About Movies and Books...

Movies I've seen recently:
~ Bright Star - I enjoyed this Jane Campion movie even though I acknowledge the movie had a plodding quality, and it has Campion's signature anglophile point of view. The movie documents the romance of John Keats and Fanny Browne. It made me want to reread the poetry of John Keats - oh how we loved his poetry along with Shelley's and Byron's when we were in high school.

~ Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs - I saw this kid movie with my grandchild Dylan. He enjoyed it more than I did. The film is based on a 1978 book about an inventor who creates a machine that causes clouds to drop - not rain - but all sorts of food. Dylan chuckled through the movie; I dozed off in some parts.

Book I'm reading: The Virgin Suicides, a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides - I highly recommend this and the other novel, Middlesex by Eugenides.

Book I'll be reading next: Michael Genelin's second crime novel, Dark Dreams, published by Soho. Michael's first novel is Siren of the Waters. Both novels have the same protagonist, Jana Matinova. Get your copy from Amazon.com or from any bookstore. Great mystery novels.

Michael was kind enough to write in the Preface of Dark Dreams, "My gratitude to Cecilia Brainard, Lauren Brainard, and John Allen for their continuing friendship and their aid in strengthening my resolve, and my work as a novelist."

Thank you Michael, for the acknowledgement!

~~~
Picture l-r: Dylan and Luke

MY FAVORITE YOUTUBE MOVIES

Here are some YouTube movies that I enjoy:

Thriller - Dance number performed by prisoners in Cebu (my home town) to Michael Jackson's Thriller

Funny Dogs - This will make you laugh out loud!

Talking Cats - Two cats
converse with each other - remarkable!

Battle at Kruger This is the one about the water buffaloes, lions, and crocodile - such drama!

And let me just comment on the two short movies I uploaded to YouTube, the one on Robert Brainard and the other on Merwyn Bergquist. I'm amazed that people are actually viewing these home movie clips. These videos are drawing more visitors than this blog, and I haven't even tried to draw visitors to them.

Hmmm, does this mean that people are more visual than verbal? Do countless number of people just sit around watching YouTube videos? And how do they even find "Robert Brainard" and "Merwyn Bergquist"? Are they Brainards and Bergquists who are surfing, trying to find Brainard-Bergquist video-clips? Are they some kind of voyeurs peering into other people's lives?

Hmmmm -

YOUTUBE ON MY MIND

Lauren mentioned the Reel Geezers, an older couple that does movie reviews in YouTube.com. Marcia and Lorenzo, both in their 80s, were featured in today's Los Angeles Times. They do this Ebert & Roeper routine, that is they review movies, sometimes agreeing, other times arguing. They are charming. There is something endearing about these two. They have been involved in the movie industry all their
lives, and they continue to connect with movies by doing these reviews. A friend/contact of theirs uses two cameras to tape them. He edits the work to 5 minutes, which you can view in YouTube. Marcia and Lorenzo are not married to each other, and I imagine how they plan to see movies together, and arrange with the film maker to come in once or twice a month to videotape their reviews of such movies as: Juno, Darjeeling Limited, Michael Clayton, etc. Beats worrying about your high blood pressure or whatever ailments older folks get.

YouTube has been in mind recently. I've had a number of home videos, which I've been talking about editing for years. Finally my son bought me the right computer peripherals that connect the videocam to the computer and allow me to download the video into the computer. I downloaded a free program called MovieMaker II, which allows me to edit these home movies. It's remarkably simple, compared to how we had done things in film school - oh, so many years ago. Now, it's just drag and drop. I still have to learn more tricks of course; this technology is different, but I'm proud to say that I've put up two short home movies in YouTube under the name of Palhbooks. Look them up under the titles of: Merwyn Bergquist and Robert Brainard. The piece on Merwyn is her 80th birthday celebration - in 2005 (I did mention I'd been meaning to work on this!). The other piece is the last home movie I made of my father-in-law, General Robert Francis Brainard. He already had terminal cancer when I filmed this, and I didn't have the nerve to focus the camera on him for any length of time, nor to interview him. I should have. He died shortly after this filming.

And the third YouTube connection today was our viewing of the Battle at Kruger, about water buffalos, lions and a crocodile. It shows a pride of lions attacking a young water buffalo. A crocodile attacks the same buffalo, so there is a tug-of-war between the lions and the croc over the poor water buffalo. And meantime, the herd of buffalos regroup and attack the pride of lions. It is quite a fight! Around 25 water buffalos form a phalanx and surround the 5 lionesses. The herd of buffalo has a leader who steps forward to kick and gore the lionesses. Remarkable! And yes, the young water buffalo survived the attack.

See it all in YouTube.