Posts from — April 2009

30 – man on fire: i’ll admit it, this movie brings the waterworks every time for me. i’m not saying it’s anywhere near good, though denzel rocks the house in this flick. i love that it spends nearly an hour of its running time to develop the relationship to the characters before the plot really kicks in; in any other “action” movie, this would happen in the first 10 minutes. I’m on the record as being in the bag for tony scott and a newish father, so take my tears with a huge grain of salt or three.

31 – the x-files: i want to believe: boooooooooring. why/how did anything think this was a good idea?

32 – doubt: good performances, especially from viola davis, but felt a bit too structured and on-the-nose to really hit home.

33 – assault on precinct 13: the original, not the craptastic remake. I’d never seen it before and thought it was a pretty inspired obviously low low budget thriller.

34 – role models: funnier than i was expecting, though paul rudd’s always a draw. you simply can’t go wrong with a foul-mouthed eight-year-old dropping f-words like precision bombs. and not a “retard” in sight, which was a pleasant surprise for a dude movie like this.

35: praying with lior: sigh. this is a fairly recent documentary about a young man with Down syndrome as he approaches his bar mitzvah. any glimpse of the life that could be for the budge is difficult to take in some ways, though the sense of love and community portrayed here was definitely something to strive for, and something that I think we’re building for archer (with a bit less of a religious bent). Amy and I talked a little after we watched it about how parents of a child with Down syndrome would watch this differently (obviously) than anyone else would — we found ourselves focusing on things like how Lior held a fork or how he walked up stairs as much as the big-picture stuff. I’d recommend this as a much brighter outlook on how life with DS could be than, say, Graduating Peter, though that’s not saying a lot. update: I would not however, recommend watching the short featurette about siblings of people with disabilities unless you want to be completely freaked out of your mind about the damage you might theoretically do to your other children by having a child with a disability. It presented a pretty shallow view, I thought, on the difficulties of growing up with siblings with extra needs, especially after having just watched how close Lior’s family was and how relatively healthy those familial relationships were. Though the focus of the featurette is mostly on autism, it’s pretty painful to watch these kids talk about how, while they love their siblings, their lives are almost universally negatively impacted by their brother/sister. It’s just too short and shallow a view, I think, with nearly no context for what the kids are saying, when they’re saying it, what their siblings are like, how old they are, etc, and so isn’t really useful at all.