Category: Movie Reviews

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She-Hulk X

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I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, “That was a damn good idea for a motion picture.”  It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.  It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.

Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?  Most of what is out there are superhero movies.  One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.  And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.  Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.  But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.  For the most part no one even dies.  It seems rather pointless.

I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.  Now this isn’t completely the case.  There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.  I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.  We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.  We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.  It’s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.

Now compare this to the Marvel “Avengers” series.  There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.  Each “hero” has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.  And now they’ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.  The most laughable one I’d say is “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”  I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.  Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.

Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.  At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.  Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.  Now it is almost unbelievable that they’ve been able to turn this into a series.  The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.  In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn’t even tell how many people he killed.  The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t even know how we’re supposed to believe that the guns don’t start to melt from the heat.  But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.

I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.  The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.  But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.  And they’re getting old.  What happens when they’re gone?  She-Hulk II or III or X?

Critical Drinker Re-reviews “Falling Down”

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The Critical Drinker is a movie reviewer who provides a very entertaining product.  He’s a younger guy but he’s actually quite astute.  I like the movie “Falling Down” and I like this review for the insights he brings to it from his point of view as a foreigner (Scot).

I think I’ll rewatch it and review it myself.

Catch Me If You Can (2002) – A Movie Review

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“Catch Me If You Can” is the screen adaptation of the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr.; a boy who at the age of sixteen years old impersonates an airline pilot, a medical doctor and a lawyer and steals millions of dollars as he crisscrosses the United States and the rest of the world forging and passing bad checks.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr. a New York city teenager whose parents Frank Sr. (played by Christopher Walken) and Paula are divorcing due to the IRS fraud investigation that has swallowed up Frank Sr.’s livelihood.  Rather than acknowledge his parents’ split he runs away.  And while trying to survive on his own he figures out how to impersonate adults like airline pilots and forge checks.

Eventually his successful check forging career catches the attention of the FBI’s bank crimes division in the person of Carl Hanratty played by Tom Hanks.  But for a while Frank’s dead-heading from city to city on airline flights keeps him one step ahead.  But eventually Hanratty learns Frank’s true identity and Frank tries to throw him off his trail by laying low.  He impersonates a doctor down in Atlanta at a small hospital.  Eventually he tries to settle down with a nurse who wants to marry him.  Her father (played by Martin Sheen) is a successful lawyer down in Louisiana and Frank convinces him that he’s not only a doctor but also has a law degree and after (legitimately) passing the Louisiana bar exam he settles in to become his future father-in-law’s assistant prosecutor.  But just as the engagement is being celebrated Hanratty shows up and Frank bails out the back window and escapes.

Frank leaves the United States and travels around Europe and elsewhere but eventually Hanratty catches up to him in France and brings him back to America.  He makes one last desperate break by escaping from an airliner bathroom through the pipe chase and escaping out of the taxiing plane.  But Hanratty finds him when he tries to see his mother and drags him off to jail.  He is convicted of grand theft and sentenced to twelve years in prison.

But over the course of several years Hanratty visits Frank in prison and decides the FBI could use his extraordinary knowledge of check fraud.  He gets Frank released into Hanratty’s custody and eventually Frank becomes a valuable asset to law enforcement and eventually becomes extremely rich perfecting fraud countermeasures for banks and other financial institutions.

This is a remarkably entertaining movie.  I’m assuming a lot has been stretched from the literal truth for the sake of enhancing the plot.  But if even a quarter of the things he did in the movie are true, it’s a remarkable story.  Frank Jr.’s brilliance as a criminal and a confidence man is contrasted with his search to restore the family life that is exploded in the beginning of the movie when his father’s wealth is snatched away by the IRS and his wife leaves him.  The interplay between these two facets of his existence gives poignancy to the story.  The ironic aspect is that every Christmas Frank Jr. calls Carl Hanratty to talk and Carl figures out that Frank calls because he has no one else to talk to.  It’s a very strange relationship between the two of them but it is effectively portrayed.  All the main characters are acted very ably and for once Spielberg directs a picture in a very balanced and well-paced way.  I’ll say this movie comes highly recommended.

The 400 Blows (1959) – A Movie Review

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The 400 Blows is reckoned one of the greatest films ever made.  I beg to differ.

