¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoy a pleasant day with your own mothers.

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all have enjoyed a pleasant day with your own mothers.

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoy a pleasant day with your own mothers.

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoy a pleasant day with your own mothers.

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoy a pleasant day with your own mothers.

Pop Song of the Week: "Danny's Song"

In honor of Mother's Day.

Movie Song of the Week: "Baby Mine"

From the 1941 Disney classic Dumbo, it is the ultimate Mother's Day tune. Please feel free to share it with your mother.

¡Feliz Día de la Madre!

Happy Mother's Day to all my loyal readers. I hope you all enjoy the day as much as my own mother.

I Don't Know How to Say This

I actually celebrated Mother's Day this past weekend by accompanying my mother and my youngest brother to a local fish restaurant, after which we went to a local theatre to see the new release Soul Surfer. And even though Soul Surfer was billed as a “Christian” movie made primarily for the appreciation of “Christian” movie-goers and even though I have a tendency to cringe whenever the makers of a certain form of entertainment go out of their way to emphasize that it's a “Christian” movie or a “Christian” TV show or a “Christian” record and not just a form of entertainment which has Christians in it -- I actually ended up liking the movie.

That's right. Despite all its religious messages and Biblical allusions and mentions of a certain Christian savior, I actually liked Soul Surfer. And this despite the fact that I am a mere heathen Catholic who is supposedly too hip to like “Christian” movies.

Perhaps it was because of the acting chops of Helen Hunt and Dennis Quaid, who play the parents of the title character, a young girl who was maimed by a shark and then forced to learn how to relive almost half her life with only one arm. Or perhaps it was because I could not help identifying with the title character. Or perhaps I relished the irony of a movie which saw no reason why surfer culture and traditional Christian culture should not be part of the same lifestyle, which was not the type of thing one would have expected from conservative Christians four or five decades ago.

No matter. The movie was enjoyable in its own way and while I would not necessarily go out of my way to see it again, I can hardly pretend that it was one of the worst cinematic experiences I have had this year.

It would be nice to blame the success of the movie on the number of scenes involving bikini-clad teenagers but I've seen Hollywood movies that have bared far more skin and still managed to be boring. Indeed, one of the most surprising things about this movie is that it appeared to have more in common with traditional Hollywood sports movies like Ice Castles and Gracie than it did with the average religious movie. And it did not hurt that many of the values it promoted (perseverance, fair play, willingness to help others) seemed suspiciously like the ideas liberal movies used to promote.

I really do not see this movie converting many viewers who were not already Christian to begin with. But I liked it anyway.

And I like to think that the fact that I was able to walk outside afterwards and not worry about getting hit by a lightning bolt says something good. If not, I am sure I will soon find out.

Trailer of the Week: Bachelor Mother (1939)

Ah, the good old days of good old-fashioned family values. I always thought Ms. Rogers' character in this movie deserved one heck of a Mother's Day present considering everything she went through.

Happy Mother's Day


Here's hoping that all my readers out there who either have mothers or are mothers have had a happy Mother's Day. I would have posted sooner but I was visiting my own mother.

Trailer of the Week: The Godfather (1972)

It's Mother's Day Weekend. What better time can you think of to go out and see a "family" movie?

Mother's Day Was All Greek to Me

I was actually able to take time off Sunday to celebrate a decent Mother's Day with my own mother and my siblings. We went to a Greek restaurant in Mesquite -- not exactly Detroit's Greektown but as close as we were going to find in this part of Texas -- and enjoyed ourselves immensely.

I even had a chance to sample Greek coffee for the first time. As much as I liked the food and service, though -- and I liked them a lot -- I doubt I'll be sampling Greek coffee a second time. The drink was too thick and powdery and I'm not really a big coffee drinker anyway. I did appreciate, however, the good humor our waitress showed in dealing with my family. Waitresses can't get enough praise for the way they put up with all the things they have to deal with in the course of their duties and yet it seems like the last cultural item that acknowledged this was the comic strip "Tina's Groove."

After our meal, my siblings and I took my mother to a movie. For some reason, she had her heart set on the new Star Trek movie, which surprised me since she never seemed to be a big fan of any of the various Star Trek series. I guess this mean I'll probably need to retract all the snarky comments I have been making about the movie as of late.

Anyway, it took a while to find a showing we could get into -- apparently going to see it on opening weekend and expecting to get in at the last minute were two very incompatible ideas -- but we finally got in and we all enjoyed it. At least my mother and my three siblings did.

I kinda enjoyed it but I can't really pretend I'm in a big hurry to see it again. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Ten More Movies Not to Rent for Mother's Day

1. Bambi (1942)
2. Beowulf (2007)
3. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
4. The Grifters (1990)
5. The Savage Is Loose (1974)
6. Rosemary's Baby (1968)
7. The Omen (1976)
8. The Others (2001)
9. The Rapture (1991)
10. The Final Conflict (1981)

Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión

Heroes: “The Butterfly Effect”

Claire Bennet, the cheerleader whom Sylar symbolically raped in the last episode, is now acting like Seventh Season Buffy, what with the angst and the “I can't feel anything” and so on and so forth. Considering what happened to her in the last episode, this is understandable. Yet, apart from a conversation with her mother, she doesn't seem to be getting much sympathy from anyone.

