Michael Clayton, Beowulf, He Was a Quiet Man, 5000 Fingers of Dr. T., Gay Deceivers.

Gay what?

Bosley! where have you been?

Sorry Bart, we've been in the middle of a major Moroccan movie marathon.

You mean that metaphorically, don't you, Bosley? You don't really watch movies up there, do you?

Oh yes, it's all movies, all the time. It's movie heaven. Well, except for the gay ghetto.

What happened there?

They were doing OK until they had to start letting in lesbians. Eventually one of them got the job of entertainment director and it's been non-stop, back-to-back showings of Personal Best and Desert Hearts.

Bosley, you read that in the St. Paul paper last week. A new gay senior-citizens home opened up and one of the senior men was quoted saying the same thing.

OK, maybe I did borrow, but it was funny, wasn't it? And it is true about the barrio going butch. Some people think Big L stands for another L word besides Love.

Who's Big L?

We're not sure. Just don't diss any dykes.

What's with all the awesome alliteration, Bosley?

Bart, that's how Beowulf was written in the Anglo-Saxon and since that's the language that Grendel is using in the new Beowulf movie I thought I would help you show your regal readers how smart we are.

And you read it in the Anglo-Saxon, Bosley?

We read all languages up here, Bart. It's what makes it paradise. Except for having to learn the accents.

Did we like Beowulf?

Not really. The teenage boys did, but they don't know the story and the book really is so much better even in English. The animation, especially in 3-D, is what everyone is talking about along with Angelina's high-heels.

Did we like Michael Clayton?

It was actually annoying. Too much going on and not enough to care about. Sydney Pollack was in it. He directed The Interpreter with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. That was a better movie. Nicole Kidman had a great line: "Vengeance is the lazy way to grieve." A significant contrast to V for Vendetta which is all about vengeance being justified.

The Beowulf story is based on the vengeance tradition of kinship retribution where if someone hurts your family then you go and kill their family. Interestingly, you live in Minnesota which has canonized Longfellow's Christianized version of Hiawatha. The historical Hiawatha lived about 500 years in what became the Six Nations area in upstate NY. Kinship retribution was the standard practice then. Hiawatha's wife and children were killed by a neighboring tribe. He decided to not retaliate and instead went to live by himself for a year. When he came out he said he had been visited by a strange man (The Peacemaker) who told him to gather all the tribes and tell them to stop the kinship retribution.

Great story and would have made a great movie in 1940 when the idea was suggested except the peacemaker role was seen as too Communist. Maybe somebody will try it again. In 3-D with Angelina playing Minnehaha. Sorry, bad joke.

Wow, Bosley, how do you know all that?

Bart, your son, Alan, wrote a paper on it in 5th grade so you know it, too. And today is his birthday. Happy birthday, Alan.

What about He Was a Quiet Man with Christian Slater and Elisha Cuthbert?

Good. Interesting story. Requires some thought. Great acting by Christian Slater. We loved him and Marisa Tomei in Untamed Heart. Baboon kings doing open-heart surgery made for a great love-story.

Well, I did like He Was a Quiet Man, too, except it's hard watching movies with medical issues when there's a female-type nurse watching it with me.

You mean your lovely wife?

Yes. She likes to point out all the silly inconsistencies and illogical medical stuff. That's the difference between men and women. When a beautiful quadriplegic is laying next to a beating heart monitor then the nurse-type woman will focus on the fact that she is not hooked up to it and the man-type man will focus on the fact that Elisha Cuthbert's beating heart is lying underneath her bare breasts.

I see what you mean. Better to let it pass. What made you rent The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.?

Stanley Kramer produced it and after watching The Defiant Ones I looked him up. Very interesting. One of the writers for The Defiant Ones was blacklisted at the time and was originally listed under a pseudonym then relisted years later under his real name.

Sounds like that Woody Allen movie, The Front.

Yes, one of the few of his I could understand. Anyway, the 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. was a Dr. Seuss book that became a fascinating live-action musical with great choreagraphy and a main character named Bart. I showed it to my class in preparation for a visit from the symphony. They loved it.

Wow, Bart, that main character sounds like someone you could relate to.

Yes, also it was made in 1953 which was my birth year.

Sounds traumatic. Anything else happen in 1953?

Dylan Thomas finally finished pickling his brain a month after I was born.

I bet you fancied yourself as kind of a Dylan Thomas neophyte.

Yes, except for the pickle part.

Any good Dylan Thomas stories? Maybe with a nurse in it.

Well, I was in Augusta way, way, way before I got married to a beautiful nurse and I had been reading Dylan Thomas to Mom and Dad shortly before Dad went in the hospital for a short stay. Some surgery of one kind or another. I happened to score a date with another nurse a few days later who told me about this patient she had who kept calling out,"Rage, rage against the dying of the night."

Any other nurse stories?

Only the time I tried to get a date with the nurse at the Jewish nursing home in NY where Grandma was after she got hit by the bus. She turned me down so I took my poker winnings from the ship I had just gotten off and had a fantastic meal at the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the World Trade Center.

Alright, Bart, we need to wrap this up. I have to get back to the Moroccan film fest. What did you see in the Gay Deceivers?

Another Defiant Ones connection. The 8 year-old boy who should have been killed when he hits his head on the rock after Sidney Poitier pushes him was Kevin Coughlin who I thought looked familiar so I looked him up. Tragically, he was killed in 1973 by a hit-and-run driver on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles while he was washing his car's windshield at 1:45 in the morning while his wife was watching. I have no idea what he was doing washing his car window at 1:45 in the morning on a busy street but that's what the Internet says. He also starred in the Gay Deceivers which predates Larry and Chuck by 4 decades and was a little funnier but a lot more satirical. It was released in 1969 which was the same year as the Stonewall Rebellion. It was originally given an X rating due to a psychologist saying that it might entice any latent homosexuals in the audience to become unlatent. The director, Bruce Kessler contested the rating and got it changed to an R. Very interesting movie with the same theme as Chuck and Larry. Some of the personal reviews on IMDb said audiences in Hollywood laughed through the entire movie. I'm laughing now. Also time for bed. Goodnight, Larry.