  I am really enjoying the weekend. This morning I slept in and after I woke John made the family heart-shaped waffles topped with the remaining Salmon Farm raspberries from New Mexico. Houston is experiencing the first cold front of the season, it was wild to wake up to 60 degrees!
We turned our heater on for the first time (pew! ) and outside you can smell some neighbors fired up their fireplaces. Just in case you are reading this from a non-tropical temperate zone, keep in mind that just three days ago it was 90 degrees, so 60 is a huge change. Yesterday we watched urlLink the Secretary and urlLink Bend it Like Beckham . It was so much fun to watch movies! Typically, we rent a movie about once a month or so, but this month we've rented movies almost every weekend. We've been in a movie lull these past few years, so maybe it's ending? The Secretary was fun, if odd. Very cult feeling like Donny Darko or the Hotel. The leading actress should win an Academy Award for her character's transformation from the movies start to end.
Wardrobe was also very crafty. It was an adventure, I'm really glad we watched it alone because it would have been an awkward movie to share with another couple. Plus, you all know my stance on censorship and kids: anything I can watch, they can watch, but I felt pretty relieved my son was napping so I didn't have to worry about his perception of sexy spanking. The movie centers on a woman perhaps around 20, from a clearly dysfunctional family with all sorts of textbook issues.
Fresh out of the institution, she applies for a job as the secretary for a lawyer with issues of his own, but who enjoys nurturing women, like orchids, into blossoming dominatrix. Well acted, well filmed, definitely explores the often polarized issue while avoiding polarities. Dysfunction is treated as absolute and normal for our culture, which I could argue it is, which is nice since the movie industry still likes to pretend we all sleep in twin beds and never curse.
Bend it Like Beckham was so amazing. It replaces Real Women have Curves as Movie of the Year in my book. Interesting though that both movies I consider tops starred purely female protagonists ( urlLink see my typical gripe about that here ). No boys needed to come save their day, and yet they were sexual creatures that enjoyed men in their lives. Parents, take your teenagers (boys and girls alike, because even boys need to see heroic women) to see both these movies.
Better yet, buy the movies for them. No, rip them, you'll be their heroes. Bend it is and English flick that brilliantly parallels the lives of two sisters in a first generation Indian family. One sister is preparing for a wedding, controversial because it is a love match rather than an arrangement. The other sister's love is football, soccer for the yanks, and even more controversial because she shows her body and throws around with boys.
It was fantastic to see the plot wrestle with how deeply and differently each family member loves the others, rather than the tired American staples of dysfunction and hatred. I watched torn between my point of view, whose life I empathised the struggle with more, that flipped back and forth from the parents wanting to raise their children to the best of their abilities according to their values and experiences, or the children who wanted to define their individuality, live their lives, and honor their parents at the same time. I thought I had the plot pegged for ending with a dramatic marriage of convenience. Now, I don't want to ruin it for you if you haven't seen it (I doubt this is the case, because I feel like the last person in the world who hadn't seen it), but the writing was so fantastic because it didn't take this easy way out.
To the end the plot stayed real, honoring every struggle from every point of view. The storyline and actors did great honor to the cultures featured: Indian, English, and Soccer. At the film's close, my heart felt like an itch deep down inside, that I didn't even know was itching, had been scratched. I wanted more. 
