Before Sunset, Godfather I, II, III

Before Sunset

Beautiful sequel to Before Sunrise. I started crying within the first minute. Well, not real crying. Manly crying, you know, where there's just a little dampness in the eyes. Still, the way they flashed back to the first movie and then how it became clear that things weren't what we thought made the opening very emotional (in a manly sense). The scene in the coffee shop was good. Watching the people in the background was fun.

I wish it had ended differently, but still a very worthwhile movie. It impressed me with how nice French people are. I had no idea. But then they did treat our paterfamila nicely, as well as the rest of the family that could make it over there for the festivities.

Shakespeare & Co Bookshop Paris, France

Godfather I, II, III

Well, we made it through all three. You'll be glad to know there's good news. Yes, the Al Pacino godfather finally quits smoking by the third installment. I hope that isn't going to ruin the surprise for anyone. He also quits killing people, maybe, but in the end it's really just a very long movie about regrets.

Best of Sicily - Road Map of Sicily

Dogma

Listen up everybody! I'm flying to Augusta for Thanksgiving. There might be a Scrabble game and probably no Wi-fi service. So unless we all get together and get Mom hooked up then you can expect frequent phone calls asking for an Internet search in order to verify a word. Wait, maybe I could just bring a Scrabble dictionary. It was nice of Tish to buy one last summer but it was also a lot of fun to call people and ask them to check a word for us. Keep your lines open.

 

Dogma

 

"I need you three to shuffle her loose the mortal coil..."

 

Ok, reading Hamlet last summer meant that I started seeing Hamlet in everything, hence my incredibly brillant connection with the Will Smith Hancock movie. Speaking of which, according to  the admissions officer at Macalester who is a friend of mine, the tank top t-shirt that Charlize Theron wears to bed and which says "Macalester" on the front is a big seller at the Macalester bookstore.

 

Now, I watched the Hamlet movie last night and this afternoon the elder resident teenager comes home with a borrowed copy of Dogma which contains the above reference from Hamlet. I may have laughed a little too hard in the first half then got tired of it for awhile then got back into it. One of the many fun parts of this movie are all the references to movies and one major play. It is a fun movie even though one critic said "in spite of all the gratuitous violence and bad language, it's still a fun movie."

 

It has a very similar theme to the Surrealist Spanish movie I reviewed last year called Milky Way. I liked that one a lot and this one in the same way. They both try very hard to criticize the Catholic Church but both come out saying some very deep spiritual things in the process and somehow showing the good things about Catholic spirituality. Alainis Morrisette plays a very provocative role. Provocative in the sense of really having to think about what it means.

 

What Dreams May Come

As long as we're on the subject of Hamlet, I'll mention this movie that we saw a few years ago. The title comes from Hamlet's suicidal "to be or not to be" musing. I thought it was a beautiful movie. Robin Williams, Annabelle Sciorra, and Cube Gooding Jr.. Heaven and hell. Incredibly sad but beautiful.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

 

Another Hamlet connection. A very strange movie but one I remember liking although it's been long enough that I really don't remember much except how interesting it was that a movie was made about what might have happened to two minor characters from a major play.

 

Here's a poem:

 

They All Want To Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers - O flowers,
     flowers slung by a dancing girl - in the saddest play the
     inkfish, Shakespeare, ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad
     and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and
     then to say over slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words
     masking a heart that's breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls and calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
     particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.


Carl Sandburg a

Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation

 

I got this one after seeing The Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. This movie is the one based on the stage production which was based on the true story of a man who pretended to be Poitier's son. Fascinating movie. Wonderfully purposeful overacting as a way to show how everybody is really pretending to be someone else. I found this interesting bit about the director on Wikipedia.

 

"John Guare, (the screenwriter and original playwriter for the stage play version), was born in New York City and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was raised a Roman Catholic, but now seems to be lapsed [1]. He was educated at Georgetown University, (BA, 1960), where in 1958 he contributed a song to an original musical revue entitled The Natives Are Restless and presented by the Mask and Bauble Dramatic Society. The song humorously attributed the success of many famous people to the syllable “O” in their names."-- from Wikipedia. Now fifty years later we have an "O" on the brink of being presidentially famous.

The Taming of the Shrew (the 1966 Taylor/Burton version)

Check out this real Bosley Crowther review: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9504E2D71E3BE63ABC4153DFB566838C679EDE

Liz and Dick divorced after this movie if that makes any difference. I loved it. Great sets and costumes. Great overacting. And, as Bosley says, great cleavage. Well, I don't think he says "great." Liz as Kate is great. Interesting  trivia: Laurence Olivier played Kate when he was 15.

 

 

Hamlet

 

I'm on a Shakespeare kick since I started developing my own list of books to read before I die or get too tired to stay up past 8pm. I read almost half of his plays last summer (more daylight hours). This version of Hamlet was the 4-hour 1996 version  with Kenneth Branagh. Wonderful but really need to know the language. Very fast dialogue and hard to keep up but the staging and casting and everything else is wonderful. Look at the cast list. A note on IMDb says Robin Williams and Billy Crystal were not allowed on the set together as they would get everyone laughing too hard.

 

Housekeeping

 

I read the book when it was first published in 1980 then saw the movie in 1987. Loved them both. Now the author, Marilyn Robinson, has a new book out and is getting a lot of attention for it. I don't think the DVD for Housekeeping ever came out, but I thought I would mention it in case enough people request it on their DVD rental service.

 

 

Even more

OK, you can stop reading my drivel now. Just go the link below and watch me in video with my imaginary friend. I'm the guy. I think. Except I really disagree with him about Tropic Thunder and political correctness.

 

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=reelgeezers 

 

Bella

 

Beautiful (sorry, but somebody has to think it's a funny and highly intelligent way of showing that I know what Bella means) movie about love, family, regrets, atonement and  kitchen management. Shot in New York using mostly Spanish-speaking actors. It's significant that the three brothers have different accents which would only be noticeable to experts in the language or in using IMDb like me. The different accents signify the different relationship each brother has within the family.

 

Well-done movie and worth seeing even if it does have the blessing of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Charles Dobson of Focus on Family Spanking. I wonder what they thought of Juno? The bishops would like us to know that there is only one slightly objectional word in English and only one slightly more objectional word spoken in an obscure Spanish dialect. We liked it so much we saw it again right afterwards but still missed the bad words.

 

 

Times and Winds

 

Turkish movie made in 2006 but apparently timeless or least as far back as the revelation from Muhammad. Verrrrry slow dissertation on Turkish teenager angst and the effects of cardigan sweaters on wall-building skills. Beautiful musical score by Arvo Part and great scenery. The rest is pretty depressing. Fathers who abuse their sons, mothers who abuse their daughters, fathers who are also imans and call the village to prayer right after abusing their sons.

 

In the Time of the Butterflies

Lots of controversy over this movie: lack of Dominican actors, shot in Mexico instead of Dominican Republic, wrong emphasis, not what really happened because what really happened would not be able to be a TV movie (probably couldn't be filmed in the first place), Jennifer Lopez' husband should have had a better part, Jennifer Lopez' husband should have had a smaller part (at least his divorce prior to J-Lo was finalized in the Dominican Republic),  Salma Hayek was in it, etc, etc.