I won’t give a spoiler alert because there’s nothing to spoil.  Nothing happens.  This was François Truffaut’s directorial debut.  I don’t know.  If I had been around back then I would have gotten in touch with him urging him to stop making movies, for everybody’s sake.  Mercifully, the movie is in French so that will warn off most of the unwary.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch it tonight after I recorded it from TCM last month during its “Thirty Days of Oscar” celebration of Academy Award winning movies.  Which goes to show you that the Oscars have been selecting bad movies for well over sixty-five years at least.

Wikipedia says that all of these famous filmmakers (Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, Steven Spielberg, Jean Cocteau, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Richard Linklater, Tsai Ming Liang, Woody Allen, Richard Lester, P C Sreeram, Norman Jewison, Wes Anderson and Nicolas Cage) think this movie is one of the best movies ever made.  Well, that’s too bad.

A 12-year-old boy is bored and gets in trouble at school, runs away from home and gets sent to reform school for trying to steal a typewriter from his father’s office.  At the end of the movie, he escapes from the reform school and runs until he finds himself on the beach at Normandy.  The End.

When the credits came up at the end Camera Girl looked at me and asked me, “That’s it?  What the hell kind of a movie is that?”  I said, “It’s abstract!”  She was not happy.  That will probably be the last French film she will be watching.  I think she holds me directly responsible for this movie.  I think I’ve lost some stature in her eyes because I recorded it and didn’t warn her off.

While at the reform school the kid gets in trouble and one of the men in charge slaps him in the face brutally hard.  So, I was afraid the title was about some horrible beating the boy receives.  But that was the only violence in the film.  The real violence is against the audience.  After watching this film there are ninety-nine minutes I will never get back.  It should be called the “The Ninety-Nine Blows.”

I know I’m just a philistine and I don’t understand art for art’s sake.  But I contend that a motion picture has to amuse the audience in some way.  It can excite or frighten or sadden or confuse or fill the audience with mirth, nostalgia or lust or almost any emotion or intellectual state.  But at the very minimum it cannot bore the audience to tears.  That’s the one feeling it cannot summon up in the audience.  That’s the one unforgiveable sin.  The lights cannot come up on an audience that looks at each other and says, “What the hell was that?”  That unfortunately was our reaction.  If I had seen this in a theater I would have pounded on the manager’s office and demanded our money back.  That’s how bad it was.

Maybe it’s the French.  Being beaten by the Germans in three major wars over the course of less than a century may have done something terrible to their souls.  Maybe this film is a form of revenge on a world that has beaten the snot out of them, physically, psychologically and spiritually.  If that is the case, then I think they went overboard.  No one, not even the Nazis deserves to watch this film.  There are limits to revenge.

Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Something Revolutionary and Unprecedented; Storytelling

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Today I had one of my grandsons over for a visit and after lunch Camera Girl asked if he wanted to watch the movie, “Catch Me if You Can.”  And he said sure, so I went looking for it in the DVDs.  But mysteriously it was missing.  So, she gave me a lot of grief because she said if I had said we didn’t have it she would have rented it at the library.  So blah, blah, blah … I said okay let’s watch “Captain America – Civil War.”  And he said sure.  Well aside from the commercials (I recorded it a couple of days ago) that I had to annoyingly fast forward through it was the typical Marvel Universe CGI extravaganza.  Well, mostly.  Since it wasn’t billed as an “Avengers” movie it didn’t have the full ensemble; Hulk and Thor were missing.  But with all of the minor heroes and the addition of Bucky (aka the Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Ant Man and Spiderman it was pretty damn crowded.

And because the title included the words civil war, what most of the action scenes consisted of was the heroes divided into two opposing factions battling each other.  So, Iron Man and his crew were battling Captain America and his backers.  Now it’s not a hundred percent clear whether they meant to kill each other.  I guess we’re supposed to assume not.

But here’s the thing.  The offensive and defensive capabilities of these various characters are woefully mismatched.  Even without Thor and Hulk who are basically unkillable, the abilities of the minor characters who are basically normal human beings without any special armor or weapons, are laughably insufficient to either harm the stronger characters or even survive a serious fight with them.  Take one obvious feature.  How does someone who can’t fly fight with someone who can?  And there are plenty of other problems like that.  It leads to an absurdity where the weaker characters are just dancing around trying to avoid being squashed flat by the heavy hitters.  And this looks ridiculous.  It looks like a jar full of hornets buzzing around in a jar, to no particular result.  And this is especially egregious with the female characters.  Even though somehow Black Widow (basically Scarlett Johansson in tight leather pants) is able to easily fight and kill a half dozen much larger men without effort, it defies all the laws of physics that she can attack a man in an armored suit that’s so heavily built that it allows him to survive anything short of an artillery shell going off in his lap.  He shouldn’t even notice her attack and she should basically break every bone in her hands punching him.

