Movies | dual personalities

February 5, 2018

“Those who wait on the LORD will renew their strength”*

by chuckofish

Well, a weekend without many plans turned into a pretty busy weekend after all. And it was cold again–it even snowed on Sunday!

I followed my usual weekend routine plus I re-read The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which was good but not as good as I remembered. I was overly aware of his details and his writing in general. But there is some real truth in it.

She simply does what her daughter tells her to, and finds a surprising relief in it. Maybe, she thinks, one could begin dying into this: the ministrations of a grown daughter, the comforts of a room. Here, then, is age. Here are the little consolations, the lamp and the book. Here is the world, increasingly managed by people who are not you; who will do either well or badly; who do not look at you when they pass you in the street.

I watched The Shape of Water (2017) which has been nominated for 13 Oscars, including best picture, and has already won a slew of awards.

636474209925005698-the-shape-of-water-002-SOW-03315-rgb.jpg

I did not like it. “‘The Shape of Water’ is partly a code-scrambled fairy tale, partly a genetically modified monster movie, and altogether wonderful,” gushed the reviewer in the NYT. I would beg to differ. “Bigotry and meanness flow through every moment like an underground stream,” he continued. This is true. We are shown several examples of this. Women, blacks and gays are treated badly. We see, we understand, we virtue-signal our superiority. Men are the bad guys in this movie, the enemy. The only decent man is gay. (Oh, and the other is a communist spy.) The #1 scary villain, of course, is a white male who works for the military, is married, has two children, lives in suburbia, and aspires to own a Cadillac. He is the real monster. I am tired of being hit over the head with this view of the world. “The most welcome and notable thing about ‘The Shape of Water’ is its generosity of spirit,” the NYT reviewer concludes. Is he kidding?

The wee babes, thankfully, came over for dinner on Sunday night. They cheered me up! They are so active now and curious, so happy. They get very excited about peanut butter and jelly, 30-year old toys, investigating the kitchen, and checking out the handles on the highboy. The wee laddie climbed all the way up to the second floor twice.

Miss Lottie slept on my shoulder after arriving, but perked right up once she awakened. She is a speed demon on all fours and can crawl the circuit of our first floor in under a minute.

The wee laddie can take up to six steps on his own and is swiftly gaining his sea legs.

Now it’s back to the salt mine–have a good week!

*Isaiah 40:31

4 Comments

February 2, 2018

“Well, if this ain’t a frosty Friday!”*

by chuckofish

“Having the right approach to life was a great gift in this life….Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself…You can do that in the company of an old friend—you can close your eyes and think of the land that gave you life and breath, and of all the reasons why you are glad that you are there, with the people you know, with the people you love.”
―Alexander McCall Smith, The Double Comfort Safari Club

Do you have exciting plans for the weekend? As usual, I do not have exciting plans. I’m not sure I even know what exciting plans are. But I have a couple of estate sales to go to and the OM and I are going to get the ball rolling on having new kitchen counters installed.

I can’t say I care about the Super Bowl. Football is on the way out if you ask me. I won’t be sad to see it go. And I am not one of those people who watches the Super Bowl in order to see the commercials. I mean, commercials are the bane of my existence! I hardly even watch network tv anymore, such is my loathing of commercials.

Screen Shot 2018-02-01 at 1.17.07 PM.png I saw something online about this emotional-support peacock and I thought it was a joke! Imagine my surprise reading this in the WSJ! Good lord! What is the world coming to?

If you want a weekend movie pic, here’s an idea. After watching The Valley of Gwangi last week, I thought I’d watch The Big Country (1958) which also features great music by Jerome Moross. So I watched it last night and enjoyed. It is not a perfect western–mostly due to the annoying character portrayed by Carol Baker–but it is still a good one, and the music really is great. Gregory Peck is at his most appealing and Burl Ives certainly deserved that Oscar he got for supporting actor. You gotta love straight talkin’ Rufus.

Well, the wee babes will be over on Sunday with their parents.

There is no pick-me-up like laughing babies.

Have a great weekend!

*Rufus Hannassey in The Big Country

4 Comments

February 1, 2018

“And you O my soul where you stand, …Ceaselessly musing, venturing…”*

by chuckofish

Hello, February!

The Olympic Games in PyeongChang begin in a little over a week.

This is the second time South Korea has hosted the Olympics–remember the summer Olympics in Seoul in 1988? I can’t say I remember much about them. I always used to love the winter Olympics with the skiing and the skating and the bobsledding. But I have to say that all the “big air” snowboarding and such leaves me cold. No one is an amateur anymore. Like everything else, it is all about the money and the politics. Oy.

It is also Black History Month.

Screen Shot 2018-01-31 at 1.51.24 PM.png

In the Episcopal Church we celebrate the life and ministry of the Rev. Absalom Jones, the first African American ordained as a priest in the U.S. “Stepping outside the box this year,” the diocese has designed a morning program for children and parents or grandparents. Gee, I can’t wait to bring the wee babes to this when they are old enough to appreciate it. We sent our kids to a public elementary school where they were in a racial minority, so they have always felt pretty comfortable wherever they find themselves–unlike those kids in the picture above who, we are led to believe, will encounter people of color in a “museum”. Oy.

The Orchid Show starts at the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Screen Shot 2018-01-31 at 1.25.20 PM.png But orchids always kind of freak me out.

The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants. The light had an unreal greenish color, like light filtered through an aquarium tank.

Maybe I’ll just stay home and re-read The Big Sleep.

Thank goodness it is 31 Days of Oscar month on TCM. Lots of good movies to watch and/or DVR.

yankee doodle dandy.jpg Find something to do this month that you can relate to. Engage with some real people. Have fun! .Don’t waste the month of February.

*Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

6 Comments

January 31, 2018

“Well, all that glitters isn’t gold, I know you’ve heard that story told.”*

by chuckofish

Today we toast actor James Franciscus (January 31, 1934 – July 8, 1991) on his birthday.

You remember him. He was in a lot of television shows in the 60s and 70s (according to my research he was on at least three TV Guide covers!) and he made a couple of memorable movies. Unfortunately he made a lot of bombs as well. Mostly he could rock a jeans jacket.

But did you know that he was born and raised in St. Louis? His father was a pilot in WWII and was killed in action, so after his mother remarried, the family moved east, thus interrupting his idyllic country childhood. After graduating from Yale, he headed west to stardom.

Growing up, we always liked him (as did our mother) and we watched whichever of his shows or movie-of-the-week was on the telly. A particular favorite was Longstreet (1971-72) which starred Franciscus as insurance investigator Mike Longstreet.

After a bomb (hidden in a champagne bottle) kills his wife and leaves him blind, Longstreet pursues and captures the killers. He then continues his career as an insurance investigator despite his blindness. Bruce Lee was a semi-regular on the show, so you know it was legit. It was a cool show. Really. Too bad it only lasted a year.

Although Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) is admittedly a special movie (and Franciscus is nearly naked throughout–check out those abs),

my personal favorite is the The Valley of Gwangi (1969)–a western/fantasy spectacle with special effects by the great Ray Harryhausen and music by the great Jerome Moross.

This movie surfaced on TCM last week and I DVR’d it and watched it one evening with the OM. It was a diverting 90 minutes to be sure. This movie deserves to be much more famous than it is! I mean, really–cowboys lassoing a T-Rex?

MV5BMGM5YzBlMDItYTA3MC00NDhlLTkxYmUtNWRhYTFmNjhlNGM1XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTE2NzA0Ng@@._V1_.jpg

A T-Rex bringing down a Mexican cathedral?

James Franciscus in this outfit?

