Papillon (2017)

This is a remake of a 1973 movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, but based on a biographical novel which was published in 1969.  Papillon (played by Charlie Hunnam) is a nickname for a flamboyant Paris thief, who spends a lot of time in Moulin Rouge sorts of places with women of ill repute.  He is arrested for a murder which he definitely did not commit and sentenced to hard labor in a penal colony in French Guyana, never to return to France.  The time in roughly between WWI and WWII.  In retrospect, France should have hung on to some of these scrappy men for what was to come.  Once on the transport boat, he meets Dega (played by the now well known Rami Malek), a counterfeiter who is wealthy, weak, and convinced that his wife will be handling his appeal and that he will soon be released.  Suffice it to say that doewn't happen, the two men get into a fair amount of trouble along the way, the conditions are brutal, but in the worst of all possible places, Papillon does finally escape, and much later, he writes a book detailing the inhuman conditions of their treatment and the cruelty of their captors.

Daughter of Moloka'i by Alan Brennert

I read this for my parent's book group, and while I had never heard of the author, nor had I read the book that precedes it, I enjoyed it.
Ruth is born of mixed Hawaiian and Japanese parents to a mother who had leprosy.  She was raised in an orphanage full of children like her, and many of them were doomed to live their lives there, never adopted due to the stigma of their origins.  Not so Ruth.  She is adopted by a Japanese family who have a bit of a secret around why they wanted her, but they are wither ignorant of her social standing or don't care, and love her dearly.
She lives through racial profiling in California's Central Valley, her family loses all their assets when they are deported to a relocation camp, and upon their release they find that feelings run high and returning to farming is not an option.  She is lucky that most of her family made it through the war, and she is in a good relationship.
The final chapter is a return of her birth mother into her life, and a fuller understanding of what happened to her.  It is rich in feeling and culture, and well worth reading.

La Vecina, Coralville, IA

 A new restaurant has come to town and it offers something a little bit different from what we had before it's arrival.  It is a wood fired oven Mexican cuisine, and while the guacamole and the tacos are good (especially the avocado tacos), branch out and try other things.  The food is sharable and I would highly recommend that.  We went with eight people and six to eight would be ideal.  The whole chicken is out of this world.  As are the hand made corn tortillas.

The thing that I liked the best was the grilled corn (elotes) with cheese and chili.  Everyone should get a piece!  The Guava Camaron was my favorite appetizer, although the octopus and the shrimp ceviche are also very good.
We all had a really nice time as well, which is an added plus that does not always come true.  Highly recommended.

Nobody's Fool (2019)

I watched this at the tail end of a transpacific flight.  On the upside, I had already closed my eyes for eight hours, so was not really rough around the edges.  On the other, it is one terribly long day (we left Melbourne in the morning and arrived in Los Angeles, also in the morning), so there is that to add to the mix.
This is a romantic comedy with a terrible role for Whoopi Goldberg, but otherwise pretty unobjectionable content.  Successful sister is risk avoidant when it comes to relationships, but when her wilder sister is released from jail and comes to live with her, she is shown a whole other way to look at eligible bachelors and how to be wooed by them.  She also takes a long look in the mirror at how she has been approaching the rest of her life and finds that to be lacking as well.  There is some drug talk and profanity that would make this unacceptable for the young, but is a reasonable choice for other occasions.

Aquaman (2018)

This is an acceptable entry into the DC world, but it is no Wonder Woman.  Additionally, I watched this on a transpacific flight, so my level of critique may be impaired. 
Aquaman, or Arthur as he is called, is a half human, half Lost City of Atlantian, the product of a love affair between his rebellious queenly mother and his lighthouse keeper father. After his birth, she was stolen away, went home, married the king she was betrothed to and had another son.  So the battle between the legitimate versus the illegitimate is set up. 
Arthur has long hair and tattoos, a knack for wisecracks and a fondness for beer, and just wants to be left alone. He rejects allegiance to land or sea, but eventually succumbs to prodding by the idealistic Atlantean Princess Mera and becomes a force for good at a time when radical forces, led by Arthur’s treacherous half-brother Orm, want to destroy the land-dwellers as revenge for polluting and militarizing the ocean.  We get where Orm is coming from, though.  High in my Facebook feed this morning was a beached dead whale with a mountain of plastic spilling out of it's mouth.

