90 Movies in 90 Days: I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing
Release Date: Vos Productions
Director: Patricia Rozema
Production Company: September 11, 1987
Summary/Review:

Polly (Sheila McCarthy) is a shy, awkward woman in her early 30s who lives alone, takes street photography for fun, and has a propensity for daydreaming.  She’s been unable to hold jobs through a temp agency because of her distractedness.  But as the film begins she starts work as administrative support for an art gallery run by Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon). Polly develops a crush for Gabrielle – whom she always calls “the Curator” – although she doesn’t seem to understand it as romantic love.  Working with Gabrielle inspires Polly to want to share her photography, while she also urges Gabrielle to share her art, which reveals an unexpected secret.

There is a lot of second-hand embarrassment watching Polly’s clumsy attempts at social interaction.  But she’s endearing because she’s just so relatable.  The film works as a populist story of art being important for the joy in creating rather than the snooty pronouncements of the gatekeepers.  McCarthy’s performance as Polly is delightful.

Rating: ****

Friday Fictioneers – Screen Time

PHOTO PROMPT © Fleur Lind

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“Ahem!”

<snork> “Oh, Alise, I must’ve just drifted off on the couch…”

…

“Where’s the baby!!!”

“He’s right where you left him, Dave-o.  In front of the tv.”

“Crap! He’s been watching machine videos for…” Dave checked his watch, “Two hours!”

“Yep!”

“Sorry, Alise, I know we’re supposed to limit screen time. After the early morning feeding, and a playdate, and a couple of hours on the swings at the park, and cleaning up an explosive poop, I just wanted a break….  And I guess I nodded off.”

“It’s alright, hon.  Even the best dads need to nap sometimes.”

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Today’s story is inspired by everything I learned while watching Mighty Machines with toddlers.  Sometimes with my eyes open, even.

Friday Fictioneers is a weekly photo prompt flash fiction challenge on Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Addicted to Purple blog.  See additional stories from the prompt by other writers here!

90 Movies in 90 Days: Plymptoons (1985-2000)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: Plymptoons
Release Date: 1985-2000
Director: Bill Plympton
Production Company: Bill Plympton Studios
Summary/Review:

Despite having a list of great movies under 90 minutes, I didn’t feel like committing to anything big last night.  So I found this collection of six animated shorts by Bill Plympton on Kanopy to watch instead.  I remember seeing Plympton’s animated shorts at animation festivals when I was in college in the early 90s and remember them as at least mildly enjoyable.  And that is exactly what they were.

Boom Town (1985) – ***1/2

Political satire performed by the Android Sisters and written by Jules Feiffer about how fears of “the Russians are coming” were used to perpetually fund defense and the military industrial complex it spawned.  Has a Laurie Anderson vibe.

Can’t Drag Race With Jesus (2000) – ***

An energetic gospel tune that depicts Jesus as an unbeatable race car driver.  Catchy tune, but doesn’t say much beyond it’s quirky premise.

Dance All Day (1992) – **1/2

A man and a woman on a beach perform a variety of fad dances to a tune styled on a 60s beach movie.  There some fun at the end when it starts getting surreal, but mostly it’s boring and repetitious.

Dig My Do (1990) – ***

A dog impersonates Elvis and sings about his impressive hairstyle.  Weird for the sake of being weird.

Flooby Nooby (1992) – ***1/2

Bill Plympton at his most surreal in this short film about a strange town which combines quirky images with a catchy tune and a lot of wordplay.

Lovesick Hotel (1992) – ***1/2

A darkly comic animated short that requires a content warning for suicide.  A hotel clerk sings of the amenities of a hotel for the heartbroken in which we see the guests in the various suites offing themselves in comical ways.

90 Movies in 90 Days: Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Release Date: January 18, 2008
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Production Company: Zootrope Films
Summary/Review:

This is a rock documentary that follows a heavy metal band that seeks superstardom despite only small turnouts at their shows, disappointing record sales, and various disasters on tour. The movie even shows a band member cranking an amp to 11 and features someone named Robb Reiner.  Despite the appearance that this is an unauthorized spinoff of This is Spinal Tap, Anvil is in fact a real metal band from Canada who at the time of this documentary had been trying to make it big for 30 years.

Lead vocalist and guitarist Steve “Lips” Kudlow has the optimism and determination that most of us should aspire to.  Lips and his best friend and drummer Robb Reiner for the core of the band that the cameras follow for two years as they tour small clubs and festivals in Europe and record an album with a topnotch producer in hopes of finally achieving stardom that has eluded them.  In archival footage we learn that Anvil actually achieved success briefly in the early 80s with members of more famous metal bands considering them an influence.  This could be a sad film, but Lips and Robb seem to have made a lot of music they are proud of and people enjoy, and even if the audiences at their shows are small, everyone seems to be having a good time.  Better yet, this movie is kind of a love story as their friendship helps them persevere to keep trying doing what they love most.

Rating: ****

Book Review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Around the World for a Good Book Selection for Sri Lanka

Author: Shehan Karunatilaka
Title: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Narrator: Shivantha Wijesinha
Publication Info: HighBridge Audio, 2022
Summary/Review:

Maali Almeida is a photojournalist, a gambler, and a closeted gay man in 1980s Sri Lanka.  The novel begins with his death and his arrival in a state in-between life and the afterlife that is essentially a bureaucratic office space (shades of Beetlejuice).  Maali has seven moons (on week) to settle his affairs on Earth before moving on to a stage of forgetting.  As a war photojournalist he’s taken photos documenting the atrocities of the Sri Lankan Civil War that he desperately wants released to the public so that it might end the violence.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a grim and darkly comic novel that satirizes Sri Lankan politics.  It also relates the life of it’s protagonist in flashback, curiously written in second person so that the reader identifies with Maali.  Not knowing anything about the Sri Lankan Civil is definitely a challenge for me reading this book, although learning new things is one of the purposes of reading.  It’s also a strange and complicated story, but it does make for an interesting story of a specific place and time, with some magical realism for added measure.

Recommended books:

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
• Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Rating: ***1/2

Book Review: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Author: Daniel James Brown
Title: The Boys in the Boat : Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
Publication Info:  New York : Viking, c2013.
Summary/Review:

In this literary historical narrative, Daniel James Brown tells the story of nine young men who became national heroes during the Great Depression.  They were members of the University of Washington’s eight-oared rowing crew (and the coxswain) who represented the USA at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936.  These student athletes all came from working class backgrounds and they all had to struggle to make their way academically into college as well as spending countless hours practicing on Lake Washington.

Brown offers a background history of all 9 members of the University of Washington crew, but focuses most deeply on Joe Rantz, the poorest of the boys.  Rantz was forced to live on his own by his father and step-mother at the age of 15 and carries the feeling of abandonment to the University of Washington where he’s bullied for being poor.  Through the crew he finds acceptance and a sense of purpose.  The book also talks about the life and career of the team’s no-nonsense coach Al Ulbrickson, who had been a student rower at Washington less than a decade earlier.  The poetic English boat builder George Yeomans Pocock also plays a big part in the story.  Working in the loft of the Washington shell house, Pocock built wooden racing shells that were renown throughout the country, and served as a mentor for young athletes like Rantz,

Starting in 1933, Rantz’s freshman year, Brown details Ulbrickson’s plans to form a crew that could compete in the 1936 Olympics.  Collegiate rowing at the time was an extremely popular spectator sport with national radio coverage.  Despite all the time they spent practicing, there were only two major annual competitions on Washington’s calendar. The first was a race against their archrivals at University of California.  The other was a race on the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie, New York against several elite Eastern universities.  Washington and Cal had only begun challenging the Eastern schools’ supremacy in the 1920s.  In 1936, the Washington crew teams (including JV and Freshmen) swept all of these events before also winning at the US Olympic Trials for the right to represent the country in Berlin.

Throughout the book, Brown offers the parallel story of Aldolf Hitler planning to use the games to show the world that Nazi Germany was a powerful – but -benign – nation.  This included deceiving the US Olympic Committee about the true severity of discrimination against German Jews when the USOC was under pressure from protestors to boycott the games in Berlin.  The final chapters detail the experience of the Washington crew in Germany, including the dramatic final race.  The fact that we know the team will win gold should make it anticlimatic, but since the Washington team had a habit of coming from behind to win races (while facing challenges like a deliriously sick member of the crew) makes the race descriptions exciting.  Even if you know nothing about rowing, Brown describes the tactics and terminology so well that the reader is well-versed in it by the Olympic races.

