Lance Mannion

Not a religion!

Updated.

Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Senator in Nevada, apparently believes that God allows rapes to happen as alternative way to bring beautiful babies into the world and that a rape victim who gets pregnant by her rapist shouldn’t want or need an abortion because God wants her to have that beautiful baby.

It’s all part of His plan.

Listen to Angle talking about His plan on Huffington Post.

For thirty years now the lamestream media---thanks for your one and only contribution to the culture, Sarah Palin---has covered the Radical Religious Right not only as if their twisted, 19th century brand of apocalyptic authoritarianism is a just folks brand of Christianity but as if it is Christianity. 

There are no true Christians except Right Wing Fundamentalists, just as there are no true Americans except Middle Western and Southern Reactionaries.

It’s not Christianity.  It’s practically its opposite.  It’s a dark religion of shame and hatred built around the superstitious appeasement of a capricious and malignant God who plays games with people’s lives and enjoys making them miserable.

The Anti-Abortion side of it turns it into a fertility cult in which women are the sacrificial offerings.

What the Wev says.

Update:  Via Andrew Sullivan, good Christian Sharron Angle’s version of WWJD?

The spies next door

There are probably national security reasons that make the story of the busted Russian spy ring less amusing than it appears at first, second, and third glance.

But, look, comrades, if you’re going to run a network of sleeper cells with agents working so deep undercover for so long that they probably have to remind themselves every day that that they’re spies, and you don’t want people to snicker when the operation’s compromised and the details come out, try to run it in a way that if what you did sounds like the plot of a movie, it’s a Hitchcock movie and not one by the Coen Brothers.

I mean, really?  A femme fatale with a Facebook page on which she practically brags she’s a spy?

 

“Anna” only shares her profile information with people with the proper security clearance.  If you know “Anna”, add her as a friend but don’t give your real name and use the password Morning Glory.

Interested in: Assets

Looking for:  “Networking.” ;-)

Activities:  Espionage, cryptography, keeping up with the gossip from back home in Vladivostok.

Favorite books:  The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad,  The Human Factor by Graham Greene, anything and everything by John Le Carre.

Favorite movies:  The Third Man, No Way Out, Salt.

Come to think of it, though, Hitchcock would have had some sinister fun with spies so determined to blend into their suburban neighborhood that unmarried agents living as husband and wife have children together and become obsessed with landscaping--"They couldn't have been spies. Look what she did with the hydrangeas."---and secret stashes of money buried in the woods outside a small town populated by eccentrics.

That’s our local connection, the cache of cash in the woods:

The complaints state that in 2004, one of the defendants, known as Christopher R. Metsos, received money from a Russian government official in New York City, then drove up to Wurtsboro and buried a portion of the money in a field. In 2006, two co-defendants, known as Patricia Mills and Christopher Zottoli, traveled to the New York area from Seattle, drove up to Wurtsboro and dug up the money. Law enforcement had installed a GPS device in the car Metsos used to drive to Wurtsboro and captured Mills and Zottoli digging up the money on video surveillance.

Locals took the news that there’d been spies in their midst in stride:

Lynn Manto, owner of Lynn's Flowers on Sullivan Street, called the revelation "crazy," but not surprising for a place rumored to have had mob links. Old mine shafts and railroad tunnels nearby offer many opportunities for hiding, she said.

"If you're going to run or hide, Wurtsboro's the perfect place," she said. "This is a place you can disappear or make people disappear."

Not sure what Hitchcock would have made of her, whether he’d have had her knowing where all the bodies are buried---and going out to check on them now and then---or have given her her own mob connections the spies threaten to expose with their blundering.

The character actress he’d cast in the role would depend on which direction he went with her.  But I know whom he’d have had playing this part:

Charlotte Strohsahl, when asked about the spy allegations, said nothing surprised her at her age. The 71-year-old Wurtsboro resident had just one concern when she read about the network in the newspaper and saw news reports.

"I'd like to know, where's the money?" she said. "Can we all go look for it? Did they find it?”

The Siren’s probably ahead of me on this one.

Thelma Ritter, right?

Photo from “Anna Chapman’s” Facebook page via The Huffington Post.

Rumpole and the Hand of God

Watched an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey last night, Rumpole’s Return, in which Rumpole’s client, an accountant accused of murder, refuses to cooperate in his own defense because he thinks God wants him punished and has intervened with a miracle to make sure he’s found guilty.

The accountant’s innocent, of course, but he’d fled from a religious cult after discovering it was a con designed to separate the desperately lonely and lost from their money and put it in the pockets of the “master.”  The master put a hit on the accountant to shut him up but the would-be assassin didn’t count on the accountant putting up a fight and wound up stabbed with his own knife.

Because there were no witnesses to the finish of the fight and the dead man was a respectable member of the aristocracy and the accountant himself is confused about what happened, the police charge the accountant with murder.

Their key evidence against him is a note found in his room that says, “Sunlight to Children of the Sun! Blood to Children of the Dark!”

The note’s in the accountant’s handwriting but apparently written in the dead man’s blood.

Since the accountant knows he didn’t use the dead man as an inkwell, he assumes that its existence is miraculous, the hand of God reaching out to collar him and throw him into prison.

And who is he to tell God He’s got the wrong man?

The accountant’s first lawyer gives the case up as hopeless but then Rumpole steps in.

Rumpole prides himself on his expertise on blood evidence.

Rumpole is able to show that there’s a simple scientific explanation for how the note appears to have been written in the dead man’s blood.  There’s no miracle.  God has not had His hand in it, unless you count God’s role in setting up the rules of biology and blood chemistry.

Relieved that the hand of God hasn’t been raised against him, the accountant tells his story, evidence about the dead man’s involvement with the cult is presented, and the verdict comes back, “Not guilty.”

During cross-examination, Rumpole asks the accountant how he feels knowing that no miracle had taken place.

The accountant admits that he’s disappointed.

A part of him would rather have been sent to prison for life rather than know that God hadn’t been playing games with his life.

That part of him would rather believe that God cared enough about the fact of his existence to want to make it miserable, for no particular reason, than face the possibility that God is indifferent to his existence or, more terrifying still, doesn’t exist Himself to care one way or the other.

Which, it seems to me, is a feeling the accountant shares with a lot of believers in the real world.  They’d rather believe in a God who plays games with their lives than in one who is apparently indifferent. 

These are the people who can be counted on to explain every disaster as God’s will.

Even when I was a devout little altar boy I had trouble with that one.

God doesn’t tell people to build towns on flood plains.

He doesn’t tell them to build slums on hills that collapse in heavy rains.

He doesn’t tell them to build slums, period.

He doesn’t tell them to build subdivisions full of houses made of cheap and substandard materials in defiance of safety codes on flat ground near coasts that are routinely pounded by hurricanes.

He doesn’t tell them to buy up Congressmen and Vice-Presidents and whole federal regulatory agencies so that they can sink their deep water drills far below the ocean floor with a near complete disregard for the safety of their employees and the ecosystem and with no plans for when something goes wrong and without the technology to stop leaks and clean up the resulting messes.

What God did do was give us the brains to know not to do these things.

Maybe because my father was a scientist and the nuns who taught at our school all had college degrees in their subjects---the nun who taught my seventh and eighth grade science classes had a master’s degree---but I grew up thinking that one of God’s great gifts to us was a world that didn’t operate by magic.

He plunked us down in a universe that operates according to rules that can be figured out and then gave us the brains to figure out those rules with.

He gave us the brains to figure out how to grow crops and husband livestock.

He gave us the brains to figure out how to make clothes to defeat the weather.

He gave us the brains to figure out how to build houses that wouldn’t fall down at the first breeze.

He gave us the brains to figure out that we could put boats in the water and row and then sail them to points far over the horizon and back again.

He gave us the brains to figure out how our own bodies work so that we could treat illnesses, fix injuries, invent vaccines to prevent diseases, cure some of those diseases, improve the general functioning of all the parts and increase the working life of those parts.

He gave us the brains to figure out how to heat and power our homes and run our machines by burning fossil fuels and he gave us the brains to figure out we need to stop doing that and figure out cheaper, more efficient, less poisonous ways of heating and powering our homes and running our machines.

What He didn’t give us was brains enough to appreciate the brains He did give us and use them all the time.

He didn’t give us enough brains to know to rely on the brains he did give us and trust to them to figure things out and not want to live in a world that was all figured out for us by others who told us that it all worked by magic and that they were the only ones who knew how to make that magic happen.

It probably wasn’t very far into human history when somebody noticed that where some seeds had been dropped in the spring plants were growing in the summer.  And it probably wasn’t very long after that, possibly even immediately, somebody got the idea to see what would happen if the seeds from those plants were dropped in another spot.

It probably wasn’t very far into human history when somebody noticed that when two rocks are struck together in the vicinity of some dried leaves those leaves catch fire.

And it probably wasn’t very far into human history when somebody who liked to spend time watching the night sky noticed that the stars moved in regular and repeating patterns, that relationships within groups of them were fixed, and that those patterns and relationships were the same way over there as they were over here, and if you kept your eye on them when you were out walking at night you could get from here to way over there and back again without getting lost.

Some of those somebodies were eager to share their discoveries with everybody else in their tribe or village.

They were the first scientists and engineers.

But many of those somebodies liked the awestruck look on people’s faces when they performed the “magic” that their discoveries allowed and they decided to keep the explanations to themselves and let people believe they had special and secret powers.

They were the first priests.

For some reason, over the course of human history, most people have preferred to be ruled by the priests than be guided by the scientists.

They have preferred to trust in the magical powers of self-appointed authorities than in the brains that their God or gods gave them.

They have preferred to believe that the world works by magic and not that it just works.

They have preferred to believe, for example, that volcanoes blow their tops whenever a god gets angry because the people haven’t been obedient enough to the priests than that they blow up because of geophysical forces that can be figured out and predicted and if you spend the money on volcano monitors you can know when a volcano is working its way towards an eruption and tell people living around it to get the hell out of the way.

