Continuing our mini-Horror Fest, tonight I watched an Italian import that made quite a splash when it was released in 1977. I am talking about "Suspiria", which made a name for it's director Dario Argento. "Suspiria" was a must-see movie for horror fans at the time, my friends and I all went to see it, and before I sat down tonight to watch it for a second time, 42 years later, I tried to remember what my reaction had been after the initial viewing. To be honest, I couldn't remember much about the film, only that it was bloody and had a lot of color. I recalled that it had "a look", but I couldn't remember anything of the story, other than that it had a "slasher" element.
Upon watching it again tonight, I think my memory (or lack thereof) of that first screening represented how I felt after my second go-round with the film.
The thing with "Suspiria" (and keep in mind I am talking about the original 1977 version) is that it looks incredible. If art direction, production design and color cinematography were the sole criteria of what makes a great horror film, then "Suspiria" would be in the Top Five in the horror genre, maybe even higher. Argento uses lurid colors, mostly blues and reds, to amazing effect, and he switches his color schemes even as a scene progresses. It's as if he has a rock concert lighting company working on his film, only instead of highlighting musicians on stage, they are backlighting a major-league scare show. The colors change and blend, and spots are lit to define moments of tension.
The other thing Argento (or his production designer) does, is to use a lot of fabrics and patterns, to add texture and to diffuse the light. Wallpaper is elaborate, sheer drapery blows in the breeze that gusts through open windows.
(don't any of these knuckleheads know that you never leave a window open in a horror movie?!)
To be sure, the sets are gaudy and gothic, but this is one instance where deeply saturated color works well in a horror movie. Put simply, you have never seen a movie, horror or otherwise, that looks like "Suspiria". If only the story was equally worthy of such accolades, Argento might've had a classic on his hands. Now, a lot of fans do consider this movie to be classic. It has a 7.7 rating on IMDB, enormous for a 42 year old horror film. But in reading some of the reviews, I see also that more than a few fans agree with my assessment, which is that the story is very thin.
This is probably why, in the long run of 42 years between viewings, I remembered none of the plot, and not even the setting. I only remembered the style.
Jessica Harper plays a young American ballet student set to attend an exclusive dance school in Germany. She arrives there in a blinding rainstorm, the spooky effects on display from the get-go. At the schoolhouse, an old German mansion, she is not exactly welcomed with open arms. In fact, she is told to get lost, they've never even heard of her. She leaves, puzzled, to spend her first night in a hotel, but not before she witnesses another girl depart from the mansion in a hurry. This girl, also a dance student, looks scared. Jessica Harper is so concerned about her own misunderstood arrangement, however, that the next morning, when she is accepted into the school by the "directress", her memory of the runaway girl has become an afterthought.
Now she is one of the elite students of Miss Tanner the dance instructor, a soul-crushing Virago if there ever was one. She is played by Alida Valli, who you may have seen opposite Joseph Cotten in Carol Reed's "The Third Man". Here she is much older but no less formidable. But even she is no match for The Directress, played by Golden Age star Joan Bennett, also much older now.
These two ladies have something up their sleeves that they don't want to talk about, which becomes a problem as other folks go missing from the school, including a blind man and his dog. The man was Miss Tanner's pianist.
Director Argento must have been extremely pleased when he walked into the studio and saw his sets and lighting for the first time, so it's not a stretch to assume that he loosened the slack on the screenplay in order to concentrate on the visuals.
For the first hour, the story is little more than a slasher whodunit. If not for the artistic razamatazz, I might not have made it through to the end. But in the last 25 minutes, a storyline does begin to develop, and as it gathers steam, so does the potential for a satisfying climax. I won't tell you what that entails, but it does build to an ending worthy of the film's lofty artistic goals.
Jessica Harper is onscreen throughout, and carries the movie with wide-eyed expression. There are certain scenes and set pieces that stand alone in the midst of the picture, that simply for their "look" could be used as separate short videos to summarise the Argento technique.
Hugely effective is the soundtrack, featuring music by the Italian progressive band Goblin. They went on to score other Argento movies, too and in "Suspiria" he combines their keyboard based work with "Exorcist" - like sounds to achieve maximum spookyness.
There are sections of extreme gore in "Suspiria", and for that reason I cannot give it a wholehearted recommendation for every viewer. I myself blanched at certain close-ups. There are images that at 59 years of age I just don't need to see anymore. They were okay when I was seventeen, but I've seen them now, many times, and I gave up on the gore factor years ago. Nowdays I want intelligent, preferably supernatural horror.
For it's visual and sonic artistry I will give "Suspiria" Two Huge Thumbs Up. It is a must see for those qualities. But for it's story it gets but a mere Single Thumb from me. Things improve in the plot as it nears the end, but too much time is wasted. Overall, if you are a fan of extreme horror, you definitely want to see this movie. Watch it on Halloween, in fact, for maximum effect. But know going in that you won't be getting an involving story, and instead watch "Suspiria" for how it looks and sounds, which may have been Dario Argento's intention anyway. /////
That's all I know for tonight. I sure hope the air quality in the Valley will improve tomorrow. It has been hard to breathe for the past two days, and really, for me it has come close to making me sick. We are having an inversion which is keeping the ozone trapped down low where we breathe, and it's just pure poison. Fingers are crossed for an improvement.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
"Children Of The Corn"
We're gonna take a little Horror Detour over the next couple days, nothing major, just a few films I turned up in a recent library search. One is an Italian classic from the 1970s, another features an actor who recently passed away, and the third is a Stephen King title that was released 35 years ago. That's the one I watched tonight : "Children Of The Corn" (1984). I avoided this movie when it came out, first of all because the reviews were negative, and also because many film adaptations of SK's stories had been subpar, including "The Shining", so I was hesitant to trust yet another one, in this case with an unknown director and what I assumed was a low budget. Mainly, though, I was into hardcore horror in those days, and if a movie didn't look like it was gonna be up to "Texas Chainsaw" standards, I often took a pass. All of these factors caused me to skip "Children Of The Corn" when it came out, but about two or three years ago - when I began to revisit 1980s horror movies - I got the feeling that I should finally check it out. It took me a little while longer, but tonight I watched it for the first time, and it wasn't half bad.
In fact, it was much better than I was expecting, just like with "Cult Of The Cobra" from last night. It's been 40 years or more since I read the original short story the movie was based on, which appeared in SK's "Night Shift", so I'm afraid I couldn't tell you the intricacies of that tale. I only remember the basics : a group of children in a boondock Nebraska town worship an unseen deity who lives within the endless rows of corn. They are fanatical and austere, like an extreme religious sect. They allow no music or art, no books (except one), and that Book they have only excerpted to suit their strict and violent beliefs.
All I remembered from the story is that a young couple traveling through corn country got lost in Nebraska and ended up in a life or death struggle with these crazy kids. The movie follows that basic premise. I will have to go back and re-read the short story to see what has been left out, but for what the movie is - a low budget SK job made to 80s standards to scare teenagers on a Saturday night - it's pretty good.
Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton (who would go on to star in "Thirtysomething" and "Terminator" respectively) are the traveling couple. He is a young doctor, she his loyal girlfriend. They are driving to Noo Joysey so he can set up his practice, but they get lost on the backroads of Nebraska, and soon they are driving around in circles. Finally they stop at a broken down old gas station that has no gas, and they ask the proprietor (old time character actor R.G. Armstrong) for directions. He tries to steer them back to the main road, but it's no use. Someone has messed with the road signs and they wind up back where they started, on the outskirts of what appears to be a deserted small town.
It is when they leave their car to search for help that the trouble begins, and I will leave you there, in the small deserted town yourself. Now you are the one walking down the empty street, toward the dead town square, looking for anyone at all who can help you find a way out. :)
"Children Of The Corn" gets an A+ for atmosphere. The filmmakers used an actual small town in Iowa for their main location, and it has that look, of old brick buildings that you might see in the Midwest in out of the way places. They have it looking barren and weed strewn because no one is living there anymore. The adults are all gone.
But the children lurk about, in the rows of corn, or hidden away in the recesses of the abandoned church. If the blow-dried 80s couple Horton and Hamilton don't keep their wits about them, they will soon be toast, because these kids, who are led by a small-fry preacher and a taller and very scary redhead, are flat-out insane.
So you've got great atmosphere and art direction, the acting ranges from decent to very good, but the problem that brings the movie down to Earth and prevents it from being excellent is, as usual, a weak script. Too much time is spent on "the confrontations". You know what I mean; the 1980s horror showdowns between the slasher nutcases and their freaked-out victims. In the low budget films, the script was often an afterthought, but it would've been nice if the belief system of the children had been explored. How did they get that way? Who the hell is 'He Who Walks Behind The Rows'? How were they able to get rid of all the adults in town?
If we had on hand some of our Great Screenwriter friends from the Golden Era, we might be able to answer these questions, and several more.
I mean, you know what you're gonna get going in, so keep your expectations on an even keel and you won't be disappointed. 80s horror was formulaic, but there is a huge nostalgic value in the aesthetics involved. That's why I have been revisiting the horror movies from that era, just to remember the way things were. But to sum up, because it's super late and I may fall asleep, I will be generous and give "Children Of The Corn" Two Regular Thumbs Up, just because it has the main ingredients in place.
The direction could have been better, and ditto the script, but it looks good and will hold your attention throughout.
That's all I know for tonight, except to repeat what I mentioned on Facebook : Man, was that ever some bad smog today. We humans have gotta get rid of these gasoline powered cars, and soon.
That's all for tonight. See you in the morning. Hope you had a nice day. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
In fact, it was much better than I was expecting, just like with "Cult Of The Cobra" from last night. It's been 40 years or more since I read the original short story the movie was based on, which appeared in SK's "Night Shift", so I'm afraid I couldn't tell you the intricacies of that tale. I only remember the basics : a group of children in a boondock Nebraska town worship an unseen deity who lives within the endless rows of corn. They are fanatical and austere, like an extreme religious sect. They allow no music or art, no books (except one), and that Book they have only excerpted to suit their strict and violent beliefs.
All I remembered from the story is that a young couple traveling through corn country got lost in Nebraska and ended up in a life or death struggle with these crazy kids. The movie follows that basic premise. I will have to go back and re-read the short story to see what has been left out, but for what the movie is - a low budget SK job made to 80s standards to scare teenagers on a Saturday night - it's pretty good.
Peter Horton and Linda Hamilton (who would go on to star in "Thirtysomething" and "Terminator" respectively) are the traveling couple. He is a young doctor, she his loyal girlfriend. They are driving to Noo Joysey so he can set up his practice, but they get lost on the backroads of Nebraska, and soon they are driving around in circles. Finally they stop at a broken down old gas station that has no gas, and they ask the proprietor (old time character actor R.G. Armstrong) for directions. He tries to steer them back to the main road, but it's no use. Someone has messed with the road signs and they wind up back where they started, on the outskirts of what appears to be a deserted small town.
It is when they leave their car to search for help that the trouble begins, and I will leave you there, in the small deserted town yourself. Now you are the one walking down the empty street, toward the dead town square, looking for anyone at all who can help you find a way out. :)
"Children Of The Corn" gets an A+ for atmosphere. The filmmakers used an actual small town in Iowa for their main location, and it has that look, of old brick buildings that you might see in the Midwest in out of the way places. They have it looking barren and weed strewn because no one is living there anymore. The adults are all gone.
But the children lurk about, in the rows of corn, or hidden away in the recesses of the abandoned church. If the blow-dried 80s couple Horton and Hamilton don't keep their wits about them, they will soon be toast, because these kids, who are led by a small-fry preacher and a taller and very scary redhead, are flat-out insane.
So you've got great atmosphere and art direction, the acting ranges from decent to very good, but the problem that brings the movie down to Earth and prevents it from being excellent is, as usual, a weak script. Too much time is spent on "the confrontations". You know what I mean; the 1980s horror showdowns between the slasher nutcases and their freaked-out victims. In the low budget films, the script was often an afterthought, but it would've been nice if the belief system of the children had been explored. How did they get that way? Who the hell is 'He Who Walks Behind The Rows'? How were they able to get rid of all the adults in town?
If we had on hand some of our Great Screenwriter friends from the Golden Era, we might be able to answer these questions, and several more.
I mean, you know what you're gonna get going in, so keep your expectations on an even keel and you won't be disappointed. 80s horror was formulaic, but there is a huge nostalgic value in the aesthetics involved. That's why I have been revisiting the horror movies from that era, just to remember the way things were. But to sum up, because it's super late and I may fall asleep, I will be generous and give "Children Of The Corn" Two Regular Thumbs Up, just because it has the main ingredients in place.
The direction could have been better, and ditto the script, but it looks good and will hold your attention throughout.
That's all I know for tonight, except to repeat what I mentioned on Facebook : Man, was that ever some bad smog today. We humans have gotta get rid of these gasoline powered cars, and soon.
That's all for tonight. See you in the morning. Hope you had a nice day. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Monday, July 29, 2019
Elizabeth + "Cult Of The Cobra"
Hey Elizabeth! I am glad to see you working on new music. That is a lovely melody you are playing over the cello notes, so I hope you do finish the piece. :) And yeah, if you had a string library then you could get into orchestrations. I mean, I have no idea how the software works, or anything about it really, but I imagine that having the strings at your disposal would open up some pretty wide creative avenues to use as a basis for piano composition, or even some all-string pieces.
Do you still have your viola? If so, eventually you can write me a String Quartet! (one of my favorite forms of classical music).
I sure am glad to see you writing and playing again and I hope you will have a chance to continue. Just remember it's all about time management and the desire to create. On that aspect of it, I am finding over the years, regarding "the desire", that it's better just to schedule your time to write, or play, or even just noodle around. When I was younger I would sometimes say, "well, I'm not feeling inspired today, so I don't think I'll play". I think the act of beginning a daily journal changed that attitude for me. Twenty years ago this October I began to write down a daily record of my thoughts and activities, and it instilled in me a discipline that extended to other pursuits, like long form writing and eventually drawing, a hobby I began in 1997 and have recently taken up again starting in 2016. If I ever have enough room to do so, I can't wait to paint again, too. When I lived at Burton Street with the gang, I did about 25 paintings of various sizes, all of which I have stashed inside my apartment with my best one hanging on the wall.
My point is : don't wait to be inspired. Just play a little bit (or a lot) every day, or as many days as you can, but make it part of your schedule and before long it will fit into your day like second nature. That is the real inspiration, just doing it every day. Write, play, record and repeat. :)
And post! If you feel like it. But yeah, I am happy to see you back. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
I did watch a movie tonight, one from my Ultimate Sci-Fi Collection Volume Two, called "Cult Of The Cobra" (1955). I will try to keep my review brief so as not to tire out in the middle of it, haha.
Six American G.I.s are on leave in an unspecified city in Southeast Asia, probably in Thailand but maybe Nepal. Wherever it is that they have snake charmers. Anyhow, the G.I.s have their cameras with them and are looking for exotic things to snap. They spot a snake charmer and after taking a few pictures they strike up a conversation with him. Of course he speaks perfectly accented English, and tells the soldiers of a secret society of people he knows, called the Lamians. They are folks who are able to metamorphosize into cobra snakes. The snake charmer is a Lamian himself, and offers to sneak the men into one of the the group's sacred ceremonies. The G.I.s are looking for adventure so they accept his offer. They don hooded cloaks to enter the Lamian Temple, but in the middle of the opening dance (in a fantastic sequence performed by a pair of dancers known as The Carlssons) one of the soldiers - a true knucklehead - ruins everything by producing a flashbulb camera from under his cloak and bursting a photo.
Now everyone in the joint is aware of the American interlopers, and the chase is on to catch them as they try to escape the temple. A Hollywood-style punchout ensues, and you know that the soldiers are gonna win that battle over the scrawny Lamians, so the soldiers make their getaway.
But not before a curse is put upon them by the snake charmer himself, who declares as they run away that each one of them will be put to death by the Cobra Woman, whom the Lamians had come to worship at the ceremony.
All of this action takes about 25 minutes, and for the remaining hour the picture is relocated to New York and we have a whole new scenario but a continued plot of revenge.
Enter Faith Domergue, a dark eyed actress who starred in sci-fi classics like "This Island Earth" and "It Came From Beneath The Sea". Here she plays Lisa, a woman new to NYC who just so happens to have moved across the hall from the apartment of Marshall Thompson (another star of classic sci-fi). He was one of the soldiers involved in the temple ruckus back in Nepal. Thompson is instantly smitten with Domergue and offers to show her around the city. She has a mysterious air about her, and she seems reticent, but after their day on the town a romance is building.
The problem is that she is really The Cobra Woman, whose real reason for coming to New York is to carry out the curse that was proclaimed upon the remaining five soldiers. She means to kill them all, one by one, but now that she is falling in love with Marshall Thompson she doesn't know if she can go through with it. Some of the other guys aren't so lucky, however.
That's all I will tell you, and I am actually writing this part of the review the next afternoon (Monday July 29 at 2:30pm). I once again failed to finish last night, but I promise to correct the problem!
To sum up, "Cult Of The Cobra" is a nice little film, and different from what I was expecting, which was a diluted-color horror cheapie with really bad special effects and a woman in a rubber snake suit. Instead, it's shot in excellent, noir-ish black and white, with no cheezy special effects. It has an intelligent script and plays more like a mystery than a sci-fi. Faith Domergue was a very good dramatic actress and Thompson and Richard Long are also capable as the male leads. The only problem is that there isn't much tension because we already know who Lisa is, and all of her killings are presaged. We have to wait for the men to figure it out, and the coppers, too. Had the filmmakers explored the "discovery" theme a little more, they might've had a minor classic on their hands. It's still a good show, though, and I will give it Two Regular Thumbs Up. Definitely a keeper for fans of 1950s black and white cult horror and sci-fi. ////
Well, that's all for this afternoon. I am off to the store as usual, then a stop at the Libe to pick up more movies, with a "Grohl Walk" down past Studio 606 if I have enough time, just to get some daily mileage in. See you tonight at the usual time, have a great day! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Do you still have your viola? If so, eventually you can write me a String Quartet! (one of my favorite forms of classical music).
I sure am glad to see you writing and playing again and I hope you will have a chance to continue. Just remember it's all about time management and the desire to create. On that aspect of it, I am finding over the years, regarding "the desire", that it's better just to schedule your time to write, or play, or even just noodle around. When I was younger I would sometimes say, "well, I'm not feeling inspired today, so I don't think I'll play". I think the act of beginning a daily journal changed that attitude for me. Twenty years ago this October I began to write down a daily record of my thoughts and activities, and it instilled in me a discipline that extended to other pursuits, like long form writing and eventually drawing, a hobby I began in 1997 and have recently taken up again starting in 2016. If I ever have enough room to do so, I can't wait to paint again, too. When I lived at Burton Street with the gang, I did about 25 paintings of various sizes, all of which I have stashed inside my apartment with my best one hanging on the wall.