 

But if you don't know the story or the book then it's an incredible movie. Beautiful, devastatingly sad at the end. The book was too difficult for me to read after the seeing the movie and knowing what was going to happen. It starts off like it could be a book for teenage girls. The other incredible part is the year this took place. I never knew anything about it.

 

Salma Hayek produced one of my favorite movies, The Maldonado Miracle. It'll make you feel good.

Nights in Rodanthe

Nights in Rodanthe

Reader Alert!

The following review is repeated directly from the matri-familia, Mom, who has actually seen the movie, as opposed to me, who has only checked out the facts on IMDb ( my motto: Movie Reviews you can trust, you just have to trust my version of the facts.)

In Mom's words:   "5-stars." "I loved it."

(warning:   a comment on IMDb calls this a "women's film"  which means I'll probably have to see it eventually) (I try to not let Linda see "women's" films with other women and especially not by herself; she can get all the wrong messages unless she has my presence there to remind her that things could always be worse.) (wait, that didn't come out the way I think I meant it)

Before Sunrise

Lovely "talkie" movie (kind of like My Dinner With Andre but with movement meaning they get up from the dinner table). A young woman and man meet on a train in Europe and spend the night walking around Vienna. I think they lay down at some point but I was really too engrossed in what they were saying. Ethan Hawke plays the man and a French actress plays the women. Like Casey Stengal said, "You can look it up" if you want to know her name. It's in English (American-English on Hawkes' part) but interesting use of other people speaking other languages without subtitles. There's a sequel we haven't seen yet but will try to soon. The title shouldn't be too hard to guess.

 

Diva

 

Absolutely one of the most gorgeous films I've seen in a long time. 1981 French film about an opera singer (a real American opera singer who had been asked to act in the movie after the producers saw her in an opera; beautiful voice and acting, you'll wish you could hear her live) who doesn't ever record herself. A young man is infatuated with her and secretly records a performance. The rest is incidental. The whole movie is about using all our senses to experience the movie. Even the sense of touch since we had to keep finding the remote everytime the phone would ring with one of the boys asking if they can stay out a little longer. Many of the scenes are staged like a work of art. Try watching it without subtitles so you can just sense what's going on. We watched it with half the subtitles since the bottom half of the subtitles was below the screen. We could easily figure out what was going on and it was much more of a sensory experience. A comment on IMDb said if you wanted to be hip in the '80's then this was one of the three movies you had to have seen. It's past the '80's now so the other two don't matter. Other comments said everything was realistic (from a French point of view) including how the man does the recording. Great scene of a philosopher and a jigsaw puzzle, also of him buttering a loaf of bread. The chase scene is supposed to be classic. If your subtitles don't work just remember what Casey Stengal said; not the one about how he was such a dangerous hitter that he got intentional walks during batting practice.

 

Cache

 

A 2005 French film with Juliette Binoche who was in The English Patient which I loved. This one had a very interesting plot, kind of like Atonement mixed in with The Battle for Algiers. Unfortunately, it really needed subtitles and they just weren't woking well in our DVD version. We missed most of the dialogue so quit after a bit.

 

My Dinner With Andre

 

I saw this in the theatre when it first came out in 1981. Since I mentioned it here I just thought I'd say, "5-stars; "I loved it."

 

 

The Shop Around the Corner

Classics time and this is a great one to spend time with. Funny, sweet, political, beautiful acting and casting.

We liked the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks You've Got Mail remake, too, but this is much better. We also liked the British TV comedy several years that was based on this movie, Are You Being Served?

Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart parry and marry while living out their solitary lives in a Budapest gift store.

Ralph, they don't actually get married, just engaged, assumedly.

Ok, but isn't it clever of me to use parry and marry in a sentence?

Nevermind. I give up. But where's the politics?

The movie takes place in 1938 in Budapest and the Depression is referred to several times while the lifestyle scenes show that people are trying desperately to ignore it. Not much of a statement, but still very interesting to see in 2008.

There are two fascinating coincidental uses of numbers in the film.

When the store owner (a very pleasant re-encounter with an actor who everyone grew up seeing at least once a year) gets out of the hospital after a nervous breakdown he goes to the front window of the shop. There is a close-up shot of the cash register showing the price 51.50 (in Hungarian money). Due to extensive and coincidental Internet research, I discovered that the California code for involuntary commitment for mental illness is numbered 5150.

The other numerical casting is the post office box number that Sullavan's character rents. The scene where her gloved hand reaches into the empty box is extraordinary. The box number, 237, is large and clear (also mentioned several times). It happens to be the same number as the hotel room used in Stanley Kubrick's movie, The Shining. Kubrick's choice of that number was mainly the result of needing a number in the 200's where the digits added up to 12 and of being a number that was not a real room number at the Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood in Oregon which served as the backdrop but not the location for the movie.

Just as a quick aside,

Please.

I thought The Shining was an excellent film from many different angles. Scary movies aren't usually my choice but this is well worth it for film fanatics. And for political fanatics since Kubrick wanted to film it partly to draw attention to the genocide of native people.

The DVD of The Shop Around the Corner has a few special features. Unfortunately, no commentary, but there is an interesting short film called the Miracle of Sound, which is an old black and white MGM film that shows how sound was put on film. The opening scene has a very brief shot of a cotton field with a hand reaching out to pick the cotton (cotton was used to make celluloid). The hand, of course, belongs to an African-American and reminded me that I learned early in my teaching career to preview films that I ordered from the school district A-V department. A similar scene, yet much longer, was in a 16mm film of America the Beautiful that I showed to a class of 3rd graders in 1989. Teachable moments sometimes turn into long discussions.

And, of course, Mr. Political Correctness could not miss a chance like this to point out that 1940 Hollywood often billed the leading actress first over the actor (apparently due to chivalry), as in The Shop Around the Corner, while 1998 Hollywood billed Tom Hanks first in You've Got Mail (apparently due to Tom Hanks having greater appeal even over America's sweetheart and greatest fake orgasmic actress, Meg Ryan). Just an interesting note.

Thanks, Ralph. Apparently, you are due for a check-up.

Quickies

 

We saw Atonement last week. Just in time for Yom Kippur. I think I already used the dumb joke about the Jewish connection with the family's last name. Beautiful movie. We read the book a year or so ago. Well told story and well done movie. English accents are only a little hard to understand but since I now qualify for the senior discount at Piccadilly I'm having a harder time hearing anything. Getting my ears cleaned out helped a little.

 

Love in the Time of Cholera came in the mail recently. I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez' magical realism style of writing. I first read his short stories, then 100 Years of Solitude. Have not read Love in the time of Cholera but wanted to see the movie anyway. Beautiful movie. I loved the casting. Javier Barden was great and a pleasure to see him after not really liking No Country for Old Men. The commentary on the DVD that I watched later was very interesting mainly because the director, Mike Newell, has a great voice. Very soothing, especially for an Englishman. Even though he is mostly a TV director the movie wasn't all that bad. Pauline Kael had a good point in the 60's that it wasn't the major movies that television was hurting but the fact that television killed the B-movie which had been the training ground for directors. With television ending the B-movie market, directors were coming from television instead which is much more one-dimensional (at least at that time, supposedly). I'm not sure if Mike Newell's television background affected this movie but he did do Four Weddings and Funeral which had Hugh Grant. That's about as one-dimensional as you can get.

