Ladybird (2017)

The plot line of this movie is one that you have seen dozens of times before, but this is an altogether different presentation of a coming of age story.  And it is wonderful in the sort of way that continues to build for days after you have watched it.  There is just a glow about it that is well captured in the film's advertising poster.  I am so relieved because I love Great Gerwig's work, and this so far exceeds anything I could have hoped for.
Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson is a heroine reflective of a wealth of outsider identities.  She is at once In her bright, awkward, ambitious, insecurity-riddled and likable.  In its finely drawn portrayal of economic pressures and class divisions, the film cuts a wide swath through the “just getting by” sector of Americans that is rarely seen on screen.
It does all that with kindness, smart, often uproarious humour and a candid, feminine point of view that  makes it tacitly a film for the moment, a modest cinematic antidote to the horrible rearing up of the racist misogynistic culture of decades ago.
Setting it evocatively in George W Bush’s America of the early 2000s courts a kind of bittersweet nostalgia that’s hitting many right of the right notes.  It is soft but sober, it’s a film about how bad things were before we knew how bad they were going to get. It is sweet, bittersweet, a tangled mess of bad parenting and poor boundaries within families that can sometimes come out more or less okay in the end.

Sourdough by Robin Sloan

This slim novel was long listed for the Booker Prize, which is a list that I try to read most if not all of.  They tend to be well written and not too focused on place but more so on people and dynamics.  So that is where I started.
The tale is of a Lois who works at a technology company that is developing robotic arms.  Her life consists of work, sleep, and she doesn't exactly eat.  She takes in nutrients in the form of a chemically constructed nutritive gel that has nothing going for it except that it is straight forward and  without objection.  You could also call it tasteless and soulless.  The opposite of exhibiting terroir.
In step Beoreg and Chaiman, two foreigners from a land never heard of before who run the Clement Street Soup and Sourdough out of their apartment.  One cooks and the other delivers.  They make one kind of bread and one kind of soup, and Lois is hooked.  When they move on to their next abode in a far away city in a far away land they leave her with the sourdough starter, and so begins Lois' journey back to the land of her ancestors, where food needs to be nurtured and cared for rather than assembled in the lab.  She comes to life herself as she devotes herself to the starter that she has been entrusted with. 

Bladerunner 2049 (2017)

I highly recommend re-watching Bladerunner before you watch this, because even with that immediacy, there are some dots that remain hard to connect.  I hadn't seen the original since my second son was born, and let's just say that while I have offspring, none of them remain children.  It was some time ago and truthfully, some of it still seemed like I was seeing it for the first time.  The one amazing thing is that Harrison Ford has aged remarkably well.
So, thirty years on, the world has gotten no less dystopian.  Ryan Gosling is a cop with no more back up than Ford had in the first movie.  He has a robot girlfriend, much like his predecessor.  As one of my aforementioned kids said, does Ryan Gosling tend towards imaginary girlfriends? He is sent to find a missing child, one that is highly sought after because it would represent the only successful reproduction of a robot with a human, and so that child is in grave danger, and he comes to think that he might be that child.  There is a lot of gloom and doom and very unpleasant characters, with some action thrown in.  Well worth watching.

Heroin(e) (2017)

This is nominated in the Best Short Documentary category, and it is definitely topically timely.  The film takes a deep dive into one community dealing with an overwhelming heroin epidemic, which has spun largely out of a large chronic opioid pain medication addiction.  When the pills dried up, the heroin came in and it was plentiful and cheap, and nowhere was harder hit than West Virginia.  The mixture of poverty, hard labor, and lack of hope is a powerful mix that led to an inordinate use of pain medication.
The documentary follows three women — a fire chief, a judge, and a faith-based social worker — dedicated to doing anything they can to stave off West Virginia’s opioid epidemic. The resulting profiles shows three different sides of addiction all the while demonstrating just how devastating this crisis really is.
The documentary starts off with Deputy Chief for the Huntington Fire Department Jan Rader. Though most of film focuses on the small, daily ways heroin destroys these addicts’ lives, Rader’s job forces the audience to literally consider life or death. On multiple occasions, she’s shown trying to help a near comatose person.  She sees every save as a win, a chance for that person to consider quitting, and she is tireless in her pursuit of another chance.  It is well worth watching and is streaming on Netflix.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