My point is : don't wait to be inspired. Just play a little bit (or a lot) every day, or as many days as you can, but make it part of your schedule and before long it will fit into your day like second nature. That is the real inspiration, just doing it every day. Write, play, record and repeat. :)
And post! If you feel like it. But yeah, I am happy to see you back. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
I did watch a movie tonight, one from my Ultimate Sci-Fi Collection Volume Two, called "Cult Of The Cobra" (1955). I will try to keep my review brief so as not to tire out in the middle of it, haha.
Six American G.I.s are on leave in an unspecified city in Southeast Asia, probably in Thailand but maybe Nepal. Wherever it is that they have snake charmers. Anyhow, the G.I.s have their cameras with them and are looking for exotic things to snap. They spot a snake charmer and after taking a few pictures they strike up a conversation with him. Of course he speaks perfectly accented English, and tells the soldiers of a secret society of people he knows, called the Lamians. They are folks who are able to metamorphosize into cobra snakes. The snake charmer is a Lamian himself, and offers to sneak the men into one of the the group's sacred ceremonies. The G.I.s are looking for adventure so they accept his offer. They don hooded cloaks to enter the Lamian Temple, but in the middle of the opening dance (in a fantastic sequence performed by a pair of dancers known as The Carlssons) one of the soldiers - a true knucklehead - ruins everything by producing a flashbulb camera from under his cloak and bursting a photo.
Now everyone in the joint is aware of the American interlopers, and the chase is on to catch them as they try to escape the temple. A Hollywood-style punchout ensues, and you know that the soldiers are gonna win that battle over the scrawny Lamians, so the soldiers make their getaway.
But not before a curse is put upon them by the snake charmer himself, who declares as they run away that each one of them will be put to death by the Cobra Woman, whom the Lamians had come to worship at the ceremony.
All of this action takes about 25 minutes, and for the remaining hour the picture is relocated to New York and we have a whole new scenario but a continued plot of revenge.
Enter Faith Domergue, a dark eyed actress who starred in sci-fi classics like "This Island Earth" and "It Came From Beneath The Sea". Here she plays Lisa, a woman new to NYC who just so happens to have moved across the hall from the apartment of Marshall Thompson (another star of classic sci-fi). He was one of the soldiers involved in the temple ruckus back in Nepal. Thompson is instantly smitten with Domergue and offers to show her around the city. She has a mysterious air about her, and she seems reticent, but after their day on the town a romance is building.
The problem is that she is really The Cobra Woman, whose real reason for coming to New York is to carry out the curse that was proclaimed upon the remaining five soldiers. She means to kill them all, one by one, but now that she is falling in love with Marshall Thompson she doesn't know if she can go through with it. Some of the other guys aren't so lucky, however.
That's all I will tell you, and I am actually writing this part of the review the next afternoon (Monday July 29 at 2:30pm). I once again failed to finish last night, but I promise to correct the problem!
To sum up, "Cult Of The Cobra" is a nice little film, and different from what I was expecting, which was a diluted-color horror cheapie with really bad special effects and a woman in a rubber snake suit. Instead, it's shot in excellent, noir-ish black and white, with no cheezy special effects. It has an intelligent script and plays more like a mystery than a sci-fi. Faith Domergue was a very good dramatic actress and Thompson and Richard Long are also capable as the male leads. The only problem is that there isn't much tension because we already know who Lisa is, and all of her killings are presaged. We have to wait for the men to figure it out, and the coppers, too. Had the filmmakers explored the "discovery" theme a little more, they might've had a minor classic on their hands. It's still a good show, though, and I will give it Two Regular Thumbs Up. Definitely a keeper for fans of 1950s black and white cult horror and sci-fi. ////
Well, that's all for this afternoon. I am off to the store as usual, then a stop at the Libe to pick up more movies, with a "Grohl Walk" down past Studio 606 if I have enough time, just to get some daily mileage in. See you tonight at the usual time, have a great day! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Sunday, July 28, 2019
"The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" directed by Preston Sturges and starring Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken
Continuing a disturbing trend - which I will make every effort to correct - this is another blog that was begun the previous night (in this case last night) but not completed until the next afternoon. This is that "next afternoon", and I will now complete the blog.
(from Saturday night July 27, 2019) : Tonight I watched another Preston Sturges masterpiece, "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" (1943), starring Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken. Having seen several of his films now, including "The Lady Eve" which we watched just a few days ago, it's obvious that Sturges was a comedic genius. His movies are unlike any other screen comedies you've ever seen, with elements of farce, the high energy of Screwball and even satire in places, but they also have the exact timing of a Swiss watch, so that everyone in the cast has to be exactly on their marks, every second, to pull of any number of off the wall scenes. Finally, because Sturges wrote most of his own screenplays, he has an identifiable, idiosyncratic style of dialogue, always witty, which comes at you so rapid fire that at times you have to hit the "rewind" button to ensure that you caught all the jokes.
It's amazing to watch, and at times, when the ensemble cast is in perfect sync and the onscreen energy borders on manic, you shake your head a little bit between laughs just to marvel at the cumulative talent of the players, and that each one is bringing an entirely separate comic style into the mix.
I had only seen Eddie Bracken in one other film ("Summer Stock" with Judy Garland), but his persona is a perfect fit for a Sturges comedy. Bracken had a long career and appeared on TV up to the year 2000, so you may know him. He specialised in playing Nervous Nerds, and in his case the characters were often stuttering, stumbling, overly polite numbskulls who generally caused mayhem wherever they went. In this movie, he is wound up tighter than an overcaffinated ADHD sufferer, fit to implode at any moment, as the weight of the world is placed upon his shoulders.
Platinum blonde Betty Hutton is the town hottie of Morgan's Creek. She doesn't mean to be - she's a nice girl - but WW2 is on, and every departing soldier boy wants to dance with her at the upcoming sendoff party for The Boys. Betty is so popular and she has promised to be at the dance, but her cranky old curmudgeon of a father (William Demarest, who excelled in these roles) forbids her to go. He was a soldier in WW1, and he knows "how they are, especially when they're on leave".
So Betty outfoxes him by asking, then, if she can go to the movies with harmless Norval Jones, played by Eddie Bracken. Norval is homely and geeky, therefore Dad should have nothing to worry about. He agrees to let her go, but then when she and Norval get out the door, she uses his infatuation with her to enlist him in a plan to get her to the soldier's dance after all. Norval feels slighted, because he knows he is being used, but he will do anything for Betty, so he allows her to drop him off at the movies and then take his car to the dance. She is supposed to pick him up from the theater at 1am, but then we see that Eddie is sitting on the sidewalk outside the theater and the sun is coming up. It is 8am the next morning and Betty is just pulling in. She is drunk and the car looks the worse for wear.
It turns out that Betty had a pretty wild night. She went to the dance, and then to other dances which were continued at several other nightclubs with the same group of soldiers. At one dance, a soldier made the drunken suggestion that everyone should pair off and get married. WW2 produced fatalistic ideas in the heads of young men who thought they might not be coming back, and they wanted to have someone back home to care about them. So, in this crazy movie there is a serious theme.
Eddie Bracken, who is horrified at what he is hearing of Betty's night at the dance, is doubly floored when she tells him that she indeed participated in the mass marriage. She was drunk, she got married on a whim to a guy whose name she can't even remember, and now, a few weeks later, she discovers she is pregnant.
This was heavy subject matter for 1943, and now Betty has to figure out what she's gonna do about her condition. Nerdy Norval vows to stand by her, always at the ready, so she enlists him to pose as the father. He agrees, and after this point, all hell breaks loose with so many plot twists and threads that you have to be as fast as Preston Sturges to keep up with them all.
I've seen a lot of crazy comedies in my time, but for sheer energy and nuttiness, "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" may take the cake. I think Screwball comedy begat the styles that led to Saturday Night Live and that kind of madcap stuff, but nothing I have seen can match up to the insanity and impeccable timing of these Sturges movies.
Though the entire cast shines, especially Eddie Braken (himself a comic genius), a mention must be made of two of the supporting players. One is William Demarest. Most people my age remember him only as the grumpy old "Uncle Charlie" on the "My Three Sons" TV series in the 1960s, and that character is indeed based somewhat on the gruff old cranks he played in his earlier film career. But Uncle Charlie is old and stiff, and almost always angry. He's humorless, which was why little kids like me who watched the show found the character unappealing. However, in his movies from two decades earlier, Demarest - using a more energetic technique - created characters that were similar in personality to "Uncle Charlie" but were full of knowing humor. In "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek", Demarest plays the Town Constable who is also Betty Hutton's father. He is up to his ears in trouble, and he takes out his frustrations mostly on Eddie Bracken, but it's as if Demarest is in on the joke. The banter he engages in with his two daughters is a high-speed riot, and he even does a couple of big time pratfalls.
The other cast member who must be separately applauded is young Diana Lynn, who we recently saw playing Rita Johnson's precocious little sister in "The Major And The Minor". In that movie, she was 14 going on 30 if you get my drift, totally aware of what the adults were up to, and she plotted a scheme against her sister to help Ginger Rogers win back Ray Milland.
In "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" she plays another "older than her years" little sister to Betty Hutton, and has the wiles and superior intelligence to both help Betty out of her jam, and keep Daddio Demarest at bay at the same time.
She was a beautiful young actress who was also a piano prodigy, a real gem who unfortunately died at age 45 in 1971. Keep an eye out for Miss Lynn, she was really great.
Two Gigantic Thumbs Up for "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek". They just don't, and probably can' t,
make comedies like this any more. ////
Okay, this is me again, writing this afternoon (Sunday). We had good singing in church. I hope you are enjoying your day too. Now I am off to the store for watermelon and other supplies. I will be back later this evening at the usual time. See you then. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
(from Saturday night July 27, 2019) : Tonight I watched another Preston Sturges masterpiece, "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" (1943), starring Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken. Having seen several of his films now, including "The Lady Eve" which we watched just a few days ago, it's obvious that Sturges was a comedic genius. His movies are unlike any other screen comedies you've ever seen, with elements of farce, the high energy of Screwball and even satire in places, but they also have the exact timing of a Swiss watch, so that everyone in the cast has to be exactly on their marks, every second, to pull of any number of off the wall scenes. Finally, because Sturges wrote most of his own screenplays, he has an identifiable, idiosyncratic style of dialogue, always witty, which comes at you so rapid fire that at times you have to hit the "rewind" button to ensure that you caught all the jokes.
It's amazing to watch, and at times, when the ensemble cast is in perfect sync and the onscreen energy borders on manic, you shake your head a little bit between laughs just to marvel at the cumulative talent of the players, and that each one is bringing an entirely separate comic style into the mix.
I had only seen Eddie Bracken in one other film ("Summer Stock" with Judy Garland), but his persona is a perfect fit for a Sturges comedy. Bracken had a long career and appeared on TV up to the year 2000, so you may know him. He specialised in playing Nervous Nerds, and in his case the characters were often stuttering, stumbling, overly polite numbskulls who generally caused mayhem wherever they went. In this movie, he is wound up tighter than an overcaffinated ADHD sufferer, fit to implode at any moment, as the weight of the world is placed upon his shoulders.
Platinum blonde Betty Hutton is the town hottie of Morgan's Creek. She doesn't mean to be - she's a nice girl - but WW2 is on, and every departing soldier boy wants to dance with her at the upcoming sendoff party for The Boys. Betty is so popular and she has promised to be at the dance, but her cranky old curmudgeon of a father (William Demarest, who excelled in these roles) forbids her to go. He was a soldier in WW1, and he knows "how they are, especially when they're on leave".
So Betty outfoxes him by asking, then, if she can go to the movies with harmless Norval Jones, played by Eddie Bracken. Norval is homely and geeky, therefore Dad should have nothing to worry about. He agrees to let her go, but then when she and Norval get out the door, she uses his infatuation with her to enlist him in a plan to get her to the soldier's dance after all. Norval feels slighted, because he knows he is being used, but he will do anything for Betty, so he allows her to drop him off at the movies and then take his car to the dance. She is supposed to pick him up from the theater at 1am, but then we see that Eddie is sitting on the sidewalk outside the theater and the sun is coming up. It is 8am the next morning and Betty is just pulling in. She is drunk and the car looks the worse for wear.
It turns out that Betty had a pretty wild night. She went to the dance, and then to other dances which were continued at several other nightclubs with the same group of soldiers. At one dance, a soldier made the drunken suggestion that everyone should pair off and get married. WW2 produced fatalistic ideas in the heads of young men who thought they might not be coming back, and they wanted to have someone back home to care about them. So, in this crazy movie there is a serious theme.
Eddie Bracken, who is horrified at what he is hearing of Betty's night at the dance, is doubly floored when she tells him that she indeed participated in the mass marriage. She was drunk, she got married on a whim to a guy whose name she can't even remember, and now, a few weeks later, she discovers she is pregnant.
This was heavy subject matter for 1943, and now Betty has to figure out what she's gonna do about her condition. Nerdy Norval vows to stand by her, always at the ready, so she enlists him to pose as the father. He agrees, and after this point, all hell breaks loose with so many plot twists and threads that you have to be as fast as Preston Sturges to keep up with them all.
I've seen a lot of crazy comedies in my time, but for sheer energy and nuttiness, "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" may take the cake. I think Screwball comedy begat the styles that led to Saturday Night Live and that kind of madcap stuff, but nothing I have seen can match up to the insanity and impeccable timing of these Sturges movies.
Though the entire cast shines, especially Eddie Braken (himself a comic genius), a mention must be made of two of the supporting players. One is William Demarest. Most people my age remember him only as the grumpy old "Uncle Charlie" on the "My Three Sons" TV series in the 1960s, and that character is indeed based somewhat on the gruff old cranks he played in his earlier film career. But Uncle Charlie is old and stiff, and almost always angry. He's humorless, which was why little kids like me who watched the show found the character unappealing. However, in his movies from two decades earlier, Demarest - using a more energetic technique - created characters that were similar in personality to "Uncle Charlie" but were full of knowing humor. In "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek", Demarest plays the Town Constable who is also Betty Hutton's father. He is up to his ears in trouble, and he takes out his frustrations mostly on Eddie Bracken, but it's as if Demarest is in on the joke. The banter he engages in with his two daughters is a high-speed riot, and he even does a couple of big time pratfalls.
The other cast member who must be separately applauded is young Diana Lynn, who we recently saw playing Rita Johnson's precocious little sister in "The Major And The Minor". In that movie, she was 14 going on 30 if you get my drift, totally aware of what the adults were up to, and she plotted a scheme against her sister to help Ginger Rogers win back Ray Milland.
In "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek" she plays another "older than her years" little sister to Betty Hutton, and has the wiles and superior intelligence to both help Betty out of her jam, and keep Daddio Demarest at bay at the same time.
She was a beautiful young actress who was also a piano prodigy, a real gem who unfortunately died at age 45 in 1971. Keep an eye out for Miss Lynn, she was really great.
Two Gigantic Thumbs Up for "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek". They just don't, and probably can' t,
make comedies like this any more. ////
Okay, this is me again, writing this afternoon (Sunday). We had good singing in church. I hope you are enjoying your day too. Now I am off to the store for watermelon and other supplies. I will be back later this evening at the usual time. See you then. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Saturday, July 27, 2019
Episode Three of Spielberg's "Taken" + Implants + Great Keyboard Players Besides The Top Three
No movie tonight, but I did watch Episode Three of Spielberg's "Taken", which is getting weirder by the week. In this ep, two characters, a father and son, discover they have identical implants in their brains. The discovery is made after the father, a WW2 Air Force pilot, suffers a seizure and is taken to the hospital. Doctors order a cat-scan, and it shows what they think is a small brain tumor. But then the son, a teenager who has exhibited no health problems, asks to be scanned as well. His brain has the same small tumor in the exact same place.
With sci-fi, even if it's a show about Aliens, you've gotta have a plotline about brains.
Brains and science fiction go together like milk 'n cookies or cheese and crackers.
Anyway, in the x-ray prints, the small spot in Dad's brain overlaps perfectly with the one in Son's brain. It turns out that they aren't tumors, but implants. The Air Force finds this out the hard way when they try to take one out of Dad's head. He has agreed to the procedure on the understanding that the AF Captain in charge of the UFO investigation will leave his son alone. Of course, the Captain will not honor his agreement, because as we saw last week, he is one Evil Son-Of-A-Bee. But when the AF doctors cut a hole in Dad's cranium to remove the implant, all hell breaks loose in the clandestine operating room. The implant seems to have a life of it's own, my goodness.
I thought I had an implant once, in my earlobe. Well, it started out in the skin on the side of my jaw but then it migrated to my earlobe when I tried to pick it out of my jawline, like an ingrown hair. When I was attempting to remove it, with tweezers, it was as if the thing knew I was trying to get rid of it, and so it "made a run for cover" and moved quickly up my jawline, all the while inside the skin tissue, and ended up in my left earlobe where it nestled in for the long haul, dug in so tightly that no amount of ear pulling could dislodge it.
You think I jest but I do not. I told my friends about this incident at the time it happened, in 1994. They thought I was nuts and in retrospect I can't blame them, but the thing is, that at the time - no one was talking about implants. Just me. I'm sure there was some literature out there on the subject, but it would've been obscure and I never read any of it.
I had never even heard of an implant. I just started talking about them because I believed I had one.
It wasn't until the late 1990s that implants became widely known, when Dr. Roger Leir started to appear on the Art Bell Show to discuss his experiences with removing them from people who claimed to have been abducted.
But me, I never claimed to be abducted (at least not by aliens), and at the time I tried to remove my implant, I still had no memory of 1989. And on top of that, I had never before talked about, thought about, or known about alien implants.
One day in about May of 1994, I just knew I had one all of a sudden, and I knew what it was. All of a sudden. And then I tried to remove it, and it migrated. I still have the scar on my left jaw where I tried to take it out before it bailed on me.
Pretty weird, I realise....... :)
You can see how difficult it is to put a blog together when I don't have a movie to review, haha. As you know, I hate politics and don't like writing about them unless Trump sends me over the boiling point and I have to release some steam. And I don't have a social life to tell you about. Likewise, I am not out on the hiking trail anywhere near to the extent I was a few years ago. I am pretty much just doing my job 24/7, with a movie in the evenings on my break. But on the rare occasion when there is no movie, you get Alien Implants. Or lists.
Let's do a list. How about a list of great rock n' roll keyboard players? The guys behind the keys never get enough credit unless their names are Emerson, Wakeman and Lord, so let's do a quick roundup of some of the other great ones, with no commentary unfortunately because the hour is very late.
So here goes, our list of Great Keyboard Players besides Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman and Jon Lord, while acknowledging that those guys are the Holy Trinity of The Boards.