 

I forgot about seeing Mountain Patrol in Augusta last summer. Strangely beautiful movie about a true story in Tibet several years ago concerning the poaching of wild antelope and the attempts by local Tibetans to stop the poaching. Gorgeous scenery and great acting. I read quite a bit of viewer response to the movie and got very confused about who was really the bad guys and was the movie really Chinese propaganda to show how environmentally concerned they are by supporting the anti-poachers but really acting the other way. Or was it the other way around? Hard to tell from all the emotional responses. One news article did clarify that the scene of what was supposed to be 100's of skinned antelopes was really goats that was the normal diet for the villagers. They just lined up the carcasses for the movie. 

 

Saw the biopic about Bob Dylan, I'm Not There. All the jokes about the title apply. "I wasn't there either." "You had to be there." "There is no there, there" (Steinian philosophy). Compelling movie, nonetheless. The casting got most of the publicity. Cate Blanchett was good. Woody Guthrie has always been one of my heroes. The scene of the child actor playing Dylan and visiting Guthrie in the hospital was very moving. Interesting connection with my comment on the Mongolian Ping Pong movie about genocide practice in China. Guthrie had been recruited by the Columbia River (Oregon) Dam Company to write 26 songs commemorating the building of the dam and the resulting benefit of all the cheap electrical power. The other result of the dam being built was the total loss of the native American tribal way of life along the river. The tribes were moved inland to reservations and soon died off. The term used by other tribes in Oregon? Genocide.

 

We tried to watch The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir (1939). It's billed as the "greatest movie ever made" mainly for the cinematic artistry. Unfortunately, the subtitles were obscured by the background so we gave up. Too bad since I love Renoir's film, Boudru Saved From Drowning (nicely remade as Down and Out In Beverly Hills). Pauline Kael is credited with praising the film enough to give it a new life in the US in the 60's. It's well worth the trouble to find it. Subtitles aren't all that necessary as the acting is so expressive.

 

We saw Moon Over Parador awhile ago. Richard Dreyfuss stars who I always like. Very funny movie. Sweet story. Great acting all around. Dreyfuss' brother plays the dead dictator in the freezer.

 

Tried to see something called Mona Lisa but I thought I had ordered the Julia Roberts film (another Mike Newell direction) and instead got some incomprehensible English gangster movie with Bob Hoskins. No idea if it was any good. Damn those English accents.

 

OK, that's enough for now.

 

Thk gdnes. OMG! I thought you'd never stp.

 

Yes, and damn those text messages from outer space.

 

Mongolian Ping Pong

 

Alright, so it wasn't The Little Shop of Horrors Around the Corner which is what I was thinking. But if you join the Blockbuster movierentalsbymail (tell them I sent you) and type in Little Shop Around the Corner you not only get The Shop Around the Corner but you also get The Little Church Around the Corner which was a 1923 movie written by Olga Printzlau who wrote well over 60 movie scripts as well as several Broadway plays. They all sound good. I'd love to watch them sometime. I love really old movies mainly for the sense of getting a sense of the time. Some are hard to watch. I tried watching a silent movie last week written by and starring Harry Houdini, called Man From Beyond. Too hard to watch due to the incredibly annoying soundtrack but maybe if I played Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd at the same time it would be easier.

Anybody every try to watch the Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon as the soundtrack?

One of the founding members of Pink Floyd was named Richard Wright. He died last month which was the same month as the birth of the writer Richard Wright who we last visited in the McCabe and Mrs. Miller review. His birthday is September 4th which alert siblings and grandmother will note is the birthday of the famous teen rebel with many causes and ping pong extraordinaire, Peter Berlin.
Well, on to an extraordinary movie, Mongolian Ping Pong.

Actually flimed in Inner Mongolia which apparently means it's really China. Who the hell knows anymore? Outer Mongolia is apparently the Chinese name for Mongolia while Inner Mongolia is in China and has a majority of ethnic Han Chinese population with enough real Mongolians left alive to act in this movie. Apparently genocide is a term that hasn't been translated yet. If you want to know anymore then look it up yourself on wikipedia.

What I do know and will gladly share is that Mongolian music (inner or outer) and the technique of throatsinging is absolutely beautiful and the practice probably goes back thousands of years. Sadly, silence goes back even further which means the soundtrack to this movie is mostly that. A little throatsinging at the beginning and end. Just enough to whet your whistle as they say in Texas which also has a history of throatsinging amongst cowboys on the range.

The silence is obviously a way to get us to appreciate the awesome landscape and vast stretches of more awesome landscape. Somewhere inbetween is a remake of The Gods Must Be Crazy but not as funny. Cuter, though. Cute kids. Cute horses. If you want anymore then watch it yourself.

Evan Almighty

Evan Almighty

Linda and I hired two resident teenagers sometime ago. They moved in several years ago and agreed to eat and sleep in exchange for access to transportation and cash money. Apparently, it's the way things are done where they come from. Parents as taxi and ATM. Prior to their employment as teenagers, they were young and innocent enough to have seen Bruce Almighty at an early enough age to have God imprinted on their brains as Morgan Freeman. Now as resident teenagers, they have become very religious and seem to naturally gravitate towards any movie that has God's voice or face.

Except Evan Almighty, which we got on DVD just recently and after they began to realize that not everything God acted in was really all that good. So, only the younger resident teenager stuck around to watch it. It wasn't that bad, amusing but oddly unfunny. Jim Carrey did not want to do the sequel to Bruce Almighty so Steve Carell got talked into it. I haven't laughed at any thing I've seen him in. Is he supposed to be funny?

The movie cost 200 million dollars to make and still lost money. Wow! Imagine that! It was the most expensive comedy ever made and only made a strong argument for how the hell small countries can survive on less money. Of course, it was a green movie as the director bought everyone bicycles and insisted on having everyone plant trees in order to off-set the movie's carbon footprint. They certainly didn't want to get out-done by those Jewish green movie-makers, the Coen Brothers who had a statement at the end of No Country For Old Men about it being a neutral carbon emission movie.

It was hard to tell if this was a Jewish version of the Noah story, a Christian version, or a Messianic Mormanish version. When some of us were younger, God was much more clearly Jewish as evidenced by George Burns in Oh, God! The Southern Baptists protested the movie in Augusta way back when so it must have been the Jewish version of God.

There were several clever references to scriptural verses in Evan Almighty which only clever people like me understood especially after I read the trivia page on the IMDb website. I did, however, immediately recognize one of Dad's favorite sayings when Steve Carell tells Morgan Freeman that building an ark was not in his plans. God, of course, laughs as in Mann traoch, Gott läuch, which Alex translated the Yiddish for us at the funeral as meaning "Man plans, God laughs."

