26 films in 4 days!

"Let me guess: comcast has graced you with premium channels for free!"

Bing, bing, bing! That's right! Streampix, HBO, and Starz, to light my nights and my days with the highlights of Hollywood! Well, and other locales, too, of course.

"Of course! So many places making movies - Dire Straits must love it!"

I know I do.

"So... what movies have you seen?"

Well, you know me. I've turned this into a series of film festivals, rather than a smorgasbord with no particular order to it. The first block was "guy movies about love", inspired by a conversation of fb with Jay Sinclair. He has a bunch of old VHS movies and was asking where to donate them. Someone suggested the women's crisis center and he countered with "they probably wouldn't go for these guy movies." I told him I loved those flicks, having grown up with three brothers (and worked in male-dominated jobs all my life).

"So, what did he decide to do with the tapes?"

Beats me! I haven't kept up with future developments on that story. I've been pretty busy watching movies to be discussin' them!

"Hey, no skin off my nose! So, whatcha watched?"

Well, I started with "40 Days And 40 Nights", which sounds like it's about the rainstorm that floated Noah's Ark, but you have to think Christian, not Jewish.

"So, that would be Lent. Hey, is that a laundromat?"

It is!!! And the sign says "Clean Laundry is a Fresh Start"! Certainly assured me that I was at the right place, right time, on Tuesday!

"Magnificent! And the movie was good?"

It was fabulous! From that one, I went straight into "(500) Days Of Summer", which was also fabulous and had my boy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, trying to work his way over to Autumn.

"Hahaha! Not the season, but a girl's name, right? How punny!"

Indeed, it really was, and I loved the five-minute dance number! And I liked the dates bouncing around, not sequential. 

"Me, too. Really makes you pay attention."

So it did, making me ready for maybe a little something I already had seen before... and had espied in the listings. "Risky Business" was the ideal chaser!

"Oh, major coolness! Hard to believe Tom Cruise is 38 years older now than he was in that 1983 movie! Such good music, too!"

You know it! And that scene on the train... and the one with him catching the crystal egg like a football... very nice!

"Oh, yes, yes, yes! So many good moments!"

There certainly were! But I had noticed that the guys had gotten younger in those three films, so I needed a "guy in love" who was a bit older, right?

"Sure, I'll play along! Where's a guy our age, g'friend?"

Exactly. Enter Richard E. Grant as a middling singer with a major crush on a conductor with curves in her hair and her body. What's a man to do but stage AN OPERA, at his country house, with up and coming young stars? And so we have "1st Night"!

"Woohoo!!!"

But wait, it gets better! The opera was a Mozart comedy, "Cosi fan tutte", perhaps to not so subtly nudge his lady love in his direction.

"How delicious! A little inside joke for them!"

Precisely!

"And was there a fifth film?"

There was not, at least not in that vein. Plus, it was already after 2 AM, so I thought something shorter might be better. And so began the HBO Kid Shorts Film Festival! Appropriately, it started with "The Music In Me", which segued quite nicely from the opera movie. Right place, right time!

"Apparently so! How wonderful! I know you love the shorts!"

I do! That first one - of eight total - consisted of a mixture of home-made clips of kids playing their favorite instruments, interspersed with more professional segments with the kids talking about how they started playing. This boy, Tony, was very impressive, with a version of "Stormy Weather" that was incredibly upbeat! Loved it!

"He really was good! So were the other children, on their violins and guitars and pianos."

So very much talent out there! That was showcased in some other films, too, in this particular personal film festival. But I had followed up that one with "Flight", about a boy with dreams of being an astronaut and going to the moon... to be close to his "mom in heaven". I really felt for the dad when the son said that.

"I hear you."

Thanks. I thought I could use a little perkier topic before I turned in, so I cued up "The Leopards Take Manhattan: The Little Band That Roared". Excellent choice! This woman who wanted to get music into the middle-school classroom started a percussion class in 1993 that was not only still going strong, but led the group to a jazz education invitational to New York City in 2006, the year this movie was finished.

"Good for them! Not bad for a bunch of kids from Louisville, Kentucky!"

Not bad by a long shot! I have to wonder where they are now, fourteen years after that movie. Right? How many stayed with playing music? How many are in bands now?

"So many questions! I know just what you mean."

The next morning, I was tuned in to a bunch of kids overcoming personal hurdles by finding something to focus on. "I Can't Do This, I CAN Do That" showed how those with non-physical issues (dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, audio processing disorder, sensory processing disorder) were able to use playing a musical instrument or dancing or some other favorite activity to bypass the problem, at least for a while. One kid put it best: "I don't like the term 'disability', I prefer the term 'different', because that is how I see myself."

"Yeah, I get that. Labels may help statisticians, but they sure do box people in."

Exactly. "I Have Tourette's, but... Tourette's Doesn't Have Me" followed that same motif, with real kids, talking on film to other kids, about their symptoms and their work to overcome them. Again, playing instruments or finding a hobby they enjoyed, including dance, allowed them some control over their bodies' tics and spasms and utterances. It was definitely made clear that they were not their disease.

"Those both sound pretty serious for a group of shorts targeted to a young audience."

Well, wait until you hear about two others. The first I saw would have been right at home in the SJFF, it really would have been. "The Number On Great-Grandpa's Arm" was beautifully done, with a middle-school aged boy having a conversation with his G'Gpa about his time in Auschwitz. Bear in mind that the man would have been about the boy's age at the time.

"Wow."

The one I watched right after that was another history lesson for the young. "What happened on September 11?" was certainly kinder and gentler than the news had been during that time. In this scene, a survivor is explaining to the class what it was like to have an acre of offices, per floor, crashing down as you struggle to get out of the building.

"Wow."

My favorite part was near the end, when they were talking about The Survivor Tree, once a charred stump buried in the rubble for 30 days, now a 30-foot tall beauty with hundreds of white blossoms. It's a flowering pear, much like the one in my front yard.

"That's pretty cool. Nice to feel a personal connection with that area."

It is. I remember going up in the World Trade Center - I don't recall which Tower - up to the observation area and feeling the building sway. That was before I went to Okinawa, you know.

"Yes, I recall you going on about that a few years back, when you saw "The Walk". What a lovely movie that was, when the building was freshly built!"

Yes, and that was with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, too.

"Indeed. It sounds like you're winding down, but I only count seven shorts here. Had you misspoken earlier?"

I had not. The eighth one, "Family Is Family Is Family", explored different types of family groups. You know, much like that commercial that has "love has no color, love has no religion, love has no gender". This included love of adopted children and foster children, too, so it was a nice glimpse back ten years. I wonder how all those families are doing?

"Good question. I have to wonder how the pandemic has affected all those folks."

Yes, well that will have to wait another day. Time for me to slunch! I have chirashi!

"Later, chica!"