They have preferred to believe, for another example, that poisoned oceans will clean themselves up if everybody gets together to pray and so they don’t have to hold anybody in a nice suit accountable for the poisoning or pay out of pocket for the clean up or give up relying so much on burning fossil fuels to run their machines and so don’t have to keep poisoning the oceans and the air.

They have preferred to believe that horrors and miseries that have been caused by their rulers’ negligence, greed, incompetence, and fecklessness or by the greed, incompetence, stupidity, and sociopathic recklessness of thieves and vandals in nice suits are their own fault and they are being justly punished for not being obedient enough to the priests.

They have preferred to believe in an irritable, vindictive, capricious, and often malicious God who cares about their existence at least enough to want to play games with them and make them miserable rather than one who says, “I gave you the brains, use them.”

__________________

I’m not much of a believer anymore.  I can’t claim to be an atheist because I backslide all the time.  I’ll find myself believing in God at least to the point of being mad at Him for not existing.  But when I did believe I believed that He had given us as His first and most important commandment, Come find me, and that the way to look for him was through applying our brains to figure out how His universe works---I believed that scientists more than priests were doing what He wanted us to do and a rocket to the moon meant more to Him than a thousand novenas.

Apparently, Plato would have agreed with me.

Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund says that even if they aren’t believers themselves most scientists aren’t hostile to religion.

PZ Myers is one scientist who is, and he’s glad to explain why.

Sean Carroll says it’s time to let go:

I understand the reluctance to let go of religion as the lens through which we view questions of meaning and morality. For thousands of years it was the best we could do; it provided social structures and a framework for thinking about our place in the world. But that framework turns out not to be right, and it’s time to move on.

Rather than opening our eyes and having the courage and clarity to accept the world as it is, and to tackle some of the real challenges it presents, as a society we insist on clinging to ideas that were once perfectly reasonable, but have long since outlived their usefulness. Nature obeys laws, we are part of nature, and our job is to understand our lives in the context of reality as it really is. Once that attitude goes from being “extremist” to being mainstream, we might start seeing some real progress.

“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”

Matt Zoller Seitz on the 30th Anniversary of the release of Airplane!

  At the same time “Airplane!” wasn’t just a collection of bits. The narrative hewed closely to that of “Zero Hour!,” and if you can factor out all the silliness — no small feat with a movie that segues from a “Casablanca”-inspired romantic flashback to a “Saturday Night Fever”-like dance number — what remains is a compact, even classical piece of filmmaking.

“A lot of comedies in the last 30 years have wanted to be ‘Airplane!,’ ” said Patton Oswalt, a comedian and actor and the voice of the hero in “Ratatouille.” “But most of those movies took the wrong message from ‘Airplane!’ They were gag, gag, gag, gag, where ‘Airplane!’ is really structured, driving the story along all the time. In a weird way it’s like a Beatlesmovie. It looks like the easiest thing in the world, but there’s a lot of sweat and blood that went into it.”

Read all of Matt’s article in The New York Times and be sure you watch his video too.

A Democrat and a Republican walk into a joke…

Well, technically one rows and the other floats into the joke.

From Ted McLaughlin at Best of the Blogs:

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

"She rolled her eyes and said, "You must be an Obama Democrat."

"I am," replied the man. "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct. But I have no idea what to do with your information, and I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me."

The man smiled and responded, "You must be a Republican."

"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"

Whole joke and punchline here.

Thanks to BoraZ.

On locking up for the night

No wolves at the door.  No bears either.  No bandits or Indians.  No marauders of any kind on two feet or four.  No storm.  No high winds or rain.  I’m not shutting anything out.  I’m locking the snugness in.

They are at Bag’s end, he is a hobbit, goo goo g’joob…

From Slate:

Ten movies that never should have been made---and thankfully weren’t

Orson Welles as Christ, Paul McCartney as Frodo, Al Pacino as Noriega, and seven other near-misses.

According to Roy Carr's The Beatles at the Movies, talks were once in the works for a Beatle-zation—with John Lennon wanting to play Gollum, Paul McCartney Frodo, George Harrison Gandalf, and Ringo Starr Sam. Collaborating with director John Boorman, screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg thought the Beatles should play the four hobbits (and agreed with McCartney that he would be the ideal Frodo).

Read the whole story.

Tip of the bowler to Rob Hill.

Three mothers and their babies

At the doctor’s office this morning, young mother struggling to keep her two and a half year old quiet and calm and within arm’s reach as she’s going over some paperwork with the receptionist.  The little boy’s two and a half, full of cheerful energy, talkative and inquisitive.  Not misbehaving, just testing.  The kind of precocious kid who wants to know everything, see everything, have things explained to him, and explain what he’s doing and what he’s discovered.  You can tell he wears his mother out at the same time he fills her with pride.  She’s aware that everyone in the waiting room is trying not to laugh at her frazzled efforts to rein him in.

“And he’s sick,” she says to the room, with a nervous laugh.  “You should see him when he’s himself.”

“You’d have to shoot me,” someone says.  It’s a woman in her sixties in a chair on the far side of the waiting room.   She’s emphatic.  “You’d have to shoot me.”

