A wonderful surprise in the mail

Tags

DVD, postaday2014, tour guide, video

Mail used to be fun or at least it seemed exciting before adulthood and bills became the norm; I am talking about the days of college acceptance letters, pen pal letters and birthday cards, Christmas cards and such. Of course back then there were weeks of dead time so when something eventually came, it was even more special.

Nowadays there is never any dead time between bills. Our mailbox is never empty, but occasionally there appears a golden nugget and happy days! Just the other day a golden nugget appeared in the mailbox in the form of a DVD from my dear new friend Claudine and it was such a wonderful gift.

I wrote about my adventures in New York City when I served as tour guide for my cousin Francoise and three members of her photography club during the first week of September. We had the best time together and we affectionately came to call ourselves the Club Bigorneaux. When I opened the DVD, I was hopping to the DVD, anxiously inserting the DVD and pressed play and voila, a masterpiece of beautifully pieced together vignettes of our time together. I laughed at so many parts and throughout it all I was smiling, I had such a great time with Claudine, Marc, Alain and of course my cousin Francoise and my mother as well when we spent part of the weekend with her.

I love it when mail gets exciting again. 🙂

Watching Argo

Tags

Argo, DVD, movie review, movies, postaday2013

My hubby and I have finally gotten around to watching Argo. I know that at the Oscars it did very well, best picture but for some reason my hubby and I weren’t chomping at the bit to see it in the movie theater.

Watching it, I see why it won best picture, it is very well made. So well made that it is bringing back many memories of that time. I was 12-13 years old at that time and it was very distressing and scary to think that foreign people could be so angry with our country that they would hurt fellow Americans innocent of any wrongdoing.

Now as an adult I have a much more nuanced understanding of the events and the history between the United States and Iran as well as the rest of the Middle East. Our oil companies and our government’s support for those oil companies impacted that region in ways that we are still paying for, sad in my opinion. What I find the saddest is that for twenty years my political text books regarding Oil, MiddleEast and Politics are still relevant.

This movie is so well done precisely for the fact that I am still having stress watching this even though I know the ending, I am sitting on pins and needles watching them try to pull off this charade of an escape.

I can imagine their absolute fear, I can feel their rising sense of panic and their anxiety over the complete loss of control over their lives. What do you do when you can’t reason with your potential captors? What do you do when you are in a situation where you are hated for inexplicable reasons and it is ultimately not your fault but your government’s perceived slights to a foreign people.

I feel for the Iranian people that they had had enough with having a cruel dictator such as the Shah of Iran foisted on them and then to be denied justice in their own courts but what they did to the American hostages in retaliation was completely unconscionable.

What a stressful time and very believable portrayed and communicated through film. Congratulations Ben Afleck!