MOVIES

Tonight was a rare night that the local sixplex was showing a good movie: as part of their intermittent "independent" film series on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, they showed "Man on Wire." It is a film, documentary but with recreations, about the man who walked between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, after earlier walking across Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney. He was a 17 year old youth in France when he first read a news story about the planned WTC and immediately it was his dream to bridge them with wire. It is a beautifully made, engaging, humorous and thoroughly enjoyable movie. In the words of the New York cop who waited on the roof to take him in, he was "...a tightrope dancer...I really can't call him a tightrope walker..." If you live where this might show, go see it; (here is where it is so far booked; check back often). Totally recommended.

Movies we watched at home recently and enjoyed include "Lives of Others," "Little Miss Sunshine," and "The Devil Wears Prada." We have now watched 158 movies during 2008....We also re-watched "Touchez-Pas Au Grisbi," which we'd seen in the theater five years ago and recently picked up on DVD. For those who enjoy film noir and gangster movies, "Touchez-Pas..." is a gem featuring Jean Gabin as an aging gangster with incredible elan but an existential bone-weariness. The director, Jacques Becker, focuses on his character's daily routines with patience and grace so the plot advancement is an odd sort of puncuation to it - there really isn't another movie I know of quite like it. It made a star of Jeanne Moreau and was Lino Venturi's first film role.