Claire Conger

“I don’t have time to be married!” wails Julie in Julie and Julia, a movie about Julia Child and devote Julie Powell. What Julie really should have cried, was “I don’t have time to work all day at my stupid government job!”

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I just watched Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)*–for the second time. I was thoroughly entertained, but I realized, watching it, that I didn’t have a way to evaluate its veracity. I wondered, for example, if Mr Moore’s FBI interviewee knew what actually happened or if his criticisms were biased because he was “out of the loop.”  When Ricky Martin couldn’t fly, was that before or after the Saudis left the country? I don’t know, because Mr Moore uses facts judiciously and juxtaposes events to lead me to believe what he wants me to believe. He’s disingenuous.

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Al Gore leads the charge for reducing green house gas emissions with his lecture An Inconvenient Truth, but the really inconvenient truth is told in Snowball Earth by Gabrielle Walker (2003). Basically, we’re doomed.

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Shine (1996) turns out to be a rather romantic movie. It’s the story of a young prodigy pianist who loses it at music college, turns into a pleasure-seeking adult without proper social constraints, an idiot-savant, if you will, and ends up getting lucky in middle age.

The movie is a loose adaption of the life of David Helfgott, an Australian concert pianist.

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I just watched a very sweet movie, Sex, Lies, and Videotape(1989).

Andie MacDowell shines as a newly married housewife, Ann, caught in a love quadrangle. The movie has a slow, dreamy pace that runs at the speed of Ann’s unfolding. We follow her as she figures out what’s going on and brings into alignment what she wants and who she is with what she has.

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