People around her chuckle.  They know she means what she’s about to say, which is, “I could not go through that again.”

The young mother smiles, apologetically.  She can’t help feeling criticized even though the older woman is actually offering a compliment and some encouragement.

“I did it twice.  I don’t know how I got through it.  You’d have to shoot me.  I couldn’t do it again.”

The little boy is standing still, looking at the older woman curiously.  The older woman says to him, “My little boy isn’t little anymore.  He’s twenty-nine.”  She adds for the grown-ups’ benefits.  “Thank God.”

“Mine is eighteen,” the receptionist says.  “He’s graduating from high school tonight.”

“My daughter’s thirty-two,” says the older woman.

“I watched him sleep this morning,” the receptionist says.  “Can you believe that?  I watched him sleep and I thought how can that big man lying there be my baby?  But he is.  He’s my baby.”

“Wait until you see him in his cap and gown,” the older mother says.

“He’s still my baby.”  She rolls her chair away from the counter and reaches for a piece of paper coming out of the printer.  She hands the paper to the young mother who gives it to her little boy.  “Here you go.”

“What’s this?” he asks, holding it in both hands and frowning at it as if he can read it but isn’t quite sure he likes what he’s reading.

“It’s paperwork.  You need to keep it for me.  It’s your job.”

“My job?”  He sounds thrilled to have a job.  “My job?”

“Yes, your job.”

The little boy nods and takes his mother’s hand and starts to lead her towards the door.  He’s ready to go to work.

The older mother says to the receptionist again, “Wait until you see him in his cap and gown.  Worse!  Wait until you see him on his wedding day.  I tell you, I cried!  When we did the mother and son dance?”

“I got our song all picked out,” the receptionist says.  “I won’t ever tell him that.”

“My son picked ours out.  He knew the right song too.  He told me he’d picked it out when he was a kid.  He knew I loved it because I used to play it over and over when they were both little.  When he led me out onto the dance floor and the DJ put on that song?  He was crying and I was crying.”

The young mother and the little boy are about to go.

“Say goodbye,” she tells him.

“Goodbye,” he says, “I have to go to my job.”

They leave.

“You’d have to shoot me,” the older woman says.  “You’d have to shoot me.”

To love is to suffer

Sonja: To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.

--from Love and Death, tonight’s feature for family movie night.

Bertie Wooster on the mischief-making talents of a certain redhead

Aunt Dahlia, describing this young blister as a one-girl beauty chorus, had called her shots perfectly correctly.  Her outer crust was indeed of a nature to cause those beholding it to rock back on their heels with a startled whistle.  But while equipped with eyes like twin stars, hair ruddier than the cherry, oomph, espieglerie and all the fixings, B. Wickham had also the disposition and general outlook on life of a ticking bomb.  In her society you always had the feeling that something was likely to go off at any moment with a pop.  You never knew what she was going to do next or into what murky depths of soup she would carelessly plunge you.

…In a word, Roberta, daughter of the late Sir Cuthbert and Lady Wickham of Skeldings Hall, Herts, was pure dynamite and better kept at a distance by all those who aimed at leading the peaceful life.

---from How Right You Are, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Toy Story 3: Sex, lust, love, and romance in the world of Pixar

You don’t need me to tell you that Toy Story 3 is worth seeing.  You already know if you’re going.

If you have kids who can’t drive themselves to the multiplex, you’re going.

If you loved either of the first two Toy Stories, you’re going.

If you’re a fan of Pixar, you’re going.

If you don’t fall into any of those categories, you’re going because somebody you know is going to drag you to it or bribe you or browbeat you into it and you’ll go along with them because you always do, which is how you wound up at Get Him to the Greek wondering what everybody else thought was so funny.

Otherwise you’re just counting the days till Inception opens and trying to decide if Iron Man 2 is worth another look.

There’s nothing I can say that’ll change any of that for any of you.

So, just to get me from here to the heart of this post, a few bullet points I’d have twittered during the movie itself if the blonde hadn’t taken my phone away:

• The producers could have gone farther with Barbie.
• They probably went as far as they needed to go with Ken.
• As it is, they were on the brink of having too much fun with him.
• Yes, that is Whoopi’s voice.
• Andy’s mom seems to be overcompensating for issues that aren’t related to Andy or his sister.
• Spanish Buzz is a hoot.
• The Gipsy King’s pasodoble version of You’ve Got a Friend In Me, Hay un amigo en mi, saves that song as a song.
• Although Robert Goulet’s cover at the end of Toy Story 2 may have made that job redundant.
• The toys’ story is finished with this one.
• You may not have known it needed finishing until you see this one and then you can see that it’s there from the very first scene of the original.
• If you had any doubt, Woody is the hero.  He is the toy whose story this has been.  Woody is a very special toy.
• He’s not special because he’s Andy’s favorite.  He’s Andy’s favorite because Andy somehow felt how special Woody was from the start.
• I think it has something to do with Andy’s father who is not in the movies but whose toy Woody must have been originally.
• Woody is vintage, after all.
• Really, despite what it says on the soles of his boots, Woody isn’t Andy’s.  Andy is Woody’s.
• The movie ducks its main point at the end, but it has to.
• Shrek 3 gets worse and worse in hindsight.

