Dark Horse

Dark Horse is another little gem that I missed at Sundance this year.  Luckily the Broadway, my favorite art house theater in downtown SLC, screens most of the Sundance selections so I can eventually see all of the movies that I missed.  I saw Dark Horse last night and I loved this inspirational documentary of how a group of working-class people from a poor mining community in Wales bred a champion racehorse.  Jan Vokes, a barmaid at a local pub, decided that she wanted to breed a racehorse and enlisted the help of the pub's patrons to create a syndicate.  Every member contributed £10 a week and eventually 23 people owned a share in the horse.  Jan bought a mare that came in last in every race she ran and had a bad temperament then found a stallion with a stud fee of £3000.  She took a second job as a cleaner at a grocery store to pay the stud fee.  They raised the foal, which they named Dream Alliance, on an allotment in their village and then, when he was old enough, found the best trainer that they could afford.   Philip Hobbs agreed to train Dream Alliance because he was "street smart and scrappy" but ultimately didn't think he could win.  At Dream Alliance's first race, the syndicate only hoped that he would finish the race but were elated when he came in fourth place.  As he began winning, he started to garner national attention and became a symbol of hope for the entire village.  The members of the syndicate are absolutely endearing and often reduced me to tears in their interviews.  My favorite scene in the documentary is when the whole syndicate, including members with tattoos, piercings, missing teeth, and sandwiches wrapped in tin foil, went to the racetrack to see Dream Alliance in his first race and, wearing badges signifying that they were owners of a horse, mingled with the aristocracy.  This is a stand-up-and-cheer movie about achieving a goal that everyone says can't be accomplished and I highly recommend it.

Note:  Dark Horse won the 2016 Documentary Audience Award at Sundance.  Good stuff!

Patriotic Celebration at Sundance

I began and ended the week with Utah Symphony performances!  Not too shabby!  Last night I saw them perform at the Sundance Mountain Resort and it was absolutely wonderful.  It has been so hot in the valley this past week so it felt really good to be up in the mountains with a cool breeze and the smell of the pine trees.  I just love listening to music under the stars!  The orchestra performed several well known patriotic pieces by John Philip Sousa (which was a great way to start the Independence Day celebrations), including "The Liberty Bell Waltz" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever."  They also played the "Armed Forces Salute" and had members of each branch of the armed forces, past and present, stand when their theme was played.  This year the cutest little old lady stood for the Coast Guard.  I would love to know her story!  The orchestra also played a lovely rendition of "The Blue Danube Waltz" by Johann Strauss II which caused the cute couple sitting next to me to sigh!  Just for fun they played several songs from the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens, including "March of the Resistance" and "Scherzo for X-Wings."  I love the music from that movie.  My favorite piece of the evening was the first movement from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (which they played at the Gallivan Plaza last Monday).  I certainly enjoyed listening to it again.  Have you been to a Utah Symphony performance lately?  It is the perfect way to spend a summer evening!  Go here for more information about upcoming performances.

Free State of Jones

Last night I went with my parents to see Free State of Jones which is an incredibly powerful movie about a rebellion against the Confederacy during the Civil War.  Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey) is a medic in the Confederate army who becomes disillusioned after witnessing his nephew's death in battle.  He deserts in order to take his nephew's body home to Jones County, Mississippi and discovers that the Confederate army has been confiscating grain and livestock from the poor farmers in the area.  In one of my favorite scenes in the movie, he helps a widow and her daughters stand up to the soldiers, thereby placing a price on his head.  He is helped by a group of runaway slaves to escape into a swamp and is soon joined by other deserters.  Knight leads this ragtag group against the Confederate army, eventually taking control of a large area of Mississippi.  After the war, he tries to hold this coalition together to fight for the rights of the freed slaves during Reconstruction but the alliance is fragile.  Some of these scenes are very upsetting, such as when one of the freed slaves (Mahershala Ali) is lynched for registering voters and when the Ku Klux Klan burns down their church.  There is also a subplot involving the relationship between Knight and one of the freed slaves (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and a trial in the 1950s involving one of their descendants who was arrested for a racially impure marriage.  As I previously mentioned, this is a very difficult movie to watch at times but I found it to be incredibly compelling, especially since it is based on actual events.  McConaughey is outstanding as the charismatic leader, especially in the scenes where he rallies his group to action (I think McConaughey was a fire-and-brimstone preacher in another life).  I really enjoyed the use of Mathew Brady's iconic Civil War photographs interspersed throughout the movie to give historical context (something director Gary Ross also did very effectively in Seabiscuit).  The movie is quite long with a running time of 2:19 (the omission of the trial of Newton's great-grandson might have made it tighter) but I found Knight's story to be riveting.  I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and I highly recommend it.

