It’s not how well you avoid problems. It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it. – Tom Mueller
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Month: February 2024
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Teachers Lounge
Well done movie. Thoughtful, well paced. Kept me interested the entire time.
Directed by Ilker Çatak, who also cowrote it with Johannes Duncker. Starring Leonie Benesch.
It’s probably best to think of the film as a parable of sorts, one where an everyday institution is presented realistically, with correct procedural details, but also stands in for a larger system or set of ideals, like the jury room in “Twelve Angry Men” or the ship in a mutiny story. The film handles national, racial and class resentments as subtly as it handles everything else.
Roger Ebert website
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Cat Power at Lincoln Theatre
Saw Power at the Lincoln Theatre in DC. Good show. Her band really killed it.
Ate at Busboys and Poets before the show. Cool place.
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Past Lives
by Celine Song
Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrested apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Twenty years later, they are reunited for one fateful week as they confront notions of love and destiny.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/movies/2023/06/08/past-lives-movie-review/
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Weekend Trip to NYC
We took a quick trip to NYC to see The Neil Diamond Musical: A Beautiful Noise at the Broadhurst Theatre. We took Amtrak there. Comfortable ride, about four hours. Much better than flying. Stayed in the Marriot Marquis, right in Time Square. Nice hotel, seemed to be recently renovated. Only compliant was the walls seemed a little thin, could hear our neighbors pretty easily. We could easily walk from the Penn Station, to the show, and to the hotel. Very convenient.
The show exceeded my expectations. I assumed it would be just a bunch of song and dance numbers, and there was a lot of that. But they also attempted, successfully it seemed to me, to make sense of Diamond’s life. The structure the story around a series of conversations between Diamond and his therapist. They used the line from I Am I Said as the story’s theme:
Did you ever read about a frog
Who dreamed of bein’ a king
And then became one
Diamond felt himself a frog unless he was performing, when he became a king. When the performance ended, he turned back into the frog. This relation helps Diamond come to terms with his life.
The actor that played Diamond as a young man was especially good. Not did he look like Diamond (although better looking), he somehow managed to sound exactly like him. The performance was really spot on.
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Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pretty good 🙂