Recommended books:

• Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand
• In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
• The Games: A Global History of the Olympics by David Goldblatt

Rating: ***

90 Movies for 90 Days: Le Million (1931)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: Le Million
Release Date: April 15, 1931
Director: René Clair
Production Company: Tobis Sound Company
Summary/Review:

A cash-strapped artist, Michel (René Lefèvre) is mobbed by his creditors when he learns that his number was selected in a lottery that will make him a millionaire.  Unfortunately, the ticket is in the pocket of the jacket he gave to his fiancée Beatrice (Annabella) to repair but she no longer has it.  Michel has to track down the leader of a Robin Hood-style criminal gang,  Grandpa Tulip (Paul Ollivier), and an operatic tenor, Sopranelli (Constantin Siroesco), to find the ticket.  His creditors, the police, and his backstabbing roommate Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert) all throw a wrench in his plans.

This is a delightfully silly and fun comedy from the early sound era.  It’s a musical that’s so earnest that characters literally say that they’ll tell you the story but it they will do it in song. I could see this story re-imagined for a modern day Broadway musical and being very successful.

Rating: ****

Song of the Week: “Water Underground” by Real Estate

Real Estate – “Water Underground”

Real Estate, an indie pop band from New Jersey, released their sixth album Daniel on Friday.  The single “Water Underground” captures their sunny sound with melancholy lyrics.  The video is a bonus featuring an Adventures of Pete & Pete reunion.

Songs of the Week for 2024

January

• “Easy Fun” by gglum
• “Until Everybody is Free” by Bella Cuts
• “Hand to Hand” by Katy Kirby
• “Barnyard Disturbance” by Christian McBride & Edgar Meyer

February

• “Mira Mira” by Don Elektron, MariaDennis, Sam Bruno
• “Belief” by Otyken
• “Fidget Spinner” by Nikki Nair, DJ ADHD
• “Water Underground” by Real Estate

90 Movies in 90 Days: Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: Shaun the Sheep Movie
Release Date: February 6, 2015
Director:  Mark Burton, Richard Starzak
Production Company: Aardman Animations | Anton Capital Entertainment
Summary/Review:

Shaun the Sheep just wants to have a day off from his ordinary routine, but his plot to trick the Farmer leads to chaos.  Soon the Farmer is lost in the Big City and suffering amnesia, so it’s up to Shaun and his flock to rescue him.  Their efforts are hampered by an overzealous animal control officer named Trumper, and the Farmer becoming a celebrity hairstylist with his talent for shearing. This stop-motion film relies largely on pantomime and slapstick for big laughs, and refreshingly old-fashioned.  This is a fun and warm-hearted movie that can be enjoyed by all ages.

Rating: ***1/2

90 Movies in 90 Days: The Little Hours (2017)

Every day until March 31, 2024 I will be watching and reviewing a movie that is 90 minutes or less.

Title: The Little Hours
Release Date: June 30, 2017
Director: Jeff Baena
Production Company: StarStream Media | Bow and Arrow Entertainment | Destro Films | Dublab Media | Productivity Media | Concourse Media | Exhibit Entertainment | Foton Pictures
Summary/Review:

Three nuns in 14th-century Italy don’t find life in the convent bringing them closer to God.  Alessandra (Alison Brie) is only cloistered while she waits for her father to accrue the wealth for a dowry, Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) has anger issues, and Ginevra (Kate Micucci) is a gossip. When Massetto (Dave Franco) seeks sanctuary at the convent from the Lord who wants him killed, each of the sisters want something from him. The dialogue and humor are deliberately anachronistic, creating a Chaucerian bawdy tale with a modern-day vernacular. The cast is strong and also includes  John C. Reilly as Father Tommasso and Molly Shannon as Mother Marea.  While I think the premise is promising, the result just misses the mark for me.  Still, a strange and curious movie.

Rating: **1/2