At the movies

I decided today that instead of sitting around gnashing my teeth over the fact that I've been wanting to go see Julie and Julia but not enough to spend babysitting money on it, and instead tucked Alec into the sling and went to see it on my own today. He slept angelically the entire time and I enjoyed myself immensely.

My parents were fans of Julia Child, so they passed their appreciation of her on to me as I was growing up. I was always predisposed to like a movie based on her, particularly when she's played by Meryl Streep, but this one did well capturing her humor and strength of personality. And on the Julie side of the story, they did a good job depicting the trials and humor inherent in learning to cook. I particularly appreciated the lobster scene since it was almost identical to my mother's story of the first time she cooked lobster.

Other movies we've watched lately:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince: Great! I don't have a lot of insightful things to say about it except that we enjoyed it and I'm glad we made the effort to see it in the theatre. It wasn't identical to the book, but they got the atmosphere right and the changes still got the story where it needed to go.

The Ramen Girl: A really sweet little movie about a young American woman living in Japan who becomes obsessed with training to become a ramen chef. I was a little hesitant at first because we've been being burned lately by movies that Netflix calls "quirky." A quirky fun movie about a man who takes his British wife to meet his eccentric Southern family... until there's a stillbirth! A quirky fun movie about a difficult, prickly woman who goes visit her sister to attend the sister's wedding... until the fiance turns out to be a pedophile! Great fun all around. I never interpreted quirky movie to mean "leaves me slightly queasy with a sharp pain between my eyes" before, but a few more movies like that will have cemented the definition for me. But Ramen Girl really was a sweet, quirky movie, with a slight Like Water for Chocolate vibe.

Parker Lewis Can't Lose: A tv series actually. Back in 1989, NBC produced a sitcom based on Ferris Bueller's Day Off that didn't last very long. Simultaneously, Fox produced a sitcom very much like it that actually did Ferris Bueller right. That sitcom was Parker Lewis Can't Lose. The first season just came out on dvd, to my great delight. To my even greater delight, it's pretty much as good as I remembered. Watching it and seeing all of the 80s fashions and pop culture references is quite a trip too.