I simply cannot get enough of The Lighthouse. I just love that film. And so of course my ass was planted in a seat at the IMAX on Wednesday night for a screening. The trailers:
The End. Joshua Oppenheimer goes from Herzogian documentary to a musical. Looking forward to this.
This looks to be a comedic take on The Wicker Man/English folk horror.
A new flick from Bong Joon Ho. Looks to be a grotesque dark comedy. Very dark.
Anything by Robert Eggers is a must-see.
Not my cup of tea.
I really liked the stylized text scrolls. Appears to be an epic drama.
The Frau and I went to AMC Fitchburg earlier this week and these are the trailers we saw before Meanwhile on Earth. Hopefully these flicks actually screen here. A lot of Tilda Swinton.
Huh. I cannot find the trailer for Love Me online so here's an interview.
Oof. I cannot find a trailer for The Return either. The movie apparently dramatizes the last bits of The Odyssey. Here's a clip, though.
The Madison Polish Film Festival dates have been announced: 10 & 17 November. Screenings are at Union South and are free and open to the public. No Union membership required. Here's the line-up.
With my adventures up north done for the year, I settled in to enjoy the autumn close to home. The two maple trees down the street regaled me with their gorgeous colors on my walks to and from the bus stop.
Speaking of bus stops, reconstruction of an arterial street near us was finally finished and, in addition to a fancy, new bike path and pleasantly smooth pavement, I got a new bus shelter.
I feel like an aristocrat when I’m inside it on dark, rainy mornings, which are becoming increasingly common, as it has a light. An amenity! A minor one, I grant you, but it’s just weird to me after having spent years and years of chilly, wet autumn dawns waiting for the bus in dark, spartan shelters.
This new public transit Xanadu was situated slightly farther away from the corner than the old one and, as Fate (or a devious streets planner with a wicked sense of humor) would have it, right next to a walnut tree. There was a recent dry morning when I was standing there and one of the fruits fell, coming within an inch of my head. Lesson learned, though I suppose it would have been a good excuse to call in sick had I taken a walnut on the noggin.
"Sorry, Boss, but I cannot work today as a walnut fell on my head and I think I have a concussion."
No doubt my boss would have suffered damage to her eyes from rolling them so much.
Walking out from our driveway one day, I noticed this suggestive mushroom sprouting from the mulch on the north side of our house.
Of course my inner 12 year-old giggled maniacally. I believe this is commonly known as a stinkhorn mushroom and some mycologist endowed it with the highly appropriate botanical name of phallus impudicus which translates as "shameless phallus".
On a recent bike ride I ran across these skeleton flamingos.
Despite being well out of flamingo habitat range, Madison has a thing for them. Well, the yard decorations, anyway. Back in September 1979, some UW students decided to pull a prank and put 1,000+ plastic pink flamingos on Bascom Hill.
The incident became a part of local lore and the plastic pink flamingo became an icon, of sorts, of Madison. And so you occasionally see a yard full of them, there’s a flamingo mural on the side of laundromat in the Tenney-Lapham neighborhood, and the bird features in the annual holiday lights display at Olin Park, amongst other appearances.
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In my spare time, I prepped for Gamehole Con, Madison’s premiere gaming convention as I was to run a few sessions of the Call of Cthulhu role playing game.
One scenario takes place in the 1950’s and begins with the players driving down a county road in a torrential downpour. They seek shelter at an isolated rural diner/gas station and take comfort in its endless supply of cheap coffee but, unbeknownst to them, there’s a nasty alien entity lurking in the woods. Although just a ball of light, it is a mindless, unfeeling devourer of the vital energies that animate living beings. There are some locals at the diner, some of whom are harboring dark secrets.
I tried to make a spooky atmosphere with people sometimes catching a light zipping through the trees from the corners of their eyes. The players eventually run into this refulgent killing machine and hilarity ensues.
The other scenario took place in the small town of Blackwater Creek, MA in 1926. A recent archeological dig had uncovered the resting place of a small fragment of the evil god Shub-Niggurath. This hideous remnant of malevolence infects one of the townsfolk who retreats to a nearby cave. She transmogrifies into a horrific creature from whose body flows enough Shub-Niggurath amniotic fluid to fill a creek. Hilarity ensues.
