Tag: Movies & TV

Let us now praise a famous man

You knew an orgy was on its way, when this man died.

Here’s one thing you can say about journalists: Surely no one loves us as much as we love ourselves.

That’s one lesson of the Tim Russert coverage.

A friend told me Sunday: “I now know more about Tim Russert than I do many members of my family.”

After Russert’s shocking death Friday at age 58, television kept serving up witnesses to his expertise, intelligence, diligence, kindness, faith, love of family, Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills. The self-indulgence was breathtaking.

On Monday’s “Today,” Matt Lauer interviewed Russert’s son, Luke. The show basically gave over the first half-hour to the Russert story. Presidential candidates aren’t questioned at such length on morning programs.

And the children of America’s fallen heroes don’t receive such a platform, either.

Etc.

On NBC yesterday, the gathered commentators seemed eager to cover themselves with Russert glory.  The more they praised him, the better they looked.

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I love this movie

What an excellent front-pager for ISI Books’ new “guide to 100 politically incorrect movies”:

Like all effective satires, this film is subtle enough to be misinterpreted by the terminally obtuse. Although it was blasted as an attack on American life by a reviewer for the neoconservative Claremont Review of Books, director Payne is attacking only the more tawdry aspects of our culture from what can only be described as an independent perspective. (In one scene, shrewd observers have even discerned a copy of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles among Schmidt’s reading matter.)… [more]

The film?  “About Schmidt,” a marvelous movie which in this viewer’s humble opinion shows off Jack Nicholson’s virtuoso versatility.  The man is in a class by himself on today’s silver screen.

The site is eminently searchable and promotes ISI’s new title, God, Man, and Hollywood: Politically Incorrect Cinema from The Birth of a Nation to The Passion of the Christ, by Mark Royden Winchell — a Clemson U. English prof who unfortunately died a few weeks ago, a quick search discovers.  R.I.P.

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Scorned by Kerasotes

Drove over last night to the Kerasotes ShowPlace 14 – Galewood Crossings a few blocks north of North, just off Central, first right off the bridge, to catch “Redbelt” as advertised for a 7:20 showing. 

“Not selling tickets to ‘Redbelt,’” said the young lady.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it’s not showing on the scornay.”

“The what?”

“The scornay.”

“The scornay?” 

Her friend, standing with cell phone just outside the ticket booth, finally intervened: “The screen, the screen.”

Which under normal circumstances would have prompted another question, Why aren’t you showing it on the screen when it’s scheduled to be shown and in fact is on the electronic list blinking right above us? 

But stunned by defeat, I returned to my vehicle and took myself back to Oak Park.

UPDATE: Renona (sp?) called from Kerasotes in Galewood, an hour and 20 minutes after I emailed them a link to this posting, and she couldn’t have been nicer. 

She didn’t know why “Redbelt” was a no-show, was very apologetic, and nicest of all, she’s givine me two free tickets, to be picked up at the gate by asking for the manager!

But at $4 a senior citizen ticket, am I going to expose myself visually as the on-line complainer?  Let me think about it.

UPDATE 2: The manager also called, also wants to be friends.  I called back, he wasn’t there.

EXPLANATION: “Scornay” is combination of her accent and my imperfect hearing, FYI.

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Diversion on Lake Street

Last night “What Happens in Vegas,” co-starring Cameron Diaz (or was it Jennifer Lopez? one of the Z-ladies) and (Half-) Ashton Something, with volume turned up so as to make this yet another cartoon with live people.  Comic books used to show “pow” and “bam” when hero socked bad guy.  Movies have bass chords or thunks.  This one had a series of thunks at one point, lest we hoi polloi moviegoers miss something.

That said, it was diversionary, in a semi-crowded theatre (Lake on Lake) half-filled with decent enough crowd.

First thing to remember (after thunks) is that this moviegoer had no spontaneous laughter coming out of his throat, nor any other kind, nor any smile.  The entire attraction was the plot line: something about this movie kept this m-goer wondering what comes next.  The characters, in addition, were not overtly off-putting, and once you accept the presumed sleep-around dating scene — if it feels good, it’s good, genitally speaking, which it is, genitally speaking — you can even appreciate the basically human (i.e., good) responses and developments of the hero and heroine.

