The Moya View

The Moya View

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  • The Whale: A Lot of Emotional Blubber

    The Whale: A Lot of Emotional Blubber

    Plot via IMDB: Idaho, 2016. Scarred by the profound wounds of grief and guilt, couchbound Charlie, an online writing instructor living with chronic obesity, now has a crystal-clear view of his secret intentions. And confined to his claustrophobic and musty apartment, the self-destructive shut-in has all the time in the world to contemplate the damaging…

  • Nostalgia

    Nostalgia

    They would feel it, every new moment- the echoes of who they use to be and what was once theirs-now dirty sheets caught in a dark tree.Everyday, the black river rolls by in blue remembranceand lilies float and drown in the burning stream.Here, the air hurts in the light of a browning sunand the stars…

  • Wooden Boats on the Water

    Wooden Boats on the Water

    Under familiar stars the water blesses this wooden fleet.The carvers shavings fall away, oak leaves in the wavesdrifting behind, until only jug beams remain- the last swayof city lights, torches yielding to sky, night and moon-until only water remains- water waving forever.

  • Poetry

    Poetry

    It has been said, by someone wiser than me,that poetry is a wind from God.Than why do I find such beauty in the rhyme of dirtโ€”Why do I listen to the lonely voicesof dead poetsโ€”Why do I want to excavate their bones,roll in them until they breakโ€”or burn them in the crematorium of my soulto…

  • Violent Night:  This Is One Die-Hardened Santa

    Violent Night: This Is One Die-Hardened Santa

    Plot via IMDB: When a team of mercenaries breaks into a wealthy family compound on Christmas Eve, taking everyone inside hostage, the team isn’t prepared for a surprise combatant: Santa Claus is on the grounds, and he’s about to show why this Nick is no saint Iโ€™m one of those film fans that thinks Die…

  • The Good Nurse:  Meds and Murder on the Side

    The Good Nurse: Meds and Murder on the Side

    Plot via IMDB: Amy, a compassionate nurse and single mother struggling with a life-threatening heart condition, is stretched to her physical and emotional limits by the hard and demanding night shifts at the ICU. But help arrives when Charlie, a thoughtful and empathetic fellow nurse, starts at her unit. While sharing long nights at the…

  • First Snow

    First Snow

    This is the gift the world has given him: snow in hallows on roofs, branches, streets, the long white candle on the window, burning to dusk while snow fills up the cityโ€” all these white contours filling his lifeโ€” starlight behind daylight wherever he gazes.

  • Puss in Boots- The Last Wish: Knowing the Last Cat Life Is Not Really the Final Curtain Call

    Puss in Boots- The Last Wish: Knowing the Last Cat Life Is Not Really the Final Curtain Call

    Plot via IMDB: Sadly, Puss in Boots, the undaunted Spanish lover and hero, is now down to the last of his nine lives, a decade after the events of Puss in Boots (2011). And as if that weren’t enough, the unstoppable bounty hunter known as The Big Bad Wolf is after him. To restore all…

  • Night Cat

    Night Cat

    Mine, mimes the black cat putting out his paw to her darkness. Letโ€™s walk in the wood, black eyes imply,the scent of shadows rising from him.The snow, the city, the night dissolves. Mornings to come he will purr to her face.She hears a word of fur and thinks itโ€™s love.Nights, he will slip out like…

  • Babylon: Unable to Get Past the Partying into the Art of Moviemaking

    Babylon: Unable to Get Past the Partying into the Art of Moviemaking

    Plot via IMDB; An original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled…

  • We Have a Ghost๏ฟผ: Going Beyond Spooky

    We Have a Ghost๏ฟผ: Going Beyond Spooky

    Plot via IMDB: Seeking a fresh start in Chicago, the Presley family moves into a dusty fixer-upper they soon realize comes with a catch: a ghost in the attic named Ernest (David Harbour). Despite Ernest’s attempts at scaring teenage son Kevin (Jahi Winston), the detached, music-obsessed teen soon finds a kindred spirit in this trapped…

  • Dust

    Dust

    I find it easier to collect dust than move it around from feathery place to place.Dust is history. It holds the flavors of myself.Dust contains my words.It sits on my mantle adding more specks every year,life upon life on death.I see God in its ashesโ€”He is dust and Dust is everythingIt swirls in endless ribbons…

  • Creed III: Rocky All the Way

    Creed III: Rocky All the Way

    Plot via IMDB: After dominating the boxing world, Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has been thriving in both his career and family life. When childhood friend and former boxing prodigy Damian (Jonathan Majors) resurfaces after serving a long sentence in prison, he is eager to prove that he deserves his shot in the ring. The…

