, though I think our favourite is:

You are SO opinionated!!!!  (exclaimed very loudly, with much opinionated vehemence, of course).

Highly recommended for a family read aloud & then a family movie night.


(text only links are for amazon.ca customers; ad box links are for amazon.com)

Summer read alouds

We've enjoyed a couple good read alouds recently.

The first was Jules Verne's Mysterious Island.

I have this edition, which includes an afterword by Isaac Asimov.



I have to admit Mysterious Island is a bit of a slog at times to read. For one thing it's bleeding long. But more importantly, the sentence structure in this translation is sometimes awkward. Sentences ended where I didn't naturally expect them to, or the syntax was so twisted that I lost the meaning while reading. There are some awkward non pc attitudes to the black member of the group (a freed slave who chooses to stay with his 'master') but it's nothing egregious.

And the story itself makes up for all that. If Hugo had had his way I would have read this non stop. It appealed tremendously to his imagination.

The book as a whole is a tribute to science, technology and a wonderful optimism of what man can accomplish. [Roo (a geologist) was rolling his eyes about the highly unlikely presence of certain minerals together in that type of landmass and Roo & I both were in disbelief at the pace of the work accomplished by the men on this island. They mined ore and established foundries in a few short weeks. They even made glass! I'm guessing it's because they didn't have the internet to distract them.]

A couple experiments resulted from this book: Hugo learned to make his own charcloth, and later he acquired a magnesium fire starter, and learned how to use these tools to make fires.

He wanted to learn to make explosives - the islanders manufactured & used explosives in a couple cases - but understandably I've been stalling him on that.



The other great read aloud was a translation of a Polish classic which I also own in the original Polish. It's called In Desert and Wilderness by Henryk Sienkiewicz (whom some of you might know from classical book lists as his Quo Vadis? often pops up there)



This is a story set in Egypt & Sudan around the time of the building of the Suez Canal. Two children of European canal engineers are kidnapped and trek through deserts and wilderness, overcoming challenges, escaping, trying to find their way back. It's an adventure story, a coming of age story, but there are also some other interesting themes: nationalism, independence, and faith. The kidnappers are Muslim and trying to use the kids as trade for some Muslim prisoners. This is the time of Charles Gordon, rebellion in the Sudan & the Mahdi uprising. There are camels, lions, malaria, and savage tribes. Again probably not very pc at times, but at the same time, Sienkiewicz had a great affection for this land and he conveys it.

We used the Lipinski translation which is the 'new' translation. I have to say that I thought there were a number of places where the language is a bit tortured. It's not just due to the 100 years old style - it definitely was a translation issue. I hear the same tortured syntax from some Poles. I'm going to try and get a hold of the older version transl. by Drezmal. One other thing - my old Polish copy has black ink drawings and some of the old Drezmal versions also have illustrations. The Lipinski has no illustrations.

There is also a newish movie version of it.



It's lushly filmed & quite beautiful. It is reasonably true to the story if I recall correctly - it's been a few years since I've seen it. I'm going to dig it out for us to watch soon. Purists do complain about the deletion of a key scene which did appear in the 1970's version; it is a pretty iconic scene so I would have liked to see it included there too. The DVD has options to view it dubbed or subtitled. The English dubbing was terrible & I think wrecked the film. If you go for it, watch it with subtitles.

I'm not scared of jiggly men thingies

Hugo got interested in Leonardo da Vinci's inventions recently (triggered I believe by a back issue of Calliope Magazine he was reading) so I dutifully put some books on hold at the library. (Note, this is one of the fundamental duties of a homeschooling parent: observe child intently for any sign of any interest in any subject, scour the library catalogues for that subject, and pick up at least 10, but preferably 20+ resources within a week of the first interest observation being made. If you wait longer than that, you run the real risk of the child having 'moved on'. If your child is less than 7 and/or ADD, you only have 48h to accomplish this task. You get bonus points if you manage to arrange a related craft/field trip/lego model within that same time period.)

I can heartily recommend this one:



We're still waiting for this one:


And when I was searching the catalogue, this popped up:

So I promptly requested it, it arrived next day, and Hugo barely made it through dinner that day in anticipation of the Leonardo video.

Mix one part history, with one brain from whoever came up with Junkyard Wars, and one part 'every reality tv type thing out there', and you get this.