Moreover, Dennis Miller as the judge unloads a hard-nosed, credible defense of wedded perseverance: he looks at his wife of 25 years sometimes and wants to set her on fire — but among other things, that’s not legal.

So for a night at the movies, 7:30 version, out in the sweet May air by 9:30, not bad.  What’s more, I had to correct the young woman at the ticket booth, prepared to charge me $8 — “I’m a senior,” I said, without adding my line, “not high school or college either” — and she switched it to $5.50.

Close call, reminding me of telling the booth lady at the State on Madison in 1944 that I was eleven, which I wasn’t, but twelve was the age of adulthood when it came to ticket price.

Phew.

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Darwin dissed, ditto poo-bahs in Stein movie

Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” is an attack partly on academic pussy-footedness and partly on Darwinism.  Stein opens with a half dozen or so cases of professors who were punished for showing even in a small way openness to Intelligent Design as explaining the origin of species than Charles Darwin.

The scientific community demonstrates nonsensical fear of intelligence as having a hand, apparently panicking at the thought of lending even a smidgen of respectability to the idea and forbidding scientists to do so at cost of their web sites, jobs, and careers, Stein argues through the film, which is being shown in six Chicago-area movie houses.

He goes after Darwinism itself with the point that the cell Darwin and anyone else knew about in the 1850s was a very simple item compared to the information-filled cell that scientists know about today.  The film makes the point partly with an animated display of dozens of shapes and colors and movement patterns. 

If Darwin’s cell were a tennis ball, one man told Stein when asked, today’s is a galaxy.  No comparison, in other words, but meanwhile science limps along with Darwin’s explanation, which doesn’t even hold together internally, much less explain that galaxy of data, which as accident is ridiculous on its face.  That’s what the film says, in a manner that I cannot but take seriously.

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Plugging the daughter

Filing this by Chi Trib’s Sid Smith under wish-I-wrote-it:

Shot simultaneously in a dozen or so locales, “Election Day” offers a snapshot, and a vibrant one, of our national diversity: urban dwellers in New York City; Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich.; farmers in Stockholm, Wis.; African-Americans in Quincy, Fla.; and Native Americans striving to get out the vote in Pine Ridge, S.D. Factory workers and dishwashers share their experiences. So does a convicted felon voting for the first time.

The movie deals with some thorny issues of disenfranchisement, in Florida in 2000 and in Shaker Heights, Ohio, in 2004. But this is more about the hues of the nation’s fabric, more an amiable glimpse into everyday life during one of our quadrennial watersheds. It’s a pleasant pastime rather than a revelation, though here and there it zeroes in on underlying anxiety. How did we get to be so divided, a woman wonders near the end, and no one seems to have an answer.

“Election Day” ran last night at the Siskel Center on State a few doors south of Lake and runs again, same place, Monday at 6 p.m.  Tix on line or at the door.  Nice refreshment bar for your usual popcorn, espresso, etc.

The director Katy Chevigny and producer Maggie Bowman were on hand for q&a.  Maggie will be there Monday.  They are also to be on WBEZ-FM’s “Eight Forty-Eight” show, 9 a.m. Monday, though .

As for viewer response to last night’s showing, (a) the parents approved, which is the first thing for a producer of anything to worry about, as we all know even if we don’t admit it, and (b) so did everyone else.

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Ellen cries

Ellen DeGeneres should learn that the world laughs with you when you laugh but sometimes laughs at you when you cry. I did.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show was put on hold for a day because of her emotionally wrenching dog-adoption drama.

“It’s been a long week and a tough week and we decided to take a long weekend and be back on Tuesday,” said Laura Mandel, a spokeswoman for Telepictures Productions, which produces “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

So what was it all about, Ellen? She got this dog from this non-profit animal-rescue agency, Iggy his name, and he didn’t get along with her cats. So she gave him to her hair-dresser’s kids in violation of contract: adopter has to give it back to agency, who then re-locates the animal.

So the agency took the dog back, leaving both the kids and Ellen in tears, she on air.