  • nocturne in pastels for hibakujumoku

    nocturne in pastels for hibakujumoku

    they fall like a strange red bird in a old snare they fall  like a strange pink koi in an old net like a shadow of a Cherry blossom on a stagnant pool like a dying pearl in the depths of the East China Sea like Akiko Futaba singing forever beneath her casement these hibakujumoku…

  • Bardo: A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths- Getting Caught in Self Deceptionโ€™s Indulgent Purgatory

    Bardo: A False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths- Getting Caught in Self Deceptionโ€™s Indulgent Purgatory

    Plot via IMDB: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is an epic, visually stunning and immersive experience set against the intimate and moving journey of Silverio, a renowned Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Los Angeles, who, after being named the recipient of a prestigious international award, is compelled to return to…

  • In the realm of twilight

    In the realm of twilight

    the wind is dying in the umbral night all aroundthe small bridge becomes the canalโ€™s umbrella weaving a shy blue garment for the waters,a silvery gown across the imponderable blue the moon glides free, an argent shadowthe rain dove purls a plaintive lay, drenching the darkening streets with a drowsy kissin these hours of tears

  • Triangle of Sadness: Going Just a Little Beyond Gilliganโ€™s Island

    Triangle of Sadness: Going Just a Little Beyond Gilliganโ€™s Island

    Plot via IMDB: In Ruben ร–stlund’s wickedly funny Palme d’Or winner, social hierarchy is turned upside down, revealing the tawdry relationship between power and beauty. Celebrity model couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), are invited on a luxury cruise for the uber-rich, helmed by an unhinged boat captain (Woody Harrelson). What first appeared…

  • Tell Me Why

    Tell Me Why

    Who can tell me the name of all my lost thingsthings so small not worth rememberinglike coins gone through a hole pocketgiven by mother father to buy the sweet things of life back then my ignorance was eternalmy world my own private thoughts not ready for the mourners hymning their dead all the walking apart…

  • Megan: Just Another Grizzly American Girl Doll

    Megan: Just Another Grizzly American Girl Doll

    Plot via IMDB: When Gemma suddenly becomes the caretaker of her orphaned 8-year-old niece, Cady, Gemma’s unsure and unprepared to be a parent. Under intense pressure at work, Gemma decides to pair her M3GAN prototype with Cady in an attempt to resolve both problems-a decision that will have unimaginable consequences When youโ€™re a robot engineer…

  • The Many Shrines of Mama Cruz

    The Many Shrines of Mama Cruz

    This is not a story about my mother,not even one about your motheror grandmother. Itโ€™s about Mama Cruz,someone elseโ€™s mother or grandmother.Mama Cruz believed with all her heart that Jesus shouldnโ€™t wander far from her sight.At her small church she was the first to communion, confession and contrition.Her only sin, she knew of, was an…

  • Cocaine Bear: Zonked Out More than the Average Bear

    Cocaine Bear: Zonked Out More than the Average Bear

    Plot via IMDB: Inspired by the 1985 true story of a drug runner’s plane crash, missing cocaine, and the black bear that ate it, this wild dark comedy finds an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converging in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of cocaine…

  • An Endless Telephone Call

    An Endless Telephone Call

    I knew this pulse had traveled thru spacewith a shivery speedto reach this felt sole,these five yards of ancient twisted wires that gave it sound-striking its bell three times in mournful bursts.it was too early to hear the good news of friends.Yet, even not quite awake,I knew between the sounds of hello and goodbye my…

  • Eo: Transfiguring the Suffering of Every Living Thing

    Eo: Transfiguring the Suffering of Every Living Thing

    Plot via IMDB: The world is a mysterious place when seen through the eyes of an animal. EO, a grey donkey with melancholic eyes, meets good and bad people on his life’s path, experiences joy and pain, endures the wheel of fortune randomly turn his luck into disaster and his despair into unexpected bliss. But…

  • Stranger Miracles

    Stranger Miracles

    โ€œThere are two ways to live your life โ€“ one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.โ€โ€“ Albert Einstein Nancy was a dancer until her toes crossed.Forty years later she met a salsa teacher.โ€œI admire you. Iโ€™m going to teach you.If you try hard you can…

  • An Old Poet

    An Old Poet

    The old poet walks downs the streets of his dying city.The ancient tenements, stories upon stories of them,rise up before him. He thinks he may have inhabited them. He remembers- he built them but never inhabited them. He looks closer and the bricks are in the shape of his mothers teeth-square and right and just;the…

