The Monday After: You Are My Passions For Life
Welcome to the passionate 520 blog, The Monday After. This is our attempt to blast through our Monday morning hangovers and offer up some quickie reviews of all the things we’re pretty sure we got into this past week, including gigs, concerts, movies, plays, and restaurants. Pop a couple of ibuprofens and enjoy.
We here at 520 aren't quite sure if we have the will to go on (watching daytime television).
Sure there's Ellen, in all her pant-suit feel-good dancing glory. And those deliciously loud crows from The View, shouting their opinions for the gods to hear. And there's Meredith, everywhere, bouncing from Today to Millionaire. There's even Granny and Jethro, if you can stand that show.
But soon there will be no Tabitha, the three hundred year-old witch. There will be no Sheridan Crane, best friend forever to the late Princess Diana. And there will be no Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald pining away over the love of her life, Ethan Bennett.
Passions, NBC's ridiculously awful soap opera, has gotten the axe after nearly nine years on the air. And by ridiculously awful, we mean gloriously pleasing. Where else but Passions would a main character be a magical doll brought to life by a sorceress? Where else but Passions would you be rewarded with a lavish, fully choreographed, fifteen-minute Bollywood dance/dream sequence? Where else but Passions could you regularly expect cheesy plot lines, bad acting, and cheap production values, and yet still find yourself tuning in just for a fabulous moment of payoff, like that time they replaced an actor halfway through a storyline, told the viewing audience about the casting change via voice-over, and then had Tabitha hear the otherworldly voice-over and freak out over it. Passions broke down the fourth wall, broke our not-gonna-watch-any-stupid-soap-opera will power in two, and now is breaking our hearts.
Good-bye, sweet Passions. We shall miss you.
And now for our weekly rankings!
The Irish Times (
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Sláinte!
A trip out to Turkey Creek (a.k.a., "East Nashville") turned out to be the best way to honor St. Patrick. John, Claire, Noel and the rest of the gang at The Irish Times certainly know how to throw a party! From tasty Shepherd's Pie to readily available Guinness to cops helping folks call cabs (rather than waiting to arrest them as they tried to drive home), The Irish Times was certainly the most organized of all the holiday celebrations in town! Even though we missed the traditional Irish music, the cover tunes of the Graceful Failures were perfect to keep the party going til the wee hours. I look forward to trying the place on a non-holiday night and drinking my pint of Guinness in something other than a plastic cup, however. Overall, it was good craic! (4/5) -S.S.
The Lives of Others (
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Living in the Fort for two years of my life, I made a lot of friends across a broad political spectrum. (Okay, so they were mostly hippies, but some were way more liberal than others.) And when living amongst poor artists and students, the topic of socialism inevitably comes up. Some loudly oppose it, some mourn its unpopularity, some praise its potential, some espouse its essence in the way they live their lives.
In The Lives of Others, the Oscar-winning foreign film from German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (which sounds like a lost character from The Princess Bride), the crux of the problem of socialism is examined: wanting what you can't have. In this particular case, the object desired is not material, but internal. An East German government worker, Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, is sent to spy on a writer and his actress wife, but the more he listens to their lives over his wire taps, the more he wishes his own life had the passion and purpose that theirs do. Wiesler truly believes in the self-sacrifice that socialism requires, but is torn between his sworn duty to the cause that he is quickly losing faith in, and his allegiance to his new "friends" who have given him a glimpse into a world that's not so lonely.
The Lives of Others is a touching film, and while it reminds us that being human goes hand-in-hand with desiring things that do not belong to us, it teaches us that there is beauty in the sacrifice of the self for the good of your country. (5/5) -J.B.
See you next week!