Escape Room: Tournament of Champions

I liked the movie Escape Room a lot more than I thought I would.  I enjoyed the premise, the design of the rooms, and the suspenseful action sequences.  My only problem was with the ending because it lacks any kind of credibility and it slows down the action with a lot of clunky dialogue in an attempt to explain everything.  There is also a groan-worthy cliffhanger that I thought was a blatant bid for a sequel (and I was right).  Did you enjoy the lengthy recap of my review for the first movie?  More about that later!  Last night I went to see the promised sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, and this time around I didn't like it as much as I thought I would.  After surviving the escape rooms set up by the Minos corporation, Zoey (Taylor Russell) and Ben (Logan Miller) are suffering from PTSD and want to hold Minos accountable for the deaths of the other players.  They follow a clue to a dilapidated warehouse in New York but eventually end up in another escape room with Theo (Carlito Olivero), Nathan (Thomas Cocquerel), Rachel (Holland Roden), and Brianna (Indya Moore).  Once again, the players must solve puzzles in order to escape from elaborately staged rooms or face deadly consequences.  This movie begins with a lengthy bit of exposition recapping everything that happened in the first one (maybe the filmmakers wanted to pad the runtime, which is 88 minutes, to compensate for a thin plot?) but this just serves to emphasize that the original characters are more sympathetic than the new ones.  The premise for the new game, namely that each player is the sole survivor of his or her respective game, is not as compelling as the original one (each player has a secret which is revealed in one of the rooms) and there is not even an attempt at characterization.  The new players are dispatched very quickly, without leaving much of an impression, in order to get to the reason why Zoey was lured back into the game and this, once again, strains credibility. We also get a cliffhanger that is even more groan-worthy (is the whole world just one elaborate escape room?).  I will concede that the design of the rooms, especially the subway car and the bank lobby, and the action sequences within the rooms are actually an improvement upon the original but I just didn't care as much about whether or not the characters survived them.  You can give this one a miss.

Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 at St. Mary's Church

Last night I drove back up to the mountains for an intimate Utah Symphony concert at St. Mary's Church in Park City.  I've gone to a few of these concerts, which are part of the Deer Valley Music Festival, and they always end up being absolutely wonderful.  St. Mary's is a beautiful church with amazing views of the mountains through a wall of plate glass windows and it is a fantastic venue for chamber music!  The concert began with String Sinfonietta by Vivian Fung.  I really enjoyed this piece, especially the second movement, which seemed very atmospheric and otherworldly, and the third movement, because the musicians plucked the strings of their instruments (and even tapped on their instruments to create a rhythm) through this whole section and it was really cool.  Next the orchestra played Within Her Arms by Anna Clyne.  The title comes from a poem by Thich Nhat Hahn, in which the Earth wraps her arms around a dear one who has died in order to transform her into flowers to comfort those left behind, and it is dedicated to Clyne's mother who died suddenly and unexpectedly.  This piece is mournful and elegiac and I thought it was hauntingly beautiful.  The concert concluded with Concerto No. 1 for Cello and Orchestra by Joseph Haydn with Utah Symphony Principal Cello Matthew Johnson as soloist.  This piece is very technically challenging and Johnson performed it beautifully.  As predicted, this was a wonderful evening filled with incredible music!  I believe that all of the remaining concerts at St. Mary's are sold out but there are a few tickets available for some of the other shows at Deer Valley (go here).

The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52

I have been able to go whale watching twice (in Alaska and Australia) and seeing a whale breach is one of the most exhilarating experiences I have ever had.  I think whales are absolutely fascinating so I was intrigued by the trailer for The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 and I even drove about 45 minutes out of my way to see it at the only theater that is screening it in my area yesterday.  At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy developed classified methods to listen underwater for Soviet submarines.  However, it was difficult to distinguish the sounds of submarines from those of marine life so an oceanographer, Dr. William A. Watkins, was enlisted to help classify the sounds.  In 1989 he discovered a single whale that broadcast at a 52 hertz frequency.  No other species of whale broadcast at that frequency so he started tracking the signal until his death 2004.  He was never able to see it or discover another whale who broadcast at the same frequency so it was dubbed "the loneliest whale in the world" and it gained a certain notoriety because people related to its outsider status.  This captured the imagination of filmmaker Joshua Zeman, who believes the ocean is a mysterious environment where unknown discoveries are still possible, and he assembled a team of scientists to try and locate the loneliest whale.  Interspersed between images of their search are discussions about the mythological characteristics of whales, the history of the whaling industry, the discovery that whales use sound to communicate with one another, the origins of the movement to save the whales, the disruption of whale communication by shipping traffic, as well as the social nature of whales and whether this solitary whale would experience the emotion of loneliness.  I found all of this to be very interesting but the footage of the whales encountered during the expedition is absolutely breathtaking, especially the images from trackers placed on the whales because they are so immersive!  I enjoyed this documentary very much but, honestly, I don't think it needs to be seen on the big screen (it will be available on VOD starting July 16).

