Don't Gel Too Soon

How Do You Feel When Your Son Can Do THIS?

SO let me be a proud mom.  Look at these two videos about Fable3. This is the preview A while ago

Do We Love this or What?

Something Truly Remarkable

Between work and Passover I have been completely delinquent about posting but you need to see this.  Really. You need to. It's less than three minutes and you'll be really glad. 

Written, directed by : Patrick Jean Director of Photography : Matias Boucardp

Audrey Hepburn, Gregory Peck and Roman Holiday: a Political Lesson? No, Really.

It was a fairy tale about a princess on a journey. Doing her duty, kind of like Diana (but, since she was played by Audrey Hepburn, even classier,) she came to Rome, after Athens, London and Paris, to conclude her mission. 

But she was young and beautiful and sick of receptions and parades. And so, in the middle of the night, she snuck out the embassy window and ventured across the Piazza di Spagna and into the Roman night. 

If you know this movie at all, you remember with sweet nostalgia the way you felt the first time you saw it.  The princess asleep near the Trevi Fountain on the Roman equivalent of a park bench is awakened, like Sleeping Beauty, by reporter Joe Bradley, played by Gregory Peck. ( If the film has a flaw, it's that we know some of what will happen once we see him there.  He's a good guy and that's who he plays.  He is Atticus Finch, after all.)   

The film was released in 1953, right in the middle of the 1950's.  Written by Dalton Trumbo, "Roman Holiday" was credited to a "front" named Ian McLellan Hunter, because Trumbo, blacklisted as a member of the Hollywood Ten, wasn't permitted to write for movies any longer.  It's one of the darkest chapters in Hollywood history, very much a part of the image of the decade and a sad facet of a beloved film that won three Oscars and introduced the world to Audrey Hepburn.

There's something else though.  The people in this film behave well.  There are things that they want, desperately, but there are principals at stake, and they honor them.  When Peck meets Hepburn, he doesn't recognize her but lets her crash at his apartment.  Once he figures out who she is, he knows this "runaway"  could be the story of his life.  Even so, after a brief, idyllic tour of the city, (SPOILER ALERT) she honors her responsibilities and returns to her royal duties, and of course, he never writes the story.  It was very much an artifact of the "Greatest Generation" ideals, manifested with such courage during WWII and very much the flip side of the jaundiced (and just as accurate) Mad Men view of the 50's.  Duty and honor trump romance and ambition. 

Once again, I'm struck with admiration for the people of these times.  Yes the 50's did terrible damage and made it difficult to be eccentric or rebellious or even creative.  But films like this one, or Now Voyager and similar films of the 40's, sentimental as they may be, remind us of what else these people were.  They'd lived through the Depression and the war and they had an elevated sense of responsibility.  As we watch much of our government (and some of the rest of us) disintegrate into partisanship and self-interest, it makes a lot more sense than it did when we rose up against it all in the 1960's.  Doesn't it? 

Meryl Streep and "It's Complicated" - As If We Didn't Know That

My posts seem to run in bunches.  After two meditations on marriage in the past month, here I am again.

It's all Meryl Streep's fault.  If you know what it feels like when your kids run off together when you thought you were all going to dinner, or to struggle to remain your own person in a long marriage  -- whether it ends or it doesn't, or just to be married for a long time and build a family with a partner - you know this story.

We went with another couple also married 38 years.  It's hard to describe the shared recognition, the warmth we all felt at the familiar moments on the screen - the rare family dinners with our adult children, continuing to learn and grow - together or apart, watching the accomplishments and weddings and occasional rages of each kid, accepting the fact that we've entered that part of life where they're on their own - and so are we.  Children grow up and earn their own lives, careers begin to ebb, and those of us who are blessed spend those years with one another.  Or, if we must, search for and find someone else to ease the way.

It was all there, gentle, funny, loving and true.  Like looking in a mirror.  Oh - and lest you wonder whether a movie about a 50-something (or maybe 60) couple recovering from a divorce - in the torrent of high-profile films and stars, it's in the top five for the holidays.  It may be complicated, but loving it isn't complicated at all.

Happy New Year: Jib Jab Does it Best

What else is there to say?   Except "Hope next year is better!"

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today

Art Imitates Life and Dr. Horrible's Nemesis Is an Author!

I'm not sure who's on first, which chicken chased which egg or even how to tell you about this.  See this book cover?  It's a real book - and Entertainment Weekly says it isn't even bad.  But the author - well, the author isn't real!!!  He's a character on an ABC TV program called - guess what --- Castle! 

Played by Dr. Horrible's own Biggest Enemy Captain Hammer -- aka Nathan Fillion - he's a debonair, wealthy mystery writer with an actress mother and a typically New-York-wise daughter with whom he has a refreshingly healthy relationship  (Mom too, actually.) 

So there's nothing wrong with the show; it's slight, sweet and kind of funny although it could certainly be better written.  In fact, from the reviews I've read, it might be better if Richard Castle (who remember, doesn't exist - really) wrote the scripts as well as his books. 

Yes books because apparently this is the first of many.  And you can get it on Kindle and Castle even has a brief (equally fictitious) bio on Amazon "Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society's prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration."

Got that?  Fillion/Captain Hammer (this guy) also plays a fictitious writer on a lightweight TV show and somebody - whose name isn't anyplace and as far as I can determine hasn't played anyone (other than a ghostwriter) has written a novel in his name.

This isn't a scandal or a crime - it's just so damned funny.  Fillion seems like a fine fellow and Castle is certainly likable enough.  But it's hard to get books published these days - especially fiction. 

So all you struggling writers out there -- now you know how to sell your novel.  Make it into a TV show and your literary career is assured.

As my mom used to say, "Only in America!"

Oh No! Say It Isn't So!!

OK I know.  The world is ending, the climate is cooking, the economy is crashing and God only knows what else is happening in the "real world."  Even so - Twitter and Facebook and all points in between are so so sad.  This break up is just not fair.  Susan Sarandon and I are the same age and I once spent time with her (well, twice but both times in an elevator in our building where friends of hers lived and we DID talk...) and in some crazy way felt more in common with her than with most shiny people.  The politics of course didn't hurt either. And Bob Roberts may be my favorite political movie and so Bush-prophetic.

Because of all that, I too feel a floating sadness - nothing heart=wrenching - just sad.  These two  have always done what they believed and made us all happy.  And they deserve to be happy too.  Whatever it takes to get there.

So Long Patrick, and Thanks

Does anybody not love Dirty Dancing?   At least for the many of us who were the darling Frances "Baby" Houseman, the idealistic, embryonic 60's activist, Daddy's girl for her brains, not her looks, the film is a misty, wonderful time capsule.  And so,  it may be, in essence, a women's film - so romantic and sexy in a new-at-sex kind of way.  But it wouldn't have worked without the sweet, gifted Patrick Swayze, who died today.  Although as Johnny Castle he gave us a young man who tried to present a weary, streetwise persona, he also brought us a man as idealistic as the rich girl who fell for him.  The perfect first lover.  Swayze, with grace and generosity, was all that and more.

This was a class story and coming-of-age story and a Times They Are A-Changin' story, evocative in ways that are difficult to express.  Baby, like us, was riding the cusp between the 50's end of the 60's and the Sixties that were to come.  Her relationship with Johnny was the bridge between those times, and so he meant even more than his lovely self.  I've always thought Swayze underestimated anyway but as I decided to write this I began to realize just how underestimated.  Without the right Johnny, Frances would not have mattered.

I, at least, could look at her and know her future.  Because it was mine.  Like Baby I never hated my parents.  Most of what I did that they wouldn't have liked, I hid.  Defiance was never a goal because I loved my parents and they loved me.   We just didn't see things like love and sex the same way so I decided just not to tell them.  There were many other things we saw differently too, but they changed their minds because they listened to us as often as we changed ours by listening to them.  We respected each other. 

So I did all my overnight disappearing on campus and kept my mouth shut about it.  And went home as the Cindy they knew -- more political and determined, but with no desire to blow up the neighborhood or leave the people I'd loved -- and still loved -- behind.  Like Frances, I responded to the Civil Rights movement and President Kennedy and longed to be part of what was to come.   Like Frances I had a "Johnny" though mine didn't dance. 

Of course, Swayze went on to make Ghost, which I think was at least as successful and even more of a fairy tale.  He appeared in gritty films like Road House and, as a tribute to his fellow dancers, many of whom died of AIDS, in drag in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.  And which role we choose to remember most probably depends on gender, and even more on age.

But for me, gratitude for the gift of memory, of the same sense of romance, in a way, that Twilight offers another generation, that's tough to beat.  And the gift, the reminder of the girl I remember and the hopes and dreams she took with her to college, that gift was from Patrick Swayze too. 

One More Day!