Category Archives: Movies

The Lost Ghosts of Paradise

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I woke up today to the sweet smell of decomposing mangos.  It’s a thick sweet smell. 

We got up and showered (in cold cool water) and decided to check out the wood house.  We went thru some books that the lady left behind.  Interesting story about the house.  We are beginning to pick up little bits and pieces of the story from items around the house and from things locals are telling us. 

Apparently the lady that owned the house before us (Kathy) died after having a car accident. In the house. And her dog too!  In a hammock in the house no less…..  I wasn’t sure if it was the hammock we asked them to leave there or not, but I took it down just in case.   It seemed….I dunno…Creepy! 


It still looks exactly like this in 2011

Anyhow we were told that she moved down here in the late 80s and lived all thru the 90s.  She was a ‘trust fund baby’ so she didn’t have to work.  From what we can gather she watched movies (VCR) and read quite a few books.  The books and movies are still in the house along with other 80s era items.  Her dishes are still dirty in the sink and the calendar is stuck on september 2001 when she died. 

It’s like the place has been lost in time.   You can just imagine her hanging out, listening to Jimmy Buffet and driving her Jeep to the Calypso resturant with her dog.  The dog in the picture we saw looks like a yellow lab or retriever.  The locals still remember her even though she died 10 years ago.  Not all of their memories are fond however and in fact it sounds like she had a drinking problem and anger issues.  I suppose when you don’t have to work and have money your other issues can get magnified. 


Looking toward the house from the acreage down below

I can’t help but think about that vivid dream I had.   I have this strange feeling that Jack (Cassie’s dad) is helping us from the otherside.  We did ask him to and it is definitely something he would do.   He loved making deals and he liked to help people.  I have a feeling that he met her and once he found out she was from Puerto Rico he saw an opportunity.  The house feels just ‘recently’ vacated in a spiritual sense.   I think he could have made a deal.  She didn’t need the house anymore and she was ‘stuck’ between worlds.  Jack would have offered to help her progress on the other side and ensured that his daughter could take the place. 

And if that’s not what is going on, I think we have a good plot for a story (movie / book ).  Puerto Rico is definitely enchanted.   Sometimes it feels like we are in wonderland.   We were driving down the road and saw a guy raking leaves in a Santa suit.  No, seriously… A Santa suit in the middle of the tropical fricken jungle.


You can’t make this up

We’ve seen some strange stuff and decided we have to take pictures for you to believe it. Otherwise, you would never in your wildest imagination begin to understand the weird, movie-like setting of this island. It’s a cross between Lost, Alice in Wonderland, and Oz all rolled into one, except I don’t THINK we’re dreaming this.


With the book at Banana Dang in Rincon

One of the books we found in Kathy’s things was the book Jonathon Livingston Seagull. It’s the perfect book…and we read it in one sitting at the beach today.

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The Mambo Kings Make Me Happy

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So I was over at the High Plains library here in Greeley the other day (a fairly regular occurance) and I was perusing their latest in new selections. I am always on the prowl for a good tropical book as you know, when I came across “Beautiful Maria of My Soul” by Oscar Hijuelos. I had no idea this was a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” (which I hadn’t read or known anything about -maybe because I was 9 when it came out and his stories are a little, shall we say, adult in nature).

Anyway, I get all the way through the novel and fall in love with the style and story and find out that this is, indeed, the second telling of the same story, but told from Maria’s perspective instead of the Castillo brothers. It happens so often for me that I fall in love with the characters, setting and story of novels that by the end of the book I just want more…and this one has more, even if I do read it in a different order.

So today I went back to the library to pick up “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love”… AND I also picked up the movie “The Mambo Kings” (starring Antonio Banderas) in old school VHS format (we’ll have to dust off the old VCR). I guess I have some reading to do and Britton and I have a movie for a chilly evening this week. Yay. Here’s a clip from the movie:

Have you seen the movie or read the books?

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Speaking of Movies…An Avatar Adventure

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A friend of mine asked if we wanted to see the Avatar at an IMAX theater in 3D. Being a tech geek of sorts I was all in on this one. I went online and reserved a few tickets Thursday because being opening weekend we knew it might be tough to get in.

We had an adventure in the morning with car problems that started the day off in a crazy way. Cassie’s car has been having coolant issues, so she decided to take mine because she thought it might break down. If you leave a car outside here (as mine was) you have to scrape the frost off the windows before you can drive. It is so cold that when you drive the windows frost up again. Cassie had to pull over a few times due to the fact she couldn’t see and was swerving all over the place. She had only gotten a few blocks away so I had to get out of bed, into my robe and sandals and then pull her car out of the garage that hadn’t been ‘frosted’ to do an early morning rescue and swapped cars. She ended up being late, but safe and luckily her car didn’t break down as well on the way there…have I mentioned winters in Colorado are so much fun?


