Monday, November 5, 2012

Clean up time and rotten tomatoes...


Last week I was cleaning up our rental garden space, a task I much enjoy. With or without the catchy John Lennon ditty ringing in my ears, I was struck by the number of rotten green tomatoes on the ground--a product of too-tightly-packed planting (my fault), a rainy autumn, and a frost the week before. But surrounded by the gorgeous quiet of the farm fields, my mind often wanders, and I found myself mulling over the November film program that was then just taking shape.

Believe me, I wouldn't use a segue this cheesy had it not occurred in my head, full of nature's silence and bird trills (not tweets), but I was reminded of the movie website, Rotten Tomatoes. I only visit the RT site occasionally, but with the November program taking shape, if only in my mind and the pencil-scrawled page, I thought I'd see what the site was saying about our choice of titles.

Well, don't I wish this was a grade school report card (unlike my childhood report cards saying, "Peter has fine grades but he is easily distracted and his clowning-around often disrupts the class"), since most of our November titles came back with Grade A ratings from the RT site. Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Master both received 86% "fresh" ratings (as does the returning Beasts of the Southern Wild),  Arbitrage and Seven Psychopaths were 85% and the returning titles Samsara (73%) and The Intouchables (76%) were quite respectable.

I have lots of films on my must-see list this month, but when it comes time to put the Dec program together, I think I'll walk through the fields around our garden, watch the winter clouds roll in, and only go looking for rotten tomatoes after the program is finished. It would feel like "peeking" and it's more fun to compare after the program is complete.

Hey, check out our film fruit, I hear it's quite fresh.

-Peter

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