  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumaniaโ€” Getting Tinier and Tinier Until It Hardly Even Matters

    Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumaniaโ€” Getting Tinier and Tinier Until It Hardly Even Matters

    Plot via IMDB: Scott Lang and Hope Van Dyne, along with Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne, explore the Quantum Realm, where they interact with strange creatures and embark on an adventure that goes beyond the limits of what they thought was possible. Itโ€™s a cinematic truism that if a character says โ€œItโ€™s never over,โ€…

  • Blonde: Going too Far Up the Skirt of the Blonde Dream

    Blonde: Going too Far Up the Skirt of the Blonde Dream

    Plot via IMDB: From director Andrew Dominik, and based on the bestselling novel by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Blonde’ boldly reimagines the life of one of Hollywood’s most enduring icons, Marilyn Monroe. From her volatile childhood as Norma Jeane, through her rise to stardom and romantic entanglements, ‘Blonde’ blurs the lines of fact and fiction to…

  • We Dream Our Babies Dreams

    We Dream Our Babies Dreams

    Motherโ€™s? Fatherโ€™s? Which dreams will you acquire ?Heritage will whisper them to you. The universe its others.What you choose will steer future mothers/fathers.Just know, you will cry before you hope, will grasp for tomorrow and maybe catch a star or just dull sky.Throw the best out to the universe, the worst bury far.For now, sleep…

  • Fireflies

    Fireflies

    The spark that comes from their belly denies the darkness its dominion and reminds the rest of a shining worldhow lonely the light really is. This light is brief in a darkness vast,an echo of the quick flare of tiny planets and suns filled with the enveloping night between. These bugs spend themselves and then…

  • An Approaching Train

    An Approaching Train

    Youโ€™ll hear it, long before you feel it, feel it long before you see it.The train whistle is a glorious shriek, full of choral bass and tremble, Something that startles your skinโ€” an unexpected scream from a well-known space. Train steam splits the sky, its wheels sunder the earth. The water in its way parts,…

  • Kisses from a Dark Piazza

    Kisses from a Dark Piazza

    From shadows he blew a kiss. It blossoms, rises to my lips.โ€œIf youโ€™ll come back, kiss my walls.โ€North, South, East, West, he kisses them all. His peppermint teases my tears.I ache for this soldier once near.I am now his shadowy grace.Outside, there are geese returning to their mating place.Spring soon nears. Each new footfall brings…

  • Taking Orders at the Caffe Florian

    Taking Orders at the Caffe Florian

    For Goethe, a Decafe to help him dream.For Lord Byron, a claret in his Abbott skull mug,spiced with a tuff of pubic hair from a girl he loved.For Marcel Proust, a Corcellett with milk, a croissantbrought to him at the brisk ring of his bell. For Charles Dickens, espresso shots, next to notes on Great…

  • The Smoker

    The Smoker

    As is his habit, he smokes the rolled cigarette  down  to ashes before taking up the brush. He waits for the smoke to linger over him, for its aroma to stay in his hairโ€” the cue to push the first arc for the grey stones on the hill he so desperately wants to capture before…

  • Lyle, Lyle Crocodile: Hoping and Bopping to that Crocodile Rock

    Lyle, Lyle Crocodile: Hoping and Bopping to that Crocodile Rock

    Plot via IMDB: Follows the title reptile who lives in a house on East 88th Street in New York City. Lyle enjoys helping the Primm family with everyday chores and playing with the neighborhood kids but one neighbor insists that Lyle belongs in a zoo. Mr. Grumps and his cat, Loretta, do not like crocodiles,…

  • Travelers

    Travelers

    The train takes them, these sleepless travelers, from a land known to them, to a land unknown. from a familiar sunrise to a foreign dawn. They are moving to a new country where the roads are not filled with shadows, the skies are not thatched with rain and shattered metal doesnโ€™t block the sky.They notice…

  • Tar: Going Beyond the Counterpoint and Dissonances

    Tar: Going Beyond the Counterpoint and Dissonances

    Plot via IMDB: Women at the height of their powers and prestige can fall and be corrupted just as easily as men. That is the premise of Tar, a film directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett, as a woman who is the conductor of the most prestigious orchestra in the world, the Berlin…

  • Mirrors of Her Self

    Mirrors of Her Self

    Itโ€™s the exact opposite of herself she sees,the cast away light she canโ€™t cast away.the ugly reality that lives in her unrealitya reverse Narcissus drowning in her reflection.The things she hates are all there- and also all the things she loves.All she has to do is look awayand it will vanish from her sight.Yet, she…

