Movies So Far: 2016

There hasn't been too much going on in my house fiber-wise this month; I'm trying to do more painting, and that's taking up some of my time, and I still have a moratorium on yarn-buying, which takes some of the fun out of it! I am taking a long plane trip on Sunday, so I'll cast on some socks in preparation for that.

Though movie-going seems like it ought to be another luxury on the chopping-block, I can't resist seeing some films in theaters! The communal experience is part of it to me, as well as the overwhelming, focusing darkness. Too often these days the communality means loud whispering and the darkness is pierced by the glare of phones - but those things don't really bother me (they drive my husband CRAZY).

So far in 2016, we've seen:

Room - I'd been wanting to see this for months. I haven't read the book, though I'd like to. It was wonderful and I want Brie Larson to win best actress. The escape sequence was one of the tenser moments I've ever experienced in a theater, even though the trailer gave away their success!

The Hateful Eight - god, I feel so conflicted about Tarantino! First off - I didn't like this movie one bit. It was unbelievably nasty purely for the sake of being nasty. That being said - Tarantino has an incredible stable of actors and gets the most delicious performances out of them. Watching Walter Goggins and my beloved Kurt Russell roll that dialogue out of their mouths was like eating a bite of perfect steak. And the dialogue itself - Tarantino uses language to its fullest potential. But it all added up to a bunch of nothing. I was disappointed. He has the ability - he could be doing ANYTHING. But he's hindered by this petty white-man-from-the-90s sensibility! Get over yourself, guy. Go watch some Michael Powell movies and get back on track.

Starship Troopers Rifftrax and The Room Rifftrax - obviously not new releases. We try to hit up the Fathom Events Rifftrax screenings whenever we can, because it's so fun to experience in a room full of people! These were both rescreenings of live events they already did, and in fact we'd already seen The Room riff when it originally aired, but we have a chronic condition where we CANNOT pass up a Room screening. Starship Troopers was, as always, a terrible movie, and the riffs weren't great either. At least my husband got two chances to bust out his Joel jumpsuit.

Deadpool - I loved it. Of course - everybody loved it! It was fun, it was irreverent, it got a great performance out of RYAN REYNOLDS who hasn't done anything worthwhile since Harold and Kumar! I've enjoyed this whole superhero boom, but it was fun to see the piss taken out of it. Of course, someday this bubble will burst. But Deadpool managed to (lovingly) mock the tradition while also belonging to it.

Roar - we saw this a few nights ago at an art gallery, as opposed to a traditional theater. I've been wanting to see this for a long, long time - ever since I saw the Life magazine photo spread of young Melanie Griffith swimming in her pool with a fully grown lion and cuddling up to him in bed. The situation, if you don't know - Melanie Griffith's mother, the lovely Tippi Hedren, was married for a time to Noel Marshall. They adopted a lion who lived with them in their California home. They developed a story based on Hedren's time shooting films in Africa. Eventually, over the course of four years, they shot an INSANE movie starring themselves, the teenaged Griffith, and two of Marshall's sons, about a family who lives with upwards of 100 wild cats of every species in their giant cat-toy home in Africa (I don't think they ever specify a country). Over 70 crew members were injured during the shoot, including DP Jan De Bont (future director of classics Speed and Twister) who was scalped. The movie is INSANE. There is practically no story, but it's worth it just for the spectacle of humans rolling around on the ground and tussling with giant creatures who could kill them at any time.

There are quite a few other movies I'd like to see in the next few weeks - Spotlight, Hail Caesar, Brooklyn. I'm not really looking forward to Batman V Superman but of course I'll see it. Sadly, this coming Sunday I will miss the Oscars for the first time IN MY LIFE because I'll be on a plane flying to a friend's wedding! I know the Academy Awards are stupid and at this point (this year especially) offensive, but I always enjoy making an evening of it. Oh well! I guess I don't have to feel guilty about missing most of this year's prestige pictures!

Holiday

I've been incredibly industrious and crafty lately, but unfortunately all the yarn fruits of my labor must remain hidden for the time being, as they're gifts for people I love. Even though no one knows this blog actually exists, it still seems like tempting fate to toss up pictures!

