Such a good day.\u00a0 Camera Girl cooked up a storm.\u00a0 Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.\u00a0 And then the desserts. At my insistence there were five different flavors of ice cream.\u00a0 That\u2019s because I know the kids crave it (well me too).\u00a0 But she also made eclairs, tiramisu, ricotta cheesecake, chocolate cake (for the kids) and pineapple upside down cake.\u00a0 I never even got to the pineapple cake.\u00a0 I was too stuffed.\u00a0 And the coffee was hot, strong and good.<\/p>\n
The kids were busy with all kinds of silly games and gadgets.\u00a0 But they were good.\u00a0 When they started to get bored, I put on the original \u201cKing Kong.\u201d\u00a0 The family Godzilla aficionado was unimpressed with King Kong\u2019s susceptibility to fifty caliber machine gun bullets.\u00a0 He informed me that a real monster is unkillable with anything up to and including a thermonuclear warhead.\u00a0 What could I say?\u00a0 I pointed out that he did manage to kill a T Rex and also a Manhattan elevated subway train.\u00a0 But apparently Godzilla is so incomparably superior to actual dinosaurs that conquering them is as nothing in the context of what Godzilla can do.\u00a0 I was made aware that if Godzilla needed to, he has a mode called \u201cthermonuclear\u201d whereby he can emit the equivalent of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb against his surroundings.\u00a0 This I was informed would utterly consume everything within a forty-mile radius around him.\u00a0 I confessed defeat and asked if we could still watch the end of the movie where Carl Denham tells the cop that \u201cIt was beauty killed the beast.\u201d\u00a0 He rolled his eyes at the screen and shook his head.\u00a0 Well, anyway, I still think Fay Wray is pretty good looking.\u00a0 I don\u2019t blame old Kong for carrying her off twice.<\/p>\n
After they went home, I watched Barabbas.\u00a0 That\u2019s an old Dino DeLaurentis swords and sandals epic from the 1960s with Anthony Quinn as the title character who in the Bible is released instead of Jesus for the Passover clemency.\u00a0 I\u2019ll say with no hesitation that this is one of the worst biblical epics hands down.\u00a0 Quinn is playing the same part he plays in Zorba the Greek and many other Mediterranean dramas.\u00a0 His struggles in a Jerusalem prison, a Sicilian sulfur mine and the Roman Coliseum all seem self-inflicted and by the end of the movie I had to wonder if even St Peter wasn\u2019t ready to kick his butt up and down the Roman jail.\u00a0 Because Barrabas mistook Nero\u2019s blaming the Christians for the burning of Rome with a real Christian plan to \u201cburn the old world\u201d Barabbas gets caught torching an oil warehouse and claims he\u2019s doing it because he\u2019s a Christian.\u00a0 So, because of this St Peter and the rest of the real Christians are crucified by Nero.\u00a0 What a genius!<\/p>\n
As Barabbas is hanging on a cross at the end of the movie making what seem to be fairly meaningless comments, it seemed to me that the whole movie was absolutely pointless from every perspective; artistically, religiously, even logically.\u00a0 As spectacle it was borderline ridiculous.\u00a0 Quinn has a showdown in the Coliseum with Jack Palance in a chariot and himself on foot.\u00a0 I\u2019ve never seen a less convincing, more boring fight sequence.\u00a0 At the end of the battle even the actor playing Nero looked like he wanted to be somewhere else but just couldn\u2019t escape.<\/p>\n
I also watched an old film noir called \u201cSteel Trap.\u201d\u00a0 That was much more satisfactory.\u00a0 I\u2019ll review it soon.\u00a0 Well, this will have to do for today.\u00a0 A good day and a busy day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Such a good day.\u00a0 Camera Girl cooked up a storm.\u00a0 Beef and pork roasts, vegetables, mashed potatoes, biscuits, gravy, stuffed mushrooms and more.\u00a0 And then<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3366,239,1263,2860,237],"tags":[966,43,38,1355],"class_list":["post-32985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-life-in-dunwich","category-movie-reviews","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-reclaiming-the-family","category-reviews","tag-anthony-quinn","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n