Well, suffice it to say, you should try to find this movie and watch it. There is something quite endearing about these pre-CG films and the action scenes are really quite exciting. And the music is terrific.

So don’t forget to toast old James Franciscus tonight! When his mother died in the 1980s she left a big chunk of money to the Episcopal church I attended. No one remembered who she was by then (she had been gone for years) but the gift went to build the St. George Chapel and was much appreciated. Funnily enough, there was another old lady at this same church at the time whose son also had a go at a career as a movie star, although he was not nearly as successful as James Franciscus. Who remembers this guy?

Yes, that’s Todd Armstrong, who starred in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)–another Harryhausen feature. He fought those scary skeletons.

And, hey, he was the son of the architect who designed the famous meeting house for those ethical humanists I blogged about last week!

Let’s hear it for synchronicity! The world is more than we know.

*Neil Young

4 Comments

January 30, 2018

“One clover, and a bee, And revery”*

by chuckofish

Yesterday was the birthday of one of our favorite ancestors, John Wesley Prowers,

the older brother of our great-great grandmother, Mary Prowers Hough. I toasted him and we watched Red River (1948) in his honor.

A more appropriate movie would probably be The Rare Breed (1966) with James Stewart, which is a fictionalized account of the introduction of the Hereford breed in America, but I didn’t feel like it. Red River is a much better movie.

It is, indeed, a fine, fine movie. The first hour is really great. It wanders a bit after that–especially when John Wayne is off stage–and my mind did too. Watching this time, I was struck by several things.

1. Ricky Nelson In Rio Bravo a few years later is really channeling Montgomery Clift hard. He even rubs his nose the same way.

2.Walter Brennan plays a character named Nadine Groot. I wonder if the character Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) is named after him. If not, he should be.

3. Young Noah Beery reminded me a lot of Nathan Fillion.

Anyway, John Prowers, a bonafide cattle king, died of cancer at age 46 in 1884. He was laid to rest in Las Animas Cemetery in Bent County, Colorado–not on the lone prairie, but in his family plot. Prowers grave.jpg William Bent is buried there as well.Maybe I will make it to Las Animas some day. It is kind of a godforsaken place, but that is not in itself unappealing.

“O bury me not on the lone prairie.”
These words came low and mournfully
From the pallid lips of the youth who lay
On his dying bed at the close of day

He had wasted and pined ’til o’er his brow
Death’s shades were slowly gathering now
He thought of home and loved ones nigh
As the cowboys gathered to see him die

“O bury me not on the lone prairie
Where coyotes howl and the wind blows free
In a narrow grave just six by three—
O bury me not on the lone prairie”

“It matters not, I’ve been told
Where the body lies when the heart grows cold
Yet grant, o grant, this wish to me
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“I’ve always wished to be laid when I died
In a little churchyard on the green hillside
By my father’s grave, there let me be
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

“I wish to lie where a mother’s prayer
And a sister’s tear will mingle there
Where friends can come and weep o’er me
O bury me not on the lone prairie.”

I always liked this song, don’t you? The theme is played throughout Red River and a lot of other great westerns too. Think Stagecoach (1939).

*Emily Dickinson

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”

6 Comments

January 22, 2018

Snowmen prophets of doom

by chuckofish

I kept getting interrupted every time I sat down to write this post yesterday, which was par for the course as my plans kept changing all weekend. But c’est la vie.

I had a good weekend even though I ended up not doing much. I watched a couple of great movies–Allegheny Uprising (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944)–and the OM hooked up the new DVD player so we could finally watch Hell Is For Heroes (1962) which he got in his Christmas stocking. (It would not play on our old DVD player.) It is not the greatest movie–it is kind of like an extended Combat! episode–but beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to SMcQ movies. And Bobby Darin was pretty great too.

I went to church on Sunday and read the Prayers of the People. The temperature got up to 63-degrees (not a record) and everyone in town was out and about. It smelled like spring! The old January Thaw.

