Sheep Movie Review: Finding Joe

Finding Joe, directed by Patrick Takaya Solomon is really all about finding You, the journey we must all take to the authentic self each of us was meant to be.

Opening October 14th

Landmark in San Francisco

Check your local listing for a theater near you.

Plot:

FINDING JOE is an exploration of famed mythologist Joseph “Joe” Campbell's studies and their continuing impact on our culture. Through interviews with visionaries from a variety of fields interwoven with enactments of classic tales by a sweet and motley group of kids, the film navigates the stages of what Campbell dubbed The Hero's Journey: the challenges, the fears, the dragons, the battles, and the return home as a changed person. That narrative gives us a metaphoric road map to personal heroism. And the man who so brilliantly read the map, Joseph Campbell, gets his celebration and explication here in this inspiring documentary about the great task of self-realization. Campbell himself, who died in 1987, does not appear in this film, but he hovers above it as his ideas and discoveries are brought to life by a diverse array of philosophical minds-from Deepak Chopra to Mick Fleetwood, including Tony Hawk, Rashida Jones, and many more. Rooted in deeply personal accounts and timeless stories, FINDING JOE shows how Campbell's work is relevant and essential in today's world and how it provides a narrative for how to live a fully realized life-or as Campbell would simply state, how to "follow your bliss."

How can each of us look past our concrete exterior and find that "gold" that is waiting inside? The song yet to be sung. Finding Joe digs deep into hero stories from across the globe, the underdog who faces an enormous life challenge to come out of it changed. It even references famous movie examples like: Star Wars, The Matrix, Wizard of Oz, Batman Begins, Rocky and Twilight all of whose characters are tested thoroughly and come out changed for the better. Sometimes pushing through the scariest things in life can end up being the most satisfying of things. These adventures favor personal success over finical success and moving past the fears that hold each of us back from achieving our personal dreams. A message of having courage and facing what happens in times of darkness with open arms, truly an incredible message for anyone.

What is your spark in life? How do we break away from the mass hypnosis that the media pushes on us? The things in life that matter most shouldn't be things we buy, the junk food we see as a "treat", numbing out to the television but what can we create. With our mind and our body. What is each of our individual potential. Finding Joe touches on all these questions and much more. Finding that dark place inside of us and letting it die only to rise once more like the Phoenix, stronger then before.

"The snake that can not shed its skin must perish"

With amazing real life stories from actors to authors and athletes Finding Joe takes a broad look at what bliss really is. Wonderfully shot and musically scored with some very creative acting from a group of young kids. Worth seeing over and over again.

Getting 4 and 1/2 Hero Sheep

KD

Peace, Love and Murder by Nancy Holzner

This was an “out of the box” read for me, for the most part I tend to keep to Urban Fantasy with lots of romance. If I do pick up a mystery it is usually a paranormal one, but I had heard that Holzner was a good writer and the price for this book was a bargain: only $0.99 at www.amazon.com.

Blurb:

Finding a corpse in the trunk of your cab is a rotten way to start the day. For Bo Forrester, things go straight downhill from there. The cops are asking a hell of a lot of questions. The murder weapon turns up too close for comfort. And the attractive woman giving him the eye turns out to be Trudy Hauser, a cute-but-crazy deputy dead set on arresting him for murder.

Bo returned to Rhodes, an upstate New York college town, hoping to reconcile with his parents, gentle hippies who couldn’t accept his decision to join the Army at eighteen. Twenty years later, the commune where he grew up is a subdivision and his parents are long gone. Pondering his next move, Bo takes a job driving a cab. And he has no clue how the bullet-riddled body of art philanthropist Fred Davies ended up in the trunk.

Now, he can’t turn around without bumping into Trudy—it’s not her case, but that’s not slowing her down. The local cops, suspecting robbery as the motive, are right behind her. When Davies’s beautiful widow asks Bo for help, he can’t say no. Starting his own investigation, he plunges into a world of privilege, corruption, and high-stakes greed. A lot of people had reason to want Davies dead: a flirtatious art history professor with a taste for booze and men; her insanely jealous, ex-felon husband; the business partner with a secret addiction; and an avant-garde artist who proclaims that murder is the ultimate art form.

As the body count escalates, Bo must combine the skills he learned as a soldier with the values he grew up with on the commune to flush out a vicious murderer—if he manages to stay alive that long.

Review:

Peace, Love, and Murder turned out to be worth all 99 pennies and I'm really glad I gave it a chance. It is written from the POV our hero, Bo, and Holzner gave him a believable and likable voice. I felt like I was in his head trying to put the puzzle pieces together right alongside him. I have a knack for figuring out plots ahead of time, but I wasn’t able to solve this murder until Bo did! That alone gets it kudos from me .

The characters in the story are quirky and well developed. Holzner made Bo very mult-dimensional; I felt like I really knew him and what made him tick. My favorite secondary character was probably Trudy. Poor, poor, socially awkward Trudy . She has serious self-confidence issues and is trying to prove herself in a profession dominated by men.

I would have liked a little more romance (cause that is my thing), but this wasn’t that kind of story so I won’t include that in my rating. It is a straight up, well written mystery. If you are headed to the pool or beach this summer I strongly recommend you download this little gem onto your e-reader and enjoy!

4 murdering Sheep!

SS