MOVIES
My Favorite Form Of Entertainment
Cinema wins hands down!
I’ve always liked to read, and I even enjoy being a working mom. Workouts leave me with sparkly beads, Cooking, I find suspenseful. Yet my guilty pleasure, Is one in which I do nothing at all. I sit back and watch The artistic endeavors of another. Not one, but a team of people. Storytellers, who use the silver screen, Live people, moments in time, automobiles to match. It is almost illegal, the amount of trouble, We let people go to, For our three-hour-long pleasure. How many man-hours is that per minute? Travel, time travel, leaps of fantasy, In a movie theater or at home, Cinema is my favorite form of entertainment.
The Iron Orchard I never knew Texas oil changed the people as well as the land. McNeely turns from laborer to magnate, but the money and oil don’t do him much good.
Unstoppable The American Railways runaway train stole my heart. I’m an Indian Railways girl, brought up in locomotive workshop cities like Chittaranjan. I never realized how used I am to our trains till I saw Unstoppable. I want to travel on an American train, just once! Somehow all the world’s Metros/Subways/Underground are the same, but the surface trains have their country’s character. I think they spent lots of money to demonstrate the mass of the train slamming into things. I was flinching as that happened.
Broadway Danny Rose This movie showed me why Woody Allen is a superstar. “May I interject one statement at this juncture?” is hilarious each time he says it. I was surprised to see in the movie that not all acts succeed on Broadway – we see only the successful ones. Maybe things are different now, with American Idol on TV, and so Broadway by definition has hit acts alone? Also, If it was made in 1984, why did Woody use black and white? Crazy genius. Somebody keep him away from Chaplin. In 2021, he’ll want to remake 1921’s The Kid.
Lincoln This 2012 release is like watching the news shot in Technicolor, back in 1865. I hear Daniel Day-Lewis stayed in character as Lincoln even off-camera. The effort paid off. He was Lincoln.
All is True Shakespeare was fractured by his 6-year old son, Hamnet’s, death due to the plague. Then he finds that his daughter had, in reality, dictated the verses Shakespeare thought his son had written — Hamnet had only written them out. The daughter had no letters, and the son, no imagination. Poor Shakespeare.
Also, Hamnet never died of the plague, he committed suicide to escape from his father’s demand to produce more verses. Shakespeare never bothers to cultivate his daughter’s mind the way he had dreams for mentoring his son. At heart, Shakespeare was just a man. I wondered what she might have written.
The Best of Enemies Real people. During school integration. C.P. Ellis, I think, was kinder than Lincoln. He didn’t have a leg to stand on when he voted for integration — none of the whites would buy any gas from his station, and he was staring down the face of arson and penury. Lincoln was President, he had power, but Ellis’ story taught me that many people who weren’t famous or powerful also followed their conscience, even if it hurt them financially and socially. Ann Atawater turned him from Klan to kin.
55 Steps Eleanor Reise, a Sprite-drinking woman with a limp, is drugged against her will. Colette Hughes, her lawyer, worked with the mentally ill as a paramedic, before becoming a lawyer to help change the law. Life happens to them, too, but they’re so big, inside.
Goodbye, Christopher Robin It teaches us to leave our children out of our writing. The nanny’s accent is like singing, and I could imagine, that the boy, Billie, would always like people who shared that accent because it was his beloved nanny’s accent. Isn’t that almost worrying, defaulting to trust, because you like somebody’s accent? It is as bad as Pavlov’s bell.
In conclusion,
I love cinema, so long as it is about people! I love watching people behave the way they do, safe on a screen I can turn off when I don't like what they do—there are no tragedies in my list of memorable movies.
Thanks to Victor Sarkin.
I’m tagging Lisa Wright, Deanna C Kilgore, Frank L. Willow-Rogers Jr, Deepak Sethi and Amber Blaize to participate in the GiaB challenge — write about cinema, and in 750 words, and before 17 February, when entries close.
For those who would like to jump into the challenge, write your entry on the topic Cinema as per the prompt by GiaB editor Victor Sarkin above.