Not gonna let “the Ellen DeGenereses of the world” push them around, said the agency women, who (I have heard on the radio, where I also heard a clip of her losing her composure completely) have since found another home for Iggy.

So Ellen took a few days off to recover. It’s like Oscar Wilde’s comment on the death of Little Nell in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop:

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.

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BON MOT PARADE

“I never knew a passion for politics exist for a long time without swallowing up, absolutely excluding, a passion for Religion,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 5/16/1797 letter to J.P. Estlin.

A few months later, to his clergyman brother, Coleridge said he had withdrawn himself from consideration of “immediate causes,” i.e., current political arguments.

Samuel Johnson’s aunt, a gossip, was “willing to find something to censure in the absent,” said SJ. It’s in Kingsmill, editor, Johnson Without Boswell, 1941.

Prime Min. Gladstone’s falling into the Thames would be a misfortune, his being pulled out a calamity, said witty man quoted in 1/19/07 Times Lit Supplement.

A “gentle dimming of the libido” is a benefit of growing old. “It’s like being unshackled from a lunatic,” said a contributor to Late Youth: an anthology celebrating the joys of being over fifty (S. Johnson ed., Arcadia), reviewed in TLS “In Brief,” 3/9/07.

It’s “a fat book covering just two years, with gruel-thin contents,” said Jan Marsh of The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ed. Wm. E. Friedman, Brewer), vol. 6: Last Decade, 1873-84, Kelmscott to Birchington I: 1873-74.

“I always have to be the bad guy. Let’s both be good guys,” said Johnny, 4, to Madeline, 6, in playground in Intercourse, PA.

AUTHOR: Hugh Kingsmill, mentioned here earlier as declaring Victorian sentimentality the product of “an unnatural union of poetry and Puritanism,” has two books on Samuel Johnson, one, Samuel Johnson, is a bio. The other, Johnson Without Boswell, consists of passages from others who knew him besides his famous chronicler.

ANOTHER: Coleridge’s writing his Biographia Literaria is a case of long-delayed production, short-term hard work on a publisher’s advance. It distilled and summed up his life’s work as poet, essayist, and philosopher, combining autobiography, criticism, and philosophy in a manner best suited to his talents as he had come to understand them. This is from the 1955 intro by Geo. Watson to the Everyman’s Edition of BL.

MOVIE, MOVIE: “Touchez pas au grisbi” (Do not touch the loot) is a 1954 film with Jean Gabin and several gorgeous women, none of whom in vulgar fashion remove their clothes or leer into the camera. He’s a criminal who protects swag from a huge bullion robbery. It ends in a gunfight on a country road which I’d say the Cohen brothers drew on for their small-city film of Prohibition times, “Miller’s Crossing.”

This “Do not touch” is deliciously tense from the start and blessedly refrains from being cute or maudlin. No faux O. Henry ending here. The film puts pleasurable tension even into a man brushing his teeth. It’s part of the Criterion Collection, which the OP library stocks to our continuing benefit.

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Two recommendations:

1. “The Chorus,” or “Les Choristes,” on DVD from OP Library and elsewhere, a marvelous story about teaching kids and being a human being.  Cinematically, if I may be so bold, it’s very intelligent.  For instance, we see someone beckoning another and are NOT given the face of the one beckoned.  Rather, the camera remains on the beckoner as we wait for the other to heave into view.  Small thing, but telling as the movie continues and you realize you are not going to be treated as a TV-viewer, with all spelled out for you.  Neither is this film wantonly mysterious (read dumb).  Nor is time spent on face shots nervously wondering when the damn camera goes to something interesting.  See “Les Choristes.”

2. The Dennis Miller Show on WIND-AM in Chicago, also national.  Mid-day, competing nicely with Rush Limbaugh on WLS-AM.  Miller went all conservative after 9–11.  He’s excellent with language and has decided it hurts only when you DON’T laugh.  Rush laughs too, but I think Miller will wear better over a longer period.  Of course, either one has its limits, when one is well advised to send them on mute, which is a killer on radio, of course, and pursue one’s Times Literary Supplement over lunch in the kitchen.  A word to the wise is sufficient, I hope.  In any case, it’s all I have to offer.

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