Movie Review: The Usual Suspects

No, this movie isn't one of the Greatest of All Time, but it's a classic (in a way) that I've never seen and it was on TV - Sundance, no less, which means F-words and all - and when you're on modified bed rest, you'll watch anything. Like seriously, anything. Do you want to know who my favorite Family Feud host of the past 10 years is? Because thanks to the Game Show Network, I actually have one.

Anyway, yes, this was the first time I had ever seen this movie.

For those in a similar predicament, here's the set-up (pay attention because there will be a test). An explosion on a boat that looks to be a drug deal gone bad leaves just two survivors - a Hungarian gangster with burns on most of his body blubbering about a mysterious criminal mastermind named Keyser Soze and a small-time thief with cerebral palsy (Kevin Spacey). While the Hungarian gives whatever hospital bed testimony he can, including working with a sketch artist, the thief, Verbal Kint, gives testimony to a couple of cops. Most of the movie is a flashback to his tale.

It begins six weeks earlier, when Kint and four other lifetime criminals are put in a lineup for a weapons charge. While in holding, they devise a plan themselves, targeting a ring of crooked cops who transport smugglers throughout New York City. After that goes swimmingly, they attempt to launder the loot with a "fence," who tells them about another job stealing jewels and/or money from a jeweler. Instead they wind up stealing drugs, and they learn that the job came from a lawyer named Kobayashi. The whole thing was a setup by Kobayashi and his client, Keyser Soze, and he (Kobayashi) blackmails each criminal into attacking the aforementioned ship to break up a drug deal between Hungarians and Argentinian gangsters.

Some of the guys take some convincing; one winds up dead before the attack. The real question is what happened on the ship and who is Keyser Soze? Kint gives a brief back history: Soze was a Turkish criminal mastermind. When his Hungarian rivals tried to pressure him by breaking into his house, raping his wife and threatening his family's lives, he responded by killing his family himself, along with all but one of the Hungarians. After that, he became more of a myth than a reality, a legend that some criminals and cops questioned even existed.

I love a good twist, not to mention a good caper, so this movie was right up my alley. Plus, the cast was fantastic - Spacey's crew of criminals include Gabriel Byrne, Benicio del Toro, Kevin Pollack and Stephen Baldwin, while the investigating cops include Chazz Palminteri, Dan Hedaya and Giancarlo Esposito. But I think what gave me the most enjoyment came after the movie ended, when I checked out its trivia section on IMDB. (Note: If you've never seen this movie before and don't want the end ruined for you, you might not want to click on that link.) Apparently, the director worked very hard to make every single actor think that HE was Keyser Soze, to the point that at least one actor got into a screaming match with the director at the premier because he was so sure it was him. That's just impressive.

Other notables: Kevin Spacey won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (strange, since I thought of him as the main actor, but what do I know?). Either way, not a bad way to spend an afternoon on bed rest.

Diaries from Modified Bed Rest

About a week and a half ago, my doctor put me on modified bed rest. I won't get into the nitty gritty of pregnancy fun, but suffice it to say that there's a good possibility the baby will make an early appearance and keeping me as sedentary as possible is one way to try to stop that.

Before now, I hadn't really heard of "modified" bed rest. Apparently, it's like a slightly better form of traditional bed rest. Instead of being strapped to a bed or couch, with standing-up privileges reserved solely for using the bathroom, I can at least move around the house. I can shower, do "light" meal preparation (my own brain has translated this to "microwaves good, ovens bad"), and go up and down the stairs a limited amount of times a day. The list of things I can't do is far more impressive:

• Work outside of home (thank goodness for the Internet)
• Take the dog out, even to the backyard
• Do laundry
• Lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk
• Clean the house
• Cook real meals that don't consist of cereal, popcorn and/or ice cream bars
• Eat in a restaurant/go to the movies/go to a store/really see the light of day

It's a strange existence. I can count on one hand the amount of times I've left our property in the last 11 days and have enough fingers left over to make a peace sign: once for a doctor's appointment, once for this weekend's baby shower (we were able to pull the car up to the back door of the room where the shower was, so I literally walked about 15 steps), and once to accompany Matt to the grocery store. I stayed in the car in my pajamas while he bought ice cream. It was the highlight of my day.