None of that you need me to tell you and none of it will change your mind about whether or not you’re going.  What you might want to know, if you’re going, is that if you get stuck in the line at the snack counter and miss the traditional Pixar short before the feature, you won’t have missed much.

Day & Night looks like it was made as a demonstration of something, possibly some apprentice director at Pixar’s ability to see a whole storyboard through.  It’s a pointless series of not all that funny visual gags with no real story or characters to tie them together.  Day and Night are personified as two blobular 2D cartoon characters that seemed to me to have been inspired by the sort of health and safety films the nuns used to show us in grade school.  In those films the blobs were blobs so that that could be laughed at when they got themselves electrocuted, flame-broiled, squashed, shredded, and disintegrated when they ignored the safety precautions the films were designed to teach us not to ignore.

The difference is that those blobs usually wore hats and sometimes had mustaches.

Same sorts of noses though.

Day and Night exist as transparent outlines of themselves against a void.  They contain within their outlines the world, which moves and changes as Day and Night move.  Inside Day it’s daytime.  Inside Night it’s night.  Clever, huh?  The joke is that Day and Night are jealous of each other’s contents.  Day wishes he could contain Las Vegas and fireworks.  Night wishes he could contain…

Well, that’s just it.  What Night mainly wishes he could contain is pretty girls in bikinis.

The Pixar world is not a sexless world, although the opportunities for overt sexual expression have been severely limited by the fact that the main characters of Pixar movies tend not to be equipped for sex of the normal human kind, being toys, cars, bugs, monsters, fish, rats, and robots.

In the movies that have featured important human characters---Up, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles---only Mr and Mrs Incredible are a hot and frisky couple.  Carl and Ellie fall in love when they are children and when we see them as adults they are already an old married couple even when they are a young newly married couple, and Linguini and Collette spend most of their movie cooking, which I suppose could be a metaphor but when you have a romance between a male character named after a long, limp noodle and a female character named after a bisexual writer with a scandalous and unconventional sex life, you probably don’t want to stretch any metaphors. 

Love and romance are very important matters in almost every Pixar movie, except Finding Nemo, and physical attraction is always portrayed as being a natural part of the mix, even in the Toy Story movies---Mr and Mrs Potato Head are a couple of real hot potatoes.  Buzz and Jessie are excited by each other’s company, especially when Buzz is in Spanish mode.  Part of the joke of the Barbie and Ken romance in Toy Story 3 is that we all know what they look like naked.  Their anatomical incorrectness---incompleteness is more like it--- would seem to be a problem, but they are drawn together by a mutual fetishistic love of fashion and trying on outfits for each other is their version of sex, which makes the interrogation scene very kinky.

So, as I said, sex isn’t absent from the Pixar world.

But plain, unsublimated, unmasked, unleashed lust is new.

So, as far as I can remember, are the fart and piss jokes that open Day & Night. 

Fart and piss jokes and other forms of scatological humor are Dreamworks specialties.

What’s even odder about Night’s lusting after Day’s pretty girls is that the main points of interest in both Day and Night’s world’s tend to appear inside them right in their bellies and lower abdominal regions.  The girls frolic inside Day at just about the spot where it’s clear from Night’s expression he’d like them frolicking inside him.

Strange, strange little film but its main flaw is that it just isn’t funny.  Stay in line and wait for your popcorn.

Now that I’m done not telling you whether or not you should go see Toy Story 3 I have to tell you that yesterday I was talking to Steve Kuusisto and Steve asked me if I thought he should go see it.  He had no plans to, but he was curious.

As it happens, Steve hasn’t seen any Pixar movies.  For a good reason.  Until very recently he couldn’t see any movies.  He could only go hear them.

Steve, as you know if you read his blog or have read his wonderful memoir, is legally blind.  He loves movies and he has always gone to them, but he usually skipped movies that were more visual and less dialogue intensive because there was no point.  Unless someone described what was happening on the screen in detail, quickly, something other people in the theaters resented, he “saw” nothing.  Pixar movie have terrific dialog but they’re still cartoons and the point of a cartoon is what it looks like.

In May of 2009, however, he had an operation on one of his eyes that has made him a lot less blind and he can now enjoy movies in a more visual way.

So, the question was, how much would he enjoy Toy Story 3 or, for that matter, either of the first two Toy Stories?

I told him he’d probably have a good time, but given that he’s never seen any other Pixar movie, he’d have a better time putting a few of those in his Netflix queue.

On the car ride home after we saw Toy Story 3 Sunday---I got treated to the movie as one of my Father’s Day presents---we Mannions discussed where we’d rank it on our lists of Pixar favorites.

I said I don’t think about the Toy Story movies in the way I think about all the others because the Toy Story movies are the only ones I think I wouldn’t have enjoyed if I hadn’t seen them in the company of the Mannion boys. 

