Myssi's Movie Monday

The office intern, who has been in hour office for more than three years and is now a graduate student, talks in a baby voice. Yes, a baby voice. It’s annoying as hell, but because her mother is an administrator, she’s untouchable and we have to put up with her. Did I mention the baby voice?

So when I saw that “The Turning Point” featured a not so young Shirley MacLaine I decided I had to see it because I was curious about how she would sound. She had a very old woman voice in “Steel Magnolias” and a baby whisper in “The Apartment” and “The Trouble With Harry.”

Turns out she sounded normal—not to high and not too low. (A relief because I don’t want to sound like an old lady for a long time.)

I was also surprised that despite it running a little more than two hours, it was a very good movie. Shirley and hot movie husband, Tom Skerritt, run a ballet school in Oklahoma City, Okla. They are former ballet dancers who decided to get married and start a family instead of continuing with the company. Shirley’s main competition is played by Anne Bancroft who looks absolutely gorgeous in this film.

Shirley wonders what would have happened if she had stayed at the company and Anne seems to regret not having a family to work on her career.

The movie also features a young Mikhail Baryshnikov—a small but muscular Baryshnikov.

Shirley gets an opportunity to live her dream through her oldest daughter because her daughter gets invited to join the dance company. They move to New York—for the summer—and the younger dancers take over from the older dancers. The dancing is wonderful, but my favorite scene is where Anne and Shirley finally hash it out and get into a fight. It’s not your typical chick fight because they end up tangled up and spanking each other. Hilarious. Of course, they make up and all is well.

I haven’t seen any other ballet movies, but this was just the right dose of drama and dancing.

Myssi's Movie Monday

“Frozen River” is a movie I really wanted to hate. Years ago I had the idea of writing about a female smuggler who got away with it because she didn’t fit the typical smuggling profile. Plus my dad knows a guy who was in prison for smuggling so I had heard lots of stories. Except that I’m lazy and never wrote anything.

Unfortunately, I liked the film. It’s about a mom whose husband steals the balloon payment for the doublewide and she’s working a part-time job without any prospects for a full-time position. She’s desperate and she and her two sons are hungry and nearly homeless.

She meets a smuggler (who stole her husband’s car) and after shooting her gun at the smuggler’s tiny trailer, they team up and start smuggling. The smuggler has the connections and the mom has the car with the pop-open trunk.

Their relationship is a bit like Walt and Jesse’s on “Breaking Bad,” but it seems that they bonded rather quickly. When they finally catch up to them, the mom asks the smuggler to take care of her kids.

It’s not a fancy shoot-‘em-up film. There aren’t sex scenes. It’s just a couple of women trying to provide for their families and that is something I can relate to, even if my desperate moments only consist of crying to my parents.

Day Three

Sorry to be posting late today. I hit the snooze button way too many times and had to rush out this morning and when I got to the convention center, was way too annoyed by the escalators not working that I didn't think I could keep it clean on the blog.

Eight hours later and fueled by honeydew bubble tea, I'm feeling a little better. I had a full day of sessions, but I don't remember much of it. I haven't indulged in any beer today so it's not that I'm whizzing by this thing drunk; it's just that there's so much info, that it's going to take me a while to digest it all.

I will say this: even though I put on sunscreen and sunblock, I'm pretty sure my face is going to be sunburned tomorrow. Just time to see my pals.

I have decided that I do want to come back next year. I'm worried because my co-worker said she plans on telling our boss that she's coming next year and the boss does pretty much whatever she says. She's a graphic designer. They have their own conferences. Shoo!

Day Two

It's day two (or three). So far, I've noticed that there are a lot of Europeans (seems that the group from London got a group rate at La Quinta) and even bumped into some Mexicans (real Mexicans from Mexico, unlike me).

I would understand if they were here for the film or music part of it, but they are here for the interactive. So far, all I've heard is that everyone wants cloud computing and location-based apps. I'm for community based software, but location-based apps scare me.

I guess I watch too much TV because the cops and the FBI and computer hacks seem to be able to find people by activating their smart phones. If I were ever wrongly accused of a crime, I might make a run for it. I don't know that I would last long because I don't have access to a lot of cash and it seems that they literally do run a lot. That's not for me, but I like the idea of maybe having a chance--as long as they can't find me using my phone. Yes, there are dump phones and prepay phones, but as I said earlier--not a lot of cash handy to buy so many phones.

