melodyssister | Entries tagged with movies

Yesterday was a relatively restful day, in that we did not spend all of it on our feet. Instead, we went for a scenic drive (there's something we haven't done in a while :-)) through Golden Gate Park, over the Golden Gate bridge and along route 1 to Stinson Beach. We had a bit of a late start, and saw the toll change from $6 to $4 while in line at the Bay Bridge at 10 a.m. On the way to the Golden Gate Park we saw some very different SF neighbourhoods from the ones we had seen by foot, like the millionaires' haven of Sea Cliff, where we saw the kind of crescent that in Bath has 18th-century row houses adorned here with mansions, and Richmond, which looked rather like a place we would enjoy living in.

The day was chilly and overcast, so we didn't spend too long in the park, as A and S wanted to cross the bridge as soon as possible. We overheard an Irish guide giving instructions to a group of cyclists who were going to cycle over the bridge and A really regretted having to be stuck inside a car! The view from the bridge was as spectacular as promised, and so was the view from the vista point on route 1. I had a bad attack of car-sickness going around all the twists and turns, both coming and going, to the extent that I believe that I made the right decision to skip soft-serve ice-cream at Stinson Beach. Everyone was very sorry for me, and I'm not sure why I was so badly affected while the boys - who also tend to car sickness - seemed perfectly fine. Part of it, I think, was that somehow I was never at the right angle for the win to blow in my face. That aside, Stinson Beach was a lovely day out: we paddled a bit, despite the cold and even drizzle, but were amazed at the people actually swimming! The Pacific is so much colder than the MEd, and the posters warning of rip tides and sharks were quite alarming. We found a nice little book shop, and more importantly at the moment, I found a post office, where I picked up boxes so we can send at least some of our books home via media mail and hopefully avoid paying overweight on our flight.

The day ended with more ice-cream, this time at Fenton's Creamery (should I be adding an ice-cream tag?), and the welcome news that our flight time had been changed: instead of leaving SFO at 8:30 with a 6 hour layover at JFK before taking off for Tel Aviv, we are now leaving at 13:20 and have only 2 hours' layover, arriving in Tel Aviv at the same time, but hopefully less complete wrecks.

Today we went back into the city, entering and leaving from the Montgomery Street BART station. We began by visiting a tea and chocolate shop we had seen from the cable car, called Spicely. We spent much longer than expected there, and did not walk out empty handed (despite our luggage concerns). If Spicely opened a cafe in Powell's bookstore in Portland, I think we would move in permanently. After that, we resumed walking up Montgomery Street to the Coit Tower. We didn't go up it, but looked at the view. We then took all the steps down through Grace Marchand Garden to Battery Street and began looking for lunch. That took longer than expected, and we ended up at The Planet, an organic cafe where the men each had a different kind of sandwich and I had an interesting tomato and watermelon salad. ADC and I had juices (and I remembered why I actually prefer them without food), and A expanded his horizons and had a smoothie. We then went to the Ferry Building marketplace, and bought artisanal bread, cheese and salami for an early supper tonight - ADC and the boys went with J to see Ant-Man. A and S enjoyed themselves greatly, especially S; ADC was distracted by the bad science involved and its inner inconsistencies.

I stayed home, began packing, and tried to get T-Mobile to unlock our phones so we can use them in Israel but was defeated due to not being ADC (in whose names all the lines are). This was after we'd made a special detour to a T-Mobile shop in town, having understood that the unlocking could be done there on the spot. I did make some progress, though, and as I used the chat, the agent assured me that we wouldn't need to give all the information again. I think chat helplines are brilliant: I'd tried calling, first, and ended up unsure if the agent had understood me properly, or I him. With chat, everything is much clearer and you can go back and check what you said much more easily.

The Fourth of July fireworks, postponed from yesterday, were well worth the wait: nearly 20 minutes of some of the best fireworks I've ever seen. I don't know the names of all of them, but my favourites are the ones that explode in different colours, float down a bit, and then explode again in golden showers. I kept on thinking of the lines from Summer by Alice Low: "We like the things that summer brings. It brings fireworks, late at night, red and yellow, blue and white." It took me a long time to understand that the book was referring to the Fourth of July; as a little girl in South Africa, I didn't realise that the book was American.