Evan Almighty is rated PG even though there is a cutesy reference to the really stupid 40-Year Old Virgin movie, so you can use it for Sunday School to teach the fun version of the Great Flood or you can use it in a socialist adult day care to teach a fairly literal version of the Great Flood of Johnstown, Pennslyvania, of 1899. Oops, I just gave away the plot. I'd apologize but according to most professional reviewers the plot was quickly obvious to everybody but me.

The Johnstown Flood was not, as the National Geographic fatuously said several years ago, a natural disaster. None of the wealthy members of the Hunting and Fishing Club got convicted of deliberately overloading the dam so they could have more water to hunt and fish but Andrew Carnegie did build a nice library for the survivors. And to add more insult to tragic injury a poem was written about the Johnstown Flood shortly after it happened. Not just any poem but one by Willaim McGonagall. It's called The Pennslyvania Disaster and is terrible which is fitting since McGonagall is famous for being declared the worst poet in the English language. He was probably also declared dead long before he actually died in 1902. He was known as the Bard of Banality before the title passed on to me. You will be utterly grateful that I am not pasting his poem here. It is awful.

We do want to extend our wishes for a speedy recovery to Morgan Freeman who was in a car accident recently. Sadly, he was also served with divorce papers at the same time.

It's hard enough for someone like my lovely wife to be married to someone who only thinks he's God.

No banal poems to paste, but since the subject of Jews came up, I'll just cut and paste some haikus from a website I can't bother to link to:

Jewish Haiku

*****

After the warm rain
the sweet smell of camellias.
Did you wipe your feet?

*****

Her lips near my ear,
Aunt Sadie whispers the name
of her friend's disease.

*****

Looking for pink buds
to prune, the old moyel
wanders among his flowers.

*****

Today I am a man.
Tomorrow I will return
to the seventh grade.

*****

Harsh Scrabble discord--
someone has placed "putzhead" on
a triple word score.

*****

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she sighs softly.
But her son is forty.

*****

The sparkling blue sea
reminds me to wait an hour
after my sandwich.

*****

Tea ceremony--
fragrant steam perfumes the air.
Try the cheese Danish.

*****

Lacking fins or tail
the gefilte fish swims with
great difficulty.

*****

Yom Kippur-- Forgive
me, Lord, for the Mercedes
and all that lobster.

*****

My nature journal --
today, I saw some trees and birds.
I should know the names?

*****

Like a bonsai tree,
your terrible posture at
my dinner table.

*****

Beyond Valium
the peace of knowing one's child
is an internist.

*****

Jews on safari --
map, compass, elephant gun,
hard sucking candies.

*****

Coroner's report --
"The deceased, wearing no hat,
caught his death of cold."

*****

The same kimono
the top geishas are wearing:
got it at Loehmann's.

*****

The sparrow brings home
too many worms for her young.
"Force yourself," she chirps.

*****

Jewish triathlon:
gin rummy, then contract bridge,
followed by a nap.

*****

"Can't you just leave it?"
the new Jewish mother asks -
umbilical cord.

*****

The shivah visit:
so sorry about your loss.
Now back to my problems.

*****

Our youngest daughter,
our most precious jewel.
Hence the name, Tiffany.

*****

Mom, please! There is no
need to put that dinner roll
in your pocketbook.

*****

Seven-foot Jews in
the NBA slam-dunking!
My alarm clock rings.

*****

Concert of car horns
as we debate the question
of when to change lanes.

*****

Sorry I'm not home
to take your call. At the tone
please state your bad news

*****

Is one Nobel Prize
so much to ask from a child
after all I've done?

*****

Today, mild shvitzing.
Tomorrow, so hot you'll plotz.
Five-day forecast: feh

*****

Left the door open.
for the Prophet Elijah.
Now our cat is gone.

*****

Yenta. Shmeer. Gevalt.
Shlemiel. Shlimazl. Tochis.
Oy! To be fluent!

*****

Quietly murmured
at Saturday services,
Yanks 5, Red Sox 3.

*****

A lovely nose ring --
excuse me while I put my
head in the oven.

*****

Hard to tell under
the lights--white Yarmulke or
male-pattern baldness

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Alright, Hussein, it's time for a Golden Oldie.

Hold on, Ralph, you aren't that old yet. This was an early '70's movie.

So was Billy Jack. That was pure gold then.

And just plain old now. Have you done anything new and exciting with yourself since 1971?

Well, last summer I did something that may be too difficult for some of our under-30 readers to be able to stomach.

Ok, let's hear it.

I sent my very first text message.

Wow! I feel sick just imagining you trying to find the spell-check feature.

Well, that was a challenge, but once I figured it out it 's been non-stop, especially during those exciting staff meetings when I can text without it being real obvious. Now I just need someone to text me back.

Well, don't hold your breath, Ralph, but what kept you from being so technologically advanced all this time?

You mean besides having to wait for a phone with spell-check? Money, Hussein. Until I ordered the family text plan and manipulated the boys into paying most of it I wasn't about to pay the 10 cents.

You're a good father. What a champ. So anyone bothering to read this and who has an unlimited texting plan could text you at 763-350-2522 and get to read more drivel.

Yep, but I like the word "dribble" which I found in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and who has the duke or friar or somebody say, "the dribbling dart of love."

Ralph, some true-blue texters don't know the meaning of fear. You don't know the meaning of pedantry. But what do you think Shakespeare was talking about besides the fact that he was the first one to use the word "pedant?"

The clap, Hussein. Dribbling darts of gonorrhea. He had just introduced us to Mistress Overdone, the madam of the brothel. Of course, he might have meant syphillis which may have been more common then and would explain the incomprehensible English accent which makes English movies needing subtitles.

Did you just insult an entire ethnic group called Anglo-Saxons? Welldone, I say. Movietime now, I say as well.

I wanted to see this movie again since the entire song list is made up of Leonard Cohen songs. I love Leonard Cohen. Good movie but only three Cohen songs. The movie starts out with a beautiful long scene of Warren Beatty riding up to the village of Presbyterian Church while Cohen performs his The Stranger Song which matches the scene so well that it could be a music video. The story I read somewhere on the Internet is that the director, Robert Altman, heard the song while making the movie and realized that it coincidentally fit the movie. Some DVD versions of the movie can be set for French which means you can hear the songs in French. I don't know if Cohen sings them but I'd like to hear it.

Ralph, Wikipedia is kind of wasted on you, isn't it? Good thing you don't need a proton accelerator. That would be 8 billion dollars down the drain.

What? Well, anyway, the movie has gained a following among Robert Altman fans and many film critics. It is good and bears a second viewing. It's supposedly a Western with an "anti-hero" which means Warren Beatty dies in the end to the great relief of those of us who don't care for him. Julie Christie plays the brothel madam, or as one reviewer put it, "the whore with a heart of opium."

The other prostitutes all seem to be portrayed as having hearts of gold. Good thing because they had very little else in those tents they started out with. There was a scene of all the women having fun together while soaking in a hot tub after they upgraded to hotel status. I don't know if that was too show that they weren't badly treated or just to show that they were human beings with the same desire for joy and companionship as everyone else. The movie did make a point of showing the prostitutes as being some of the first on the water brigade when the church catches fire. It is an interesting scene especially since no one ever went to the church yet everyone was anxious to save it when it started burning.