I read a lot of murder mysteries, but you would not know it from my blog.  I keep that part of my life secret, more or less.  Only my librarian knows for sure.  I occasionally highlight a particularly good writer, but not often.  For example, I think both Tara French and Louise Penny are some of the very best authors of the genre, but I do not review either of their books.  I think the Charles Todd series highlight the experience of WWI for Britain, and are consistently enjoyable, but I do not write about them either.  So why this one?  It is a bit of a unique set up, clever and well written, so I am openly acknowledging my enjoyment of it.
It is a book within a book, and I think it helps to know that up front.  The first to start and the last to finish is a straight ahead Agatha Christie inspired cozy mystery, where there is murder and mayhem at the manor house in a sleepy English village.  Horowitz reportedly likes to emulate British mystery writers, with his first book an ode to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his second in the style of Ian Fleming.  The second is a murder related directly to the book, and they are different and both are enjoyable.  I won't say more because, you know, it is a murder mystery and picking out the killer is half the attraction, so no clues will be dropped here.

Darkest Hour (2017)

Gary Oldman doesn't look much like Churchill, but he does a spectacular job of capturing him.  Unlike the other Churchill movie that came out this year, which is set on the eve of D Day and The Crown, which has Churchill during the waning days of the British Empire, this is set during the crisis that began WWII.  It was undeniably the darkest hour for England but it was Churchill's finest hour.  The German's had devastated the French and Belgian armies, and had almost the entire British army pinned down on the beaches at Dunkirk.  They were trapped between the Germans and the sea, and there were insufficient Naval ships so that there wasn't hope of bringing even a fraction of them home.  In addition to the tragic loss of life, they would have been without an army.  Churchill, who had correctly assessed the danger of Hitler from the very beginning, wanted to fight, fight to the death, while others wanted to negotiate peace.  Churchill's response in the movie was "You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in it's mouth.", meaning that England would not retain independence or it's colonies in a negotiated peace.  All the while he is fighting his counterparts he also mobilized civilian boats, almost 900 of them, to go to Dunkirk and bring the army home, which they did in a spectacularly successful operation. His "We shall fight on the beaches", which was characterized by his opponent, Viscount Halifax as "He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.", thereby saving Europe (with some help from Russia, and eventually the United States).

Churchill (2017)

Churchill somehow managed two movies this year, and this is the lesser known of the two (Gary Oldman just won the Golden Globe for his portrayal in the other).  It is set on the eve of the invasion of Normandy, known as D-Day going forward.  In this film, he is at heart against it, preferring a more nuanced and broad based attack, whereas Eisenhower and Montgomery were pusjing him aside, more than implying he didn't understand modern war fare.
True or not?  Here is what the history books and Churchill's own letters tell us.  Churchill and Roosevelt met together with Stalin at Teheran in December 1943, Churchill tried to avoid the massive, single-front invasion across the Channel. With Passchendaele, Dunkirk, and the disastrous raid on Dieppe in mind, he feared a bloodbath.  Stalin insisted that an invasion of northwestern France was the only acceptable military strategy. Churchill did not prevail. Churchill supported his version of a cross-Channel invasion consistently from start to finish, but just as consistently argued for a peripheral, “closing the ring” strategy—a series of smaller, widely separated attacks to wear down German strength and disperse German forces. While he accepted and then supported the OVERLORD Second Front, he never became its advocate, telling one adviser in April 1944 that “This battle has been forced upon us by the Russians and the United States military authorities.” Only a month before D-Day Churchill had told the dominion prime ministers that he was “in favor of rolling up Europe from the South-East, and joining hands with the Russians.” The Americans insisted, prompting Churchill to complain that “They had been determined at every stage upon the invasion in North-West Europe, and had constantly wanted us to break off the Mediterranean operations.” So he was on the record as ambivalent and bullied, which this film depicts.  With he not in good humor about it.

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Margaret Atwood is quoted on the cover of this book, so you know right away that there is going to be some serious feminism in the guise of fiction contained within. The difference here is that the women rule, and the bad news is that it really is just as bad as when the men do.  The story is told through several lenses and it is beautifully written and you can view it many different ways, and you won't forget it, whether you love the book or hate it, and I think for the most part it will be one or the other and not something in between.  Which is a real accomplishment in and of itself.
The story is that girls and women across the globe begin to have electrical power,  they are able to transmit this electricity to people and things and they use this power mostly to get back at the patriarch.  Men have oppressed women for generations and now they are ready, even eager to take over the reigns of power.  But not so much to use it for good.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this is no exception.
In the end, I think what I have always thought, that power sharing is the key to peace.  We know that gender imbalance, in either the work place or government, leads to problems.  Women are just as capable of being villains as men are, if given half a chance.   The real issue is we need change, but let there be more peace on earth, let's just tuck the patriarchy in and put it put to bed, never to arise again.

