I'm leaving this one public also but I just reread my last entry and realized that I was so full of ranting mercilessness I misspelled Xenophobia.

Apted may be a good man, I sort of doubt it. Maybe he thinks there is great value in what he is doing, and I think he has convinced himself that he cares about the subjects in the film. He probably does.

I just think he has failed to ask himself the crucial question - Does he have a right to expose these people in the manner that he does? What right have we to know about their lives?

None. He has no right. He needs to stop and let these people live in peace, without dreading that Apted and company are going to roll up the driveway ...

In five years. It's like a balloon payment on a mortgage...but they never bought anything.

Gah, LJ just dumped my earlier rant about this but this is how ranty I'm feeling, I'm recreating the rant. It's a documentary film vs reality TV show rant. Skip at will.

In 1964 Michael Apted and Granada films had an interesting idea, 14 children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds would be interviewed about what they thought the future held, what they believed, and what they wanted to contribute. It was based on the quote "Give me a boy until he is seven, and I will give you the man." The theory being that our basic characters are formed by the time we are seven, and that as adults, we return more to our seven-year-old ideals than we know. It was to give audiences a glimpse of Britain in the year 2000.

Cool right? They were seven-years-old, the documentary was touching, moving, very funny and a bit silly. The children were volunteered by parents, schoolmasters and in two instance, by the state homes in which they lived (yeah, I'll never be good with that). Interesting, a bit goofy. It was called 7Up!

Then he returned every seven years. In 2005 he filmed 49Up! Every. Seven. Years. These children that were volunteered had this man, a film crew, and God help them a huge variety of clips of whatever boneheaded thing they said over the course of decades said brought back into their lives...then their lives were judged Internationally.

Think about it, your past relationships, every stupid belief you've since changed, heck, a divorce, a failed career...a failure to marry...all of those thing trotted out in a different film every seven years. Justify your life for the people at home. God save 'em.

Sure, they are old enough now to choose not to participate, but it doesn't matter. You see Apted did have one subject drop out after 21Up! Every installement, there is footage of that man, and the things he said at seven, fourteen and twenty-one. There is no escape. Apted holds them prisoner by showing that stuff and letting them be judged every seven years regardless of whether or not they participate, so almost all of them have. Several have declared a deep, bitter hatred for the process.

I don't blame them. They are put on trial before strangers more than once a decade. Mental illness, divorce, smoking, infidelity...Apted has no shame. If that was you, wouldn't you want to testify on your own behalf? That's what he's got on these people, the sense of horror that it doesn't matter if they are in it or not, Apted will trot out their previous lives and give them over to strangers.

He's already said that he will make 56Up!

Now, we live in the reality TV show era. It can be exploitative, but it can be entertaining. Most importantly, all the people involved in reality TV actively want to be there. No one voluteered them when they were little better than babies to have their lives dissected.

I've written a letter, actually two, and am in the process of trying to pin down the correct address to send them to. I've politely outlined why I believe that this subjects are not lab rats, and Apted needs to find a different hobby. It's been nearly half a century, Apted, and I get that this is his main claim to fame. But he needs to let these poor people Go!

We see the clips of them as children, bright eyed, goofy, gap-toothed...and then we see them through the years culiminating in the latest film, which I just saw (and I'll never see another) ...thick of waistline, thin of hairline, wrinkled, gray...and stalked by Michael Apted.

Documentary film making at is worst, what was once intresting has become a nightmare or voyeurism on Apted's part. I watched the earlier films as part of a film study, then I was too young to realize how much it must have SUCKED for these people.

But yesterday, watching a London Cabbie have his Zenophobia and infidelity thrown back into his face years later...and I saw another man that had been mentally ill dragged back into the past, and the footage of him at 28, rocking back and forth trying to explain madness to people he has no reason to have to justify anything to...and I. Got. REALLY. ANGRY.

Apted will doubtless make 56Up! regardless of what I have to say about it. But he shouldn't.

He really shouldn't.

I want my husband to come home from out of town! My son is at school, the pets are subdued. Yeah, the big plan for the day? Laundry.

I just wanted to prove that I actually do post strange, chatty comments every now and then.

What can I say, I SUCK at light chit chat!

Ahhh :::stretch, yawn,sip:::, what a momentous occasion, the first cup of coffee for 2007. One of life's little blessings, and a complete necessity to jump start my brain. I don't know about you, but before the first cup of coffee has time to trickle into my brain, alerting my senses, jangling my nerves, I'm useless. It's a bad idea to ask me about, or for, anything before the brewed nectar of life seeps into me.

If Environmentalists want people to really wake up and think green? Tell us that global warming threatens to cause all coffee crops to perish. The entire United States would be quequing up for hybrid cars, we'd be stalking the dudes that install solar panels.