  • Girl Really Crying

    Girl Really Crying

    She looks out of the corners of her eyeswondering whether to flee or stay.She had been a punching bag before, but this is much worse. This is not shame.It is fear. A fear grown deep in her heart and soul.Her tears are almost real,jagged specters of her inside-not part, yet part of this comic book…

  • Down Swing

    Down Swing

    Iโ€™m too old to swing in the air,let the wind blow my hair wild.I have grown beyond childish things. Gravity-time has chained me here.Now, I hold all of my fears dear,huddled in all my tears to care.This cheap pipe playground has rusted,lasting just one trusted summer.Childless, Iโ€™m not my motherโ€™s peer. She exists all dead…

  • Empire of Light:  Living Within the Flickering Light

    Empire of Light: Living Within the Flickering Light

    Plot via IMDB: Hilary (Olivia Colman) is a cinema manager struggling with her mental health, and Stephen (Micheal Ward) is a new employee longing to escape the provincial town where he faces daily adversity. Together they find a sense of belonging and experience the healing power of music, cinema, and community. Empire of Light takes…

  • Sunflowers Flash Bye

    Sunflowers Flash Bye

    In my car, I speed by a field of sunflowers following the light as the sun follows them,  their life with me over in the flash of an eye, leaving only remembered halos in the shadows of buzzing bees whose journey, like mine, will be over by dayโ€™s end.

  • Parrots Call the Colors of a 1000 Names Remembered

    Parrots Call the Colors of a 1000 Names Remembered

    They meet everyday in the vermillion walltender colors of viridescent and lapis lazuli thatcaress the blood before it stains then fades,calling the colors of a thousand names rememberedThey drop their cracked seeds to be mashed into the mud of the cobbled street belowpreening each otherโ€™s feather to a quiet array,moaning softly, butting heads in ritual…

  • Be Anita and Not Maria from Westside Story

    Be Anita and Not Maria from Westside Story

    All the Puerto Rican girls from my neighborhood, way back in the early 1960โ€™s wanted to be Anitafrom West Side Story- a chica, with caliente legs,red Cutex lips, golden earrings and suave dance moves.To be Maria, the heroine, was to be their mothersโ€”boring, white dresses and crucifixes, Ave Mariaโ€™s tied up in a simple demure…

  • Van Goghโ€™s Last Self Portrait

    Van Goghโ€™s Last Self Portrait

    He lost the battle in the cornfields when the sky gave the crows a victory.โ€œWhat will be left of me,โ€ he thought.โ€œMy sorrow will last forever,โ€ his last words.He walked the starless streets of Auver a pencil, sketchbook in hand and drew nothing. The rows of lamplights receded, becoming walls of yellow clay.At home, he…

  • An Old Couple Happily Waiting

    An Old Couple Happily Waiting

    Theyโ€™ve been evicted, this old couple sitting outside, watching tv through the open window of the house across.A mystery is on. Theyโ€™re waiting to be murdered, or so they think. Their son will be there soon, maybe.Heโ€™ll bring them food, hopefully. They sit, waiting happily for the ambulanceโ€™s arrival.

  • To Leslie:  An Honest and Worthy Oscar Performance of One Personโ€™s Sobriety Journey

    To Leslie: An Honest and Worthy Oscar Performance of One Personโ€™s Sobriety Journey

    Plot via IMDB: Having squandered every single dime of her lottery winnings on liquor and drugs, defeated West Texas single mother Leslie Rowlands finds her way back home six years after the life-altering event. But now the money is gone, the already few friends are lost, and her long-suffering family has moved on with their…

  • Women Talking:  Getting to Exodus

    Women Talking: Getting to Exodus

    Plot via IMDB Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave. In 2010, the women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling a brutal reality with their faith. โ€œWhat follows is an act of female imagination,โ€ is the opening title card to Sarah Polleyโ€™s talking debate drama Women Talking. The eight Mennonite woman gathered in…

  • Battling Moby Dick

    Battling Moby Dick

    White whale, white demon you go down, yeah.Dive down, till the Ocean cries, โ€œStop!โ€But yeah shall not stop, not even at hell.Fire be jealous of flame. Alit it must reach higher.Yeah will beat your head against the jagged rocks until that dead manโ€™s itch leaves yeah thoughts,blinding everything until all above yeah is blind,until that…

  • Masks Strolling Veniceโ€™s Square

    Masks Strolling Veniceโ€™s Square

    A rogue with a stitched mouth steals bye,swiping a pearl from the porcelain womangazing adoringly at the moon-face lothario. The false Pope blesses the crying baptized child that Godfather death holds in his hands.The masks float along the Venice squaresinging dead languages, hiding their selvesin the faces of gods and goddesses sighing.

