Living on the frontlines

Nell is the story of a young woman who lived in the back woods of North Carolina. She had grown up with her mother, a partially paralyzed woman and the only other human being (besides a deceased sister) Nell had ever known. When authorities learn the mother had died, they found Nell. After so many years of isolation, Nell had developed her own language. Two doctors with differing ideas of how to best help Nell set out to learn about her and try to protect her from exploitation. The story is very hear twarming. It’s a family friendly film, but probably for older kids. There is some nudity, but it isn’t sexual. The film was released in 1994 and stars Jodie Foster. I’m not sure if the plot is based on a true story or not. If anyone knows, I’d love to find out. A quick Google search only yielded links about the film its self. I give it a five out of five spoons on the spo onworthy scale – grin!

Mom and I watched this movie over the Christmas holidays. It’s one of the best movies I’ve seen in some time. The story is about a writer, a young white woman, who sets out to tell the stories of the African-American maids that inhabit her world. It’s no small task. She must gain their trust, and guard their stories. While the film has very serious themes, it is also quite funny in places. It’s pretty family friendly. I don’t remember anything too much in the way of anything rude. If it’s there, it was so small it didn’t register in my memory. Small children would probably find it boring, but older kids would not only learn something from the story, but be entertained by the humor as well. It isn’t yet available for instant play on Netflix, but you can order the DVD. I give it five out of five spoons!

Most of my friends and family know it. I’m a Netflix addict. They really ought to give me a commission because even through the recent turmoil, I’ve been a huge fan. When I lost my job in 2008, it was a cheap way to still have at least some entertainment. (I had to cut expenses and so got rid of the cable TV.) After two months at my mom’s with 100’s of channels, honestly with the exception of a handful of international news channels from abroad – I’m not missing much at all. In fact, I’ve developed a real hatred of commercials, once I’m past the first day and the novelty has worn off. Grin! At any rate, I also love documentaries. Since I was a kid I’ve been fascinated by the story of Pompeii. It might seem a bit dark, but Pompeii provided such an amazing historical record – a flash in time. Living in Europe, we visited several Roman ruins, but none like this. This particular documentary “Pompeii: Back from the Dead” tells the stories of 54 inhabitants that all found refuge in a cel...

This movie is a bit unique as World War II movies go. It follows prisoners after they were released from Auschwitz as they try to get back home again. So many movies covering the topic of the concentration camps only reflect on the horrible time in the camps, but how often do we think about the turmoil and trials that occurred as the survivors tried to get home, and then found their worlds completely different from what they left behind. On a spoon scale of five, I give this film a four out of five. And yes, it’s available on Netflix instant play. (It’s not a film for kids.) P.S. I am posting this in a smaller font only because there seems to be something wrong with Blogger's larger font. When I change the size to post it larger, it goes all weird and unreadable.

This is a movie I found on instant play on Netflix. It’s a nice little romance with a somewhat complicated plot. Charlotte Gray is a Scottish woman living in World War II London. She speaks French very well and gets recruited to be a spy working with the French underground. Before she leaves England, she falls in love with a British pilot. Just as she’s about to set out on her mission, she finds out his plane went down over France. Suddenly her mission is more complicated than relaying intelligence. She wants to find her love, who she hopes has taken refuge with the underground. Her plans to find her lost love get complicated, however, when the French family that has taken her in and provided her cover story rescues two Jewish boys whose parents have been taken away to the camps in Germany. She has to choose whether to look for the love, or save the boys. By the end, things become even more complicated with a new love interest. It was a nice little flick. I don’t remember t...

I recently watched the series “Bramwell” from start to finish as if I was reading a book. It felt like reading a novel as I got so engrossed in the story, I kept clicking for the next episode to find out what would happen next. This is a British series set in Victorian London. Miss Bramwell is the daughter of a doctor and forward thinker. He sent his daughter to medical school and the story picks up as she tries to find a job as a woman doc in a Victorian world. As you might expect, it wasn’t smooth sailing. Finally, she sets up a clinic of her own. The story then moves to the lives on the poor patients she serves. I enjoyed the series very much, both for the great story lines and for the glimpse into Victorian medicine. The last season, however, took a departure from the feel of the first three. I didn’t look at the credits to discover if this was true, but it almost felt as though a different writer took over the story. I didn’t like the ending much at all. I guess it ...

A friend of mine recently said she missed my movie reviews. I miss posting them. I don’t get to watch many movies these days, and when I do I typically don’t have much time afterward to write about it. Still, there are times when no matter how busy you are, you reach a kind of wall and have to step back to clear your head. It was in one of those moments I found a little television series I’ve fallen in love with – Little Men. Unfortunately, it seems it only ran two years. I guess no one else was as taken with it as I am, having discovered it 10 years plus after it ran. I don’t even remember ever seeing it on television back then. How could that be? The series takes place in the 1800s in Concord, Mass. It’s the follow up to the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. The girls are all grown up and Jo, recently widowed, is running a school in the big house left to her by her aunt. I’ve been to the home where Alcott wrote these books. It looks similar to the ho...

