Phoenix in space
My coworkers enjoy talking about movies and such, and yesterday was no different. Somehow they were discussing A Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger, which led to a discussion of how he died too soon, same with River Phoenix, and Joaquin Phoenix also came up. My one coworker did a little digging and, despite my mentioning that they were brothers, a few minutes later went, River and Joaquin had been brothers! Yes; how is that stunning information? I then started mentioning what I knew about the family, how the siblings had kind of hippie-ish names and that Joaquin had gone by Leaf, and they were child stars, and all that. They were just astonished that I knew so much. Well, let's see, they're child stars when I was a child, and they made movies that I watched, and I have a mother who has always been obsessed with celebrity so that I was exposed to tabloids from a young age. River was in The Mosquito Coast and Stand By Me, the latter of which the one coworker--the office manager--had never seen, which stunned me and the other person, who'd been a Stephen King fan back in the day. He and I have had discussions about the books. And Joaquin had been in one of my favorite movies from 30 years ago, SpaceCamp. I watched that regularly, likely on HBO back in the day. I was able to recite the plot a little too eagerly. That movie probably doesn't hold up, but I encouraged them to watch it purely for the cheese factor alone. I mean, kids who go to Space Camp and accidentally get launched into space and they have to make it back on their own? What's not to love?!? The hilarious part is that I refuse to watch more recent space movies--think Gravity--because they scare the hell out of me. I have a fear of drowning on earth; I'd be afraid of running out of oxygen in space. But yeah, it was fun to go back in time to my childhood for a bit. It was also a nice diversion from work.