Griffin and Phenix

Cancer is what is looming ahead of ALL of us.
Who didn't suffer a loss of a loved one thanks to a tumour?
In this particular movie IS VERY ACTUAL.
The non actual is the story behind.
Can we still find friendship and love in this everyday life?
If we can, then also death won't be that terrible as it can look.

What matters is life and living.
Death is unavoidable and sooner or later we have to face it.
But living as if we knew we have, and still be able to enjoy life, that is the secret recipe of this movie.
Don't live as if everyday you live was the last one.
Live as somebody who knows that the joy of life is in what you can reach and in love and friendship.
We are born alone, we die alone, that is why we should succeed in sharing our loneliness, at least for the time we live...

The Lake House

Very unusual story.
Unusual because impossible, but nevertheless intriguing.
Good sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.
Dramatic romance, love story without the story, just the written love.
The king of the film is the Glass House on the lake.
No privacy, but like living on the lake with all the comfort of a house.
Who wouldn't like it?
When it snows, you see the snow falling on your head and it stops just a few centimters before falling on you.
You see the stars from your bed and also the first rays of light.
The sudden death frees the Director to explain how you could live in two different years.
But a dream doesn't need to have an explanation, does it?

A Good Year

I love old mansions, a little less old mansions in France.
But nevertheless if I had had to choose between London and that mansion (even thought I love London too) I wouldn't have needed much to decide for France.
But an investment broker addicted to fast money, born crook, grown up bastard, had just one choice: a fast and profitable sale.
Well, at this point, there wouldn't have been any need to make a movie out of it.

A movie is like wine, you have to sip slowly to appreciate the colour, the bouquet and the taste.
A then, just then, you can say I like it or not.
You learn nothing from winning, very often something from losing, the important you do not make a habit of it.
Max lost half property to the unexpected arrival of a cousin, but gained wisdom and may be happiness with a new love....

Something's Gotta Give

Nicholson plays his usual part of a half misanthropist who is an old age playboy and Diane Keaton the prude mother that surprisingly rediscovers sex at 56, but it is not sex, it's love.
A little bit confusing with mothers and daughters who swap boy friends and fathers that marry their wife's college friend's daughters and young men (doctors) who fall in love for twenty years older women.
But in the end, nature prevails and people come to terms with their age (and illnesses) and choice of partners.

Lesson of the movie: do not mix up with too young partners and do not abuse Viagra.
Technology is good, but abused could kill you (heart attack).
Love is what makes the world go on and people sleep eight hours.
Between sex and love, love is , as usual, the winner and Something's Gotta Give.

Little Miss Sunshine

Hard to find in reality a family so unblessed.
The grandfather is a drug addict, the wife's brother a broken gay who tries suicide, the son mute since years for reaching the goal to become a pilot and later finds out he will never be able to because he is colours blind, the father who tries desperately to prove that losing in life is just a matter of not believing in oneself and inconsequentially goes bankruptcy.

All together they travel 800 miles in an old family van to bring the daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant "Little Miss Sunshine".
Hard to believe the van breaks on the road, the father dies for an overdose, while they manage to arrive a few minutes later, when the admission to the contest is closed.
In the name of the strength of the "winning spirit" the father, on his knees, manages to be able to admit the small daughter, who, trained by the sex obsessed grandpa performs in an indecent dance.
Conclusion: they have to agree to "no any more pageant in California" to get out free of charges.
It is a true elegy to the "in spite of", and the proof that, whatever you believe, life is hard and luck or no luck, it is not enough to believe to fulfil your dreams.
Defeat of goals, but victory of family's love.

Happiness is in enjoying everyday's life

The true challenge of technology is how to get the most out of it without letting it overwhelm us. How to keep things simple but powerful. How to master technology without letting it become our master.
Here are some tips how to:

Focus on the essential. It’s important to take some time to think about what’s essential to your tech work (and play). What do you really need? What gives you the most benefit for your time? What’s not so essential? What takes up a lot of time without making much of an impact?

Do one thing at a time. I know. This is super hard when it comes to tech. Browser’s on, a dozen tabs open at once, switching between reading and email and work and IM and Twitter … we live in a multitasking world. But it doesn’t have to be this way. While there’s nothing wrong with having multiple tabs open, it can be very helpful to focus on one task at a time.

Have periods of disconnectedness. While I do most of my work online, I find it extremely useful (and calming) to close my browser and just work offline for awhile.

Don’t live in your inbox. Email is everything to many people. It’s communication, it’s a task list, it’s where you do your work, it’s your organization system. But if you work from your inbox, you are constantly being interrupted by new messages.