Wonder Woman (2017)

I have not been the devotee to the Marvel series that my offspring have, been I really enjoyed this movie.  One thing that is appealing to me is the link with ancient myths, which my children tell me is true to the Marvel narrative.  They aren't teaching any history lessons, as Wonder Woman is the Roman god of the hunt, Diana, but her brother is Ares, the Greek god of war.  Maybe Artemis didn't seem like all that sexy a name.  In any case, Diana is hidden away on an island with the Amazons and demonstrates what excellent homeschooling and strong female role models can do to develop a vibrant, confident adult superhero.  All is well until a WW I pilot pierces their island's invisibility cloak and Diana gets a glimpse of what is going on in the outside world.  She is convinced that her brother is to blame for the horrors that Europe is suffering under, and she defies Hippolyta who like all mothers would like to keep her charge out of harms way, and heads into battle.  She is the least complicated of superheros, unencumbered by guilt and brave in her pursuit of what is right.  An altogether enjoyable action movie.

The Prophet (2014)

Watching this movie it became very clear very quickly that I remember nothing of the book from which it came.  So back to the drawing board to get that information.  The film is based on the book of the same name by Lebanese writer/philosopher Gibran. In it, the prophet Almustafa is about to board a ship that will take him home after 12 years away when he is stopped by a group of people and proceeds to discuss a number of topics related to the human condition in the form of 26 prose poems. Since its initial publication in 1923, the book has never gone out of print.  The thing about the animation in this movie is that it is positively lyrical, and while I find the poetry a little too flowery for my taste, the animation matches if to a tee and is fabulous.
I think the approach to telling the story is not entirely successful, but that the beauty of it overall carries it off well, and is worth watching for that reason alone.

Dining In by Alison Roman

Oh my goodness, this is a very fun and humorous cookbook.  I am unfamiliar with her blog, which is where she got her start, but it might be worth checking out if the cookbook is any indication.
This is not about putting together quick meals on a weeknight, but neither is it about fussing over food until you get it just right.  It is about making strongly flavored and well balanced food that works.  She has some of the aspects that I like about Alice Waters, which is letting the flavor of the food shine to it's best advantage, but she also doesn't take herself too seriously.  She pokes fun at us, the home cook, but also at herself, and she has a dialogue with the reader about what is great about this recipe, what it can do for you or your dinner party, and what it cannot do.  She has simple to prepare dishes and then there are dishes that you are simply not going to have half the ingredients on hand to make and you are going to have to go shopping. Maybe even in a different state if you are like me and you live in Iowa.  But it is very fun and very beautiful, and one of the few cookbooks of 2017 that I chose to buy.

Strong Island (2017)

Wow, this is interesting to watch, because it is about a number of things all at the same time.  There is a lot to this story, which is unwrapped in a slow and deliberate manner, but you cannot shake the feeling that if the killer were black and the victim were white it would have gone differently.
The film's director is the brother of a black man who was murdered 20 years before.  He speaks directly to the camera about his brother's murder, and about the resultant shattering of his family. The camera is close to Ford's intense face, very close, almost blotting out the pitch-black background. The effect of this attention-getting choice (distinguishing it from the more straightforward presentation of the other interview subjects) is to immerse the viewer in the claustrophobia of grief, helpless anger and "unfinished business," experienced by the filmmaker. The film is both personal memoir and factual investigation into the sketchy circumstances under which his brother was murdered, seemingly in cold blood, by a white car mechanic. Formal in its style, it has an urgency underlying every scene. The story is not as cut and dry as it seems. It may be the case that a little bit of distance might have helped the film, might have moved the focus just a little further back to get a more complete picture. There are questions that circle around themselves, endlessly, providing no broader outlook. However, by the same token, it is that very lack of objectivity that makes the documentary the experience that it is. It is a very tough film to shake. 