A couple years ago I started my own tradition of serving kringle to my players. The kringle is a Danish pastry shaped in a ring of sweet-filled dough. Early one morning I walked over to Lane’s Bakery to pick up my order. This involved traversing the lesser used parts of the convention center grounds until you get to an ill-lit gravel street. From there things get brighter but it’s a bit of a spooky walk in the antelucan hours.
It was clear and chilly out but at least this afforded me a good glimpse of Orion. You know it's autumn when you see the hunter in the southern sky.
I bought a highly seasonal pumpkin kringle, no frosting. While I love sweets, I find that, as I've gotten older, I want to taste the dough more, I want my tongue to revel in the delicious results of those Maillard reactions instead of being subjected to a mindless blast of sugar. Frosting only serves to obscure the grainy goodness.
The kringle was wonderful but the trip to Lane’s was bittersweet as the bakery was to close in December after 69 years. It was genuinely sad to hear the news of the impending loss of a Madison institution and this now leaves me without a source of fresh kringle within walking distance of the convention center. The only place I can think of in the area that makes the ringed goodness is a bakery in Stoughton, about 10-12 miles south of Madison.
It's easy enough to find kringle in grocery stores as the Racine Danish Kringles brand is ubiquitous. However, I taste margarine or imitation butter flavoring in their dough. Perhaps I ought to check out some grocery stores I don't usually shop at to see what's on offer. There are surely other brands on supermarket shelves around town.
In addition to running games, I played them as well. A highlight was the Blade Runner role playing game. The movie is an all-time favorite of mine and I was really looking forward to trying it out. I was not disappointed.
I played the role of the chain smoking, grizzled veteran cop. My fellow players and I investigated the “retirement”, a.k.a. – murder, of a replicant, i.e. – a synthetic person. Our sleuthing led us around to various locations in the Los Angeles of the future where we met a slew of suspicious replicants and various human members of the criminal underground.
The game was really well done with nice, high quality supplements.
The dice were funky too with one side having an eye, a recurring motif in the movie, and an origami unicorn, something made by Gaff, one of the cops in the film.
The game had an intriguing storyline, well fleshed out characters, and some genuinely thought-provoking thematic material. Really fun.
In the dealers room someone was selling appropriately themed coffee and I bought a bag of Kraken. Who doesn’t like tentacled sea monsters?
When I wasn't gaming, I was to be found spending time hanging out with friends and BSing. One night someone in my cohort told us that there was a group of well-heeled gamers from (present day) Los Angeles at the con. Apparently they like to game in style as they had brought a butler with them who had catered a particular gaming session with a portable build your own taco bar. A butler at a gaming convention filled with unwashed masses of gamer dorks is as incongruous a pairing as anchovies and ice cream. Plus there was just something intuitively wrong about a group of rich white guys bringing a black butler to the con. The whole idea just had bad 19th century vibes.
When I heard this tale, I realized that I had run into the guy in an elevator. Anyone not clad in a black t-shirt or in costume at a gaming convention sticks out like a priest at a brothel. He must have had a good haberdasher back in L.A. because he was dressed to the nines making me look like a serf in contrast. I had greeted him as I stepped into the elevator and he seemed in good spirits as he flashed a smile. Recalling the encounter, that old TV show Soap popped into my head about that rich white family who employed a wise-cracking black butler.
I hope his employer treats him well and that he was generously compensated as being a non-gamer at a gaming convention is surely like being trapped in one of the circles of Hell.
During another late night BS session, a friend revealed that he was contemplating running the epic Call of Cthulhu scenario Beyond the Mountains of Madness.
It's a sequel to the H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness which chronicles a 1920s Antarctic expedition that, like everything in Lovecraft's tales, goes horribly wrong. In Beyond, players are sent on another expedition to the icy wastes to try and discover what happened to the first one. No doubt it is a tale of great woe and I fully expect my character to go insane and/or die.
Beyond is a massive scenario that takes days and days to go through but my friend would like to try to condense it into 3-4 long sessions at next year's Gamehole Con. He asked if I and another friend of ours would be anchor players who would commit to all of the lengthy sessions and help out other players as needed to keep the game moving forward.
We did.
And so, if this plan comes to fruition, it will be an epic, chilling adventure next year. Plus it has the added bonus of delaying having to find a bakery near the convention center for a couple years.
