Good News & More
Let’s start with good news, headline from nypost.com: “4 kids lost in Amazon rainforest for 40 days after deadly plane crash found alive.” Ages 13, 9, 4, and 11 months. Wow! Photo from Google Images:
More good news, headline from foxnews.com: “California family finds 1 million copper pennies in old home.” According to the article by Chris Pandolfo, that’s ten grand at face value, although it may be much more if rare coins are in the cache. For the time being the family has decided against using Coinstar, which charges an 8% fee. It had no luck with banks. It will try OfferUp, a popular resale app and website, asking price $25,000. Nice problem to have.
Even more good news — no celebrity deaths to report.
Friday night’s movie fix came not from Netflix but from the pile of DVDs my Super gave me recently, an M. Night Shyamalan flick I somehow missed, The Happening (2008). It’s the story of a mysterious virus traveling through the northeast that makes people suicidal. The origin is debated but unsolved. Mark Wahlberg stars as a Philadelphia science teacher just as baffled as everyone else. He and his wife, played by Zooey Deschanel, decide to flee to a rural area. There is plenty of mayhem along the way. John Leguizamo and Betty Buckley bring their considerable talents to brief roles. The script has a familiar feel. It’s not a bad film, simply mediocre, although skillfully executed, as are all Shyamalan movies. There are many creepy images, but the violence is not of the gross-out variety. Fortunately it runs only 91 minutes. 212,000+ users at IMDb have rated The Happening, forging to a consensus of five on a scale of ten. Given that weak figure, I was surprised it fared very well at the box office, returning $163+ million worldwide on a budget estimated at $48 million. My guess is it’s strictly for fans of the director. I wish Shyamalan would shoot another writer’s screenplay. Like Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino, his works seem similar, lacking freshness. Then again, those three are attracting millions to theaters, so who am I to say? Here are the stars in character, photo from GI:
Only one buyer at the floating book shop on this gorgeous day, a repeat customer who knows a bargain. She bought a broad mix of items, including kids’ books, a forever young Denise Austen exercise DVD, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Jane Brody’s the New York Times Guide to Personal Health. My thanks.
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