What's your New Year's Resolution? Or, like me, do you think those are doomed to fail so you don't make them? I usually have a goal in mind for a new year. This year's is just to make a conscious effort to remember daily to actually think about my life. Sounds stupid, right? Well, here's the thing, I think the details of our lives our too easy to overlook. Things become too familiar, and we forget that they are pretty friggin' special.

Like this cup of coffee. It smells GREAT. It tastes fantastic, it warms me up, wakes me up, and hell, I'm even drinking it from a cup that has great memories attached to it.

That's a stress relieving technique, by the way. I'm not stressed, heck, I just got up so no worries here. But if you are, some behaviorists believe that a good way to manage stress is to focus, even for a few seconds, on something that is truly enjoyable in your environment right now.

Like, your shirt. How does it feel? Do you like the color? Good memories of the time you bought it? The entire thing is supposed to be about redefining the focus of your energies. Kick starting positivity (hell, is that a word? Close enough, the coffee is still making its way to my soul) is supposed help you control your blood pressure, tension and attitude.

In other words, when the going gets tough? Play a little trick on yourself. Determine your own mindset. Change your focus.

So, I modified that into the five favorite things philosophy. Sounds goofy, right? Right. But what if it works?

Here's how you can try it, if you want to. If not, feel free to laugh at me, laughters generally positive too. See how it makes you feel. Right now, stop what you are doing, concentrate on your environment and think of five things that are good within it. For instance, the jeans I'm wearing are uber comfortable. They fit so well, don't pinch, move with me, make me feel like I have true freedom of motion. I've got a Chat Noir poster in front of my desk, if you've ever seen them, then you'll get this: I can look up at it and pretend that drawn cat knows some great and pleasing mystery.

That's how it goes. If anyone knows much about chakras, you're getting that this is also a way to align them without meditation. Pick things that appeal to your senses, sight, sensation, sound, etc.

If you just did this, then woohoo, go you, you just managed your personal energies. Optimized your attitude without drinking deep at the well of Tony Robbins or something stupid. For all I know you think this is stupid, and that's cool. Distracting your brain is also a way to step back from stress. I think the stuff we have at our fingertips to make us feel better is some really cool stuff in the universe. God really gave us cool tools.

Mostly though, it's a tool that makes you feel better. Gives your mind a moments respite from all that assails it.

Or, you know, just brew up some coffee and let it saturate your soul.

Happy New Year, everyone. Everyone that knows you, feels grateful to do so. They might not concentrate on that, they might forget the importance of telling you that. Negatives, well, all of us sometimes focus on that. It's human. It's not even bad, after all, we all want to fix negatives. I just personally believe we stand a better chance of doing that when we think about the positives first. It makes me feel stronger, it makes me appreciate my life, and appreciate that a New Year is another opportunity.

But if you want to set the tone for the year, try it. Try naming five things that are good about anything, or anyone.

Then go forth and grab 2007, ready to make it a great year.

Oh, here's a note on why I don't use spell check. It's my feeling that our imperfections are part of what makes us ...well, us. When we learn to accept our imperfections, we learn to accept ourselves.

That's the theory at least. Others might say, "No, that's just lazy." True, that. But one of the biggest challenges most people face is learning how to hang out in their own skin.

I hope you love the skin you're in, folks. There's nobody like you out there. How freaking much do rock hard core solid just because of that? Hugely.

I've always liked that the word fruitcake is sort of gentler way of saying "lunatic". However, we're in the fruitcake time of year when people actually try to eat the stuff. Things get weirder when it turns out that Harry and David's actually produces a form of fruitcake that is alleged to be good. I received one in a basket this year, but decided to forgo eating it, and instead pitched it. We've all heard the fruitcake legends, I didn't even want to risk ingesting it. But I did send a basket to my mother, and the one with the most pears (my mother adores pears) also had a fruitcake.

A good fruitcake, my mother asserts, and she doesn't like fruitcake but this one she said is not merely passable, but actively good. Go figure. She's Scottish/English (born in Scotland, grew up primarily in England) and her tastes can run to the "blech, who eats blood sausage?" kind of alarming but my brother, the chef (family full of cooks and engineers over here, very odd) concurs. So, if you need a fruitcake? Harry and David's is taste bud approved.

Now, I can't really imagine needing a fruitcake for any purpose other than to hurl at an intruder, but you never know when odd needs will arise.

Mostly movie comments to follow. Since my minor was in film studies, I do tend to give pretty indepth film commentary. Skip this if you aren't interested.

How we spent the weekend before Christmas - watching movies. How my son spent it? Going off and doing his sixteen-year-old thing, occasionally coming home to play music very loudly in his room, which is thankfully well insulated. A good time was had by all but let's consider some of the movies. Nearly all of which fall under the "must avoid" designation. Starting with "All the King's Men."