I will say that everyone should go to Ravelry and drop $5 on this Feminist Killjoy hat. It's amazing. I can't wait to see it on the recipient's head, and I'm already planning to make another for myself. (I would recommend adding some repeats at the brim and the crown - the prototype I made was pretty shallow.)

I made cassoulet last night. It's one of my all-time favorite dishes (probably because it's replete with duck, for which I have an all-consuming passion) but I had long considered it way too complex for home-cooking. This recipe, which I found through David Lebovitz, convinced me otherwise. I couldn't even track down duck fat (and this in a city with a RESTAURANT called Duckfat!) and it was still the MOST delicious thing that has ever come out of my kitchen. I'm heating leftovers for breakfast as we speak. I have a lot of leftovers because my husband refuses to eat beans. MORE FOR ME.

TRANSITION

Have you all seen Holiday? The third-best-well-known Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant team-up is less aggressively brilliant than their most famous outing, The Philadelphia Story, and less bonkers than the almost exhausting Bringing up Baby.  It's absolutely wonderful.

First of all, this poster is quite misleading! Million dollars aside… one of the most fun things about this movie is that, against type, Cary Grant is playing something close to what he actually was - a working-class guy. (A working class guy who can do back-handsprings, which former acrobat Grant actually did!) He's worked his way up with a flair for business, and is on the verge of making that promised million, but Johnny Case is not the cultured man-about-town that we're so used to seeing Grant excel at. When we meet him, he's arriving at his fiancé's house for the first time. He assumes that she's a maid in the giant mansion, and is both delighted and weirded out when he realizes that she's a daughter of a household with a full staff and an elevator. 

It's a very small story, really - a couple gets engaged and then finds out if they actually like each other. But there are so many layers, mainly expressed through the diverse characters. Besides Grant, you've got Edward Everett Horton as his best friend, a middle-class professor (it's quite fun to see Horton in a non-bumbling role!). Lew Ayres is completely heartbreaking as the baby brother of the millionaire family, who stumbles about in a drunken stupor to avoid his reality as a disappointment to his authoritarian father. And then, of course, there's Katharine Hepburn as the black sheep of the family. 

It's funny to look back on, given that Hepburn is the Meryl Streep of Hollywood's golden age, but in 1938 she was still famously considered "box office poison." The label would not be rescinded until 1940's The Philadelphia Story, where she sent up her icy, snobbish persona to great effect. Hepburn had, of course, an undeniable personality that stamped itself on every role she played. Her authoritative bearing, her exaggerated transatlantic accent, her high cheekbones - she was arrogant! Many people found it hard to swallow. In retrospect, she is a force of nature. 

She struggled to escape the inescapable. In 1937's Stage Door, she played a rich girl who wants to act and assumes it's easy. It's an unlikeable role, not helped by the fact that in the end she achieves her goal through the death of the movie's sweetest character! In 1938, the same year as Holiday, she played against type in Bringing Up Baby, which is now seen as a perfect example of screwball comedy. It was a huge critical and commercial failure at the time. Personally, it's not one of my favorites - Hepburn is brilliant, but I find her chattering character exhausting! 

So she had tried two extremes - playing her persona to the hilt, and tossing it aside completely. In Holiday she did something subtler. Her character is to the manor born, but dissatisfied with her privilege. She's a prisoner in a golden cage. It could come off as "poor little rich girl" but instead it works - maybe because Hepburn felt herself to be in a similar trap.

In 1938, America was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression, which wouldn't entirely fade until war production ramped up a few years later. It was perhaps a daring choice to make a movie about unhappy rich people. Not that there weren't movies about the rich - the depression years were filled with escapist fantasies (several of the Fred and Ginger movies come to mind). Stranger, though, was a movie that posited that a poor man was in fact happier and better than a rich one, and that money would not buy happiness. Audiences without enough to eat, who would presumably identify with Cary Grant and his friends, were asked also to feel sympathy for Lew Ayres and Katharine Hepburn, who had an elevator in their home but no love, no joy. It's a nice grey scale of characterization that gives depth to what could be a lightweight comedy (though we still get the cartoonishly avaricious rich in the persons of Grant's fiancé and her father).

