Tag: Reviews

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.

22JAN2025 – Country Song for the Morning Sugarland – Very Last Country Song

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Sugarland is what I would call hippie country music.  They’re doubtlessly godless communists.  But they have produced some superb music.  I think this is one of their best.  The images and emotions it summons up are achingly beautiful.  Well done you drug-addled hippies.  Well done.

 

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.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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We have a family get together on Saturday and I was looking for a movie for the grandkids in case things get too quiet.  By luck I had recorded this monster themed comedy movie back in October.  Now of course I’ve seen this movie many times.  One of my local tv stations back in New York City during my childhood would cycle through the Abbott and Costello movies on Sundays.  Annoyingly, the movie always coincided with church which really made me wonder about God’s priorities and sense of humor.

So, I put it on tonight.  And just as I remembered, it’s the perfect movie for boys between the ages of seven and eleven.  All of the jokes are corny as hell and the monsters are about as tame as rabbits.  But Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolfman still look the part.  And Lou Costello sells his constant hysterical fear with his signature screams of panic and running around in circles.

The plot is laughably bad.  Dracula and the Frankenstein monster have been shipped to America disguised as exhibits for a “House of Horror.”  Bud and Lou work for the company that is supposed to deliver them.  The Wolfman is in America to foil the plan and Lou’s girlfriend Sandra is a mad scientist who is working with Dracula to re-energize the weakened monster.  In addition, she has selected Lou’s brain to be transplanted into the monster’s body to give it a more controllable personality for Dracula’s plans.  Of course, Lou doesn’t know about these plans.

Add in a beautiful insurance claims investigator named Joan who is searching for the missing monster exhibits and a non-evil medical doctor who is assisting Sandra and you have a showdown at the island castle laboratory with Sandra, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and Lou in the operating room when Larry Talbot (the Wolfman), Bud Abbott and the Doctor break in and stop the surgery.  Eventually the Wolfman grabs Dracula in his bat form and the two of them fall from the castle heights into the ocean.  The doctor rescues Bud and Lou from the monster by setting on fire the dock that the monster is trapped on.  In the last scene Bud and Lou are in a rowboat and are rejoicing that Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and the Wolfman are dead and they don’t have to be scared anymore.  Suddenly the Invisible Man chimes in that he wants to join the fun and the boys jump overboard.

I didn’t give a spoiler alert because the plot really doesn’t matter at all.  It’s just an excuse for Universal Studios to cross-pollinate their monster movie franchise with their most successful comedy team.  They would follow this up with several of the other monster characters (the Mummy, the Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) meeting the “boys” but I would say this first effort was the most successful and most enjoyable.  It works as an Abbott and Costello comedy and as an homage to the Universal horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

I’m very hopeful that the younger grandkids will enjoy this ancient comedy.  I’ll report back with an update.

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

The End of Yellowstone

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So, something happened to Yellowstone.  I think Kevin Costner got sick of playing cowboy “JR” and quit.  Well, good.  It’s a bizarre nighttime soap with a cast of characters that run the gamut from absurd, to revolting to demented.  Now granted, the visuals of Montana and the use of excellent non-mainstream country music does make watching the show interesting from time to time.  But it’s still a weird and wacky cartoon in my opinion.  But Camera Girl loves her some psycho-drama.  So of course we’re in.

And the current situation does appear to be headed for a small screen Armageddon.  The first episode opens up with John Dutton (Costner’s character) dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in the Montana Governor’s mansion.  His insanely driven daughter Beth and his likeable son Kayce converge on the scene to plan what to do about the death of their father.  But Beth is already sure that the death is murder set in motion by their adopted brother Jamie.

And she’s right.  The flashbacks show that Jamie is in cahoots with a vixen from a hedge fund company that will do anything including murder to get their hands on Dutton’s land to build a resort and airport complex.  And we see deals being made with black ops contractors and other ridiculous things.

Okay, so this could be a lot of fun.  I already know how I think this will end.  Kayce Dutton’s son is half Indian.  I’m guessing the ranch becomes a Native American possession with Kayce as the steward of the land on behalf of his son.  It goes along with a bunch of anti-colonial jibber jabber that Kayce’s wife was spouting a couple of years ago.