The wee babes came over for dinner with their parents on Sunday night.

And here’s a song from ol’ Tom Petty that I like:

Have a good week back at the salt mine.

5 Comments

January 18, 2018

Throwback Thursday

by chuckofish

c5d3514d301ec159433f48686b4dbcb1

Did you know that Lillie Langtry visited St. Louis in January, 1883? Well, she did and she caused quite a stir. St. Louisans, we are told, were “agog over her presence” and why wouldn’t they be? Oscar Wilde, it was said, was inspired by her beauty to write Lady Windemere’s Fan. Daughter of an Anglican dean, the Very Reverend William Corbet Le Breton, Langtry was one of the first international superstars.

When Col. A.B. Cunningham, an editor of the St. Louis Globe Democrat, was denied access to her quarters at the Southern Hotel for an interview, he stormed past her servants to find the lady breakfasting en negligee with Fred Gebhard, her manager. The Globe ran a scathing story about the actress, claiming that her success was due soley to her notoriety and urging St. Louisans to ban her stage performances as a protection to the city’s morals. Gebhard called Cunningham an infamous liar, whereupon Cunningham challenged him to a duel. After Lillie persuaded Fred not to accept, Cunningham posted placards around town denouncing him as a coward. The city’s other newspapers had a grand time writing of the whole affair, and Lillie’s performances were sold out.

Some things never change, right? Our expectations of the press certainly…

Anyway, all this talk of Lillie Langtry made me think of the The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) which stars Paul Newman as the infamous Bean,

the life and times of judge roy bean 2.jpg

who is obsessed with “the Jersey Lilly”. Langtry is played by the beautiful Ava Gardner, who makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film.

3486e8e54f522e68e79f4cc1d96a8b11--the-life-and-times-ava-gardner.jpg

The movie, directed by John Huston, is a bit strange, but I saw it again recently and I enjoyed it. There is a lot of humor in the screenplay by John Milius, but the underlying tone is sad and elegiac and the music by Maurice Jarre supports that. Paul Newman raises the bar once again. So if you are looking for something to watch, check it out.

Meanwhile I’ll raise a toast tonight to the lovely Lille Langtry.

(Information regarding Langtry’s visit to St. Louis from Frances Hurd Stadler, St. Louis Day By Day)

2 Comments

January 15, 2018

“Speak, for your servant is listening.”*

by chuckofish

Visit then this soul of mine, pierce the gloom of sin and grief!

Fill me, radiancy divine; scatter all my unbelief;

More and more thyself display, shining to the perfect day.

–Charles Wesley, hymn #7

Boy, do I love a three-day weekend! Don’t you? Daughter #1 stopped overnight Friday on her way to Indianapolis to meet up with some old college friends who also had had exciting careers in NYC and then moved back to the midwest. Then she stopped last night on her way back to central Missouri. How fun is that? We watched The World of Henry Orient (1964)–“an Upper East Side” movie and one of our faves. It is by far my favorite Peter Sellers movie and the girls in this film are dear to my heart.

(Like all trailers, this one does not quite convey the true idea/flavor of the movie.)

In between I met with my girlfriends to plan a bridal shower in March. Bells are ringing (again)! I puttered around the house putting stuff away. This is what I do and this is what brings me joy.

We had a guest preacher at church on Sunday–the Bishop’s Deputy for Gun Violence Prevention. I thought, oh brother, are we in for it, but he actually preached on MLK (his feast day is April 4, whatever) and tied it into the OT reading. Okay, then.

The wee babes came over on Sunday night for dinner and to show us their new haircuts.

That face!

Their mother loves to take them to have their locks shorn–I’m not sure why and neither are they.

But mine is not to reason why. They are adorable regardless.

Here are a few things from the internet:

This was interesting. #6 is particularly true–especially for those of us with scary RBF**: “Remember to smile. It will brighten your aspect and your voice, and serve as a corrective to the inevitable facial droop.”

