Five years of Movies

I have seen 140 movies and documentaries in the last five years.  I know this fact because of the lists I've been keeping on this blog - a thing I wish I'd always done.  I'd love to be able to look back at my movie list from ten or twenty years ago.  I'm sure I've forgotten so many.  

I have rated each film with one to five asterisks, (based only on my personal enjoyment of the film.) And after five years, only eleven were deemed worthy of a five asterisk rating: Doubt, The Visitor, Frozen River, UP, Julie & Julia, Iris, An Education, A Single Man, Midnight in Paris, The Flat, and Five Broken Cameras.

The films I hated and gave only one asterisk are:  Gran Torino, District 9, Inception, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, I'm Still Here, I am Love, and Blue is the Warmest Color.

So:  I only hated 7 out of 140 films.  But I only loved 11, which seems pretty low to me.  I am so often disappointed at the movies these days.  So many films are ho-hum.  

In memory of my Mom

Today is twenty years since the death of  my mom, Marie Kathleen Bocianowski. She had just turned 70.  Here are a few of my favorite photos of her:

Happy New Year

I only posted to this blog five times in 2013.  But since it seemed like I wasn't blogging at all, I'm kind-of surprised by that number.  And since this is my first post of 2014, I guess this blog isn't completely dead yet.  And I wonder how long it can exist?  Will it still be here somewhere on the internets ten years from now if I don't purposely take it down? Will it still be here in twenty years? Fifty?  I doubt that.  But who knows.

I didn't take as many creative photos last year as I usually do.  But here are some of my favorites from 2013: