Monday Minivan Media

Picture yourself in the front seat of my Venture minivan. (Oh yes. You're already green with envy over my life of obvious excess.) We both have a grande skinny vanilla latte, and we have a little time to kill. We could be waiting for our kids, or for our meth dealer to show up. No matter. We're here, in the van, together. Let's talk pop culture. I promise to give you a 1000 word review where less than 10% is actually about the topic. It's like having an actual conversation with me.


Today's movie: Midnight in Paris

Okay, I know today is actually Tuesday, but really, I'm so far behind that on my To Do List it is still Monday, so I'm going to put this in the Win column.  On a side note, still best time ever because I got to leave work today at 12:30 and take my kidlets to the pool, where I sat on a chair and started Hunger Games and drank a gi-freaking-normous fountain Diet Coke and got a small sunburn.  Lovely.  I know I will regret the Diet Coke and the sunburn someday, but for a few hours I felt like I was 17 again.  Except that my legs looked less like Barbie legs and more like turkey drumsticks and these three kids kept calling me Mom.  At one point, the Depeche Mode song "Personal Jesus" came on at the pool, and I was truly transported.  But do I want to be back in high school?  Never.  College?  Maybe.  But now is pretty good too.  Which brings me to the topic at hand.

Last night I had the double benefit of seeing a friend I haven't seen in a while and going to the movie "Midnight in Paris".  I normally avoid Woody Allen movies because of the whole "gettin' down with Soon-Yi" thing, but this one had Owen Wilson in it and it is about writers and Paris, so game on.

And? It has a cool poster.

The movie was terrific.  Owen Wilson is the same, affable, yearning character he always is, Rachel McAdams is gorgeous but cutting, and I love Michael Sheen in anything.  (Marion Cotilliard is great too, I loved her in La Vie En Rose, but she lost me when she started spouting off about how the US government was complicit in 9/11.  I mean, puh-lease.)  The theme in the movie is wanting to be somewhere else.  Owen Wilson is a writer who wants to be in another time, and he ends up in Paris in the 1920's with Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds and parties galore, and he lives the life of an American in Paris.  Lovely.  The scenery made me want to be a foreign exchange student.  But one starts to explore the idea of being somewhere else.  Do we all yearn to be a part of another time?  In another place?  Do the people who live in that time and place yearn to be elsewhere?  What does it mean to be happy where you are?

Besides getting all philosophical, I drank a large Diet Coke and ate half a bag of buttered movie popcorn, which, combined with the raw broccoli and dip I had before I left home, very burpy.  I am sure the people sitting around me were thrilled about that turn of events.

In sum - my legs look like drumsticks, I still like Depeche Mode, and I have horrible gas after eating broccoli or movie theater popcorn.  That is all.

Happy Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, and go see the movie, and then yearn for Paris.  And maybe the 1920's.  But take it easy on the popcorn.

What great movies have you seen this summer?  Any recommendations?