SOLTuesday: Traveling, Movie-Going, and Not Quite Getting Lost in Hawaii

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            Two weeks ago I flew to Hawaii to get away from New York City’s cold weather. The two Tuesdays I was there, I went to the movies.

            The Doris Duke Theater at the Honolulu Academy of Art was showing the three sets of Oscar-nominated shorts – live action, documentary, and animation – and that first Tuesday my friend and I went to see the live action shorts. I wrote a Slice about the film I liked the best, Enemies Within, last week, but it doesn’t seem to be available online, and neither are Timecode, a peek into the secret dancing life of parking garage security guards in Spain, or Silent Nights, about a volunteer working with immigrants in Copenhagen who falls in love with one of them, without knowing all the facts of his life. The winner, Sing, can be watched here.  And The Woman and the High-speed Train, a fable about a baker in Switzerland who waves to the train that passes her house every day for 30 years and begins to correspond with the conductor, can be purchased for $2.99 on iTunes.

            The following Tuesday I saw Hidden Figures, which I loved and now have the book to see what else I can learn about these remarkable women.

            This film I went to on my own. I had no problem finding the mall theater, but returning, I took one wrong turn after another. The first time I turned right instead of left, and almost immediately knew it was wrong. But the highway here was two lanes with no place to pull over and make a U-turn. I had to go more than a mile before the next intersection, where I could get turned around. But then there was the three-highway crossing, and again, I followed the wrong signs. It took me a bit longer to realize I was on the wrong highway, and again, I had to travel almost 10 miles before I reached a turning point.

            Oahu is divided by a range of volcanic mountains; the friend I was staying with and the mall showing Hidden Figures  were on the windward side, while Honolulu is on the leeward side. When I reached the long tunnel going through the mountains, I knew I was on my way to Honolulu. Eventually, I reached an intersection and could get back to the other side and the town of Kailua.  And I was passing beautiful vistas, which, since I was driving, I couldn’t take pictures of.

            The whole enterprise made me rethink the value of letting Google Maps tell me how to get from one strange place to another, and I used it on my new iPhone a few days later when I had to get to the airport with my rental car. Hurray for technology!

SOLSC Day 15: YouTubing

Daughter C. and her partner, R, came over for dinner tonight. I made a West African chicken stew with peanut butter — delicious.

            Between dinner and dessert, we showed each other Oscar-nominated animated shorts on YouTube. C. showed me The Blue Umbrella, which is sweetly sentimental and cleverly shows how many inanimate objects can look like faces.  I showed them Destino, a Dali-Disney collaboration from 1946 that was never completed until Disney’s nephew unearthed it in 1999, had it completed, and it was nominated in 2003. Surreal visuals and a haunting song make this something I could watch over and over.

            These Oscar-nominated shorts, the animated and live action, can usually be seen only if you’re an Academy voter or are lucky enough to live in New York City or L.A., where they are sometimes shown in the weeks before and after the Academy Awards. But YouTube has many of them, either whole or trailers. Check them out.