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Dear Mrs. President
Dear Mrs. President
Ana Maria Medici | 2021 | Children
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
Are you looking for a book that will help encourage young girls to dream big? Maybe go a little further in life than what their mothers or fathers have for them. Well, this book called "Dear Mrs. President" helps with that along with the diversity.

This book shows what an inspiration anyone girl, whether she is a female of color or not. Should try and dream big and could ever well become President of the United States. It is encouraged by the first vice president of color and the first female president of the United States of America.

The book stands written to use a child letter that tells the story of encouraging and inspiring girls and diversity through the letter and what a female can do the job and still be strong. Anyone can be anything they want to be.

It does encourage dreaming big. It should not matter if you are a female of color or not or a male to do the job. If you can do the job, you should be able to do so. This book symbolizes hope and to female leaders everywhere you can, and it's to make kids go big and dream further than ever before.
  
Grande Liturgie Orthodoxe Slave by Choer Bulare Svetoslav Obretenov
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Whenever I listen to this I find myself quite overwhelmed by it. There was an interest in the '70s in that Bulgarian folk singing, the kind of singing where they sing in 2nds. One of the harmonies they use a lot is a 2nd, which is a very unusual interval, and I remember that being around and there being a great album called Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, which is an amazing record, so I think I was aware that that part of the world had interesting music. I don't really remember how I got this one other than I bought it in France. The softness of the male voices is like softly blown flutes. If you grow up in England with the disgusting operatic tradition we have, where the men's voices have to be so manly, it makes you violently ill [laughs]. Hearing the softness of this was so touching to me. There's one section in one of these tracks that is too amazing, where the voices that are all woven together gradually separate out so that all the voices above a certain register keep on going higher and higher and the ones below keep going lower. It ends with this incredible chasm between the voices that is just startling."

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Dianne Robbins (1738 KP) rated To Tell the Truth in TV

Apr 6, 2021 (Updated Apr 6, 2021)  
To Tell the Truth
To Tell the Truth
2016 | Comedy, Game Show, Mystery
3
6.0 (8 Ratings)
TV Show Rating
Sexism (0 more)
I used to watch the original To Tell the Truth; the old one in black & white, late at night on the Game Show Network, and loved it. It was charming, classy, intriguing, delightful, and funny. So I was excited when the modern iteration of the game show came out. I'm not a huge fan of the host but he's tolerable. What I don't like is his mother, Doris. She makes disgusting sexual comments that are highly inappropriate to the male contestants. Comments that would not be tolerated if a man were making them toward a woman. The men are visually uncomfortable with her remarks but they play it off like it's a funny joke, but it isn't. I'm appalled that that level of sexism is allowed on television in the post #metoo movement world. I would have thought that people realized that you can't treat people like a piece of meat but apparently Doris did not get that message. She needs to go! Boot her off the show!

Other than her, they have people with interesting secrets and truths to tell on the show and it's fun to try to guess which one of the contestants is the one with the secret. It's a shame that Doris has to spoil an otherwise entertaining show.
  
Good Joe Bell (2020)
Good Joe Bell (2020)
2020 | Biography, Drama
3
3.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Rating
The film has a great premise. An alpha male walks from his home in La Grange, Oregon to New York to tell the story of his gay son who was bullied so badly he committed suicide. Sounds interesting until you realize that it is nearly impossible to adapt into a cinematic story. It is one man traveling on the road. He is not rich; he is stubborn; he is kind of a jerk to other people. Mark Wahlberg is good as Joe Bell, but there is not much of a character to play. So you have to give him the spirit of his son, but the son would be his version of the son and not the real son so the actor playing him would need to distinguish the two versions. This never happens. Another huge problem is the ending. It comes too quickly and is extremely shocking (and not in a way a filmmaker would want). Yes, the event is foreshadowed in the first act and it would fit with the character, but there needed to be more story in order to achieve the desired effect of the event. The whole film has a problem by staying true to life instead of adding texture to the characters and story.
  
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
1977 | Comedy, Drama
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"I am convinced that Buñuel had intimate conversations with God throughout his life, wherein they would share their observations on humanity and tell lots of jokes. Buñuel’s movies are evidence of these dialogues. That Obscure Object of Desire is about a little man like you and me, self-satisfied and lustful. He is in love with a woman who refuses to give herself to him physically. This 1977 movie (Buñuel’s last) is irreverent, sexual, funny, elegant, shocking, embarrassing, political, and light as a feather. The way to enjoy it is to just let it happen to you, rather than to harbor any preconceived thoughts. To try to analyze why the director uses two actresses to play the same character and the motivation behind when he chooses to use each one is to miss the movie entirely (and to be the butt of a Buñuel practical joke—that’s him laughing at you while you are engaged in this fruitless exercise). As the story unfolds, you begin to feel that these two physically opposite actresses (the drop-dead gorgeous Carole Bouquet and the sultry, exotic Angela Molina) are the same woman and represent Buñuel’s complete male fantasy. Like many of his great films, this one includes a pig, a few nuns, a dwarf, and Fernando Rey."

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Awix (3310 KP) rated Angel Has Fallen (2019) in Movies

Aug 21, 2019 (Updated Aug 21, 2019)  
Angel Has Fallen (2019)
Angel Has Fallen (2019)
2019 | Action, Drama, Thriller
Bog-standard alpha-male action-thriller with Gerard Butler off on another bloody barrage of bombastic bodyguarding. Swivel-eyed psycho Mike Banning is struggling to come to terms with knocking on a bit (bad neck, painkiller addiction, looming desk job) when a bigger problem arises - someone tries to kill the Prez (who is Morgan Freeman this time) and frames Banning for it! Must be time for him to knife someone in the throat.

Thoroughly mechanical and frequently quite dull stuff, leavened only by the odd narrative curve-ball - we meet Poppa Banning, who is also a swivel-eyed psycho, but a comic relief one played by Nick Nolte. There is some stuff about Banning being framed for colluding with the Russians which seems mainly pitched to appeal to the red baseball cap crowd (I would say the film's depiction of the US presidency had completely departed from reality, had the presidency itself not already done that many months ago). There is something oddly tender and even perhaps romantic to the concluding tussle to the death between Butler and Danny Huston (who at least is good value). And it is less grimly objectionable than the previous one. But all in all - my advice, Gerard? Take the desk job.
  
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Awix (3310 KP) rated Proxima (2019) in Movies

Aug 3, 2020  
Proxima (2019)
Proxima (2019)
2019 | Drama, International
6
6.0 (1 Ratings)
Movie Rating
Slightly arty space drama with Eva Green. A female engineer is delighted to be selected for a mission to help prepare for the first manned landing on Mars, but does not anticipate the strain this will place on her relationship with her daughter.

Not really a science fiction film in any genuine sense of the word, but one which combines a very realistic portrayal of life as an astronaut in training with an examination of what it means to go off into space leaving your children behind. Doesn't quite ring correctly on a number of levels: we are invited to dislike the American mission commander, who is a chauvinist alpha-male in some ways, but on the other hand the film is about the extra difficulties of being a mum on the way to orbit. Mmm, I don't know - is it really that different from being a father and going off into space? A definite sense of maternity being idealised - a key sequence sees Green's character breaking mission protocols in a pretty major way just to keep a promise to her daughter. (Then again I'm neither a woman or a parent.) A bit of a shame as the film is engaging and well-played, but it's much more about Mas than Mars.