Still, it's been kind of amusing. If you said this was how I'd have to live forever, I'd probably lose my mind. But we're all having fun coming up with ways to keep it interesting. Because of my intense fear of getting bored, I've become even more OCD, making daily to-do lists for myself that contain the limited amount of productive things I can do (Write thank you notes! Fold laundry! Upload photos to the computer!) and stupid things to make sure I don't look up at 8 p.m. and realize I spent the whole day watching reruns of American Horror Story. So thinks like "read" and "work on embroidery" somehow get the same billing as "pay cell phone bill." Whatever. Don't be jealous of my sweet to-do list.

My other unasked-for advice for anyone on modified bed rest is to get dressed in real, honest-to-goodness clothes every day. Being home and not seeing other people is a big motivation to wear pajamas 24/7, a reflex I fully understand. Normally, I'm in pjs within 10 minutes of getting home from work, and the only reason it takes me that long is because I have to take the dog out. But there's something about putting on real clothes that still allows me to feel like a functioning adult, even if my day's big event was scoring a 89-point word on Words with Friends. 

Be prepared for more messages from the homefront. I mean, "write blog" was No. 10 on today's list.

Movie Review: Baby Mama

Clearly, I'm keeping with my "highest-quality movies of all time" theme going here by watching and reviewing Baby Mama. I often get this confused with Casablanca myself.

In all honesty, sometimes, you need brain candy. Especially when you've been couped up for a week on modified bed rest, watching people do such fascinating things like laundry and emptying the dishwasher and walking their dog with a level of jealousy previously reserved only for taste-testers in the Cadbury chocolate factory (all of my talent is going to WASTE!). And so rather than move on to the No. 3 Greatest Movie of All Time, On the Waterfront, I watched Baby Mama. Do not judge me.

In case you couldn't guess from the cover or the title or your previous knowledge of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Baby Mama is about a career-driven woman who waits too long to have children, discovers she's infertile, and hires a white trash surrogate to help her out. Fey's Kate is an executive with a Whole Foods/Trader Joe-style organic food store (with her hippie boss hilariously played by a ponytailed Steve Martin) and while her professional life is going splendidly, she never got around to marrying or trying to have kids. Now 37, she tries in vitro fertilization only to find that her T-shaped uterus is not the ideal gestational home for a baby.

That leads her to hiring a surrogate from a company run by the most fertile should-be-post-menopausal woman in Sigourney Weaver. The company presents her with Poehler's Angie, who moves in with Kate after she becomes pregnant and breaks up with her common law husband (played by Dax Shepard). The two have the typical bitter battles you would expect between an upper-class yuppie and her white trash baby mama. Kate needs to come out of her perfectly constructed shell. Angie needs to grow up and come clean about a lie she lives with for most of the movie. How could things possibly work out in the end?!?! Don't worry; they do.

The movie was exactly what I thought it would be and that's good. Oscar-bait movies are all fine and good but they take a level of mental effort that I just don't have on a late Sunday afternoon. This. This is what I wanted and needed.

And no, just because this and Juno are both in my DVR at the moment does NOT mean that I am some baby-movie-obsessed junkie. If my DVR is an indication of my life, I'm also a meth cooking Mexican serial killer while also reigning as one of the top home-chefs in America.

Movie Review: Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is kind of like Casablanca with me. I know it's considered one of the biggest classic movies in the history of movies, but other than the fact that it has something to do with the Civil War and includes the line, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," I really knew nothing about it. Unlike Casablanca, I was less than thrilled.

For other modern-day movie morons, I'll give you as brief a rundown as possible with a 4-hour-plus movie. (Seriously. Four hours. Plus. Especially if you actually sit through the 75 musical interludes.) When we first meet Scarlett O'Hara, she's the prettiest and most sought-after young thing in her Georgia town. The oldest daughter in her rich, plantation-owning family, she has pretty much every guy she meets wrapped around her finger. Well, every guy except the guy she loves: Ashley Wilkes, the son of another rich plantation owner in town. She dolls herself up for a party at the Wilkes' place, hoping to lure Ashley  into her clutches, until she realizes that the whole point of the party is to announce Ashley's engagement to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. (Apparently, marrying cousins is big in the Wilkes family. Ashley's sister wants to marry Melanie's brother, too. It's possible this whole thing takes place in Shelbyville.)