  • All Quiet on the Western Front: Getting Beyond 1917

    All Quiet on the Western Front: Getting Beyond 1917

    Plot via IMDB A young German soldier’s terrifying experiences and distress on the western front during World War I. All Quiet on the Western Front, Germanyโ€™s official Oscar submission, echoes not only its Erich Maria Remarque source novel, but Sam Mendes, 1917, another World War I film. This is the first German language version of…

  • Rain

    Rain

    I have known other rainsRain destroyed my world (once) and will end itโ€” with other rain I am a man in rain beyond home The name of this is not mine but the rainโ€™s My world is called rain Itโ€™s the distance from home Yet, after each one after removing colors it resettles my world,…

  • Autumn Leaves

    Autumn Leaves

    The leaves gift an elegy to the earth below.The generous winds scatter them afar.Old berries fall for the new buds bloom.Silence yields to the rattle all around.The poetry of spring is being written, re-vised with each withered branch renewed.Silver fringed hope is pushing through.Autumn is passing with each sunbeam.

  • Walking Her Bicycle Back Home, Alone

    Walking Her Bicycle Back Home, Alone

    Oh, child of mine, Iโ€™ve come back toreclaim your most precious thing from that blue ravine off the stone road.I lack the steadiness and pulse of movementto ride it home.So, I walk it back totally alone now,remembering those first unsteady lessonsuntil you found the perfect balance to peddle this silver dreambeyond my steady support.I will…

  • Aftersun:  Building to All Our Mournful Memories

    Aftersun: Building to All Our Mournful Memories

    Plot via IMDB Sophie reflects on the shared joy and private melancholy of a holiday she took with her father twenty years earlier. Memories real and imagined fill the gaps between as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn’t. AfterSun, a subtle debut feature from Charlotte Wells, shows how…

  • Amidst the Whiteness All Around

    Amidst the Whiteness All Around

    They came lighting up the white pasture once greenโ€” the bagpipes of their bleating filling the center, until the snow is thick with sheep, the sun shining over their plump bodies in the winter mist.

  • Old Stagecoach

    Old Stagecoach

    I came upon it almost hidden in the grass,leaning against bluff, amongst fallen boulders,prideful and wizened in the fading sunlight, easy to see how it once thundered plains, prairies.The boy who drove it is dead, no longerdreaming of the new town at the next stop,no longer seeing wonder in the buffalo dustingall around him, knowing…

  • Waiting Boats

    Waiting Boats

    Two boats nested close to each other on the shorewait for those to sail them outthe tide to feel their steady hand the wind to love their backto love them backto turn with the wind and turn them back to the waiting shore

  • Blasted Oaks in the Snow

    Blasted Oaks in the Snow

    The oaks split into shaggy specters.Until it snowed again, they stood. They came, cut them down,limbs yielding to their will, the thinner branches whittled to finely crafted switches,to beat the children who live in the puritanical world.

  • Brute Force

    Brute Force

    The blood wiped from her face evaporates into red smoke that always trails behind her. The first inhale before it fades awayattaches to all her memories.Her walls are now painted in crimson and white stripes.She looks upward and heaven drips blood drops.She looks downward. Hellโ€™s crimson river flows.The accusing arrows have her eyes as points.…

  • Sundance:  The Tuba Thieves

    Sundance: The Tuba Thieves

    Plot via Sundance:A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, d/Deaf first-time feature director Alison Oโ€™Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where soundโ€™s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story…

  • Sundance:  Mami Wata

    Sundance: Mami Wata

    Plot via Sundance:In the oceanside village of Iyi, the revered Mama Efe (Rita Edochie) acts as an intermediary between the people and the all-powerful water deity Mami Wata. But when a young boy is lost to a virus, Efeโ€™s devoted daughter Zinwe (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) and skeptical protรฉgรฉ Prisca (Evelyne Ily Juhen) warn Efe about unrest…

  • Devilโ€™s Marbles

    Devilโ€™s Marbles

    Karlu Karlu โ€œRound Bouldersโ€ the Warumungu people say it,becomes โ€œDevilโ€™s Marblesโ€ when the Aussie folks pray it. Millions of years these stones crack balancing earth-sky in their stack.

