Movies in September

Where does the month go? You'd think with a week off I would have had time to catch up, but no. More swamped than ever. Well, let's wrap this up before October ends.

Our family favorite: the Marx Brothers. We watched four of these in September. Animal Crackers and The Cocoanuts had all four Marx Brothers, A Night at the Opera and A Night in Casablanca just three. If only Zeppo had had a schtick. A Night at the Opera is justly revered. I think Oliver in particular liked the bit where Groucho moved through the audience during the performance, heckling the opera. But then he would.

Other things we watched all together: Wolverine, which was more fun than I was expecting (but then my expectations were low).

Gundam Wing I found horrible to slog through. The episodes were an endless series of infodumps and the plot was convoluted, and not in a good way. There was no real story, but the look of the show was top notch. The boys of course like the Gundams but I thought even the character design was well done. Alas for the writing. I wonder if the dialogue sounds more natural in Japanese? In the end I took to heckling this show myself, which the boys found amusing, and Quin took to taking long Gundam naps.

Wallace and Grommit: Loaf or Death was clever and charming, natch. I can always rely on Wallace and Grommit to give me a warm glow.

Watched with Quin: Heroes Season 3. The show is starting to irk me. There are two main problems here. Half the time the characters are acting in ways that make no sense for who they are, like Matt Parkman suddenly deciding he's going to kill innocent people to get back at the guy who let his girlfriend die. I never quite bought that he felt as strongly for the speedy girl as we were meant to believe he did, and the little bit of faith I was giving that in the name of playing along was destroyed when he promptly forget her and went back to his wife. Quite a bit like Peter totally forgetting the girlfriend he left behind in some alternate future. Sure he can't get back to her now, but he doesn't ever even seem to think about her. The other problem is pretty much the opposite, the endless circularity of what I'm sure the writers have decided are the characters' primary motivations. Claire is the worst offender here: every conversation she has with anybody sounds just like the last ten conversations she had with them; why is she still tearing up as if these emotions were fresh? Ugh. If the actors weren't so likeable I wouldn't bother anymore.

We also watched to foreign films: Run Lola Run in German and Sin Nombre in Spanish. I'm late to the Run Lola Run party, but it is a seriously cool flick. Sin Nombre is about how much life sucks when you're poor in the slums of Central America, to the point where risking your life to ride on the top of a train in the hopes of reaching the US is worth it. Well done, but very depressing.

And on my own: Bollywood. I watched another sort of Heroes, this time a movie about the families of soldiers in the Indian army who had died in Kashmir. There were some nice bits (particularly Salman Khan in a beard and Panjab accent), but it took too long to get started and I don't think ever really made its point.

A better movie about Kashmir is Mission Kashmir. This was one of the first movies from Hrithik Roshan and he is amazing in it as an adult survivor of a horribly traumatic childhood. He is so convincingly traumatized, though, that the happy ending felt false to me. I was expecting his character to die, which would have been a horrible downer but, I think, more honest. Jackie Shroff is also very good here, wonderfully creepy (I thought his character was always hunched the way he was because it made his gaze so intense, but there's a real piece of back story there). A good film despite the ending.

I had more mixed feelings about Aamir Khan's Ghajini. It is similar to, and was certainly inspired by, Memento, but unlike many Bollywood takeoffs of American films the stories themselves are very different. Khan's character (who is very, very buff) also can't remember more than 20 minutes at a time and takes pictures and leaves notes for himself in his quest to find his fiancee's murderer, but it's clear early on that unlike Memento he isn't to blame, and the actual story is very uniquely Mumbai, with gangsters and girls from villages enslaved in brothels (after having their kidneys stolen; this isn't a happy story). The darkness of that story is offset by the lightness of the back story, of how Khan's character met and wooed his fiancee. Personally, I liked the back story better; the actress playing the fiancee had a great energy and their romance was very believable (a film rarity in any language, I find). Alas, the present time story was too violent for me, and I had to cover my face in two places because I didn't want to risk seeing what I was afraid I was going to see (having watched Salman Khan have his skull crushed twice I no longer take any chances when villains approach with blunt instruments). And the ending was very drawn out. It felt like a video game, and as it's since been made into one I guess that's not a coincidence.

The last film was one Aamir Khan produced, starring his nephew Imran Khan, Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na. This was written and directed by Abbas Tyrewala, a guy who's got a writing credit in a ton of other films I've enjoyed. The characters feel like real people (even the two guys wearing Western gear and riding on horses to all the clubs of Mumbai, and that's saying something). Tyrewala also wrote the lyrics to the songs in the film, which was a nice touch. Here the music feels more a part of the story, less a pop music intrusion. Of course having AR Rahman do the music is always a nice touch. I linked before to "Pappu Can't Dance" back when Rahman won his Oscar, so here I'll put "Kabhi Kabhi Aditi", the song Imran's character sings to cheer up Aditi, who has just suffered a major loss: her cat has died (hence the kitty in the basket):

Mount Rushmore (with pictures!)