Scarlett declares her love to Ashley but he really does love Melanie. So she does the next best thing: marries Melanie's brother Charles out of spite, to make Ashley jealous while also keeping the whole Wilkes family close by. About five seconds later, the Civil War begins, Melanie & Ashley and Scarlett & Charles marry within a couple days and a couple days after THAT, the boys are off to fight.

It doesn't take long for Charles to become a non-violent war casualty, dying of pneumonia and leaving Scarlett a very young and not very mournful widow. She decides to move to Atlanta to stay with Melanie to "help with the war efforts," which really means "know as soon as possible what's going on with Ashley and then try to steal him from her." The two women devote their time to helping care for injured soldiers, etc. When Ashley gets a few days' leave around Christmas to visit, he spends his time doting on Melanie, trying to ignore Scarlett and also getting Melanie pregnant. Before he leaves, he asks Scarlett to take care of Melanie.

It's a bigger promise than Scarlett realizes when Melanie has a difficult pregnancy and gives birth right around the same time as Sherman's invasion of Atlanta. Scarlett and her simple-minded servant (slave?) are stuck delivering the baby and then trying to get to the O'Hara plantation - named Tara - in order to keep them safe and also to check on Scarlett's own sick mother. She calls the only person she can think of: Rhett Butler.

Until this point, Rhett has been kind of like that annoying fly that keeps showing up. We meet him at the Wilkes' party, where he annoys everyone by saying the North would win any war with the South. He overhears Scarlett's declarations of love to Ashley and then teases her about it. But he's an able-bodied man with lots of connections and he gets her a horse and carriage to take Melanie and her baby away. Along the trip, both Scarlett and Rhett grow up a little bit when they see their wounded soldiers march by, and Rhett is motivated to jump out of the carriage right then and sign up to fight. Why? I have no earthly idea. Scarlett continues the journey, learning along the way that the Wilkes plantation has been burned to the ground by those evil Yankees.

Tara is still standing, but barely. The barn is gone, the livestock is gone, all but two of the "servants" are gone, her mother is dead of typhoid, her two sisters are both sick with the same disease (although recovering) and the stress has driven her father to mental instability (something the actor - Thomas Mitchell - is pretty adept at, since he also played Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life). Scarlett becomes the de facto head of the household, trying to keep everyone fed and afloat.

Then the war ends and the South lost. And the government puts a heavy tax on Tara that Scarlett can't afford. Her father is so overcome with rage that he starts chasing after a prospective buyer and dies falling off his horse. Scarlett finds Rhett in Atlanta and tries to flirt the money out of him, but he sees through her and refuses. She runs into Frank Kennedy, her sister's fiance, who is trying to run an antiques store and lumber mill in order to raise enough money for the wedding. Seeing how high his prospects are, Scarlett tells him her sister is marrying someone else and goads him into marrying her instead.

Scarlett's business acumen (she and Frank join forces with Ashley Wilkes) leads to a thriving lumber mill, but that doesn't stop her from almost being raped in the middle of the woods. Frank, Ashley and a gang of vigilantes goes out to get revenge - Rhett tries to save them but is too late as Frank dies and Ashley gets shot in the arm. So now Scarlett's a widow twice removed.

Rhett takes the opportunity of her husband dying, oh, 12 minutes before, to propose and convince her to marry him. She agrees and they travel around in the lap of luxury. But when they return home, Scarlett goes back into her Ashley-obsessed ways. She gives birth to her and Rhett's daughter, who Rhett adores, but the couple is distant and aiming for divorce. Also, there's a lot of drinking and marital rape, so that's fun.

I'm almost to the end so I'll stop there. I've spared you about 12 more character deaths. Moral of the story? Stay away from Scarlett O'Hara. Nothing good can come from this.

I had a problem getting into and enjoying this movie, which probably makes me a bad movie fan, but oh well. First of all, with the exception of the good-hearted Melanie, every character was despicable. Scarlett and Rhett were both selfish and conniving and manipulative and cold-blooded. Ashley (and Scarlett's parade of dead husbands) were clueless. I wasn't rooting for Scarlett to get Ashley or Rhett to get Scarlett; I wanted Melanie to win and Mamie to raise up the other servants and say, "Hey, you guys enslaved us for years and you can't buy me back with a red petticoat. I'm going north, suckas!" I had a hard time sympathizing with these Southern rich slave owners during the Civil War, too, their English acting accents be damned. Yes, it's sad that people died and their lives were difficult, but then...they were slave owners. They'd been making their slaves' lives pretty difficult for a few decades.

Anyway, Gone with the Wind was ranked No. 2 on my arguable Greatest Movie of All Time List. Here's why:

• Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1939 (also won for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and a slew of cinematography awards that I didn't count but are worth mentioning).
• No. 4 ranking in the American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Greatest Movies list in 1998.
• Held on for a No. 6 ranking 10 years later.
• No. 43 in AFI's 100 Years, 100 Cheers.
• Had three of AFI's most memorable quotes, including No. 1:
• "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (1)
• "After all, tomorrow is another day!" (31)
• "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" (59)
• Oscar win for Best Actress for Vivian Leigh. (Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American to win Best Supporting Actress for playing Mamie, while Clark Gable (Rhett) and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie) were nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.)

Book Review: Danny the Champion of the World

After reading a slew of Stephen King DEATH TO EVERYONE books, with Serious Literature like The Cellist of Sarajevo and Serious Nonfiction like The Other Wes Moore, I was due for some brain candy. For some, that means Danielle Steele or a Twilight book or Fifty Shades of Horny Middle-Aged Ladies, but like my actual candy, I prefer something of a little higher quality. Like Cadbury. And what could be more of a literary version of Cadbury chocolate than Roald Dahl.

A background: I was totally a Roald Dahl kid growing up. Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Witches were always my favorites. I devoured them like so many creme eggs. But somehow, I missed Danny the Champion of the World. I'm not sure how that happened; maybe the children's library I went to didn't have it. But I always notice it as THE Roald Dahl book on "best children's books" lists and figured it deserved a belated shot.

Danny's mother died when he was a baby, leaving him and his father with each other. They didn't have much money or many possessions; they lived in an electricity-free gypsy caravan behind the gas station/auto repair shop his father ran. But they were not wanting for things, thanks to his father's adventurous attitude. His father taught him how to build a car engine from scratch, how to fly a kite, how to make a fire balloon. He regaled him with fantastic stories before bedtime. What else could you possibly need?

One day, Danny learns of his father's secret hobby: pheasant poaching. Because this is England and people in England are weird, rich people had a habit of raising certain types of game and when they're ripe, inviting all their weird, rich friends to "hunt" the more or less domesticated animals. You know, kind of like "The Most Dangerous Game," but instead of hunting men, they hunt pheasants. Poaching pheasants from these rich people's property was kind of a family and town tradition; not only was Danny's father into it, but so had been Danny's grandfather and mother, the town doctor, the town policeman and even the town vicar. It was a way to catch delicious pheasant while also sticking it to Victor Hazell, the town's designated Mean Rich Guy.

One night, Danny's father goes off a-poaching, but when he doesn't return, Danny goes looking for him. He finds him in a deep pit, a trap set by one of Hazell's pheasant guards, with a broken ankle. Danny gets him out before the guard finds him and their doctor friend, Doc Spencer, gives him a walking cast. Still, Danny's father is kind of irked. I mean, a guy protecting his property from pheasant thieves? The nerve! So he and Danny decide the perfect revenge would be to somehow poach all of Hazell's pheasants the day before his annual big pheasant hunt, where all the local dukes and barons and important people would come to hunt.

The strangest thing about this story was the idea of pheasant poaching as heroic. Admittedly, I was born 10 years and a country away from where this story takes place and so raising game for hunting purposes isn't something I'm familiar with. And Hazell is kind of a jerk. But it's still a weird thing that poaching pheasants is this wonderful activity that unites the whole town.