We’ve seen all the Pixars together as a family, except the first Toy Story.  We went as a family.  There were only three of us then.  Oliver was on his way.  Ken was only two and a half and the experience scared him.  It was his first trip to a movie theater and he was overwhelmed.  When the army men appeared and the screen filled with a close up of Sarge, Ken ran for the doors, saying, “Goodbye, movie.  See you later!”  I went after him and we explored the mall while the blonde was left to watch the movie on her lonesome.  But all the others after that were group outings.  So I don’t know for a fact that I’d have enjoyed any of them as movies in their own rights if I’d seen them the first time without kids in tow, but there are several I’m pretty sure I would have and I recommended those to Steve.

I’m not saying which ones.  I’m leaving that up to you.  We don’t have to limit this to Pixar flicks either.

What supposed family or children’s movies would you recommend as good movies for adults who won’t be going to see them with kids?

_________________

Oliver Mannion says that you don’t have to have kids to enjoy Toy Story 3 or either of the other two Two Stories.  He says that you’ll like it if you’re someone who like the authors of the best children’s books, Raold Dahl, for example, who remembers what it was really like to be kid.

Asperger’s

By now I ought to be able to write about Asperger’s with some objectivity and perspective.

Asperger’s is not the worst thing a kid or his parents might have to deal with.  But as far as I’ve ever been able to see, Asperger’s kids lead lives of daily frustration, disappointment, self-recrimination, bafflement, and loneliness and it’s amazing to me that an Asperger’s kid can head off to bed at night, knowing what he’s going to face in the morning, cheerfully wishing his parents a goodnight and even more amazing that in the morning he can march himself out the door to school, whistling.

Today was a morning of school-related parental failure and I just can’t bring myself to be objective or find any perspective.  All I feel is that if I ran into Moby right now I’d punch him in the nose.

In an interview with The New York Times, the musician Moby talked about how he was a purist when it came to tea, preferring it untainted by milk or sugar. “It might be a function of Asperger’s,” he said.

“You have Asperger’s?” asked the interviewer.

“No,” Moby said. “I just like to pretend I do. It makes me sound more interesting.”

Globe & Mail columnist Elizabeth Renzetti doesn’t say how first hand her experiences with Asperger’s are, but she must be close to someone who has to deal with it to know this:

So is Asperger’s “cool” now, as Moby seems to think? Is it merely geek chic, the undiagnosed condition that may have afflicted Mozart and Einstein? Not if you ask the thousands of people who struggle every day to function at work and school in a society that may view them as quirky, but doesn’t really understand how difficult it is to exist when you are, essentially, always speaking a foreign language.  Or is it more likely that people share (even in some small way) the suspicion that this is all just a trendy camouflage, and agree with stand-up Denis Leary’s allegedly comic observation that “your kid is NOT autistic. He’s just stupid. Or lazy. Or both.”

I think I’d like to punch Denis Leary in the nose too.

Dealing with Asperger’s isn’t a matter of accepting that you are mildly and interestingly eccentric.

It’s living out of synch with everybody around you and knowing it and not having a clue how to fix that.  It’s feeling as though you are from another planet even when you are with the people who know you and love you best.  It’s suspecting that you are always missing the point, that you are not quite in on the joke, that there was something that was said you should have paid closer attention to, that you said something you shouldn’t have said but you have no clue what it was or why you shouldn’t have said it.  It’s wondering, all the time, “What did I do this time?”

Whatever Renzetti’s experiences are, her column offers some of the objectivity and perspective I can’t manage right now.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip Steve Kuusisto.

Time catches up with all of us, even Cary Grant

 

Cary Grant could still move pretty well for a guy his age in 1964.

He was 60 when he made Father Goose, this past weekend’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night, and while the movie doesn’t require him to outrun strafing biplanes and hang from the cliffs of Mt Rushmore or climb drainpipes and creep across rooftops while eluding the gendarmes, as he was doing for Hitchcock a decade before when he could still move pretty well for a man in his 50s, he does have to dive for cover from strafing fighter planes, vault fallen trees, and catch a fish with his bare hands.

It’s not much, but because he could do it gracefully, fluidly, and with some agility and alacrity, and because he was in excellent shape, he gives the impression that he could do a lot more and if the script had called for it he wouldn’t have looked too ridiculous fighting it out hand to hand with a squad of Japanese soldiers.

He doesn’t look as though he’d have won with his flying fists and karate skills.  Just as though he wouldn’t have won by causing the soldiers to die of laughter.

One thing he can’t do is carry a gun.  In the several scenes in which he has to carry a rifle he holds it as if it’s an oversized rolled up newspaper he’s about to use to swat a very large fly, one-handed, at waist level, with no sign of its having any heft or that he expects any kickback if he has to fire it, which he’ll to do without aiming.

But then Grant never got much practice carrying a gun, or wielding any weapons, over the course of his long movie career.  He probably has the lowest body count of any leading man in Hollywood history, if you don’t count ships he sunk in Destination Toyko, and he didn’t use a gun in that one, he did it with torpedoes.

Otherwise, he moves and acts like a younger and more active man, and you can almost believe he’s in his mid to late forties, instead of five years from collecting Social Security, which is helpful to enjoying the movie because his love interest’s played by Leslie Caron, who was nearly thirty years younger than he was.

