Rainy Day Movies (Penny Rader)

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Our topic this month is What's your favorite rainy day movie? I haven't been able to narrow it down to just one, so I figured I'd choose a few based on what my mood might be on any given rainy day.

When I need to laugh I watch:

  • Sandra Bullock:  Among my favorites are While You Were Sleeping and the Miss Congeniality movies.  I'd like to add The Heat to my video library because I laughed myself silly when I saw it.  
  • Meg Ryan: French Kiss (with Kevin Kline) and Kate & Leopold (with Hugh Jackman)
  • Drew Barrymore: Wedding Singer (with Adam Sandler) and Music & Lyrics (with Hugh Grant).

If I need to laugh and cry:

  • PS I Love You (Hilary Swank, Gerard Butler)
  • Hope Floats (Sandra Bullock, Harry Connick, Jr)
  • Stepmom (Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon)
  • Steel Magnolias (Julia Roberts, Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Dolly Parton) switches from laughter to tears and back to laughter so swiftly I can barely catch my breath.

And if I just need to be swept away by the power of love in a historical background:

  • Titanic (Kate Winslet, Leonardo diCaprio)
  • Last of the Mohicans (Daniel Day-Lewis, Madeline Stowe)
  • Beauty & the Beast (Disney)

~~~

How about you? What are you go-to movies for a rainy day?

WARA's 9/14/14 Meeting Time Has Changed to 5 pm


Hi, this is Penny. We're having some technical issues with our website, so I just wanted to make sure everyone knows the September meeting will begin an hour later than usual.  Here are the details:

When: September 14, 2014

Where: Yorktown Estates Apartments Clubhouse
             9520 W. 21st Street
             Wichita, KS

(The first apartment complex west of the 21st Warren Theater. Drive to the back of the complex and look for the WARA sign. There is plenty of parking.)

Time: 5 p.m.


Technical, Emotional, Reality, Fantasy, Oh my……



People love stories. It doesn’t matter whether they are spoken, written, or watched. But, the enjoyment of each delivery system is different.

When a story is spoken, the listener uses his own imagination to add details that enhance the story.  When a story is read, the reader uses his own imagination to add enhancing details that personalize the story for them. However, when a story is watched the story the writer wrote is enhanced by the music, the director’s vision, and the nuances added by the actors. These stories, although fine in themselves, are not the mind-candy of spoken or written stories.

Who provides the mind-candy teasers? We do. We are the writers of the written word. We battle technical demons—our computer software, memory machines, and other actual mechanical things. Then we argue over the best grammar and punctuation, spelling and word selection to give life to the story. We hope to breathe emotion and life into our characters. We fight over whether more reality or less is better in every scene.  The fantasy world we work in sometimes fights with the fantasy worlds of our readers, editors, and other professionals needed to bring the best story to the market, hence re-writes.

Is it any wonder that we sometimes take on real world problems and leave our writing world to go to the dogs (dust covered) occasionally? Yet, we all would rather play in our worlds than do our real world every day duties. That is the insane part of the writer’s human condition.

Give us a beverage of choice, some extra pencils and paper, a couple of writers and we can while away time in a frenzy of fun…oh my.

I wrote this to remind us all that writing is exhausting, exciting, and intricate—but necessary to all  people. Keep up the good work.

Best,
Nina


Now to figure out how to get this posted since I inadvertently picked up a Trojan thingy trying to hook up my mom to football on the computer last Sunday and in getting rid of all such infections erased all of my passwords. If you see this on the 10th. I was successful. If you see it later—well it will be after a break and a cursing spell.

What’s your favorite rainy day movie? by J Vincent



The movie that came instantly to mind was Enchanted April. The DVD cover as well as the summary of Enchanted April (1992) are from Rotten Tomatoes:
Previously filmed in 1935 with Ann Harding, Enchanted April, a romantic novel by Elizabeth, was remade in 1992. The first film skips along superficially at 66 minutes: the second, directed by the always intriguing Mike Newell, runs 101 minutes, allowing for richer characterizations and a bottomless reserve of brilliant dialogue. Two cloistered, married English women (Josie Lawrence, Miranda Richardson) impulsively rent an Italian villa and embark upon a vacation without their spouses. They are joined by two other ladies: the high-flown aging widow Joan Plowright, and elegant upper-crust beauty Polly Walker whom they've never met. Under the spell of an exotic new location, the foursome are in for quite a few life-altering experiences, many of them amusing, and not a few very surprising. Impeccably accurate in its recreation of European manners and mores in the 1920s, Enchanted April is sheer bliss from fade-in to fade-out. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

It's a quiet British movie but shows how two browbeaten women come to realize empowement is within their own hands as well as substantial emotional growth of another pair. It came out in 1992 and starred Miranda Richardson, Joan Plowright (always a delight), Alfred Molina (long before he was Dr. Otto Octavius in Spiderman), Josie Lawrence, and Michael Kitchen (one of my favorites--you may recall the Foyle's War series).  It had three Golden Globe nominations-won one--and three Academy Award nominations.

The character development/growth for almost all of the characters is substantial.  The conversation is witty, moments are poignant, and some are comedic. It's optimistic but doesn't manipulate or otherwise try to trick the audience. It pleases on an intellectual level as well as an emotional one.  Four “happily ever afters” is much more affirming than just one, especially as they come about naturally.  Just thinking about it makes me want to have a girls’ movie night to watch it even if it isn’t raining.