Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Movie Review--Flight Plan

Another enjoyable movie. Jodie Foster is great in the role of Kyle Pratt, a recently widowed mother whose husband was killed in an accident. Kyle is traveling from Berlin to New York with her 6-year-old daughter when the unthinkable happens and her daughter disappears. She searches the plane (which is much bigger and more impressive than any plane on which I've flown) to no avail. She enlists the help of the flight crew. The only problem is that there's no record of her daughter ever being on board. None of the flight crew or passengers remember whether or not a little girl was ever with Kyle. They believe that maybe her recent loss has caused her to snap and imagine her daughter was with her. Kyle understandably gets more and more upset as more time passes and her daughter remains missing, but this only makes her look more unbalanced. She is on her own in trying to find her daughter.

The movie was a little slow to get started, but after that it was suspenseful and entertaining. In general, I like Jodie Foster; if you like her, you'll probably like this. One did have to suspend disbelief at times. I never thought anyone could be that hard to find on a plane, even though it was a much bigger plane than any I've flown on. I did enjoy it, however.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Movie Review--Just Like Heaven

I loved this movie. I really like Reese Witherspoon in pretty much anything she is in, and I like most romantic comedies. This romantic comedy was rather unique in that one member of the couple wasn't quite physically present.

Reese Witherspoon plays a doctor, Elizabeth, who is totally wrapped up in her work, to the exclusion of any kind of personal life. One night after an especially long shift, Elizabeth is driving to her sister's and gets in an accident.

David (Mark Ruffalo) is a widower who is still grieving the loss of his wife. He rents a furnished apartment in San Francisco largely based on the fact that he likes the couch. He then proceeds to veg out and make a mess of the place.

He then discovers he has a roommate, a bossy young woman who insists that he's in her apartment and is highly indignant about the mess he is making, especially his failure to use a coaster. At first he assumes that there is a misunderstanding, but then he realizes that his roommate can pass through solid objects. She also has a tendency to appear and disappear at will. David then believes she must be a ghost and tries to help her pass over to the other side. He checks out an occult bookstore and even has a priest do an exorcism, but nothing works.

Elizabeth realizes that her ability to pass through solid objects is rather odd, but still believes that she is alive somehow. Unfortunately, she cannot remember who she was before; at first she cannot even remember her name. So she enlists David's help to figure out who she was and what happened to her. They fall in love, but realize that they may never really be able to be together and that time is running out.

The movie is sweet and touching, as well as funny. Ruffalo and Witherspoon are great together. I also thought Jon Heder was hilarious as Darryl, a psychic and medium who works in a occult bookstore. I would definitely consider it a "chick flick" (the best kind of movie in my opinion). I highly recommend it.

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Book Review--The Stupidest Angel, by Christopher Moore

Okay, it's not exactly the right season for this. I seem to have a habit of reading Christmas books out of season. But this isn't exactly a typical Christmas book anyway.

The story takes place in the small town of Pine Cove, California. There a seven-year-old boy, Josh, is distraught because he thinks he saw a woman kill Santa Claus. He prays that Santa will come back from the dead for Christmas.

In reality, Lena Marquez had just killed her hated ex-husband, who had been wearing a Santa suit. Josh doesn't know that, of course, so his one wish for Christmas is for Santa to come back to life.

Raziel is an archangel who has come to Earth to grant a Christmas wish for a small child. Raziel isn't too bright, however, and in attempting to bring "Santa" back to life, he casts too wide of a net. Long-dead residents of Pine Cove come back as zombies to terrorize a Christmas party.

The characters in this book are great. My favorite is Molly, a schizophrenic who went off her meds in order to be able to pay for a Christmas present for her husband. She's just such a colorful character.

This is the first book I have read by Christopher Moore, and it was a lot of fun. Apparently some of the characters, including Molly, have appeared in some of his other books. I will have to check those out.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Random Thought Number 11: Swimming Cats

Last night I had the strangest dream. In the dream, my cats were swimming in the pool in my apartment complex and just having a great time. I have had variations of this dream before, and I'm always amazed. "I didn't think cats could just automatically swim the way dogs do, but I guess they can," I always say to whomever is with me. This time, I was worried about the cats being in the pool, though I thought it was pretty amazing that they could swim, since cats aren't exactly allowed in my apartment complex swimming pool. It was hard to keep them out though, because somehow they kept escaping because they wanted to swim so much.

I looked this up in The Everything Dreams Book by Trish and Rob MacGregor. This is a pretty interesting book. Though it discusses the importance of determining what different dreams and dream symbols might mean to the reader personally, it does have some interpretations of common dream symbols. Anyway, not surprisingly, it doesn't have "swimming cats" so I looked up cats and swimming separately. Cats can be a postive or negative symbol, depending on the dreamer's association with cats and the other things happening in the dream. I love cats and it didn't seem like a bad-luck kind of dream. So, I don't think the cats should be interpreted in a negative light in this dream. (Cats can mean prosperity or represent independence, the feminine, or sexual prowess, according to this book). However, I did have mixed feelings: amazement that they could swim, and worry because they weren't supposed to be in that pool and I couldn't seem to keep them out of it.

A dream about swimming, on the other hand, "suggests the dreamer is immersed in an exploration of emotional matters or the unconscious. " (p. 270). This is interesting to me since I often have dreams about swimming with no cats involved, since I love to swim. However, I am not sure how to tie these two elements together. I don't think it was trying to tell me that my cats are deep in thought about emotional matters or the unconscious, for example. Does anyone out there in cyberland who is better at dream interpretation than I have any thoughts about this?

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Movie Review--March of the Penguins

This movie wasn't what I was expecting. I guess I was expecting something more along the lines of Ice Age or something like that. I did enjoy March of the Penguins, however. It's a documentary, narrated by Morgan Freeman, about the lives of penguins. This may sound rather dry, but it was really interesting. If there really is such a thing as reincarnation (which I do believe in), I definitely don't want to come back as a penguin.

The movie starts with the penguins' march (they walk or slide on their stomachs) of some 70 miles. They do this to spawn. They have to get to a place where the ice is really thick and won't melt until summer, so their offspring don't fall through. When they get to the spawning place, they engage in a sort of "singles" ritual. It's unknown exactly what they are looking for, but they are looking (interesting, since they all look exactly the same). They only have one mate, but I think this only lasts for a season. The females lay the eggs (one egg apiece). Once they do, they have to pass it off to the male right away, and he protects the egg from the cold via a flap in the skin. But they have to be really careful in passing it off, because if the egg is exposed for any length of time, it will freeze and the chick will die. Then the females, having lost a third of their body weight from producing and laying the egg, have to eat, which requires trekking back to where they came from and diving into the ice-cold water to get food. They stuff themselves with food, enough so that they can regurgitate some later and feed their offspring, and make the trek back again. Once they come back, the chicks have hatched, and they take care of the offspring while the males, having lost half of their body weight, go to eat. Some of the chicks freeze to death, and the mothers grieve, sometimes so much that they try to steal another penguin's offspring, though the other penguins stop them from doing so. They have a strong bond even though they haven't been together that long. But once it's time to leave the spawning place, and the babies can care for themselves, the parents and offspring probably will never see each other again.

Anyway, I knew absolutely nothing about penguins before seeing this, and I found it all really interesting. Looks like a really miserable life, though. I guess it's not like they know of any other way to live, though.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Book Review--Twilight Children, by Torey Hayden

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, Torey Hayden is one of my favorite authors. Twilight's Children is her latest book, just out this year. Most of her books are about her experiences in the classroom, teaching emotionally disturbed children. This book is about her experiences working in the psychiatric ward of a children's hospital. The focus is on three people with whom she worked.

Cassandra was nine years old. At age five, she was abducted by her father. He kept her for two years. Finally Cassandra was found three states away, alone, starving, filthy, and forgaing for food in garbage cans. When she finally returned to her mother, she didn't speak, and even when she began speaking again, she refused to talk about anything that had happened during the time she had been abducted. She had post-traumatic stress disorder and had been sexually abused.

Drake was a happy, intelligent four-year-old. Yet he never spoke, except to his mother. His extremely overbearing grandfather brought him to Torey, knowing that her specialty was elective mutism, and expected her to get him to speak immediately. Was there something physically wrong with Drake, or had he suffered some horrible trauma that had caused him to stop speaking? The truth was actually quite shocking.

Gerda was an elderly woman in a rehabilitation unit close to the children's hospital. A stroke had robbed her of most of her speech. Torey usually only worked with children, but she agreed to see Gerda as a favor to a friend. She ends up learning interesting details about Gerda's past, though Gerda had a tendency to speak in monologues rather than actually being able to converse. The attitude of some of the people who worked with the elderly came as something of an unpleasant shock to Torey.

I always like Torey Hayden's books, but this one, though still good, wasn't necessarily one of my favorites. The three cases, though interesting, were disconnected, and there wasn't as much of a unified story as with her stories about teaching, and her other book about working as a therapist, Murphy's Boy . I wasn't even quite sure why she included Gerda's case, since it was so different from any of her other cases and though it was rather interesting (and sad), there didn't seem to me to be that much to say about it. I did feel bad for Gerda though; she had no family that really cared, and her cats were put to sleep since she couldn't take care of them anymore. That made me mad. She had a lot of cats and it would have been hard to find homes for them all, but it still made me mad; it was just so cold, getting rid of her loved ones.

Anyway, not quite as good as her other books, but still really enjoyable and thought-provoking.