This is in no particular order :
Peter Bardens of Camel
Patrick Moraz of Refugee and Yes
Rick Wright of Pink Floyd
Eddie Jobson of Roxy Music and UK
Tony Banks of Genesis
Hugh Banton of Van Der Graaf Generator
Manfred Mann of Manfred Mann's Earth Band
Rik Van Der Linden of Trace
Robert Jan Stips of Supersister
Dave Sinclair of Caravan
Don Airey of Rainbow, Ozzy and Colosseum ////
Check out the music by these guys and their bands if you aren't familiar with it. Keyboards, more than any other instrument, was what made Progressive Rock progressive.
So there you have it. Tomorrow night we will return will a movie review.
See you in the morning, tons of love sent your way all night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
With sci-fi, even if it's a show about Aliens, you've gotta have a plotline about brains.
Brains and science fiction go together like milk 'n cookies or cheese and crackers.
Anyway, in the x-ray prints, the small spot in Dad's brain overlaps perfectly with the one in Son's brain. It turns out that they aren't tumors, but implants. The Air Force finds this out the hard way when they try to take one out of Dad's head. He has agreed to the procedure on the understanding that the AF Captain in charge of the UFO investigation will leave his son alone. Of course, the Captain will not honor his agreement, because as we saw last week, he is one Evil Son-Of-A-Bee. But when the AF doctors cut a hole in Dad's cranium to remove the implant, all hell breaks loose in the clandestine operating room. The implant seems to have a life of it's own, my goodness.
I thought I had an implant once, in my earlobe. Well, it started out in the skin on the side of my jaw but then it migrated to my earlobe when I tried to pick it out of my jawline, like an ingrown hair. When I was attempting to remove it, with tweezers, it was as if the thing knew I was trying to get rid of it, and so it "made a run for cover" and moved quickly up my jawline, all the while inside the skin tissue, and ended up in my left earlobe where it nestled in for the long haul, dug in so tightly that no amount of ear pulling could dislodge it.
You think I jest but I do not. I told my friends about this incident at the time it happened, in 1994. They thought I was nuts and in retrospect I can't blame them, but the thing is, that at the time - no one was talking about implants. Just me. I'm sure there was some literature out there on the subject, but it would've been obscure and I never read any of it.
I had never even heard of an implant. I just started talking about them because I believed I had one.
It wasn't until the late 1990s that implants became widely known, when Dr. Roger Leir started to appear on the Art Bell Show to discuss his experiences with removing them from people who claimed to have been abducted.
But me, I never claimed to be abducted (at least not by aliens), and at the time I tried to remove my implant, I still had no memory of 1989. And on top of that, I had never before talked about, thought about, or known about alien implants.
One day in about May of 1994, I just knew I had one all of a sudden, and I knew what it was. All of a sudden. And then I tried to remove it, and it migrated. I still have the scar on my left jaw where I tried to take it out before it bailed on me.
Pretty weird, I realise....... :)
You can see how difficult it is to put a blog together when I don't have a movie to review, haha. As you know, I hate politics and don't like writing about them unless Trump sends me over the boiling point and I have to release some steam. And I don't have a social life to tell you about. Likewise, I am not out on the hiking trail anywhere near to the extent I was a few years ago. I am pretty much just doing my job 24/7, with a movie in the evenings on my break. But on the rare occasion when there is no movie, you get Alien Implants. Or lists.
Let's do a list. How about a list of great rock n' roll keyboard players? The guys behind the keys never get enough credit unless their names are Emerson, Wakeman and Lord, so let's do a quick roundup of some of the other great ones, with no commentary unfortunately because the hour is very late.
So here goes, our list of Great Keyboard Players besides Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman and Jon Lord, while acknowledging that those guys are the Holy Trinity of The Boards.
This is in no particular order :
Peter Bardens of Camel
Patrick Moraz of Refugee and Yes
Rick Wright of Pink Floyd
Eddie Jobson of Roxy Music and UK
Tony Banks of Genesis
Hugh Banton of Van Der Graaf Generator
Manfred Mann of Manfred Mann's Earth Band
Rik Van Der Linden of Trace
Robert Jan Stips of Supersister
Dave Sinclair of Caravan
Don Airey of Rainbow, Ozzy and Colosseum ////
Check out the music by these guys and their bands if you aren't familiar with it. Keyboards, more than any other instrument, was what made Progressive Rock progressive.
So there you have it. Tomorrow night we will return will a movie review.
See you in the morning, tons of love sent your way all night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Friday, July 26, 2019
"Belles On Their Toes" starring Jeanne Crain, Barbara Bates and Debra Paget
I'm mega-tired tonight but I will try to finish the whole blog, haha. I watched a movie called "Belles On Their Toes" (1952), which was a sequel to a film called "Cheaper By The Dozen" (1950), which we saw about a year ago when we were on a Clifton Webb kick. In that movie (and give yourself a Gold Star if you remember it), Webb starred as a scientist who worked as an efficiency expert for a major corporation. His specialty was motion study, and he used it in every facet of his life, to do things like eat his meals faster or get dressed with less effort. He was married to Myrna Loy, who was a psychologist, and they had twelve children, hence the title "Cheaper By The Dozen". Clifton Webb was so great in the lead role, apparently based on a real person, and the script in that first movie followed the family up and down the East Coast as Webb changed jobs, continued to develop his unorthodox lifestyle, and tried to accept his oldest daughters' desire to be part of modern culture, to wear makeup and the latest clothing styles. It was a really great story (remade for Steve Martin in 2003), but the only downside was that Clifton Webb - the Dad - died at the end. I guess the real guy, Mr. Galbreath, died also and they wanted to keep the story authentic.
But at the end of "Cheaper", it is up to Myrna Loy now to keep the family together. This had always been Clifton Webb's main goal, even over his career. He loved his kids, and because of the way they were raised, they love being together. It's a family in the truest sense of the word, all for one and one for all, and everyone has different jobs around the house to keep things running smoothly. There are also little cliques between different sets of siblings, but generally they are all happy to be on the same team.
So when Webb dies at the end of "Cheaper", Myrna Loy decides that if she is to keep the family together, she will have to train to be an engineer and an efficiency expert, just as her husband was.
This is where "Belles On Their Toes" kicks off. Loy is now head of the family but is having difficulty being taken seriously as a female scientist. Meanwhile, Jeanne Crain as the eldest daughter puts her own life on hold in order to help her Mom out. While Loy travels in search of a job, Crain stays home as a surrogate mother to the brood. She in turn has plenty of help from her two closest sisters, Barbara Bates and Debra Paget, both of whom have taken their late father's efficiency lessons to heart.
Crain has many suitors while Mother Loy is away, and this storyline is the main plot of the movie, involving her conflicted emotions between her loyalty to her family and her desire to live her own life and have a relationship. Martin Milner of "Adam 12" fame has a hilarious role as Jeanne Crain's first boyfriend, a pompous, wealthy goombah whom her eleven brothers and sisters can't stand.
Handsome Jeffery Hunter, who would later play Jesus Christ, fares better. He is a local doctor who Crain eventually falls in love with, and this is where her conflict begins, torn between family and independence. The movie is hardly a drama, however. It continues the family fun and shenanigans that you'd expect from an early 1950s movie about a single Mom with twelve kids. She has a helper, a combination handyman/servant played by famous American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. He is always brewing up batches of illicit hooch down in the cellar, which serves as comic relief.
The real stars of the show, and the focus of the story, are the three eldest daughters, and it must be said that you'd be hard pressed to find a more attractive trio than Jeanne Crain, Barbara Bates, and the stunning Debra Paget. The producers knew this of course, and by keeping things lively with all of the interplay between the 20 or so different characters in the film, the three beauties stand out even more by being part of the ensemble.
This is 1952, so the tone is wonderfully wholesome throughout. I have a weird nostalgia for the 1950s, because I didn't live through it but I wish I did, or at least the Hollywood version of it, which probably wasn't too far off the real thing.
I deplore the way things are now in America, and let us all pray that God will save us, and the world, from four more years of Donald Trump. May we return to more wholesome ways, and experience good times in this country again.
Obviously, you can tell that I loved "Belles On Their Toes". I give it Two Very Big Thumbs Up, but the deal is that you have to watch "Cheaper By The Dozen" first, to better appreciate the sequel, and believe me, you will indeed appreciate it. But watch the first one first, to understand how the family came to be the way they are, under the paternal tutelage of the eccentric but brilliant Clifton Webb. ///
That's all I know for tonight, and hey! - it looks like I made it through the blog without falling asleep.
Not too shabby, I say, and I give myself a High Five right now, on the spot. :)
See you in the morning, hope you had a good day too. Love, love, love.. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
But at the end of "Cheaper", it is up to Myrna Loy now to keep the family together. This had always been Clifton Webb's main goal, even over his career. He loved his kids, and because of the way they were raised, they love being together. It's a family in the truest sense of the word, all for one and one for all, and everyone has different jobs around the house to keep things running smoothly. There are also little cliques between different sets of siblings, but generally they are all happy to be on the same team.
So when Webb dies at the end of "Cheaper", Myrna Loy decides that if she is to keep the family together, she will have to train to be an engineer and an efficiency expert, just as her husband was.
This is where "Belles On Their Toes" kicks off. Loy is now head of the family but is having difficulty being taken seriously as a female scientist. Meanwhile, Jeanne Crain as the eldest daughter puts her own life on hold in order to help her Mom out. While Loy travels in search of a job, Crain stays home as a surrogate mother to the brood. She in turn has plenty of help from her two closest sisters, Barbara Bates and Debra Paget, both of whom have taken their late father's efficiency lessons to heart.
Crain has many suitors while Mother Loy is away, and this storyline is the main plot of the movie, involving her conflicted emotions between her loyalty to her family and her desire to live her own life and have a relationship. Martin Milner of "Adam 12" fame has a hilarious role as Jeanne Crain's first boyfriend, a pompous, wealthy goombah whom her eleven brothers and sisters can't stand.
Handsome Jeffery Hunter, who would later play Jesus Christ, fares better. He is a local doctor who Crain eventually falls in love with, and this is where her conflict begins, torn between family and independence. The movie is hardly a drama, however. It continues the family fun and shenanigans that you'd expect from an early 1950s movie about a single Mom with twelve kids. She has a helper, a combination handyman/servant played by famous American songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. He is always brewing up batches of illicit hooch down in the cellar, which serves as comic relief.
The real stars of the show, and the focus of the story, are the three eldest daughters, and it must be said that you'd be hard pressed to find a more attractive trio than Jeanne Crain, Barbara Bates, and the stunning Debra Paget. The producers knew this of course, and by keeping things lively with all of the interplay between the 20 or so different characters in the film, the three beauties stand out even more by being part of the ensemble.
This is 1952, so the tone is wonderfully wholesome throughout. I have a weird nostalgia for the 1950s, because I didn't live through it but I wish I did, or at least the Hollywood version of it, which probably wasn't too far off the real thing.
I deplore the way things are now in America, and let us all pray that God will save us, and the world, from four more years of Donald Trump. May we return to more wholesome ways, and experience good times in this country again.
Obviously, you can tell that I loved "Belles On Their Toes". I give it Two Very Big Thumbs Up, but the deal is that you have to watch "Cheaper By The Dozen" first, to better appreciate the sequel, and believe me, you will indeed appreciate it. But watch the first one first, to understand how the family came to be the way they are, under the paternal tutelage of the eccentric but brilliant Clifton Webb. ///
That's all I know for tonight, and hey! - it looks like I made it through the blog without falling asleep.
Not too shabby, I say, and I give myself a High Five right now, on the spot. :)
See you in the morning, hope you had a good day too. Love, love, love.. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Elizabeth
Elizabeth! I was glad to see you back on FB tonight. I mean, I don't know if you actually are back, but a post is a post and I was happy to see your post, especially because of the content of the video. That lady is living the kind of life you deserve to have, and I know you will be living a similar type of life, one of your own design, just as long as you never, ever give up on your dream, which - as we saw last year (and really since 2012) - has already in some ways become a reality.
I have to admit I was a little worried about you. Not because of anything terrible, but just because of your disappearance from FB this year, and even Instagram of late. I know how big a change you underwent in your lifestyle this year (believe me, I of all people know and I empathise), but I had just worried that you might be feeling a little down because of the loss of free time to pursue your various arts. In years past, you were free to work on one project after another, and if a person looks back at your output from 2013 - 2018, and especially after you got out of college, it is very impressive.
So I know how difficult the change must have been, and must continue to be, even though you are making money and hopefully enjoying at least some aspects of your job. I just say all of this because I sensed a difference because of your absence. All I would say in that regard is the same thing I always said to you about being an Artist, back in the olden days circa 2013.
All you've gotta do is make sure the bills are paid. Everything else is about Art.
As we can see, the lady in the video has achieved this, and you will too.
I have always guaranteed you this result. All you have to do is keep believing in yourself, have confidence in your artistic gifts, and keep working toward creating art, even if you currently have little time to spare.
I myself have little time, but one of my little goals this year has been to produce 12 colored pencil drawings, by years end, of my 1989 experience, using the Prismacolor pencils I bought last Winter.
My original goal was 16 drawings because I got off to a fast start. But then my job became a bit more demanding so I scaled it back to twelve, and I am on track to make my goal. I also have had to "make time" for hikes when before it was easier to get out there. But the point is, all these things are doable.
Everything can be done, so long as the Intent is there.
My belief, for you, is that a regular job, 9 to 5 lifestyle is not "who you are", and thus it is not where you will end up. Again, this is not to say that you don't enjoy your job. I have no idea if you do or don't, or if your feelings are somewhere in between. I know that when I got my job at MGM, my own feelings were all over the map. I was 18. The first day I told my Dad, "I can't do this". By the end of the first week I discovered that I could do it, and do it easily. Then I settled in. I never liked having to get up and go to the job, to drive there and have to be on time, etc. I hated the overtime. I liked having money to spend, but after I bought a car and some clothes and my first guitar, I discovered that I wasn't really a materialistic person. Having stuff didn't compare to having my free time.
And I went through a whole series of changes that became my life. While I had my MGM job, I found many things to like about it, and in hindsight it was a tremendous honor to have worked there, but there was no way I could have made a career out of it. It quite simply would have killed me, if not physically, then spiritually at the very least. So what happened is that my inner survival instinct took over, and I think that is true for many artists. I think that some folks just know inside that they aren't cut out for an ordinary existence, and they take whatever avenues they can find to locate the road that will "take them home" to where they were meant to be.
Elizabeth, you are already on the way to that road. I urge you not to forget your major accomplishment of just a year ago, of having your video showing repeatedly for weeks over Staples Center. Whatever you are going through as a result of the 180 degree change in your environment this year, please don't lose heart.
Nothing is permanent, except what you feel in your heart and what you know in your head.
Your Intent is what's most important, so let it direct your life, and remember - for an Artist, money is first and foremost about paying the bills so you can continue to make art.
When a person is as gifted and as creative as you are, sooner or later the right connection is going to be made, and then you will be at home in your world, just as the lady in the video is in hers.
As I always say, "keep posting", and I hope you will. But even if you won't, can't, don't feel like it or whatever, please know that I am still here and am thinking about you, and will always support what you are doing 100%. xoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Well, I did also watch a movie this evening : "The Lady Eve" (1941) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, and directed by Preston Sturges, who was behind some of the most sophisticated but also riotous comedies of the 1940s. His style was close to being Screwball and featured scenes of very fast dialogue and pratfall timing, but overall I would liken him closer to a director like Ernst Lubitsch, whose films we have also enjoyed, as an auteur of great visual style and unique wit. Sturges was also a writer, and as far as I know he either wrote many of the films he directed or adapted the screenplays, and thus his own take on wordplay is on display in every picture I've seen so far from him. His dialogue is hilarious, and it takes an actress the caliber of Stanwyck to rattle it off without stammering.
Very briefly, Barbara and her father Charles Coburn (him again!) are card sharps. They are scammers who, as the movie opens, are riding a steamship looking for a wealthy "mark". The patter is so fast at the beginning of the film that I was unable to determine if they knew Henry Fonda was on board before they found him, but they did, and very quickly Babs has him in her spell and at the ship's poker table with her Dad. Fonda is a nerdy scientist studying snakes (a slight Adam & Eve reference), and he hasn't much personality, but Barbara and her Dad have ascertained that he is also the son of a wealthy beer magnate, and is ripe for the picking at a game of cards.
This may be another blog I have to complete the following afternoon, as was the case last night, due to the late hour and the fact of "tired". :)
I always have a lot that I want to say, but not always the energy, at this hour, to finish it. So, stay tuned tomorrow afternoon for a wrap-up on "The Lady Eve", and anything else I may be thinking about at that time. Afternoon writing has a different energy than does Late Night. Also, I will be getting my hair cut in the morning, always something worth commenting on.
So I'll see you then. Please do have an awesome evening and I'll send you tons of love in regard.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
I have to admit I was a little worried about you. Not because of anything terrible, but just because of your disappearance from FB this year, and even Instagram of late. I know how big a change you underwent in your lifestyle this year (believe me, I of all people know and I empathise), but I had just worried that you might be feeling a little down because of the loss of free time to pursue your various arts. In years past, you were free to work on one project after another, and if a person looks back at your output from 2013 - 2018, and especially after you got out of college, it is very impressive.
So I know how difficult the change must have been, and must continue to be, even though you are making money and hopefully enjoying at least some aspects of your job. I just say all of this because I sensed a difference because of your absence. All I would say in that regard is the same thing I always said to you about being an Artist, back in the olden days circa 2013.
All you've gotta do is make sure the bills are paid. Everything else is about Art.
As we can see, the lady in the video has achieved this, and you will too.
I have always guaranteed you this result. All you have to do is keep believing in yourself, have confidence in your artistic gifts, and keep working toward creating art, even if you currently have little time to spare.
I myself have little time, but one of my little goals this year has been to produce 12 colored pencil drawings, by years end, of my 1989 experience, using the Prismacolor pencils I bought last Winter.
My original goal was 16 drawings because I got off to a fast start. But then my job became a bit more demanding so I scaled it back to twelve, and I am on track to make my goal. I also have had to "make time" for hikes when before it was easier to get out there. But the point is, all these things are doable.
Everything can be done, so long as the Intent is there.
My belief, for you, is that a regular job, 9 to 5 lifestyle is not "who you are", and thus it is not where you will end up. Again, this is not to say that you don't enjoy your job. I have no idea if you do or don't, or if your feelings are somewhere in between. I know that when I got my job at MGM, my own feelings were all over the map. I was 18. The first day I told my Dad, "I can't do this". By the end of the first week I discovered that I could do it, and do it easily. Then I settled in. I never liked having to get up and go to the job, to drive there and have to be on time, etc. I hated the overtime. I liked having money to spend, but after I bought a car and some clothes and my first guitar, I discovered that I wasn't really a materialistic person. Having stuff didn't compare to having my free time.
