Movies

Julia Roberts is Not My Guru


I have a basically unread copy of Eat, Pray, Love that I will likely never read at this point especially now that there is a movie version. Reading a book that you can watch is just very not done in my homeland. Americans are practical in their quest of the lowest road that will not make them appear too lazy or uneducated.

I am probably one of only a handful of women in the western world who hasn’t read more than the chapter excerpt of Eat, Pray, Love which appeared in Oprah magazine sometime in early 2006. I bought the book because I wanted to use the O magazine version as a reference on my comps. We had to write a bibliography of all the books or magazine articles we quoted, or that influenced ,the gazillion mini-thesis papers that made up the examination at the end of the masters program I was just finishing in the spring of 2006. Unfortunately, I had reached my limit on the number of magazines I could use and needed books. So I just figured since I liked the chapter, perhaps I could claim to have read the whole book and then do so after the fact, in case I got quizzed on it during our Masters week in July.

As a matter of fact, or point of reference, take your pick, I was working on those comps exactly four years ago. Or I was trying to. My father was having surgery and Mom was freaking out. He had a growth that needed removing that could have been cancer but the doctor didn’t think it was overly likely. I was prevailed upon to come home for Spring Break and … step up? … despite the fact that I had a thesis paper to finish and comps to take.

Big memory of that week, being annoyed that I was stuck taking care of kids, sitting at the hospital with Dad and generally being expected to be strong and serene while Mom and DNOS went about their normal routines for the most part. It was like they didn’t notice that I had really important agenda items on my plate that I couldn’t delegate. Sigh, always the delegatee back then

Anyway, Eat, Pray, Love.

I’d heard about this movie. Investigated the author and novel’s premise a bit more. Decided she was a poser and dismissed it all as self-help garbage.

“Why do people need to travel to exotic locales to find themselves?” I asked Rob on our most recent lunch date. “Your self is inside of you. There is no need to go looking.”

“Well,” he said, ” I’m a little hurt by that statement because it’s kind of what I did after Shelley died and I took my trip down south to revisit places we’d been together and see people we knew.”

Which, to my mind, made what he did different from what Eating Author did. She was running away in hopes that the bad stuff about herself would be sloughed off as she discovered new things or cultivated new things or something like that. Rob was reconnecting with memories – the good ones that get lost sometimes after your spouse dies.

I remember at the time I read that single chapter thinking “wouldn’t it be nice to have such simple problems and be able to shed a whole existence and start fresh with someone else bankrolling you?”   That just wasn’t my reality and never had been. When life needed overhauling, I had to stick around and do it and pay for it myself.

However, in a way, coming to Canada has been my mini-Eat, Pray, Love – minus the pray part or Yoda or getting to hang in India.  Canada? Not India. I have put on weight though. Perhaps I am like Eating more than I care to acknowledge?

Since Rob would rather sledgehammer a toe than go to a theatre to see a chick flick with delusions of enlightenment no less, I will likely only see this if the universe nudges me to pick it up at the bookmobile but since the book hasn’t moved me to crack its spine in fours years, I doubt it.

Men with Brooms: The Review


We watched two dvd’s on Friday night. First up was the family film The City of Ember based on a novel for tweens of the same name. Mick recommended it to us over the Christmas holiday and had given Dee a copy of the novel, though she is still a bit too young to read it to herself.

As usual with fare aimed at families, dead parents were plentiful. The main characters had two dead mothers and a dad between them and the girl’s grandmother dies in her sleep just to add to the authenticity. I should really get over this particular dramatic effect because I totally get where the plot point comes from – most children’s greatest fear is losing a parent in some way.  Dead parents throw a child into a world that requires them to take care of themselves which is another childish fear – who will take care of me?

I just wish that  kid movies did something more than play on well-recognized fears  or portrayed live adults in children’s lives as incompetent and/or stick up the bum prigs.

But the City of Ember wasn’t really too bad though it hammered a bit on the whole eco-collapse thing due to man’s wanton waste (not surprising as Tim Robbins was featured and it was produced by Tom Hanks).  Still, it had a lot to say about the current state of modern life as played out in the future effects of short-sightedness.

And the character who directs much of the problem-solving, as it is a bit of a mystery, is a girl. I like girl heroes.

Later, Rob picked the “grown-up” movie for himself and I, a Canadian comedy from 2002 titled Men with Brooms. It’s about curling and a fictional Stanley Cup of the curling world – The Golden Broom.

“I’ve seen this,” he told me. “And no one is dead.”

The film begins on a lake with beavers singing and quickly takes us to a father and daughter on a boat, retrieving a curling stone that somehow wound up on the bottom of the lake.

