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What Drives You To Summit?
Ransom Altman, the protagonist of my novel, WILD ANIMUS, is a mountain climber who’s not satisfied merely to summit peaks. He’s on a quest for a level of meaning and truth accessible only in the wildest corners of the globe, and ultimately, he ascends Alaska’s Mt. Wrangell with a single-minded purpose: to reunite himself with…
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Movie: Frida
This is one of the better artist portrait films I’ve seen. It incorporates her accident, physical problems, lovers, husband, politics, and especially her art into a very real-feeling world. Ann has read a book about Frida, and from what she’s told me the movie is fairly accurate, but a little romanticized. No matter, it’s an…
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Breckenridge
The lesson of our first day on the ski slopes this year is this: if you don’t know where sniff out the deals you will pay out the nose. I remembered that a local grocery chain sells lift tickets, and this saved us $28 on the ski-base price of $118 for two day passes. And…
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Movie: Big Fish
While this movie has some interesting things to say about how our personal histories can disappear and be replaced by the stories we tell, it loses steam beyond that. Too bad, it has some fun moments, but you have to sit through a lot of predictable scenes to enjoy them.
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Movie: Lost in Translation
I didn’t plan it, but this movie provides a pretty amazing contrast to The Last Samurai. Here we also have Americans living in the midst of Japanese culture, but in modern-day Tokyo. It’s a pretty stunning comparison. I get the feeling that Sophia Coppola represents a unique phenomenon in Hollywood because her father’s name, connections,…
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Movie: The Last Samurai
I was first facinated by samurai culture as a kid when the SHOGUN miniseries came out on TV. This movie attempts to convey some of the same things, and it does so in a few ways. Most of the time, though, just when I was getting curious about some facet of the main character’s environment,…
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Movie: Shaolin Soccer
It’s great to see a Chinese Kung Fu Comedy poke fun at western sports and movies as well as their own beloved Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun Fat flicks. Like Mortal Kombat, computer graphics are used instead of wires to create impossible kung fu action, but all in the context of soccer. They…
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Movie: Super Size Me
What a good documentary. Because it’s so unpretentious and unpreachy, even the arguments presented that I disagree with (for lawsuits against fast food companies) are not offensive or a turnoff. It addresses a genuine curiosity: what would happen to you if you ate nothing but McDonald’s food? That curiosity is satisfied with shocks and laughs…
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Movie: The Station Agent
A dwarf inherits a small, remote station house and loses his job when his boss dies. With nowhere else to go, he moves into it. That’s about all there is to the story, but somehow this movie manages to find charm and depth in otherwise ordinary people and situations. It’s like spending an afternoon in…
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Horsetooth Reservoir
I peer over at the fun roof I just climbed on toprope, during which Ann was too busy waiting to catch me when I flew off to snap a picture. But I managed to keep myself scrunched up in there with my hands working quickly into the smooth crack long enough to get over it.…