And I went through a whole series of changes that became my life. While I had my MGM job, I found many things to like about it, and in hindsight it was a tremendous honor to have worked there, but there was no way I could have made a career out of it. It quite simply would have killed me, if not physically, then spiritually at the very least. So what happened is that my inner survival instinct took over, and I think that is true for many artists. I think that some folks just know inside that they aren't cut out for an ordinary existence, and they take whatever avenues they can find to locate the road that will "take them home" to where they were meant to be.
Elizabeth, you are already on the way to that road. I urge you not to forget your major accomplishment of just a year ago, of having your video showing repeatedly for weeks over Staples Center. Whatever you are going through as a result of the 180 degree change in your environment this year, please don't lose heart.
Nothing is permanent, except what you feel in your heart and what you know in your head.
Your Intent is what's most important, so let it direct your life, and remember - for an Artist, money is first and foremost about paying the bills so you can continue to make art.
When a person is as gifted and as creative as you are, sooner or later the right connection is going to be made, and then you will be at home in your world, just as the lady in the video is in hers.
As I always say, "keep posting", and I hope you will. But even if you won't, can't, don't feel like it or whatever, please know that I am still here and am thinking about you, and will always support what you are doing 100%. xoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Well, I did also watch a movie this evening : "The Lady Eve" (1941) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda, and directed by Preston Sturges, who was behind some of the most sophisticated but also riotous comedies of the 1940s. His style was close to being Screwball and featured scenes of very fast dialogue and pratfall timing, but overall I would liken him closer to a director like Ernst Lubitsch, whose films we have also enjoyed, as an auteur of great visual style and unique wit. Sturges was also a writer, and as far as I know he either wrote many of the films he directed or adapted the screenplays, and thus his own take on wordplay is on display in every picture I've seen so far from him. His dialogue is hilarious, and it takes an actress the caliber of Stanwyck to rattle it off without stammering.
Very briefly, Barbara and her father Charles Coburn (him again!) are card sharps. They are scammers who, as the movie opens, are riding a steamship looking for a wealthy "mark". The patter is so fast at the beginning of the film that I was unable to determine if they knew Henry Fonda was on board before they found him, but they did, and very quickly Babs has him in her spell and at the ship's poker table with her Dad. Fonda is a nerdy scientist studying snakes (a slight Adam & Eve reference), and he hasn't much personality, but Barbara and her Dad have ascertained that he is also the son of a wealthy beer magnate, and is ripe for the picking at a game of cards.
This may be another blog I have to complete the following afternoon, as was the case last night, due to the late hour and the fact of "tired". :)
I always have a lot that I want to say, but not always the energy, at this hour, to finish it. So, stay tuned tomorrow afternoon for a wrap-up on "The Lady Eve", and anything else I may be thinking about at that time. Afternoon writing has a different energy than does Late Night. Also, I will be getting my hair cut in the morning, always something worth commenting on.
So I'll see you then. Please do have an awesome evening and I'll send you tons of love in regard.
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
"Robinson Crusoe On Mars"
This blog was begun last night but was not completed due to tiredness, so I am finishing it now. I will be back again this evening at my usual late-night hour :
(from 7/23/19) : Tonight I stayed in Sci-Fi mode with a Criterion release called "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" (1964). I'd heard of this flick a while back but it always flew under my radar. Perhaps the title sounded hokey, in the same way as a cheapie horror flick like "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein". Nothing like putting a historical or literary figure in a ridiculous context, as the makers of "Abraham Lincoln, Zombie Hunter" can attest. But about a week ago, "Crusoe" popped up as a recommendation somewhere, either on Amazon or the library's website, and when I saw that it was now released on the prestigious Criterion label, I figured I'd give it a try. I've been watching (and reading) a lot of sci-fi this summer and have wanted to keep the vibe going.
It turned out to be a pretty decent movie, much better than I expected. Paul Mantee stars as an astronaut aboard a "gravity probe" headed for Mars. The other astronaut on board is Adam West, who was soon to become "Batman" (and then you could've had "Batman on Mars"), but at any rate, they are holding steady in Mars orbit when they discover a giant meteor heading straight for them on a collision course.
So far the sci-fi quotient is looking good! Captain Adam West manages to avert a catastrophe, dodging the fireball, but in doing so he has maneuvered off course. Now the ship has been thrown out of orbit and is being pulled by Mars' gravity toward an eventual crash on the surface of the Red Planet. Astronauts Mantee and West have only one alternative - to eject into the hazy red Martian sky. They do so - Mantee going first.
He lands somewhere in the mountains of Mars (actually Death Valley), along with Mona the Monkey, the test animal brought along on the mission. The first thing Mantee must do is find shelter, which he locates in an underground cave. Once he is set up, he begins to recite into a tape recorder the catastrophic developments in the mission's directive. He also notes his limited supplies of food (in toothpaste tubes), air (in his oxygen tanks), and water in his canteen. And these he has to share with Mona. He calculates that he has 50 hours to live.
The next morning he sets out to find Adam West, who had ejected from the rocket a minute behind him. Crossing a barren landscape (reminiscent of scenes in "The Martian" with Matt Damon), he ends up discovering West's ejection capsule, but the result is not pretty. West is dead. Mantee is now alone on Mars, with only the company of Mona for companionship. However, she will come in quite handy as things progress.
The first hour of this film was reminiscent of "Cast Away" (with Tom Hanks), which is also, in part, a Robinson Crusoe story. The astronaut Paul Mantee needs to survive first and foremost, therefore much time is spent in his pursuit of air and water, with Mona providing assistance.
Finally she has helped him to find a food source as well (think seaweed), and now survival is no longer an imminent problem.
But Mantee is isolated, and as we saw in "Cast Away", isolation is the most grievous affliction of all. Tom Hanks had "Wilson" the volleyball to keep him company, and Paul Mantee has Mona, a real live monkey who is very smart. But he is still alone as a human being.
And this is what "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" is really about : isolation, the survival instinct, loneliness and the need for human companionship.
In the end credits, there is none for script or screenplay. It says only, "from a story by Daniel Defoe", which is of course the original "Robinson Crusoe" book.
I don't wanna give any spoilers as to what happens in the second half of the film, but I will say that this is when the sci-fi kicks back in, big time. Before that, it had been an adventure film more than science fiction - but now another character is introduced, one who is involved in an adversarial relationship with a Martian enemy. Suddenly, space ships arrive - many of them - and these animated scenes are a highlight of the film. They resemble Harryhausen effects, or maybe those of George Pal, but they look and sound great. My only complaint regarding the effects is that the same attack scene appears to be used multiples times, maybe due to budget limitations. Still, the production design looks great with it's red Martian sky and craggy landscape, and the swift, streamlined Alien attack ships.
One thing I really liked about "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" was it's human story. The script is very intelligent, and the one relationship that does develop is based on cooperation rather than conflict. There is empathy between the characters and also self-sacrifice.
Overall, there is still a feel of a kid's matinee for a Saturday afternoon, as in something like "The Adventures Of Sinbad", though the two films are unalike in every other way. But it has that "boy's adventure story" quality, and is shot in Technicolor which reinforces the effect, which sets the film apart from the more sinister, dread-inducing feel of the black and white sci-fi films from the classic 1950s era.
I will nevertheless give "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" Two Thumbs Up, because it looks good for the most part, has some awesome Flying Saucers, and a thoughtful, compassionate story.
See it for a different type of sci-fi experience. //////
Well, this is me again, cutting in this afternoon (Wednesday July 24, 2019) just to remind you that I'll be back again tonight as usual. Hopefully I won't fall asleep this time, haha. Did you watch the Mueller hearings? I saw part of the second one. Not sure much will come of it, but the committee got some good monosyllabic responses out of Robert Mueller. At least it was revealed that the FBI is still investigating Trump. Maybe they will go after him when he leaves office. Now wouldn't that be poetic justice?
Now I am gonna head back out into the blazing heat. Gotta go to Sprouts for watermelon and avocados. See you tonight at the usual time, have a great afternoon. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
(from 7/23/19) : Tonight I stayed in Sci-Fi mode with a Criterion release called "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" (1964). I'd heard of this flick a while back but it always flew under my radar. Perhaps the title sounded hokey, in the same way as a cheapie horror flick like "Jesse James Meets Frankenstein". Nothing like putting a historical or literary figure in a ridiculous context, as the makers of "Abraham Lincoln, Zombie Hunter" can attest. But about a week ago, "Crusoe" popped up as a recommendation somewhere, either on Amazon or the library's website, and when I saw that it was now released on the prestigious Criterion label, I figured I'd give it a try. I've been watching (and reading) a lot of sci-fi this summer and have wanted to keep the vibe going.
It turned out to be a pretty decent movie, much better than I expected. Paul Mantee stars as an astronaut aboard a "gravity probe" headed for Mars. The other astronaut on board is Adam West, who was soon to become "Batman" (and then you could've had "Batman on Mars"), but at any rate, they are holding steady in Mars orbit when they discover a giant meteor heading straight for them on a collision course.
So far the sci-fi quotient is looking good! Captain Adam West manages to avert a catastrophe, dodging the fireball, but in doing so he has maneuvered off course. Now the ship has been thrown out of orbit and is being pulled by Mars' gravity toward an eventual crash on the surface of the Red Planet. Astronauts Mantee and West have only one alternative - to eject into the hazy red Martian sky. They do so - Mantee going first.
He lands somewhere in the mountains of Mars (actually Death Valley), along with Mona the Monkey, the test animal brought along on the mission. The first thing Mantee must do is find shelter, which he locates in an underground cave. Once he is set up, he begins to recite into a tape recorder the catastrophic developments in the mission's directive. He also notes his limited supplies of food (in toothpaste tubes), air (in his oxygen tanks), and water in his canteen. And these he has to share with Mona. He calculates that he has 50 hours to live.
The next morning he sets out to find Adam West, who had ejected from the rocket a minute behind him. Crossing a barren landscape (reminiscent of scenes in "The Martian" with Matt Damon), he ends up discovering West's ejection capsule, but the result is not pretty. West is dead. Mantee is now alone on Mars, with only the company of Mona for companionship. However, she will come in quite handy as things progress.
The first hour of this film was reminiscent of "Cast Away" (with Tom Hanks), which is also, in part, a Robinson Crusoe story. The astronaut Paul Mantee needs to survive first and foremost, therefore much time is spent in his pursuit of air and water, with Mona providing assistance.
Finally she has helped him to find a food source as well (think seaweed), and now survival is no longer an imminent problem.
But Mantee is isolated, and as we saw in "Cast Away", isolation is the most grievous affliction of all. Tom Hanks had "Wilson" the volleyball to keep him company, and Paul Mantee has Mona, a real live monkey who is very smart. But he is still alone as a human being.
And this is what "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" is really about : isolation, the survival instinct, loneliness and the need for human companionship.
In the end credits, there is none for script or screenplay. It says only, "from a story by Daniel Defoe", which is of course the original "Robinson Crusoe" book.
I don't wanna give any spoilers as to what happens in the second half of the film, but I will say that this is when the sci-fi kicks back in, big time. Before that, it had been an adventure film more than science fiction - but now another character is introduced, one who is involved in an adversarial relationship with a Martian enemy. Suddenly, space ships arrive - many of them - and these animated scenes are a highlight of the film. They resemble Harryhausen effects, or maybe those of George Pal, but they look and sound great. My only complaint regarding the effects is that the same attack scene appears to be used multiples times, maybe due to budget limitations. Still, the production design looks great with it's red Martian sky and craggy landscape, and the swift, streamlined Alien attack ships.
One thing I really liked about "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" was it's human story. The script is very intelligent, and the one relationship that does develop is based on cooperation rather than conflict. There is empathy between the characters and also self-sacrifice.
Overall, there is still a feel of a kid's matinee for a Saturday afternoon, as in something like "The Adventures Of Sinbad", though the two films are unalike in every other way. But it has that "boy's adventure story" quality, and is shot in Technicolor which reinforces the effect, which sets the film apart from the more sinister, dread-inducing feel of the black and white sci-fi films from the classic 1950s era.
I will nevertheless give "Robinson Crusoe On Mars" Two Thumbs Up, because it looks good for the most part, has some awesome Flying Saucers, and a thoughtful, compassionate story.
See it for a different type of sci-fi experience. //////
Well, this is me again, cutting in this afternoon (Wednesday July 24, 2019) just to remind you that I'll be back again tonight as usual. Hopefully I won't fall asleep this time, haha. Did you watch the Mueller hearings? I saw part of the second one. Not sure much will come of it, but the committee got some good monosyllabic responses out of Robert Mueller. At least it was revealed that the FBI is still investigating Trump. Maybe they will go after him when he leaves office. Now wouldn't that be poetic justice?
Now I am gonna head back out into the blazing heat. Gotta go to Sprouts for watermelon and avocados. See you tonight at the usual time, have a great afternoon. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
"Dr. Cyclops" starring Albert Dekker
Tonight's movie was "Dr. Cyclops" (1940) selected from my recently acquired "Ultimate Sci-Fi Collection Volume 2". Albert Dekker, a longtime Hollywood actor who specialised in playing bad guys, stars as a research scientist who is working on a secret project deep inside the Amazon jungle. He is having a problem with an experiment but is unable to diagnose it, so he sends word that he needs the help of a respected microbiologist. Veteran character actor Charles Halton answers the call (you've seen him in a bunch of movies) and brings along his assistant, Dr. Mary Robinson, played by the comely Janice Logan. They, in turn, hire another biology specialist to accompany them on the trip, seemingly for little reason other than he is young and handsome and can provide whatever slim romantic possibilities are available where Dr. Robinson is concerned.
Finally, when they get to the Amazonian jungle (country unspecified), they need pack mules to traverse the terrain. The mule owner they locate is intrigued that they are on their way to visit a Mad Scientist, and - as a condition of renting them his mules - he insists he be allowed to come along, so now our trio has become a foursome and the travelling group is finalised, three men and one woman.
When they arrive at Albert Dekker's remote laboratory, the two microbiologists identify the problem that is holding up his research, but then to their surprise the group is dismissed! Charles Halton, the senior scientist, is justifiably upset. After all, he and his team have journeyed ten thousand miles to reach the site, under the impression that they were to be working with Dekker for the duration of his experiment. But he wants them out of there and says so, in polite terms at first.
Charles Halton resists and demands an answer. "We came a long way! Why must we go? What kind of project are you working on"?
But Dekker will not answer that question, because..........he is working on a Shrink Ray.
Yep, the secret is out, but we knew it before the Halton group did, and in fact we saw Dekker in his lab at the beginning of the movie, covered in protective clothing and a giant-sized soup pot helmet to protect himself from the radiation emitted by his device.
ate
I need to break in here to say that, first of all, the "Mad Scientist" footage at the beginning of "Dr. Cyclops" is some of the greatest Science Fiction imagery I've ever seen. Secondly, it was filmed in lurid Technicolor, which only enhances the effect. You know me - I love my black and white - but in this case, the opening scene was made for the types of tones Technicolor can deliver, which brings me to my last point concerning not only the first scene but the whole movie : the print of the film is as pristine as if you were watching it in a theater. This few minutes of high tech sci-fi from 1940!, at least a decade before the classic era of the genre came into being, is reason enough to watch the movie.
Directed by Ernest B. Shoedsack, who was the uncredited producer/director of "King Kong", "Dr. Cyclops" goes on to become more of an adventure movie than a true science fiction film, as the biology team falls victim to Dekker and his Shrink Ray. Suddenly the four are only a fifth of their former size, ranging from about 13 to 18 inches, and in this new reality they come up against creatures, like cats and roosters, that would have been subordinate to them in their prior life but are now terrors to be feared and prepared for.
All of a sudden they have become shrimps and have to deal with everything being much bigger than they are, and they face a twofold dilemma. They can stay in Dekker's lab and try to deal with him, and the cinematographer lets you know that he is enormous (he was 6'2" in real life but looks bigger in the movie), photographing him from the ground up. He is also a complete psycho who is bent on keeping his tiny friends captive.
Or they can try to escape, and deal with the dangers of the jungle, like gigantic crocodiles and bears (though I didn't know bears lived in the jungle).
I thought the first 40 minutes of "Dr. Cyclops" was awesome. The imagery at the beginning and in scenes spread out through the first half of the film looks amazing, with a HG Wellsian quality, almost Steampunk, but even cooler because it isn't retro.
Later on, the movie becomes more of an adventure story than a classic Sci-Fi, but keep in mind that it was made in 1940, before the atomic age and at a time when stories of jungle expeditions were still popular. It is without a doubt still worth a view, however, and even for more reason than that if you are a fan of classic sci-fi. A large part of the film is about how the shrunken down science team deals with their new reality, and in that sense - for modern viewers who recall shows like "Land Of The Giants" - it can seem like a gimmick, but if you just let things flow and appreciate "Dr. Cyclops" for the time in which it was made, and watch it for it's scenes of incredible Mad Scientist elaborations (again, in pristine Technicolor), you will not be disappointed.
I give "Dr. Cyclops" two regular thumbs up. Two Gigantic Thumbs for the laboratory scenes, though.
It's a must-see for the sci-fi completist. /////
That's the movie report for the evening and all I know of interest on this particular day. I hope your day was a good one and I will see you in the morning. Huge love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Finally, when they get to the Amazonian jungle (country unspecified), they need pack mules to traverse the terrain. The mule owner they locate is intrigued that they are on their way to visit a Mad Scientist, and - as a condition of renting them his mules - he insists he be allowed to come along, so now our trio has become a foursome and the travelling group is finalised, three men and one woman.
When they arrive at Albert Dekker's remote laboratory, the two microbiologists identify the problem that is holding up his research, but then to their surprise the group is dismissed! Charles Halton, the senior scientist, is justifiably upset. After all, he and his team have journeyed ten thousand miles to reach the site, under the impression that they were to be working with Dekker for the duration of his experiment. But he wants them out of there and says so, in polite terms at first.
Charles Halton resists and demands an answer. "We came a long way! Why must we go? What kind of project are you working on"?
But Dekker will not answer that question, because..........he is working on a Shrink Ray.
Yep, the secret is out, but we knew it before the Halton group did, and in fact we saw Dekker in his lab at the beginning of the movie, covered in protective clothing and a giant-sized soup pot helmet to protect himself from the radiation emitted by his device.
ate
I need to break in here to say that, first of all, the "Mad Scientist" footage at the beginning of "Dr. Cyclops" is some of the greatest Science Fiction imagery I've ever seen. Secondly, it was filmed in lurid Technicolor, which only enhances the effect. You know me - I love my black and white - but in this case, the opening scene was made for the types of tones Technicolor can deliver, which brings me to my last point concerning not only the first scene but the whole movie : the print of the film is as pristine as if you were watching it in a theater. This few minutes of high tech sci-fi from 1940!, at least a decade before the classic era of the genre came into being, is reason enough to watch the movie.