Altman used the novel as a starting point and then heavily interpreted it for his own sense of the story he wanted to tell especially given the era of Vietnam and the strong anti-war movement. He had just finished MASH and was able to get this made on the success of the MASH movie. I found out through the wonder of the Internet that the literary agent for the novel's author was the widow of Richard Wright, the author of Black Boy and Native Son. Wright also wrote several thousand haiku poems in his last year of life. About 800 of them were published in a book called This Other World. I happened to come across it last year in a bookstore. Beautiful poems.

Five Haikus

1.

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

2.

I give permission
For this slow spring rain to soak
The violet beds.

3.

With a twitching nose
A dog reads a telegram
On a wet tree trunk.

4.

Burning autumn leaves,
I yearn to make the bonfire
Bigger and bigger.

5.

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

Here's one of Cohen's poems that I love. Each pair of lines has a double meaning which I know because I actually read about it in a book.

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill
So my body leaves no scar
On you and never will

Through windows in the dark
The children come, the children go
Like arrows with no targets
Like shackles made of snow

True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It's lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun

As a falling leaf may rest
A moment on the air
So your head upon my breast
So my breath upon your hair

And many nights endure
Without a moon or star
So we will endure
When one is gone and far

True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It's lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun

Lotsa Movies

Moliere

The Apartment

Buster Keaton

Benny and Joon

Iron Man

Charlie Wilson’s War

Watermelon Man

Stromboli

Tropic Thunder

More Hussein’s Insanely Nebulous Movie Reviews from the uber-guru of the True Church of Reform Islam, Balack Hussein OBerlin.

Ralph Hussein, are you making fun of a particular presumptive presidential candidate?

No, Hussein II, but I should point out that he has fathered two black children. The world needs to know this.

Maybe so, but you need to know that getting into heaven is a lot easier the lighter you are which means losing the ego, O mighty uber buber. Even with your recent fan mail there is still a chance that your reviews are enjoyed the same way as fruitcake.

What? Well, onto the races, of which all but the first one was viewed in Augusta while mooching off my mother while various siblings dropped in or stayed in as in Tish.

Moliere, the 2007 version, was great fun, good acting, sweet story. Based more on his plays than his life. A reviewer on IMBb said it better than I have time to, even if I could: “Moliére may not fully capture the true essence of the French author but the fact that it does suggest a writer of depth, wit, and inspiration may entice the viewer to seek out the source material first hand. Granted that the film is speculation, not biography, but it is art and the payoff is a romantic and richly entertaining tribute to one of the greatest playwrights in history.”

The Apartment (1960) with Shirley Maclaine, Jack Lemmon, and Fred McMurray was great. Wow! What a story and acting! Billy Wilder had fun pushing the Production Code (precursor to the ratings system we have now) to its limit. Adultery and how to do it in the era of hotel detectives might have been the obvious plot, but just as obvious, through the incredible directing, is the same story as in Children of Men. Faceless individuals who get lost and lose their soul. All three main characters have no clue as to how their own actions affect their ability to become individuals. Much more of a drama than a comedy. Jack Lemmon’s character has become a model for man as mouse.

I had brought some Buster Keaton movies after having seen Benny and Joon 20 times. Silent movies are fun to watch, but unfortunately Buster Keaton used a really annoying musical score in College that worked much better with the sound turned down. He sure looks like Johnny Depp. Or is it the other way around? It’s eerie to watch him and see how much he influenced Depp not only in Benny and Joon but in Depps’s other movies.

Benny and Joon is just a beautiful movie. The soundtrack along with Depp sitting in a tree makes the movie. We didn’t watch it this trip, but I had to mention it.

Iron Man is great fun. As a certain California-based musician wryly noted, “Robert Downey, Jr. is so sardonic.” “Yes, he is, California musician female-type person”.

We did love the movie and saw it in the cheap theatre with the Augusta-based matri-familia type person who also liked it. Apparently and inexplicably, I may have found some of the more sardonically sexist jokes funnier than my companions found them. I do think that Terence Howard deserves much more than being cast as the token A-A gofer, best buddy character. But still a very good comic book movie. Great message movie which Nicholas Cage also did so well with in Lords of War. The real-life arms merchant that Cage’s character was based on was finally arrested this past year. No news yet on what happened to him next. I’m sure someone else stepped in right away.

We saw Charlie Wilson’s War the other night. The bonus feature on the real Charlie Wilson was good. Movie was good, too, but the book might be better according to Chris who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, not Birmingham, England, which recently discovered that their city’s webpage uses a picture of the skyline of Birmingham ---- Alabama..

Watermelon Man from 1970 was funny, still-topically satirical, and very dramatic at the end. Godfrey Cambridge stars and was very good. He starts off a white bigot and then wakes up black. Some early reviewers called it worth seeing but a one-joke movie. It is a long joke, however, with many layers.

Stromboli was the 1950 Ingmar Bergman movie in which she fell in love with the director, Rosellini, and left her husband and child for him even though she had just learned how to speak Italian and probably didn’t know any better. Then she left him several years later after she learned what those Italian men are really after.

Fascinating movie. Some actual book research in the library told me that the original version is a good bit longer than the international version and has a different ending. I couldn’t tell which version we were watching. It was VHS without any special features. It was also full-screen which means we may have missed some parts of the scenes without the wide-screen option of which letter-boxing fans like me and Tish were out-voted by old-school matriarchs like Mom. Still, a well-worth watching movie. The in-house Bergman expert visiting from California (at least, Tish claimed to have read her autobiography) said Bergman was the only professional actress on the set. All the others came from the island of Stromboli (the resident food expert visiting from St. Paul just stayed hungry throughout the movie; Pinocchio experts were missing ). The big mystery in the movie is why in the hell anybody lives on an island which has a volcano that blows up frequently. The evacuation scene in the movie looked really difficult.

Speaking of difficult, Tropic Thunder must be at the top of whatever level of difficulty movies are judged. It’s also near the top of the list of movies not to see with your mother. A Clockwork Orange is probably the first movie people think of when trying to find a movie not to see with their mother. Tropic Thunder is a close second. But, fortunately, I’m at the age now where when I go to a movie like TT with my mother (and adult sister, I might add) I can rest assured that at any time I can look over at Mom and see that she has fallen asleep.

The jokes in this movie-within-a movie, which is supposed to be a joke in itself, are mostly a repeat of Ben Stiller’s one-joke empire. The satire is appreciated. The irony is lost. At least on me.

I think it’s wonderful that Stiller and company included a skit on making fun of movies that use mental retardation as a theme. Unfortunately, they aren’t the ones to make that kind of joke. Most of the people who will see this movie (other than me, of course, and two other people of which at least one was awake for most of the movie) are going to be adolescent boys who may not understand that calling someone “retard” really is not a joke. It is sad that as the “N” word gets to be finally politically incorrect the “R” word is replacing it. Wow! What a surprise.