I couldn’t agree more with this. Bravo.

Have a great week.

Thanks be to Thee, my Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits which Thou has given me, for all the pains and insults which Thou hast borne for me, O most merciful Redeemer, Friend and brother, may I know Thee more clearly, love Thee more dearly, and follow Thee more nearly, day by day.

–St. Richard of Chichester

*I Samuel 3:10

**Resting Bitch Face

3 Comments

January 8, 2018

“O Comforter draw near, within my heart appear”*

by chuckofish

Here is a photo I found of one happy DP on Christmas morning circa 1972 or 1973 with our pater who looks slightly annoyed per usual.

It struck me that we were still sitting on the same loveseat this Christmas.

Screen Shot 2018-01-07 at 12.51.24 PM.png

It has been in our family for nearly 200 years. I had it re-covered several years ago, horsehair stuffing and everything. The wee laddie has already spit up on it, so it has been baptized. I do not get upset about such things. We do not live in a museum. C’est la vie, right?

It also struck me that back in the day I was no doubt foolishly critical and hard on my 17-year old self in that picture, thinking I didn’t look like I thought I should look. Good grief, what is wrong with teenage girls? The thing is– I still do this, and I am going to resolve to stop doing it in 2018.

Good luck to me!

Well, we had a busy weekend. I wrapped all my Christmas decorations, which I had taken down last week, and put them away–even the outdoor lights! Our neighbors across the street have not turned off their outdoor Christmas lights since they put them up in November! Their inflated Santa in a trailer decoration stayed inflated and plugged in night and day throughout December, and when I would get up at 3:00 a.m., Santa would still be opening the door and closing it. Finally the snow and ice did him in and he got stuck…

…and then he died.

He will probably be there ’til the spring thaw. Neighbors.

The OM and I babysat the wee babes on Saturday night while their parents went out to celebrate daughter #3’s birthday. The babes were tired and so it wasn’t difficult to get them to bed. The wee laddie even let me change his diaper without much of a struggle–a sure sign of exhaustion. The OM went to sleep on the couch shortly after and I scanned Netflix for something/anything to watch–quelle wasteland. I watched the Tin-Tin movie which was not great.

Oli kept me company in Lottie’s chair. The cats appear to have seized ownership. Big surprise.

I read in church on Sunday and then went home and finished putting away Christmas stuff. In the afternoon I took a break and treated myself to 3 Godfathers (1948).

Just a perfect movie. I also watched Logan Lucky (2017) with my fave Channing Tatum. I think it kind of bombed at the box office, but I can’t imagine why. I liked it and recommend it. Kind of a hillbilly Oceans 11, the hero is smart and sweet. Daniel Craig plays against type. It was even rated PG-13 (no violence, no bad language!)

I have a super busy week ahead. Have a good one!

*Hymn #516

7 Comments

January 5, 2018

Brrrrrrrr

by chuckofish

The Mississippi River freezes solid in February 1905.

Il fait froid! There are ice chunks in the ol’ Mississip today, but I don’t think one could walk across it. I certainly wouldn’t want to try! Here are some interesting historical photos of our frozen river through the years.

I plan to stay warm at home this weekend packing up Christmas decorations. But I also have two birthdays to celebrate, including daughter #3’s, so I’ll be out and about.

I saw a fox run through our back yard early on Christmas Eve morning. Maybe he’ll be back.

2c1da737e0268d5ed4d12f77027cd076

Thus by the snow I was made aware in this short walk of the recent presence of squirrels, a fox, and countless mice, whose trail I had crossed, but none of which I saw, or probably should have seen before the snow fell. Also I saw this afternoon the track of one sparrow, probably a tree sparrow, which had run among the weeds in the road. (Dec. 14, 1855)

–Henry David Thoreau, A Writer’s Journal

Since it is Epiphany,

Screen Shot 2018-01-04 at 5.27.06 PM.png