All the melodrama.

Bob wants to use hickory. Steven wants to use oak. Will John be able to find a solution?

All the tension.

Jane isn't happy. The project is in jeopardy (cut to camera panning out of scene in a poignant moment, everyone looking sad and dejected).

The false sense of impending doom.

(narrator whispering) Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.

The terrible dilemmas.

(hushed narrator, in concerned tone) Bob is in a lumber yard. Looking at logs. Will there be a suitable log here?


And what is it all about? What matter of life and death is being determined here?

Um. Well, we have a couple groups of nerdy people who are building full scale projects of a) a giant crossbow and b) a glider, from drawings made by Leonardo. (Yes, that's how you refer to him. Leonardo. Not Da Vinci. Not Leonardo Da Vinci. Well, maybe just the first time. After that, it's just Leonardo. With an Italian accent please.

So apparently these teams have to use materials which would have been available in Leonardo's time and I think they're supposed to stick to the methods which would have been in common use at that time as well. Right away the crossbow team makes a decision to use laminated strips & I'm guessing they're using some fancy schmancy high tech glue so you can see how it goes.

You know, the show wasn't as bad as I'm probably making it sound but at one point, some director clued in that you could only show these wonderfully, plain, normal, nerdy, and very sweet but nevertheless rather dull people only so much on the screen before the viewer would change the channel. I mean, they're mostly sitting around thinking. And hammering. And looking at logs. With concerned faces.

So, off the director goes on a quick side trip of educational wonder to teach us all about how wonderful Leonardo is. And ooooooh, Leonardo was interested in anatomy. That will keep the audience glued! In fact, Leonardo was so interested in anatomy that he dissected corpses and made very detailed anatomical drawings of people! That's the ticket! Let's show the audience Leonardo hacking away at a really good imitation of a cadaver! Let's show him cutting up what looks remarkably like a human heart (& is therefore probably a pig heart). Yeah!!! That's the ticket!

The kids and I mostly missed the squelchy, blood spattery bits by hiding our faces.

Then it was finally over. But the boring teams were still doing quietly dull building so the director remembered:

For part of his anatomical studies, Leonardo sketched nudes!

Look! A modern art class sketching the human body. An old man standing in front of the classroom. He's nude. He's just standing there.

And from waist to knees he's pixelated.

Because you know how the jiggly man thingies might offend the viewer!

A cadaver with a partially dissected arm being hacked at by a bloody saw - bring it on!

But no naked flaccid penis! No naked old man buttocks!

No naughty bits at all, please. That would be too sensationalist.

Thanks PBS!

So. Which do you prefer? Dangly old man bits or squelchy dissection of a cadaver? Which (if either) would upset your kids more?

Me and Isaac Newton

This is fabulous.



It's a documentary directed by Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist) and focuses on seven modern day scientists: three women, four men, a wide variety of fields. Once you hear their accomplishments, you wonder why theirs are not household names. Why do we hear about sports stars and socialites but not these people?

The documentary is about what made them want to be scientists, what they have achieved, what do they see as their moral obligation. When I was reading the dvd blurb to the kids I said, "I think this might just be a bunch of people talking. We might not even see a lemur. Just because it mentions a lemur, don't get disappointed if there isn't one."

Because I sometimes forget that my kids are not 5 years old anymore.

Hugo said, "Mom, it sounds good. Just put it on."

So, it's not zooboomafu. But it is excellent.

What I liked most was that some of these scientists arrived in their careers a bit by accident, in roundabout ways. Some knew they wanted to be scientists from an early age but not all. That is a good thing to hear for kids who are not quite sure yet 'what they want to be' when they grow up.

I also think too often our kids lose the sense that one person can make a difference, and certainly as science and knowledge as a whole becomes increasingly complicated, a lot of the work is done collaboratively in teams. But still, on those teams are individuals, and their contributions are great.

I highly recommend this for the 10 and up crowd. Note that there is some emotionally moving content - there are scientists working on cancer treatments, and on water quality in the 3rd world. Dirty water kills 5000 children A DAY. These are real problems people are tackling, and while that's not the focus of the documentary, it is in there and it packs an emotional whallop.

It is an amazingly hopeful and inspiring film. Even if your kids have no interest in becoming scientists, I think they will appreciate it because the quest to live a good life is surely universal.

