Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Movie Tuesday 1/21

Still very busy and very hectic here, now in the middle of a huge snowstorm! So much for getting anything done this week before my son's surgery on Thursday. This storm is so bad that the area hospitals have cancelled all surgeries for tomorrow - hoping it is cleared up by Thursday. The good news is that I am feeling better - back on Diflucan and frantically gathering information on various types of probiotics, hoping that switching to a new one might help. Several people have recommended Prescript Assist, so I ordered some.

We spent our weekend at my mom's condo in a ski resort so my son could celebrate his birthday (and his freedom before knee surgery) snowboarding with his friends. I mostly stayed on the couch in front of the fire! We did enjoy a couple of movies:

My husband and I watched The Way Way Back on Saturday night, and we both really enjoyed it. It's a coming-of-age story with a large dose of family dysfunction. The main character is a a 14-year old boy named Duncan. As the movie opens, he is riding in the back of a vintage station wagon (what we used to call the way back when we were kids!), reluctantly on the way to spend the summer with his divorced mom (played by Toni Collette), her boyfriend, Trent (played by Steve Carell), and his snooty teen daughter, Steph. Trent has spent summers at the same beach house (looks like Long Island to us) since he was a kid, so this is all his territory. As the cute next-door neighbor girl explains to Duncan, "this place is like spring break for adults."  Duncan hates Trent (with good reason) and is miserable watching his mom and Trent and the other adults go wild, until he stumbles into a job at a local water park, where he meets happy-go-lucky Owen, an adult who never grew up. There is a vintage feel to the movie (they joke that the water park hasn't changed since the 80's) that at times reminded me a bit of Adventureland (which I loved). The movie contains both drama and comedy and was very enjoyable.

Sunday night's movie, which we watched with our 19-year old son, was less of a success! We watched an older sci fi movie, Solaris, starring George Clooney. We all liked the premise: Solaris is a space station orbiting a strange planet where weird things have been happening. Clooney is a psychologist on earth who is sent into space to investigate what's been happening on Solaris. What he finds there is even stranger than expected and impossible to explain. It's a fascinating concept - even my son agreed that the book it is based on was probably very good - but it didn't have enough action for my son and husband. I liked it - my only complaint was that it is filmed with a lot of very dark scenes, dark both thematically and cinematically, so that it was sometimes difficult to see what was happening. But I thought it was thought-provoking and interesting. If you don't care much for action and enjoy sci fi or psychological thrillers, then you might want to give it a try. Incidentally, we never did quite figure out whether we'd watched it before, years ago. Brain fog and getting older can be beneficial at times!

Have you seen any good movies lately?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Liked the Way Way Back, too. Actually it was filmed in the South Shore of Massachusetts which is the coast between Boston and Cape Cod. Very beautiful area.

Sue Jackson said...

Oh, that's funny because our first guess was Cape Cod (which we visited for the first time this summer) - we thought it looked a lot like Sandwich, MA. But then, one of the characters said something about "Hampton" and some other place name that made us think they meant for it to be in Long Island. I'll tell my husband we were very close!

Sue