The World's Common Tater

Finally a week when I have a lot to report in all three areas. A rainy, cold holiday weekend does wonders for reading and watching TV. Here’s my week.

Movies

We watched three movies this week:

Mr, Right – I am a big fan of both Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell, so I don’t know how I miss this one. Rockwell plays a former hitman who wants to stop killing so now he kills people who try to hire him. Kendrick meets him, falls in love and then discovers that all of his talk about killing people is true. She gets mixed up in his battle with hisformer mentor and the latest people trying to use him. It was a fun movie. It is on Netflix

27 Dresses – Another old one I had never watched. My daughter loves it, so we watched with her. It’s a standard romantic comedy where Heigl’s character is in love with her boss who meets and falls in love with her sister. She now has to help her sister plan the wedding. It has a lot of actors I love: James Marsden. Judy Greer, Malin Akerman. It was another fun movie. It is on HBO Max

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things – We start with Mark, a teen who is living the same day over and over again. He spends his days doing small good deeds and winning the lottery until the day he meets a girl who is also stuck in the loop. They fall in love while trying to figure out how and whether to escape the day. It was better than I expected it to be. The standard teen romance wedged into a Groundhog Day plot sounds contrived, but the two actors are good enough to make it work. Kathryn Newton has been n several movies I like recently. She joins the Marvel universe soon and is on her way to stardom. It is on Prime.

TV

I’ve discovered that I have lost interest in some of the shows we were saving to watch with my daughter. I suspect she has lost interest as well. We are finishing Supergirl, but we both think we are done with Nancy Drew. We are still watching Good Girls, but it is hard to get invested again knowing it might be cancelled. We watched the first episode of The Titans That Built America. The one focuses on Du Pont, JP Morgan Jr, Chrysler, and Boeing. My daughter is watching The Circle on Netflix. I did not watch the first season with her, but I have been sucked into season 2. It is a reality show where contestants live alone in apartments and only communicate online. Some are who they say they are. Some are not. They talk, they play games, they rate each other and then the top two rated players decide who goes home. Now I stay up way too late watching that with her. I am watching a lot of Chopped and Beat Bobby Flay in the afternoon while reading/writing.

Books

I finished two books this week. You can read about all the books I read in May here.

Sooley by John Grisham – I am a fan of John Grisham. I am a college basketball fan. This should have been the perfect book for me. It was not. It started out pretty good. Sooley livs in a small village in South Sudan. He is chosen to play on a national team that will fly to the US to play in a showcase tournament. He is the last one selected for the team and does not impress the college recruiters with his play. While he is away, his village is attacked. His father is dead. His sister is missing. His mother and brothers are in a refugee camp. He gets a scholarship offer from a small school in North Carolina. Then it goes off the rails. Sooley’s emergence as a star is not believable. The basketball action is not believable. As I wrote yesterday, Grisham either has no clue how March Madness works or does know and changed it for dramatic effect. The twist ending is not true to the character. Just wait for Grisham’s next legal thriller.

Your Second Act by Patricia Heaton – I happened to see Heaton on a morning talk show talking about this book. As I am trying to figure out my second act, I decided it might be worth a read. It starts with Heaton talking about her life and how she took a risk to move to NYC to become an actor. It then has a string of stories about people and their second acts with notes and reflection questions at the end of each story. It ends with a few more chapters from Heaton with things to consider when looking to your second act. There are some valuable suggestions and things to consider in the book. The reflections were helpful. I just wish the stories were a little more relatable. Most of the people in the book had a second act of starting a multimillion dollar company or an impressive non-profit. There were no stories of ordinary people like me.

On Deck

We have a long list of movies we might watch. I don’t know which ones we will pick. I have The War with Grandpa on DVD I need to watch by myself. My daughter is going back to her apartment today. She is living at home during the week since she works close to here and then goes back to campus area on the weekends. That means today and tomorrow my wife and I will catch up some on shows we watch without her. We have a lot of those. The DVR is 94% full. I am reading The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett.