This week my blog turned One – Happy Birthday to the Roses in the Rubble Blog & your sporadically diligent blogger, Virginia, with 126 posts to date!! Last year i started this blog mainly to highlight inspirational movies & books, but it morphed into a wee bit more.  (Keep checking the movie page above though, as updating continues along with movie round-ups et all.) Thanks so much to my family (especially Cindy : ) & friends for your encouragement (especially during that ‘why-am-i-doing-this’ stage) & for all you amazing bloggers out there in the cyberblogsphere who have made it Such Informatively Interesting (& often faith-building) Fun to interact…

As America celebrates our ‘birthday’ of independence on this 4th of July, here’s a re-post of one of my first blogs….  Happy 4th of July … (Va. the Cook has to Get Busy : )

THE PATRIOT & THE 4TH OF JULY…  (from july 4, 2011)

My brother and I saw this movie on the 4th of July,2000 while on holiday in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Since the Canadians ‘confederated’ their way out of British bondage (& they’re still on good Commonwealth terms with the UK), the theater-goers’ reactions were not so favorable given how the British are portrayed in this Revolutionary war epic (burning churches & killing children!) My brother & I, however, cheered on Mel Gibson as his character Benjamin Martin morphed from a neutral-sit-on-the-farmer’s-fence-father into THE PATRIOT.

Since then I’ve watched this movie on every 4th of july or close to the date (working overseas July 4th is not a holiday so I often celebrated by watching this & eating American Dorito chips when they could be found!) Viewing it again yesterday,  I’m still inspired by the whole ‘stay the course’ theme – through victory, defeat, death and sacrifice against what look like insurmountable odds, patriots like Benjamin Martin prevailed to lead the fledgling colonies into freedom and…the United States of America.

Heath Ledger (may he R.I.P.) gave an outstanding performance as Gabriel Martin, Benjamin Martin’s oldest son, who enlists early into the Continental army. The story weaves fiction with fact as General Cornwallis takes South Carolina and local militias are called up to fight. Tom Wilkinson plays a convincingly arrogant Cornwallis, while Peter Woodward is great as his always-complimentary sidekick, General O’Hara.  The “bad-guy-loudly-boo” award goes to Jason Isaacs who portrays British Col. Tavington, a ruthless Dragoons cavalry officer who employs extremely ‘ungentlemanly’ tactics.

Some of my favorite lines  are from Chris Cooper as Continental Col. Harry Burwell. (after a disasterous battle – “who’s in charge?” … “I am…I think.”) After Benjamin suffers incredible loss and wants to leave, Col. Harry challenges him: “You’re wrong Benjamin, you matter to your men, and to others as well. Your victories and… and your losses, are shared by more than you know. Stay with us. Stay the course!”

There’s a love story (2, actually), family values (Benjamin is a widower with SEVEN children), faith (Rene Auberjonois as Pastor Oliver, “sometimes a shepherd has to fight off the wolves”), a wedding, lots of historical settings…and a bit of violence (this is a Mel Gibson movie, after all) including the cannonball-off-with-his-head & gory ‘hack-a-soldier-to-bits-with-tomahawk scenes.  Rated R – not for children – but this is one of the few ‘R’ movies (in my opinion) that has an extremely high inspiration factor.

On this 4th of July, may you STAY THE COURSE wherever you might be & to my fellow & fellow-ette Americans, may we never forget the sacrifices of those who went before us (including the French who came to our rescue at Yorktown!)

grace, peace & birthdays

    Virginia : )