To a modern viewer, it works. But although the film was critically lauded, it didn't make money - contemporaries still didn't like Hepburn. Her next professional move was to leave RKO and Hollywood to star in Broadway in the play The Philadelphia Story, written especially for her. She didn't make another movie until she starred in the movie adaptation of that play, two years later. The rest is history.

A few notes: 

Lew Ayres, most well-known from All Quiet on the Western Front, is completely heartbreaking in this film as the depressed, drunken brother who doesn't have the willpower to escape his misery. When World War II broke out a few years after Holiday, Ayres registered as a conscientious objector - his work on All Quiet had exposed him to the horrors of war. He served as a medic in the Pacific theater, but public opinion was vicious. His career was irreparably damaged. 

Fun fact to offset this horrible story: He was briefly married to Ginger Rogers!

Holiday was directed by George Cukor, a giant of classic Hollywood, who was one of Katharine Hepburn's champions. By 1938, Cukor had already directed her in Little Women and Sylvia Scarlett (the latter with Cary Grant). He would go on to helm many of her collaborations with Spencer Tracy, as well as that little tour de force, The Philadelphia Story. Cukor was famous for being great with actors, particularly women. He should get a lot of credit for continuing to champion Hepburn when most of Hollywood had turned away. He deserves his own article!

I feel like I've mentioned The Philadelphia Story more than Holiday in this essay! It's hard to get away from it when writing about Katharine Hepburn, and especially her collaborations with Cary Grant. Its importance in film history aside, it's a perfect movie that I'll write about one day when I'm feeling brave. 

A last note: Cary Grant's Johnny Case seals a business deal over the course of the movie that nets him a tidy sum. He decides to retire on the profits, because he'd rather enjoy life as a young man and go back to work when he's old. He is 30. I will just say that his decision reads very differently to me, also 30, than it did when I first saw this movie a decade ago. Also, this sort of undercuts the movie's thesis that money can't buy happiness. Guess what - it does!! It's WORKING that stinks, duh.

Despite this movie being called Holiday (and my writing about it in December) it's not a Christmas movie (although it does take place over the New Year). The holiday of the title refers to Johnny's dream of a life on holiday. Nevertheless, it's wonderful holiday viewing! It's heartwarming, funny, and you get to see Cary Grant do acrobatics (and, at one point, a routine where Hepburn somersaults off his shoulders from standing height. It's very impressive!). What more do you need?

Comfort Movies - October Sky

Do you have movies that are security blankets, warm bowls of soup, familiar old friends? I do. When I went to college, I brought a binder with about 20 favorite movies, and popped one into my laptop whenever I was feeling nervous or lonely. When I moved to Portland, OR and didn't know anyone, I spent many evenings watching old classics on the couch. 

One of my favorite comfort movies, for whatever reason, is the slight, but excellent, October Sky. The Jake Gyllenhaal-Chris Cooper period drama about the clash between father and son, coal country and the space age, never seems to pop up on anyone's list of… anything, really. Maybe it suffers when compared to Chris Cooper's other repressed-father-of-a-heavily-eyebrowed-son performance of 1999, in the Oscar-winning American Beauty. 

I first saw October Sky during its theatrical run. Washington, D.C. used to have a fantastic eat-in movie theater, where you sat on sofas and enjoyed cheeseburgers during the movie (I've been to the modern equivalent, Ipic, but it just doesn't have the same magic). I was in D.C. visiting family, and we all went to the theater together. I was 13. I have no memory of my initial impression of the movie, but I never forgot the fun theater experience.
Maybe that's why my sister and I reached for October Sky years later on a night when we needed some assurance. In 2008, we spent seven weeks traveling through New Zealand (a trip I'll elaborate on some other time, since it was majorly inspired by a certain movie series!). Almost without exception, we had a fabulous time and stayed in weird, but comfortable, hostels. Almost. 
We never planned farther ahead than the same evening, and it had always worked out, but one night we found ourselves coming into a little town that had remarkably little in the way of hostels. Nothing, actually. Night was setting in, and I had started to contemplate sleeping in the car, when we found a sort of oddly empty looking motel. 
We seemed to be the only guests, and as we were led to our "room" we started to think we might end up as cannibal food -- our bed for the night was in a freestanding structure that was, pretty much, a shipping container. We locked ourselves in and noticed that the interior walls were... fuzzy. And there were snails crawling on them. We huddled together in our bed, a hemisphere away from a familiar face, and decided that we needed to be transported. We opened our travel-DVD stash (because we are a family that always has a movie stash) and pulled out October Sky.