  • Why She Only Wears Louboutins

    Why She Only Wears Louboutins

    Goat skin, satin in a silk embrace, red soles sexy as the devilโ€™s smile, requiring  adjustments of posture for the right walk.

  • Sundance:  When It Melts

    Sundance: When It Melts

    Plot via Sundance:Eva struggles with human connection. Now that her younger sister Tess is moving out, and long estranged from her neglectful parents, the fragile Eva is finally truly alone. Already reeling, sheโ€™s instinctively revulsed by a social media post announcing the memorial celebration for a long-passed childhood friend. She emotionally recalls her sensitive 13-year-old…

  • Sundance:  Girl

    Sundance: Girl

    Plot via Sundance:Mother-daughter duo Grace and Ama have established a deep bond thatโ€™s protected them from outsiders, but as they start anew in Glasgow, things begin to change. Amaโ€™s burgeoning puberty and curiosity set off reminders of a past that 24-year-old Grace has been running from. The comforting fairytale-like origin story that Grace has been…

  • Sundance:  Scrapper

    Sundance: Scrapper

    Plot via Sundance:Following her motherโ€™s death, a resourceful 12-year-old girl, Georgie (Lola Campbell), continues to live alone in their London-outskirts flat. She makes money stealing bikes with her friend, Ali (Alin Uzun), and keeps the social workers off her back by pretending to live with an uncle. It works like a charm until Jason (Harris…

  • Sundance:  La Pecera (The Fishbowl)

    Sundance: La Pecera (The Fishbowl)

    Plot via Sundance:After years of remission, Noeliaโ€™s cancer has returned and is spreading quickly. Exhausted by relentless treatment plans and pills that do more harm than good, she seeks another way out. Brushing aside her boyfriend Jorgeโ€™s well-meaning but suffocating gestures, she heads back to Vieques, the blissful eastern Puerto Rican island where she grew…

  • Sundance:  Mama Cruz

    Sundance: Mama Cruz

    Plot via Sundance:Devoutly religious Cruz leads a routine existence with her husband and precocious granddaughter Viky, while her daughter Carlota chases her dream of becoming a professional dancer in Vienna. A single errant click while attempting to navigate the internet momentarily exposes Cruz to online pornography. Sheโ€™s mortified but suddenly reminded of her own desires.…

  • Sundance:  Slow

    Sundance: Slow

    Plot via Sundance:Contemporary dancer Elena meets Dovydas when he is assigned to interpret via sign language in a class she is teaching to deaf youth. Their connection is immediate, kinetic, and frictionless. As they gravitate toward each other, resisting the forces and interventions of their separate daily lives, their bond deepens from platonic to romantic.…

  • Sundance:  Bad Behaviour

    Sundance: Bad Behaviour

    Plot via Sundance:Lucy seeks enlightenment. The former child actress makes a pilgrimage to join her guru, Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw), for a silent retreat at a beautiful mountain resort with a Tesla-crammed parking lot. Before she shuts off her phone to the world, Lucy reaches out to her daughter, Dylan โ€” a stunt person training…

  • Sundance:  Animalia

    Sundance: Animalia

    Plot via Sundance:Heavily pregnant Itto looks forward to a day of peace and quiet when she gets her affluent household mostly to herself after her husband, Amine, goes away on business. Sheโ€™s quickly lost sight of her modest origins and has adapted to her new familyโ€™s detached opulence. But when a mysterious state of emergency…

  • Sundance:  Heroic

    Sundance: Heroic

    Plot via Sundance:Eighteen-year-old Luis (Santiago Sandoval Carbajal) enlists as an infantry cadet in the Heroic Military College in the hopes of becoming an officer and supporting his struggling family. Tucked away in the mountains and surrounded by statues honoring Aztec gods, the school is constructed from giant slabs of stone and ruled by even more…

  • Sundance:  All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

    Sundance: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt

    Plot via SundanceTender caresses and enveloping embraces are portals into the life of Mack, a Black woman in Mississippi. Winding through the anticipation, love, and heartbreak she experiences from childhood to adulthood, the expressionist journey is an ode to connection โ€” with loved ones and with place. Review notes: All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt…

  • Sundance: A Thousand and One

    Sundance: A Thousand and One

    Plot via SundanceStruggling but unapologetically living on her own terms, Inez is moving from shelter to shelter in mid-1990s New York City. With her 6-year-old son Terry in foster care and unable to leave him again, she kidnaps him so they can build their life together. As the years go by, their family grows and…