Grant plays Walter Eckland, an expatriate ex-history professor hiding out from responsibility, civilization, and any demands on his time or sympathies in the South Pacific at the outbreak of World War II.  Eckland is coerced into helping the war effort by an old friend, an officer in the British Navy, played by Trevor Howard, who puts him to work as a frontline spotter reporting back to headquarters on the movement of Japanese ships and planes.

Eckland’s job is to sit alone on an otherwise deserted island with a radio and a pair of binoculars and watch the skies and the ocean horizon and hope the Japanese don’t figure out he’s there.

The job would seem to suit him.  Eckland is misanthropic, anti-social, and totally self-centered.  At the start of the movie he seems to believe he can ignore the war entirely and that the war will ignore him.  He’s also grown lazy and sloppy since he's left teaching and spending days on end in solitude with nothing to he has to do, nowhere he has to be, and nobody he has to impress should be a dream come true for him.

But, minimal as it is, it’s still a responsibility and it’s still a connection to a society he has rejected.  Worse, it requires him to stay sober for longer stretches of time than he’s used to or can tolerate.

He has no choice, though, but to make the best of it.  Which he does, grumpily and under protest, until his island’s invaded….

By Leslie Caron and a company of schoolgirls.

Caron, as Catherine Freneau, a teacher and daughter of a French diplomat, and her charges have been stranded along the way trying to escape the Japanese advance.  Eckland comes to their rescue, reluctantly.  Plot complications in the form of the war prevent the Navy from rescuing Eckland from those he’s rescued and he’s stuck with their care and feeding.

He resents the intrusion, he resents the responsibility, and he resents Catherine’s insistence that he act as a respectable father figure for the girls.

Catherine is as prim and proper, neat and tidy, and respectable and responsible as Eckland is none of those.  Naturally, they fall in love.

After a period of hating each other during which Eckland, under the influence of Catherine’s example and the girls’ surprising affection for him, unconsciously grows back into someone more like his former self, responsible, caring, considerate, and sober.

Father Goose is a fun film and Grant and Caron make a plausible pair of potential lovers, as long as you accept that she’s playing a few years older than her real age so that she’s closer to forty than thirty and he’s playing a guy in his late forties, somewhat weathered by the tropical sun and rusting from the inside out thanks to his heavy drinking. 

And you can accept this because, as I said, Grant moves so well.

But then Eckland shaves.

Removing Eckland’s beard was probably meant as a signifier that he had completely reformed.  Cary Grant with two week’s worth of stubble is a drunken bum.  Cary Grant clean-shaven is…Cary Grant.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to come across.

It’s not how it came across to me the other night.

Cary Grant unshaven looked like a character named Walter Eckland.  Walter Eckland beardless looked like an old man who used to be Cary Grant.

I can’t swear to it but I’m pretty sure Father Goose was the first Cary Grant movie I ever saw.  I don’t know exactly how old I was.  I have a habit of thinking that everything important that happened to me as a kid happened when I was nine.  And I might actually have been nine.  Safe to say I was somewhere around nine but no younger than seven and no older than twelve.  What I remember clearly is loving the movie.  It was one of my favorites for a long time afterwards.

What I don’t remember is thinking of Cary Grant as old.

At whatever age I saw it I would have been looking at a Cary Grant who was right around the age of both my grandfathers but I sure didn’t think of Walter Eckland, or Cary Grant, as grandfatherly.

I don’t think it was the case that I was less of an ageist when I was nine…or ten or eleven or however old I was.  I definitely thought of my grandfathers as looking grandfatherly.

I think it was partly that I just was more willing to accept whatever a movie required me to accept in order to enjoy it.  If the movie required me to believe that Cary Grant could take on Japanese soldiers and sweep a woman young enough to be his daughter off her feet than that’s what I believed.

But it was also that Cary Grant was Cary Grant and even as young as I was I understood that Cary Grant was different.

Time and he had an understanding.

If Father Goose was the first Cary Grant movie I saw, Operation Petticoat was the second.  I got to know Cary Grant as a somewhat gruff middle-aged (but not grandfatherly) man.  Seeing him as a young man, seeing him as what he was for most of his career, which had to wait until I was in high school and college when our family got cable and then I was able to see his movies on a big screen at second run houses and college film festivals was a revelation. 

And now, having seen all those movies, I can sort out his career chronologically in my memory, and understand that one of the great things about Grant was how gracefully he aged.

I don’t mean that he kept his looks and his hair and his figure longer and better than most normally mortal human beings are lucky enough to do.  I mean that if you watch him get older from Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings, through Notorious and His Girl Friday, and on through It Takes a Thief and North By Northwest, and then on up to Charade and Father Goose, you can see the way he altered his acting style, his habits of speech, his whole screen persona to work in the fact that he was getting older.