American Mistress (2015)

Greta Gerwig is having a great year, and well deserved. She has been taking giant steps toward stardom from the very respectable platform of independent film making and I have really enjoyed both her writing and the characters she has played.  This film is no exception.
Here she plays Brooke, an almost-thirtysomething New Yorker who talks and talks without every actually seeming to listen, much less connect, with anyone else, and who wants to be influential and famous and successful but doesn't seem to have any sort of realistic plan for achieving that, or any particular talents to bring to bear on her goal.  She is an ideas woman who has little in the way of follow through, but the charisma to bring people into her orbit.  Tracy is about to be her step sister and she is the perfect side kick for Brooke, initially believing her capable of anything, and when that star loses its luster, she goes about finding an escape hatch for her.  It is an enjoyable ride from start to finish.

Future House of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

There is a bit of Margaret Atwood going around these days, and this book is very much in the family that for me starts with The Handmaid's Tale, a book I both hate and think is memorable as well as a cautionary tale.
The review in The Guardian aptly sums up where we are in our new world where every vile thing that comes into a narrow mind finds its way into a Twitter stream, often with attribution.  No longer do the misogynists feel like they need to hide.  Here it goes. Troll: “Look out the window and name one thing women have made.” Without missing a beat, a woman tweeted back: “EVERY. SINGLE. HUMAN. BEING.”  Really?  These men are so quick to claim the accomplishments of their gender without a hint of the talent that went into it.  And that, female fertility and the male need for that to be a point of subjugation and not power, is at the core of this book.  Erdrich is amazing in her insight, her way of telling a chilling tale without it seeming to be overtly terrifying, and the abundance of her work across a number of equally awful human traits is something to be in awe of and this book is no less so.  Beautifully done, and ultimately haunting. 

Long Strange Trip (2017)

A documentary about the Grateful Dead is complicated for me.  I saw them for the first time in 1974, and for the last time in 1995, and literally hundreds of times in between.  They define the bookends of my youth.  So while I do not have first hand knowledge of much of the beginning, I know quite a bit about the middle and the end from the standpoint of a Dead Head who saw hundreds of shows.  For example, when i saw the Grateful Dead exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I had far more concert tickets, back stage passes, and bootleg tapes than they did. 
So maybe I am too close to it all, but there were a number of things that I loved about this documentary. One was that it captured the audience side of the experience very well.  We did feel the energy of the show, and while there were good nights and nights that were off, it was always an adventure that exceeded just the music, or what happened within the venue.  The parking lot was always interesting, and you would never just show up in time to go into the show.  It also demonstrated that trying to stay true to your roots as a touring band gets really tiring when you get into your 0's and 50's and the toll that took on the band in general and Garcia specifically.  The other thing that as a fan I always found fascinating is that their roadies and their sound and lights designers were employees, not just people they hired on the spot.  So the whole crew was a known entity that traveled everywhere with them.  It is just an unusual musical mark in time that is pretty well captured here.

Genius (2016)

This is a somewhat intense but very enjoyable movie looking at the relationship, both personal and professional, between the writer Thomas Wolfe (played very intensely by Jude Law) and his editor at Scribner, Max Perkins (beautifully underplayed by Colin Firth).  Wolfe was a prolific writer, who spewed out dozens of pages of writing every day, and yet it was largely incomprehensibly but perfectly worded.  He had a manic quality about him.  Like his temporal lobe was over stimulated and he couldn't stop writing.  he thought he was a genius, but no one saw it until Max Perkins.  He had been repeatedly rejected by other publishing houses, but Max saw a glimmer of brilliance in him, and he worked doggedly with Wolfe to pare down the thousands of pages into something manageable.  Look Homeward Angel was published as Wall Street was literally crashing down and yet it managed to be a huge success, and they were able to work together to publish one additional book together.  But that was it, because the process was very painful for Wolfe, and he felt bound in by Perkins rather than altogether grateful.   The work of a great editor is a thankless one.  Perkins had a glorious career, in that he discovered not only Wolfe but also F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. 

Coming to My Senses by Alice Waters

This is a funny book, and when I say funny, I really mean that. It is a little bit comic and a little bit odd.  The one thing that it does not come across as is arrogant.  She looks back on her youth, her growing up experience, going away to college and becoming more independent, and then her first forays out into the world, all in an attempt to show how she came to be the woman who opened Chez Panisse at the age of 27, without any experience in cooking, running a restaurant specifically, or a business in general.  There were several pivotal experiences that she had that made it crystal clear to her what was important to her and what was not. She had the strength of character mixed with equal amounts naivete and hard work that she started a revolution.  Ruth Reichl was in Berkeley at about this same time, and has already described the cool chemistry that was available there to do new and great things with new and great ideas as they relate to food, and Alice Waters did it right.  She had support and talent and luck, but it was also great timing.  She tells a great story about salad, which I think is at core what I have learned from her.  Put the very best food you can find on the table, and let it speak for itself.  Treat it as well as you can, and the food will follow.  This is a must read for anyone who cooks in a serious way as a home cook.

