Valentine's Day Middle Child Candy Hearts Are Here!

     Just in time for Valentine’s Day! FREE Limited Edition candy hearts, with sentiments specially selected for the Middle Children in your life. (Oh, you can’t really eat them. They’re just images. But when you’re a Middle Child, you take what you can get.) Right click an image to download or e-mail, and share one today -- before you totally forget!

CLICK HERE 
to see the entire collection of Middle Child Valentine's Day Cards.

The Best Overlooked & Underappreciated Movies of 2019

Academy Awards Special: the Middle Child Movie Guide

     Hollywood’s big night is here, and as usual, the Best Picture nominees are the stars of the evening. The center of attention. Of course, the critics have questions. Did the Academy get it right?  Did they really nominate the best Best Pictures? Who got snubbed? And is the Academy being selective enough? Are there too many Best Picture nominees?
     This year, there are nine. Nine! That does seem like a lot. But when you consider there were 786 movies released in the U.S. and Canada in 2019 according to Statista, maybe it’s not so many? Of course, that also means there are hundreds of other movies that won’t get to bask in the Oscar limelight. Far from Hollywood favorites, we hardly even know their names. But they’re out there. The Middle Children of the movie industry, yearning for your attention.
     While the lucky nine spend the evening basking in the glow of their nominations and exchanging accolades with their film families, I'd like to shine a little limelight on those less loved films. There are lots of websites where you’ll find lists of these lesser known movies. I looked at lists from Looper, Indie Wire, Screen Rant, Parade, Thrillist, and The Daily Beast. There are 123 different titles on these six lists. That's a lot of overlooking, not to mention a lot of... looking. If you saw just two a week, it would take over a year to see them all. I really love popcorn, but I still don’t think I could do it. So I combined the lists, narrowing it down to those titles that were on more than one -- the crème de la passed over movie crème. I figure the more lists you appear on, the less “most overlooked” you are, right? I mean, ideally, if you were genuinely overlooked, you wouldn’t be on any of these lists.
     I was able to trim the list down to 29 movies. I gave each a star to indicate how many lists they’re on and linked them to their trailer. Look at all the hours of work I'm saving you! Maybe now you might have some time to actually see some of these.
     To be honest, out of all 123 movies, I’ve only seen five  -- and only a pathetic one from the “short list.” In fact, I only saw four of the Best Picture nominees, so why listen to me? Clearly, those aren’t the kind of credentials that make me what you’d call a movie buff, even though did I mention that I really love popcorn? But while I may know diddly squat about cinema, when it comes to being overlooked and underappreciated, unfortunately I am somewhat of an expert.

****

  Her Smell
***

                            Blinded by the Light           Fast Color                High Flying Bird

 

                                      Little Woods                   Luce                        Monos

                                             The Last Black Man              Wild Rose

                                                in San Francisco

**

                                     Apollo 11                   The Art of                   Brittany Runs
                                                                     Self Defense                 a Marathon

                                         Crawl                  Dark Waters                Fighting with

                                                                                                          My Family

                                    High Life                  Give Me Liberty             The Kid Who

                                                                                                         Would Be King

                                  Knives & Skin            The Mustang               The Nightingale

                               The Peanut Butter           Plus One                      The Report

                                       Falcon 

                                 The Souvenir              Sword of Trust        Under the Silver Lake

                                                  Wild Nights with              The Wind   

                                                           Emily

Lower Than a Groundhog

     This past Sunday was February 2nd -- Groundhog Day! I know this, because a reminder popped up on my iPhone. I did not enter the date, and I certainly didn’t set up a reminder. It’s a default entry on the Google calendar app, right in there with Thanksgiving and Christmas. Groundhog Day! Like it’s some kind of national holiday.
     It’s not like I needed any reminder anyway. It’s kind of hard to escape. It was all over the news. Forget impeachment, Brexit, Coronavirus -- will some woodchuck weatherman see his shadow? We need to know! Geez. They even made a movie about Groundhog Day,  and then a Broadway musical.  It’s that big of a deal. Robert Frost wrote a poem about groundhogs. Robert friggin’ Frost! When the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry writes a poem about you, you know you matter.
     It must be nice to be a groundhog. They must be sooo happy, having a special day with their name on it that so many people pay so much attention to. How nice for them. I mean, how awful would they feel if there was a Groundhog Day and nobody paid any attention to it? Could you imagine?
     Oh wait, I can -- it would be like Middle Child’s Day! Which is kind of ironic, because just like Groundhog Day, year after year, it’s always the same thing -- everybody ignores Middle Child’s Day! No headlines. No movie or musical. And certainly no built-in Google calendar entry or iPhone reminder. Sure, there’s that Middle Child poem I’ve written about in previous posts, but that hardly counts. That poem was messed up. But sure, let's all make a big fuss over Groundhog Day because, you know, we wouldn't want to hurt their feelings!
     Honestly, is a weather forecasting rodent worthy of more attention than a Middle Child? Actual human meteorologists can’t predict the weather, and we think some grubby groundhog can!? Of course they can’t. Punxsutawney Phil, the world’s most famous furry forecaster, has only been correct 39% of the time over the last 100 years. That sucks!!

     Not to worry though. There are actually other marmot meteorologists we can turn to. Thank god. And while some of them have a better record than Phil, they’re not always in agreement. Take this year, for example. Staten Island Chuck (NY), Buckeye Chuck (OH), and Dunkirk Dave (IN) all agree with Phil. None of them saw their shadows, calling for an early spring. But General Beauregard Lee (GA), Jimmy the Groundhog (WI), and Sir Walter Wally (NC) did see their shadows, which means six more weeks of winter. Now what!?
     Maybe Bee Cave Bob holds the key. This Texas weather-forecasting armadillo also agrees with Phil, if that sways you one way or another. And if it does, you have a serious problem. But there’s one thing I can tell you with 100% accuracy: whether any of these creatures saw their shadows or not, Middle Children can expect six more weeks of being overlooked and forgotten.
     Probably more.