I suggest that you do not look up any of these scientists ahead of time. If you don't know them, just let them tell their own stories. The stories unfold quite amazingly throughout the film.

As a woman, a feminist, and mother of a girl, I was thrilled to see the women in this movie. Absolutely wonderful.

Really young viewers might find the beginning just a bit slow. The film does show the scientists in their own environments, and there is some beautiful cinematography but it is not done in the frantic modern fashion with abrupt scene and angle changes. It is more of a contemplative movie.

But there are lemurs.

And robots!

Rude, Crude, and Violent

but then so is the original.

We loved, loved The Reduced Shakespeare Company's The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged). I laughed so hard I got a stitch.



Hugo was really reluctant to watch this. In fact, we almost had a boycott on our hands because the last Shakespeare I inflicted on him was Helen Mirren's old version of As You Like It, which yes, has Helen Mirren in it and yes, she's a great actress, but NO, she never did look like a man. Not even remotely. Not. At. All. And that was all we could focus on during the entire play.

Now, for a great many reasons, the fact that none of these actors look at all like women, and yet they play women, does not bother us at all.

If you like Shakespeare and know Shakespeare, you'll laugh. If you know nothing about Shakespeare, you'll laugh. If all you know about Shakespeare is enough to know you don't like it, try it - you'll laugh.

Reading, watching and falling

For our current read aloud, we've just finished The Mysterious Benedict Society



and have launched straight away into the sequel, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey



We also recently enjoyed a film adaptation of E Nesbitt's The Treasure Seekers



It's cheezy in a delightful English way.
A very young Keira Knightley (the DVD was released in 2000) is briefly in it and as usual I was struck by the fact that something about her mouth makes her look frighteningly feral, and that she looks so much older than she actually is. I would have guessed her now to be in her early 30's. I thought that in the Beckham movie she was in her late 20's trying to pass for late teens. Ooooops. She really is young which makes me wonder what it is about her that makes her look so aged.

Speaking of aged



That's yours truly, having decided to take a beginner snowboarding lesson last week.



This is the falling part, as promised by the title of this blog post.

It was fun, though the legs & butt did a lot of protesting. Our instructor was a young Australian boy. The Vancouver area mountains are staffed entirely by Aussies as far as I can tell. And it's a true sign you're getting old when everyone (except Keira Knightley) starts looking like they're too young to be doing their jobs, but I really wondered if he was old enough to be out that late at night.

The first 10 minutes of the class were agony and I was already mentally rehearsing how to excuse myself gracefully and extricate myself from the class, when things started to get just a teeny bit easier, and it stopped feeling like my knee bone was about to separate from my thigh bone and the thigh bone unplug entirely from my hip bone and slide down the hill without me.

Then of course we went to the big hill (well not really big; we started on a teeny knoll so going to the edge of the bunny slope was a large advancement) and things got difficult again but by then, it was also a bit fun. There was lots of giggling, and lots of big loud thumps as we fell again and again to the perennially cheery background Aussie tune of "Good on ya!" and "You right?" The butt and legs got numb and once I stopped feeling them, I could ignore their protests, though they did have something to say about it the following day.

I was totally slayed by the stupid tow rope which dangles low down by my ankles somewhere, which means that to grab it I have to bend over in half. The tow rope slope has also been groomed by evil gnomes into a series of olympic moguls. It's true, I swear it. Just when I got the hang of the damned rope and managed to hang on for 20 feet or so, I'd hit a colossal bump and fly off.

I did enjoy it all so much, that I'm going back tonight, just to goof off on the slope with the kids and my mom - yes, my mother learned to snowboard before I did.

I do get to check off a bunch of things on this year's to do list. You know those creativity lists which have you take up something new, do something silly, try something embarassing, something you're bad at, and challenge yourself a bit? Check, check, check.

What new things are you trying this year?

History of aviation

Hugo all of a sudden developed an interest in ballooning and aviation history. And, in spite of the fact that we're on our Ancients rotation through history, I'm more than willing to take detours to anything which really captures a child's imagination. So I zipped through the online library catalogue and scrolled through, putting requests in for anything that looked interesting.

Which is how we got the Nova Documentary "Wings of Madness":

Have you heard of Alberto Santos-Dumont? Known in Brazil as the Father of Aviation? I hadn't.