Directed by Ernest B. Shoedsack, who was the uncredited producer/director of "King Kong", "Dr. Cyclops" goes on to become more of an adventure movie than a true science fiction film, as the biology team falls victim to Dekker and his Shrink Ray. Suddenly the four are only a fifth of their former size, ranging from about 13 to 18 inches, and in this new reality they come up against creatures, like cats and roosters, that would have been subordinate to them in their prior life but are now terrors to be feared and prepared for.
All of a sudden they have become shrimps and have to deal with everything being much bigger than they are, and they face a twofold dilemma. They can stay in Dekker's lab and try to deal with him, and the cinematographer lets you know that he is enormous (he was 6'2" in real life but looks bigger in the movie), photographing him from the ground up. He is also a complete psycho who is bent on keeping his tiny friends captive.
Or they can try to escape, and deal with the dangers of the jungle, like gigantic crocodiles and bears (though I didn't know bears lived in the jungle).
I thought the first 40 minutes of "Dr. Cyclops" was awesome. The imagery at the beginning and in scenes spread out through the first half of the film looks amazing, with a HG Wellsian quality, almost Steampunk, but even cooler because it isn't retro.
Later on, the movie becomes more of an adventure story than a classic Sci-Fi, but keep in mind that it was made in 1940, before the atomic age and at a time when stories of jungle expeditions were still popular. It is without a doubt still worth a view, however, and even for more reason than that if you are a fan of classic sci-fi. A large part of the film is about how the shrunken down science team deals with their new reality, and in that sense - for modern viewers who recall shows like "Land Of The Giants" - it can seem like a gimmick, but if you just let things flow and appreciate "Dr. Cyclops" for the time in which it was made, and watch it for it's scenes of incredible Mad Scientist elaborations (again, in pristine Technicolor), you will not be disappointed.
I give "Dr. Cyclops" two regular thumbs up. Two Gigantic Thumbs for the laboratory scenes, though.
It's a must-see for the sci-fi completist. /////
That's the movie report for the evening and all I know of interest on this particular day. I hope your day was a good one and I will see you in the morning. Huge love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Monday, July 22, 2019
"The Major And The Minor" starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland
Tonight's movie was "The Major And The Minor" (1942), a very funny romantic comedy helmed by Billy Wilder in his American directorial debut. Ginger Rogers stars as a young woman from Iowa trying to make it in New York City. As the movie opens, she is hurrying down the street on the way to an appointment for her new job as a "hair restoration specialist". This is the kind of opening setup that Wilder excelled in, totally off the wall and wacky. Ginger knocks on the door of her client, a pudgy middle aged man, who invites her in and immediately starts hitting on her. She is all business, though, so she opens her suitcase and takes out an electric "scalp massager", some hair tonic and a couple of eggs for an "egg shampoo". All of this takes place in a sequence of Screwball pacing. The man offers her a Martini. Ginger breaks an egg over his head and begins shampooing. He won't give up; finally she has had enough and backs out the door, suitcase in hand, with one spare egg left to use as a threat should he refuse to let her leave.
We are about ten minutes into the movie. Ginger is ready to leave New York and head home to Iowa. This hair restoring job was about the tenth one she's had since she arrived. NYC is too crazy for her, so she goes to the train station and with her last 27.50, which she kept in a sealed envelope for return train fare in case things didn't work out, she stands in line to buy a ticket back to Council Bluffs. Then the ticket clerk informs her that the fare has been raised to 32 dollars and she doesn't have the extra dough.
Thoroughly frustrated, she is about to storm out of the train station when she spots a mother buying tickets for herself and her daughter. The daughter, about twelve years old, is getting her ticket for half price.
A light bulb goes off in Rogers' head and the next thing we see is that she is in the ladies' room, scrubbing off all her makeup, tying her hair in pigtails and quick-tailoring her clothes with scissors to make them smaller. She emerges wearing a Pollyanna hat, with fresh face and "new" clothes, looking for all the world like a too-tall and somewhat too developed adolescent girl. This is where the Screwball is kicked up a notch. She returns to the ticket counter with a man from the lobby whom she has paid a couple of bucks to pose as her father, and this time the clerk sells her a half-price ticket, though not without giving her a funny look.
Now the stage is set for a classic farce. The paid-off "father" goes his own way and Ginger gets on the train heading back to Iowa. When the conductor passes through her car checking tickets, he stops to quiz her. She claims to be twelve years old. He is suspicious and the next few sequences involve his attempts to trip up her ruse.
Just when he is about to bust her and kick her off the train, she escapes by hiding in another compartment. She thinks it is empty, but then Ray Milland appears - tall, handsome, erudite and charming. The room is his. Rogers has to think quickly so she feigns a stomach ache, claims to be delirious and speaks in a little girl voice. Milland falls for it and insists that she lie down on his bunk until she feels better. Thus she has evaded the pursuing conductor and is safe for the time being.
When she wakes up, Milland introduces himself. He is a Major in the Army, on his way to a teaching position at a military academy in Wisconsin. She plays dumb and continues her little girl act. He is "The Major", she is "The Minor" (because she's "twelve years old") and there you have both your title and your premise.
It is a premise that could almost certainly never be green-lighted today in these degenerate times, but the morality and sensibilities in 1942 were light years away. Despite the terrible war, it really was a more innocent time, meaning mostly that it was less cynical. So you could make a movie about a thirty year old woman posing as a twelve year old, and have a forty year old Army Major fall for her ruse and take her under his wing (and nothing more), and have it all work without being puerile because it was directed by the mega-talented Billy Wilder, with the equally skilled Rogers and Milland in the lead roles. In fact, not only is the movie not unduly suggestive, but it is heartwarming and hilarious, because Wilder gives his audience credit for being in on the joke. Ginger Rogers is not twelve years old; she is thirty. And she is falling in love with the gallant Ray Milland, who has no clue she is fooling him.
He does have a fiancee back at the academy, however, and in movies of the Golden Era the existence of a fiance often signals a plot twist. There are also 300 cadets to deal with, once Ginger is brought back to the academy with Milland, until he can locate her "parents". By this time the ruse is too far gone, Rogers can't get out of it. She is in love with Milland but he thinks she is twelve (and tall for her age). She also has every teenaged boy at the academy coming on to her in awkward ways, but she does have one ally in Diana Lynn, a sophisticated young actress who plays the fifteen year old sister of Ray Milland's fiancee. Miss Lynn knows of Ginger's ruse. She knows her real age and also knows of her feelings for The Major.
She and her sister the fiancee are not close. Diana Lynn knows her sister is a schemer, and she will turn her attention to Rogers in an effort to hook her up with Milland, while trying to help Ginger harmlessly dissolve her adolescent deception.
Ginger Rogers is in every scene, she carries the picture but with support from the entire cast, including a half dozen or so young men playing the military cadets. Rogers' own mother has a small role near the end, and there isn't a casting decision nor a single edit that is out of place in this movie.
It is a gem of gems, and may even require a hanky at the very end.
Two Very Big Thumbs Up for "The Major And The Minor", made during a better time, a time of optimism rather than cynicism, a time of determined cultural uplift in the face of world war, movies made looking at the best in people, and making them laugh in the process.
10/10 for "The Major And The Minor". Ginger Rogers goes to the top of the heap in my book. I haven't been as familiar with her work as I have with other actresses, but I can see she was much more than a fantastic dancer. Really she had the charisma and overall onscreen abilities of the very biggest of the movie stars. /////
That's all for tonight. The singing was good in church this morning. I hope you had a good day too.
See you in the morning, with tons of love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
We are about ten minutes into the movie. Ginger is ready to leave New York and head home to Iowa. This hair restoring job was about the tenth one she's had since she arrived. NYC is too crazy for her, so she goes to the train station and with her last 27.50, which she kept in a sealed envelope for return train fare in case things didn't work out, she stands in line to buy a ticket back to Council Bluffs. Then the ticket clerk informs her that the fare has been raised to 32 dollars and she doesn't have the extra dough.
Thoroughly frustrated, she is about to storm out of the train station when she spots a mother buying tickets for herself and her daughter. The daughter, about twelve years old, is getting her ticket for half price.
A light bulb goes off in Rogers' head and the next thing we see is that she is in the ladies' room, scrubbing off all her makeup, tying her hair in pigtails and quick-tailoring her clothes with scissors to make them smaller. She emerges wearing a Pollyanna hat, with fresh face and "new" clothes, looking for all the world like a too-tall and somewhat too developed adolescent girl. This is where the Screwball is kicked up a notch. She returns to the ticket counter with a man from the lobby whom she has paid a couple of bucks to pose as her father, and this time the clerk sells her a half-price ticket, though not without giving her a funny look.
Now the stage is set for a classic farce. The paid-off "father" goes his own way and Ginger gets on the train heading back to Iowa. When the conductor passes through her car checking tickets, he stops to quiz her. She claims to be twelve years old. He is suspicious and the next few sequences involve his attempts to trip up her ruse.
Just when he is about to bust her and kick her off the train, she escapes by hiding in another compartment. She thinks it is empty, but then Ray Milland appears - tall, handsome, erudite and charming. The room is his. Rogers has to think quickly so she feigns a stomach ache, claims to be delirious and speaks in a little girl voice. Milland falls for it and insists that she lie down on his bunk until she feels better. Thus she has evaded the pursuing conductor and is safe for the time being.
When she wakes up, Milland introduces himself. He is a Major in the Army, on his way to a teaching position at a military academy in Wisconsin. She plays dumb and continues her little girl act. He is "The Major", she is "The Minor" (because she's "twelve years old") and there you have both your title and your premise.
It is a premise that could almost certainly never be green-lighted today in these degenerate times, but the morality and sensibilities in 1942 were light years away. Despite the terrible war, it really was a more innocent time, meaning mostly that it was less cynical. So you could make a movie about a thirty year old woman posing as a twelve year old, and have a forty year old Army Major fall for her ruse and take her under his wing (and nothing more), and have it all work without being puerile because it was directed by the mega-talented Billy Wilder, with the equally skilled Rogers and Milland in the lead roles. In fact, not only is the movie not unduly suggestive, but it is heartwarming and hilarious, because Wilder gives his audience credit for being in on the joke. Ginger Rogers is not twelve years old; she is thirty. And she is falling in love with the gallant Ray Milland, who has no clue she is fooling him.
He does have a fiancee back at the academy, however, and in movies of the Golden Era the existence of a fiance often signals a plot twist. There are also 300 cadets to deal with, once Ginger is brought back to the academy with Milland, until he can locate her "parents". By this time the ruse is too far gone, Rogers can't get out of it. She is in love with Milland but he thinks she is twelve (and tall for her age). She also has every teenaged boy at the academy coming on to her in awkward ways, but she does have one ally in Diana Lynn, a sophisticated young actress who plays the fifteen year old sister of Ray Milland's fiancee. Miss Lynn knows of Ginger's ruse. She knows her real age and also knows of her feelings for The Major.
She and her sister the fiancee are not close. Diana Lynn knows her sister is a schemer, and she will turn her attention to Rogers in an effort to hook her up with Milland, while trying to help Ginger harmlessly dissolve her adolescent deception.
Ginger Rogers is in every scene, she carries the picture but with support from the entire cast, including a half dozen or so young men playing the military cadets. Rogers' own mother has a small role near the end, and there isn't a casting decision nor a single edit that is out of place in this movie.
It is a gem of gems, and may even require a hanky at the very end.
Two Very Big Thumbs Up for "The Major And The Minor", made during a better time, a time of optimism rather than cynicism, a time of determined cultural uplift in the face of world war, movies made looking at the best in people, and making them laugh in the process.
10/10 for "The Major And The Minor". Ginger Rogers goes to the top of the heap in my book. I haven't been as familiar with her work as I have with other actresses, but I can see she was much more than a fantastic dancer. Really she had the charisma and overall onscreen abilities of the very biggest of the movie stars. /////
That's all for tonight. The singing was good in church this morning. I hope you had a good day too.
See you in the morning, with tons of love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Sunday, July 21, 2019
Apollo 11, To The Moon And Back 1969 to 2019 + My Moon Globe
Tonight I watched the excellent "Apollo 11" documentary by Todd Douglas Miller that was produced by CNN films. I don't know whether it was in theaters, or if it was shown on CNN - I got my copy from the library, on dvd, as usual, and I am glad it arrived just a few days ago so that I could time my screening perfectly to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing.
I can still remember that day, July 20th 1969. I was nine years old. Me and my brother Chris, who was five, were playing out in front of our house on Osborne Street in Northridge. If I recall correctly, we were gathering up walnuts for yet another walnut throwing battle, or perhaps to make a line of walnuts spanning the street for cars to run over. We always got a kick out of that. But that afternoon our activity was interrupted by Dad, who opened the front door and called out to us.
"Boys! Come inside! The astronauts are about to land on the Moon"!
The landing was televised - can you believe that?! That was some absolutely incredible technology for 1969, or even today. Dad, an Air Force veteran, was a big fan of the space program and had been watching all morning when the live coverage first went on the air. Chris and I went out and played because it seemed to be taking forever. But when Dad called for us to come inside and watch the landing, we dropped our shirts-full of walnuts (t-shirts pulled up to make a collection pouch) and went into the house.
There, in the living room, on a black and white set that had perhaps a 17 inch screen, we stood and watched as the Lunar Excursion Module made it's final approach to the Moon. If you saw any of the JPL replay footage today, then you saw the exact same thing. I watched it myself, on Facebook. Or maybe you also saw it on July 20, 1969, as it was happening. It was a very big deal as you can imagine. People all over the world stopped whatever they were doing to watch.
I can remember standing there in the living room of our house, excited but impatient, listening to the radio patter between Mission Control and the LEM. It sounded like code to me, official "pilot speak" in monotone technical language. Imagine being Neil Armstrong, who was actually flying the LEM, guiding it to it's landing spot on another planet. No doubt he had to pay close attention to what he was doing! He couldn't afford to get excited. But as a nine year old boy, I couldn't wait for the astronauts to touch down. Like millions of other kids, and humans worldwide in general, I'd been following the space program since I was old enough to understand it. Now they were about to culminate the experience with the moment we had all been waiting for.
I can still remember the moment of touchdown. It gave me goosebumps to see it again today on Facebook, replayed at the exact same time of day by JPL. I remember it seemed to take forever for Armstrong to exit the capsule, but I can remember watching him come down the ladder, and then finally his feet touched the surface of the Moon.
We stood and watched the fuzzy black and white image on TV, and then he uttered his famous line :
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind".
To this day, I think it's the greatest human achievement the world has ever seen.
We went to the Moon five more times (six if you count Apollo 13, which had to abort), and after a while it seemed like old hat. By 1971 they were driving a dune buggy around up there. I mean, holy smokes, can you even imagine that? And they were exploring some really weird craters and venturing much further from the landing site than Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ever did. Everybody still watched every takeoff from Florida and every landing on the Moon for the later Apollo missions, but it will always be Apollo 11 that is most remembered and celebrated, because it was the first.
It's amazing to me that it happened a half century ago now, and that conversely it seems futuristic, like it was ahead of it's time, even now. Because now, even though we have Rovers on Mars, and SpaceX rockets in test orbits, it's like we are back in 1960, spacewise, when we already had the same level of achievement with out first satellites and early Redstone rockets. And we've been doing the Mars Rover thing for forty years now, so we've gone backwards and it's as if we are learning to do it all over again, with private money instead of the great power of NASA.
It's as if it still hasn't settled in what a remarkable achievement it was.
For Christmas in 1968, Dad got me a Moon Globe as a present. At the time, Apollo 8 had just launched. This was another historic mission, the first one to orbit the Moon, ten times. Apollo fans will remember astronaut Frank Borman's Christmas Day prayer from the book of Genesis, which was broadcast worldwide from the capsule of Apollo 8. As an aside, it was used as an overdub sample on one of my favorite albums of all time, Mike Oldfield's "The Songs Of Distant Earth".
But that Christmas Day, I had received my Moon Globe as a present, while the first astronauts were orbiting the Moon and while Frank Borman was delivering his long distance prayer.
Fifty one years later, I am happy to report that I still have my Moon Globe. It sits atop my refrigerator in The Tiny Apartment that I live in. For some crazy reason - and I know not why - it has remained with me all these years, through the long period when it was stuffed in a closet in the 70s and 80s, to when my house was destroyed in the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, and though several moves from house to house in the crazy late 1990s....
Man, I have no idea how that Moon Globe stayed with me, because when I became a young adult, rock and roll was all that mattered (well, that and a few other things). But in my 20s and 30s, and up to my mid-40s, the memories and importance of the space program was in my rearview mirror.
So I have no idea how that Moon Globe stuck with me during that decades long interim and has now been in my possession for 51 years. But there it sits on top of my fridge, and as of last year I have a Lunar Atlas to go with it.
Life is weird, and sometimes all you can say is "wow".
That's all I know for tonight. See you on the Moon during the dreamtime, then in church tomorrow morning, with tons of love beamed in all directions in between. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
I can still remember that day, July 20th 1969. I was nine years old. Me and my brother Chris, who was five, were playing out in front of our house on Osborne Street in Northridge. If I recall correctly, we were gathering up walnuts for yet another walnut throwing battle, or perhaps to make a line of walnuts spanning the street for cars to run over. We always got a kick out of that. But that afternoon our activity was interrupted by Dad, who opened the front door and called out to us.
"Boys! Come inside! The astronauts are about to land on the Moon"!
The landing was televised - can you believe that?! That was some absolutely incredible technology for 1969, or even today. Dad, an Air Force veteran, was a big fan of the space program and had been watching all morning when the live coverage first went on the air. Chris and I went out and played because it seemed to be taking forever. But when Dad called for us to come inside and watch the landing, we dropped our shirts-full of walnuts (t-shirts pulled up to make a collection pouch) and went into the house.
There, in the living room, on a black and white set that had perhaps a 17 inch screen, we stood and watched as the Lunar Excursion Module made it's final approach to the Moon. If you saw any of the JPL replay footage today, then you saw the exact same thing. I watched it myself, on Facebook. Or maybe you also saw it on July 20, 1969, as it was happening. It was a very big deal as you can imagine. People all over the world stopped whatever they were doing to watch.
I can remember standing there in the living room of our house, excited but impatient, listening to the radio patter between Mission Control and the LEM. It sounded like code to me, official "pilot speak" in monotone technical language. Imagine being Neil Armstrong, who was actually flying the LEM, guiding it to it's landing spot on another planet. No doubt he had to pay close attention to what he was doing! He couldn't afford to get excited. But as a nine year old boy, I couldn't wait for the astronauts to touch down. Like millions of other kids, and humans worldwide in general, I'd been following the space program since I was old enough to understand it. Now they were about to culminate the experience with the moment we had all been waiting for.