But the worst part about Tropic Thunder was that Robert Downey, Jr., while good, was not sardonic. According to Tish. I’m still learning what the hell that word means. And after 10 days in Augusta playing tournament Berlin Scrabble (rules are constantly shifting in Berlin Scrabble) I learned that my mother can add an “O” to “blini” and call it an Irish pancake which means that sardonicy has risen to new heights. I also learned that cheating at Scrabble gets harder when other people can see how long I’m taking to look up a word after a challenge. A certain old-school person had a strong objection to the Scrabble dictionary and since her one vote counted for more than any number of other votes we had to resort to calling up loved ones who happened to have Internet connection so they could look up a non-sensical two-letter word for us.

We finally forced our way in and bought a Scrabble dictionary but allowed the use of the in-house Webster’s to also count. Big mistake. Tish played “ra” which I knew was not in the Scrabble dictionary but she found it in the Webster’s which meant I lost my turn. I got so upset I called the phone number listed in the Scrabble dictionary and was promptly told that I should have insisted on using only one dictionary.

Wow, Ralph Hussein Oblini! And to think that only a few months ago I was happily enjoying heaven and now find myself in hell being channeled by a fruitcake.

Hancock, Dark Knight

Hamlet, Hamlet, and more Hamlet

So many movies—so much time. Let’s get going with Hussein’s Insanely Speedy Movie Reviews.

Great idea, Hussein, but first, do you ever use spell-check?

No.

I suppose you subscribe to what a futurely famous movie blogger once said about something like, “Pity the person who only knows one way to spell.”

Mark Twain had a movie blog?

No, but you could start channeling him and give me something else to do, like write an advice column on how to get into heaven.

Right, but still I should acknowledge an earlier defect in which I misspellede sobriety and even worse, mistakenly put a still-stunning, ravishing red-haired Georgia native in a socialist-sisters ski club at Vassar. For the record, my mother was not a member of the Communist Party at any time nor was she ever a sorority sister. Further spelling error detections should be directed to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest which just announced its 2008 winner and which inexplicably refers to both Checker cabs which is the model that Dad had in Maryland after ditching the VW bus and also to our continuing theme of utility hole covers otherwise known as “manhole covers.”

Hence the just announced winning entry:

“Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.’”

Did you write that? No? Sounds like it could be. Movie reviews, please, Hussein.

Will Smith (note the initials) as Hancock in the revolutionary role of a black super-hero who also happens to be a drunk and along with the real Hamlet plays a tortured iambic soul who can't make up his mind. Co-starring with Charlize Theron’s cleavage (which easily out-acts Will Smith’s puckered lips). Literate movie-goers will not be looking at her earthly assets when she gets into bed wearing a tank top but will, of course, be reading the message on the tank top which bears the name of Macalester College, a pre-eminent school blocks from our house in St. Paul and the alma mater of the director, Peter Berg.

Theron’s father was an abusive drunk in real life which makes her role next to a drunken non-Scientologist all the more emotive. Will Smith claims to not be a Scientologist but he has (apparently) funded a school for budding Scientologists and (apparently) gave out free personality test coupons to the cast after the shooting was finished. Also, the entire story line in Hancock is about undergoing a personality change. So, make up your own mind. As in, does it make a difference in choosing to see a movie?

But in another incredibly coincidental convergence, Theron’s character’s name is Mary which happens to be Shakespeare’s mother’s name. As we all know, Freud said he based his Oedipus theories on Hamlet (as well as some old, dead Greek guy). So if Hamlet was mad at his uncle for marrying Hamlet’s mother because Hamlet wanted to marry her then the Hancock movie must be carrying the theory forward. But anymore and I’ll give away the vastly complex plot line. See this one at your own risk. Not really worth it as it makes "action movie" into an anagram for "I'm no actvoie." Spoiler alert: The movie does make a nice connection to angels and how they might interact with us. A much better movie is City of Angels with Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage which was a remake of Wim Wender's Wings of Desire which I haven't seen yet but have heard is very good.

Things got really weird after seeing Hancock in the drive-in with Get Smart as the second feature. I loved the TV show. Not the movie, which was a huge disappointment. However, erudite fans will note that the actress who plays Agent 99 is . . . . Anne Hathaway. Which is . . . Drumroooolll. . . . the same name as Shakespeare’s wife!

Bartman Hussein O’Berlin, you are nuts!

Which leads us to Batman, O’Dark Knight.

Also Hamlet?

Yes, with the exception that it’s true to the Comic Book Code which says the hero never directly kills anyone. Too bad, since Michael Caine as Alfred could have been the exception. Caine was much better in Children of Men with Clive Owen. I loved Children of Men and will spend more e-mail ink on that Hamlet connection later. If you do see it, remember that it is very sad and depressing but also one of the most hopeful and joyful movies that I’ve seen. I did have an interesting emotional response when I watched the YouTube attachment about the dancing guy that Tish sent out a few months ago. I had just watched Children of Men and then re-watched the YouTube clip for the 10^th time. The idea that an individual can bring people together in joy was the perfect real-life antidote to the possible near-future real-life of the “infertility of the individual soul” that is the story within Children of Men.

In anther stunning coincidence, the commentary to Children of Men (all the special features are worth watching) has a shot of the director wearing a sweatshirt from . . . drumrooolll . . . Vassar. We wonder what that means.

Hussein, another incredibly nebulous blog.

What the hell does nebulous mean?

Not clear.

Then why use the word?

Nevermind. And stop getting your jokes from the newspaper comics. And what the hell does “emotive” mean?

What?

Back from vacation

It’s too much, Bosley. I can’t take it anymore.

Can’t take what, Ralph? And it’s not Bosley anymore. It’s Hussein, thank you very much.

I can’t take the suspense and where did you get Hussein from?

We’re all big O’bama supporters up here and he’s getting a lot of flak for his middle name sounding Egyptian or maybe Yemenite. Many of us are adopting his middle name as ours. That way we’ll all sound Kuwaiti or Omani and no one can say that his name doesn’t sound Americani. And what’s all the suspense?

Ok, so you’ve been reading the papers. Good for you. So how are things up there, anyway?

Oh, big happenings. The lesbian bloc rose up and had a mass self-resurrection of their souls. They’re all coming back. Remember what I said earlier. Don’t diss any dykes.

What’s up with them? Did the California vote on gay marriage get them all excited?

No. Most of them care more about finding out if Shakespeare really wrote those plays himself. Once you get up here you realize there is some truth to what that liberal Anglican priest said that arguing about gay marriage is really about rich people arguing about sex while the poor still look for justice.

Interesting point. So what’s heading up the annunciation?

Your new Poet Laureate. She’s a dyke and a hot mountain biking Californian, too. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/352?gclid=CPuUlrTT4ZQCFQN2sgodwFswSA

Poetry is what gets people worked up up here, not marriage. Remember that. Your lovely wife might like a little poetry from you.

I’ll work on it. What about the gay men? Doesn’t poetry get them excited, too.

Not as much as television. But they may be self-resurrecting, too, now that As the World Turns has a gay couple.

That’s right. Their name is Nuke as in Noah and Luke, just like Brangleina and what’s his name. Wow, I wonder what my mother’s mother, Granny, is thinking about that. She watched that show like it was a religion.

I’ll ask her. Of course, I still love Billy Crystal in the old TV comedy, Soap. That was good TV. What’s happened down there since scientists discovered that the brain in gay men closely resembles the brain in straight women? Any research on lesbian brains?

