AVALON - A Great Film

Yesterday, Easter Sunday was a pleasant and peaceful day. We had omelette and pancake braekfast at Woodbury Friends Meeting, after which I went to my sister Susan's house. She rents a bungalow on Platt's Farm, so a visit there is Spring is a special treat: all the trees are in bloom, the chickens are running around, the rooster crowing, and happy people shopping for their spring gardens.

After a delicious ham and potato salad traditional meal (I am vegetarian, so I only ate the potato salad) we had dessert of Pisker's Easter Egg Cake and NY stule cheesecake! Delicious.

When I got home, I decided to watch Avalon, about which I had been thinking for a couple of weeks. It is one of my all time, top ten favorite movies. The writing, by Barry Levinson, is brilliant, evocative, profound. The acting Armin Mueller Stahl plays Sam, the main character, is superb, and at 93 is still alive. The film was nominated for nearly every catagory in the Oscars, and many of the other awards like the Golden Globes as well. To me it is the quintessential portrait of the rise and decline of the 20th Century. All the hopes and exuberance, the shiny metal flake dreams of the post-war era are brilliantly filmed in this loving portrait of a time, a place, a family. I have wateched this film many times over the 35 years since it came out in 1990 and it always makes me smile and cry. It is my childhood. It is all our childhoods, those of us born in the first half of the 20th Century. And in it. in Sam's decline, is ours as well as the world in which we lived.

The writer/director, Barry Levinson is still writing and direction and I saw another of his tv series awhile back, The Kominsky Method.

If you want a heartwarming, thoughtprovoking, and touching film experience, you can rent AVALON for 3.99 on Amazon prime. I thinkit is a masterpiece.

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoocom (if you wish to comment, please use my e-mail as the comments section on blogspot is polluted and clogged with spam, thanks!)