Still, I was a big fan of the book and here's why. Dahl dedicates this book to his entire family: his wife and four children. And this book is really a love letter to the family bond, particularly that of a father and son. In most of Dahl's books, the protagonist is a precocious child who outsmarts some evil adult - Matilda and her parents/the Trenchbull; Charlie and Willie Wonka; James and his evil aunts. And while Victor Hazell is an adult villain, nearly every other adult in the book is a friend to young Danny, especially his father. It's a nice, sweet message that's less about revenge and more about love.

And adventure.

Book Review: The Other Wes Moore

Wes Moore was born in the late 1970s in one of the more poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Baltimore. After his loving father died of a rare and sudden illness when Wes was three, his mother Joy raised him and his two sisters herself. Joy was an immigrant from Jamaica, having arrived in the U.S. as a child so her father could get a college education. The importance of schooling was passed down as Joy also got her degree. But the struggle of raising three children alone wore on Joy and she moved them to the Bronx to get help from her parents.

Living in a tough neighborhood had its effects on Wes, who befriended people from all walks of life playing street basketball. Fearing of the dangers of the public schools she had attended herself, Joy sent Wes to a private school, but that only added to his troubles. At school, he stood out for being poor and black. At home, he stood out for going to a rich school for white kids. He started skipping classes and got caught up in minor street crime.

Seeing where Wes was headed, Joy and her parents scraped together the money to send him to Valley Forge military school in Georgia. Isolated from the streets, taken in by older cadets and supportive commanding officers, he rose through the ranks. He eventually went to Johns Hopkins University on scholarship, studied abroad in South Africa, earned a Rhodes Scholarship, worked on Wall Street, served in Afghanistan, and acted as a fellow at the White House.

Wes Moore was born in the late 1970s in one of the more poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Baltimore. After his father abandoned him before he was born, his mother Mary raised him and his older half-brother Tony by herself. Mary was one of nine children and had Tony as a teenager; she didn't have much support from her family and while she tried to go to college, she eventually had to drop out when government cuts took away her Pell Grant.

Living in a tough neighborhood had its effects on Wes, who befriended people thanks to his skills as a football player. Fearing the streets that turned her older son into a drug lord by the time he was in his early teens, Mary moved Wes around to different neighborhoods. Tony also wanted a different life for Wes, too, but the example he set was different than the lessons he tried to teach and Wes' criminal record began when he was just eight, after he brandished a knife at another boy in a street fight. Wes continued down Tony's path when he began working for drug dealers. He rose through the ranks, making money, friends, and enemies. He dropped out of high school, got his girlfriend pregnant and by the time he was in his early 20s, had four children by two women (one of whom was a drug addict) and several convictions for drugs and violence on his record.

 Seeing where he was headed, Wes tried to change his own path by participating in the Job Corps program, earning his GED and training as a carpenter. But a year of the legitimate life made he realize how much money it takes to support his mother, two former/current girlfriends and four children and he quickly regressed. One day, he, Tony and two other men wielding guns and mallets broke into a jewelry store and took almost $500,000 worth of merchandise. They also fatally shot an off-duty police officer.

Around the same time that one Wes Moore learned of his Rhodes Scholarship, the other Wes Moore learned that he'd spend the rest of his life in prison.

How could two men with the exact same name and such similar backgrounds have seen their paths diverge so drastically? There's no way to answer that and Wes Moore (the author) doesn't try to. The closest thing I can really see is the difference in support system. Yes, both men didn't have a father. But Joy had supportive family who cared about things like education and keeping Wes off the streets. When they recognized the warning signs that he might be headed down the wrong path, they did everything they could to stop it - first at the private school and then with military school. Mary didn't have those resources. She knew education was key but with no one to help her out, she could only do so much to support her sons. The other other "parent" that Wes Moore knew was his older brother, who became a player in the drug game at the ripe age of 14. When no one shows you another path, you take the one you recognize.

Still, it's a fascinating look at how our society works. The opportunities afforded to certain privileged people, whether it's because of race or class or geography, make things so much easier for some than for others. Wes Moore struggled to become the man he did, but he was given a leg up thanks to such a supportive family and, later, because of the connections he made at Valley Forge. The other Wes Moore, while he could have taken a different path, didn't really have the opportunity to do nearly as much as his namesake. This isn't to make excuses for the crime he committed - he definitely should spend his life in jail for killing an innocent man - but it's sad that that path was the easiest one for a boy to take.