Brave Movie Review

My wife and I went with some friends to see Pixar’s Brave last night.

Not to knock the movie, because there are lots of reasons to see it and ultimately we recommend that you do, but the best part of the whole thing was the animated short that preceded the actual movie. What can I say? I still have the attention span of a six-year old. And any animation that can adequately tell a complete story without a single word of dialog is fantastic in my book. It’s called La Luna and it tells a heart-warming story about a young boy on his first day on a very unique job that is being passed down from grandfather to father to him. You have to use your imagination (as Pixar is so good at doing) to follow what’s happening, but it’s fun and it’s interesting and extremely cute. So yeah. Go see that.

And go see Brave too. But be warned, as my neighbor pointed out to us, “You need to be brave to see Brave.” It’s scary. Like more than Ursula in Little Mermaid Scary. It’s legitimately scary. There’s a recurring theme of bears throughout the movie, and as one accustomed to hanging out withand around bears, I’m not too scared of them as a whole, but the way they depict one of the bears and a few of the scenes are so intense that it’s actually pretty dang scary.

My wife thought, and I agree, that it’s more scary and intense than it is funny and cute (which is what we were going for – since that’s what we expect from Pixar).  But yeah, Merida is a great heroine. She’s as fun and rebellious as you would expect from an adolescent princess. Her shortsightedness (never trust anybody willing to grant you wishes!! I hope all of you readers know this by now. If not, here are some more examples: Arial in Little Mermaid. The Mad Hatter and the King in Once Upon a Time. Jafar in Aladdin) and stubborn pride messes everything up, and then she needs to fix it all before it becomes permanent.

The story is a little crazy – as much as I don’t need my cartoons to be realistic by any means, this one is out there. I love the wisps though. And I really wish they were in real life too. I would definitely blindly follow those into a dark forest.

The little brothers are great: predictably mischievous in all the right ways. The mom is just like your mom. So you’ll like her. And the dad is as loud and boisterous as you would hope a big jolly one-legged warrior would be.

Overall, it’s good. Worth seeing but probably not buying.

Hiking the U (Almost)

Isa and I were missing Broadway and we really wanted to go see a show, so we found a high school in West Jordan (that’s the “other side of the tracks” for those of you not from around here) that was putting on Seussical the Musical. We had never seen it, and it was only $10. So we drove down (we rented a car for the weekend) to see it.

They actually did a pretty good job. We found out that although it was held at the high school, it was put on by a community theater. So it wasn’t just high school kids. The Cat in the Hat was fun – very talented and charismatic (although I would have loved to see this on Broadway, because I think he would have been really great). Our favorite character was actually Myrtle McGirdle. She was such an expressive and fun actress. We smiled every time she came on the stage. We also liked Horton.

It finished and we drove back to Salt Lake City around 10pm. Since we had a car and it was still so nice out (about 90 degrees still, with a breeze and no humidity) we decided to drive up to the U. (Here in Utah, many of the cities put a giant letter up on the mountain that you can see for miles around. Like this:

BYU has a Y. The U (University of Utah, here in Salt Lake) has a U. There’s a B for Bountiful, a G for Pleasant Grove, and all sorts of other letters depending on where you go.

Isa and I hiked the Y when we drove through here two years ago, and it was hot and miserable and long and really just not a very good experience. But I had heard that hiking the U was much easier (for the pansies that go to the U, that makes sense). So we decided to try it. And easier it was.

You can drive pretty much right up to it. Then you take a sidewalk straight across to a road, walk for about 30 seconds, and you’re right below it. Then you need to hike up the mountain for about 100 feet. Not bad, huh?

Well we didn’t make it. The dirt on the trail was so dry and loose that our sandals couldn’t get a grip. We got about three fourths of the way there (so I was about 20 feet away from the bottom of it) and we decided to turn back. Turning around was probably the hardest part of that hike.

So if you want to hike the U, make sure you have about 5 minutes and some good sneakers.

A New Era

Well, well, well. It's been a while and things have changed a bit since we last updated you, blog. I'm sorry for our neglect, but to be fair, we've been busy. And if it makes you feel any better, we really haven’t updated facebook or foursquare either. And poor twitter has absolutely no idea what’s happening. As far as twitter is concerned, we're still relaxing with the Mayor in NYC.

So here we go.

We no longer live in New York City. (gasp!) I know. It hurts. And we miss it. As much as we try not to admit that we miss it every day, and we’re doing much better at not mentioning how much we miss it every day, the fact of the matter is that we do. There’s just no place like the City.

We’ve moved to downtown Salt Lake City. We live across from City Creek, which is a beautiful shopping center.

Instagrammed pic from inside City Creek.

We live about a two blocks from the temple, and one block from Trax. I take Trax to work every morning (we’re planning on not buying a car – that’s right Utah, it actually is possible to live here without a car).

I work for Del Sol. I’m the new Sales Training Manager. I love it. I’m overhauling everything and making it much easier to access and use the tremendous amount of sales training content we have available, with the intent on helping our stores learn and implement the skills they need to succeed in our slower economy.

I also go to school full time. Yeah, it’s kind of a busy time for me. I have one year of insanity before I never have to go to school again. Ever. I enjoy my classes so far. I’m currently taking classes in history, writing, and marketing. One of the requirements in my writing course is to maintain a blog. So here you go. Entry #1.