I can still remember the moment of touchdown. It gave me goosebumps to see it again today on Facebook, replayed at the exact same time of day by JPL. I remember it seemed to take forever for Armstrong to exit the capsule, but I can remember watching him come down the ladder, and then finally his feet touched the surface of the Moon.
We stood and watched the fuzzy black and white image on TV, and then he uttered his famous line :
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Mankind".
To this day, I think it's the greatest human achievement the world has ever seen.
We went to the Moon five more times (six if you count Apollo 13, which had to abort), and after a while it seemed like old hat. By 1971 they were driving a dune buggy around up there. I mean, holy smokes, can you even imagine that? And they were exploring some really weird craters and venturing much further from the landing site than Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin ever did. Everybody still watched every takeoff from Florida and every landing on the Moon for the later Apollo missions, but it will always be Apollo 11 that is most remembered and celebrated, because it was the first.
It's amazing to me that it happened a half century ago now, and that conversely it seems futuristic, like it was ahead of it's time, even now. Because now, even though we have Rovers on Mars, and SpaceX rockets in test orbits, it's like we are back in 1960, spacewise, when we already had the same level of achievement with out first satellites and early Redstone rockets. And we've been doing the Mars Rover thing for forty years now, so we've gone backwards and it's as if we are learning to do it all over again, with private money instead of the great power of NASA.
It's as if it still hasn't settled in what a remarkable achievement it was.
For Christmas in 1968, Dad got me a Moon Globe as a present. At the time, Apollo 8 had just launched. This was another historic mission, the first one to orbit the Moon, ten times. Apollo fans will remember astronaut Frank Borman's Christmas Day prayer from the book of Genesis, which was broadcast worldwide from the capsule of Apollo 8. As an aside, it was used as an overdub sample on one of my favorite albums of all time, Mike Oldfield's "The Songs Of Distant Earth".
But that Christmas Day, I had received my Moon Globe as a present, while the first astronauts were orbiting the Moon and while Frank Borman was delivering his long distance prayer.
Fifty one years later, I am happy to report that I still have my Moon Globe. It sits atop my refrigerator in The Tiny Apartment that I live in. For some crazy reason - and I know not why - it has remained with me all these years, through the long period when it was stuffed in a closet in the 70s and 80s, to when my house was destroyed in the Northridge Earthquake in 1994, and though several moves from house to house in the crazy late 1990s....
Man, I have no idea how that Moon Globe stayed with me, because when I became a young adult, rock and roll was all that mattered (well, that and a few other things). But in my 20s and 30s, and up to my mid-40s, the memories and importance of the space program was in my rearview mirror.
So I have no idea how that Moon Globe stuck with me during that decades long interim and has now been in my possession for 51 years. But there it sits on top of my fridge, and as of last year I have a Lunar Atlas to go with it.
Life is weird, and sometimes all you can say is "wow".
That's all I know for tonight. See you on the Moon during the dreamtime, then in church tomorrow morning, with tons of love beamed in all directions in between. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Spielberg's "Taken", Episode Two
No movie tonight, but I did watch another 90 minute episode of Steven Spielberg's "Taken" (2002), which is turning out to be even more epic than I was hoping for. Now, as I mentioned last week, this is a seventeen year old miniseries that you may have seen when it came out, or in the years since, and if so then you already know the full story. But just in case you don't, I'll give you a general outline.
As reported last week, the story begins in the skies over Germany during WW2. An American squadron encounters Foo Fighters and eight of the nine pilots are lost. No one knows what became of them, least of all the lone surviving pilot, who wakes up in a military hospital and then is put into a psych ward when he starts talking about the "blue lights" he and his crewmen saw.
In another story thread, a crashed UFO is recovered from one of the 1947 New Mexico sites, and is taken back to Wright-Patterson in Ohio. In Episode Two it has been shipped over to Area 51, where scientists are trying and failing to figure out it's propulsion system.
The Colonel in charge of the program, which includes extreme secrecy and a coverup, was there at the beginning, at the crash site in 1947, and has risen through the ranks to have complete control over access to the recovered flying saucer, which looks to be in reasonably good shape. The Colonel is based in Nevada now (and stationed at Area 51), but he is frustrated that his prized team of Nazi Paperclip scientists are unable to reverse engineer the ufo's drive train.
One of the Germans tells him that there is no mechanical propulsion system. The saucer is driven by Mind Control, of which the Aliens have to a degree that human beings can't comprehend.
The Colonel, who is a psychopath by the way, then orders his team to find the best "sensitives" (i.e. psychics) in the country to be brought to Area 51, to see how they perform in the driver's seat.
If you are a fan of Roswell lore, and all the stuff that came after, you can see that all of the elements of the mythology are being included in the storyline, right up to the citizen Remote Viewers who are used as guinea pigs to try and unlock the secrets of the spaceship.
As I also mentioned, Spielberg seems to have the whole thing down pat. Everything we know about Alien Abductions has been popularised by him, and he apparently knows a lot about the subject (ahem!), because in my opinion he has been given access to national security secrets in order to slowly disseminate the idea of UFO disclosure to the public.
Episode Two deals with hybrid children, a storyline that was left at bay when "The X-Files" ended in 2002 (the same year "Taken" premiered). One of the hybrids is the son of the surviving WW2 pilot, who is now a train hopping hobo in 1958. His son is not physically half Alien; he has a human mother also (the pilot's ex-wife), but he is a hybrid in the psychic sense. Whatever "they" did to his father during the Foo Fighter disappearance, the young son has inherited. He is now a teenager and is experiencing his own horrific abductions, which begin as dreams in the guise of his favorite children's story of Artemis P. Fonswick, a four foot tall squirrel.
This is some seriously spooky and weird stuff, and again I propose that Spielberg not only has the goods on the alien scenario, but that as a filmmaker he has a very dark side. Witness his "War Of The Worlds". He is not the Pollyanna he would have you believe, and he shows this side again in "Taken".
The abduction scenes involve the typical kind of "probing" you've heard of, though it is thankfully kept brief.
Another child of interest to both the aliens and the military is young Anton Yelchin (God rest his soul). He is an actual physical hybrid; his father was the "man" who was hiding out in the shed on his mother's property in Lubbock, Texas back in 1947. Now his father is long gone, back to the heavens, and child Anton has mental powers that are head and shoulders above anything humans have ever seen, though he keeps these powers mostly to himself.
The evil Colonel wants to get at the kid, to take him back to Area 51, but the kid sees him coming a mile away. ////
That's all I need to tell you about the two episodes of "Taken" that I have seen so far.
The bottom line is that aliens are real, Roswell happened, and the abduction phenomenon is real, too, though not in mass quantities as the New Agers would have you believe.
I know from my own experience how battened down the hatches really are concerning government and military secrecy in matters of anything having to do with actual ufo or alien encounters.
The phoney ones they let slide. Those are the stories that wind up in all the books where everyone and their grandmother has been abducted on a trip to Venus or Alpha Centauri.
But the real ones you could count on a handful of hands, and the info on those ones is locked down so tightly that only Spielberg is given clearance to provide you with a dramatic representation of them.
And then there is What Happened In Northridge, which is locked down tighter than anything in the National Security files..........I absolutely kid you not.
But yeah, Spielberg's "Taken" is an epic that so far covers all the bases and even the dark shadows in between.
I will be watching an episode once per week, with eight more eps to go.
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of man's landing on the Moon, our greatest technological achievement, I think, and certainly our greatest adventure.
That's all I know for tonight and I will see you in the morning, having sent you a Ton Of Love in the meantime. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
As reported last week, the story begins in the skies over Germany during WW2. An American squadron encounters Foo Fighters and eight of the nine pilots are lost. No one knows what became of them, least of all the lone surviving pilot, who wakes up in a military hospital and then is put into a psych ward when he starts talking about the "blue lights" he and his crewmen saw.
In another story thread, a crashed UFO is recovered from one of the 1947 New Mexico sites, and is taken back to Wright-Patterson in Ohio. In Episode Two it has been shipped over to Area 51, where scientists are trying and failing to figure out it's propulsion system.
The Colonel in charge of the program, which includes extreme secrecy and a coverup, was there at the beginning, at the crash site in 1947, and has risen through the ranks to have complete control over access to the recovered flying saucer, which looks to be in reasonably good shape. The Colonel is based in Nevada now (and stationed at Area 51), but he is frustrated that his prized team of Nazi Paperclip scientists are unable to reverse engineer the ufo's drive train.
One of the Germans tells him that there is no mechanical propulsion system. The saucer is driven by Mind Control, of which the Aliens have to a degree that human beings can't comprehend.
The Colonel, who is a psychopath by the way, then orders his team to find the best "sensitives" (i.e. psychics) in the country to be brought to Area 51, to see how they perform in the driver's seat.
If you are a fan of Roswell lore, and all the stuff that came after, you can see that all of the elements of the mythology are being included in the storyline, right up to the citizen Remote Viewers who are used as guinea pigs to try and unlock the secrets of the spaceship.
As I also mentioned, Spielberg seems to have the whole thing down pat. Everything we know about Alien Abductions has been popularised by him, and he apparently knows a lot about the subject (ahem!), because in my opinion he has been given access to national security secrets in order to slowly disseminate the idea of UFO disclosure to the public.
Episode Two deals with hybrid children, a storyline that was left at bay when "The X-Files" ended in 2002 (the same year "Taken" premiered). One of the hybrids is the son of the surviving WW2 pilot, who is now a train hopping hobo in 1958. His son is not physically half Alien; he has a human mother also (the pilot's ex-wife), but he is a hybrid in the psychic sense. Whatever "they" did to his father during the Foo Fighter disappearance, the young son has inherited. He is now a teenager and is experiencing his own horrific abductions, which begin as dreams in the guise of his favorite children's story of Artemis P. Fonswick, a four foot tall squirrel.
This is some seriously spooky and weird stuff, and again I propose that Spielberg not only has the goods on the alien scenario, but that as a filmmaker he has a very dark side. Witness his "War Of The Worlds". He is not the Pollyanna he would have you believe, and he shows this side again in "Taken".
The abduction scenes involve the typical kind of "probing" you've heard of, though it is thankfully kept brief.
Another child of interest to both the aliens and the military is young Anton Yelchin (God rest his soul). He is an actual physical hybrid; his father was the "man" who was hiding out in the shed on his mother's property in Lubbock, Texas back in 1947. Now his father is long gone, back to the heavens, and child Anton has mental powers that are head and shoulders above anything humans have ever seen, though he keeps these powers mostly to himself.
The evil Colonel wants to get at the kid, to take him back to Area 51, but the kid sees him coming a mile away. ////
That's all I need to tell you about the two episodes of "Taken" that I have seen so far.
The bottom line is that aliens are real, Roswell happened, and the abduction phenomenon is real, too, though not in mass quantities as the New Agers would have you believe.
I know from my own experience how battened down the hatches really are concerning government and military secrecy in matters of anything having to do with actual ufo or alien encounters.
The phoney ones they let slide. Those are the stories that wind up in all the books where everyone and their grandmother has been abducted on a trip to Venus or Alpha Centauri.
But the real ones you could count on a handful of hands, and the info on those ones is locked down so tightly that only Spielberg is given clearance to provide you with a dramatic representation of them.
And then there is What Happened In Northridge, which is locked down tighter than anything in the National Security files..........I absolutely kid you not.
But yeah, Spielberg's "Taken" is an epic that so far covers all the bases and even the dark shadows in between.
I will be watching an episode once per week, with eight more eps to go.
Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of man's landing on the Moon, our greatest technological achievement, I think, and certainly our greatest adventure.
That's all I know for tonight and I will see you in the morning, having sent you a Ton Of Love in the meantime. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Friday, July 19, 2019
"The More The Merrier" starring Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn
Both of the problems reported last night have been taken care of, yippee! An ATT tech called this morning to let us know that Pearl's phone line had been repaired. He said the break was outside the house on the main line, but didn't specify where, or what it was. Probably a possum chewing through a wire, as usual. Anyway, I've got my Internet back here at Pearl's, so I can write to ya late at night once again.
Also, the replacement car key did indeed unlock the ignition and steering wheel, and has worked fine all day long, so that is another relief. Now I'd just like a few days (or weeks, months, eternities, etc) without a mechanical problem of any kind, thank you very much. :):)
Tonight I watched a movie called "The More The Merrier" (1943), starring Jean Arthur once again, along with Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn. The setting is Washington DC during wartime. Housing is scarce in the capitol city due to all the crisis-management activity taking place. The movie is a rom-com, though, so the housing problem is not a dramatic issue but merely a device to get everyone in place together. Jean Arthur, looking years younger than her IMDB stated age of 43 (she must have been both a fitness and health food fanatic), has her own apartment on "D" street, but feels she must rent out the extra bedroom as her patriotic duty during the housing shortage. She puts an ad in the paper and the next morning there is a line of men and women outside her door, all wanting to rent the room.
But up walks the shifty but genial Charles Coburn, a tall, rotund older gentleman who works as an adviser to the war department. He will only be in town for a few weeks and needs a temporary place to stay. His motto, repeated throughout the film, is "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead", so he walks right past the line of would-be renters, opens the front door of the apartment house and goes straight up the stairs to Jean Arthur's apartment. When she opens the door he very politely begins to insinuate himself as her new tenant, using sophisticated comedic manipulation techniques.
Jean Arthur was a top level comedienne herself, so the parlay between the two continues successfully for a dozen minutes. The context is the pairing of opposites : Coburn the 65ish overweight cigar-chomping political patron, and Arthur, the petite, stylish younger woman (who could pass for early thirties) who has an unspecified job in the war effort. When they first meet, we go though sequences of fast talking screwball comedy, then a couple of minutes of pratfall slapstick. So talented are the two stars that the director, George Stevens, must have wanted to make the most of his opening setup.
The plot begins to develop when Coburn (who was born in 1877 and is thus one of the oldest stars I've been able to verify) decides to sublet half of his rented room, in his own effort to ease the housing crisis (and save himself a few bucks). Without telling his landlady Jean Arthur, he rents out a share of his room to young, tall and handsome Joel McCrea, who you know from many a cowboy movie when he was much older. McCrea is also working for the war effort, but in a top secret way. He is military, though this will not figure too greatly in the story as the focus is on love.
Jean Arthur is engaged to a nerdish and nebbish lawyer who moves in the same DC circles as does Charles Coburn. The nerd is Arthur's age, but he is as stiff as a board (and played by an actor named Richard Gaines, who is an absolute riot). She really doesn't want to marry him, and so once Joel McCrea moves in to Charles Coburn's room you can guess what happens.
At first Jean Arthur is outraged, in a comedic way of course. It is her apartment! How dare Charles Coburn sublet his room without asking her. She doesn't want two men living in her unit.
But then McCrea is handsome, and he is a low key gentleman, the opposite of Coburn's effusive mover/shaker.
Jean Arthur decides to let both men stay, and the plot is set.
Being that the context is World War Two and the setting Washington DC, there is a lot of intrigue involving spies and national security, but again this is only a surface level theme. The real plot involves Arthur, and her choice between her fiancee the nebbish Richard Gaines, and her newfound love Joel McCrea. Charles Coburn will play matchmaker, and he steals the show in this one. I will be looking for more films with him.
"The More The Merrier" has a 7.8 rating on IMDB, which is very high for a 76 year old motion picture. That, and my Two Very Big Thumbs Up, should be enough of a recommendation to get you to see it. The wartime context and the need for every American to pull together is a running subtheme throughout, but the movie belongs to it's three leads and their clockwork interplay. Arthur received an Academy Award nomination for her role and it is well deserved, though I still say Charles Coburn is the secret weapon here. He should've won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, going away. He is a revelation and a real find for fans of Old Hollywood. ////
That is basically all I know for tonight. I hope you are enjoying your Summer. See you in the morn.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo tons of love.... :):)
Also, the replacement car key did indeed unlock the ignition and steering wheel, and has worked fine all day long, so that is another relief. Now I'd just like a few days (or weeks, months, eternities, etc) without a mechanical problem of any kind, thank you very much. :):)
Tonight I watched a movie called "The More The Merrier" (1943), starring Jean Arthur once again, along with Joel McCrea and Charles Coburn. The setting is Washington DC during wartime. Housing is scarce in the capitol city due to all the crisis-management activity taking place. The movie is a rom-com, though, so the housing problem is not a dramatic issue but merely a device to get everyone in place together. Jean Arthur, looking years younger than her IMDB stated age of 43 (she must have been both a fitness and health food fanatic), has her own apartment on "D" street, but feels she must rent out the extra bedroom as her patriotic duty during the housing shortage. She puts an ad in the paper and the next morning there is a line of men and women outside her door, all wanting to rent the room.
But up walks the shifty but genial Charles Coburn, a tall, rotund older gentleman who works as an adviser to the war department. He will only be in town for a few weeks and needs a temporary place to stay. His motto, repeated throughout the film, is "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead", so he walks right past the line of would-be renters, opens the front door of the apartment house and goes straight up the stairs to Jean Arthur's apartment. When she opens the door he very politely begins to insinuate himself as her new tenant, using sophisticated comedic manipulation techniques.
Jean Arthur was a top level comedienne herself, so the parlay between the two continues successfully for a dozen minutes. The context is the pairing of opposites : Coburn the 65ish overweight cigar-chomping political patron, and Arthur, the petite, stylish younger woman (who could pass for early thirties) who has an unspecified job in the war effort. When they first meet, we go though sequences of fast talking screwball comedy, then a couple of minutes of pratfall slapstick. So talented are the two stars that the director, George Stevens, must have wanted to make the most of his opening setup.
The plot begins to develop when Coburn (who was born in 1877 and is thus one of the oldest stars I've been able to verify) decides to sublet half of his rented room, in his own effort to ease the housing crisis (and save himself a few bucks). Without telling his landlady Jean Arthur, he rents out a share of his room to young, tall and handsome Joel McCrea, who you know from many a cowboy movie when he was much older. McCrea is also working for the war effort, but in a top secret way. He is military, though this will not figure too greatly in the story as the focus is on love.
Jean Arthur is engaged to a nerdish and nebbish lawyer who moves in the same DC circles as does Charles Coburn. The nerd is Arthur's age, but he is as stiff as a board (and played by an actor named Richard Gaines, who is an absolute riot). She really doesn't want to marry him, and so once Joel McCrea moves in to Charles Coburn's room you can guess what happens.
At first Jean Arthur is outraged, in a comedic way of course. It is her apartment! How dare Charles Coburn sublet his room without asking her. She doesn't want two men living in her unit.
But then McCrea is handsome, and he is a low key gentleman, the opposite of Coburn's effusive mover/shaker.