This is an independent film I watched a few weeks ago while recovering from one of my headaches. It was released in 2009 and is rated PG – 13. It’s about a divorcee from Palestine and her son who immigrate to the United States in hopes of a better life. Like so many that migrate, the United States wasn’t everything they expected, nor was life as easy as they’d hoped – but in the end they manage to settle in and start to build relationships in their newfound home. The film moves a little slow in places. It isn’t an action film for sure. It does, however, almost have a documentary-like quality to it in the way it follows the family and their emotions. There is one scene in particular that reminded me much of my own family’s migration to the United States. The mother has carefully hidden her life savings in the baggage to protect it. Unfortunately, she hides it in the wrong place and it disappears. When one of my great great grandfathers and his family came to the United States from Engla...

This is a movie I remember my family renting when I was in high school, and it was a delight to watch it again. It’s about the last Emperor of China, who ascended the throne at the tender age of three. As history would have it, China was in the midst of undergoing great political change. In the midst of it was this poor little last Emperor of China who, it seems, never really had control of his own life. The movie follows his life story from his crowning at three, to his spoiled upbringing inside the walls of the Forbidden City, to his forced abdication, to his role in Manchuria with the Japanese during the Second World War, to finally his existence as an average Chinese citizen. This is a movie for adults, although with the exception of a sex scene it isn’t too family unfriendly. The content, however, is historical and would probably be of little interest to younger viewers. I give it four and a half out of five spoons.

After celebrating New Year’s at Echo and Karen’s, I spent the first day of the year being lazy with my friends Tina J, Meghan and Shannon. They were in town to attend the jam session at Echo’s and decided to crash at my place rather than risk driving home on the icy roads with a bunch of drunk people. We spent New Year’s Day just being lazy and we watched the film, “The Nanny Diaries.” I’d give this film four and a half spoons out of five on the Heather movie spoon system. It was a very cute, lighthearted comedy without much in the way of smut or other things that could ruin the movie for general family viewing. There is the occasional swear word, but the offender is scolded, if that matters to you. The story is about a recent college grad looking for that first “real job.” The pressure of the job hunt gets to her and she realizes she’s just not ready for it. So, to buy some time, she takes on a job she thinks is going to be easy – being a nanny to a four-year-old boy. It turns out to ...

If you’re in need of a little laughter, this comedy was a riot. It’s not a new film. I think it came out in 2000 – ironic given the current economic situation in our country now. The story is about your typical, upwardly mobile, upper-middle class family that seems to have it all. They’ve got the big house in the suburbs, the car, the life sort of speak, and they’re in competition for even more. Plans go wrong, however, when they both find themselves without a job. They try everything to stay afloat and keep up appearances, but ultimately, they turn to a life of crime. In the end, however, they turn their newfound criminal know-how back on the corporate criminals that caused them to lose their jobs in the first place. The very last line of the movie had me belly laughing for a while. I give it four out of five spoons.

Need a little comic relief? I thought this film was pretty funny. Either that, or I just really, really needed to laugh. The story is about a manager at a call center. His company decides to outsource his entire section’s duties to India. They’re firing everyone but him. His job is to go to India and train his replacement. He arrives in India totally not interested in India, it’s culture and certainly not happy about the job. Much of the humor is based on cultural misunderstandings. I do wonder how the movie would go over in India as it sort of portrays India as being backward. From the people I’ve met that have gone there, this isn’t universally true. But, if the main character wasn’t impressed with India in the beginning, he does have a change of heart and finally begins to take an interest in Indian culture and all it has to offer. I give it four out of five spoons.

This is not a movie to watch after a bad day. It’s a tear jerker, but oh so good. The story is about a little boy growing up in Nazi Germany. His father gets a promotion and the family has to move from the home they loved in Berlin to a place far away in the country. What the boy doesn’t understand is that his father’s new job is running a concentration camp. The boy is very lonely as there aren’t other children to play with. He wanders off and eventually makes a friend of a boy in the camp about the same age. They play checkers etc. through the wire fence. The ending is unexpected and I won’t give it away. The movie has a great moral point. It’s easy to justify something as long as it’s happening to someone else. One thing I liked about the movie is that to me, it really felt like Germany. I don’t know where it was filmed, but one thing I remember fondly about Germany is that it was always green. Even in the dead of winter when all the leaves were gone from the trees, it was still gre...

This was a nice little accidental movie find. Arranged is the story of two women, both teachers, who meet at a school in Brooklyn. Other teachers and students expect the two to have friction as one is an Orthodox Jew and the other Muslim. Instead, they become best of friends. They share the expectation of entering into arranged marriages and they share the struggles of balancing their own traditional cultures with the rest of modern America. I thought it was a great movie and family friendly. I give it four out of five spoons.

This is a story I adored as a little girl. I even have two sets of Little Women dolls that someday I hope to be able to afford to display. I’ve kept them carefully preserved all these years so as not to mess them up – they’ve never been played with but rather simply admired. The story is told from the perspective of one of four daughters who wishes to be a writer. She remembers what it was like to grow up in the Civil War era after her father left home to participate in the conflict. The stories of the lives of she and her sisters are sweet, hearth and home, remembrances. Watching this movie again after several years made me a bit sad that I don’t have family around, and made me look around at this apartment and wish I had the funds for a flourish of nesting. The movie just makes you feel like home – as if an apple pie should be in your oven and pretty table settings around your table. It’s a chick flick for sure! I give it five out of five spoons.

Here’s another little Netflix instant gem. It’s a four-part BBC miniseries called North and South. I’d best describe it as Dickens meets Jane Austin. The story is based on a novel by Elizabeth Gaskill. The story is about a minister’s family. The minister has a falling out with the Church of England and moves his family from their Jane Austin-like country existence to a harsh, dark and dirty mill town. The story’s central character, the minister’s daughter, Margaret Hale, must learn to adapt to the move. Although it was only from one part of England to another, the differences are as if she’s moved to a new country. Eventually she comes to appreciate the place she, at first, looked down upon as uncultured and uncivilized. And, there’s a great love story plot that would make good old Jane Austin proud! The last episode is the best! I give it five out of five spoons!

I haven’t done movie reviews in a while, although I have watched some rather good ones lately. One of the wonderful things about Netflix is that I can watch a wide variety of things instantly, where ever I am, provided I can get internet access. I only hope that Netflix is able to keep making movies and TV shows available on instant stream. I’m sure there are many in the entertainment community that would just assume limit the access – however, I hope more of them have the foresight to understand you can’t dictate how your customers want your product. You’d be better off to offer what they want rather than what you find easiest to give them. At any rate, I’ve just started watching a documentary series available on Netflix instant play called Empires: the Medici. It’s a PBS production. I’ve always wanted to go to Florence, Italy. Italy is a place I never got to visit while I lived in Europe, and I’d love to see Rome, Venice and Florence. This is a documentary about the Medici family. It...

It isn’t what you might think. Born into Brothels is one of my recent watches on Netflix. It’s a documentary about the children of sex workers in Calcutta. Actually, the film has very, very little to do with sex at all. It’s much more about a photographer working to record the lives of women living in the red light district. She moves into the brothel so that she can truly get into the lives of her subjects, and while there discovers the lives of these beautiful children who happen to have the misfortune of being born into such a difficult place. She decides to set up a photography class for the children and as she teaches them, and sees their world through their own eyes, she becomes more and more attached to them. Eventually, she makes it a personal mission to try to help rescue some of these children from a life with little hope for a future by getting them admitted to school. To pay the expenses, she manages to set up exhibitions of their photography in the U.S. etc. In the end wha...

The Associate The Associate is a Woopi Goldberg film that came out in the 90s. It’s cute and something great to watch if you’re looking for something funny that doesn’t require too much in the way of actual brain cells. The story is about a talented investment banker (Whoopi) who just can’t seem to break through the glass ceiling. When her assistant gets promoted over her, it’s the last straw and she strikes out on her own to start her own business. The trouble is the good-old-boys club is just too strong on Wall Street, so she invents a business partner – a good-old-boy of her own – to break into the necessary circles to make the right deals. She’s very successful, but eventually the plan backfires. I especially enjoyed the sections of the film where Whoopi was trying to start her own business. I feel like that a bit in a way – that to find a way to earn an income working on HPS is like starting a business. If only I were as good at it as she is. This is not exactly a family night fil...

As those who know me already know, I’m a sucker for historical dramas. I especially love Jane Austin and other stories from the same period. I can’t quite figure out why. Why is it so appealing to watch stories about the lives of women during this period? Why is it so appealing to follow the lives of women who have only one goal, one thing that seems it will give their lives any meaning – marrying well. I guess if being an old maid is a fate worse than death, I can be grateful I didn’t live then. Although good old Jane never married and somehow she survived. Perhaps it’s the gentile manners, the prescribed codes of conduct or just the flowery language. And can you imagine these men? I truly wonder if men of this era were as prone to get swept up into the romantic goings on around them this way? At any rate, they seem to have a sense of romance that men, in general, in the real world, seem to lack. Perhaps if one were to develop a curriculum for men on how to be romantic, Jane Austin sh...