CAPTAIN PHILLIPS * PHILOMENA * SUSPICION

Winter break is almost over, the snow has finally ceased, and it's time to step up and get organized for the coming year.  In the meantime I'm seeing all the movies while I can!  I will say that these movies did not entice me with their interesting titles, or I would have made more of an effort to see them at the movies.  

Captain Phillips -  What a great movie!  Just see it - it's better than the title, easy to watch even though you might be on the edge of your seat.  And it really happened.  It's so good that you forget that these are actors and that it's not the real story unfolding before your very eyes. 


Philomena - Again, a movie that is so much better than the title.  Judy Dench plays Philomena, a smart, devout regular woman who finally tells a secret she'd been keeping for 50 years.  Accompanied by an intellectual, too smart "guide", she decides to uncover the mystery at the bottom of her secret.  It's a wonderfully powerful little movie about a story that is all too common.  If you want to take the time, there is much here to ponder and wrestle with when it comes to faith, God, religion, nuns and society, which makes it sound as if it isn't as good a story as it is.  Just see it and you won't be sorry.  So so good.

Suspicion - Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine in a 1941 Alfred Hitchcock movie about a handsome playboy and the wealthy woman he woos.  I love seeing the interiors, enjoying the accents, watching Cary be so affable and sneaky while she overacts, and loving that the whole thing is in black and white, and that when it first came out, my mom was a little girl who might have seen it at the show, and my dad might have seen it before he found out that he was going to have to enlist in the Navy.