Confessions of a Grandma

Some of you wanted to know my opinion of the movie Nebraska. I thought it was really well done, deserving of its mostly high ratings in reviews.  My personal reaction can be summed up in one word--HEARTBREAKING. Bruce Dern plays Woody Grant of Billings, Montana, who has been notified of authorization to collect a prize of one million dollars (if....).   He is determined to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to collect his money.  He doesn't trust the mail.  He will walk if he has to.  After his younger son fails to convince him the letter is only a come-on for selling magazines, he agrees to drive his father to Nebraska. The movie was heartbreaking to me first of all because as far as looks and also certain aspects of the curmudgeonly personality, I was watching Mike on the big screen.  Sweet and bitter torture.  Heartbreaking. When the trailer first came out, Mike's daughter texted me to google it.   Leave it to Dad to come back as Bruce Dern....

Saturday afternoon was stretching out in a rather directionless fashion so I decided to take in a 4:00 movie at the local theater.  Apparently, many others had the same notion as the line, when I got to the theater fairly early, was extremely long.  I bought a ticket for August: Osage County. I 'll admit that I did not know too much about it, but I figured with Meryl Streep, I couldn't go wrong.  It is not an upbeat, feel-good kind of movie by any means.  That was okay with me.  I did appreciate the story and Meryl Streep is beyond brilliant.  To watch her acting is to watch art being made. There was quite a bit of grumbling about the trailers having given people to believe it was a comedy.  Themes of abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, infidelity, suicide, incest--hard to make a comedy out of that stuff. I did hear a few remarks along the lines of, "Well, my life doesn't seem so bad now!"

My sister belongs to Netflix.  She watches a movie nearly every night, a habit she developed about the time her nest emptied out.  There are certain movies ( To Kill a Mockingbird  comes to mind) that she watches again and again over the years. Unlike my sister, I am not a big time TV movie fan.  It's like a two hour commitment and other things are always there to call to me.  (Like what? Well, nothing really.)  Last night, I decided to check out the offerings on Free Movies On Demand.  I can tell you right off the bat that there is little danger of my developing an every night movie habit based on the offerings there.  However,   American Graffiti  did catch my eye. Good grief!  Has it been THAT long since 1973??!??  Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfus, Harrison Ford--all young enough to at least get away with playing teenagers.  And whatever happened to Wolf Man Jack, I wonder? I remember it like it was yesterday--19...