“sometimes my heart pushes my ribs”-Ellen Kennedy-Muumuu House 2009

"sometimes my heart pushes my ribs"-Ellen Kennedy

This book and the next book I read and then review are poetry books put out by Muumuu House. This one is sometimes my heart pushes my ribs and it is by Ellen Kennedy. I haven’t read poetry for fun in maybe forever, meaning, never probably. I blame school for taking the fun out of it. I blame Ellen Kennedy for putting the fun back into it.

These poems are “witty” and make me smile on the inside and often on the outside. I still have a hard time thinking of poetry without thinking of rhyme because that’s what we were taught. But Ellen Kennedy’s poetry is free from constraint and even imagination doesn’t seem to put on a limit on her because her mind wanders places that a lot of people’s might not and even if they did they wouldn’t think to write a poem about it, but it’s okay, because Ellen Kennedy has.

My favorite poem in this book is “Orange”. It seems the “most poetic” I think. A lot of Ellen Kennedy’s skill is in being able to weave a good tale, but in “Orange” she doesn’t do that. She paints a picture and it is a totally sweet picture where people riding bikes down a never ending hill.

She does flaunt her storytelling in this book with a couple of…I dunno…are they long poems? short stories? mini-epics? Let’s go with that last one. There are three of these and my favorite one is “Norm Macdonald” because it is about Norm Macdonald and it really seems like a day in the life of Norm Macdonald. It’s about Norm Macdonald being rich and depressed. You could read into it deeper that it’s about how rich and famous people struggle with life just the same as us normal folks and that kind of works well because Norm Macdonald is the right kind of famous where you think you could probably still relate pretty well to the man and this story helps you also feel that way. He seems to have some anxiety issues.

There are a couple of poems in here that struck me as “all right” until the final stanza and I thought “This final stanza would be an awesome poem by itself without the rest of what came before it, I mean, I realize it’s Ellen Kennedy’s choice and it’s ‘art’ and all, but man…that last stanza was just…oh man.” These two poems are “Manatees” and “Brighter and Clearer”.

Though “Orange” was my favorite, I think “How to Hold a Person” is pretty “standout” as well. Again, it seems pretty “poetic” but also pretty original and simple. “Understated” maybe, and I’ve heard that’s a good thing these days.

This book is worth it. It’s 88 pgs. of nothing less than “good” and for the most part “pretty great”. Buy it here.

So I am watching “Taken” with Liam Neeson. This was a movie I thought I might have wanted to see in theaters but never did, so I added it to my Netflix queue and waited patiently and it came the other day.
I just watched the first 20 minutes or so. The daughter just got to Paris, but I wanted to stop so I can make some play-by-plays. Let’s first talk about those first 20 minutes.

1. Liam Neeson is a good actor. He’s a great actor. But he and everyone else in this movie is overacting like if they stop acting as hard as they have ever acted in their entire acting careers a bomb will explode and kill a box full of puppies.

2. FORESHADOWING!!!!!!!!! the entire plot of the movie is spelled out in overt foreshadowing during these first 20 minutes. I mean, I knew the plot before from the previews, but now I can tell you how the whole movie will probably play out.

3. I get it. Liam Neeson’s character is AWESOME at everything he does. He has an EYE FOR DETAIL. He wraps that birthday present so tight that he seems to be walking the line between killing it and making love to it.

4. His 17-year-old daughter acts like she’s 5. Like seriously, it’s as if her brain stopped developing when she was 5 years old and she is a child trapped in a soon-to-be-adult body.

5. U2? Really?

Ok. Let’s leave it at that and press “play” again. Everything I will try to roughly time stamp. We’re starting @ 23:35

@ 26:30 Her dad can hear the footsteps of the abductors through her cell phone while she’s in a bedroom down the hall from them. He knows their there. This whole scene, up until about 28:00 is really dramatic until he starts talking through the cell phone to nobody. and then magically there is somebody on the other line.

@36:00 I might be wrong, but I don’t think there’s a magical process button like the one Mr. Neeson uses (and many shows like CSI use) that magically makes a crappy digital image all of a sudden not crappy. Especially when the image started as such a low-quality camera phone image.

@37:00 Was that the first black guy in the movie and he just got a karate chop to the throat? And he totally left finger prints all over the place.

@39.:50 Oh, the Parisian spy guy’s name is Jean-Claude. Liam Neeson’s character should have been John Smith.

@40-45:00 The whole hooker scene is probably the best yet.

@48:00 This whole shoot out is James Bond ridiculous. I guess so is the whole movie. (END OF MOVIE UPDATE: Also kind of Batman near the end.)

@51:00 This movie perpetuates the stereotype that cars are really that easy to hot wire. And this movie would be totally worth it if he just took this hooker home, with his daughter’s jacket on, and tried to convince everyone that little baby Neeson was back safe and sound. (END OF MOVIE UPDATE: Whatever happened to the hooker he saved? She probably died of starvation)

@54:54 OMG. LOL

@59:30 France? Tolerant to immigrants? HAH (END OF MOVIE UPDATE: all of the immigrants are evil or hookers in this movie. And the director is French.)

@102:40 Well, we all knew there was no way he was gonna be carrying both of those girls out alive. (END OF MOVIE UPDATE: Does he just pretend he never found the friend instead of telling them all she was found dead of a forced OD?)

Made it to 113:00 without much complaint. It was even kind of a good move for the story where it looked like Liam Neeson was about to win the day and then HE GETS KARATE CHOPPED. That’s some cumuppance if I’ve ever seen it.

@118:04 is he going to jump onto the boat? I mean, of course, but is he going to jump THE CAR onto the boat?

@120:00 No..no he just jumped onto the boat regular and went about kicking more ass.

@121:00 Cue techno music

@121:30 And only the baddest middle eastern dude, wearing the most eye liner is any match for Liam Neeson.

END
Nobody important died.
A better way to end the movie would have been if the daughter, mom and step dad all died on the drive home from LAX.
The daughter does not seem traumatized at all. Her and her friend were kidnapped, sold into slavery, drugged, her friend died and she was sold off as a high-cost virgin. Yet she is fine. That must be part of the same mental illness that keeps her mind at a 5-year-old level.

Conclusion: This is a movie about a dad trying to protect his daughter’s innocence and how he doesn’t want her to grow up but she already has and he wasn’t there for any of it. So now he goes and kills guys before she is de-virginized by a hideously obese sheik. Then he helps her realize her dream of being a singer which was her dream when she was 5-years-old.

Cinematically speaking: They were trying to make an action movie and any part of this movie that isn’t action is horrible but the action is pretty all right.