More cheerful fare for your isolating days. These three comedies are currently showing on the Criterion Channel but you should be able to find them elsewhere.
Tag Archives: happy things
Cheer You Up Movies 2
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Filed under Isolation Picks, Movies
Can you Spot the Surrealist*?
Here’s a little self-isolation game for you. It’s like ‘Where’s Waldo’ but way more intellectual…
(* and yes, I know I’m conflating Surrealism here with Dada and general Avant-gardeism, but I liked it as a title! Enough with the quibbling!)
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Filed under Isolation Picks, Miscellaneous Fun-ness, Movies
Why Watch Old Movies? or: The Consolation of History
(Yes, another blog post about the pandemic, or at least about watching movies during the pandemic. It does, however, apply to non-isolation movie viewing as well.)
So why is now a good time to watch old movies? As everyone is shut up at home waiting out the high tide of covid-19, I know many are looking to Netflix and other streaming services for distraction and solace. If you do, consider this: old movies may be more consoling than newer flicks.
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Criterion Channel List: Movies to Cheer You Up
I just put together a few titles for a friend and thought I’d put some of my suggestions here too. You can probably find these elsewhere, but they are all available on the Criterion Channel right now.
And, I might add, the Criterion Channel offers a 2-week trial period for free…
Dancey
You Were Never Lovelier (1942)
Director: William A. Seiter
Starring: Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth
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Why I Want to Live in a Wes Anderson Film
I don’t just love Wes Anderson’s imaginary world, I want to live in it. I want to live among his characters and, even better, work with them. I once had a conversation with a movie-loving Catalan couple, over a lingering late supper in a Barcelona restaurant, in which they expressed their utter bewilderment over The Royal Tenenbaums. I mimed swooning with love for that film; they shook their heads. “The characters… the way they talk… it’s not real,” they said. They were flummoxed by the deadpan expressions and laboured dialogue. I had to reassure them that the Tenenbaums did, in caricature, represent a certain, distinctive North American type: intellectually serious but emotionally immature WASPs. “They’re my people!” I enthused, only at that moment realizing it to be true.
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Pushing Daisies Around
I just want to know what the deal is with the damned daisies.
The summer heat came at last and they popped up, bright masses lolling all over my yard, so stupidly cheerful it made me giddy. I defy anyone to lie down in a sunny patch of daisies and not feel ecstatic.
So of course I wanted to pick some for my table. It was only when I tried to untangle them that I realized daisies have no structural integrity whatsoever. Unable to stand on their own, they lean drunkenly on their neighbours until everyone falls down.
Their lack of spinal fortitude is only enhanced in a vase: the stem flops, the head flops, each individual petal flops. My daisies were either engaged in some kind of work-to-rule strike or they are just naturally, intrinsically on vacation. Forever.
I kept pushing them around, to no avail. And I don’t think I was asking for too much, I wasn’t expecting the moral rectitude of a flipping Gerbera for heaven’s sake. All I wanted was a haphazard jumble of joyful blossoms, but they absolutely refused to cooperate. It was like trying to sculpt with pudding.
Does their uselessness make them happy? Or does being happy make them useless?
Is life just so good that they can’t stand up? Is succumbing to gravity the last surrender of the truly content?
If there was nothing to push against in the world – hardship, strife, pain – would we all just melt into a puddle of bliss?
Enough. I must go now and shake my finger at the flowers of the field, the birds of the air, and those irritating, dilly-dallying clouds…
“Shape up, everyone, do you hear me? Shape up!”
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Ode to a Volvo: 2
Voluminous Volvo!
Accommodating to a fault,
You swallowed up everything –
Couches, tables, Ikea flatpacks,
Hockey bags, camping gear,
Chairs, coolers, firewood,
Garbage and recycling,
Bikes, children, groceries.
Accepting all without question
Almighty Deliverer!
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Ode to a Volvo: 1
O handsome automobile!
Cross-country chariot
Sweat-box
Your AC was an unfounded rumour,
A mirage.
During the heatwave you blew hot air in my face and I had to spend seven hundred dollars to make you stop.
Cross-country trip with the windows rolled down,
So loud we couldn’t hear each other
Your loose bones rattling beneath us.
And yet we loved you.
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Debate Club, Elementary School style!
The kids at my daughter’s elementary school are keen on starting clubs. Handwritten notices show up all the time on the main bulletin board.
Last fall a Debate Club started in this way. A group of grade 4 and 5 girls began meeting in the library during lunchtime recess. They were inspired by the CBC Radio show “The Debaters”, in which comedians debate topics for laughs. Not all the girls had heard the show, but the few who had were in possession of the basic format: you have a topic, you are assigned a position ‘for’ or ‘against’, and you take turns stating your views. At the end the audience applauds and picks a winner.
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More Eldritch To Come…
So true! (Bill Watterson)
Okay, I think I can finally make it official… I have signed with Dundurn for two (yes, two!) Eldritch Manor sequels. I am nearly finished writing Book 2, actually sprinting/stumbling to the finish as we speak. Which would be why I’ve been neglecting this blog and not leading a writing club at the library this fall. Must… focus…
(Obviously on the to-do list: come up with a title!)
Thanks to everyone who urged me to write more about Willa and her friends, and thanks of course to Dundurn, for agreeing to more of this creepy foolishness!
Stay tuned for more details about release dates! I’ll pass them along as soon as I know more.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to work.
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Filed under Author Info/Biographical