This is What You Get When You Mess With Us

Rob

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

by

Many years ago, pre-Pandemic, I was in New York City for the weekend. It is something I do rarely, but SHE WHO WILL NOT BE BLOGGED has a deep and abiding love for Broadway and that’s where we were headed. Pre-show, we had drinks at a roof-deck bar at one of the W hotels. On an otherwise sunny spring day, the space between the buildings was shaded; the hotel was projecting, with surprising clarity, The Maltese Falcon.

I would have stayed at that bar all night, straight through the play. The Maltese Falcon is one of those movies that, when it comes on, I have a very hard time turning it off. But I value my life, my marriage, and, besides, I have the film on DVD.

Trailer…
[Read more…] about The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Too Late (2015)

by

I am a strong proponent of California Noir, especially the subset LA Noir. My memory of my family’s brief time in the City of Angels is piss-yellow and grainy, like the intro to James Gardner’s The Rockford Files or Emergency! Not the Kodachrome Los Angeles of mid-century musicals. Not the jewel-toned love letter to “trying to make it” of La La Land.

Noir pictures, and novels, fit this memory. So I seek them out, have my favorites. Chinatown… L.A. Confidential… both the movie and the novel, but for different reasons. He’s a right-wing wackadoodle, but James Ellroy can set a scene with a few words and write wicked dialogue. Widely panned by the Twitterati, I thought the second season of True Detective hit all of the beats of an L.A. Noir… I liked the story and characters, even though Vince Vaughn played a gangland version of his stock character… I still don’t understand the hate.

Violence against women at the hands of powerful men is the recurring theme in noir stories. The old “dame in distress” trope: murdered hooker, socialite in crisis for getting some of the same action any of the male characters take for themselves. As my hair goes gray, I find it harder to excuse this trope. I try to find stories where it’s subverted/turned on it’s head.

Really, the only poster…

Too Late, starring John Hawkes, isn’t that story. It dives head-on into the trope, like a hophead into the shallow end of an empty pool.

[Read more…] about Too Late (2015)

High Noon (1952)

by

Following up on my thoughts on Silverado, a 1980s film dripping with nostalgia for Westerns and serials the filmmakers watched in their Boomer youth, I decided I wanted to watch an ur-Western, preferably something without The Duke1 A palate cleanser, if you will; a film to set my understanding of the genre in the right direction. I chose High Noon from my Amazon Prime queue. Many reviewers on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes called this movie “the greatest Western of all time.”

Theatrical Trailer

The epithet is certainly a bit of hyperbole. Perhaps modern reviewers have warm and fuzzy memories of watching it as children, and it has won a bunch of awards, but there are certainly more nuanced Western films. Reading about the production, many see the film as an allegory for the Hollywood blacklist: a man, with his life and livelihood at risk, standing up for what is “right,” is abandoned by the community that he helped to build.2 Helping him in a time of need, they believe, will end their good lives. That theme resonates today.

[Read more…] about High Noon (1952)
  1. John Wayne made a good movie or two in his time. He was also rabidly racist and an arch conservative. His film, The Searchers, is a about a man who spends years trying to find his niece, who’s been “captured” by the Apache. Not to return her to her family, of course, but to murder her. She’s been defiled by a savage, he says. ↩
  2. the writer, Carl Foreman, was run out of Hollywood and the United States after production wrapped after refusing to name names to the HUAC ↩

The Croods (2013)

by

We’ve seen The Croods at least three times in a bunch of Family Movie Nights… So often I barely remember other animated films. The Croods holds beachfront real estate in my brain. All other residents died of the common cold…

My girl laughs *uncontrollably* throughout the entire film. 

The Croods are a family of, presumably, Neanderthals (or some other pre-Homosapien hominid…  I’m not sure it matters.)  The Crood family lives in constant fear of anything new or different, snug in a cave, leaving only to dine on the rare bird’s egg or edible bug. This bunker mentality is necessary. Their environment is purpose built to kill them. As Eep, voiced by Emma Stone, outlines in the 10 minutes of exposition at the top of the film, each of the neighboring families have been killed by animals, plants, or viruses. The Croods are the sole survivors; they face extinction every minute of every day. 

[Read more…] about The Croods (2013)

Twisted Balloons

by

There was a great toy store in Potomac that closed after 41 years because of the pandemic. It was a great place to get kid’s birthday presents, including good puzzles, craft kits, and science-focused toys. Yes, they were more expensive than Amazon, but there was no wondering if what you buying was the real deal or some Chinese pop-up factory knockoff. They wrapped the gifts for you. They hired High School kids. It was nice to be able to ask people questions about what kids like and get an answer great than a poke at an end cap and a grunt.

Fun for the whole family!

Anyway, I bought this $5 kit during one trip in advance of a big weekend of birthdays. Again, one of the great things about a store like that was discovering something you might otherwise think about. I put it in a drawer and sometimes, when I’m giving the kid a tub, I make some wiener dogs.

Wiener Dog #1, Yellow

Image 1 of 4

My first attempt of the day

The kit is obviously made for much smaller hands (ages 8 and up); the pump is miniature size and the balloons are 1/2 the size of those that clowns give away on city streets.

Conveniently, if you want to give this a try and your local toy/magic show was closed because the Federal/States/Local Governments couldn’t get their collective acts together over the last 12 months, you can use your google machine to find an amazon alternative. Looking to expand my repertoire beyond long dogs, I got some adult sized balloons and a pump from a place called Bargain Balloons, where they don’t spend a dime on their website in order to pass the savings on to you.

My girl wants me to make many of these:

Friday Fun Family Movie Night: Tangled (2010)

by

Anyway, our plan was to watch Penguins of Madagascar on Netflix because our girl loves the Madagascar films and the Penguins. But Your Wonderful Comcast decided Friday night at 5pm was the perfect time to reboot the Internet. So we dug through our Blu-Ray collection and pulled out Disney’s Tangled.

Tangled is a Disney interpretation of the story of Rapunzel. You can read the Grimm Brother’s version of it here. The Grimm’s telling itself is an interpretation of a story that occurs so often in traditions throughout the world, academics have assigned it a type: Type 310. The movie follows tale closely, but with a notable difference.

In the film, a magical plant grows wild, and the witch, Gothel (musical theater person Donna Murphy) nurtures it, but is certainly not interested in sharing the magic with anyone else. She has used that magic to keep herself alive and youthful for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

The pregnant Queen is dying; the King directs his people to search the countryside for this mythical curative flower. The King’s men pluck the flower and turn it into a single dose elixir that saves Queen and gives their daughter, the princess Rapunzel, played by Mandy Moore, golden hair that can also cure the sick and heal the wounded. When cut, the magic hair dies at the root.

Read the rest here: http://tiwygwymw.us/12p