Schedule your IM time. If IM is important to your work, then schedule IM meetings, or have certain times of the day when you’re available for IM and tell your colleagues and friends about it. And have it for a limited amount of time and then end it.

Set limits on what you do. For example, check email just twice a day. Write emails of only 5 sentences or less.

Liberally taken by Zenhabits

I guess the secret is not in imposing limits, it is enjoying what you do.
Your life is yours, your day is yours, all the rest is just technology.

The Golden Land

A testimony of the journey to the New Golden Land, where rivers have milk instead of water and trees grow money.
The reality is different from what expected and promised, the farewell to Sicily painful.
But the family Mancuso will have to be divided: the mother and the mute son will have to go back, following the strict selection of Ellis Island.
Good reproduction of the experience of the immigrants and of what they went into.
But what I felt lacking is a true story, something to feel for.
A good documentary, great pictures and scenes, but nothing more.

A shortcut to happiness

Success is like women: when you get it, is just normality, and in most cases normality gets boring and sometimes a burden.

This movie shows the dilemma we confront everyday: how to reach happiness, what is happiness.
Happiness is what we do not have.
Stone wanted success so badly he was even willing to give his soul for it.
But, once reached fame and fortune, he realizes they do not bring happiness and wants back his soul.
"He was cheated" Hopkins says, "into believing that richness and fame would bring him happiness" "the contract has no value".
"There is no shortcut to happiness".

"Change in expectations is a generational thing, experts say. People who grew up during the Depression were happy to have a job and stuck with one for a lifetime. Many members of generations X and Y were raised in a different light. They expect a buffet of opportunities and are peeved when they don't materialize."

But if they do it is even worse.
They are not what expected.
There are two tragedies in life: one is not being able to get what we want and the second, even greater is getting it...( I do not remember the exact words of Oscar Wilde)

The contract is declared invalid, for the happy ending's sake.

In reality there is a shortcut to happiness, the fault is NOT SEEING IT.

The Brave one

Jody Foster struggles to recover from a brutal attack by setting out on a mission for revenge.
The perfect mirror of today's society.
The legal illegality and the not working justice has brought to this.
The illegal that becomes and is accepted as legal, at least morally.
The problem is that we invented civilisation and democracy to avoid that justice was on the side of the physically strong, we accomplished to create a society where justice is still on the strong's side.
Where the strong is usually not the one who carries a gun, but the one who carries power (money and political power).
Big corporations lose just in movies.
In reality the weak is still the weak, with nothing at his side.
Out of anger, poverty, distress, lack of hope in a better future, we have seen our big cities becoming the concentration camps of violent, aggressive, ready to everything (because they have nothing to lose) people.
And the only way to survive is very often a gun.
The one who pulls the trigger first is the winner.
Providing he knows how to shoot.

A perfect Jody Foster (one of my favourite actress) makes a good movie out of an original story.
Unusual because it legalizes what hypocrisy denies.
Are we going into this?
I guess the answer is yes. From a virtual world we will slowly arrive to reality.
May be next generation.
Then, of course, after going backward to un civilisation, we will come back to a civilized society, where Courts should take the place of guns.
It could work, if it wouldn't be a farce.
But, I am sceptical about it, because Historia is NEVER magistra vitae.

88 minutes

In 88 Minutes, Al Pacino stars as Dr. Jack Gramm, a college professor who moonlights as a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI.
It would take 88 minutes to Al Pacino to die, it takes just 5 minutes to understand he won't.
In the best TV movies style, the plot is more or less the same.
On one side the bad who desperately tries to involve the good (who usually lost a wife or a sister in a dramatic way) and almost succeeds to frame him with the aid of a psychological weak partner.
The guilty is known since the beginning, the accomplice usually is the person you would and could least suspect.
Well, it ends, of course, with the bad's death and the good's rehabilitation.
If Al Pacino was not the main character, it would be a good episode of a discreet TV series.

It got difficult to find good movies lately.
The problem is that the number of good stories and good actors is almost the same, while the number of movies has dramatically increased.
It gives the (true) impression the most of the latest films are rubbish.
Good is rare, if it was common it wouldn't be good, it would just be normal.
We are always at the same: The Good, The Bad, and The Successful.

Becoming Jane

Whoever is fond of Jane Austen's novels will love this.
It explains why she wrote what she did.
Every novel had seeds in her own life, which was less happy ending than what she wrote.
But then, writing, as reading, is living the life you would like.
That is exactly what a novel, a movie is for.
To show you something you have known all your life, but in a different way.
And a movie is worth if it leaves something in your mind or in your heart.
Otherwise is not even pure entertainment.
How can you enjoy what doesn't involve you?