  • Sundance:  The Starling Girl

    Sundance: The Starling Girl

    Plot via Sundance:Seventeen-year-old Jem Starling struggles to define her place within her fundamentalist Christian community in rural Kentucky. Even her greatest joy โ€” the church dance group โ€” is tempered by worry that her love of dance is actually sinful, and sheโ€™s caught between a burgeoning awareness of her own sexuality and an instinctive resistance…

  • Sundance: Fair Play

    Sundance: Fair Play

    Plot via SundanceHot off the heels of their new engagement, thriving New York couple Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) canโ€™t get enough of each other. When a coveted promotion at a cutthroat financial firm arises, supportive exchanges between the lovers begin to sour into something more sinister. As the power dynamics irrevocably shift…

  • Sundance: Fancy Dance

    Sundance: Fancy Dance

    Plot via SundanceSince her sisterโ€™s disappearance, Jax (Lily Gladstone) has cared for her niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) by scraping by on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma. Every spare minute goes into finding her missing sister while also helping Roki prepare for an upcoming powwow. At the risk of losing custody to Jaxโ€™s father, Frank (Shea…

  • The Squirrel Holds Tight the Acorn

    The Squirrel Holds Tight the Acorn

    When I looked again, the squirrel with the acorn was gone, perhaps vanishing behind the trees.Minutes later, I noticed her gray shadow.She moved to me then ran the other way.In her fright, she did not notice the car, and the car did not notice her. For the driver, the squish could of have been another…

  • Sundance:  Mutt

    Sundance: Mutt

    Plot via Sundance:Feรฑa, a young trans guy bustling through life in New York City, is afflicted with an incessantly challenging day that resurrects ghosts from his past. Laundromats, subway turnstiles, and airport transfers are the hectic background to this emotional drama that overlaps past, present, and future. Settling the disharmony of transitional upheaval in relationships…

  • Putting Marbles Away

    Putting Marbles Away

    Oh, I wish I could hear the sound of marblesbut my world exists in silence and sight. So I watch my Grandkids collide and scatterthem on the old wooden floorboards.When I put them in their jar, I delight in their smoothness and coolness.They form layers of iridescent swirls, rainbows that light up my worn world.

  • Cup of Light

    Cup of Light

    I watch the light filter through the sky, touch the grass. It moves thru the window forming a yellow light in the glass on the table. Barely glimpsed, it moves again, almost touching the room where you are dying.

  • Sundance:  The Accidental Getaway Driver

    Sundance: The Accidental Getaway Driver

    Plot via Sundance:Long, a Vietnamese driver in Southern California, answers a late-night call for a ride. Already in his pajamas, he reluctantly accepts, picking up a man, Tรขy, and his two companions. But the men, recently escaped convicts from an Orange County jail, take Long hostage at gunpoint, thrusting him into their getaway plan. When…

  • Sundance: Magazine Dreams

    Sundance: Magazine Dreams

    Plot via SundanceKillian Maddox lives with his ailing veteran grandfather, obsessively working out between court-mandated therapy appointments and part-time shifts at a grocery store where he harbors a crush on a friendly cashier. Though Killianโ€™s struggles to read social cues and maintain control of his volatile temper amplify his sense of disconnection amid a hostile…

  • Sundance:  Shortcomings

    Sundance: Shortcomings

    Plot via Sundance:Ben, a struggling filmmaker, lives in Berkeley, California, with his girlfriend, Miko, who works for a local Asian American film festival. When heโ€™s not managing an art house movie theater as his day job, Ben spends his time obsessing over unavailable blond women, watching Criterion Collection DVDs, and eating in diners with his…

  • Sundance: Theater Camp

    Sundance: Theater Camp

    Plot via Sundance:As summer rolls around again, kids are gathering from all over to attend AdirondACTS, a scrappy theater camp in upstate New York thatโ€™s a haven for budding performers. After its indomitable founder Joan (Amy Sedaris) falls into a coma, her clueless โ€œcrypto-broโ€ son Troy (Jimmy Tatro) is tasked with keeping the thespian paradise…

  • Fragile Fleeting Light

    Fragile Fleeting Light

    Itโ€™s the weak light that remains in memoryโ€” the fragile fleeting light that stays an ephemeral moment behind gray storm clouds, rosy dawns, rainbows, streaking like a meteorโ€” and is goneโ€ฆ

  • Sundance: Short Film Program 1; Six Shorts

    Sundance: Short Film Program 1; Six Shorts

    Help Me Understand Plot: Six women must come to a consensus on a detergent brand scent. Review notes: There are heavy shadings of 12 Angry Men in the dozen brand testing panel women futilely trying to turn the mind of the lone hold out. As the stakes gets higher, the frustrations more real, the claws…