Still looking for one, but we did have a potential lesbian scare the other day. Amy Adams, who played the fairy tale princess in Enchanted, had her picture in the paper with the caption reading, “Adams to marry high school sweetheart.” Right next to her picture was a picture of Pamela Anderson. My first thought was not pretty.

Too much fantasy for you, huh?

What?

I’m still waiting for the suspense, Ralph.

Well, maybe I’ll use Hussein, too, and the suspense is all about which one of my siblings won the bet.

What? Bad bet, Black Bart? I mean Ralph or Hussein, or whatever. At least you didn’t switch to Bartman who was the spectator who stole the World Series from the Cubs in 2003 by interfering with the foul ball. Of course, you could be Bartman Hussein O’Berlin. Which would put you back in Ohio since Oberlin College is there and in an amazing coincidence so is the home office for Ho’Bart dishwashers.

Sure, and the bet was about how long I would last with keeping my mouth shut.

All Shall Be Restored

by Kay Ryan

The grains shall be collected

from the thousand shores

to which they found their way,

and the boulder restored,

and the boulder itself replaced

in the cliff, and likewise

the cliff shall rise

or subside until the plate of earth

is without fissure. Restoration

knows no half measure. It will

not stop when the treasured and lost

bronze horse remounts the steps.

Even this horse will founder backward

to coin, cannon, and domestic pots,

which themselves shall bubble and

drain back to green veins in stone.

And every word written shall lift off

letter by letter, the backward text

read ever briefer, ever more antic

in its effort to insist that nothing

shall be lost.

Indiana Jones, Zohan, Great Debaters

Indiana Jones

Zohan

Great Debaters

OK, I'm going to be in Augusta this August for 2 weeks. Tish is supposed to be there for part of the time. Maybe she'll teach me how to do web links. Oh boy! I can hardly wait.

I took Alan and some of his friends out to the drive-in the other night. School's out and I'm nuts. The paper said Indiana Jones was playing along with Drillbit Taylor followed by the new Narnia movie. The first one wouldn't start until close to 10 which meant 5am before getting home but since I'm a responsible father I said only the first two. And I might have actually meant it this time except it started raining about 1:30 so I was saved from having to say, "OK, just one more."

When it rains in Minnesota it pours. At the drive-in you can listen to the movie on their speaker or on a radio station. It's louder on the radio but then the car has to be on. We listened to it on the speakers since it was a beautiful night (until 1:30) and I sat outside which I love. A crescent moon above me, stars in the sky, faint aroma of pot in the air.

Too bad the car next to us decided to use their radio. Their battery died and their sunroof was open. When the rain crashed down, their kids were sleeping in the back seat. We couldn't find the battery in the dark in my car so they found someone else to get a jump. It's a regular neighborhood out there.

The drive-in had decided to switch movies so Indiana was second and Narnia was third. Much to the teenage boys' delight the first movie was Don't Mess With the Zohan with Adam Sandler giving a really pitiful attempt at Jew/Palestinian reconciliation humor. I read that most Arab actors wouldn't have anything to do with this movie. Anyway, Oh boy!!! Yuck. Almost as bad as Borat. Clueless teenage boys loved it, though, as they did Borat.

It's probably not a coincidence that Zohan and Zohar are just a downstroke away from being the same word. Probably why Madonna had a bit part. No wait, that was Mariah Carey. Maybe she's also into kaballah.

Kevin James had a small part. He was the Chuck to Adam Sandler's Larry in Chuck and Larry get Anal. Interesting that that movie started off with an R rating because the MPAA deems homosexual content to be R. Sandler appealed it and got it down to PG-13.

Zohan contains vast amounts of really dumb hetero sex but only gets a PG-13. I suppose it is an advance after the Gay Deceivers in 1968 which started off with an X and then got appealed to PG-13.

Ralph, is it true that you wrote "content to be R. Sandler . . . " as a way of getting Adam Sandler to pay you for suggesting he's a rabbi?

It's called a period, Bosley. Complete sentences? Hello?

Then Indiana Jones and the Silver Spoon came on. The first one came out in 1981. I remember watching it with Mom and Dad. Great fun. Dad loved it. I think some siblings were there but what do I know? I do know that I didn't know that Indiana Jones had served in the OSS in WWII. He mentions it in this installment. Interesting that several years ago, the movie reviewer (hah! what does he know?) for our local paper commented that most of the events in WWII had been turned into movies with one major exception: The OSS missions in China. He said Hollywood better hurry before all the first-hand account-bearers, like Dad, are gone. It was already too late.

I only remember hearing a few stories from Dad about China or even France. I did hear the one about sneaking into the German camp in France to get sugar and coming out with salt. The only one I heard about China was Dad doing early morning push-ups in the POW camp so the Japanese would think he had malaria and wouldn't put him in the forced labor camp. I was never quite sure how push-ups resembled malaria. I think the idea was to look exhausted. Heck, I can do that with one push-up.

I met an 86 year-old man recently who had been shot down over Germany and finished the war in a POW camp. He told me he belongs to the Ex-POW Association. I went to their web site (link here later) and saw that they have a page to provide biographies of ex-POWs. Should we submit one for Dad?

Well, Indiana has seen better days. I missed the last half due to the rain but I think I had seen it all before. It's fun and well done, however. Lots more fun for kids who didn't see the first one when it was exciting adventure. Karen Allen got brought back. Speilberg called her up and said he had a part for her. Nice to see a romantic interest in a movie with an older leading man and an actress who isn't young enough to be his grandaughter.

The Communist Party in Russia hated the movie. They tried to get it banned there. I'm glad to see they put their efforts into something important and which means they never have to mention the 10-20 million people Stalin killed through his food redistribution program. (link would go here with a source verifing my info but you'll have to take my highly objective opinon as historical fact until Tish shows me how to actually write). Maybe it's the fact that it was poets and writers he lined up in the basement on August 12, 1952, and had executed that gives me an extra sense of disgust.

Well, the CP theme crept into the movie I finally saw tonight, The Great Debaters. Good movie. All about a small town Jew from Brooklyn who gets invited to use his GI Bill at Vassar College to debate the first southern sorioty sister he can find who wants to go out for ice cream.

That's not the real movie, but wouldn't it be a good one? The final scene could be shot in Mongolia with a whole bunch of Mongolian princesses racing their horses around the bride and groom and whooping it up with Pete Seeger. Let's see, who could we cast as Seeger's romantic interest? And, yes, I know about the controversy about Pete's CP and Stalinist roles. He did the Obama thing a long time ago. Pete for Prez!

Of course, in the real movie it's Denzel who is branded as the communist and his debate team which gets invited to Harvard. Wasn't it strange to see the Harvard Ve Ri Tas banner? I thought I was back in our dining room and looking at Dad's Harvard chair.

I loved seeing Forest Whitaker act with Denzel. They're both great actors but Forest is exceptional in all his scenes especially the ones he has with Denzel. He really gets into his roles. Denzel does, too, but they're often the same role.

Great music. Oprah's Harpo company produced it. Oddly, it takes place in Texas and the executive producer is named Davy Crockett. Was that a joke? Also the actor who plays the 14 year-old James Farmer is named Denzel Whitaker. No relation to either, but he was named for the other Denzel.

