Harry's Ruminations

Much as it takes a symphony in multiple movements to fully exercise an orchestra, Edgar Wright's  Baby Driver  fully exercises film as a systemic input to your brainstem. I left exhausted, happy, and eager to see it again. Act I, Take Me Away! Act 1 is Wright's original concept writ large: "Baby" is a getaway driver, and we see a contender for the best getaway scene in film set perfectly to a soundtrack. This is the overture, the who, what, and where. There's almost no dialog--just searing "wow....Wow....WOW!!!!!" Then from that allegro, an adagio: A minutes-long scene shot as a SINGLE FOLLOWING SHOT with lyrics from a song visually embedded throughout.  Once my brain got it , it was this surreal joy, all from an unassuming kid going for coffee down a street. Per IMDB, this shot took 28 takes to get, and it seems a miracle it took that few. Act 1 closes with the divvying up of the money, the thieves going their separate ways, with John H...

I've just been having a rough time lately. I'm like an overstuffed Tupperware and me trying to close the lid and put one foot in front of the other isn't working so well in the past few days. This is me attempting to talk that out, to myself. To begin: My sixteen-year-old stepson chose not to live with us, and the Kentucky judiciary has supported that decision.  Months of preparation and legal wrangling resulted to a seven minute conversation in chambers.  That was a month ago, June 8th, and the reality of it settles upon me a little more each day.  It's all just sadness and anger, and it comes out at inconvenient times for no apparent reason. Sometime in August, I'll put the kid I swore to love on a plane and send him back to a bad situation because ultimately he chose that over being part of our family.  Maybe if I write that sentence a thousand times I'll understand it. Everyone in my family has accepted the above reality, and I've had a year...