Persuasion (2007)

This BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's lesser known novel of the same name is wonderfully done, in large part because Sally Hawkins is cast in the lead role of Anne Elliot.  She is one of three sisters who come from a characteristically marginally well off family that has an estate, but no male heirs, and therefore the property and title are destined to go to a cousin upon the death of the girls father.
The family is completely obsessed with this and consider nothing else of import.  They are shallow in their estimations of the worth of others, basing their judgement solely on one's wealth and status.  Anne fell deeply in love with a young captain on his way to war, and her family dissuaded her from making such a match.  Now, years later, the handsome and now quite wealthy captain has returned.  Anne is convinced that what she did to him was unforgivable, but was it?  There is no plain speaking in an Austen story, so it takes three times as long for things to be sorted out, but it is time enjoyably spent in this case.

Under Silver Lake (2019)

This is just weird enough to develop a cult following.
Sam (Andrew Garfield) is a bit of a slacker.  He can't pay his rent, he doesn't have a job, and he doesn't seem terrible upset about his lack of prospects.  His world is turned upside down when he meets the gorgeous Sarah, a new neighbor in his L.A. apartment complex. They flirt, chat, and wonder about the latest headline-grabbing story of a dog serial killer—someone who’s killing local pets.  Then Sarah literally disappears. Sam goes down to find her one day and everything in her apartment is gone. His investigation into what happened to her, fueled by a zine he’s found about the underbelly of Hollywood, is the driving force of the movie.  The movie has neo-noir elements, but it’s not exactly a thriller. Its darker qualities come with a heavy dose of slacker comedic sensibility—it’s the only movie I saw this year in which someone suspicious is trailed via paddle boat. So there is a comedic quality as well.  I didn't love it and I didn't hate it.

Golden Exits (2017)

This is a movie about uncomfortable people in uncomfortable situations.  It is set in a small area of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and we almost never leave the block. Within a few minutes, the movie has given viewers a frame to put around it: twenty-five year old Australian Naomi takes a job assisting a fortysomething archivist named Nick and reawakening the mistrust of his wife Alyssa, a psychologist, who's still stung by Nick's previous infidelity with younger women.  Naomi is a bit of a self conscious siren who has everyone buzzing around her.  In addition to Nick and Alyssa, she gets an earful from Alyssa's sister, who sees them in an unflattering light, and is altogether too wrapped up in her father's legacy that she doesn't have the time or energy to develop herself.  Naomi looks up a friend of her mother's son, who also falls into her orbit even though he is also married.  It all starts to spin off it's access while we look intently into the lives of ordinary people.

Chicken with Dijon and Vermouth

We made chicken as the main dish for the non-vegetarians amongst our guests for a groom's dinner that we hosted at our house, and it was delicious.  This variation of a classic French dish comes more or less from Diana Henry's From the Oven to the Table.

• 8 Skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
• 4 tablespoon Dijon Mustard
• 1 tablespoon Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• Freshly Ground Black Pepper
• 3 Garlic Clove, finely grated
• 150 ml Dry White Vermouth 
• 1/3 cup sour cream or creme fraiche
• 2 tablespoon Finely Chopped Parsley
• Squeeze of Lemon Juice
• 10 g Unsalted Butter 

one. Preheat the oven to 190ºc.
two. Put the chicken thighs into a heavy roasting tin in which they can lie in a single layer, sitting snugly together with not much room around them, or into a 30cm shallow casserole.
three. In a small bowl, mix the mustard with the olive oil and spread this all over the skin of the chicken. Season with pepper (there's a lot of salt in the mustard). Mix the garlic with the creme fraiche and dollop it on top if the chicken (it doesn't have to be neat, as it will melt and run off the chicken once it goes into the oven). Pour in about 100ml of the vermouth, at the sides, so it runs underneath the chicken.
four. Cook for 40 minutes, adding the rest of the vermouth halfway through.
five. Put the chicken on a warmed plate and cover it with foil to keep warm.
six. Quickly bring the juices in the tin or casserole to boil and then reduce them a little so that they thicken. Add the parsley and lemon juice and whisk in the butter, bit by bit. Return the chicken to the sauce, then serve.

Free Angela and Other Political Prisoners (2012)

I haven't thought about Angela Davis in a very long time.
This documentary covers the time in which she was a controversial figure, and given what we now know about the police, it rings true.
She was born in Birmingham, Alabama and educated at the Frankfurt School, Angela Davis was uniquely positioned at the heady 1960s crossroads of political activism and academic theory.  The movie begins at the flash point, with Davis’ arrest in August of 1970 in connection with a courtroom hostage takeover that left six people dead and had Richard Nixon denouncing her as a “dangerous terrorist.”  Again, knowing what we know about Nixon perverting justice, makes this sketchy at best.  She was a member of the Communist Party who allied herself with the Black Panthers, Davis was also a fiercely articulate intellectual specializing in German philosophy—in other words, very powerful. So when it turned out that the guns used in a courtroom standoff belonged to her, the FBI seized the opportunity to bring her in. First, however, she went underground, which turned her from a figure of controversy into a nascent legend. John Lennon and Yoko Ono wrote a song about her, as did the Rolling Stones; her Afro-ed silhouette became as iconic as Che’s beret.  The ultimate clearing of her name is a perfect bookend to the movie, and it was very enjoyable.

