Lucky Miles

This little Australia-made film is a real treat.  Lucky Miles is based on a collection of actual events and tells the story of a group of Iraqi and Cambodian men illegally unloaded on a very VERY remote stretch of Australian coastline.  Most of the men are rounded up fairly quickly by the authorities, but three men without a plan, a clue, or even a remote sense of direction, much less the sheer scale of the place in which they've been set loose, manage to elude capture for over a week.  Through sheer accident they manage to survive some of the harshest and most unforgiving terrain on the planet.  The story is told with a fair degree of humor, yet doesn't fail to impress upon you the peril these men face.  It's well told, well acted, and certainly worth a watch!

Last Child in the Woods

Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv, is one of those books that everybody should read.  It's of particular importance to parents.  Within the pages, this book addresses and names a malady that has been on the rise, but so far ignored, namely nature-deficit disorder.  While this isn't necessarily a medically recognized condition, the author lays out a convincing case for its existence, and more importantly, what can be done right now, today, to take steps toward a cure.  The children of today no longer play outside, and there are a myriad of reasons.  Many parents, in today's fear culture of never-ending bad news believe (and it's hard to blame them) that it's simply too dangerous to let their kids out untethered.  Also, the legal system, particularly in the U.S., makes free play in parks and wilderness areas bordering cities a potentially litigious affair.  Gone are the days of building tree houses.  Many areas now have ordinances specifically prohibiting such structures, and laws demanding the removal of already existing ones.  Basically, feel free to play in nature, just don't...you know...mess it up or anything.  This disconnect seems to be marching hand-in-hand with the increase in childhood obesity, ADHD, and other disorders.  The author points to study after study showing the power of nature to have significant, immediate, and lasting improvements for such conditions.  He also makes note of groups and such who've experimented with different community designs with very interesting results.  In short, read this, then recommend it to others!

An excellent view indeed!

We received the most wonderful gift this last Christmas.  Our dear friends the Lees sent us a beautiful photo book, Yellowstone View, full of gorgeous photographs of Yellowstone Park taken over the years by the man of their household, Thomas Lee.  Tom's a good friend and long time photographer for the Bozeman Daily Chronicle newspaper, the Montana Quarterly magazine, and does a fair bit of freelance business as well as Thomas Lee Photography.  The guy knows how to take beautiful pictures.  It's certainly a book we'll treasure, and one I can recommend without hesitation.  Tom's a great photographer, and Yellowstone is one of the world's great wilderness areas.  It's an ideal match.  For those interested, I see the book's available at the Chronicle's website, Alibris, and at Amazon.com.

Orange Moon Rising

Today's commentary isn't about some movie, book, music, nor any other such nonsense.  Today is about friend of mine who is now also the biggest celebrity I know!  Sure, my own wife may have played a part in a museum promotional film, and even better, was featured in a special about women in science on the Science Channel, and up till now, that was cause for celebration.  However, to turn a very appropriate phrase, that has now been fully eclipsed by Meredith of Orange Moon Toys with her wonderful appearance on the Martha Stewart show! Meredith and her sister Robin created Orange Moon Toys to sell beautiful and elaborate shadow puppets.  Their company has been successful in its own right, and their novel and beautiful creations caught the eye of Martha's people.  Scheduling was finally worked out, and Meredith gave a brilliant demonstration to Martha's audience.  Here's the YouTube clip of the show:

Additionally, Meredith had a related interview for the local NBC affiliate in Madison, Wisconsin.

So, a huge congratulations to Meredith, Robin, and Orange Moon Toys!

Plus, one can only imagine the stratospheric heights the company will reach with a hearty endorsement here on my blog.  ;-)

It's like having a movie channel

There's a big break right now with the local tv stations.  There aren't any series' running, new ones wouldn't seem to be lined up just yet to fill the spots, so it seems to be a movie a night around here.  Tonight's installment is The Lake House, with Keanu Reeves (as Neo in a post-apocalyptic Matrix world, ready to settle down by the lake) and Sandra Bullock (with freshly reinstated identity from The Net, looking for futuristic Matrix-style action from Neo).  Ok, I made that up.  It's actually a combination of You've Got Mail meets Frequency.  Two people become acquainted via post and ultimately develop a friendship and the beginnings of love, but with the twist that (ta-da!) they're living 2 years apart!  Keanu gets routinely bashed for being a terrible actor.  I disagree.  I'm not saying he's spectacular, but his flicks are fairly consistent performers and here he does a decent job, as romantic comedies go.  It's a pretty nice feel-good movie, there's the drama of whether they'll actually get to be together, but it's largely a sweet warm-fuzzy kind of flick.  Watch it with your significant other sometime.  

Total silliness

The nightly movie on the tube is Boat Trip with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Horatio Sanz, two would-be chick magnets who mistakenly book tickets on a gay cruise.  Hilarity, of course, ensues as it does in these kinds of plots.  This of course isn't Oscar material, nor is it even up there with the best of comedies, but if your expectations are sufficiently low and you're in a goofy mood, it's entertaining to see Cuba in this kind of a flick.  We're fans of some of his serious work, and it's nice to see the guy can have fun doing the ridiculous.  That said, don't rush out to the video store, wait for cable.

Speaking of silliness, Boat Trip was followed up by Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid.  This is intended to be a serious dramatic thriller, but the acting and cheezy plot points make it tough to take too seriously.  The scares are of the "something sudden happens and somebody screams" variety.  The rough plot outline is this:  a group of scientists discover a chemical compound derived from an orchid from Borneo that helps prolong life.  A veritable fountain of youth flower.  They set off for more samples and run into a group of super gorillas!  I jest...they run into enormous snakes of course.  The scientific expedition is staffed full of unusually good looking people.  The rough and manly guide they hire to take them up the river is muy macho, and the effects...well, they're not too bad, but require a hefty suspension of belief.  Of course, they continually make decisions requiring great ineptitude, and gradually get picked off one by one.  It helps to have really low expectations.  This one goes beyond waiting for cable.  It requires the perfect storm of waiting for cable AND extreme boredom AND nothing else better being on television.

Too long gone...

A chat with my neighbor about blogs brought into sharp relief my laziness and absence from my own.  It's been fully a month since the last post.  Shameful stuff, that is.  

So, here are some thoughts on some viewing and listening you may find useful.

I've recently discovered Newton Faulkner's music and have really been enjoying it.  I'll take a quick moment here to plug amazon.com's DRM-free music offerings.  The downloads are high bit-rate and reasonably priced.  The music, well, taste is highly subjective there, so I'd recommend giving the disc a preview (which amazon and other sites offer) or hitting youtube.  He bases his tunes on acoustic guitar, and the result (IMO) is brilliant.  It's pretty smooth and up-beat listening.

Anika Moa is a Kiwi musician, and I've been really enjoying here music as well.  She has a wonderful singing voice, at once delicate and powerful.  She has a few albums out now, and they are all really good, covering a variety of emotion and subject matter.  New Zealand has many strong offerings in the music department, and Anika is (or should be) at the top of that list.

Planet Earth is a 5 disc documentary nature series from the BBC narrated by Sir David Attenborough, and in a word, it's brilliant.  The cinematography is breathtaking, moving the viewer through some of the planet's most remote and imposing landscapes, beautifully capturing the changing seasons.  It makes this ever-shrinking planet feel like a big place again, and re-instills that sense of wonder that one tends to lose journeying into adulthood.  This is beautiful and really should be on everyones watch list.