Spoilers ahead: 

It's a solid movie with a great cast - besides Gyllenhaal and the always-wonderful Cooper, there's Laura Dern as the inspiring teacher and Elya Baskin, a familiar face, as the shop tech who makes Homer's dreams reality. Gyllenhaal plays Homer Hickam, a real-life NASA engineer who started his life in the most poetically unlikely place - destined for a life underground in a West Virginia coal mine. He was inspired by Sputnik to build a rocket, and the movie is the story of his quest to escape his birthright and reach the stars. It's about how much help he gets, and how hard it is to let go.

The movie is full of cliches, but it works - maybe because it's true, but also because the actors and the script give everything real weight. It's almost absurd how perfect the balance is between Homer's two futures - down in the coal mines, breathing black dust with his father in his tiny hometown, or out in the openness of space, part of the first global effort. Joe Johnston, who also directed the first Captain America movie, may not have an auteur's flourish, but he knows how to make a solid, emotional movie. The climactic fight between Homer and his father is fantastic. The score is beautiful, in the way that so many 90s scores were. There's a moment in the movie - when Laura Dern's character, dying in the hospital, sees Homer's last rocket plume straight up into the clouds - that gives me chills every single time.
The movie's got great texture. It takes place in 1957, and Johnston lets a lot happen with that. There's the overwhelming fear of technology and the Russians - the newfound ability of humankind to utterly destroy itself is referenced throughout. Elya Baskin, working in the machine shop, is a European immigrant (like Homer's hero, Wernher von Braun) and refers obliquely to the horrors he escaped. 

There are a couple of weaknesses in the movie. The first I can forgive - the complete glossing over of Wernher von Braun's more questionable characteristics. The character appears only in a cameo, but Homer name-drops him throughout the film and regularly writes him. Von Braun was, of course, the father of American rocketry. He was also a Nazi, brought to the US through Operation Paperclip. He lived out his life in comfort. I don't think October Sky had the time to go into his past properly (nor did it need to, narratively) but it's still hard to see a Nazi treated like a hero.
The other problem is the TERRIBLE characterization of Homer's love interest, Valentine. The character has MAYBE three lines. For most of the movie, she moons over Homer while he moons over the peppiest girl in school. Then, with a weird, slow motion stare, she seems to hypnotize him into submission. Later, they are together. It's totally unexplained, undemonstrated, and unfortunate in movie that has two really wonderfully drawn female characters - Homer's inspiring teacher, Miss Riley, and his stubborn, loving mother. It would only have taken a few lines of dialogue to turn Valentine into an interesting person too.

The strongest part of the movie, for me, is in the characterization of Homer's father. John Hickam, in the hands of a lesser writer and actor, could have been one-note - the set-in-his-ways grump, the obstacle keeping our hero from his dreams, or at worst, the abuser. Homer's father, instead, is shown to be an honorable, admirable man, who wants Homer to follow in his footsteps not only because it's all he knows, but because he loves his work and believes in it. Homer's success is his tragedy - he has to let his son, so like him, go off into a world where he can't follow, can't help, and can't understand. By the end of the movie he accepts this. Homer's tragedy is that he has to leave his father behind. The brilliance in the movie is that this true story, which runs the risk of being cloyingly saccharine, is instead approached with enough depth to reveal its underlying sadness. 