I had a blast at Gamehole. Many characters died heinous deaths in the games I ran and the games I played were great fun. Plus I got to hang out with friends deep into a few alcohol-soaked nights where we BSed and those of us who knew my late brother indulged in some warm reminiscing.
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A week or so after the convention I was off to West Chicago to meetup with a couple friends who were to accompany me to the lovely Arcada Theater in nearby St. Charles to see a concert by Martin Barre.
Barre was the guitarist in the progressive rock band Jethro Tull for 40+ years before being unceremoniously booted by band leader Ian Anderson back in 2011 or thereabouts. Since then he has assembled his own group, recorded 5 albums, and performed many a concert. He is currently on the "A Brief History of Tull" tour.
It was a great show! Despite being in his 70’s, Barre had a lively stage presence. Although I couldn't play a guitar if my life depended on it, I regard him as one of the best guitarists ever to come out of the rock world. He always seems to play the right notes, to play what a song needs instead of demanding to be heard strictly as a virtuoso. As a jack of all trades kind of player, he can do big, heavy riffs like "Aqualung" or judiciously add color to an otherwise acoustic song like "Velvet Green".
We got a good overview of Jethro Tull’s catalog with “My God” being a highlight. It opens quietly with some gentle acoustic guitar adorned by piano. But when those big slashing electric guitar chords came thundering in, well, they sent a chill up my spine. The flute solo in the middle was replaced by some of Palladio, a contemporary classical piece by composer Karl Jenkins and it fit seamlessly.
The band's playing was tight, energetic, and everyone seemed to be having fun and this is what live music is all about.
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Before heading back to Madison the next day, I bid my friends farewell and went to see Anatomy of a Fall which was playing at the cinema in St. Charles. I hadn’t seen anything to indicate it was going to open back home so I jumped at the chance to see this French film by Justine Triet that had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier in the year.
Sandra is a novelist who lives with her husband Samuel in a chalet up in the French Alps along with their son Daniel and his dog, Snoop. As the movie opens, a woman has come to their home to interview Sandra. But while they are chatting, Samuel cranks up some music upstairs where he is remodeling the top floor. Sandra and her interlocutor agree to reschedule the interview for a quieter time.
Daniel and Snoop go for a walk and, upon their return, find Samuel's body lying on the snow in front of the house. Daniel screams prompting Sandra to come out of the house where she sees her husband’s body.
Samuel is pronounced dead at the scene and Sandra is accused of having pushed him out of a window. She hires a lawyer who is also a friend and goes about defending herself as she consoles her traumatized son.
One of the great things about this movie is that it sends you down dead ends and leaves you wondering. It’s a murder mystery, but only just. We don’t see things from the point of view of a detective but rather watch as life continues for Sandra and Daniel. As a courtroom drama unfolds, we learn about Samuel and Sandra’s marriage troubles. The movie left me alternately convinced of Sandra’s innocence and thinking that she may have done it through scenes of her in the throes of grief and ones where she is cold, almost emotionless.
And those courtroom scenes were interesting. I don’t know how true they were to the real French judicial system but they mirrored the scenes in Saint Omer, another French film about a woman put on trial for murder, that I saw back in January.
Prosecutors are apparently given free rein to hector the accused and their witnesses are allowed to be openly hostile to them. And here no one stops Sandra when she answers a question only to go off on tangent filled monologues for minutes at a time. French trials seem to be able to change into free form routines.
I was fed revelations about Sandra and Samuel’s marriage in small bites almost throughout, which was addictive, and pushed me towards thinking she was guilty only to have the movie offer me something else to get me going in the other direction.
The truth about everything here was elusive whether it be how Samuel died or how strong or weak his marriage to Sandra was. I found myself questioning everything. I loved how the movie, largely through Sandra’s lengthy discourses on the stand, talked about the intricate complexities of marriage as well as those of self-assessment. Samuel’s death gives Sandra cause to reassess her relationship to him as well to reflect on her own feelings, thought, and behaviors.
I adored Anatomy of a Fall. I loved the way it weaved an intense look at a failing marriage into a murder mystery that did its best not to give much in the way of definitive answers.
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In preparation for Halloween, my Frau got her costume together. It was of the creepy dead girl in the Japanese horror movie Ring.
Speaking of Halloween, a friend sent me this photo which he swears was taken in Chicago.