Did you know he made the first European airplane flight on Oct 23, 1906?

I didn't.

A fabulous innovator, he used a variety of designs and methods for aviation (unlike the Wright brothers who pretty much stuck to the same design). An idealist, he believed flight would unite the brotherhood of man and bring peace to the world. The knowledge that airplanes were subsequently used in war brought him terrible despair.

A fascinating man and a compelling documentary, well worth checking out.

Recommended

Several things which we've enjoyed recently


This is a YA book which I picked up for myself and then convinced Amelia to read. She thought it was depressing but couldn't put it down. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Many of us prepare for localized emergencies - we live in an earthquake zone and have been making building emergency preparedness stashes in several areas of our property. Our preparations however are predicated on the emergency being limited to our area. This book considers the implications of a global catastrophe. It's in the format of a 16 yo girl's journal. Well paced and exciting. Warning - may cause strong desire to stock up on food, fuel and medicine.


This is a dramatic re-enactment of Einstein and puts his idea in context of the other scientists who came before and during his lifetime. Each of the elements of the e=mc² equation is considered separately, with a depiction of the scientists who were 'responsible' for developing that portion of our understanding of the world. History, drama and science, all wrapped up.


We listened to the audiobook last summer. Lots of adventure in this story about a boy who is left in the wilderness to keep his family's land claim in colonial US. It's a grand tale of self sufficiency, coming of age, and the tense relations but also some deep friendships between the native and white inhabitants. Hugo was enthralled.


The movie version of The Sign of the Beaver, in some places it was released as Keeping the Promise. Sensitively done, with a lot of the scarier elements of the original story omitted, it has a good mix of adventure and suspense. Hugo liked this a lot though he said he thought they made a mistake in focusing so much on what Matt's family was doing. He feels the story should have stayed with Matt and the tension in the book was derived from the fact that nobody knew whether the family would come or not. By showing the viewer the family, a lot of that suspense is gone. Worth watching. The DVD includes a brief history lesson.


Yup, the writing was on the wall.


And in my TBR pile:

Recently viewed

Bend it like Beckham - everyone enjoyed this. Strong young women playing soccer, conflict with parents and traditions, a bit of romance, loads of laughs, and a good soundtrack. The special features are a hoot. We especially liked learning how to make Aloo Gobi but watching the real Beckham trying to sing 'hot, hot, hot' was kind of painful. And Posh was really no better.

Enron, the smartest guys in the room - OK, first thing is that there's a stupidly gratuitous scene of a stripper & lap dancing. If you're not ok with your kids being exposed to this depiction of women, you'll want to preview & fast forward through that scene, which really doesn't add anything to the documentary. The other thing is that there's a lot of swearing. I'd suggest not skipping that - not that you really could as it's quite pervasive - if only to see how incredibly, arrogantly vulgar the traders are. I'm torn about this movie because it was OK as far as it went, but that's just it - it didn't go far. At the end, I didn't really understand more about Enron than I did before. There's only so much you can put in a 2h movie to explain how the US's 7th largest corp. failed, so perhaps that's why it feels a bit superficial. Or maybe it's because all the execs seem so superficial....

Frontline - Secret History of the Credit Card - good introduction to the credit card industry. You can view it online & the website has further reading and resources, as well as a teacher's guide.

Oh yeah, I'm super cool

Poetry Friday

I was just thinking of one of my favourite films Truly, Madly, Deeply and so my selection today is

La Muerta
Pablo Neruda
trans. Donald Walsh
- excerpt

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you are not living,
I shall go on living.

...

No, forgive me.
If you are not living,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you
have died,
all the leaves will fall on my breast,
it will rain upon my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with cold and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to march toward where you sleep,
but
I shall go on living


If you don't know this movie, do check it out. A brief synopsis would make you think of Ghost - "woman's lover dies and as she's trying to struggle through her grief, he comes back to comfort her" - but it is a much, much better film.

The acting is superb. Juliet Stevenson's portrayal of grief is raw and real and at times too painful to watch. This isn't maudlin melodrama, it is a deep, honest sorrow. It is definitely a kleenex-at-hand movie, but it is also funny, charming and warm. The wonderful Alan Rickman (with a dodgy mustache but I'll overlook it because of his voice, oh yes, his voice) plays the dead man who comes back to comfort his beloved.