But the fun will be a full-fledged shooting war between the Dutton Ranch and the bad guys.  Who knows, there could even be tanks and helicopters with sidewinder missiles.  Kayce is the head of the livestock police (really?) and apparently that gives him access to armored vehicles and other military grade equipment.  He’s not just the dog catcher.

There will be bullets and rocket propelled grenades and all kinds of ridiculous stuff going on.  And as a finale Beth has sworn a blood oath that the last thing Jamie sees before he dies is Beth laughing at him.  Now that I’d like to see.  Because it is the outcome that the show has been working up to from the beginning.  Beth is barking-at-the-moon crazy but Jamie is a cowardly, smarmy, disloyal worm and seeing him get terminated by Beth will be enormously cathartic.  Of course, I’m pretty sure Beth and a bunch of other characters will probably end up dead too.  But that would make the whole crazy thing a little less improbable.  So sure, why not?

So, bring it on, bring it on, bring it on.  Let the lead fly and let all the cowboys, cowboy up.  We’re headed for the last roundup and when the dust settles all the black hats will be pushing up daisies and one cowboy and one Indian and their son will be left living happily ever after.  How can you not love that?  Well, sorta.

October Viewing – 9

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October Viewing – 9

So, this being October 30th and tomorrow a really long work day, it’s a pretty good bet this will be the last “October Viewing” of the year.  A good friend who has been following this series of posts proposed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies as a good subject.  And we both liked how it sort of dovetails with the whole woke Democrat pod-people meme.  You know, how they speak like lifeless automatons and point and shriek if you reveal yourself not to be one of them.

Now my friend felt that even the two reboots were good subjects for the post.  But as in all things I am conservative.  So, let’s harken back to the 1956 original in all its black and white splendor.  Dut, dut, dut daaaah!

Spoiler alert!  If you want to avoid knowing the plot, skip to the boldened text below to just get my opinion.

Sturdy character actor Kevin McCarthy (no, not the politician!) stars as Dr. Miles J. Bennell.  He’s a small-town doctor in the fictitious California town of Santa-something-or-other.  Miles is puzzled to find that several patients are claiming that their friends and relatives have been replaced by visually identical individuals that lack any emotion.  One case is a young child claiming his mother has been replaced.

So, Miles and his girlfriend Becky and their friend Jack and his wife “Teddy” begin investigating a very strange series of occurrences.  Jack finds what looks like a human body but with very indistinct features, almost as if acid had burned away the facial features.  Shockingly, over time the “body” begins to take on Jack’s features.  And more of these bodies begin appearing.  Eventually they learn that enormous seed pods are the source of these transforming “bodies.”

And soon the two couples discover that the great majority of the townspeople are pod people.  The distinguishing characteristic of pod people is a complete lack of emotion in their voice and actions.  While pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to broadcast this alarming news to the rest of the outside world, Jack and Teddy become “podified” and so Jack provides the exposition to Miles and Becky to explain exactly what the hell is going on.

In his sedate pod-man voice Jack explains that spores floating through outer space landed on Earth where they grew into the pods.  If a pod is placed near someone (how near?) and that person falls asleep the pod will absorb the person’s memories and appearance and somehow disintegrate the real person and replace him.  Jack tries to convince Miles and Becky that the procedure is painless and all for the good.  Miles and Becky decide not to cooperate and run away.  They try to escape from town.  But they have to pass through a crowd of pod-people who are loading up trucks with seed pods for delivery to the surrounding towns.  They try to act like pod-people by being emotionless but are given away by Becky’s scream when she witnesses a traffic accident.  Women!

The pod people chase after them but the couple successfully take refuge in a cave that was conveniently around when they needed it.  But when Miles goes out to scout an escape route Becky falls asleep and by the time Miles returns, she’s fully podified and sounds the alarm to the rest of the wooden-faced pursuers to catch Miles.

Sleep-deprived Miles runs in a nightmarish state and ends up in another town trying to warn people on the highway about the pod people.  Of course, they assume he’s nuts and drag him to a hospital where he tells his story to the skeptical doctors.  But just at the end of his story an emergency room worker reports that a traffic accident with a truck full of giant seed pods has produced casualties in the ER.  And so, the doctors get to work calling in the FBI!

Dunt, dunt daaah!