Jean Arthur decides to let both men stay, and the plot is set.
Being that the context is World War Two and the setting Washington DC, there is a lot of intrigue involving spies and national security, but again this is only a surface level theme. The real plot involves Arthur, and her choice between her fiancee the nebbish Richard Gaines, and her newfound love Joel McCrea. Charles Coburn will play matchmaker, and he steals the show in this one. I will be looking for more films with him.
"The More The Merrier" has a 7.8 rating on IMDB, which is very high for a 76 year old motion picture. That, and my Two Very Big Thumbs Up, should be enough of a recommendation to get you to see it. The wartime context and the need for every American to pull together is a running subtheme throughout, but the movie belongs to it's three leads and their clockwork interplay. Arthur received an Academy Award nomination for her role and it is well deserved, though I still say Charles Coburn is the secret weapon here. He should've won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, going away. He is a revelation and a real find for fans of Old Hollywood. ////
That is basically all I know for tonight. I hope you are enjoying your Summer. See you in the morn.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo tons of love.... :):)
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Two Snafus
Hey folks, I am writing early tonight, and from home, just to let you know that the internet service is down at Pearl's once again. It has been down since yesterday morning, and this time it's her whole phone line that's out of service. We seem to have a problem with it every year. ATT is coming over tomorrow to look at it. Hopefully they can fix the problem in less than the six days it took them last time.
To add to the recent snafus, today I took Pearl's car to the Subaru dealership in Van Nuys to get the airbag replaced. You may have heard there has been a recall on the airbags in certain cars, but anyway, they fixed it, but when I went to start the car to drive home, the key wouldn't turn in the ignition. It figured it had to do with the removal of the dashboard for the airbag replacement. When you take a dashboard off, when you put it back on things are never lined up exactly as they were before. Everything looked fine as far as the dash was concerned, but I could see that now, after the airbag replacement, there was slight movement with the ignition cylinder in it's plastic housing, when the steering wheel was turned, whereas before, it was set firmly in the housing with no motion whatsoever. Anyhow, at the dealership I jiggled the wheel a little bit and the key eventually turned and I drove home. A little while later it turned again with no problem when I drove back to Pearl's.
But a little while ago, when it was time for my evening break, I went out to the car and the key wouldn't turn again. So once again I jiggled the steering wheel a little bit, and this time the wheel locked up too. I tried the usual trick to get the steering lock undone, where you turn the key as you put pressure on the wheel, but the key wouldn't budge. After 15 minutes of trying I gave up and walked home, 3 1/4 miles from Pearl's. Good thing I'm in shape cause I've gotta walk back in a little while.
I would've just stayed at Pearl's for the evening, but I wanted to Google the situation with the steering and ignition locks, to see if anyone had a solution. There are lots of good "car guys" on the Internet who know all the tricks, and I really wanna avoid having to go all the way back to the dealer, which would require having the car towed. I wouldn't be able to do that until Friday, anyway, because tomorrow I have to wait all day for the ATT repairman to arrive. So I walked home tonight because I needed to Google the car repair, because I couldn't Google at Pearl's because of the ATT repair.
Or something like that. :)
Well, anyway, I'm still flying high on the Paul McCartney concert, so as long as all of these hassles get fixed by tomorrow or Friday I'll not be too aggrieved.
I'm just glad the ignition didn't lock up, say, at the store with groceries sitting in a hot car, or far worse, with Pearl in the car. That would not have been good.
So, right now I am gonna continue my Google search, and if I have time I might watch a Tim Holt Western. I have finished reading Robert Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" (one of the best novels I've ever read, highly recommended for sci-fi fans) and I am now beginning "The Assassination Of James Forrestal" by David Martin. James Forrestal was the nation's first Secretary Of Defense. If you are unfamiliar with his story you can Google it.
That's all for tonight. Hopefully by this time tomorrow, both the ATT problem and the ignition thing will be history. Keep your fingers crossed and have a good evening.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
To add to the recent snafus, today I took Pearl's car to the Subaru dealership in Van Nuys to get the airbag replaced. You may have heard there has been a recall on the airbags in certain cars, but anyway, they fixed it, but when I went to start the car to drive home, the key wouldn't turn in the ignition. It figured it had to do with the removal of the dashboard for the airbag replacement. When you take a dashboard off, when you put it back on things are never lined up exactly as they were before. Everything looked fine as far as the dash was concerned, but I could see that now, after the airbag replacement, there was slight movement with the ignition cylinder in it's plastic housing, when the steering wheel was turned, whereas before, it was set firmly in the housing with no motion whatsoever. Anyhow, at the dealership I jiggled the wheel a little bit and the key eventually turned and I drove home. A little while later it turned again with no problem when I drove back to Pearl's.
But a little while ago, when it was time for my evening break, I went out to the car and the key wouldn't turn again. So once again I jiggled the steering wheel a little bit, and this time the wheel locked up too. I tried the usual trick to get the steering lock undone, where you turn the key as you put pressure on the wheel, but the key wouldn't budge. After 15 minutes of trying I gave up and walked home, 3 1/4 miles from Pearl's. Good thing I'm in shape cause I've gotta walk back in a little while.
I would've just stayed at Pearl's for the evening, but I wanted to Google the situation with the steering and ignition locks, to see if anyone had a solution. There are lots of good "car guys" on the Internet who know all the tricks, and I really wanna avoid having to go all the way back to the dealer, which would require having the car towed. I wouldn't be able to do that until Friday, anyway, because tomorrow I have to wait all day for the ATT repairman to arrive. So I walked home tonight because I needed to Google the car repair, because I couldn't Google at Pearl's because of the ATT repair.
Or something like that. :)
Well, anyway, I'm still flying high on the Paul McCartney concert, so as long as all of these hassles get fixed by tomorrow or Friday I'll not be too aggrieved.
I'm just glad the ignition didn't lock up, say, at the store with groceries sitting in a hot car, or far worse, with Pearl in the car. That would not have been good.
So, right now I am gonna continue my Google search, and if I have time I might watch a Tim Holt Western. I have finished reading Robert Heinlein's "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" (one of the best novels I've ever read, highly recommended for sci-fi fans) and I am now beginning "The Assassination Of James Forrestal" by David Martin. James Forrestal was the nation's first Secretary Of Defense. If you are unfamiliar with his story you can Google it.
That's all for tonight. Hopefully by this time tomorrow, both the ATT problem and the ignition thing will be history. Keep your fingers crossed and have a good evening.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Paul McCartney at Dodger Stadium
I apologize for last night's attempt at a Paul McCartney review, reading it back I see that I told you a lot about the food and drink prices at Dodger Stadium and next to nothing about the concert itself. I had been awake for most of the previous 40 hours when I wrote that blog, so the result was not surprising. I am not sure I'll be able to do any better tonight, though I will try to give you at least a few details. I do have a link for you if you wanna read the review from the Daily News :
https://www.dailynews.com/2019/07/14/paul-mccartney-reunites-with-ringo-starr-at-dodger-stadium-during-career-spanning-show/
You will have to copy and paste it, as Blogger does not post "clickable" links (at least not on my page).
Here are some random thoughts about the show :
Paul and band came onstage at 8:35pm, following a half hour scroll of old Beatles photographs bordered in psychedelic colors that were being projected on the stage screens. The photo scroll was accompanied by Beatles and McCartney music (what else?). It was the only show I've ever been to where the pre-concert music was by the artist himself. But at 8:35, the lights dimmed and there was Paul, dressed in black jeans, a white dress shirt and a modern version of Beatle boots. He also wore a black jacket to begin the show but removed it after a couple of songs as the night was very warm.
They began with "Hard Day's Night" (one of my Top Ten Beatles Songs) and we were off and running. Paul played his signature Hofner "Violin" Bass, and you could hear every note in his basslines. The sound mix was excellent for a baseball stadium and the volume was very loud, not wimpy at all, but was also clear with good separation. I encourage you to Google the setlist to more easily get a feel for the progression of the songs. He played 38 of 'em. That's almost twice as many as you would hear at any other concert.
Eight songs in, Paul switched to guitar, a psychedelic colored Les Paul, for "Let Me Roll It", which turned out to be an early highlight as the band went into an extended jam at the end, based around Jimi's "Foxy Lady" riff, and - would you believe it?! - Paul played some fiery, bluesy leads.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Paul played lead guitar, but then it must be noted that he began as a guitarist and only switched to bass after George joined The Beatles. But yeah, it was super cool to watch him shred.
They followed that up with "I've Got A Feeling", and Paul was in high gear. His voice was rich and powerful, missing a little bit on the high end, but hey - he's still 85 to 90 % of the singer he always was. How many 77 year olds can say that?
His band is phenomenal, as you would expect, but what might surprise you is their power. They play like a real band instead of simply a collection of studio musicians, and they can recreate anything in Paul's catalogue, Beatles, Wings or solo, note for note and with each song's original dynamic.
"Maybe I'm Amazed" was another highlight, and it was at this point, about one third of the way through, that I realised I was watching the greatest concert I have ever seen (well, tied with Pink Floyd at the Rose Bowl and Cal Jam, which I think I mentioned last night). But yeah, as Paul sang the lyrics, it may as well have been 1970 all over again. It feels like he lives inside his songs, and though he is the most famous and popular songwriter of all time, and the biggest rock star on the planet, onstage he comes across as a guy who just loves to play and entertain, and happens to be very, very good at it. It's weird, almost, in a cool kind of way, that even though he was in The Beatles and achieved an unsurpassed level of fame, and even though his songs are iconic and will be listened to 1000 years from now, that he still seems like James Paul McCartney, the guy from Liverpool whom, if you lived there, you might see around the neighborhood or in the pub. You know, the lively chap, the one with all the songs.
That's what the deal is with him : Paul and his songs.
He did take over The Beatles near the end, after John lost himself in Yoko. "Sgt. Pepper" was Paul's idea, as was "Magical Mystery Tour". Of course John contributed brilliant and legendary music to both albums, but there is no question Paul was giving the band it's direction at that point, and by the time "Abbey Road" was being recorded, it was almost all Paul. "Abbey Road" is close to being a McCartney solo work, when he was at the height of his powers.
As much as I love rock n' roll music, and as much as I revere so many different bands and put certain musicians on pedestals, there has still never been a band in my life like The Beatles. This is true for millions of fans worldwide, from 1963 onward. I never include Beatles in any Top Ten lists or anything like that, because they are beyond. In the history of popular music, there has never been anything like that group, and there never will be. They were life changing, and they changed the whole world.
So, by the time the concert was entering it's final hour, and Paul and band were ripping through "Mr. Kite" and "Birthday", "Back In The U.S.S.R" and "Live And Let Die", I was experiencing a life changing moment of my own. I was finally seeing a Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney, the greatest songwriter of the rock era. The experience is even more than that, like love it's undefinable, and that's why The Beatles were so unbelievably huge, because whatever they had cannot be defined or duplicated.
By the time Paul sat down at his grand piano to play and sing "Let It Be", the entire audience was carried away by everything involved with that particular song - it's history as one of The Beatles last big hits (and their biggest seller), that it came upon their breakup, and that it sounds like a religious hymn, perhaps for the end of an era.
But then here is Paul McCartney, still selling out stadiums 50 years later (think about that for a moment), and still singing and playing the songs with the same urgency, so it couldn't have been the end of an era. The era never ended, because of Paul McCartney's music, and John's and George's.
Just like the classic music era beginning nearly 400 years ago has never ended, because of composers like Bach, the same is now true of the rock era. And so, in closing, I am blown completely off the map that I got to see Paul McCartney of The Beatles, still at the top of his game at 77 years of age!, in concert, and that I got to see him play a show for the ages, joined by Ringo Starr at the end.
Again, please Google and read some professional critical reviews and also go to setlist.com to read the list of 38 songs.
I've been to many, many concerts in my life, and so many have been "off the charts" or whatever superlative I can give them. A few, however - meaning this concert and the two others mentioned - have been life changing.
That's the thing about this Paul McCartney show. I knew it was gonna be really good, excellent even.
I just didn't know it was gonna be next level. But then I was taking for granted, perhaps, that I was going to see a Beatle, and one of the greatest musicians who has ever lived. /////
That's my review, see you in the morning, peace and love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
https://www.dailynews.com/2019/07/14/paul-mccartney-reunites-with-ringo-starr-at-dodger-stadium-during-career-spanning-show/
You will have to copy and paste it, as Blogger does not post "clickable" links (at least not on my page).
Here are some random thoughts about the show :
Paul and band came onstage at 8:35pm, following a half hour scroll of old Beatles photographs bordered in psychedelic colors that were being projected on the stage screens. The photo scroll was accompanied by Beatles and McCartney music (what else?). It was the only show I've ever been to where the pre-concert music was by the artist himself. But at 8:35, the lights dimmed and there was Paul, dressed in black jeans, a white dress shirt and a modern version of Beatle boots. He also wore a black jacket to begin the show but removed it after a couple of songs as the night was very warm.
They began with "Hard Day's Night" (one of my Top Ten Beatles Songs) and we were off and running. Paul played his signature Hofner "Violin" Bass, and you could hear every note in his basslines. The sound mix was excellent for a baseball stadium and the volume was very loud, not wimpy at all, but was also clear with good separation. I encourage you to Google the setlist to more easily get a feel for the progression of the songs. He played 38 of 'em. That's almost twice as many as you would hear at any other concert.
Eight songs in, Paul switched to guitar, a psychedelic colored Les Paul, for "Let Me Roll It", which turned out to be an early highlight as the band went into an extended jam at the end, based around Jimi's "Foxy Lady" riff, and - would you believe it?! - Paul played some fiery, bluesy leads.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Paul played lead guitar, but then it must be noted that he began as a guitarist and only switched to bass after George joined The Beatles. But yeah, it was super cool to watch him shred.
They followed that up with "I've Got A Feeling", and Paul was in high gear. His voice was rich and powerful, missing a little bit on the high end, but hey - he's still 85 to 90 % of the singer he always was. How many 77 year olds can say that?
His band is phenomenal, as you would expect, but what might surprise you is their power. They play like a real band instead of simply a collection of studio musicians, and they can recreate anything in Paul's catalogue, Beatles, Wings or solo, note for note and with each song's original dynamic.
"Maybe I'm Amazed" was another highlight, and it was at this point, about one third of the way through, that I realised I was watching the greatest concert I have ever seen (well, tied with Pink Floyd at the Rose Bowl and Cal Jam, which I think I mentioned last night). But yeah, as Paul sang the lyrics, it may as well have been 1970 all over again. It feels like he lives inside his songs, and though he is the most famous and popular songwriter of all time, and the biggest rock star on the planet, onstage he comes across as a guy who just loves to play and entertain, and happens to be very, very good at it. It's weird, almost, in a cool kind of way, that even though he was in The Beatles and achieved an unsurpassed level of fame, and even though his songs are iconic and will be listened to 1000 years from now, that he still seems like James Paul McCartney, the guy from Liverpool whom, if you lived there, you might see around the neighborhood or in the pub. You know, the lively chap, the one with all the songs.
That's what the deal is with him : Paul and his songs.
He did take over The Beatles near the end, after John lost himself in Yoko. "Sgt. Pepper" was Paul's idea, as was "Magical Mystery Tour". Of course John contributed brilliant and legendary music to both albums, but there is no question Paul was giving the band it's direction at that point, and by the time "Abbey Road" was being recorded, it was almost all Paul. "Abbey Road" is close to being a McCartney solo work, when he was at the height of his powers.
As much as I love rock n' roll music, and as much as I revere so many different bands and put certain musicians on pedestals, there has still never been a band in my life like The Beatles. This is true for millions of fans worldwide, from 1963 onward. I never include Beatles in any Top Ten lists or anything like that, because they are beyond. In the history of popular music, there has never been anything like that group, and there never will be. They were life changing, and they changed the whole world.
So, by the time the concert was entering it's final hour, and Paul and band were ripping through "Mr. Kite" and "Birthday", "Back In The U.S.S.R" and "Live And Let Die", I was experiencing a life changing moment of my own. I was finally seeing a Beatle, Sir Paul McCartney, the greatest songwriter of the rock era. The experience is even more than that, like love it's undefinable, and that's why The Beatles were so unbelievably huge, because whatever they had cannot be defined or duplicated.
By the time Paul sat down at his grand piano to play and sing "Let It Be", the entire audience was carried away by everything involved with that particular song - it's history as one of The Beatles last big hits (and their biggest seller), that it came upon their breakup, and that it sounds like a religious hymn, perhaps for the end of an era.
But then here is Paul McCartney, still selling out stadiums 50 years later (think about that for a moment), and still singing and playing the songs with the same urgency, so it couldn't have been the end of an era. The era never ended, because of Paul McCartney's music, and John's and George's.
Just like the classic music era beginning nearly 400 years ago has never ended, because of composers like Bach, the same is now true of the rock era. And so, in closing, I am blown completely off the map that I got to see Paul McCartney of The Beatles, still at the top of his game at 77 years of age!, in concert, and that I got to see him play a show for the ages, joined by Ringo Starr at the end.
Again, please Google and read some professional critical reviews and also go to setlist.com to read the list of 38 songs.
I've been to many, many concerts in my life, and so many have been "off the charts" or whatever superlative I can give them. A few, however - meaning this concert and the two others mentioned - have been life changing.
That's the thing about this Paul McCartney show. I knew it was gonna be really good, excellent even.
I just didn't know it was gonna be next level. But then I was taking for granted, perhaps, that I was going to see a Beatle, and one of the greatest musicians who has ever lived. /////
That's my review, see you in the morning, peace and love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Monday, July 15, 2019
Partly Paul But Mostly Toast
I'll try to tell you as much as I can about last night's Paul McCartney concert at Dodger Stadium. I'm super-duper mega tired, running on four hours sleep, and I've already been talking about it all day, people calling me wanting to know "so.......how was it"?
It was Freakin' Unbelievable is how was it, tied - with Pink Floyd at The Rose Bowl in 1994 and California Jam in 1974 - for the best concert I've ever seen.
I guess I'll start at the beginning and see how far I can get before I pass out. I left my apartment at about 4:15 and drove to the North Hollywood Metro Station. By 5pm, I was on the Red Line subway en route to Union Station, where we arrived at apprx 5:30. Grim had given me a tip about the Dodger Stadium shuttle bus, which departs from Union Station. The shuttle enabled me to take the subway downtown instead of trying to drive to the stadium, which would have been a fiasco and would also have broken the bank because they wanted 35 dollars for parking!
Screw that!
So thanks to Grim, all that was avoided. Instead, I spent a measly $1.75 on my subway ticket and the shuttle bus to Dodger Stadium was free. We arrived in the parking lot at about ten minutes to 6:00 - led along by a police escort motorcycle! - and after we got off the bus I walked a short distance to where the line for the loge entrance was located. This was my first trip to Dodger Stadium since 2009, but in my life I've been there perhaps 25-30 times and you kind of know the layout, even if you haven't been to the joint in a decade.