Tradition!

Weddings can be stressful, or so I hear.  I have never put one together, so I can't say with any sort of knowledge base, but people tell me that.  Certainly the wedding of my oldest son was very stressful for me, but it was all related to the food, which my spouse and I were responsible for.  This time around, we do have the desserts on our plate, but be sure, and we are most certainly not people who decorate wedding cakes, so one more hurdle this time around to go. 
All that said, I really love an event where whole families congregate to celebrate a life event.  All my nieces and nephews will be here, as well as their parents, and some relatives that are more distant when it comes to blood, but who have always made the effort to attend these occasions.  My house has been filled, by larder has been emptied, I have relied on friends and family to help pull this off, and it is a very warm feeling indeed.  Rejoice, even though not everything in the world is well.

Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is Coates first novel and while it is not him at his very best as a story teller, it contains all the elements of his writing that make him memorable.  This is a book with slavery at its center,  then anchored by the true stories of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to develop a narrative that is both new and familiar.
Hiram, the narrator, tells this story from a distance of many years, but he describes everything with bracing immediacy.  It begins with a horse-drawn carriage crashing off a bridge into an icy river. The driver is Hiram, a slave, miraculously survives. But the passenger, Hiram’s white half brother and the heir apparent of the Lockless plantation, drowns. For their father, this is just the latest disaster. Poorly managed tobacco farming has destroyed the soil on the plantation (the wordplay between Lockless and luckless is undeniable). Every year, more slaves must be sold down South to service rising debts. To the master, this is a troubling inconvenience. To the enslaved families ripped apart, it’s a death sentence.
After the drowning death of his half brother, Hiram jumps back to describe the traumatic loss of his black mother and his existence as the favored slave of his proud father/master. That precarious position introduces Hiram to the social and psychological contortions of America’s “peculiar institution,” and he becomes an insightful critic of the layers of white deception.  There is a search for freedom, the interplay with the Underground Railroad and historically accurate conductors, and the human tragedy of the legacy of slavery.

Breakthrough (2019)

Let me start off by saying that despite the fact that this movie contains a song that was nominated for an Academy Award, it is not a really great movie.  The story is told in a very religious light, and if you are a person of faith who likes a good miracle story, this is definitely one for you.
Three boys are fooling around and doing things that they know they are not supposed to do. When a restaurant owner spots the boys out on a not quite frozen solid lake and yells for them to come to shore, they go further out, and then the inevitable happens.  The ice cracks and they fall in.  Two are rescued quickly but the third has sunk and it takes a good half hour to find him.  We have all heard stories about people who have been frozen without oxygen surviving relatively unscathed.  You are not dead until you are warm and dead has truth to it.  In this story it seems like it went a step further, where vital functions returned later than would have been considered reasonable to expect, followed by a lengthy coma.  The outcome of this is never in doubt, so it is all about how this experience changed people, all of it whipped up with faith, god, and the role of the clergy in intimate family life as well as the community.  The song, which doesn't come into play until the credits, is very good.

Ad Astra (2019)

I am definitely not a fan of the life in space movie genre.  They represent a lot of technical accomplishments that I do not fully understand (the movie was nominated in the category of sound editing only, but visual effects is another frequent nomination category).  I typically find the plot very thin and the long periods of time focused on the big wide emptiness of space bore me.
So when i watched this, because it had been short listed for an Oscar and it was available, I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it is.  I know Brad Pitt won a long awaited Oscar for his performance in Once Upon a time in Hollywood but this was my favorite 2019 performance of his.

Set in the near future, Roy McBride (Pitt) is  a legend in a spacesuit. The opening has him in a dive from a tower that reaches from the ground into space is a power surge that devastates the entire planet, killing thousands of people. The source of the surge back to an anti-matter device stationed near Neptune, which just happens to be the last place anyone heard from a famous mission called The Lima Project, headed by Roy's father (played by Tommy Lee Jones).  For years, Roy believed his father was dead, but now he may not only be alive but behind an attack on Earth. Roy is sent to Mars to attempt to communicate with a father he has thought dead for years, in the hope that a reply will allow them to pinpoint his interstellar location.

Chasing New Horizons by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon

When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto and its moons in July 2015, returning remarkable images and other data of these worlds, it was a culmination of an effort much longer than most people recognized. They knew that the spacecraft had been traveling from Earth for nine and a half years to reach Pluto, and probably understood that the spacecraft had been in development for several years before its January 2006 launch. But convincing NASA to fly a mission to Pluto in the first place, and then keeping the agency sold on the mission, was an effort as long and as difficult as the scientific and technical challenges of New Horizons.  The funding for the Pluto mission was an extended and uphill battle, one that I found somewhat fascinating.  The orbit of Pluto is 248 years, and so if we didn't fund a mission when it was relatively close to us, it could be several lifetimes before we could do it again. 
After all those efforts to get a Pluto mission launched, the actual flight of the mission to Pluto might seem a little anticlimactic, given the success it ultimately enjoyed in its flyby. But the book does go into detail about the years of work that went into the planning for the flyby and the issues along the way, including the computer problem just a week and a half before closest approach that put the flyby into jeopardy. It also, of course, recalls the joy of the successful flyby and the gorgeous planet itself.