Heather and I went to the movies today. She let me pick and I wanted to see Elvis. We didn’t know what to expect but the trailers seemed interesting.
We were blown away. What a fantastic movie. It’s kind of hard to describe it because it is unique on how it tells the story. The story is of the relationship between Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) and his promoter, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks)
The movie web site provides a great synopsis and other information. The movie IMDB site has a complete cast list and 149 photographs and other information.
The movie shows Elvis as a youngster and his influences from then up to becoming a star and then does a great job showing his development as singer and performer including a long string of movies. Tom Hanks does a great job of being the complex, mysterious promoter who had a hold on Elvis. I’m not going to give the movie away. I think one thing it will do is reinvigorate Elvis’s reputation. The man was an incredible talent with a wonderful voice and knew how to move an audience.
The clip before of Elvis singing Unchained Melody in 1977 in maybe his last public performance is incredible. It was toward the end of his life but the power in his voice is wonderful.
The kid is home, we are tired of being locked down so we headed to a local theater and saw Spider-Man: No Way Home. Heather and Logan love the Spider-Man movies. I go along and enjoy them but I can’t keep track of all the characters and all the actors who play Spiderman, and there are lots of them plus the whole series of movies is embedded in the “Marvel Universe.” Yep, well okay!
That being said, this is a great movie. It is hard to write about the movie without spoiling it for people. Let me just say that I loved it. It has a number of twists and turns in it. The action is intense and so is the acting. Read the IMDB writeup if you must.
I give it five stars out of five. I’d go watch it again.
I went on a little tour of Tulsa Saturday. It was a tour of a movie locations for “The Outsiders” based on the coming of age novel by S.E. Hinton. The movie was shot in Tulsa in 1983 by Francis Ford Coppola and several rising young stars in it including, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, and Patrick Swayze.
I went to several places including “The Outsiders House” where many of the scenes were shot. It is in a rough neighborhood that now appears on the upswing. The house had gone through some rough times since the filming and was about to be demolished when rapper Danny Boy O’Connor purchased it in 2016. The house was gutted and rebuilt with a lot of help of volunteers. It is now a museum and is pretty cool.
The inside has been restored and there is a lot of memorabilia on display. It’s kind of like walking through an old house, because it is an old house.
I also went to Will Rogers High School where some of the scenes were shot. It is a beautiful old Art Deco school. My wife and I attended a concert there several years ago and the interior is gorgeous.
Another scene was shot at the Circle Theater. Excuse the terrible photo. It is still in service but is now kind of art movie type venue.
And the Admiral Twin Drive-in which is still in use. It burned down several years ago and was rebuilt.
In times past I have been to other Outsiders Locations. This is a gas station in the suburb of Perry north of town and across the street…
Is another location used in the movie.
And this is Boston Avenue Church in downtown Tulsa. An exterior shot of this was made as a hospital.
So I had a lot of fun on my little tour. It was actually a type of geocache called an Adventure Lab where one has to travel to the various sites and answer a question about the site, while at the site (it uses your phone’s gps to keep you from cheating.)
The family went to see another movie on Sunday. “Blinded by the Light” by Gurinder Chada, starring Vivek Kalra, as Javed, a young Pakastani living in a small town in England in 1987 with his parents and sister. He lives a life dominated by his Father and family which doesn’t leave him much room to himself and he doesn’t quite know what to do about it until one day…
A friend of his loans him a couple of tapes (it’s 1987, and you could loan somebody tapes, and share the music, how the crap do you share music in this day of downloads???? Yeah, I don’t know either!)
Through Springsteen’s music, Javed feels understood finally, that somebody else has felt hopeless in a small town yet still found a way to find hope in this world. This is helped by a sympathetic teacher that recognizes Javed’s writing talent and of course the love a of a good woman, a new girlfriend.
Javed eventually finds his voice, gets the courage to stand up against his socially rigid, controlling father, and learns that he can find a future without building a wall against his Pakastani upbringing.
It was eyeopening for me, I was like a quarter generation off Bruce Springsteen’s core audience. I liked some of his music but found it a little pretentious for my tastes plus I wondered why he never really rocked out. But then again I never listened to the lyrics. I never listen to lyrics except for hit them over the head lyrics like Carly Simon’s “Come Upstairs” … “Come upstairs, we can take off the phone, Come Upstairs, you can take off my clothes”!!! (Yes, I get those lyrics). Oops sorry, (not sorry), I am really digressing bad.
The first song, Javed listens to “Dancing in the Dark”
I get up in the evenin’ And I ain’t got nothin’ to say I come home in the mornin’ I go to bed feelin’ the same way I ain’t nothin’ but tired Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself Hey there, baby, I could use just a little helpYou can’t start a fire You can’t start a fire without a spark This gun’s for hire Even if we’re just dancin’ in the dark
And its like wow, and it is on and on. And it is fun watching Javed grows up right before our eyes and learns how to be his own person. In the meantime, movie magic happens and people break out singing and dancing.
This is a great, feel good, eye opening movie. I highly recommend it. How many stars you give to movie, give all of them to this one.