Demolition (2017)

Grief is different for everyone.  As are relationships.  Jake Gylenhaal’s wife is killed in a car accident, and his life unravels.  He impulsively marries a woman who he is perhaps in like with but is not completely in love with.  So the marriage has some bumps that were not completely laid to rest when she suddenly dies.  The second complication is that her parents do not like him, and he works for her father.  So his work environment is inherently linked to his personal life, and with her death, that becomes intolerable.  So how does he respond?  Very poorly.  He becomes increasingly agitated to the point where he starts to destroy things.  He loses his job.  His FIL tries to wash his hands of him, saying at one point that he wishes that his SIL had died rather than his daughter.  None of this helps him process what he is feeling.  But after taking a bulldozer to his house, he starts to move forward, and ends up coming up with a fitting memorial for his wife.  Grief comes on like a juggernaut, and the path to recovery is varied and can be equally surprising.

Paprika Rubbed Roasted Chicken

I have been getting cookbooks that came out in 2017 that received some critical acclaim out of the library and giving them a try.  I love this cookbook and this recipe.

• 1 (3 1/2- to 4-lb.) chicken, spatchcocked
• 1 tablespoon fennel seeds
• 2 teaspoons hot paprika
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 garlic cloves, finely grated
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 2 lemons, quartered

Step 1

Preheat oven to 325°F.

Step 2

Pat chicken dry with paper towels. Grind fennel seeds in a spice mill or with a mortar and pestle. Combine fennel, hot paprika, salt, smoked paprika, black pepper, garlic, and olive oil in a medium bowl; rub spice mixture all over chicken. Rub any leftover spice mixture onto lemon quarters.

Step 3

Place chicken, breast side up, on a rimmed baking sheet or in a 12-inch ovenproof skillet; scatter lemons around chicken. Roast at 325°F for 1 hour or until chicken is tender, lemons are soft and jammy, and a meat thermometer inserted into thickest portion of breast registers 160°F, basting chicken with drippings every 30 minutes. Remove from oven; rest 15 minutes. Squeeze lemons over chicken, or serve lemons with warm chicken.

Paris Can Wait (2017)

This is a small movie that is really very inviting.  The reviews of it were quite critical, perhaps because the maker is the spouse of a well known director.  I did not approach it with any previous knowledge, and was on a long flight, and I found it to be diversionary in a pleasant way.
Ann is the wife of a distracted, all business, no time to play director. In order to strengthen and reinvigorate his marriage, he has brought his wife along on a business trip.  Which goes exactly as you would expect—poorly.  They are in Cannes and headed towards Paris, but he gets called away to Budapest for an emergency on a film that has run into difficulties, and she is going to travel by car with a French man.  He immerses her in the culture on a meandering route through the countryside. The food, the wine, the cheese, the art, all of which demonstrates the French appretiation of what is good in life, and making time for it.  It is a philosophy that resonates with me, and captures some of what I love about travel in France, and I really enjoyed it.

Gandhi (1982)

The quest to know more about the vast country that is India continues, even after we returned home.  We had seen Ghandi when it came out 35 years ago, but not since, and it really chronicles an amazing story that inspired a number of people who followed his recipe for success overcoming a tyrannical force with nonviolence.
Ben Kingsley plays Gandhi, starting as a young man, and following his transformation from a young Indian who was educated in the West and wore Western clothing into the man who wore traditional clothing of a low caste that he wove himself.  He felt increasingly that he needed to identify with the millions of Indians who were living in poverty, and that non-violence was the only way to win the war with the British, who were like the Romans at their peak.  Fighting them would be an unsinkable battle.  Instead they tolerated beatings and killings, massacres that were reported world wide, and in the end they prevailed. The story ends with Muslims fighting Hindus, which was a grizzly end to an otherwise inspiring story.

The Years Roll By Quickly At Our Age

I'm in love with a man who's in love with the world.  As Amos Lee goes on to say:
But the people on the street,
Out on buses or on feet,
We all got the same blood flow.
Oh, in society,
Every dollar got a deed,
We all need a place so we can go,
And feel over the rainbow.