We spent the first part of the day packing the suitcases we are taking to the West Coast, to be sure that we had enough space and didn't need to ship even more clothes. Thankfully, it looks like we are OK. In the afternoon, we watched Harvey before ADC erased our user profile, as he sold the computer and it was collected tonight. He also sold his bike back to the shop, and tomorrow he is sleight car back to the dealers. So far, he is the only one to have any luck - we set out the small number of items (mainly kitchen appliances of which we have doubles with the right voltage back home in Israel) on the front lawn and tried to attract passers-by from 4 p.m. until after the fireworks, i.e. around 10, with absolutely no success. On the other hand, M and D came over to help us drink bubbly and eat chocolate while watching the fireworks, and they cleaned out our remaining herbs/spices/jams/flour, which was very nice. Tomorrow ADC will take all the remaining closed packages to the Takoma Park Food Pantry on his way to the car dealers.

Getting back to Harvey: I hadn't seen the movie before, but was familiar with the concept of a six-foot tall white rabbit from the story of the same name in the Winter 2011 SS/HG Exchange. I thought the movie was very sweet, and I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Mrs Simmons and Judge Gaffney. I also though that Elwood P. Dowd's line "Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it" was absolutely brilliant.

In order to finish our subscription to Netflix DVDs, ADC and I watched another two films over the past few nights. Last night we watched The Last Wave and the previous two nights we watched Boyhood. It would be hard to find two more different films, I think. The Last Wave, directed by Peter Wier (whose surname is missing a D, I always feel), is a very creepy tale of how a white Australian lawyer become drawn into the Dreamtime when he agrees to help a group of Aborigines accused of murdering another in a drunken brawl - which turns out to be a ritual killing due to the latter committing sacrilege. Boyhood, on the other hand, is a slice-of-life filmed over twelve years with the same actors, which despite having ups and downs (particularly the mother's relationships), ends on a positive note. The conceit of the actors naturally aging, rather than being made up or using different actors for different ages, was very well executed, and everything was entirely believable.

The weekend was slightly schizophrenic. For the first time in a while, the rain began in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, rather than in the afternoon, and continued almost without a break until late at night. As a result, we switched around our plans, and spent the day at home. We did a bit more packing (mainly ADC's clothes) and had quality family time: playing games together (and choosing which ones to ship and which ones to take to the West Coast), and watching To Have and Have Not. As I remembered, the plot suffers from comparison with Casablanca, but Lauren Bacall holds her own when compared to Ingrid Bergman. Both are incredibly lovely, but with a very different sort of beauty. It is hard to believe that Bacall was only 19 when she made that movie - and I wonder if my acceptance of SS/HG is due to knowing about Bogart and Bacall already as a teenager, thus predisposing me to think that a 20-year gap or so was not an insurmountable problem as such. There are some Snapely aspects (at least of the fanon version) to Bogart's character, HarryMorgan/'Steve,' as there are to Rick. 'Slim' is much more similar to Hermione than Ilse is, though!

On Sunday, we got up early and went to the farmers' market for the last time. Of course, it was the best it has been for a long time - everything is starting now (hence why we are eating pasta with zucchini flowers again today). We then continued to Mt Vernon, where S had been on a school trip, but which the rest of us had not seen. It was a very different experience from Monticello, which we visited off-season on a foggy day, so that we only got to see the house. At Mt Vernon we saw the two-part movie overview (part 1: advertorial for the site; part 2: hagiography for Washington), took the timed-entry tour of the house, and spent most of our time exploring the garden. The differences between Jefferson and Washington are expressed amazingly well in the differences between the estates. Washington was a farmer and a soldier, while Jefferson was an intellectual as well as a politician. Monticello is much more interesting as a house than Mt Vernon. Admittedly, the interpretation at Monticello was much better - we had a proper guided tour, rather than being herded in line with people repeating the same spiel in every room. Even so, there was something much more ordinary about Mt Vernon. Washington described it as "pleasant," and that is what it is - pleasant and unexciting. I also found the Jefferson family cemetery more moving than Washington's tomb.

On the other hand, the gardens and grounds - which we could not properly experience at Monticello, due to the fog and the winter - at Mt Vernon are wonderful. The upper gardens, with their combination of flowers, vegetables and parterres, were what I had expected the National Arboretum to be like. The pioneer farm, where eighteenth-century American farming is reenacted, had a lot of potential, but when we asked the interpreters questions, they had difficulty getting away from their set speeches, which was disappointing. We had just missed, by a couple of weeks, the hand-harvesting and threshing of the wheat grown there in a system devised by Washington himself. We did see the harvested grain in what had been stables and it was fascinating to touch the kernels, still soft (one always thinks of the dry wheat, forgetting that it would begin as soft as sweetcorn kernels).