You can push ahead to the 3:28 mark, when he asks her to translate this poem:
(oops, try around 2:30. When the vid is on youtube the counter goes up, but now it seems to be counting down in reverse.)



Then go get the movie and watch it all.

For more Poetry Friday selections - I think universally more cheery than mine - , check out the Roundup, courtesy of The Miss Rumphius Effect.

A different pirate movie

So. You need to know that I'm not a fan of the other pirate movies. I fell asleep halfway through a DVD of the first one a few years ago & have never been enthused enough to actually finish watching it. Didn't notice and didn't care when the second one came out. Not lining up to see the third one. And more to the point, not letting my kids see any of them.

I'll tell you what I suggest as an alternative:



Yes, a 1975 production of Pippi Longstocking in the High Seas. This movie is delightfully cheesy and whimsical and unpretentious. It's a total antithesis of the hollywood blockbuster glitzy productions, and it is innocently charming.

It is dubbed (why yes! Other countries do make movies and they don't all speak English!) and not very well dubbed either, so there's a fair bit of humour in the lips moving & mismatched voice thing. It has the lamest special effects. I'm guessing that as I write this, there are year-end elementary school productions which have more elaborate theatrical effects than this film.

There is an incredible innocence in this film (& the other Pippi productions starring Inger Nilsson) which I can't help but feel nostalgic about. The most incredible part of this movie for me is right at the beginning, when Tommy and Annika's parents are going away for a 3 week holiday and leaving the kids behind - to be watched over by 9 year old Pippi. Now granted, Pippi is not just any girl, but still......

The rest of the movie is sweet, silly, adventurous, with just a bit of drama thrown in. And no scantily clad anorexic woman-child characters. Just oddly dressed real-looking children, chubby men, monkeys and parrots. Try it.

Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane?

NO! It's Superman!

Yeah, went to see it last night. Roo won a year's pass for 2 to pretty much any movie theater in the Lower Mainland so I guess we'll be seeing some movies.

So. Superman. Very nice. He's alwasy been my favourite superhero and this is a good Superman. Fills Christover Reeve's tights very well. Good actor, though I can't even be bothered to google who it was.

There's just this one tiny problem I have had all along with Superman. I mean really. I alternately wear glasses and contacts, and sometimes contacts with reading glasses on top, and I have never yet had anyone not recognize me. How the hell can a room full of investigative reporters not recognize Clark Kent? Especially now that they have these really high quality photos of Superman plastered all over the newsroom? Perhaps if I wore blue tights with my underwear on top? Is that the key? Is that the reason for the costume and the underwear on top? Cause it distracts everyone from looking at your face? Could be. I know where I was looking....

I notice that in the cellphone age, Superman is having a problem finding a place to change. Soon he'll be like the rest of us - ducking into the bathroom of your local fast food joint for all quick personal needs.

I also noticed that to get that PG rating, they had absolutely no swear words. See, I have a hard time believing a bad guy who says "what did you do?" just as his girlfriend has foiled his plot for global domination. Gosh darn it, that just makes me so mad. But violence? Oh yeah, baby, bring it on. Lots of scary scenes and a really big violent swarming with gloopy sound effects of booted foot kicking face. 'Cause what's more likely to pollute a child's mind? Hearing the F word? Or seeing a guy beat to death? Right.

****Spoiler Alert*****

Don't read this if you haven't seen it & don't want the plot spoiled.......

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OK. Lois slept with Superman, and I'm dying to know: what special powers does Superman's willy have? Superman has special powers with his eyes and ears so I figure it must do something special too..... What do you think? Hmmmmmm.

Where was I? Oh yeah, I like the kid. Of course the kid means we can look forward to Superman movies forever now.

And one other thing. When Superman was in the hospital, why didn't anyone think of putting him out in the sun? He's like those solar patio lights, he needs to recharge in the sun. What were they thinking, leaving him in a hospital room for ages???

Verdict - Roo & I enjoyed it for its intellectual, spiritually uplifting and thoughtful exploration of the meaning of truth and justice in the modern world. Wait, no. Wrong movie. This was fun and brainless and fluff entertainment. Superman is pretty easy on the eyes. Roo says Lois didn't hurt him any either.

Tags: Superman Returns, movie review, Hornblower