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Bonus photo. This is a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott that I saw on a visit to St. Louis several years back. Their bid for freedom began at the Old Courthouse there in 1846, though I suppose it was quite new back then.
So someone decided to make a Bob Dylan biopic - A Complete Unknown.
The trailer looks pretty good. Apparently it chronicles Dylan's life from a teenaged aspiring folkie in the New York scene to going electric at Newport. I guess no brief sequence of his stay here in Madison.
I heard some good news: our AMC cinema out in Fitchburg with an IMAX screen is bringing back a series of documentaries this summer. While it was my hope that they'd start screening them again on Sunday mornings as they used to, the flicks are instead going to be screened on Tuesday mornings while I am at work. Bummer.
I went to see Run Lola Run, a.k.a. - Lola rennt, on the big screen. I don't think I'd seen it since c.1999 when it originally came to theaters. Great fun. I had forgotten quite a bit, such as the brief bits of animation.
Watching it this week, I recalled a bit of how it felt doing so 25 years ago. It felt new wavey back then with an electronic music soundtrack at a time when that genre was The Next Big Thing every year for a few years. Its frenetic pace with a plethora of camera angles woven together provided continuity but also served to heighten the tension. The characters were about my age and there was some of that aforementioned animation along with split screens. A very nice visual mix.
Now that I am older, I can really appreciate the ideas here, the notions of destiny and that one's life could have been different.
Olivia Colman plays pious spinster Edith Swan who has been receiving poison pen letters from an anonymous villain. Edith lives at home with her parents and the missives are upsetting her mother and making her nasty, controlling father angrier by the day.
The letters are written very strangely, as if their composer was still a novice at the whole vulgarity thing. And so you get stilted turns of phrase such as "foxy ass piss country whore", "You dirty old bitch, you belong in hell, probably", and "Edith sucks ten cocks a week, minimum!".
One person who is not an amateur when it comes to wielding profanity is the Swan's next door neighbor, Rose Gooding, a single Irish mum who frequents the tavern, amongst other unladylike activities. Rose is accused of sending the dirty dispatches.
She is played by Jessie Buckley who is foul-mouthed, spirited, and a lot of fun to watch. Buckley was great in Men and Women Talking too. Colman does a wonderful job with her facial expressions, sometimes showing her adherence to propriety (and abhorrence at those who would deny it) while at others letting us see the damage done by the repressive patriarchy of her day.
The police investigate the letters and finger Rose as does the rest of the small town. However, PC (Police Constable?) Gladys Moss believes Rose to be innocent and she assembles a Bloodhound Gang of local ladies to prove it. Moss has her own issues/run-ins with the patriarchy in the form of the hierarchy of the police department which bolsters the theme.
We aren't bashed over the head with this theme; rather it is sprinkled here and there so that we never forget it but the patriarchy of 1920s Britain is not allowed to get in the way of the mystery and the comedy.
Wicked Little Letters is a lot of fun and hearing Colman blurt out the amateurish obscenities is hilarious.
The prophetic words of Douglas Adams came to mind: "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."
It was wonderful to see a documentary on the IMAX again - one made for the format.
Deep Sky has a running time of about 40 minutes so it quickly ran through the story of getting the James Webb Space Telescope up into space and into its viewing position nearly 1 million miles from Earth. While the telescope's mirrors aren't as big as space, the mirror array was pretty large, as mirrors go.
But it was the photographs of space that were the main attraction. This was perhaps as close to a Total Perspective Vortex as we'll get. It was one amazing view after another. First we saw what to our eyes is a teeny tiny speck of black space become under the JWST's probing mirrors a menagerie full of galaxies. Hundreds of them. Thousands! Then came a series of photos of colossal clouds of interstellar dust and gases that churn out stars like our sun. The Pillars of Creation!
Contemplating the vast distances between our blue ball and those star factories as well as the sheer size of those clouds was absolutely mind boggling, truly awe-inspiring.
I came out of the theater a bit exhilarated yet feeling quite insignificant. Also hoping that we get more IMAX documentaries here in Madison.
My Frau and I went on a date last night to see the new horror flick Abigail.
Not really my cup of tea but there were some funny parts. I know it was totally puerile but I still laughed at one character waking up after another one had drawn a cock and balls on his cheek in permanent marker.
