home!

so i've been home for the past few days now being done with work and free for the rest of my summer vacation (which amounts to about three weeks) - spending this first week catching up with friends and eating yummy food, then going on a family vacation to hawaii! (yes, so so excited) and depending on how crazy that all is i may or may not post again before school starts...

so until then. enjoy the warm weather that actually feels like summer :)

theater: the torch-bearers

I forgot to mention that I saw The Torch-bearers last week - thought it was funny but considering its all star cast, it definitely could have been better. Play within a play plot line. In any case, the set was amazing and partially made up for some of the plays other faults.

movies: the quiet american

So yesterday I watched two movies with the same name based off of the same book. I'd gone into it knowing they were very different but hadn't realized to what extent til I was about half way through the more recent one, made in 2002. The older one, in black and white, was made in the late 1950s. I'm almost hesitant in saying that I liked the newer one better but I think that it is more for the changes in the plot line then anything else. Plus there's the issue of finding the highly different ending of the older one more fitting than that of the new one, but unfortunately I can't mesh what I like best about both into one great movie so I must choose. The story is of a British journalist and his Vietnamese girlfriend. When a quiet, young American shows up, he changes both their lives when he falls for the journalist's Vietnamese girlfriend. Amidst the chaos of war (French Indo-China, the Communists, and maybe a third force?) it is only natural that disaster ensues. However, the two take very different takes on said disaster. The first paints the young American as wholly idealistic, good, and essentially innocent, whereas the second takes a much darker view of him, pointedly exposing his involvement with the CIA and a mysterious third force. In both movies, my perception of all the characters was vastly different, especially given the different endings - in the older one, the journalist ends up alone, whereas in the newer one, he gets his Vietnamese girlfriend back. I know that the latter movie tried to stay closer to the book (based on the novel of the same name by Graham Greene) and I only wonder what the book's ending was. In any case, I suppose since I'm to choose which one I like better and discuss it with my professor, I'd be inclined to recommend the latter which stars Michael Caine and Brendan Frasier (but for reasons other than that I've heard of the actors).

woohoo!

Congrats to Sonia Sotomayor who just got confirmed by the senate to be a Supreme Court Justice! Now let's see what the "Wise Latina" can/will do.

movie: whatever works

I also saw Woody Allen's new movie Whatever Works recently. It was funny because at the end of the movie Jessica Hecht shows up as a psychic and she's actually here in a play that I saw last night (see next post) and so I was watching going why does she look so familiar? Well, it's because I see her everywhere around town, as in at the coffee shop and walking around with her kids. Movie stars Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood along with Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley Jr., and more. I thought it was a pretty good movie - although the twist at the end came rather quickly. Definitely a good amount of funny too. The plot could be called too contrived but I think it works well with the cast and the story.

theater: what is the cause of thunder?

saw this play last week on Thursday. thought it was overall pretty good but I wasn't the world's biggest fan of the ending which is too bad since it made me less of a fan of the entire thing. it's about a soap opera star and her screen life and home life and about how crazy, like literally insane, she is/becomes. the two actresses in it were very talented which also made the play more enjoyable of course.

art: sol lewitt

when family visited the other day, we went to mass moca (my first time since i've been here...sad i know) and though there were a bunch of exhibits that i really liked, my favorite was the sol lewitt exhibit. i really like contemporary stuff that brings it back to basics, but not just in a red circle on a white canvas kind of way, in an innovative way too. the style of having the work painted directly on the walls and covering the entire thing only adds to the impressiveness. it's divded into phases of the artist's life and by the last floor, the walls are bursting with color. anyways, check out the mass moca's website to get a glimpse at the stuff, although really, pictures just don't do it justice.