But sometimes,
We forget what we got,
Who we are.
Oh who are are not.
I think we gotta chance,
To make it right.
Keep it loose,
Keep it tight.
 Today is my spouses birthday, and since his last birthday, we have had many adventures and I hope we have many more.  We traveled far and near.  We became grandparents.  We hiked across the hills of England, we drank port in Porto, and we marveled at the accomplishments of the Mughal empire in India.  It was a year of change and a year of some concerns, but we (mostly) savored it all and hope for more to come.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015)

This will not be nominated this year, but I watched it and really found a lot to like about it. The main character, Greg, is a talented and funny amateur filmmaker who has almost nothing in common with Earlexceptthat they develop story and staging ideas for short movies and then execute them. His life takes a dramatic turn for the better when his mother insists that he spend time with Rachel, a woman he played with when they were both children, but who he hasn’t much seen since grammar school. She has been diagnosed with a not very good kind of cancer, and Greg’s mother correctly predicts that her friends are likely to shun her as a result.  She is quite alone, and struggling with what her illness means, and Greg and Earl do manage to be a bright light in an otherwise dim landscape.  It is funny and sad at the same time, and well worth watching.

One of Us (2017)

This documentary has been shortlisted for the Oscars this year, and is streaming on Netflix (I know, I keep saying that, but it is a plethora of riches that exists on Netflix when it comes to quality documentaries).  The bad news is that like many of the critically acclaimed films of this genre, it is very depressing.  This story chronicles the lives of three members of the tight knit Hasidic community in Brooklyn who leave the tribe.
There is zero tolerance for any behavior that does not strictly conform to the communities definition of Jewish law,as interpreted by exclusively male elders. There is no reading that is not religious, schooling leaves young adults poorly prepared to function outside the community, and there is essentially no legal recourse or medical independence, because all of that is done within the religious confines of the community.  So when a man beats his wife, she has no choice but to take it if the rabbi does nothing.  You leave the movie feeling like it is another form of slavery.  Then again, all extreme religious communities bear these same hallmarks.  Same cruel men, different god.

Lego Batman (2017)

On the off chance that this might be nominated in the animated film category, I watched it on a recent long haul flight, and all I can say is that I really hope it does not make the cut.  I fell asleep twice, not just once, but twice while watching it, and it was not that late at night when I started.  I dutifully rewound the film to the spot where I last remembered the action, and so as a consequence this took me so much longer than you could imagine, and in the end I thought it was just awful.  And I unexpectedly loved the first Lego movie!
There are a few things that I can say that are positive, though.  The first is that there really is nothing that I wouldn't let a young child see, so it is a family movie that could be watched over a long weekend or a snow day.  The other is that, like the first movie, there is great integrity to the Lego format, which will be very pleasing for those who spent their youth assembling these (or their parenthood, as the case may be).  And while it is silly, it is not mean.  So there is that.

Last Men in Aleppo (2017)

This is yet another documentary that has been shortlisted that you can find streaming on Netflix.  It is very painful to watch, so brace yourself.  This is a longer length version of White Helmets, which won best short documentary last year, following the men who rush into bombed buildings to rescue those who might have survived the bombing and to recover the bodies of those who do not.  The city is in ruins, the film does capture that quite graphically, without words needed to describe.  There are people in buildings that have fallen half, trying to recover some of their possessions.  There is soul searching about whether to have the children leave.  There is fear that there really is not good answer, that their Arab neighbors hate them and do nothing to mitigate the hell that they are trapped in.  It is not stunning, it is terrifying and heartbreaking and exhausting.  Essential watching to get a glimpse of a nation being gunned and bombed to pieces.