The young woman dives down to attach a line to the stone and then helps her father haul it up. Curling stones weigh 42 lbs after all.

And then the father drops dead of a heart attack and the young men he coached all show up for his funeral and are urged by their dead coach at the reading of his will to reunite one more time to compete for The Golden Broom.

Using a curling stone that is doubling as his urn.

Let’s see … one of the daughters is a recovering alcoholic who is in love with one of the men who left her sister at the altar ten years earlier resulting in that sister getting degrees from McGill and Harvard and becoming an astronaut. The vied for gentlemen in question has “issues”. He cheated the last time that the rink (curling team) competed in a match together.  His dad is a legendary curling champion who was away from home much of the time his wife was dying (yes, I know, I know) and father and son are estranged.  Another teammate is a drug dealer who can’t remember the names of the women he sleeps with. A third is an undertaker in a lifeless marriage.  The last man is desperate to impregnate his wife but has a single digit sperm count.

Oh and there is a lesbian local police chief being chased by a waitress that has no relevance to the plot in any way but keeps coming up.

And quacking beavers swarm the roads.

Rob says that beavers don’t quack but people who live in Ontario apparently don’t know this because the beavers in this movie make a noise that is very duck sounding.

Oh, and curling? Major sport. Major. Not like hockey is major but more like how softball rules in some parts of the midwest. I have a writing friend whose son is heavy into curling. It’s like being a little league baseball mom.

The soundtrack for the film is all Canadian and it rocked. The film itself picked up speed and meandered away to subplots but was charming and funny. Leslie Nielsen, who hails from the Northwest Territories, plays the estranged father who grows “magic mushrooms” and is quite good – and surprisingly attractive for such an old man.

It’s not as heavy-duty a movie, and already I’ve forgotten much of the point of it, but I don’t lament the time lost and that’s hard to say about so many movies these days.

Mamma Mia!, I am Not Allowed to Pick Movies Anymore


Which is what my sweet husband would say if he didn’t have better control of his inner voice than I do.

Normally, Rob is the one who makes the questionable picks, but this last Wednesday, my number finally came up in the library queue for Mamma Mia!, the Movie with Meryl Streep. Did you know that she can’t really sing?

And sadly, she was the main character, so it was her or no one, but I can’t cast aspersions on her vocal talent without noting that aside from the girl who plays her daughter, the Greek chorus and Christine Baranski, who plays one of Streep’s best friends, no one in the film can sing.

I loves me some musicals. I have no problem suspending my belief long enough for characters to burst into song or dance in the pursuit of coherent story-telling. Musicals though weave song, dance and acting together to create a world for characters to inhabit. Mamma Mia took pop songs and quilted a story around them in a way that resembles a spiderweb after a thunderstorm. There is but a semblance of the beauty.

“I saw this,” Mick commented when she saw the dvd on the kitchen counter Thursday evening. “It was disappointing.”

She had wanted to see the movie when it was in the theatres. We’d even talked about going. I had requested it from the library at the beginning of June in hopes of having it when Mom and Auntie came in July.

Rob sighed. He watches chicky flicks for me only. He considers it a husbandly duty. When he found out it was a musical on top of a chick flick, he visibly braced himself.

“I am exercising my right to veto if this sucks too much,” he informed me before we snuggled into bed to watch it on the laptop.

But despite the fact that it was horrid from the first number, neither one of us gave up on it. Mostly because the premise of the story is that Donna (Streep) slept with three men the summer she got pregnant with her daughter Sophie who has invited all three men to her upcoming wedding in hopes of discovering who her father is.

SPOILER: She never finds out and neither do we.

Hours worth of butchered 70’s pop and for what? No daddy reveal. A tone deaf cast. Pierce Brosnan singing – which I assure you is every bit as awful as the earworm it gave me – and Colin Firth (one of the potential daddies) discovers his true sexuality and hooks up with a pretty Greek boy at the end. Not that there is anything wrong with a gay dad, but why couldn’t it have been the unattractive Swedish guy instead of Mr. Darcy? It could have been a stereotype breaker.

Speaking of stereotypes, I will give the movie props for not airbrushing or otherwise emaciating Streep and her friends. They looked like middle aged women and it was wonderfully refreshing.

The finale has everyone dressed for a special appearance on the Midnight Special in Kiss like platform shoes and stretchy polyester that glittered appropriately under the disco lighting. Enough said.

Mamma Mia is one of the worst movies ever. It is also the highest grossing film to date in the UK and we are moving there, but I will reserve judgment. It could have been a bad movie summer there that year and the earworminess of ABBA cannot be denied.

If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. Life is too precious to waste like that.