It's Sunday, I'm Blogging

Okay, so here’s the deal.  The phone jack in Danielle’s room is busted, so that means that I have to physically shift her computer so I can run the internet cord from her room to the living room.  That means that I hardly ever get on the internet anymore, and when I do, I usually don’t have time to blog.  This makes me sad because I like blogging.  Not that I usually have much to say, but since it’s been a month or so since I unloaded my thoughts on life, love, and TV, let’s play a little catch-up, shall we?

1. I got a new car!  Yes, you read it right.  The Beast is no longer.  Actually, The Beast is currently sitting in the Lost Tree parking lot with no license plates on it.  It’s a long, drawn-out story, but the short version is that members of my church donated money for me to be able to have this car payment-free.  You heard me right:  I was given a car.  Praise God for his huge blessings!


2. Danielle and I planned a community concert we entitled “Not Your Mom’s Broadway” and it went really well.  We invited all our talented friends to sing and play with us, and we had a lot of fun.  The whole point of it was to do some stuff that wasn’t incredibly familiar to the audience- we called it “a shamelessly biased overview of musical theatre showtunes from the last fifteen years.”  I made a dorky, irreverent program and we did stuff from shows like Bright Lights, Big City, which no one knows and doesn’t have any sheet music released for it.  I was pleased with the way it went: no one blatantly forgot their words, and everyone more or less showed up on time.  Like I said, it was fun.  However, it stressed me out so badly that I vowed to never plan something like that again.  Seriously.


3. My birthday came and went, and the best two things about the day was that Danielle and I spent it at the library booksale in Springfield and she got me Jason Robert Brown’s solo CD, Wearing Someone Else’s Clothes.  It’s been a week and a half and I’m still listening to it every day.  Actually, I’m listening to it right now.  Oh, good Lord, it is beautiful.  (There are clips of it up on Amazon.com, or you can go to his website for more details.  I’ll try and put a link to it in my sidebar.)  My favorite songs: “Someone to Fall Back On,” “Getting Out,” “Music of Heaven” “Nothing in Common,” and “I Could Be in Love with Someone Like You.”  He says on his website that “I Could Be in Love with Someone Like You” was the jumping-off place for his superb musical The Last 5 Years (my favorite of all his musicals, partly because Norbert Leo Butz and Sherie Rene Scott recorded the original cast album.  We really want to produce it for TLC with Daniel and Alison in the two roles.) Oh, and another good thing about my birthday:  I went to church that night and the kids all sang happy birthday to me, all gross and off-key.  It was the most beautiful rendering of “Happy Birthday” I have ever heard.


4. Alias returned.  (Erin, if you’re reading this, you may want to stop right now, because I will most likely divulge spoilers.)  I have never been so happy to watch a TV show.  Vaughan Lives!  Will returned!  SpyMommy is still evil, Jack still loves his baby girl, Gina Torres returned as Anna, and Sloane killed Nadia?  Holy crap.  I’m going to give Sloane the benefit of the doubt and say, “We didn’t actually see Sloane kill Nadia,” but right now, it doesn’t look good for him.  Oh, and Prophet Five cloned Syd using Anna.  That made me a little sad because I love, love, love Gina Torres as Anna (she was spectacular on Firefly.)  This week, Vaughan is back and we get some Sark action, which I have been waiting for ever since he and Rachel had their little, ahem, tryst earlier in the season.  No matter what people say, I’ve liked this season.  I like the new characters and will be sad to see them go.  This is what I say:  Alias movie!  Alias movie!  Alias movie!  J.J. Abrams himself could direct.  Which leads me to…


5. Danielle and I watched Mission Impossible 3 this weekend solely because J.J. directed it, and I am happy to say that he didn’t disappoint.  Frankly, Tom Cruise scares the junk out of me for a variety of reasons (that permanent crazy look on his face, for one,) but I so thoroughly enjoyed the supporting cast I almost forgot the psycho was in it.  Jonathan Rhys- Myers (love him, I’ll talk about Match Point in a second) and Keri Russell (who knew Felicity could handle a gun like that?  If we had known that during her freshman year, maybe she and Ben wouldn’t have been mugged and she would still have her grandmother’s necklace.)  Shaun of the Dead as the Marshall-esque computer nerd back at APO (oops, I mean IMF.)  Not to mention Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the bad guy, and let me say, he was the best bad guy I’ve seen in a long time.  No “monologuing,” and he didn’t die due to his own arrogance, which is a theme in movies like this.  He just laid down a solid performance, not over-the-top.  Altogether, the movie was great.  I kind of felt like it was a long episode of Alias with Tom Cruise as Sydney.


6. I had a banner movie rental weekend last weekend.  I rented Match Point and Speak.   Match Point was by Woody Allen and say what you will about him, this was a fantastic movie.  I’ve never watched a movie that so clearly had the end in minds from the very first scene.  I as a viewer didn’t know what the end would be, but the filmmaker did, and it showed.  I won’t ruin it for you by giving you the end (I’m not Neil Ward) but let me say: it starts out as a little movie about relationships and ends up as something completely different.  Speak was also very good, in a completely different way.  It’s based on the book of the same name by Laurie Halse Anderson, and I suggest it if someone you love is a teenager or if you work with teenagers in any way.  It offers chilling insight into their view of cliques, teachers, and what’s really going on when they’re not talking to you.  Anyway, what made this movie so good was that it kept Melinda’s (the main character) narrative line so strong through the whole movie. Melinda doesn’t really speak, due to a traumatic event that happened before the school year started, and in the nook we get her thoughts through internal monologue.  In the movie, they changed those to voice-overs, and they weren’t cheesy like they could have been.  It’s a great movie.

All right.  Tons more has happened to me in the last month, but I know when to quit.  Maybe I’ll be back for part two tomorrow, maybe not.  Right now, I have to go detach Shadow from the internet cord, he’s chewing on it again.  A bientot, (or not,)

Brianne <><