Snow Days and Disasters.....in the Movies!!!

Well, its been a heck of a winter especially the last two weeks here in beautiful downtown Brooklyn.  I woke up (well, actually, I was woken up by a text and email blast from the university that there would be no classes or administration going on), at 5:30 AM on Friday morning to a world of white outside my windows.  The good thing is that I got to stay home and read, eat when and what I want, watch movies and make my cat Marco happy by keeping him company and playing with him.  Besides, all the birdies and squirrels he watches or tease him from the windows have disappeared to wherever those creatures disappear to when there are big snowstorms or heavy rain.  In any event, its pretty for the first 24 hours and since it snowed for 24 hours it was pretty to look at and take photos off.  I wish I could play in it but these not so spry and not so resilient bones of mine can't take that sort of thing anymore.  What my bones are really asking me is why don't I take them to some warm sunny beach or warm sunny anywhere!  And they say there's more snow to come this week.  Aaaarrrgghhh.... My granddaughter will be going to school till July if this keeps up to make up for lost school days.

Then I had a slight heart attack (figuratively) because Thursday night it was snowing heavily already and my Direct TV dish was burried under the heavy WET snowflakes and I thought I would miss the ladies figure skating final at the Olympics but milagro! It came back on just about 9:30 pm.  Wasn't that Korean girl just exquisite?!!

Nothing much else exciting is going on.  Well, there is this earthquake in Chile, which is not exciting but horrid for those people and that tsunami scare because if it is supposed to reach Hawaii and Japan, the Philippines isn't far off but so far, it hasn't happened. 

When I was a kid in Manila, really young, I had seen a movie called "Fair Winds to Java" and it was about a tsunami and for years and years I used to have nightmares about a tsunami rolling over us thru Manila Bay.  When the real thing happened not so long ago in Banda Asche (Sp.?), I thought - some nightmares do become real. I know I may be a trifle weird but I rather like watching "disaster" movies like the original "Poseidon", "Earthquake" with Jennifer Jones/Charlton Heston, "Twister" (I like watching the movie but I can't relate too much to tornadoes not having really experienced or seen one in real life and I don't live in Oklahoma or Kansas),  "Impact" or something with an impact about asteroids hitting the earth, which are a bit scary, and the two movies about nuclear bomb explosions, one had Jason Robards in it, "The Day After" and those are scary too. And then there's "The Towering Inferno" which those nasty terrorists made all too real and a thousand times worse by giving us a taste of the real thing.  But I have the movie in video and I like it because of all the actors in it: William Holden, Fred Astair, Steve McQueen, Jennifer Jones, Susan Blakely, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway and even OJ Simpson, who had a good supporting role.  I like ""Dante's Peak" wth Pierce Brosnan (I like anything with him in it), "The China Syndrome", "On the Beach", "Titanic" and "A Night To Remember" (to some even better than Titanic by Cameron), "The Devil at Four O'Clock" (Frank Sinatra and Spencer Tracy), and "When Time Ran Out" with Jacqueline Bissett, Paul Newman and William Holden (talk about the dream team actors!).  Anyway, I'm into a disaster mode and I haven't even included movies like "The Hot Zone" or "The Adromeda Strain." 

I guess I'm from the older generation because I'd rather watch any of the above movies again than something about Iraq (The Hurt Locker), or blue people with a "message" (Avatar).  Which brings me to the (drum roll) the Oscar's next Sunday.  I have my favorite actors and actresses but none will win because everyone is now so "PC" (I HATE that term), but I like the spectacle and like looking at the dresses and who makes it or doesn't.  I wish I could work the red carpet as an interviewer just for that night.  As I'ved said previously, I like the Golden Globes awards better but the Oscar's are a tradition, so something to look forward to.

And for those of you who ARE "PC" and think that I should be talking about more serious stuff in here than old disaster movies, well, we get the serious stuff in our faces every day in the news, on TV and in our lives so I can indulge in old fashioned harmless memories of rotten and not so rotten movies that do what movies are supposed to do - entertain.  Your entertainment may be French noir or Italian comedy or Merchant/Ivory films (I love them!) or Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice.  Whatever works, I say.

And then there's always my Kindle.  Just finished reading a lot of non-fiction like "The Lost City of Z" and "The Johnstown Flood" so yesterday I indulged in a bit of chic lit called "Very Valentine" and loved it.  The second of the trilogy by the author of this book releases in the middle of March and I can't wait. 

Last but not least, last night I watched "The V.I.P.s" with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Orson Wells, Maggie Smith, Elsa Martinelli and Rod Taylor and fell asleep watching Cameron's "Titanic" and hated Billy Zane all over again! Besides, not a thing to watch if you hate the cold!