We are having a late winter this year and it is really irritating me. I mean the days are longer, the light is good, even the birds are singing but it is bitter cold. What’s up with that.
I got me a glass ball to take photos with. I love it. It took me a while to get the hang of it but I am liking it now. You have to be careful in full sun. I was taking a photo today with it and I about burnt my hand. It is like a magnifying glass. I’ve read reviews that it can start fires if you place it on dry grass in full sun.
I like messing with photographs. This is the green space in our neighborhood. I edited it rather heavily with some iphone apps.
The floor was kind of cold, even with a mat.
I’ve been taking lots of yoga classes lately. Six so far this year, five in the last three weeks. I have very stiff muscles and at my age I can tell if I don’t do anything about it then it is going to be a bigger and bigger factor as time goes by. I don’t want any big factors. I can tell a difference already. I feel a little looser and a lot stronger. Yoga is not for weaklings. Those small, skinny, women who teach are strong as well as limber. Plus I have this great sense of well being afterward.
A nice French Ale
So I signed up for a “Beer and Yoga” event at a local brewery. Yep, I went. It was great. I noticed most of the participants got their beer to begin with. I didn’t because the brew was going to be my reward. Plus at my age, if I drank it before the class then I would have to leave the class temporarily one, two, or three times. Don’t make me explain why. Anyway I loved the class but it will be a while before the next one. Our gym was hosting a kids indoor triathlon last Saturday and had cancelled all the classes. So this Saturday I’ll be back to either the stand up paddleboard class I have been taking or my wife’s AquaZoneBa class she teaches. No beer at either one but hey, I have lots of my own beer.
And while I am telling on myself, here is some more. We went to a recently renovated movie theater the other day and guess what they have a full bar. So I got me a craft beer to go with the movie. It was cold that day and they had reclining seats so I brought me a blanket as well. T Don’t you judge me!!
Now that I have shared much more than I should, I am linking with Skywatch Friday.
Heather and I went to see A Star is Born recently. It is a really good movie. Guess what, Bradley Cooper can sing, he rocks and he does it really well. And, Lady Gaga can act. And as a bonus they have great chemistry together. Cooper also directed and produced the movie. I have no idea how that much talent ends up being concentrated in just one person.
You can check the link above for a synopsis but basically Cooper plays an aging rocker, Jack, who sees this young chick singer with an amazing voice, Ally, in a dive bar. Sparks fly, he helps her with her career and it zooms off to the stars, while his career, rocket charged by too much booze and pills heads downward quickly.
On the way though we get quite a ride. Lady Gaga of course can really sing, and she does some Pop diva songs in the movie but I have really like her recent album where she plays a lot slower, less produced songs that are really good. I think the sound track to this movie is something I would consider buying.
Supposedly this is the third or fourth version of this movie and I can’t tell you how this stands in relation to others because I didn’t see them!
I give this film four stars out of four or five out of five or however else you want to rate it. Go see it, you won’t be disappointed.
Downsizing is a fun little movie. It is a kind of a science fiction, environmental, romance kind of movie. Matt Damon plays Paul Safranek a man with once bright prospects who is now an under achiever, compared to his peers. He and his wife try and buy a new house but they just plain don’t make enough money to qualify.
This is against a background of a well developed technology of molecular downsizing which is being promoted as the environmentally responsible thing to do. Paul and his wife to check it out and are wowed by how much their limited dollars will stretch if they downsize and live in a dedicated town. They decide to go ahead and do it.
The movie doesn’t get good reviews but I thought it was interesting. Downsizing is just another way of migrating from where you are to where you think the grass is greener. Americans have been doing it for years. In the movie, the environmental impact thing is played up but to the characters greed is the driving force. The opportunity to live in gigantic doll houses that cost a song is the allure. But you know, every paradise has its problems.
People move into their big houses but they don’t want to clean them. Whats the point of having a huge house if you have to clean it yourself? So guess what? there are downsized people who need the money who will clean your house. Where they live is not as not as nice as your house. So we have an immediate underclass.
I don’t want to get all political on anybody but it struck me that many of us would be happy with paradise. We wouldn’t want to emigrate, or downsize just to live in the same kind of house as what we have. We want an upgrade. And we will want to hire somebody to clean it for us.
So I liked the movie. There is a lot more to it than what I am saying but I don’t want to spoil it for you. There is a flurry of sexual language to the end that I think is totally uncalled for. Just letting you know. I think Matt Damon does a good job. Like I said the movie is getting mediocre reviews but I think it is worth watching.
Heather and I went to see “The Shape of Water“, a movie set in a mysterious defense lab somewhere in the USA during the early 1960’s. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a lonely young woman who cleans and mops in the lab. This is basically a science fiction type, action, adventure, spy, fantasy, romantic movie. It involves a water monster caught in the Amazon River and hauled to the lab and subject to abuse. I am not going to spoil it for you. It is a Beauty and the Beast movie and has a satisfying conclusion. Sally Hawkins does a great job, Michael Shannon plays a great old school security officer, Octavia Spencer, from Hidden Figures, does well as Elisa’s work buddy.