Overall, October Sky is a wonderful movie - an interesting look at a crucial moment in recent history. It feels like home to me, although nothing could be further from my real home than the claustrophobic hills of West Virginia coal country. I identify with Homer's wonder at the rapid evolution of the human experience, and desire to be part of that change. I identify with Homer's father, afraid of losing everything he knows as the world changes too quickly. And I'll always be grateful to October Sky for keeping my sister and me alive on a creepy night in a fuzzy box on the other side of the world.

Ten Worst Movies

My husband started to read me an internet compilation of the ten worst movies ever made. It went, in predictable order, "The Room, Troll 2, Birdemic…" 

I had to stop him. Not only is that list cliched at this point, but I vehemently disagree with it! I mean, no one who's ever watched that glorious trio would ever argue that they're not empirically, emphatically, ridiculously terrible in every way. Incompetently made, terribly acted, unintentionally hilarious… but never boring! Those movies have brought more joy to a greater audience than the filmmakers could ever have imagined. Beyond that, they've inspired love, and even more incredibly, creativity. My overwhelming thought upon leaving my first screening of Birdemic was, "My god! I could do that so much better!" I went right home and started mapping out my own disaster screenplay, knowing that with my home camcorder I could easily surpass James Nyugen.

Except, of course, I didn't. Most of us don't actually have the drive, the force of will, or the delusional belief in our own genius that leads to the auteur's creation. James Nyugen and Tommy Wiseau are more impressive than we give them credit for.

So, that being said, my definition of "worst movie" involves many things: being boring, being derivative, being sappy or manipulative, on top of the regular crimes of bad acting and production. I find mediocrity worse than terribleness, which at least is interesting!

These aren't in any particular order, except for #1, which I really, really think might be the worst. Although it gets VERY strong competition from #10.

1. Down to You

This stars Freddie Prinze Jr. It's deep because after he tries to commit suicide by drinking shampoo, he has a conversation with a spider. 

2. Simply Irresistible

It tries to do magic realism and… oh, it fails. A magical crab makes Sarah Michelle Gellar float.

3. Breakfast at Tiffany's

I really hate this movie. Racism aside (and how can you put it aside???) it's the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl story - the fascinating, lively dream girl is so original that she names her cat Cat! Wacky fun! SPARE ME. I think this one offends me the most because it is so beloved and so, so mediocre.

4. Bio-Dome

I admit that I just don't think Pauly Shore is funny. Also, my only viewing of this was on a bus stuck in traffic with my Amnesty International group somewhere between New York and Boston - not an ideal way to watch a new movie. Nevertheless, I feel confident in saying this movie sucks.

5. Yankee Doodle Dandy

Watching James Cagney prance around like a little pony is an experience I didn't need in life. 

6. Carefree

By far the worst Fred and Ginger movie of their ten, I find this pretty much unwatchable. The storyline is atrocious and offensive, but worse even than this - the dancing isn't great! The famous slow-motion dance scene manages to make Fred Astaire look ungainly. What a failure.

7. Vampires

I've already complained about this movie, my least favorite John Carpenter. My friend Randall made us watch it in college. I can barely stomach James Woods after this atrocity! Terrible effects, mean-spirited, boring.

8. Love, Actually
Pardon me for attacking sacred cows, but ugh, this movie! From the saccharine opening scene manipulating our heartstrings by evoking 9/11 to the creepy lack of autonomy demonstrated by almost every female character, this movie drives me nuts! There seems to have been a backlash in the last few years, which I appreciate. This movie did not age well.

9. Chicago
Best picture??? BEST picture??? This movie had one thing going for it: Catherine Zeta Jones's enthusiastic performance. It's always a joy to see a musical theater star get to show off their stuff on the big screen. Everything else was blah. I can barely accept that this movie beat out LOTR: The Two Towers, the weakest of the trilogy - but that it beat it for SET DESIGN as well??? And that it won best picture over Gangs of New York - a mess, but a mess with more creativity and artistry than Chicago could dream of - or The Hours? No.

10. HEARTBEEPS

This movie pollutes the air with its craziness.

