Three Beautiful Things 06/08/15: Mom Update, Rice Salad, *Heat*

1. I had a good talk with Mom on the telephone. She's still learning what she can do and can't do because of the dizzy spells she has. She saves newspaper sports pages for Paul -- a good thing -- and she bent down to pick them up and when went to stand up straight again she experience dizziness. Carol was there to help steady her, but it's becoming more apparent that Mom needs to let someone else bend down and pick things up. This might seem a small thing, but Mom is a habitual pick things up off the floor person -- like food bits and other small pieces of things her eye catches that didn't get swept of vacuumed -- and she talked with me about not bending over to pick up such stuff. My fingers are crossed.

2. It made me very happy tonight that the salad I made of brown rice, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, almonds, basil, kalamata olives, olive oil, lemon juice, and fresh basil tasted so good and made such a fine dinner.

3.  Al Pacino and Robert De Nero. Together on screen for the first time! I remembered back twenty years ago that this was the way the movie Heat was marketed. Twenty years later, I watched this movie for the first time tonight. The scheming of the thieves and the work the police did to bring down the thieving crew worked for me. So did the idea that the cops and robbers live and work, not in contrasting worlds, but in parallel ones -- they are very much like each other.  What didn't work for me were the detours the movie took into the tedious love lives of the characters played by Val Kilmer/Ashley Judd, Pacino/Diane Venora, and De Nero/Amy Brenneman . I could hardly wait for these scenes to end -- even though they helped underscore the movie's exploration of cops' and robbers' parallel worlds.  Likewise, I found the shoot out scenes, especially the central one following the crew's last bank robbery, tedious. But the complications the thieves faced, with each other and in their work and the work of the police was fascinating.  I also enjoyed all the terrific character roles played by John Voight, Ted Levine, Ted Sizemore, Dennis Haysbert, and, ha!, even a bit role played by Bud Cort.