The Life and Times of a Midwestern Movie Addict

A few weeks ago, I got to experience something that always manages to shake my confidence in myself.  You see, the chorus I sing in always throws a cast party to celebrate the show and to give us a chance to watch a video of the performance.  Watching the performance is one of my favorite parts of the cast party because when you’re a part of a show it can be very difficult to appreciate the whole.  You can’t see yourself, you can’t see how all the pieces fit together, and you can’t appreciate the finished product in the same way that the audience can.  So it is great to see it all together and to get an idea of what it was like for the live audience.  However, I spend a lot of the viewing watching myself and how I move.  Confession time: I really hate watching myself.  I do not enjoy seeing moves that I thought were very precise and focused turn into vague and sluggish hand gestures on the video.  I don’t love watching my face and being surprised...

        I had an interesting and rare experience last weekend.  I saw two films that were dramatically different from each other and yet shared a common thread that also fell in line with some of my own recent thoughts.  The two films were Captain Marvel and Us.  Now, if you’ve seen either film, or even the ads for either film, you can clearly see how different they are.  One is a classic superhero origin story and the other is a horror and suspense thriller.  Yet, they both have a central idea at their core that they share.  In both films, there is a female protagonist struggling with fragmented images from her own past and if she can put the pieces together, she might just be able to solve the central problem of the story and figure out who she really is.  It was astonishing to me that I would randomly choose such different films and that both of them would tread such similar ground.  I enjoyed the juxtaposition and the expos...