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?