I loved it but keep the kiddos at home. It has, in my mind, purely gratuitous sexual and full frontal nude scenes which gives me pause in recommending it, but it is still a good movie.
Check out the web site for more info and of course IMDB has lots of information on movies, actors, and directors.
The family went to see “Only the Brave – The Story of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots” last weekend. It is a great movie about a group of 19 elite firefighters who died fighting a fire in the Weaver Mountains near Yarnell, Arizona in 2013. It was a shocking loss by any measure but especially because these were guys who were trained to avoid such disasters. I mean the movie was great but it was based on a true event and to me that kind of overshadows everything.
Below is one of the eeriest videos I have ever seen. It includes some footage shot by the guys who died soon afterward.
There is a lot of commentary and articles speculating about what happened. Just google it and you can find plenty of articles with all sorts of speculation about how these guys ended up in such a terrible situation. It is all overwhelming especially since nobody knows for sure.
There is now an Arizona State Memorial for the hotshots. It is definitely on my bucket list. Check the link. It has brief profiles of each of the guys who died. It is heartbreaking, these guys were in the prime of their lives.
I had a very personal interest in the movie. My father, who passed away in August, worked in the Forest Service and although he wasn’t a hot shot, or spent much time on the front lines, he fought forest fires for years. When I was a kid, during a dry summer he’d be gone almost the whole season, Idaho, Montana, California, Nevada, Arizona. We didn’t hear anything from him, and then he would show up one day covered in dirt and soot, smelly, and exhausted. Afterwards he would have to be very careful around my mother to give the impression that he didn’t like the work.
Payson, Arizona
When I was a kid, the hotshots, the smoke jumpers, and helitack crews were hard as nails men doing back breaking labor. The hotshots rode in trucks to as close to the fire as they could and then humped across country with their equipment, food, shelter, and water on their back to the fire. The theory was that you get these guys on a fire fast to keep the fire from getting bigger. They were expected to handle anything that came up. I remember my mother talking of the hotshots as being a rough bunch.
Payson Hotshots, playing frisbee football
So nowadays, they have a little bit of glamor to them and have really nice vehicles to ride instead of the backs of trucks that I remember but the work itself is just as hard if not harder. After a half century or more of fire extreme suppression, and perhaps global warming, the fuel to burn is more than ever and the weather conditions hotter and drier than ever and so the work may be difficult and dangerous than their predecessors had it.
Forest Fire in Idaho, 1960’s, photo by my father.
I have only seen a few fires and they have been from a distance and they definitely puckered me up although I was miles from them.
Forest Fire in Idaho under control, photo by my Dad.
I can only imagine what being next to one would be like. It is hard to figure out what my Dad went through. He tended to downplay everything to no big deal and my mom’s Irish tended to embellish things perhaps a bit much. She was part of the Forest Service wives club that was pretty close knit so she could find out about stuff that dad didn’t like to talk about. She said she heard one time he drove a truck through a fire to get a guy that had been stranded behind the lines and that the paint had got burned off the truck in process. Dad said nonsense, he got the guy sure, but there was no danger, and no paint was burned. And it wasn’t just Dad. In the small towns we lived in, the Forest Service guys were the dads who took the Boy Scouts camping and led all sorts of other things. They were community minded men, and so were their wives. It was very close knit. Whenever dad got transferred somewhere we generally knew people where we were going.
Slurry bomber in Idaho, mid 1960’s, photo by my Dad.
So anyway, it is a great movie. I think it accurately shows how brave these guys were. And like I said, I have never been anywhere close to a fire but I think it shows accurately what being near a fire is like and how backbreaking building a fire line and clearing brush is. So as you can probably guess, I strongly recommend this movie.
We went to see The Hero on a flaming hot Saturday afternoon. The movie stars Sam Elliott, of the craggy face, big mustache, and wonderful voice, playing an actor, Lee Hayden, who had one great film, The Hero, forty years ago and has been living on that fame ever since. He now spends his time doing voice overs for commercials, drinking bourbon, and smoking pot. He has an ex-wife, played by Elliott’s real life wife, Katherine Ross, and an estranged daughter, other than that he keeps to himself until he finds out that he has a very lethal form of cancer, and he immediately doubles down on the pot smoking and whiskey drinking. On an outing to a former actor buddy who is also his pot dealer he runs into Charlotte, played by a smoking hot Laura Prepon, who is also there picking up some weed. So we start this May December romance thing that just appears out of nowhere.
From there the movie plods along and we have lots of long walks on the beach and more drinking and pot smoking along with pills and mushrooms. We have indecipherable dream sequences and a sound track that features lots of iPhone sound effects. Things kind of brighten up a little bit as Hayden starts telling people about his illness. Overall though the movie doesn’t seem to have much of a message and is pretty much a downer. I’m kind of fifty-fifty on it. If you like Sam Elliott, you will love this movie. Otherwise, its a movie that seems confused about itself.
Leave the kiddos at home, lots of casual drug use, a little side boob view of Prepon and some suggestive scenes.