If you saw commercials for this film you were probably puzzled as to what such a stellar cast was doing in a film that didn't seem to be about anything in particular. Literally, the ads would feature famous face, after famous face with Sean Penn shouting in the most incomprehensible accent "Ahhhh wooooonnn't lit zem!" Or, "I won't let them" but if you're like me, it took about three times of seeing the commercial to have a reasonable level of assurance that was, in fact, what he was saying. The plot was a mystery if you weren't familiar with anything else about the film.

It's about a Louisianna governer trying to avoid impeachment in the late fifties. Get this, the accents are so tangled that after fifteen minutes we gave up and turned on the subtitles. Everyone speaks as if they are from down yonder, fixin' to get themselves a glass of sweet tea...and as if they have a mouthful of blistering hot mush. It's beyond dreadful and the dialogue coach should be flogged. I know people from Louisianna. Yes, they have heavy accents, and yes, I can easily understand them.

It isn't the films fault that hurricane Katrina makes a political film about the haves vs. the have nots rather unpalatable. However it is very much the fault of the film that Penn's character embraces political corruption as a means to an end, to the point where it engulfs him entirely making it impossible to suss out if there is anything admirable about Stark (Penn's character). It is also the fault of the film that this decision is made the very day he is disillusioned to the point of (I'm not making any of this up) trading in his trademark orange soda, with two straws for all the Archie comic book ploys, for an elephantine shot of sipping whisky guzzled straight on down the hatch. He passes out drunk and wakes up an angry shadow himself. That is the full extent of his character development. For the rest of the film he hangs around, with his incomprehensible shouting, being various kinds of skeevy to strange.

Everyone else turns in a great performance based on the fuzziest of character constructs. Viewers aren't allowed to root for or against a character because they are all a listless shade of grey. Primarily characters so put off by their limp lives of privilege that they do things in direct contrast with what they are expected to do for the sake of the contrast, not the action. Made me want to slap something admirable into all of them, or at least understandable. Heavens forfend it would be something interesting.

As it stands, Jude Law is like a less likeable fallen Gatsby figure, or much worse, a poorly penned Tenesee William's character. One that eventually ruins his doting godfather not out of any sense of moral outrage, or a belief in helping anyone, but simply because he is told to do so by Stark.

The entire exercise elicits a huge shrug. Sean Penn, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins and the usually luminous Kate Winslet show up to all be various shades of off-putting to boring.

Then there is Woody Allen's "Scoop". Starring Woody Allen, Scarlett Johannsen and Hugh Jackman. Allen is his now usual, not funny, not appealing but at least less neurotic self. Even though in most of his scenes we found ourselves never able to separate Allen the man from his character. Since Woody got up to some extra marital mischief most foul with his wife's adopted daughter, that is NOT a good thing. Scarlett is dragged down to his level by the script and Woody's direction and only Jackman turns in an interesting performance.

Admittedly, Hugh is like the chipper, sweet anit-Woody. Go to Hugh Jackman's IMDB page and witness a miracle, the only negative thing claimed against him? That he doesn't have anything wrong with him. So, you've got the towering Jackman, universally praised by interviewers and co-stars as being a stellar human being, alongside Woody Allan. The movie is not good, or even comparable to WA's recent works. It is WA in his rapid decline of wit. But Jackman is pretty, has the good grace to seem slightly chagrined by his age difference with Scarlett...and in the biggest oxymoron of all, he turns out to be the villain. For that irony alone, it was funny for all of six seconds.

The best film out of the three we watched was Failure to Launch, the one we both expected to be awful. It wasn't great, but it was honestly good. Including a good comedic performance by Terry Bradshaw (I know, that earned a big "Huh? What is going on here?" from me too) with the funny and appealing "naked room", an honestly funnier than hell moment in a film that elicits a gentle laugh here and an honest smile there.

Also out of the three, it has the worst premise but still manages to deliver the most from its script. I think because unlike the other two scripts, the authors of the movie dared to like their characters enough to breathe something resembling life into them. Great supporting characters distract from the two mains and again, this is weirdly a very good thing. The best part of the movie goes to a funny, intelligent clerk behind the gun counter. The movie succeeded mainly because where I expected to be bored, I was laughing.

Never more so when the snarky second player goes up against the gun clerk. I'm a gun control proponent, so honestly, the fact that I liked this character pretty much instantly was surprising.

Hello, livejournal of mine.

I wandered into the GGMM one day and became embroiled in a conversation about, if I recall correctly, things that would make a nun blush.

Then something else came up that would make a priest faint and I couldn't know about unless I too had an LJ. So, I have come, bearing with me citrus fruit and recipes to the land of journals so that I too can swoom over whatever the heck is going on as I type in the aforementioned GGMM.

In other news, it is snowing like blazes where I am.

Not an auspicious start to a journal, but in a pinch it will do.

Greetings, salutations, and whatnot.

shimpy