They started letting people in at 6pm, and I was inside by about 6:25, the wait being due to long lines and security checks. I now had 95 minutes to kill before showtime, a factor I don't usually enjoy but in this case it was merely a "chill out" experience simply because I was so happy to be inside the stadium before 90% of the crowd and to have arrived there relatively unscathed, on freeways, subway and shuttle.
I had time to kill, so I walked the loge level concourse, just to get a feel for being inside the stadium but also to check out the crowd and the merch prices. As I remarked to my sister Vickie, the crowd demographic was mostly people between the ages of 60 and 70 (leaning toward the latter), but a lot of Thirtysomethings too. Not too many people my own age, and very few ten year old kids like you might see at other concerts where their parents bring 'em, but lots of very small children and even an infant or two, brought along by the Thirtysomething couples. There was a smattering of Millennials also, perhaps 5 to 7 % of the crowd, most of them in the company of the older folks. Really it was like a cross section of society rather than a "genre" crowd like long haired heshers at a metal concert or Hollywood hipsters at a Radiohead show. This crowd just looked like everyone and anyone you might see walking down the sidewalk, and that figured to be the case because everyone loves The Beatles and everyone loves Paul McCartney.
I was still walking the concourse as the crowd began to trickle in. Many of the tricklers headed straight for the merch lines, which grew long very quickly. I checked the prices - 50 bucks for the shirts - and passed, but a lot of folks must have money to burn or just plain wanted a souveneir of the show. I can't blame 'em. I used to always by a shirt at every concert when they were six bucks back in 1975, and I would've bought a Paul shirt if they were maybe......hmmm......30 dollars? But fifty I just wasn't gonna do, in contrast to the hundreds of guys in the merch lines, who had no problem with such an expenditure.
The food and drink prices were similarly prohibitive : 17 bucks for a beer! 8 dollars for a Dodger Dog.
Now, I am not a cheapskate (and I had expected 9 bucks per beer or thereabouts), but now we were talkin, if you add it up, about a six pack that would run you into the 100 dollar range.
I was obviously not gonna pay 17 bucks for a beer, but I was just having fun scoping the place out and killing some time to boot.
By 7:30 I headed back to my seat, which was located directly behind Home Plate, about halfway up the loge. The pre-concert music was beginning to play: it was all Beatles and Paul oriented. At 8pm, a video scroll started to run on the screens on either side of the stage. Pictures of the young John, Paul George and Ringo were shown. This reminds me to tell you of a headline I once saw in the National Lampoon : "John Paul named Pope, George Ringo Miffed"!
I am now so exhausted, at the hour is so late, that I will have to attempt to continue this concert review tomorrow. I do feel a bit like George Ringo at the moment, miffed that I haven't finished, and in the meantime I encourage you Paul fans to Google the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium show for professionally written reviews, possibly from Variety or the Los Angeles Times.
I will still try to continue tomorrow, however.
Paul played 38 songs. That's something to consider right there, in the meantime.
Once he played "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude", my concertgoing life was complete. Even if I never saw another live show again, I would still die happy.
But don't jinx me please! (c'mon, self.....don't make such fatalistic proclamations).
You know what I mean, though.
I will try to write more tomorrow. Hopefully I won't be complete toast.
See you in the morning. Peace and Love as per Ringo. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
It was Freakin' Unbelievable is how was it, tied - with Pink Floyd at The Rose Bowl in 1994 and California Jam in 1974 - for the best concert I've ever seen.
I guess I'll start at the beginning and see how far I can get before I pass out. I left my apartment at about 4:15 and drove to the North Hollywood Metro Station. By 5pm, I was on the Red Line subway en route to Union Station, where we arrived at apprx 5:30. Grim had given me a tip about the Dodger Stadium shuttle bus, which departs from Union Station. The shuttle enabled me to take the subway downtown instead of trying to drive to the stadium, which would have been a fiasco and would also have broken the bank because they wanted 35 dollars for parking!
Screw that!
So thanks to Grim, all that was avoided. Instead, I spent a measly $1.75 on my subway ticket and the shuttle bus to Dodger Stadium was free. We arrived in the parking lot at about ten minutes to 6:00 - led along by a police escort motorcycle! - and after we got off the bus I walked a short distance to where the line for the loge entrance was located. This was my first trip to Dodger Stadium since 2009, but in my life I've been there perhaps 25-30 times and you kind of know the layout, even if you haven't been to the joint in a decade.
They started letting people in at 6pm, and I was inside by about 6:25, the wait being due to long lines and security checks. I now had 95 minutes to kill before showtime, a factor I don't usually enjoy but in this case it was merely a "chill out" experience simply because I was so happy to be inside the stadium before 90% of the crowd and to have arrived there relatively unscathed, on freeways, subway and shuttle.
I had time to kill, so I walked the loge level concourse, just to get a feel for being inside the stadium but also to check out the crowd and the merch prices. As I remarked to my sister Vickie, the crowd demographic was mostly people between the ages of 60 and 70 (leaning toward the latter), but a lot of Thirtysomethings too. Not too many people my own age, and very few ten year old kids like you might see at other concerts where their parents bring 'em, but lots of very small children and even an infant or two, brought along by the Thirtysomething couples. There was a smattering of Millennials also, perhaps 5 to 7 % of the crowd, most of them in the company of the older folks. Really it was like a cross section of society rather than a "genre" crowd like long haired heshers at a metal concert or Hollywood hipsters at a Radiohead show. This crowd just looked like everyone and anyone you might see walking down the sidewalk, and that figured to be the case because everyone loves The Beatles and everyone loves Paul McCartney.
I was still walking the concourse as the crowd began to trickle in. Many of the tricklers headed straight for the merch lines, which grew long very quickly. I checked the prices - 50 bucks for the shirts - and passed, but a lot of folks must have money to burn or just plain wanted a souveneir of the show. I can't blame 'em. I used to always by a shirt at every concert when they were six bucks back in 1975, and I would've bought a Paul shirt if they were maybe......hmmm......30 dollars? But fifty I just wasn't gonna do, in contrast to the hundreds of guys in the merch lines, who had no problem with such an expenditure.
The food and drink prices were similarly prohibitive : 17 bucks for a beer! 8 dollars for a Dodger Dog.
Now, I am not a cheapskate (and I had expected 9 bucks per beer or thereabouts), but now we were talkin, if you add it up, about a six pack that would run you into the 100 dollar range.
I was obviously not gonna pay 17 bucks for a beer, but I was just having fun scoping the place out and killing some time to boot.
By 7:30 I headed back to my seat, which was located directly behind Home Plate, about halfway up the loge. The pre-concert music was beginning to play: it was all Beatles and Paul oriented. At 8pm, a video scroll started to run on the screens on either side of the stage. Pictures of the young John, Paul George and Ringo were shown. This reminds me to tell you of a headline I once saw in the National Lampoon : "John Paul named Pope, George Ringo Miffed"!
I am now so exhausted, at the hour is so late, that I will have to attempt to continue this concert review tomorrow. I do feel a bit like George Ringo at the moment, miffed that I haven't finished, and in the meantime I encourage you Paul fans to Google the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium show for professionally written reviews, possibly from Variety or the Los Angeles Times.
I will still try to continue tomorrow, however.
Paul played 38 songs. That's something to consider right there, in the meantime.
Once he played "Let It Be" and "Hey Jude", my concertgoing life was complete. Even if I never saw another live show again, I would still die happy.
But don't jinx me please! (c'mon, self.....don't make such fatalistic proclamations).
You know what I mean, though.
I will try to write more tomorrow. Hopefully I won't be complete toast.
See you in the morning. Peace and Love as per Ringo. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
Saturday, July 13, 2019
"Steven Spielberg Presents 'Taken' " + Sir Paul Tonight
No movie tonight, but I did begin a miniseries I've been waiting a long time to see : "Taken" (2002), which is formally billed as "Steven Spielberg Presents 'Taken' ", so you know it's not Liam Neeson you're gonna be dealing with but little Grey aliens. Spielberg is the king of alien encounter movies, and really I think they are his specialty, his greatest films all belonging to that genre : "A.I.", "Close Encounters", "War Of The Worlds". I have long suspected that he was "clued in" on the realities of the subject years ago, after he became not only a top box office director with "Jaws" but also demonstrated his technical prowess at the same time. I believe that around that time, the "top brass" decided this is our guy for "disclosure through popular entertainment", and lo and behold his next picture was "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind", a phrase nobody had ever heard before as the title for a movie with special effects nobody had ever seen before and subject matter that no filmmaker had previously explored to such depth or with such realism.
So yeah, SS is the director or producer you want at the helm of anything of this magnitude involving Alien abductions. The series runs 15 hours spread out over ten 90 minute episodes. It was originally broadcast over the Syfy Channel in 2002 (man, the years have just flown by), and I really wanted to see it then but I didn't have cable. More recently, since about 2010, I had occasionally checked the dvd price on Amazon, but it was always cost prohibitive. This past Spring, however, when I checked it the price was way down, and I didn't hesitate. Anything involving this subject matter is a must-see for me (and for you too!), but only if it has been produced by Spielberg or someone at the highest artistic level.
I am of two minds where "Alien Abduction" stories are concerned. On the one hand, 99% of them - be they revealed in books or movies or tv shows - are phoney tales spewed out by New Age nut jobs who were taken to Zeta Reticuli or wherever. I steer clear of the subject for the simple reason that everybody and their mother has been abducted by aliens, except for that they really haven't been. They just want attention.
And these kinds of stories annoy me because I really and truly have had something beyond comprehension happen to me, except that my story doesn't fit any neatly accepted cliche pattern that you hear in all the other myriad accounts. For one thing, I was never abducted by aliens.
But I did see one. We all did; those of us who were present at the Wilbur Wash and perhaps at Northridge Hospital as well. And of course the military was involved in the events of September 1989, as was the FBI and CIA. We've all had memory issues, too. But unlike the cliche tales, my story is true - hell, it's too weird to be fake, no one could make it up, not even me! - and so, to finish off my point, when it comes to books, movies or TV shows about aliens, I only watch or read the high grade ones, the ones I know will have a ring of truth. And I have always trusted Steven Spielberg to give me some truth, even if it is couched in a dramatic storyline. He did this in 2001 with "A.I.", which I think is one of the greatest and most revealing movies ever made, disclosure-wise. And now, it looks like he has done it again with "Taken", even though I am seeing it 17 years after the fact and am quite late to the party.
The first episode covers much of the same ground we just saw in "Project Blue Book" (reviewed earler this week), a thorough exploration of the Roswell events of July 1947 and other related UFO cases that took place at around the same time, including the phenomenon of the Lubbock lights. Prior to these events, there were the Foo Fighter fireballs that were seen by WW2 pilots over Germany. As an aside, I can remember my Dad telling me about these when I was 6 years old. Dad was in a radar battalion which may have tracked such things. His stories of the Foo Fighters might have been my first knowledge of anything having to do with Unidentified Flying Objects.
"Taken" introduces an interesting aspect to the familiar Roswell and Wright-Patterson legends, that of the one Grey who survived the crash and was taken to an observation cell at Wright/Pat. Some say it was Edwards, but at any rate, this little guy who became known as "J-Rod" supposedly lived for many years afterward, on the base, and it is rumored that Eisenhower knew about him. But in the show, there is another survivor. I don't wanna tell you too much about him, except to say that he is similar to "The Man Who Fell To Earth" in certain respects.
All of this really makes you wonder what happened in 1947, and how the secrecy led to the creation of our modern day National Security State. In all of these shows, "Blue Book", or "Taken" or "X-Files", a dominant theme has to do with who is generating the aircraft. Is it the Russians? Could it be the Germans? Maybe they are ours, and part of a Top Secret project.
This is what really led to all the Cold War paranoia. To be sure, both the US and the Commies were frightened of each other's unknown nuclear capability.
But the real fear was created by the UFO panic that was in the air from 1947 to 1952, because no one knew for certain what they were or where they were coming from.
That is - no civilians knew, nor did most military and politicians.
The secrets have been kept all this time by a select few, and those secrets have shaped the world as we know it. Most of the electronic technology that has swept the world since 1947 has been developed from information that has been kept secret.
UFOs crashed here on Earth and the world changed, and here were are today over 70 years later still fascinated by the subject because we don't know the whole story. Thank goodness, then for "Disclosure Emissaries" like Steven Spielberg and Chris Carter and the producers of other high quality shows like "Project Blue Book". From them, we have at least learned something over the years, and I think we have a pretty good general idea of what the truth is.
One thing is for sure : We know it wasn't a weather balloon that crashed at Roswell!
"Taken" is off to a great start. I will be trying to dole out the episodes to myself rather than binge them, which I can do because I own the dvd, so there is no library return date. So I will probably try to watch one per week, and will report back on how things are developing. ////
(this part was written this morning, Saturday July 13) : Today is my last day off until next month, and in just a few hours I will be heading out the door to go to the Paul McCartney concert at Dodger Stadium. I've never been to a concert there, only ballgames, so I am gonna leave a little early to allow for traffic and long lines. I am super stoked to see Sir Paul, and as I've mentioned my concert-going career will now have come full circle because when I was six years old, I rode in the car when my Dad drove my sisters to Dodger Stadium to see The Beatles in August of 1966.
So, no hike or any other activities today, just preparing for the concert. I did have a nice hike at Santa Susana yesterday, going up the Devil's Slide and back. I will try to check in for a brief post-concert report tonight, though I imagine it will be pretty late when I return. Stay tuned, though, and by tomorrow at the latest I will deliver a full report.
And have a wonderful day yourself. Tons of love all day long and into the night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
So yeah, SS is the director or producer you want at the helm of anything of this magnitude involving Alien abductions. The series runs 15 hours spread out over ten 90 minute episodes. It was originally broadcast over the Syfy Channel in 2002 (man, the years have just flown by), and I really wanted to see it then but I didn't have cable. More recently, since about 2010, I had occasionally checked the dvd price on Amazon, but it was always cost prohibitive. This past Spring, however, when I checked it the price was way down, and I didn't hesitate. Anything involving this subject matter is a must-see for me (and for you too!), but only if it has been produced by Spielberg or someone at the highest artistic level.
I am of two minds where "Alien Abduction" stories are concerned. On the one hand, 99% of them - be they revealed in books or movies or tv shows - are phoney tales spewed out by New Age nut jobs who were taken to Zeta Reticuli or wherever. I steer clear of the subject for the simple reason that everybody and their mother has been abducted by aliens, except for that they really haven't been. They just want attention.
And these kinds of stories annoy me because I really and truly have had something beyond comprehension happen to me, except that my story doesn't fit any neatly accepted cliche pattern that you hear in all the other myriad accounts. For one thing, I was never abducted by aliens.
But I did see one. We all did; those of us who were present at the Wilbur Wash and perhaps at Northridge Hospital as well. And of course the military was involved in the events of September 1989, as was the FBI and CIA. We've all had memory issues, too. But unlike the cliche tales, my story is true - hell, it's too weird to be fake, no one could make it up, not even me! - and so, to finish off my point, when it comes to books, movies or TV shows about aliens, I only watch or read the high grade ones, the ones I know will have a ring of truth. And I have always trusted Steven Spielberg to give me some truth, even if it is couched in a dramatic storyline. He did this in 2001 with "A.I.", which I think is one of the greatest and most revealing movies ever made, disclosure-wise. And now, it looks like he has done it again with "Taken", even though I am seeing it 17 years after the fact and am quite late to the party.
The first episode covers much of the same ground we just saw in "Project Blue Book" (reviewed earler this week), a thorough exploration of the Roswell events of July 1947 and other related UFO cases that took place at around the same time, including the phenomenon of the Lubbock lights. Prior to these events, there were the Foo Fighter fireballs that were seen by WW2 pilots over Germany. As an aside, I can remember my Dad telling me about these when I was 6 years old. Dad was in a radar battalion which may have tracked such things. His stories of the Foo Fighters might have been my first knowledge of anything having to do with Unidentified Flying Objects.
"Taken" introduces an interesting aspect to the familiar Roswell and Wright-Patterson legends, that of the one Grey who survived the crash and was taken to an observation cell at Wright/Pat. Some say it was Edwards, but at any rate, this little guy who became known as "J-Rod" supposedly lived for many years afterward, on the base, and it is rumored that Eisenhower knew about him. But in the show, there is another survivor. I don't wanna tell you too much about him, except to say that he is similar to "The Man Who Fell To Earth" in certain respects.
All of this really makes you wonder what happened in 1947, and how the secrecy led to the creation of our modern day National Security State. In all of these shows, "Blue Book", or "Taken" or "X-Files", a dominant theme has to do with who is generating the aircraft. Is it the Russians? Could it be the Germans? Maybe they are ours, and part of a Top Secret project.
This is what really led to all the Cold War paranoia. To be sure, both the US and the Commies were frightened of each other's unknown nuclear capability.
But the real fear was created by the UFO panic that was in the air from 1947 to 1952, because no one knew for certain what they were or where they were coming from.
That is - no civilians knew, nor did most military and politicians.
The secrets have been kept all this time by a select few, and those secrets have shaped the world as we know it. Most of the electronic technology that has swept the world since 1947 has been developed from information that has been kept secret.
UFOs crashed here on Earth and the world changed, and here were are today over 70 years later still fascinated by the subject because we don't know the whole story. Thank goodness, then for "Disclosure Emissaries" like Steven Spielberg and Chris Carter and the producers of other high quality shows like "Project Blue Book". From them, we have at least learned something over the years, and I think we have a pretty good general idea of what the truth is.
One thing is for sure : We know it wasn't a weather balloon that crashed at Roswell!
"Taken" is off to a great start. I will be trying to dole out the episodes to myself rather than binge them, which I can do because I own the dvd, so there is no library return date. So I will probably try to watch one per week, and will report back on how things are developing. ////
(this part was written this morning, Saturday July 13) : Today is my last day off until next month, and in just a few hours I will be heading out the door to go to the Paul McCartney concert at Dodger Stadium. I've never been to a concert there, only ballgames, so I am gonna leave a little early to allow for traffic and long lines. I am super stoked to see Sir Paul, and as I've mentioned my concert-going career will now have come full circle because when I was six years old, I rode in the car when my Dad drove my sisters to Dodger Stadium to see The Beatles in August of 1966.
So, no hike or any other activities today, just preparing for the concert. I did have a nice hike at Santa Susana yesterday, going up the Devil's Slide and back. I will try to check in for a brief post-concert report tonight, though I imagine it will be pretty late when I return. Stay tuned, though, and by tomorrow at the latest I will deliver a full report.
And have a wonderful day yourself. Tons of love all day long and into the night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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