Denzel Washington plays the poet and professor, Melvin Tolson. I couldn't find any biographical info that supported the movie's plot line that he was a union organizer. Maybe they changed that just like they changed the final debate from the real-life contest at University of Southern California to the more upscale Harvard. Tolson was a famous poet. Here's an excerpt from one of Tolson's poems. (put a damn link here, Ralph! What's the matter with you?)

"The following is a section from another of Tolson’s great pieces, “Dark Symphony,” which was published in The Atlantic Monthly and won first place in a poetry contest sponsored by the American Negro Exposition in Chicago a year after the events of The Great Debaters. "

II

Lento Grave²

The centuries-old pathos in our voices
Saddens the great white world
And the wizardry of our dusky rhythms
Conjures up shadow-shapes of ante-bellum years:

Black slaves singing One More River to Cross
In the torture tombs of slave-ships,
Black slaves singing Steal Away to Jesus
In jungle swamps
Black slaves singing The Crucifixion
In slave-pens at midnight,
Black slaves singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
In cabins of death,
Black slaves singing Go Down, Moses
In the canebrakes of the Southern Pharaohs.

III

Andante Sostenuto³

They tell us to forget
The Golgotha we tread…
We who are scourged with hate,
A price upon our head.
They who have shackled us
Require of us a song,
They who have wasted us
Bid us condone the wrong.

They tell us to forget
Democracy is spurned.
They tell us to forget
The Bill of Rights is burned.
Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet:
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!

Oh, how can we forget
Our human rights denied?
Oh, how can we forget
Our manhood crucified?
When Justice is profaned
And plea with curse is met,
When Freedom’s gates are barred,
Oh, how can we forget?

There Will Be Blood

There Will Be Blood
Feast of Love

Well, yesterday was the anniversary of the U.S. Congress passing of the amendment to allow women the vote (it still had to be ratified by the states) (thanks to Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac). And yesterday was the presumed crowning of Barack O'bama as the Democratic presidential nominee (right here in downtown St. Paul).

And the connection, Ralph?

Glad you asked. Since black men got the vote (technically or theoretically) way before women did then it follows that a black man will get the chance to be the prez before a women. Follow?

Sure, but what's with the apostrophe in Obama?

That's to help him get the Irish vote in Alabama since the university football team there is known as the 'Bama.

Wow, just like your Irish cousins who started O'berlin College in Ohio.

You got it. Now get this--

"1st Revelation: Jesus born of an Immaculate Conception

2nd Revelation: Christ returns from the dead, opens doors of heaven

3rd Revelation: the endtimes -- Jesus returns w/ his father and the Holy Ghost, raises the dead, and sits in judgment of all humanity for eternity.

The Church of the Third Revelation, then, is the church of the end of the world. Daniel is the 3rd revelation, because he is the final evolution of American capitalism. He goes from poor lone independent worker (first scene), to small wealthier entrepreneur (all business ventures before Little Boston), to stratospherically rich monoplolist (stranglehold on SoCal oil). Note that each permutation leads to more people under his control, and progressively less family/community."

Ralph. what the hell are you talking about?

There Will Be Blood. It's from an unlinked webpage I found that tries to explain the background for the Church of the Third Revelation which seems to be a central metaphor in the movie. The other central "metaphor that hits you in the face" is a how-to guide on how to acquire end-stage alcoholism. No wait, that's not a metaphor; that's a depressing movie to sit through. The opening music should be a clue. If you can sit through that then you can sit through the movie. Daniel Day-Lewis' extraordinary acting makes it worthwhile unless you were thinking there might be a more-than-two word speaking part somewhere in the movie for a woman. Of course, this makes it a good movie to watch in honor of Obama becoming the nominee since it is unlikely that Hillary will get a speaking part in the race.

Ralph, you should get the nomination for your genius in being able to make really stupid connections.

Thanks, but wait, there's more.

Daniel Day-Lewis' character is named Daniel, he is married to Rebecca Miller (Arthur Miller's daughter) who has a brother named Daniel, and the Book of Daniel in the Bible provides the background for the spiritual theme of the movie. And to continue this extraordinarily brilliant thread, his mother is Jewish, his wife's father is Jewish, the Hollywood industry is Jewish (as evidenced by a comment from a reporter who said "Hollywood is so Jewish that if you move there, your foreskin falls off after six weeks," and the movie was filmed in Marfa, Texas, which is where No Country For Old Men was filmed (at the same time) as well as Giant (not at the same time) and everybody knows that the Coen Brothers are . . .

"Are" what?

I can't say it. It's too brilliant.
I'm sure it is, but isn't it true that the Marfans still like Giant a whole lot better than these Jewish movies?
Bosley, you just asked that so you could say "Marfan."
Moving on to Feast of Love. WARNING! Men, make sure you know what color your significant other's eyes are before seeing this movie. Women whose significant other is a woman: Don't worry about it. You already know.
Alright, we loved this movie. Cliches and tears aside (and great sex), it is a sweet, funny, predictable, fluffy movie. Very good, and it has a Leonard Cohen song which makes most movies watchable. It also has Morgan Freeman as God (who else since George Burns died?) and Greg Kinnear who I first saw in As Good As It Gets so I always thought he really was gay, but in this movie he's just really happy. All the time. Even when he's filleting things he shouldn't be. It's his wife who is gay.
Lots of sex. Lesbian sex, straight sex, teddy bear sex. Rated R probably because the teddy bear is naked and the lesbians are white.
But the best part (yeah, right) is that it's filmed in Portland since the actual location in the book is really boring. Filmed in actual coffee houses in Portland and using my alma mater, Portland State University, as a backdrop, even though the campus scenes were shot on Reed College since PSU is really boring.
And to make another brilliant connection, it's directed by Robert Benton who co-wrote No Country For Old Men. No wait. He co-wrote Bonnie and Clyde. No Country For Old Men was the remake. Did I mention the sex?

When I lived in Portland (where Linda and I met on a forest trail on the first day of spring) I was very involved with what was called at the time the Association for Retarded Citizens, now just called the ARC, and was part of the Citizen's Advocacy program. A major friend of the program had been Lloyd Reynolds (1902-1978) a long time professor at Reed College. He was a champion not only of the rights of people with disabilities but also of the art form of italic handwriting. He also studied Zen poetry extensively and used a form of it he called Weathergrams. I do this with my class every year.

from The Calligraphy of Lloyd Reynolds by Gunderson & Lehman:

“Weathergrams are poems of about ten words or less. They are written on narrow strips of kraft paper cut from used grocery store bags. They are hung on bushes or trees in gardens or along mountain trails. There are generally seasonal and are left out for three months or longer. The name means ‘weather writing’ — notations by sun, wind, rain, and possibly ice. Written with the proper inks, the writing lasts. Let them weather and wither like old leaves. In composing one, let the meaning grow out of things, with some action involved if possible — in a here and now. The meaning is not all on the surface. The unexpected is essential. It is not a condensation, but a moment of vision.”

Here's an example:
"Bud,
blossom,
then fruit,
the final
goal.
But,
the seeds . . ."