Kristin Chenoweth at Deer Valley

Last night I got to see Kristin Chenoweth perform with the Utah Symphony at Deer Valley and I can't even begin to express how much I loved this concert!  I know that I am starting to sound like a broken record but I really missed seeing concerts at Deer Valley last summer!  Sitting outside and listening to music is so wonderful, especially up in the mountains because the temperature is a lot cooler than in the valley, and Kristin Chenoweth puts on a fantastic show!  Last night she was a bit emotional because this is the first opportunity that she has had to perform in front of people since the pandemic started.  She began with "Que Sera, Sera" and then performed a heartfelt version of Trisha Yearwood's "The Song Remembers When."  Next she sang "Zing! Went The Strings of My Heart" and gave an emotional rendition of "The Sweetheart Tree" which she dedicated to a friend who had recently died because it was her favorite song.  One of my favorite songs in the show was an incredibly sultry version of "Desperado" by The Eagles.  She brought out a guitar player (Josh Bryant) that she said she knew to perform with her and, after the song ended, he planted a very passionate kiss on her to the delight of the audience!  She gushed, "I didn't say how well I knew him!" Before the intermission, she sang "I Could Have Danced All Night" from My Fair Lady and then she said that she had to go change her clothes and we all had to go to the bathroom and buy a copy of her album, For The Girls, which was half price!  She returned to the stage with two incredibly talented vocalists, Crystal Monee Hall and Marissa Rosen, to perform "I'm a Woman" with choreography.  She was in the middle of a Broadway show, which included that song, and it only had a few performances before the pandemic shut everything down so she said that it was a lot of fun for the three of them to perform it again!  She also had them join her for "You Don't Own Me" and a beautiful rendition of "Hard Times Come Again No More."  Another favorite moment came next when she sang "Popular" from Wicked.  After this she introduced herself to all of the straight men and said she played Glinda in the show.  That got a huge laugh!  Then she sat on the piano and sang an incredible version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."  She gave the stage to Crystal and Marissa (she loves mentoring young singers) who sang "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" which was amazing!  During her last concert at Deer Valley, she gave one of the best performances of "Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables that I have ever heard and she did again last night!  I loved it so much!  Next came "Yesterday Once More" by the Carpenters (I may or may not have sung along to this) and she ended the show with a beautiful song written by her music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell called "Reasons For Hope."  For the encore, she sang "Smile" which seemed very appropriate for the past year.  I had such a wonderful time at this concert and I hope that she keeps coming back to Deer Valley because I will certainly be in the audience!

We Are the Brennans

My Book of the Month selection for July was We Are the Brennans by Tracey Lange (the other options were Sisters in Arms by Kaia Alderson, Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby, The People We Keep by Allison Larkin, and 56 Days by Catherine Ryan Howard) and I really loved it. In fact, I stayed up reading into the early morning hours several times because I was so riveted by the story. Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital room with severe injuries from a car accident after a night of drinking. She eventually decides to return home to New York to be with her close-knit Irish-Catholic family to recover and deal with her legal situation. However, it turns out that she abandoned her father Mickey, her brothers Denny, Jackie, and Shane, and her fiance Kale (who has since married someone else) and fled to California five years ago without explanation after a traumatic incident and has never spoken to them about it. She tries to reconnect with her loved ones but she is not the only one who has been keeping secrets and the repercussions of her secret threaten to destroy the happiness and security of all of the Brennans. The family members love each other fiercely and they think that sparing each other from any unpleasantness is an act of kindness but it is driving them apart. Ultimately, they must learn to trust each other to get through their problems together. This family is incredibly dysfunctional and each character makes terrible decisions but I still found them all to be very sympathetic. The family dynamic feels authentic because it is informed by Lange's own experiences growing up with a large Irish-Catholic family and the interactions between the family members are both humorous and heart-breaking (and incredibly relatable). I was the most invested in the relationship between Sunday, Kale, and his wife Vivienne because it is so awkward, especially when Sunday and Kale realize they still have feelings for each other, and it is tragic because they could be together if they had only communicated with each other. The narrative alternates between multiple perspectives and Lange uses the device of ending a chapter with a conversation that is picked up in the next chapter by a different POV which is incredibly effective at drawing in the reader because I literally couldn't put this book down! It seems like a new secret is revealed in every chapter, several of which really surprised me, and I really appreciated the fact that every problem isn't magically solved in the end but the resolution still feels incredibly hopeful. If you love a good generational saga as much as I do, I highly recommend We Are the Brennans.