Tommy's Honour (2016)

This was a challenging movie to watch for two reasons.  One is that as is true in all things colonial, they acted like privileged idiots who were insufferable in their arrogance.  The other is that Tommy himself was pretty insufferable, so no one to like.  The best thing about this movie is that it is about the making of professional athletics.
The film is is tradition-minded, which is to say a tad nostalgic and unapologetically patriarchal. It concerns “Old” Tom (Peter Mullen) and “Young” Tommy Morris (Jack Lowden), who, according to titles at the film’s end, were “founding fathers” of the sport—a statement that’s closer to accurate if you insert “modern” before “sport.” (Indeed, golf was already old when it was banned by King James II in 1457 for interfering with archery practice.)
The historical turn reflected in the movie’s story was when golf moved from being a sport for aristocratic amateurs to a profession open to all classes. After a future-tense prologue, the tale begins in the 1860s, when Old Tom is a caddie and greens keeper who golfs but mainly serves his masters without complaint. When Tommy begins to show promise as a golfer, the two begin to play together, and turn out to be a team that’s rarely beaten.  They play and others bet, which the younger Tom found completely unacceptable.  He demanded--and got--a cut of the winnings, and so the era of the paid athlete began.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

On the one hand, the analogy that the Planet of the Apes has stood for over the decades since Charlton Heston battled them can be said to have been gotten across, and why go on.  On the other hand, we live in an America that elected a president that should have been impossible to elect 50 years ago much less today, so maybe we really don't quite get it.
So here we go again.  

Bad Ape, an eccentric zoo primate, summarizes the genre well when he says: “Humans get sick, apes get smart, humans kill apes.”
This isn’t a buddy movie but, rather, a psychological western that breaks and becomes a revenge thriller war movie; trench warfare eferences are included free of charge. Michael Giacchino’s whirring score ratchets up the tension, while cinematographer Michael Seresin’s agile camera flies directly overhead (these are two aspects of the film that are spectacular. At times, the apes appear tiny, toy-soldier figurines from his bird’s eye perspective; on other occasions, the camera skims puddle-strewn beaches at hoof-level and swings with the apes as they clamber snowy pylons.
The film’s real technological achievement isn’t the rendering of CGI forests (though these are pretty very good) but the motion-capture apes themselves, huge liquid eyes.  Science fiction is part philosophy; here, the movie asks what distinguishes humans from animals. The twist is that as the apes get “smarter” (and the humans become crueller), they also grow softer, in a reminder that humanity resides in both the head and the heart.

Spicy Indian Tomato Soup

The most unimpressive restaurant that we ate at in India (which wasn't at all bad) had a surprisingly great soup.  Here is an attempt to recreate it.

• 1/2 tsp oil
• 1/4 tsp cumin seeds
• 1/2 cup chopped onion
• 3 cloves garlic
• 1/4 cup chopped carrot or 1 medium carrot, chopped
• 1/2 tsp  ground coriander
• 1/4 tsp turmeric
• 1/4 tsp cayenne
• 1/4 tsp black pepper or a combination of black and white pepper
• 15 oz tomatoes 1 can
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 1/2 to 2 tsp sugar
• 1 small bay leaf

1. Heat oil in a saucepan over medium heat. When hot, add cumin and cook for 1 minute or until the cumin seeds get fragrant.
2. Add chopped onions, garlic, carrot and a pinch of salt. Cook for 4 to 5 minutes or until onions are translucent. Stir occasionally.
3. Add coriander, turmeric, cayenne and pepper, mix for a few seconds.
4. Add the onion mixture to a blender. Add tomatoes and blend until pureed.
5. Transfer the pureed tomato mixture back to the saucepan. Add water, bay leaf, salt and sugar and cook over medium heat for 12 to 14 minutes. Taste and adjust salt, sweet and heat. Add more water if needed. Garnish with chives and Serve with crusty bread or croutons or grilled vegan cheese sandwiches.

Icarus (2017)

This documentary was also on the short list, and like Chasing Coral, it is available to stream on Netflix, which is so nice.  This is a story that I think started out as a demonstration by an amateur cyclist, Bryan Fogel about what doping can get you, and how easy it is to do it and evade detection.  He gets involved with famed Russian anti-doping figure Grigory Rodchenkov, who turns out to be not about anti-doping but about not getting caught doping.  He has elaborate measures that he takes and precise performance enhancing cocktails that  he matter-of-factly discusses in details on film.  And then the story takes a very interesting turn when the whole enterprise is uncovered on the international level, and the state sponsored doping program, which truthfully has probably been in place to a great extent for decades, became exposed, ultimately leading to the Russians being banned in the upcoming Winter Olympics, and with Rodchenkov entering a witness protection program after a couple of high level officials in Russia died unexpectedly.  Poisoning is still so Russian, even today.  Fascinating and thought provoking.

The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863

I live in a house that was built when Lincoln was President and I often think about the country that he lived in. President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free."
Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it captured the hearts and imagination of millions of Americans and fundamentally transformed the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.