Now of course superhero movies are based on the idea of fantasy.  So sure, let the girl fight her way through the bad guys.  That’s what we expect.  But in general, the mixing of unkillable and highly lethal characters with humans whose only superpower is wearing a spandex costume, just doesn’t make very entertaining cinema.  The only time these movies make good watching is when two powerful and very evenly matched characters are set against one another.  So, in the original Iron Man movie Tony Stark and his former partner; Obadiah Stane have powered suits that at least are in the same ballpark of capability.  This allows brains and experience to allow the fight to resolve itself in an interesting way.  In the original Captain America film Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt are both super soldiers (biologically enhanced) and therefore on a relatively level playing field.  In the original Thor movie, the antagonists are both immortal Norse gods.  This level playing field in each movie makes the conflict less improbable and more interesting as theater.

So, I am not surprised that stacking more and more heroes and villains of completely unequal and confusing capabilities just makes the action scenes an unholy mess with very little tension or enjoyment.  And now it seems the audience has grown tired of all this crowded hyperactive choreography.  It’s grown stale and annoying.  And the numbers are going down at the box office.  Maybe it’s time for the Marvel Universe to try something revolutionary and unprecedented; storytelling.

Gene Hackman – A Film Career Retrospective

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I guess everyone has heard that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home under what the police are calling “suspicious” circumstances.  The 95-year-old retired actor and his 66-year-old wife were found in different parts of the house deceased and in reportedly advanced decomposition.  The news sources hint it may have been a multiple suicide or some other unfortunate situation.  Well, we’ll probably get the gruesome and sad details soon enough.

I guess I wish I had written a post on Hackman’s career under happier circumstances.  But better late than never.  I had a chance to review his career over at IMDB and made a list of the movies that I had seen and either liked or at least considered good.

1969 Marooned
1971 The French Connection
1974 The Conversation
1974 Young Frankenstein
1978 Superman
1886 Hoosiers
1992 Unforgiven
1994 Wyatt Earp
1995 Get Shorty
1998 Enemy of the State
2001 The Royal Tenenbaums

 

It’s a surprisingly broad cross-section of genres.  He was equally skilled as a comic actor, an action/adventure star and even a few dramatic roles.  What I would say about his talent as an actor was that he would use his considerable acting abilities to take whatever part he was given, no matter how threadbare and make it memorable.  You could see this in Young Frankenstein and Get Shorty where he’s playing minor parts and yet he owns the movie while he’s on the screen.

My favorite of his films was “The French Connection.”  I was a freshman in high school and my homeroom picked the movie as our class trip.  We went into Manhattan and saw it on a big screen on Broadway and riding there on the subway it was surreal just how close to reality the scenes on the subway resembled reality.  Graffiti and drunks passed out on the trains were the perfect intro for the movie.  And Hackman was the perfect Popeye Doyle.  Brutalizing his drug suspects, antagonizing his chain of command and chasing a runaway subway train in a muscle car down the wrong side of the street under the 86th St elevated subway line through my old neighborhood in Brooklyn.  It didn’t get better than that.  I used to walk past the housing project where Popeye supposedly lived.  If he had, he would’ve been the only white man living there at the time.  It was a very tough place.

I enjoyed Hackman’s Lex Luthor in the first Superman movie.  It might have been the only discernible acting talent in the series but he managed to make it fun.  He was good in Unforgiven.  He was pretty over the top in the techno-thriller Enemy of the State alongside Will Smith but he gave it his all.  I’ve been told by film aficionados that “The Royal Tenenbaums” is a very good movie.  Well, I saw it but didn’t really “get it.”  But I’m unsophisticated.  That was the last movie I saw with Hackman.

Based on his versatility and skill I would say Hackman is one of the best acting talents I ever watched.  Maybe Brando or Pacino played more dramatic parts.  Robin Williams was a funnier clown.  Maybe Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis blew up more stuff than Popeye Doyle.  But on balance Gene Hackman was the consummate professional.  He made the character real and he always stole the show for me.

Well done, Mr. Hackman.

