Monthly Archives: February 2010

As I’ve mentioned recently, I have started this year in a reading slump and am trying to work my way out of it. It’s not that I’m not seeing books that I want to read, because working part-time at our local library I am seeing plenty of books I’d like to read in the future; however, it’s just a matter of reading motivation. I’m not feeling very motivated to read.

That said, I have watched 14 movies so far this year. Only one of them was at the theater, and that was Avatar. The rest have been on DVD or on Turner Classic Movies during its 31 Days of Oscar. Among them have been a few surprises, including this gem starring Mickey Rourke as a professional wrestler:

“I didn’t know what to expect, but I really did like that,” my wife just said when I mentioned the movie a minute ago. The movie received a 98 percent on the Tomatometer over at Rotten Tomatoes, with only five  “rotten” reviews; the other 200 were all “fresh”, and all deservedly so. Don’t be put off by it being about a sport for which you most likely care nothing. Rourke, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood all deliver incredible performances in this one.

One that wasn’t a surprise was Sophie’s Choice, with Meryl Streep, who won the Best Actress in a Leading Role in 1983 at the Oscars  as Polish refugee Sophie Zawistowska. However, I never had seen it, even though my wife told me it was a must-see, so when it appeared on Turner Classic Movies recently while I was volunteering overnight at a hospice, I decided to go ahead and watch it. I’m glad I did. While the movie, based on the book of the same name by William Styron, itself may falter a bit (only a little bit) at times, Streep never does and makes this movie a must-see.

Two others that weren’t surprises to me, both of which I also watched on Turner Classics in recent weeks, were A Place in the Sun, based off Theodore Dreiser’s novel, An American Tragedy, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, based on the Tennessee Williams play. I had seen parts of A Place in the Sun years ago and was mesmerized by the performances of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor and had seen all of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Taylor again, and Paul Newman and Burl Ives,  mesmerizing me.

One which had been on a list of movies that both my wife and I have wanted to see for a long time, and then finally I put in my Netflix queue, was Maria Full of Grace with Catalina Sandino Moreno in her movie debut as Maria Alverez who becomes a mule for a drug cartel in Colombia.

Like Sophie’s Choice, there are times that the movie falters, but again the lead actress never does. She is, if nothing else, in a word “phenomenal.”

I’ll mention one last movie while not phenomenal was very good. It is another one that like The Wrestler looks like a sports movie but isn’t and like Maria Full of Grace, it (well, most of it) is in Spanish and has subtitles. It is called Sugar and is about a baseball player from the Dominican Republic coming to America to play baseball. A friend of mine who teaches Latino youth in Reading, Pa. recommended it to me, and I didn’t know if I would like it, but I was pleasantly surprised, mainly because it isn’t your typical rags-to-riches sports movie.