End of the spoiler alert!

So, as you can see this is a hum-dinger of a paranoid’s dream come true.  They’re all out to get you and they’re all monsters.  And the emotionless pod-people are a pretty good stand in for the swarms of antidepressant-doped leftists that walk the Earth all around us and can only summon energy when they point and shriek to their cohort about the presence of some normal human in the immediate vicinity.

And this is the modern horror story.  If you add a violent angle with the imposters capable of becoming murderous creatures like in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” then it’s doubly frightening, especially with the modern special effects available.

But even this old-fashioned cinematic portrayal hits home by showing the confusion when familiar surroundings aren’t what they seem.  And when the truth is doubted by everyone except the growing crowd of pod-people who are coming after you then panic results.  Yep, a perfect nightmare scenario.  It does resemble the current state of our world too.  But I’ll save that for a current events post.

October Viewing – 8

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Tonight, I got around to rewatching “Sleepy Hollow.”  This 1999 movie starred Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, a New York City lawman whose scientific methods were too advanced for 1799.  He is sent upstate to solve a string of murders that all involve the victims being left headless.  Christina Ricci stars as Katrina Van Tassel the daughter of a prosperous businessman whose family is at the center of the ring of murders.  And, of course Katrina is Ichabod’s love interest in the movie.

Spoiler alert; skip down to the last paragraph to avoid spoilers and just read the recommendation.

What we learn is that, just as in the Washington Irving stories about Sleepy Hollow, the countryside is haunted by the ghost of a Hessian soldier that was killed during the American Revolutionary War.  The Hessian lost his head during a battle with the Americans and his spirit has haunted the neighborhood ever since.  In our story, the Hessian (when he has a head) is played by Cristopher Walken.  And when he doesn’t have a head, well, who knows?

Being a man of reason, Ichabod disbelieves the stories about the ghost and claims the murders were the result of human efforts.  He claims this until he actually sees the Headless Horseman kill a couple of townspeople.  But once Ichabod recovers from his shock, he determines that he will investigate the ghost and figure out a way to end the string of murders.

And after most of the prominent townspeople are murdered, Ichabod realizes that the horseman is controlled by someone inside the town who understands black magic.  And that turns out to be Katrina’s stepmother (naturally).  There is a showdown and Ichabod figures out how to turn the horseman against the witch and save Katrina from being decapitated by the head-lopping Hessian.

Sleepy Hollow was a Tim Burton film and so it is no surprise that the look of the film stylishly captures the eerie, misty atmosphere of this dark fairy tale land.  The movie is always at least half comedy and Depp is very good as the always squeamish but determinedly, reluctantly brave man of science doing his best to solve the mystery and save his love interest from a gruesome fate.  While this tongue in cheek approach does not allow the movie to ever frighten us, it does succeed (in my opinion) in entertaining the audience.  The special effects around the character of the horseman aren’t quite up to the current state of the art CGI standards.  Nevertheless, his scenes are very well choreographed and look splendid.  The supporting cast do a creditable job of moving the plot forward one severed head at a time.  I’m going to recommend this movie to anyone who likes fantasy and the supernatural.  Here’s a natural pick for October viewing.

October Viewing – 7

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The Wolf Man (1941)

I figured it was time to review Lon Chaney Jr.’s magnum opus.  The first thing that is apparent is that Claude Rains was an order of magnitude above the rest of the actors.  Well, Rains was two orders beyond Chaney.  But I will say that in the non-monster related earlier part of the movie the scenes with Chaney and his father and with the girl were fun to watch.  As Larry Talbot, Chaney was engaging and sympathetic.  But once he started killing werewolves and becoming a werewolf he became increasingly annoying and neurotic about telling everyone about how tough it was being a werewolf.  Me, me, me.  Very needy.

Incidentally, they killed off Bela Lugosi about ninety seconds into the only screen time he was given.  And to add insult to injury, they didn’t even bother to give him an original character name.  They called him Bela!  I mean, how lousy is that?  They probably paid him by the hour and sent him packing after his scene to save money.  Very sad.