The Old Man and the Afternoon

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So, the tax accountant got back to me today and told me I owed Uncle Sam a couple of thousand dollars and because of that I had to pay some kind of penalty.  Well that really sucked and I had to go adjust my deductions on my paycheck and blah, blah blah … it ate up half my morning.  So, I was out of sorts today.

Because of all that, I needed to do something fun this afternoon.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch a movie we both like and haven’t seen in a long while; Ernest Hemingway’s, “The Old Man and the Sea.”  It’s the one with Spencer Tracy as an old Cuban fisherman who catches swordfish.  He’s recently become “unlucky.”  He hasn’t caught a swordfish in 85 days and the boy who used to help him has been told by his father to find a luckier boat.  So, the old man is all alone and he goes out to try his luck one more time.  And the story is a folk tale about a three-day odyssey to land and bring home a giant swordfish, bigger than his little sailboat.

In a way it’s a meditation on life and old age and fate.  It’s a simple story and mostly takes place between the old man and his mythic prey.  Most of the dialogue (or soliloquy) is the old man talking to the fish (or himself).  Occasionally he remembers (or dreams about) his past, when he was a valiant man of great strength and skill.  And often as the strain of fighting the fish becomes unbearable, he exclaims, “I wish the boy was here.”

And slowly and painfully the story unfolds and the old man finally plays the fish in and kills it with his harpoon.  But because of the size of the fish, he must lash it to the outside of his boat and eventually sharks are drawn to the smell of blood.  The old man fights them off the fish with his harpoon until it is lost, then a makeshift spear, then the gaffe hook and finally a club.  But as his weapons become cruder and less effective the sharks increasingly mutilate his prize until finally all that is left is the head, tail and a naked backbone.  When he reaches home on the morning of the fourth day, he is utterly exhausted and defeated and barely crawls back to his hut to sleep.

That morning the other fishermen are astounded at the colossal size of the carcass and remark to the boy how amazing the fish must have been.  The boy brings coffee to the old man and tells him that despite his father’s order not to fish with the old man he will defy him and bring his luck to the old man’s boat.  So, the story ends with the continuity of life as the torch is passed from the old to the young.  But in this case youth partners with the heroic efforts of the past instead of pushing it out of the way to replace it.

It’s a very strange story and plays out as something of a fairy tale.  Mercifully, the fish never speaks but the old man treats it as if he wouldn’t be surprised if it did.  The old man taught the boy to fish and so they have a mentor/pupil relationship but it appears more like a grandfather/grandson bond between them.  And that is the only major character dynamic going on in the story.

There really isn’t that much to this story.  Most of it takes place in a boat on the water with only one person present.  I really don’t think I could justify why I like this movie that much.  Maybe because I like watching it with Camera Girl.  Her father was an avid salt water fisherman.  And I think the movie is evocative of that connection.  Well, anyway it brightened up our day.

No Brainer

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Do you know what movie is the front-runner for Best Picture and Best Actress Oscar Awards?  It’s a musical called Emilia Pérez.  It’s the story of a Mexican cartel kingpin named Manitas Del Monte who decides to undergo a sex change operation and become a woman named (you guessed it) Emilia Pérez.  And as you might imagine problems crop up.  He wants to keep tabs on his wife and children (who think he is dead).  And when his wife resumes an affair with one of his henchmen well, that’s going to be a problem.  Eventually everyone ends up dead, so it’s kind of a cautionary tale about sex changes I guess.  But it’s a musical so I’m sure it’s a lot of fun.

Now of course the best bit is the “actress” playing Emilia Pérez is, of course a man who has had his manly bits hacked off and now wears a dress and wig.  So, this is the year when a man will win the Best Actress Award.

Another milestone!

I guess you’re asking yourself where is he going with this?  What is there to say?

It’s a fair question.  After all this is just the logical conclusion to the progression in Hollywood for the last twenty years or so.  The proportion of movies that are strictly message movies and lack any entertainment value has been increasing steadily for two decades to the point where whole years can pass without anything appearing in theaters that general audiences can enjoy.  Of late even the superhero and Star Wars movies have been saturated with gender and racial equity messaging to such a point that these once bullet-proof box-office money makers have been crashing and burning.  Disney has had a string of flops that instead of making billions as they used to aren’t even breaking even.

Well, I think with Emilia Pérez we’ve reached the edge of the cliff.  If Hollywood gives the Best Picture and Best Actress awards to Emilia Pérez they will have passed into self-parody and forfeited any hope of recovery.  I have seen outtakes from this film.  There is a whole song devoted to vaginoplasty.  This is not the work of sane people.  This makes “Springtime for Hitler,” the farcical play within a play from Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” look like Shakespeare.

