July 2020

Just trying to have a safe and relaxing summer.

Happy August, readers! Hope you’re staying safe in this world savaged by a pandemic and about a dozen other threats. If you’re anything like me, you like to take a break from all that with a few movies. Here are the new-to-me films I watched in July:

• *The Virgin Suicides (1999 Sofia Coppola) 
• Hamilton (2020 Thomas Kail)
• What Men Want (2018 Adam Shankman) 
• *Wendy and Lucy (2008 Kelly Reichardt)
• The Witches of Eastwick (1987 George Miller)
• *The Old Guard (2020 Gina Prince-Bythewood)
• Palm Springs (2020 Max Barbakow)
• *Can’t Hardly Wait (1998 Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan)
• *The Edge of Seventeen (2016 Kelly Fremon Craig)
• The Hustle (2019 Chris Addison)
• *They (2018 Anahita Ghazvinizadeh)
• *Summer of 84 (2018 François Simard and Anouk Whissell)

*Indicates directed or codirected by women 

New to my kid: Back to the Future

My 6 year old talks a lot about time travel. I think he got a lot of his ideas from the Transformers shows he watches. I gave him a fun Saturday afternoon showing of Back to the Future, with root beer floats to distract from the more mature themes. He loved it! I think Doc Brown is his new favorite scientist. The look on his face each time the DeLorean hit 88 mph was priceless.

I also checked out part of the local film festival here in Indianapolis, the Heartland Film Festival. Due to the pandemic, this year viewers were able to watch films from the festival from the comfort of their own homes. There were also showings at the local drive-in theater to allow for more social distancing. I watched the Indy Shorts Horror selections from the comfort of my own couch. All the short horror films were wonderful and worth the $7 to watch them all. Who Goes There?, an intriguing, mysterious film about sisters encountering a stranger while living on the prairie won the category’s top honor. I was also excited to see another film by my friend Ronald Short in the fest, The Rink, a bloody story of a budding relationship that takes a wrong turn late one night at a roller rink. It’s very cool!