Meanwhile, FuturePeter (the Peter Petrelli from a distant future) is still messing things up, PresentPeter (the Peter Petrelli from our present time) is trapped in the body of an imprisoned supervillain, Nathan Petrelli is seeing dead people, Tracy Strauss is discovering her superpower at the worst possible time, and Elle is trying to make her father proud by tracking down Sylar. Only Sylar tracks down her father first and almost kills her.

Sylar ends up being captured but in the process, Elle accidentally knocks out the electrical system in Level 5 of the Primatech Paper facility where supervillains are imprisoned, and as a result, a trio of nogoodniks gets away, taking PresentPeter with them.

Hiro and Ando do their damnedest to track down the mysterious blonde girl who stole the secret formula in the last episode -- a blonde girl who looks almost like Elle but isn't and who goes by the name of Daphne -- but don't have much luck.

Angela Petrelli takes over Elle's late father's position as the head of the Pinehurst facility and decides to talk to the imprisoned Sylar. Only to reveal to him that he is actually a member of the Petrelli family and that she is his mother.

And the poor guy didn't have a chance to buy a Mother's Day card. I just knew he'd pay for that Claire Bennet attack in some way...

All the New Movies That I Have Seen

1. 88 Minutes (2007).

My mother and my youngest brother wanted to see a movie for Mother's Day but unfortunately the one movie my mother had her heart set on seeing -- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- wasn't out yet. So we saw this instead.

It wasn't the best movie we could have seen. In fact, I was already glancing at my watch long before the first half-hour was up. The movie was your standard serial-killer flick with the obligatory surprise ending and plot twists that wasn't really all that twisty. Add to that the fact that the flick starts off with what looks like a torture porn sequence for the PG-13 crowd and it's safe to say that it wasn't one of the best movies I ever saw.

Al Pacino has definitely done better work in the past. Let's hope he does far better than this in the future.

2. Iron Man (2008).

There was no way my mother was going to agree to seeing this on Mother's Day but I enjoyed it. The film is not so much Robocop meets Transformers, as one film critic put it, as it was MacGyver meets Charlie Wilson's War. I would not argue that this is the best superhero movie ever made, but considering the fact that it got me emotionally involved in the story of a comic book character I've never been particularly fond of in comic book form, it seems appropriate to say that it's pretty good.

Great acting by all the actors, including Robert Downey, Jr. and Jeff Bridges. Even Gwyneth Paltrow gave a good performance -- though she still reminds me a lot of Lisa Kudrow for some reason.

Pop Song of the Week: “We Belong”

Yes, I know. I should have posted something last week but I didn't.

So here as a belated Mother's Day gift my mother may or may not appreciate is Pat Benatar's “We Belong.”

Enjoy:

Ten Songs Not to Play on Mother's Day

1. "A Well-Respected Man" -- The Kinks
2. "Because of You" -- Kelly Clarkson
3. "Fancy" -- Reba McEntire
4. "Hell Is for Children" -- Pat Benatar
5. "I Don't Wanna Play House" -- Tammy Wynette
6. "Lady Madonna" -- The Beatles
7. "Mother" -- Pink Floyd
8. "Mother's Little Helper" -- The Rolling Stones
9. "Papa Loved Mama" -- Garth Brooks
10. "The End" -- The Doors

Ten Movies Not To Rent for Mother's Day

1. Carrie (1976)
2. Die! Die! My Darling (1965)
3. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
4. Like Water for Chocolate (1992)
5. Mommie Dearest (1981)
6. Mother's Boys (1994)
7. Psycho (1960)
8. The Brood (1979)
9. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
10. The Whole Wide World (1996)

Ginger Rogers: Single Mom

Hey, everybody, it's everyone's favorite actress Ginger Rogers playing an unwed mother in 1939's Bachelor Mother. (And here I had gotten the impression from all those Fred Astaire movies that she was a nice girl.)

Okay, seriously, the character Ginger plays in this movie, Polly Parrish, is a nice girl, and the process through which she becomes an unwed mother is more of a comedy of errors than the usual way would be. The whole thing starts one day when Parrish sees a woman leaving an infant on the doorstep of the local foundling home. Fearing for the baby's safety, she takes it upon herself to take the baby inside. There she gets caught up in a huge misunderstanding when she is mistaken for the child's birth mother and well...things escalate from there.

One subplot involves a feisty co-worker talking her into joining a local dance contest. (Though where the writers got the idea that Ginger Rogers was a good dancer, I'll never know...) Yet another subplot involves her tentative romance with a patrician character named David Merlin (played by David Niven, natch) who just happens to be the son of her boss. (And in a way, he's her boss as well.)

Since this is a comedy written during the Code era, the writers do not mention the most obvious drawbacks to being a single mother like Parrish, but to their credit, they do not pretend that the experience is a day in the park either. Even though Ms. Parrish gets help from a kindly landlady and David Merlin, she still ends up losing a lot of sleep due to an infant which is not even hers. Nor can she escape the unwanted stigma that all too often came with being an unwed mother in that era.

Fortunately, she gets a happy ending of sorts. But unfortunately, said ending requires her to play a role she never really wanted to play to begin with: that of the child's mother. More than a few of the movie's male characters have to deal with embarrassing misunderstandings too but Ms. Parrish proves to be the only character in the movie who is never truly vindicated.

Here's hoping she at least got a heck of a gift on Mother's Day. The poor dear definitely earned it.