MFU Short Stories

I haven't been watching as many movies, mainly I think because my husband stopped working. But the two weeks I spent in Phoenix with my sister more than made up for it. She just loves watching movies!


MOVIES WATCHED IN JANUARY

Jan 24 - The Rip (2026)
A group of Miami cops discovers a stash of millions in cash, leading to distrust as outsiders learn about the huge seizure, making them question who to rely on.
Director: Joe Carnahan
Stars: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun

Not bad. I probably enjoyed it more than I normally do these types of movies. For some reason I like seeing Ben Affleck.

Jan 31 - In Bruges (2008)
After a job gone wrong, hitman Ray and his partner await orders from their ruthless boss in Bruges, Belgium, the last place in the world Ray wants to be.
Director: Martin McDonagh
Stars: Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Ciarán Hinds, Ralph Fiennes

Very strange movie. I was pretty disappointed, as I’ve come to expect more from the Gleeson/Farrell match-up.


MOVIES WATCHED IN FEBRUARY

Feb 7 - As Good As it Gets (1997)
A single mother and waitress, a misanthropic author, and a gay artist form an unlikely friendship after the artist is assaulted in a robbery.
Director: James L. Brooks
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, Greg Kinnear, Cuba Gooding Jr., Shirley Knight, Jill the Dog

And oldie but goodie I enjoyed watching. A great movie with an excellent cast. Certainly better than Titanic to which it lost Best Picture.

Feb 21 - Life of Chuck (2024)
A life-affirming, genre-bending story about three chapters in the life of an ordinary man named Charles Krantz.
Director: Mike Flanagan
Stars: Tom Hiddleston, Jacob Tremblay, Benjamin Pajak, Mark Hamill

Loved this movie. I didn’t remember the story, it’s been so long since I read it, but I was not disappointed with the movie. Hiddleston is always great.

MOVIES WATCHED IN MARCH

Mar 17 - The Dresser (1983)
Personal assistant Norman struggles to get deteriorating veteran actor, known to others as Sir, through a difficult performance of King Lear.
Director: Peter Yates
Stars: Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Edward Fox

Now this was a really strange movie. Though nominally about the dresser, Albert Finney as “Sir” steals the show.

Mar 17 - Sleepless In Seattle (1993)
A recently widowed man's son calls a radio talk-show in an attempt to find his father a partner.
Director: Nora Ephron
Stars: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Ross Malinger, Bill Pulman, David Hyde Pierce, Rosie O’Donnell, Rób Reiner, Rita Wilson, Victor Garber

Another movie I’ve watched several times over the years and enjoyed every time.


Mar 19 - Hoppers (2026)
A 19-year-old animal lover uses technology that places her consciousness into a robotic beaver to uncover mysteries within the animal world beyond her imagination.
Director: Daniel Chong
Stars (voices): Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Meryl Streep

Very pleasantly surprised by this one. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Cute, but with a message.

Mar 21, 22 - The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)
Edmond Dantes, a sailor falsely accused of treason, is imprisoned in the Château d'If off Marseille. After escaping, and adopting the identity of the Count of Monte Cristo, he plans revenge against those who wrongly accused him.
Stars: Sam Claflin, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Ana Girardot, Jeremy Irons

I’ve never read the book, so I’m not sure how close this adaption followed it. The ending was different from the 1975 version, but I still enjoyed it. Apparently the book is so long that it would be almost impossible to film the entire thing.

Mar 22 - Cadillac Records (2008)
Chronicles the rise of Chess Records and its recording artists.
Director: Darnell Martin
Stars: Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé

I’d never heard of this record company, but it sounds something like a forerunner to Motown. An interesting movie.

Mar 23 - EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025)
Follows Elvis Presley, featuring never-before-seen footage and recordings.
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Stars: Elvis Presley, James Burton, Glen D. Hardin

I liked that there was quite a bit of footage of Elvis on a personal level, so that the viewer gets a more complete picture of him, not just as a performer.

Mar 24 - Nuremberg (2025)
A WWII psychiatrist evaluates Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Göring.
Director: James Vanderbilt
Stars: Rami Malek, Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Colin Hanks

I didn’t know about this side of the trials. It’s a long movie, but well worth watching. Malek and Crowe are exceptional.

Mar 24 - Stronger (2017)
Stronger is the inspiring real life story of Jeff Bauman, an ordinary man who captured the hearts of his city and the world to become a symbol of hope after surviving the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Director: David Gordon Green
Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany, Miranda Richardson

An interesting biopic. I don’t remember hearing anything about Bauman before, though. It being a Gyllenhaal movie, my sister insisted on watching it…again.

Mar 24 - Spotlight (2025)
The true story of how the Boston Globe uncovered the massive scandal of child molestation and cover-up within the local Catholic Archdiocese, shaking the entire Catholic Church to its core.
Director: Tom McCarthy
Stars: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Liev Schreiber

One of my favorite movies. Great story with a truly excellent cast.

Mar 25 - Hamnet (2025)
In late 16th-century England, Agnes, a healer sensitive to the world around her, builds a home with William, a local tutor and aspiring playwright. As their lives fracture, they are tested by distance, silence, and grief.
Director: Chloé Zhao
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Zac Wishart

I’d read the book so really wanted to see the movie. It’s truly excellent how the characters and their grief are portrayed.