Beyond that, the sets for the spooky mansion were just perfect. Victorian looking with stuffed animals, tons of bookshelves, dark wood, and the like. The characters, however, were one dimensional cliches but the 14 year-old actress who played Abigail, one Alisha Weir, did a very fine job. Frank sported some classic 70s cop glasses. I also enjoyed Melissa Barrera's generous cleavage which was shown in some well-crafted high angle shots.
I simply got tired of the jump scares and the hissy screams.
In the first couple days after Grabby’s death, Piper acted differently. I suspect she realized that her sister was gone. Piper seemed more sedentary, that is, she seemed to lie on the couch more instead of her usual peripatetic routine of hanging out there for a bit before wandering over to the cardboard bed and then to the cat house to grabbing a snack in the kitchen and then circling back to the couch. Grabby’s body lay wrapped in a towel inside a cat carrier, just as it was when I brought her back from the vet. My Frau was not quite ready to bury her.
Eventually we chose a spot in the yard and I dug a fairly deep hole to keep local carrion scavengers from digging Grabby up. We buried her one very warm evening, her loss hanging in the air just like the oppressive humidity. I now want to have a little marker made. She’s buried next to the deck and I’d like to have a wooden plaque hung on the stringer above her grave.
The Frau and I are adjusting to not having Grabby around any longer. We miss petting her extremely fine fur – the softest fur I’ve ever encountered on a cat. I no longer wake up to her staring at me when breakfast is a minute late. Her appetite was never satisfied and she would jump on our laps while we were eating or, at least, get as close to the human chow as she could and stare at it. Sometimes she’d drool.
Grabby quickly learned the sound of a cat food can lid being removed and she came running into the kitchen whenever any can was opened, whether it was her chow or soup, tomato sauce, beans, or any other non-feline food. Now I open cans and look down reflexively to see Grabby at my heels but she’s not there.
She'd come into the bathroom when I was in the shower and hang out on the counter. Upon opening the shower curtain, Grabby would be there staring at me impatiently for, after I'd dried off and dressed, she'd jump on my shoulder and curl around my neck and I'd take her for a ride. She kept my neck very warm in the winter. The only way to get her off was the promise of treats. I still expect to see her there on the counter when I brush the shower curtain aside every morning.
Cat food and litter stocks are depleted at a much slower pace these days and I have less scooping and cleaning to do at the litter boxes. I call Piper Grabby by mistake sometimes.
There are just a million little routines and habits that have yet to change or disappear. However, I do not miss her farts. The lymphoma or whatever ailed her guts gave her the worst gas. She'd be lying on your lap peacefully relaxing and without betraying the slightest hint that she was trying to kill you, this miasma would engulf your head. Waving your hand in an attempt to disperse it was futile and only seemed to make it worse. And Grabby would just lie there as if nothing was happening, although I suspect she was gleefully chuckling to herself on the inside with feline schadenfreude.
For my part, I found myself going to the movies a lot.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, my first visit to the cinema after Grabby’s death was to see this:
Cat Video Fest is just a bunch of people’s cat home movies/cell phone videos strung together. There were kittens sleeping on their backs with their little bellies exposed, cats attempting to jump on a counter and falling woefully short, cats spinning on ceiling fans, and cats casually knocking dishes and vases off of hutches. Plus much more.
Just good fun.
Next was John Carpenter’s classic commentary on the Reagan era, They Live. It screams the 1980s. I chuckled at some of the ladies’ Aquanet-drenched coifs and the men’s mullets. But it has that classic cinematic slugfest featuring our nameless drifter hero coming to blows with his co-worker Frank in an attempt to get him to put on the glasses that allow the wearer to see who the aliens are and exposes their subliminal messages.
A highly enjoyable blast from the past.
Perfect Blue is a bit more serious than the previous couple movies. It’s anime and follows a singer named Mima who leaves the music business to pursue an acting career. She is beset by a stalker and this is followed up by the murder of several people around her. Soon Mima shows signs of psychosis and the movie takes on strong Phildickian tones with questions of identity and what is truly real.
I’d rented this on DVD last year so it was nice to be able to see it in the theater. Not only did it look better, the big screen heightened the sense of the uncanny that this movie traffics in.
This is a wonderful little love story. I really enjoyed how the tension between the two main characters slowly builds before they realize they’ve fallen in love with one another. Their desires are so bright, so hot yet they remain unfulfilled. This is one of the most intense love stories I’ve ever seen.