Summer Reading: Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave is a book that I desperately wanted to love (there is so much hype surrounding it and the topic is particularly salient at the moment) but, while I did love many parts, the story left me feeling flat at the end. Little Bee is a 16-year-old Nigerian refugee who has seen her entire village, including her family, brutally murdered and is seeking asylum in the UK. Sarah is a 30-something suburbanite mother who runs her own fashion magazine but feels like she is losing her journalistic integrity and that her marriage is in shambles. The lives of these protagonists converge for a brief moment under horrific circumstances on a beach in Nigeria and the story begins two years later when Little Bee seeks Sarah out to help her (with flashbacks that reference the events many, many times before revealing them). The narrative alternates between the two women but I enjoyed Little Bee's perspective much more than Sarah's. I found Little Bee to be incredibly sympathetic and her voice made me think differently about the refugees around the world. I had tears in my eyes every time she would search for a way to kill herself in a new environment just in case the bad men found her and I laughed as she thought of ways to describe first world problems to the imaginary girls back in her village. I found Sarah to be less likable because her behavior seems so random.  I could never figure out her motivation for anything (I think her affair with Lawrence would have made more sense if it had begun after the events on the beach), including her reason for helping Little Bee, and she wasn't entirely believable to me, especially in her interactions with her son Charlie (who refuses to wear anything other than his Batman costume). I am not sure how I feel about the ending because it seems rather ambiguous, as if Cleave's message is that there is nothing anyone can do to help refugees. I don't want to believe that! I liked this book (I would have liked it better had it been from Little Bee's perspective only) but I didn't love it and I certainly don't think it lives up to the blurb on the cover (a cryptic message that the book is so good that the publishers can't give away any of the details).

Note:  I do, however, still want to read Cleave's latest book Everyone Brave Is Forgiven.

Waitress on Broadway

The one musical that Esther really wanted to see, besides Hamilton of course, was Waitress.  I am so glad that she suggested it because I don't think I would have picked it if left to my own devices and I ended up loving it so much.  It is absolutely amazing with incredible music by Sara Bareilles and a powerful performance by Jessie Mueller, both of whom were nominated for a Tony.  The musical is based on the 2007 independent film of the same name and tells the story of how Jenna (Mueller) uses baking to cope with her dead-end job as a waitress and her unhappy marriage to Earl (Nick Cordero).  When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant and then begins an affair with her gynecologist (Drew Gehling), she feels as if her life is spiraling out of control and decides that her only hope is to enter a pie baking contest to use the prize money to begin a new life.  Whenever life gets to be too much for Jenna, everything around her freezes and she gives the audience the recipe for a pie that would help her situation, always beginning with, "Sugar. Butter. Flour."  In the end she realizes that the one ingredient missing from her pies is courage!  There are parts of the story that are so funny and parts that brought tears to my eyes.  The music is brilliant and I loved every single song.  My very favorite was "She Used to Be Mine" because Mueller performed it with so much passion (Did you see her perform it at the Tonys?) that I literally cried through the whole thing.  I loved the fact that the cast actually makes pies throughout the show and that they place them in large pie coolers (like you see at Village Inn) on both sides of the proscenium.  It is an amazing show and I am so glad that I got to see the original Broadway cast!

Note:  At intermission you could buy individual servings of pie in tiny Mason jars!  I got cookies and cream pie and Esther got Key lime pie.  So much fun!