They Live

Amazingly, given my mom's taste in schlock, I never saw a John Carpenter movie until I went to college. My friend Randall opened my mind in short order. I think the first Carpenter movie we watched was The Thing, though I know we screened most of his (good) oeuvre in short order - and that brilliant movie remains one of my favorites to this day.

Carpenter movies fall into three distinct categories: the simple and assuredly brilliant (The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Escape From New York), the terrible but still enjoyable (Village of the Damned, Prince of Darkness, Ghosts of Mars), and the unwatchable (Vampires). 

And, of course, there's They Live. It was sandwiched somewhere in my Carpenter crash course, maybe between Big Trouble in Little China and the terribly unfortunate Vampires. It's an impossibly simple premise - a man finds out that aliens are infiltrating earth, gets a big shotgun, and blows them away until he gets blown away. The burn is almost too slow - a dialogue-less into that leads into at least half an hour of inaction before any actual plot progression. And the star is a pro wrestler - "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, about as good an actor as you'd expect. 

But it all works. What you get is a tonal, atmospheric world, inhabited by the downtrodden but warmhearted, oppressed by the moneygrubs in power. Piper, a strong, silent loner (perhaps strategically silent, to capitalize on Piper's strengths?) is a classic reluctant hero - repeatedly selfish, stubborn, and crude, he is forced by circumstance to save the world and sacrifice his life. He's called Nada - literally nothing - a nobody.

Three good scenes and no bad scenes. Howard Hawks's criteria for a great movie. 

They Live's great scenes:

1. The scene when he first wears the glasses.

One thing that makes this scene great is the revelation that aliens have infiltrated the earth, and the way in which they've done it. Every billboard, advertisement, newspaper, and $20 bill is revealed to be a piece of subliminal messaging, encouraging us to OBEY, SUBMIT, CONSUME. It's a condemnation of consumer culture and an amazing, unforgettable visual feat. The aliens themselves are revealed, under their perfect perms and designer suits, to be glowing, rotting corpses.

Then there's Roddy Piper's performance. He plays the disbelief, the horror, and the humor of the scene perfectly. The simplicity of the sunglasses is perfect - they're never really explained because they don't have to be.

2. The scene at the bank.

Nada has a good heart, but he's kinda dumb. That's why, when he finds out aliens have taken over Earth, he figures the best thing to do is take a shotgun downtown and start blowing them away. It all boils down to one line: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum."

3. The fight scene.

What was scripted as a 20-second dustup as Nada forces the glasses onto the disbelieving Frank turned into a FIVE MINUTE AND 20 SECOND brutal beating as the two of them smashed car windshields, kicked each other's knees, and practically killed each other. Supposedly, Keith David and Piper choreographed the fight on their own and Carpenter was so impressed that he kept the whole thing. It's a piece of beautiful absurdity and brutality, laced with bits of strange realism - at one point when Nada smashes Frank's car window, he apologizes, horrified, before continuing to beat him up. At another point he bursts out laughing. It's one of the best fights in film history.

Honorable mention: Holly beats Nada.

Nada, on the run from the law/aliens, kidnaps a woman, Holly (Meg Foster, owner of terrifyingly pale eyes). He forces his way into her car and then her apartment. She is terrified, but you sense that she is also intrigued by his story. You sense her warming to him, and you can see where it's going - he's going to win her to his side, she's going to help him, they're going to have a romance.

Then - nope. He stands in the wrong place, and she shoves him through a plate glass window. He falls halfway down a mountain. We don't see her again until she reappears on her own terms. It's a delightful genre-tipping moment, and illustrates one of the things that make Carpenter movies, to me, stand out from all the other small-group, survival-situation movies out there: By and large, Carpenter characters make smart, or at least understandable, decisions. They do what they would do in real life, instead of contorting in strange ways to make the plot work. Sure, some characters do stupid things - see Nada shooting up the bank in broad daylight, or Jack Burton doing any of the things Jack Burton does in Big Trouble in Little China. They do dumb things because they're dumb, though. Not because the plot requires them to be dumb just for a minute. The characters in John Carpenter movies feel like real people.

Roddy Piper, you will be missed. You'll never run out of bubblegum in heaven.

Welcome to Reel and Skein!

