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The Secrets of Primrose Square (book 1)
By Claudia Carroll
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

It's late at night and the rain is pouring down on the Dublin city streets. A mother is grieving for her dead child. She stands silently outside the home of the teenage boy she believes responsible. She watches . . .

In a kitchen on the same square, a girl waits anxiously for her mum to come home. She knows exactly where she is, but she knows she cannot reach her.

A few doors down, and a widow sits alone in her room. She has just delivered a bombshell to her family during dinner and her life is about to change forever.

And an aspiring theatre director has just moved in to a flat across the street. Her landlord is absent, but there are already things about him that don't quite add up . . .

Welcome to Primrose Square.

What a genuinely lovely book to read. It was so heartfelt and touching. It showed the struggles of grief and the amazing friendships that come from it. There’s nothing worse than losing a child and this book showed the struggle of dealing with it. I think we all need a Primrose Square in our lives.
  
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Lenard (726 KP) rated The Post (2017) in Movies

Jan 16, 2018  
The Post (2017)
The Post (2017)
2017 | Biography, Drama, Thriller
Acting (3 more)
Directing
Production Design
Editing
Costumes (0 more)
Burying the Lead
Meryl Streep is an American institution. Yet again, she proves that she is not finished finding new dimensions to her characters. In "The Post," she plays pioneering publisher Katherine Graham from The Washington Post. The film itself somehow manages to bury the lead in its own story. In an early scene, Streep playing Graham is at a meeting of the Board Of Directors voting whether The Post should go public. Graham never utters a word. Her advisor/attorney makes every statement for her. This is an indictment of the times, referred to later when Ben Bradlee makes an off-the-cuff remark about why her husband was given the paper in the first place. It is also a subtle clue about the quiet authority Katherine actually had, pulling all the strings though she had no voice in her own company. A later scene in which she retires to the drawing room with the other women while the men talk politics is another sign on the backward thinking times of not-so-long-age. It is here that the obstensible plot starts. Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara pulls Katherine away from the other women to reveal a story that is about to appear in the New York Times. A classified Pentagon report was leaked that detailed how the American government knew the conflict in Vietnam was unwinnable, kept the war going as a facade, and had been lying to its constituents. Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell threatened the free press with injunctions, restraining orders, and incarceration. In the resulting Supreme Court case, Justice Black found that the press is responsible to protect the governed and not the governors. Buried within is the story of the inequality of men and women and the small strides women made to exist in this patriarchal society.
  
    Baby Monitor Duo (VoIP)

    Baby Monitor Duo (VoIP)

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American Animals (2018)
American Animals (2018)
2018 | Crime, Drama
I'm always a little worried when you get documentary with motion picture, it gives me flashes of terrible Crime Watch style recreations. But watching the blend between the real and the fictional in American Animals was a pleasure. I felt like it drew just the right balance. You got less real life as the film progressed until the conclusion and that then brings back the reality of what happened.

We all know that moment when you tell a story with a friend and there's that pause... wait... that's not how that happened, is it? The film even accounts for that. It deals with the slight uncertainties in a fun way by breaking the... well, I'm not sure what wall it's actually breaking when it's the real person talking to his fictional self.

Each part was played really well, and everyone worked in harmony throughout the whole film. I was really impressed with the way the actors handled the unravelling into the conclusion of the film.

While I don't have any particular quibbles with the whole thing I also don't have any urge to see it again. It was interesting, but didn't really capture my imagination to want to know more. It had the potential for intrigue, but it really didn't click into place.

What should you do?

It was a good watch, but maybe wait until it's streaming.

Movie thing you wish you could take home

That special collections room. Just imagine all the fascinating things in there.
  
The Wicker Man (1973)
The Wicker Man (1973)
1973 | Horror, Mystery
Acting, scenery, script. That song about the corn and barley? Meh (0 more)
Not bad, but unexpected nudity. I must have missed the warning. (0 more)
Something Wicker This Way Comes
Contains spoilers, click to show
Forgive me, Father, for I am about to spoil this whole film. I am a novice film reviewer, and as such, I know no other way.

This film opens up with a police officer (Sergeant Howie) flying to an island in Scotland. I knew something was up when the older gentlemen in the harbor refused to send a dinghy for him to get onto the island. The older men seemed to be in on some kind of joke. As my teenager would say, “Very sus.”

The rather uppity lawman, portrayed quite convincingly by Edward Woodward, is searching for a girl on the island. The girl, Rowan Morrison, was reported missing by way of an anonymous letter sent to the mainland.

We are then introduced to the woman who is allegedly the missing girl’s mother. She runs the most unsettling candy shop ever. There are a lot of chocolate bunnies, which I am normally all in favor of. But she corrects the officer when he refers to them as bunnies. They are rabbits, of course. Because that increases the creepiness factor by ten.

Howie’s lodging is above a righteously rollicking pub. The locals sing and play about in the pub, and all seems normal.

Forward to the next scene. Holy unexpected nudity, Batman. I am glad my son chose to stay in his room and play Roblox. There are a bunch of naked locals openly copulating in and around the churchyard. Of course, it is later explained that it is not a churchyard, because poor, very stodgy, very Puritan Sergeant Howie has stumbled upon an island of RECKLESS HEATHEN PAGANS.

The lovely Britt Ekland portrays Willow, the barmaid. In a scene early on, she does a ritualistic dance in the nude, in the room next to the very tempted police officer. My boyfriend correctly observed that Howie should stay away from this woman, as she is clearly a siren. Her dance moves were odd to me, and at one point, I asked aloud, “What is she doing?” My boyfriend responded, “She’s twerking.”

The plot thickens like a good rabbit stew. Christopher Lee aptly portrays Lord Summerisle, the leader of the island. Summerisle makes some strange claims about the island, and says the women there get pregnant asexually by way of a ritual. This claim seems counterintuitive, since there seemed to be a lot of unprotected boinking going on by various members of the island, in the open air no less. But hey, maybe these adulterated pagans missed the lecture on the birds and the bees.

As a heathen myself, I didn’t find this movie too horrific until it neared the end. I was more focused on Sergeant Howie’s unwillingness to entertain a faith other than his own. The scenery was breathtaking, as it was filmed entirely on location in Scotland.

I’m not really going to spoil every detail of the ending. But I must observe that this is the strangest version of The 40-Year-Old Virgin I have ever seen.