Splash Seafood Restaurant, Cairns, Australia

Let me start off by saying that the coastal cities in Australia are blessed with an abundance of really delicious seafood, in all sorts of permutations.  I love crustaceans and there are quite a few of them that never make it to the United States, and they are right to keep them from us because they are just absolutely delicious you cannot imagine sharing them with others.
Our first stop on this trip to Australia was to Cairns, which is one of the entryways to the Great Barrier Reef (one of the largest living things on earth).  We had traveled across the US, had a seven hour layover in Los Angeles, completed the 15 hour flight to Melbourne and then flown an additional four plus hours up the coast.  So our only goal that first day was to figure out where our boat was leaving from the next day and to have a good meal, hoping to stay up until nightfall.  Mission accomplished--this meal was better than the fancy place we ate the next night.  We should have gone back and had this exact same thing again.

No Reservation for Anthony Bourdain

I am amongst the last handful of people who had not seen an Anthony Bourdain episode before he died, who also believes themselves to be both a foodie and a traveler.  Bad on me.  I know people who have chosen vacation destinations based on a show that he did, so it is not like I had no exposure.  It wasn't until he took his own life that I decided it was time to see what he had on offer.
I watched two episodes of No Reservations and was not impressed.  The cinematography was terrible, and his sense of humor was off putting for me.  Then at the end of the episode in Sweden, he mock hung himself.  Not funny at the time, and certainly not in hindsight.  The episode that covered the US-Mexico border was strangely prescient of a future where the situation would devolve.  But not good enough to want me to watch more.
I then watched an episode of Parts Unknown, which was better produced, and smart mouthed.  He had a global sense that he wanted to impart was laudable.

Stan and Ollie (2018)

This movie is based on the end of Laurel and Hardy's career together, after their period of separation and now they are on the ebbing end of their time together. Stan is played by Steve Coogan and Ollie by John C. Reilly.  I think it is truly a shame that this film did not get nominated in the Best Make Up category because it was astounding.
The era of vaudeville is coming to an end.  Their popularity is waning and so is Ollie, physically.  There is at the center of their tension with each other the fact that Ollie betrayed Stan by doing their act with someone else for a time.  Ollie had a lot of financial obligations from a number of failed marriages, while Stan was better with his money and less of a disaster at marriage, and that plus the tension between their wives is pretty much the only plot line besides what is happening to them professionally.
Some have commented that it is too bad that they didn't go earlier, when they were at their peak, but I disagree. Their talent is still on display, but all good things come to an end, and in a lot of ways that is the more interesting story.  Well worth watching.

Snap Pea and Cabbage Salad

I love cookbooks and am inspired by them as a cook.  But I do lover the internet for when I have a lot of two things in my fridge and I am looking for something to tie them together and viola, it is found.
That is what happened with this dish.

• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon honey
• Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
• 1/4 small cabbage, thinly sliced
• 8 ounces sugar snap peas, thinly sliced crosswise
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh mint or basil
  Make the dressing (the first four ingredients), prep the vegetables and the herbs, and then when you are getting ready to serve, toss them all together to taste.

Searching (2018)

This is an interesting way to tell a story, one that is highly linked with the ways and means we communicate in the 21st century.  The back story is told in a series of emails, video files, and instant messaging.  So within about ten minutes you know that a family of three has becomes a family of two because the mom has had a blood cancer, was treated, did well,  then relapsed, didn't do well, and died.  David Kim and his daughter Margo are left alone with each other.  This is beautifully done, in my opinion, and I was sucked into the story in a good way.
The bulk of the story is about Margo disappearing at the end of her junior year of high school and the subsequent search for her.  The search rolls out in the same way that the story started, just with more details, and the occasional live action face to face sequence.  David, not surprisingly, discovers a lot of things about his daughter that he did not know.  He comes to term with the fact that he was affected by his wife's death to the extent that he was less effective as a parent, and he also comes to face the issue of his daughter's ongoing grief.  The rest of the movie is the hunt for what happened.