SKEIN

I remember the first time I picked up needles and yarn and made something. I have no idea how old I was - young enough that learning new skills was my constant state of being. I asked my mom to teach me. She kindly overlooked that I had always refused to wear her knitted creations - the sweater that was too itchy, the adorable striped hat whose Winnie the Pooh buttons embarrassed me at school - and sat me down with some nice fat size 13 needles and the stockinette stitch. I worked a few rows back and forth and then went to her, bored. "I'm done practicing, can you show me how to do it for real?" Laughing, she showed me the tiny bit of knitted fabric I'd produced. "You're doing it for real. That's it!" My boredom vanished. I'd thought I was just wasting my time - but the whole time, I was actually doing it! I was hooked.

Actually, the hooks came later. When I was a teenager, I noticed my cousin twisting up granny squares at an incredible clip, and was drawn in by their retro-ness and her speed - I'd gotten a little impatient with the tedium of knitting after producing an endless snake of scarves and one ill-fitting sweater. With the help of my cousin and my grandmother, I was soon churning out my own squares. What followed was years of obsessive practice, the growth of a terrifyingly large collection of crocheting books, and many, many projects, from afghans to doilies to a creepy Zac Efron doll.

A few years ago, I finally acted on a childhood desire to learn to spin my own wool. (Sleeping Beauty was my favorite Disney movie, and I somehow missed the underlying message that spinning = DEATH.) I took a beginner's class at the Art League school in Alexandria, VA, and another obsession was born. Within a year, I was the proud owner of a Babe Production wheel and a Country Craftsman (the second an antique store find from a friend). I've been spinning ever since, though I'm still an extreme novice.

Funnily enough, spinning brought me back to my first love: knitting. Crocheting, fast, easy, flexible, also eats quite a bit more yarn than knitting. When I wanted to start crafting with my early spinning attempts, I was too miserly to want to use them up too quickly. For the past year or so, I've been re-learning a lot of the knitting skills I'd forgotten over then past decade or so. It's been rewarding and ridiculously fun.

REEL

My parents are both film nuts, and my childhood memories are laced with moments of sharing movies, having them on in the background while cooking or eating or just hanging out. They delighted in choosing the right moments to introduce us (my brother, sister, and me) to the classics. I remember being sat down to watch the original Star Wars for the first time; my dad had to fast-forward through Dark Star, which was recorded on the tape before it.  When I was about ten, they showed us Blazing Saddles, and my mom told us how she had literally fallen out of her chair laughing when she first saw it in the theater. For my 13th birthday, they showed us Harold and Maude.
Beyond these introductions, there was a whole world of film that was as familiar to me as the music of the Beatles; I can't remember a time when I hadn't seen the best Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers collaborations, The Philadelphia Story, or The Maltese Falcon.
But lest you think we were a snobbily erudite family, my parents instilled in me a great love of schlock as well. From old classics like Ben-Hur to modern awesomeness like Congo and Damien: Omen II, we watched it all. My film education was wide, discerning, and varied.

In college, I studied film along with fine art. I met friends who shared my enthusiasms and introduced me to brilliance even my parents didn't know: John Carpenter, Bruce Campbell, and the entire horror genre in general. I had an amazing film and screenwriting teacher who put into context all the movies I had grown up loving - I learned about the evolution of musicals from Swing Time to High School Musical, and how the strictures of the Hayes Code inspired daring filmmakers to get creative with their sidesteps.

After college, a two-year stint in Los Angeles (and a one-week job on a movie set) convinced me that maybe being an active part of the movie business wasn't in my DNA - but it didn't dull my enthusiasm for watching, devouring, enjoying (or despising) movies. I try to go to the movies as much as possible, to see modern as well as classic films, and my husband and I have a truly obscene private collection that we spend a lot of our time screening.

I hope that this blog will be a mixture of my enthusiasms - movie reviews, works in progress, musings on film, techniques, and artists and craftsmen I admire. Those are the kinds of blogs I like to read. I think there's a strong connection between creating and enjoying the creations of others, across mediums and through computer screens. I hope you feel the same way!