We then continued to Huntley Meadows Park. Compared to our visit almost exactly two months earlier, we saw far fewer birds. We did, however, see an osprey with fish in its claws, being beaten about by a much-smaller redwinged blackbird, clearly evicting a predator. We also saw a rather huge turtle, possibly an alligator turtle, in addition to the common red-eared sliders. We ended the weekend with our last Southern barbecue, at a local branch of Famous Dave's, where we had eaten in Chattanooga. This branch did not have the grilled pineapple I remembered fondly, but both the chips and the broccoli were excellent, from my point of view, and the others all enjoyed the ribs very much.

..the last week with any sort of routine for a while, I think, since the second week of camp was cancelled on Tuesday. A and S were very disappointed, as they were looking forward to a marine biology camp - but I guess not enough people felt like paying that price for four days of camp. They thoroughly enjoyed Japanese art camp, though, coming home today not only with manga booklets they had prepared themselves, but with papier-mâché Noh masks, origami animals, kimono designs and durga(sp?) heads. They also experienced a sushi workshop, and are now prepared to eat some kinds of vegetarian sushi, which is an improvement over refusing to eat sushi at all (they both reject fish in any form).

We spent three nights this week watching movies: two nights watching The Last Waltz on Netflix, while last night (Thursday), we went on a family outing to the cinema, for only the second time since coming to the US. We saw Inside Out, which deserves its rave reception. I won't go into the plot, so as not to spoil anything, but it was a complex and original story, with really fantastic animation and artwork. I thought that all the sweaters worn by the characters had really been knitted. Surprisingly, the traditional Pixar short before the main feature was terrible, in my opinion, by any standards, but especially considering how excellent Inside Out was.

Today M and D came over for supper - part of the campaign to finish everything in the pantry. As a result, we served meatballs, brown rice/wild rice/barley and succotash, with challah to start and brownies and biscotti to finish. We finished a bottle of wine (opened that evening) and a bottle of port (opened several weeks ago). M and D are such nice people; D is excellent with the boys, the kind of cool uncle Y was before he had kids of his own :). We made tentative plans for them to come over to watch the Fourth of July fireworks, which apparently are across the road from us, at the middle school field, and help us drink another bottle of wine, as well as taking everything we won't be able to donate to a food bank, like open bags of flour and jars of jam.

My own week was productive: I edited two articles and reviewed another. The article I reviewed was for Journal of Ethnopharmacology, and I am not sure I am really competent to review there. In this case, however, I thought the methodology sound and the information useful, but the English was so bad (the authors were Turkish) that the article was almost unreadable. I sent it back with an "Accept pending major revision / revise and resubmit", but ADC told me I should have rejected it. I'm not sure about that: the topic was certainly suited to the journal and really my only problem was with the language. I don't think the authors should be penalised totally for spending more time on their research than on their language skills.

I also started sewing another pair of shorts, which I intended to finish today but was attacked by a bout of lethargy/want to read all the fics instead of anything else.

The weekend has been boiling hot, and spending Saturday on the Shenandoah River was a very good idea. We reached the rafting company at Front Royal around 10:30, and were on the river just after 11:00. We floated along until 15:30 - the Shenandoah was much wider and slower than the Jordan was when we went rafting there, and we got stuck at every "riffle" - places where rocks are high enough to cause very mildly choppy water, but it was still great fun. ADC and A did most of the rowing, and every so often we stopped at an island and had a dip in the lovely cool water. I am still trying to get the algae out of my shorts - admittedly I made them for this kind of activity, but still, I'd like them to look newish after only one wearing. You can float so well when wearing a life jacket! The boys insisted on racing the other people who had been in the shuttle to the rivers with us - two men who were camping with their six-year-old sons. Unsurprisingly, we reached our end point - 7 miles from the start - before them. On the way back, we decided to take a scenic detour along the Skyline Drive, in the Shenandoah Valley National Park. We had been there before, in early October, and this was our last chance to be there again. Unfortunately, I think we were too tired to appreciate it properly - and also the view, when we stopped at overlooks, was quite hazy.

After such an exhausting day, we had a much quieter time yesterday. ADC finally went to buy bagels for Sunday breakfast. He said that he was one of the few male customers not wearing a kippa, and that all the staff were clearly Orthodox Jews - which to my mind seemed a good indication of quality control, and indeed the bagels were delicious. I wonder why American bagels are so much softer than the ones Granny and Grandpa used to make - a difference between Polish and Lithuanian traditions, perhaps? We then slowly wended our way to the weekly farmers' market and listened to a few acts at the Takoma Park Jazz Festival. It was incredibly hot and humid - Tel Aviv seemed cool and dry in comparison - so we didn't stay as long as we might have. We ended the day by watching Flash Gordon, which A had been very eager to watch due to the soundtrack being by Queen. I saw sometime in my childhood, but remembered very little of it. It was quite hilariously campy and bad, with enough woodenness to furnish a carpenter in every scene with Flash and Dale Arden, on the one hand, and Brian Blessed chewing all scenery he came within point blank range of: "Hand me the remote control!!" sounded just like "Release the Kraken!!"

