Happy Birthday to Me

My last truly important birthday was probably my 18th, and that was a long, long time ago. I still feel like I’m 18, act like I’m 12, and sleep like I’m 5 months old. But life doesn’t often let you live in the blissful ignorance that I’ve mastered. Nothing will make you feel the icy fingers of mortality around your neck like cleaning out your childhood home, putting it up for sale, and preparing to close that lengthy chapter of your life. That’s what has occupied me for the past two weeks. My sisters and I looked through our parents’ …

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Movie Review: Star Trek

2009. Starring Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto. Directed by J.J. Abrams. There’s a particularly good episode of Northern Exposure — one of television’s funniest and most-thoughtful series — in which the Native American character played by Graham Greene is studying white American culture for examples of healing and instructive myths. He notes that various tribes have stories that help put the universe in perspective and help explain the often-unexplainable burden of being human. After questioning everyone in town, he finds that no one can name myths in white culture similar to those you find in Native American culture. He then stumbles …

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Movie Review: Wendy and Lucy

2008. Starring Michelle Williams. Directed by Kelly Reichardt. Summer is the time of blockbusters — screen-filling spectacles of ‘splosions and sequels. The fantastic and futuristic epics that challenge the stabilizing structures of logic while we suspend our disbelief. Reinterpretation of familiar narratives and remakes of films that were better in their first iteration. But once in a while, you are reminded that there is drama in everyday life, and a story that will break your heart behind every person with a downcast face you pass on the street. That’s why we need the blockbusters and explosions. There is just too …

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Movie Review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2008. Starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett. Directed by David Fincher. There are many deaths in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; that is, there are many lives lived. I say that because, if what this story tells us can be boiled down to a single point, it’s that, in order to live, you must accept that you will die. To make this point as simply and gracefully as the movie does, it shows us the life of a man born into a physically old body that becomes younger as he ages.  In all other ways, he experiences the joys and …

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Passings: Jeff Hanson

Found out late this afternoon that Kill Rock Stars recording artist Jeff Hanson, 31, has died. This tragic news, on a cold and rainy day in Minneapolis, is sad and sobering. I first heard him being interviewed on public radio a couple years ago, describing how he sung his trademark falsetto (forgive me if that’s not the right term) as a child, and utilized the same style when he became a songwriter. I picked up his self-titled LP, and was impressed with the delicate, unconventional songs. If you are a fan of Elliott Smith or Iron & Wine, this is …

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Movie Review: Quantum of Solace

2008. Starring Daniel Craig, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench. Directed by Marc Forster. There were so many negative reviews of this, the second movie in the series of reinvented James Bond adventures, that I was not in any kind of hurry to see Quantum of Solace. Even though I loved 2006’s Casino Royale, which introduced us to Daniel Craig’s icy, brutal James Bond, who lacks the winking casualness of past Bonds, and substitutes his bare knuckles for the increasingly goofy devices that drove earlier movies. Casino Royale began its reinvention with a bang — a relentless parkour chase that leaves the …

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Country Music Reclamation Project: The Sweetest Gift, A Mother’s Smile

For my mom, gone from this world six years now. I hope she wakes up with breakfast in bed every morning, and with no worries about her kids. The Sweetest Gift, A Mother’s Smile (performed by the Blue Sky Boys) Written by J.B. Coats One day a mother came to the prison To see an erring but precious son She told the warden how much she loved him It did not matter what he had done She did not bring to him parole or pardon She brought no silver, no pomp or style It was a halo bright sent down …

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Movie Review: The Reader

2008. Starring Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, David Kross. Directed by Stephen Daldry. The secrets we keep from each other, with varying degrees of shame, is the theme that seems to run through The Reader, the adaption of the Bernhard Schlink book and last year’s Oscar nomination vehicle for Kate Winslet. It is a sad, quiet story that imagines an intense, brief love between two people neither can handle. Winslet is deserving of the Oscar win, especially for her work in the second act of the movie, but her young co-star nearly outdoes her. Ralph Fiennes portrays the adult Michael Berg, …

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Movie Review: The Wrestler

2008. Starring Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. The talk leading up to this past Oscar season was that there couldn’t have been a better actor for the role of the washed-up warrior in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler than the once-famous Mickey Rourke. That may be true. But I think that, instead, there could not have been a better way to reintroduce the natural and intuitive acting skill of Mickey Rourke than this role — a role that seems written precisely for him. Rourke becomes Randy “The Ram” Robinson very seamlessly, and it may be because he looks …

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Movie Review: Shadow of a Doubt

1943. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Choosing a favorite Hitchcock movie is a hopeless challenge. Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and the unbearably suspenseful scene when Raymond Burr comes home early. North By Northwest has Cary Grant dealing with a worst-ever case of mistaken identity. Strangers on a Train has that amazing plot, plus the carnival scene. Psycho has Norman Bates, the shower scene and its overall weirdness. Vertigo, its own weirdness and Jimmy Stewart. Finally, the scene in The Birds in which the birds attack the townsfolk caused me, as a child, …

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