  • Raise the Red Lantern, Take Down the Blue Lantern

    Raise the Red Lantern, Take Down the Blue Lantern

    The wooden shutters must be flung opento scatter the doves on the ledge to the sky.Hang up that red lantern long reserved for all.Put it in the brightest spot to release the most joy.Take down that old blue lantern put up on the eaveswhen Mว”qฤซn (Mother) flower began to wilt in winter. for today, she…

  • Reflecting on Where Sheโ€™s Going

    Reflecting on Where Sheโ€™s Going

    She thinks of Questions of Travel,caught in her green box of reflection.More of the gold palms of a Sydney Beachor again to Sri Lanka to see her mother?Her work, just like her past, is a neat stackof books, in earth and ocean tones.She must turn her back to being Down in the City, The Lost…

  • A Man Called Otto:  Tom Hanks Gets a Little G(r)umpy

    A Man Called Otto: Tom Hanks Gets a Little G(r)umpy

    Plot (Sony Pctures):Based on the # 1 New York Times bestseller โ€œA Man Called Ove,โ€ A Man Called Otto tells the story of Otto Anderson (Tom Hanks), a grump who no longer sees purpose in his life following the loss of his wife. Otto is ready to end it all, but his plans are interrupted…

  • Rain

    Rain

    The rain creates its own ballet starting with a lone figure  holding an umbrella in the fog splashing teardrops with her feet . . .

  • The Bridge

    The Bridge

    The bridge hides its sorrows.The daylight dilutes the fear of falling.Underneath the river flows,no one seeing its blackness,nor the mixing and depositing of everything that has cried.

  • Missing: Google How to Overwrite a Thriller

    Missing: Google How to Overwrite a Thriller

    Plot (from Wikipedia)When her mother disappears while on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, June’s search for answers is hindered by international red tape. Stuck thousands of miles away in Los Angeles, June creatively uses all the latest technology at her fingertips to try and find her before it’s too late. However, as she…

  • A Not So Beautiful List of Beautiful Things

    A Not So Beautiful List of Beautiful Things

    Nothing is more beautiful than beauty that is gone:the unknown side effect that leaves blue stitches in the cheekthe moment that Marilyn Monroe stops playing the dumb blondeto Dougherty, DiMaggio, Miller andallows her beauty mark to be memory,roses wilting in the sunand melting in the snow,the purple flash among the green that leaves sun spots…

  • Kekkon hirลen no shashin (the wedding party photo)

    Kekkon hirลen no shashin (the wedding party photo)

    Hahaoya: The red Camilla/ living the noble death of love/ amongst daughterโ€™s sky. Chลjo: Red spider lily/ lives in the web of neglect/ to eat butterfly. Ichibanshita no musume: A chrysanthemum/ blooms amongst all the flowers/ that have turned black.Hanayome: The cherry blossom/ hopes her short bloom will not wilt/ in the red stringโ€™s cutting.Japanese…

  • He Creates the Sax for Her

    He Creates the Sax for Her

    She brings his instrument all together: a reedy tongue golden viper that fits his fingers. She is his night. And she dances for him, caressing him until the night is jazz and he is jazzโ€” his only music.

  • Golden Lanterns

    Golden Lanterns

    Golden lanterns created  under fluorescent lights  are manufactured solely for this lucky night-   the twelfth day, the first month of Buddhaโ€™s delight- to escape tungsten binds and be decaying satellites.

  • She Supposes

    She Supposes

    She supposes a life beyond this wooden bench,this windswept summer day, this clear blue bay with fur seals mewling on the distant rocks.What will her husband, father, kids do if she dies? Nearby, a boy and girl are playing in the sandy grass.Just watching, a father and son, on another bench,weโ€™re talking sports, memories of…

  • Fathers and Friends

    Fathers and Friends

    He cradled her from birth, first steps.And he carried her to death, last steps.One was once her father. The other was her life mate.After her funeral , on this bench,they talked and commiserated.Ever since, their bench talks grew tomore kids, sports, small memories of her. This poem has a mirror poem- She Supposes. https://themoyaview.com/2023/01/20/she-supposes/

  • Walking the Dead Beach

    Walking the Dead Beach

    1The beach evaporates into the clouds and on sandsbeyond hourglasses, I walkโ€”under a dry and empty sky,a blue that doesnโ€™t exist, a white that has died inside.The dark and light hereare not things. The beach is a negative of souls. I try to imagine a life before the dry,perhaps a lover,someone besides me,to sleep in…

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