Back from our whirlwind two-day trip to South Dakota and Wyoming. I'm going to have to spread these pictures out over a few blog posts here. (And I'm not sure when I'll figure out how to upload the video I shot).

It rained nearly the entire way to Rapid City, so we didn't get to see much fall color, and it was dark by the time we got to our hotel. It was in the low 30s when we woke up in the morning, but we had come prepared with parkas, hats and mittens.

When we got to Mount Rushmore it was foggy and covered with frost and patches of snow: very pretty.


We spent the morning around Mount Rushmore. They have a walking trail made from that plastic lumber, all steps and patios with lots of benches. The snow melted as we walked, and we saw a few mountain goats skipping through the rubble or eating the lichen.

In the afternoon we went to Jewel Cave. We took the hour and a half tour through the cave plus hiked some trails near there. The boys did a series of activities with the park rangers and earned ranger patches and badges both. After that we headed to Custer Park, but got there too late to see much. We just drove through and saw tons of deer, but alas couldn't find the bison.


After nearly two hours underground:

I was still learning all the features of the camera, so most of my shots of the cave didn't turn out, but I got a few:

The cave tour follows these metal walkways up and down and around; it's quite dizzying. The cave didn't get much narrower than this; good thing, as we weren't supposed to touch any of the rocks.

More Mount Rushmore (with pictures!)

Watching the mountain goat eat:


Pushing snow off the bannisters while walking (you think they'd never seen snow before):

What pictures can't convey: the smell. Particularly on the trails around the Jewel Cave where they had just done a controlled fire; it was a smokey, piney smell that was just lovely.

This is still at Mount Rushmore before the snow melted:

By the time we left to go to Jewel Cave the snow was gone, but when we arrived in the bust of Borgeum had a nice snow toupee.

Devil's Tower (with pictures!)

On the day we were going to come back home we decided to head west to Wyoming first and see Devil's Tower. Which took quite a bit longer than I thought it would; we didn't get home until 1 in the morning. That was a long, long day. But the trail winds around the base of Devil's Tower was cool, and it was nice to get a good hike in before spending 12ish hours in a car.

This is from an overlook on the way to Devil's Tower (see it there, in the back?). Waiting for someone to click a picture while staring straight into the sun, but trying not to stare straight into the sun:


Climbing the rocks around Devil's Tower:

A nice overlook at the valley below. We could hear the cows bellowing. Quin and the boys:

Me and the boys:

More Devil's Tower (with pictures!)

Someone is always looking for a pose that just has to be a picture:


Pretending to stack rocks (they were like that when we got there):

The one picture where you can kind of see that we are in fact at the foot of Devil's Tower:

The three of us standing at the bottom of Devil's Tower:

Books in September

Still working my way through the Niven catalog. First was the Niven/Pournelle/Barnes sequel to The Legacy of Heorot, Beowulf's Children. Not quite as "this should be a movie" as the first book, but the fact that this felt more novel-like is a good thing. My only quibble: I wasn't buying the evolved, more intelligent grendel conceiving of a grendel god. Deities are such social constructs, I don't see how or why a solitary animal would create one, or feel the need to create one. That aside, it was a killer story.

In the Niven and Barnes sans Pournelle category, I read Dream Park and its sequel The Barsoom Project. These were both awesome too. In these books and the two above, the women characters feel so much more real and complete in a way I don't find them in books just by Niven or Niven and Pournelle that I'm beginning to suspect I might be a bit of a Steven Barnes fan. I'll have to add his name to the list of writers I plan to read up on.

The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins. What can I say? I just found one of the spines for my high school biology curriculum. This book is amazing. Part of my reason for homeschooling my boys was the way public schools tiptoe around evolution. They mention it (which is enough to piss off certain people), but they never actually teach it, what it is, how it works, and most of all the wealth of evidence we have for it. This book does all those things, and Dawkins with his wit is such a pleasure to read. My own understanding of evolution is mainly from the medical end, genetics and comparative anatomy, so the chapters on geology and fossils I found particularly informative. I've never really read up on all that before, and it is dead interesting. I highly, highly recommend this one. I don't know how anyone could look at life this way and not be overwhelmed with awe and wonder at how it all works. We live in an amazing world.

Lastly, A Primer of Modern Standard Hindi by Michael J. Shapiro. I've actually been working on this one for a while. It starts assuming no knowledge of Hindi and then builds to a level I found to be just about where Teach Yourself Hindi ends, so it was perfect for me. It contains a selection of snippets from actual readers used in schools in India, little stories about the gardens of Kashmir, or folk tales, even the opening of Alice in Wonderland all in Hindi. There was also a thorough discussion of the grammar. I'm such a grammar geek sentences like "It is possible to arrange a number of the most common Hindi adverbial forms into a highly systematic paradigm" actually make me swoon a little.

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But I suppose that's just me.