Car antenna being attacked by cold

I put a downspout on the rental house and ended the day driving to Denver with Cassie. We left our house at around 5pm. We encountered traffic jams and we took a wrong turn that almost took us to DIA. It was a good thing my friend had saved 2 seats for us. “Top row middle” was the IM I received on my cell phone. We ended up being about 10-15 min late.

Top row middle means that if you want to sit down you’d have to scooch past about 25 people. We decided to just hop over the chairs instead. We put our 3D glasses on and….wait…there was…No magic? WTF? Cassie hadn’t ever seen a new 3D movie and was thinking it wasn’t too cool. In fact it was blurry. I asked my friend Clifton to see his glasses…Oh..WOW. Apparently we got the wrong glasses.

I had to jump over the seats again and go to the lobby. Told them we had the wrong glasses. The guy sez “Let me see your ticket stub”. Of course when I got in the door man didn’t give me back my stub. I told him that “I don’t have it.”. Of course he rolled his eyes and replied “Well then how am I supposed to know which 3D glasses you’re supposed to have?”. Well….that was a good point and it makes you wonder how many types of 3D glasses do they have?! Turns out they have 2 types and since the ones I was holding weren’t the right ones that left…the other pair.

He reluctantly gave me the other pair of glasses. I went back to the theatre and hopped over the seats yet again. Finally…I got where I wanted to be.

The movie was pretty cool. It was a lot of ‘cartoon’ looking scenes blended with ‘real life’ scenes. They used the science fiction to mask the real life issues we face. Things like environmental destruction, how we use force to destroy and get what we want at any cost, and our lack of caring for indigenous people, plants or animals. I was surprised to see the film makers paint the military as an evil force. You usually don’t see that side of things in American films. Instead we usually get Transformers types of films that are meant to recruit people for the armed services and to buy new Camaros by showing ‘kick ass’ scenes. This was the anti-transformers.

One thing Cassie of course noticed was the couple of smoking scenes in the movie. I thought it was kind of odd as well. Why would a scientist/biologist (the character played by Sigourney Weaver) be smoking in space? In a cabin where they have to pipe in oxygen to stay alive no less. For one thing, most scientists and people in other highly esteemed professions (like doctors) don’t smoke. You would be hard pressed to find 3% of the highly educated, wealthy group smoking. For another, this is supposed to be set in the future. Do you think many people will be smoking in the future? Hopefully not. And the risk of fire or blowing up your spaceship would be way too high. Makes you wonder if the tobacco industry was involved in financing this movie…hmm

Technologically it was far beyond what Transformers achieved and Avatar has a decent storyline too. When we got done watching the movie we snapped a picture with some of the people waiting to see the next showing.

Cassie with the ‘correct’ 3D glasses and a guy dresses as one of the ‘blue monkey cats’

Afterward, we went over to Dave and Busters and had a snack and talked about the movie, the day and how our lives are always such an adventure/

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Casi Casi -Almost Cassie?

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The other day I happened upon this list of movies filmed or set in Puerto Rico. I thought this was so cool, so I set out to find some that looked familiar. I didn’t realize that so many famous movies were set there. Movies like Lord of the Flies, Jacob’s Ladder, even the new one The Men who Stare at Goats.  Some I did know were filmed there like  Captain Ron, Feel the Noise and El Cantante as well as the upcoming Rum Diary movie.  

popcorn

I was interested in checking out a few of the other lesser known movies and found a movie with a name that intrigued me: Casi Casi which means literally “almost, almost” or more closely in English to “just barely but not quite”. The reason this title caught my eye is because when I say my name in Spanish when introducing myself “Cassie” sounds exactly like “Casi”. Most Spanish-speaking people look at me strangely, as most English-speaking people would look at someone strangely if they were named “Almost” as in “Hello, my name is Almost, how are you?” So, instead I usually introduce myself in Spanish with my formal birth name of Cassandra. And people relax a little more. “Ahh, Cassandra… que bonito el nombre” they will say, or “Oooh, Cassandra, la mujer de las telenovelas”. Apparently there were some Spanish soap operas where there was an protagonist (or was it an antagonist?) whose name was Cassandra. Usually Cassandras in these types of shows are somewhat psychic as well so kind of mysterious…Here’s an article about the Mexican actress Anette Michel who plays Casandra in the telenovela Pasión Morena.

Anyway, I wanted to see Casi Casi and so headed off to the local library to see if they had it. Which they did! Britton and I watched the DVD about a week ago and thought it was pretty good. It’s a low budget movie, but has a simple story line about a bunch of high school teens who get in trouble when rigging a school election. It is classic Puerto Rico with some of the slang Spanish (the whole film is in Spanish with English subtitles), games (dominoes), clothing (the kids wear the traditional uniforms),  salsa dancing and they even take a trip to old San Juan. It really gives the flavor of contempory Puerto Rico from the teenage perspective.

I thought it was a fun, cute movie with a great title 🙂 Check it out.

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