Evanston: ONCE; EASTERN PROMISES; shopping; snow
Evanston: ONCE; EASTERN PROMISES; shopping; snow
I had not heard of ONCE until it began appearing on year end Best Movies of 2007 lists, often at the top. A charming, simple boy meets girl Irish movie, but with an unforeseeable ending.
The boy is a street busker in Dublin, played by Glen Hansard, who in what we persist in calling real life was the lead singer in a group I have also never heard of, The Frames, and did quit school at at thirteen to sing on the street; the girl is a Czech immigrant street vendor, played by a Czech singer/actress, Marketa Irglova. There aren’t any other major characters. There is a lot of singing, which blends naturally into the story, including a brief piece sung in the back of a bus, “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy,” whose title is almost longer than the song.
I liked the music so much that immediately after watching the movie I downloaded the soundtrack from iTunes.
A bittersweet feel-good movie that deserves its place on the ten best lists.
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Another movie on many of those lists, very different and with very different music, that I also liked and subsequently bought from iTunes, is EASTERN PROMISES.
A teen age Russian prostitute stumbles into a London hospital where she dies in child birth. Naomi Watts plays a midwife who tries to learn enough about the girl to know where the infant should be placed. In doing so she enters the world of the Russian Mafia and particularly an ambiguous gangster played by Viggo Mortensen. There is some very serious violence in this movie, including one of the most dramatic flights/attempted murders I have seen on screen. The violence is as natural in EASTERN PROMISES as the music is in ONCE.
I just checked and neither of these movies are on the Netflix Top 100. Too bad. They make my best movies of the year list, too.
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For the past two days I’ve been ordering boat stuff to take back with me: a new halyard and sheets for the new gennaker; electronic chart cartridges; sail repair tape; a replacement light air vane for the Monitor; new sheets for the forward berth; a water proof camera bag.
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A few inches of still pristine snow cover everything except the streets themselves. Cars are frosted.
In addition to hiding blemishes, the snow also deadens sound and makes the city quieter.
When I’ve gotten up around 5:30 a.m. the past two mornings the temperature outside was 3ºF/-16ºC. Seriously cold. By 10:00 when I went out to get some passport photos to please the Indonesian and New Zealand governments--normally I don’t need a visa for New Zealand, but this time I want to enter without a return air ticket--it had warmed up to 11ºF/which happens to be about -11ºC. Brittle snow crunching beneath my boots.
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The photograph was taken from our west windows and is in color.
Thursday, January 3, 2008