Today was the first day of the summer holidays. The boys and I have begun packing - in the sense that they went through all their school stuff, and there is now a pile of paper almost 23 cm high waiting to be recycled - and I began inventorying which of the things we bought for the house we plan to send in a lift and which we plan to leave behind as it's not worth sending them, when you factor in the cost of shipping and customs. Tomorrow a rep of one of the shipping companies I contacted is coming to do an in-home survey; another company estimated (based on my very preliminary listing) that we had about 5 cubic metres to ship. I think the cost of shipping will come to almost equal the value of the things that we are shipping, and that's before customs is calculated. The state really wants you to buy things in Israel, rather than importing them personally!

Not the country, Terry Gilliam's film, which ADC and I watched tonight. ADC has seen it before, but apparently the American (truncated) version, as opposed to the European (director's cut) we saw on Netflix. This was the first time I watched it, although I think I must have seen clips from it, as the first scene at the records department seemed very familiar.

I won't go into the plot, such as it is, as the atmosphere is much more important (and I am really tired). I guess Brazil was an important influence on steampunk (

eumelia, help me out here), with all the exposed ducts and the Enigma-style computer consoles. Definitely not surprised to discover that the planned title was 1984 and 1/2, as the comparison with Orwell's book and Fellini's film are obvious. I was intrigued how similar the design was to Quadrophenia, which is very much set in the (then) real world - the workers at the Department of Information dress very similarly to those at the advertising firm in which Jimmy works. And Robert deNiro was clearly having a great time - an early version of his Captain Shakespeare character from Stardust, I thought.

Has anyone else seen a good movie recently? We are coming tothe end of our wishlist on streaming.

We spent the first half of the weekend - Friday evening through Saturday afternoon - visiting our friends in Baltimore, KM and AM and their children IM, AW and CR. KM was instrumental in me being able to come to the US, as he sponsored my J-1 visa, and he and ADC have been friends from childhood (their fathers were postdocs together). IM and AW are a year and a half younger than A and S respectively, and the four boys have always got on extremely well (CR is a sixteen-month-old toddler, so is not really part of the equation yet, as far as they are concerned).

We have exactly a month left before leaving the DC area, so we were very pleased to be invited for the weekend, actually just as ADC had been about to call to ask when we could see them. As we left Takoma Park during Friday evening rush hour, Google Maps took us on a different route from our previous visit, and after a whole year in which I had only seen the part of the Baltimore that was the route between Penn Station and Johns Hopkins' Homewood Campus, this weekend I saw two areas that were quite different. To begin with, we ended up going through a rather depressed area of Baltimore before we reached the Ms' house, on W 34th St. We discussed with the boys how you identified a poverty-stricken area: peeling paint, boarded up windows, no greenery, no chain stores but rather corner shops prominently advertising liquor. A added children playing outside on the pavement and adults sitting on the steps leading up to the row houses, and S added that those adults were smoking. As we moved north, the neighbourhood improved - this seems to be a near constant, north is better than south (if your city has an up and a down, like Haifa does, with Mt Carmel, then up is better). I wonder if there is any explanation for that.

After supper, we went to get ice cream at the Charmery, just around the corner on W 36th St., and saw another side of the city. This was the hipster Baltimore, which KM and Am had said was like Zichron Yaakov in Israel, with boutiques selling various kinds of handmade food and clothes. They were quite right, and we were sorry to see that we had missed happy hour at a chocolatier. We were not too late for an oyster stall, and to our surprise, S agreed to try one (we assume because IM, rather than one of us, told him that it tasted good). He wasn't impressed, but at least he didn't reject the suggestion out of hand.

We had planned to go to the Aquarium in the morning, but once again we didn't make it. The Ms are very big on board games, and had specifically requested that we bring Seven Wonders with us. We played after coming back from the ice cream, and ended up going to bed very late. Once we got up in the morning, AM made waffles, after which the boys (including the fathers) began playing Clue, while AM and I took CR to the playground. When we got back, because CR was getting hungry, the game was still going on, and by the time it finished, we decided to just go back home and do homework and watch You Can't Take It With You, which is exactly what we did.