And I noticed something very strange about the wolf man character.  Right before Larry Talbot  goes out on his first killing spree, he notices hair growing on his body.  He takes off a white shirt leaving him in a white undershirt (incidentally a wife beater style).  Then he takes off his shoes and socks and we watch his feet becoming paws while he is sitting in a chair.  Then still focusing on his legs he gets up, apparently heading out the window of his room to go find the grave digger and rip out his throat.  But in the next shot we see the wolf man in a dark colored button down shirt.

Now are we supposed to believe that the Wolf Man went into Larry Talbot’s closet, picked out a matching shirt and using his front paws, buttoned it up and headed out for a bite to eat?  I don’t know.  I mean it was a nice shirt but just how far is my suspension of disbelief supposed to stretch.  I feel like I’m being abused here.

Well, anyway, after Claude Rains clubs Lon Chaney Jr. to death with his own silver wolf-headed walking stick, the gypsy lady recites that, “The way he walked was thorny” doggerel over poor Larry’s corpse and the music soars and the credits roll.

But i don’t know.  I feel kind of cheated.  I feel like Larry’s ghost should have appeared and complained about the bum deal he got.  He’s living in California for eighteen years, helping to build the Mt Wilson observatory.  Then his elder brother dies so he returns to Talbot Castle to take up the role of heir apparent to his father’s title (baronet?) and after just a couple of days he’s bitten by a werewolf and beaten to death by his own dad.  And what fun did he actually have?  He only managed to kill one crummy grave digger.  It doesn’t seem fair.  At least if he’d gotten a chance to sink his teeth into Gwen Conliffe’s throat he’d have a story to tell the other dearly departed monsters like Dracula and the Mummy.  But as things stand he seems to have been given short shrift.

Alright.  That’s enough.  So all in all the movie starts off well and ends a little flat.  Perhaps I’ll consider Larry Talbot’s run in with Abbott and Costello more successful.

The Honeymooners – Complete Series Review – Episode 4 – A Woman’s Work Is Never Done

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In this episode Ralph berates Alice for some small housework chores that she neglected to do.  She explains how busy she was but he won’t hear what she’s saying.  He threatens to introduce a demerit system to highlight her deficiencies.  Alice tells Ralph she’s fed up with his ingratitude and declares that she is going to get a job and with her salary hire a maid to do the housework.

When they go to the employment agency the manager explains that due to the shortage of domestic help the maids have become very independent and unless their employers accede to all their requirements and exceptions, they refuse to accept assignments.  Then we meet the available maid, Thelma.  She’s taller than Ralph and looks extremely strong.  She tells the Kramdens that she doesn’t do heavy jobs like windows and floors because she’s “sickly.”  But when she hands Ralph her suitcase to carry for her, its unexpectedly extreme weight drags him down to the ground and he exclaims sarcastically, “Sickly!”

Thelma resists most of Ralph’s demands for her to assume a genteel and respectful manner of addressing him.  When Ralph attempts to get her to address Norton and himself politely she mockingly refers to them as, “the simp and the blimp.”  When this causes Ralph to explode in anger she quits and leaves.

Now Ralph is forced to do the housework himself since Alice has found a job at the local bakery as the jelly donut stuffer.  He tries to recruit Norton to help him with the backlog of chores but they both prove hopelessly inept.  Finally, he decides to try and flatter Alice about her appearance in the hope that she will agree to quit her job and resume her wifely duties.  After being rebuffed for his obvious flattery Ralph is forced to admit that housework is harder than his job and begs Alice to come back.

This is one of my favorite episodes.  Alice has one of the best lines in the series.  While sarcastically pretending how much she enjoys mopping the floors and washing the windows she mocks the outdated appliances in the apartment.  She says she is so thrilled with having an atomic kitchen.  She explains that she calls it that because, “It looks like Yucca Flats after the blast.”  Which is referencing the American nuclear testing in the desert southwest in the 1950’s.

In general Ralph’s imperious behavior toward Alice sets the pattern for their relationship.  Alice comes off as the reasonable wife but Ralph is demanding and unreasonable.  Invariably he gets knocked down a couple of pegs and has to swallow his pride and apologize to Alice.  And although this does make him a sort of straw man for Alice to pummel, Ralph manages to make the whole spectacle hilarious and entertaining.  And between the physical comedy, the battle of the sexes and the machinations that Ralph and Norton always resort to, the half hour almost always entertains.  Highly recommended.