From what I’ve heard, Mexico is up in arms.  Apparently, the honor of the narco-trafficantes has been besmirched by the premise of the movie.  I’m amazed that the producers don’t fear that they may end up as heads in a duffel bag somewhere in a cartel stronghold in Mexico.  And personally, I don’t see how we could blame them for taking offense.  After all it’s kind of like misgendering in a way.  And we all know how bad that is.

But seriously, if there is still any doubt that conservatives could easily make excellent money by opening up a half-decent movie studio and provide the public with even mediocre entertainment, this is the proof.  The idiots in Hollywood have lost their damn minds and nobody wants to watch what they are producing and awarding.

Right now, a studio using ten-year-old CGI technology and century old plots could be picking up most of the billions that Marvel and Lucas Films are leaving on the table by being woke.  Something like Dune or any space opera from the 1940s would sell tickets all day long just by providing teenagers with a hero saves the princess plot.  After all that’s what Star Wars was based on and they printed money for forty years until they screwed it up with the woke crap they had to inject into it.

Let me recommend that you not go to see Emilia Pérez.  In fact, let me recommend that you not watch this year’s Oscars (not that you would).  But who I am really talking to is Elon Musk and other deep pockets guys who have the wherewithal to take advantage of others’ mistakes.  Hire a few of the better movie screenwriters and tell them to write a Star Wars rip-off.  Except make it for normal people.  Then film it and make a billion dollars.  No brainer.

Christmas Movie Time

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Here it is two days before Christmas and I’ve already eaten so many cookies that I feel like a drunk in the middle of a four-day bender.  Well, there’s no avoiding the excesses.  Camera Girl is fiendish in her strategies to kill me with food.  She should hide these evil foods somewhere far away.  Instead, she lays them out all over the kitchen where even a man with a will of iron must succumb.  I’ve kept up my exercise regimen as best I can but exercise deals in hundreds of calories while pastries are measured in the thousands.  The pain, the pain.

Yesterday I watched, “It’s a Wonderful Life” in its entirety.  That’s something I haven’t done in at least fifteen years.  Many years ago, I overdosed on it.  I watched it too many times and it became played out.  But yesterday I found it fresh and enjoyable.  Of course, every scene in the movie was extremely familiar down to the slightest word and even gesture of the actors.  But I was able to appreciate just how fine the acting and directing was.  And as highly emotional as the ending of the movie obviously is I wasn’t put off at all by it.  Maybe this American Christmas Carol is fitting for the time and place we live in.  Maybe people are ready to hope for miracles again.  It’s certainly true that we need a few of them.  I’m not going to claim that heaven interceded and put Donald Trump in the White House instead of Kamala Harris.  At best maybe a divine force kept him from intersecting with that bullet that grazed his ear.  I’m afraid that heaven is not going to let us off the hook for the situation we find ourselves in.  But maybe we are being given a chance to straighten things out on our own.  The headaches that will entail are already beginning to emerge.  Well, we’ll leave the future to next year for now.

Today it was time to begin my annual “Christmas Carol” viewing experience.  I chose the George C Scott version.  And it did not disappoint.  Marley’s ghost, the Cratchit Christmas dinner and the final scene in Scrooge’s office provide all the correct notes to ensure my approval.  And as always Tiny Tim is pathetically frail and impossibly uncomplaining.  I noted to Camera Girl at the appropriate moment that Mrs. Cratchit’s railing against Scrooge during the toast moment was pitch perfect.  I could imagine and probably have heard equivalent protest from Camera Girl when some acquaintance of ours overstepped the bounds of propriety according to Camera Girl’s standards.  She does have a highly developed sense of outrage, especially when she decides that I will have to be the one to enforce it.  Women have that propensity.  Bless them.

Well, time is running out.  I’ll have to fit in the Alistair Sim and Reginald Owen versions in tomorrow.  That should be doable but I don’t think I’ll be able to get through “The Holly and Ivy” tomorrow.  Well, that can wait till Christmas Eve morning.  Christmas Eve and Christmas will be full days and I am not sure what my posting will be like.  The quotes and the photos are all pre-scheduled but my patented rants are a daily chore so I’ll have to do the best I can to put together something fitting.  We’ll have to see how that goes.  But Christmas week is here and away we go.