And the cast of characters that inhabit that apartment building they live in are funny, especially the ones in the regular mahjong game.
I’ve read that this is the second film in a loose trilogy so I must seek out the other two.
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On a recent afternoon my Frau, a friend of hers, and I made a quick trek up to our beloved Lapacek’s Orchard. We were just shy of a month into apple season so I expected a fair variety of them to be available. Luckily they had this handy dandy analog tool letting you know which one are available(red), which ones are coming soon(green), and which ones are done for the season(yellow).
I was rather surprised at how many yellow apples there were. Some varieties do not sit on those shelves for long, especially ones with “strawberry” in the name.
Next to the availability indicator was a tub full of gourds.
Of course I went to see the goats. I love petting them. Look at this cutie!
Lapacek’s has the perfect Halloween/momento mori chair. (Grabby! ☹)
Lots of apples for sale inside. The Frau bought a couple half pecks, with a peck being a quarter of a bushel or 8 quarts. Silken and Wolf River, I believe.
Out back, the flora, including some very tall sunflowers, was still looking very nice.
Lapacek’s has a lot of barn cats. Some will let you pet them while others are cagey and prefer that humans keep their distance, like this one. She was OK with letting me watch her do a bit of grooming but pets were strictly off-limits on this day.
We went home with more apples than we knew what to do with and will have to find a way to eat them all. Sauce? Pie? With pork? The possibilities are endless.
If having to figure out what to do with a peck of apples wasn't enough, my Frau's friend bestowed some ground cherries on us from her CSA box. While I'd seen them at the farmers market recently, I had never had them before. Synchronicity!
At one point, I figured they’d sat in our refrigerator long enough so I pulled them out, removed the husks, and washed them. I popped one into my mouth and found it to be sweet, at first. A bit like a cherry but with a tomato element to it. As I swallowed, the sweetness wore off and it took on a more vegetal flavor. Very tasty.
Now what? Ground cherry clafoutis!
It was quite delicious. I am not sure what else there is to do with ground cherries – maybe put them in salsa? – but I am content with more clafoutis.
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Bonus photo. Earlier this month I spied this classic Chrysler New Yorker outside a diner in nearby Cottage Grove.
I went to see A Cat's Life because I'd seen the trailer a couple times and just couldn't pass up the chance to see all those cute kittens on the big screen.
The opening scene introduces us to our tabby protagonist, Lou, and his siblings who were all interminably cute. They, along with their mother, live in an attic of an apartment in Paris. An adult stray wanders in through an open window and this stirs the curiosity within Lou who starts climbing a bookcase in order to get to the window. His 3 siblings would sit there on a derelict chair and watch him like a Greek chorus, their big kitten eyes telling us that Lou's headed for danger.
Oh, mama! My CU (cuteness unit) meter was pegged in the red throughout this whole opening scene.
Lou gets his first dose of country life when Clem's family vacations at their cabin in the woods. While he encounters some danger in the form of a lynx that calls the forest home, he mainly hops from the ground onto fallen trees and back onto the ground as he navigates his new environment. I could have watched those close-ups of his little feet walking on moss and fallen leaves in close-up for hours.
We meet an old crone type character, Madeleine, who lives in the woods with her very large dog endowed with ginormous jowls after she rescues the extremely curious Lou.
Clem's family returns to Paris where her parents decide to ignore the admonishment of Melissa Kearney and seek a divorce. One last trip to the cabin to empty it out in preparation for sale sees Lou escape into the woods again. This time, he does not return to Clem. While she is heartbroken, he goes on adventures dodging hungry owls, meeting up with some fellow local ferals, and chasing a very pretty lady cat. At one point, he goes in pursuit of a mouse(?) and gets stuck in some wire left behind by some ne'er-do-wells who think the forest is a garbage dump.
Chasing rodents as bad karma is a motif in the movie as, not only does it get Lou snared in wire and so tangled that he cannot escape, but it was pursuit of a rat that led to an accident for his mother and her disappearance.
Lou is held fast by the wire and helpless for a some time before Madeleine rescues him. Clem and her mother return only to find Lou in bed and hooked up to a little kitty IV. The vet said he was not expected to recover.
Thankfully he does and Clem learns her life lesson as she lets Lou, who has seen his lady cat outside and is now scratching at the door so he can get some, free. Something got in my eyes during this scene and they welled with tears. Stupid ventilation system.
While I have no doubt that this type of tale about a girl growing up has been told countless times, A Cat's Life was still a boatload of fun. The English dubbing was annoying and unnecessary but cinematographer Dan Meyer did a great job of following the rambunctious felines and capturing kitten faces in close-up. There's always a cat ear or a tail or some whiskers somewhere on the screen. And who doesn't want to see cat feet traversing a mossy log in close-up?! Editing this movie must have been pure joy.
The soundtrack is full of meows and purrs and squeaks and just all manner of cat noises. I suffered cuteness overload within 30 seconds of the movie starting because teeny tiny kittens suckling at their mother's teat is just adorable, wholesome goodness.
Just about a year ago I lamented that the IMAX screen at AMC in Fitchburg no longer shows documentaries like it used to, back when it was Star.
Well, I have discovered that this is about to change as Deep Sky opens on 19 April.
"Deep Sky brings the awe-inspiring images captured by NASA's Webb Telescope to IMAX® — taking audiences on a journey to the beginning of time and space, to never-before-seen cosmic landscapes, and to recently discovered exoplanets, planets around other stars."
I'm glad to see that a documentary will screen on the IMAX here, even if it's a one-off.
Earlier this week I went to catch Yolo at the cinema. It's a Chinese movie that, I learned towards the end of the credits, is a remake of a 2014 Japanese movie called 100 Yen Love. Yolo has been doing very good box office in its home country, if not worldwide, and this probably explains how it ended up here in Madison.
The movie is a Bildungsfilm, I guess youcould say,which chronicles the transformation of Du Leying, a woman in her early 30s, from an overweight slacker into a lean, mean boxing machine whose motto is carpe diem.
When the story opens, we find her sleeping, something she does most of the time, apparently. Unemployed and living at home, Leying has basically retreated from life into a shell. We witness her and her sister get into a fight and Leying leaves home out of spite. She gets a job at a barbecue restaurant and rents an apartment that is, shall we say, not the height of luxury. Then one day she accidentally runs into a trainer from a local boxing gym named Hao Kun and they eventually become romantically involved.
And so the first part of the movie is a romantic comedy with Hao Kun's interest slowly luring Leying into the gym and out of her shell.
With some help from his new ladyfriend behind the scenes, Hao Kun ends up at the city championship bout. However, when Leying goes into the locker room, she discovers that he has taken a large amount of money to throw the match. When she confronts him saying that he can win and that he shouldn't take the money and retire from the sport as he plans, Hao Kun becomes distraught, angry, and defensive. He eventually tells Leying that their relationship is over.
Seeing Hao Kun give up inspires Leying to engage with life even more. She vows to win at least once in her life. To this end, she trains for the next year, losing a lot of weight. After becoming a lean, mean fighting machine, she enters a match with an experienced professional. Although she loses the bout, Leying feels good about herself for finally having accomplished and won something in her life.
This romantic comedy cum Ugly Duckling/Rocky inspirational drama was fun overall. There were genuine laughs to be had and largely not cheap ones about Leying's weight. Director Jia Ling also stars as Leying and she apparently put on weight and then lost about 100 pounds for the role. There were 3 young women sitting down the row from me and I think they were Chinese as they laughed at times when I felt mildly confused about a Chinese cultural reference. There weren't many of these instances and I don't feel like I missed anything important - just a few jokes.
The Rocky theme was used during the weight loss/training montage which I felt was longer than it would have been in an American movie. There were a couple more montages that seemed to be twice as long as I'd expect from a similar domestic flick. Plus, there was the scene where Leying leaves the locker room in slow motion and walks down a hallway towards the ring for the final match. She looks at the windows that line one side of the hall which reflect her image but she sees her weightier self. Not just a couple times but lots and lots. That slo-mo walk was a short film in itself. I wonder if this common in Chinese cinema or a stylistic choice particular to the director and editor(s).
Yolo tread a lot of familiar ground and I wouldn't have gone to see it if it was an American flick. Still, I appreciated that Leying and Hao Kun didn't live happily ever after and that she didn't manage some hyper-unrealistic come from behind victory in the ring against that professional pugilist. But she was victorious despite all that. She stopped floating down the river of life and started steering her own course.