Mar 25 - Coco, (2017)
Aspiring musician Miguel, confronted with his family's ancestral ban on music, enters the Land of the Dead to find his great-great-grandfather, a legendary singer.
Directors: Adrian MolinaLee Unkrich
Stars: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt. Edward James Olmos

One of those “we have to watch this movie” whenever I visit Phoenix. It’s so well done.

Mar 27 - How to Train Your Dragon (2025)
As an ancient threat endangers both Vikings and dragons alike on the isle of Berk, the friendship between Hiccup, an inventive Viking, and Toothless, a Night Fury dragon, becomes the key to both species forging a new future together.
Director: Dean DeBlois
Stars: Mason Thames, Nico Parker, Gerard Butler

I’d heard some not quite good reviews about the movie, mostly because the storyline is basically the same as the animated version. I didn’t have a problem with that. In fact, I felt more empathy for Hiccup as a real person than I didn’t as an animated character.

Mar 29 - Ben Hur (1959)
A Jewish prince is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend in 1st-century Jerusalem, but it's not long before he regains his freedom and comes back for revenge.
Director: William Wyler
Stars: Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Stephen Boyd, Sam Jaffe

Sort of in the middle when it comes to a “sword and sandal” movie. I’d read that Boyd had been asked to play the role as if he and Hur had been lovers as boys. I could sort of see it. The dramatic ending when Hur is reunited with his mother, sister, and love interest took a humorous turn when my brother yelled out “Group hug!”

Mar 30 - One Battle After Another (2025)
When their enemy resurfaces after 16 years, a group of ex-revolutionaries reunite to rescue the daughter of one of their own.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Teyana Taylor

It took me awhile to get into this movie, but once I did I really enjoyed it. The characters are certainly unique with a story line that surprises.

A major new history from the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, on how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In this daring and important work, our most trusted voice on the founding era reckons with the realities and regrets of our founding and the tragedy of its two great the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal.

“How does it appear in the sight-of-heaven,” wrote Samuel Hopkins of Newport, “that these States, who have been fighting for liberty, cannot agree in any political constitution unless it indulge and authorize them to enslave their fellow men.”

On the eve of the American Revolution, half a million enslaved African Americans, many in place for several generations, were permanently embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, even as the thirteen colonies armed themselves to defend against the idea of being governed without consent. This paradox gave birth to what one of our most trusted and admired historians, Joseph J. Ellis, calls the “American Dilemma.” How could a government that had been fought for and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalize slavery? How could it permit a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to mean claiming Indian land?

In The Great Contradiction, Ellis, with narrative grace and a flair for irony and paradox, addresses the questions that lie at America’s twisted roots—questions that turned even the sharpest minds of the revolutionary generation into mental contortionists. He discusses the first debates around slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, from the Constitutional Convention to the Treaty of New York, revealing the thinking and rationalizations behind Jay, Hamilton, and Madison’s revisions of the Articles of Confederation, and highlights the key role of figures like Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and Creek chief Alexander McGillivray.

Ellis writes with candor and deftness, his clarion voice rising above presentist historians and partisans, who are eager to make the founders into trophies in the ongoing culture wars. Instead, Ellis tells a story that is rooted in the coexistence of grandeur and failure, brilliance and blindness, grace and sin.

For such a short book, it delves into two of the most intriguing questions of the Revolution: why was slavery permitted to continue, and why the indigenous population’s removal allowed. They would be the two greatest failures of the revolutionary generation.

Though more of the book focuses on the subject of slavery, both issues are given thorough examination, being the “great contradiction” of the American founding and early history. The founders would declare that all men are created equal, while preserving slavery. They would declare their freedom from a tyranny that they would then use to allow the genocide of the indigenous population.

One can argue that the Union could never have been created if the southern colonies had not been allowed to keep their slaves. That the new government didn’t have the martial strength to hold back the tide of rapacious settlers as they swarmed over native land. Both are true. But not only would nothing be done about the issues, but laws would be passed that would make both issues worse.

The main characters on both sides of each issue are examined. Their motives would be concisely analyzed to the best of the author’s knowledge. It would seem that the contradiction was both political and personal.

The book is a truly compelling read.




Mount TBR 2026 Book Links


Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.

1. The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
2. Four Past Midnight by Stephen King
3. The Possession of Alba Díaz by Isabel Cañas
4. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon/a>
5. Moon Flower by James P. Hogan
6. The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H.W. Brands
7. Fires of Eden by Dan Simmons
8. Clytemnestra's Bind (House of Atreus 1) by Susan C Wilson
9. Glory and the Lightning. by Taylor Caldwell
10. Into the Ice: The Northwest Passage, the Polar Sun, and a 175-Year-Old Mystery by Mark Synnott
11. Regeneration (Regeneration 1) by Pat Barker
12. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
13. A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher
14. Thinner by Richard Bachman
15. The Voyage Home (Women of Troy #3) by Pat Barker
16. The Girl in the Green Glass Mirror by Elizabeth McGregor
17. Helen's Judgement (House of Atreus 2) by Susan C. Wilson
18. The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding by Joseph J. Ellis