So I'm off again to see what I'll find this time. Hopefully there will be no fire alarms and a lot less crack.

It's like so mid '90s

A little more than 15 years ago, I moved to Austin, Texas. I was a big city girl living in a small town and Austin was as far as I could afford to escape. A lot of classes later, a husband, a son and a laughable career later, I moved back to Laredo, Texas, thinking we’d be there two years at the most. Five years later, we’re still there. But today I’m here.

After years of avoiding Austin during spring break, I am back. I’m here because of work and I feel like a tourist. Not only are the regular hipsters here, there are other hipsters from all over the world.

Fortunately, I drove here so I was able to get dinner without having to go to the usual tourist places. I needed to get that hometown feel after battling downtown traffic. I felt a bit overwhelmed and lost downtown when I went to register. I think it was because I used to point and laugh at the people who would drive the wrong way on one way streets.

I walked around the convention center earlier today to get to know it. I remember feeling like a loser my first week at UT because I walked around and around and around and couldn’t find the building I was looking for. I finally asked a girl who was walking by and she looked at me with disgust and pointed to the building across the street from us. Now I want to be able to look at people with disgust and point across the street.

Myssi's Movie Monday

I feel that I am now back in the grove of my movie watching weekends. There are so many movies I want to watch and there’s so little time, especially on the weekends. It’s hard to make plans to watch movies when you also want to make plans to get out of town more. But we were in town this weekend and I decided to let TCM pick my movie—“Gladiator.”

I know this movie came out a while back, but not too long ago. I have no excuse for not having seen it, especially since one of the very few perks from my last job was free cable. I just never got around to it. Plus, it’s extremely long. So I settled on the couch and sent Dan’l to bed.

It took a while to get used to the idea of watching a movie where Russell Crow is a gladiator or a Roman Army general. The first time I saw him in a movie, he played a cool gay guy where he made out with a guy and felt him up. (That was when I was into Australian films at “The Village” in Austin.)

I settled into watching the movie and I must have been so comfortable that I caught myself falling asleep. I’d wake up and then go back to sleep. I couldn’t take it anymore, set the DVR to record and went to bed. So much for movie night. R stayed up and watched the whole thing. I’m such a wuss.

The next day, I almost didn’t watch it. The movie is long and I thought about how I nodded off the night before. I decided to watch it anyway and am glad I watched it. Russell has achieved a certain level of fame where I only see him, not the character he is playing, but he wasn’t that annoying. His character didn’t whine or cry about wanting to go home. He dealt with what he was given, nutted up and dealt with it.

The movie wasn’t predictable plus I was able to FF through the fighting scenes.

It’s nice to watch a movie after all the hype is gone. Maybe I’ll watch “Titanic” in 2020.

Myssi's Movie Monday

I was pretty sick last week and watched a lot of TV, but I must have been really sick because I don’t remember much of what I watched. I have an idea I started getting better around Saturday because I actually remember what I watched Saturday.

The ol’ Netflix movie came in the mail, but I forgot that I had added “Ernest Saves Christmas” and wasn’t up to watching that. Fortunately, TCM saved the evening with some ‘70s flicks.

Dan’l and I saw “Bullet,” the first feature, sometime ago, but I had never seen “The French Connection.”

For a while back in my youth, I eschewed early ‘70s movies, with the exception of “The Godfather” and “The Exorcist.” It’s something about the way they’re shot—too gritty I suppose. But as I got older, my tastes changed and that ‘70s look and sound doesn’t bother me. Also, I gained an appreciation for Roy Scheider and thought I should watch it. After all, it won a bunch of awards. It should be good, right?

Eh, it was OK. Would I be lacking if I had never seen it? Did my life improve and my mind expand because I saw it? No, I liked but the shots of New York City in the 1970s. The ones I see now are generic (mostly "Fringe") to look like other cities so it's not lost on me that I liked how real it looked even though I originally didn't like it because it looked real. Oh well.

The story was interesting and hard to believe things like that happened. Who ships their car (other than the Scooby gang) to the country they're visiting and gets to drive it almost immediately? I know the po-po are still guilty of unnecessary roughness so that hasn't changed. Drugs are still a problem, but the methods of transportation are different. Who would have thought 30 years ago to smuggle it in a human body? But that's not the point.

The move was long, but it didn't drag. You know who the bad guy is all along and you think you know how they're going to grab them. Despite being nearly 40 years old, the movie holds up.