He was careful about choosing his movies.  There’s no Spirit of St Louis or Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in his filmography.  But it’s not just that he never tried to play any characters ridiculously younger than himself.  I see Eckland as in his late forties but the part could have been played as if he’s the same age as Catherine, and the reason I see him as older, although not as old as Grant was, is that Grant didn’t let himself try to make Eckland younger.  Eckland comes off as ten or fifteen years younger than Grant because Grant could move as if he was ten or fifteen years younger.  But he never slips up with an expression, a look, a phrasing of a line, or a gesture that reminds us of the truly young Cary Grant.

Other leading men and women have managed this, the ones who were good actors.  I just can’t think of any others who did it as well or who made the transitions as seamlessly.  Think of any of your favorites and odds are there’s a five or even ten year period when they were playing “young”---that is they were still playing parts as if they were still the hot young romantic leads they’d been---when they should have already moved on.

Jeff Bridges!

That’s one.

There’s nothing that does more to make actors look old than trying to play young when they’re not and this includes having their characters do things that the actors themselves are clearly too old and stiff to really do, so please, Mr Ford, Mr Speilberg, no more Indiana Jones movies!

Walter Eckland is in his late forties because he was played by Cary Grant but Grant himself did nothing to make Eckland that young.  Grant just was that much younger than his real age.

Which I guess is why it came as such a shock to see him without the beard and realize that as slowly as it was coming upon him old age was coming.

Now of course I know that Cary Grant got old.  Very old.  He lived another twenty-two years and I saw him in his dignified, white-haired dotage on the Oscars and talk shows.  But that was the real Cary Grant.

Cary Grant, the screen presence, aged but he did not get old.

Grant did Father Goose for the fun of playing against his image.  He was looking for a part that would teach audiences to see him in a very different way so that he could start playing the kinds of character parts that formerly leading actors take on when they are closing out their careers.  But then he made only one more movie after Father Goose, Walk Don’t Run, the one and only film in which he played a fatherly version of his former self.

A different thing from playing a father, by the way.

And he never played grandfatherly versions of his former self, as Clint Eastwood has been doing.

He never went on to play judges, generals, crime bosses, old college professors, or, well, fathers and grandfathers.

He aged gracefully and beautifully but he did not get old on screen.

As I said there are no embarrassments in his career like The Spirit of St Louis.  But there’s no Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, no Road to Perdition, no On Golden Pond.  Nothing like The Shootist or True Grit.  Nothing like Atlantic City or Local Hero.

There’s only those few moments in Father Goose like the one on the beach just before the climactic Japanese attack when he looks over his arm at Leslie Caron and you can see it, around his eyes, along his jaw.

The fact that time catches up with all of us, even Cary Grant.

Ward Cleaver, Steve Douglas, Jim Anderson, Lance Mannion

From the Department of Communications:

Lance Mannion wishes everyone a Happy Father’s Day and announces he will celebrating the day himself by rewiring a lamp, fixing a kid’s scooter, mowing the lawn, and giving his sons sage but unwanted advice, all while wearing a cardigan and smoking a pipe.

Soul Men

The Vatican’s official newspaper has declared The Blues Brothers a “Catholic classic.”

The Blues Brothers was the featured film for Mannion Family Movie Night a couple weeks back and when Oliver Mannion heard this news he asked, “Has the Pope seen the movie?”

Recently confirmed a Soldier of Christ, a marker in his spiritual development he does not take as seriously as his mother and grandmothers had hoped, Oliver feels he has a pretty good idea of what Catholicism teaches and it does not include endorsements of exchanges like this:

Elwood:  Shit.

Jake: What?

Elwood:  Rollers.

Jake: No.

Elwood: Yeah.

Jake:  Shit.

Good Catholics don’t swear that casually and they aren’t afraid of getting pulled over by the cops because they’ve got over a hundred outstanding warrants on them.

Once upon a time, good Catholics would have been told they shouldn’t enjoy movies with scenes like that in it.

Oliver would like to point out that on those grounds he is not a good Catholic.

“How can this be a Catholic classic?” Oliver wanted to know.

“Well,” I said, actually just as baffled, “It is a story of redemption, sort of.”

Jake and Elwood are criminals at the beginning of the movie and by the end of the movie they’re…still criminals.  Only with longer rap sheets.

But they are on a mission from God, a joke we’re meant to take seriously in that they are out to do a good deed.  They succeed too, and along the way they rescue their friends from various small, private Purgatories and defeat the forces of evil in the form of Illinois Nazis---Jake: “I hate Illinois Nazis.”  Makes you wonder what he thinks of Iowa Nazis.

They also commit a whole bunch of felonies.

Which they pay for.

They are arrested and go to jail in the end.

This makes The Blues Brothers very different from the other great nihilistic, anti-authoritarian John Belushi comedy of its time.  The gang from Animal House not only get away with the destruction they cause, they are in various ways rewarded for it.  Their only punishment is getting expelled but it’s been made plain that Faber College isn’t much of a school and being denied a diploma from there isn’t a real loss.

Plus, their antagonist, Dean Wormer, while objectively in the right---Delta House is a disgrace and its members are not gentlemen and scholars---is motivated by spite, ego, anger, and a personal desire for vengeance.  “Fat, drunk, and stupid” is no way to go through life, but it may be better than going through life angry, vindictive, and mean.

And Dean Wormer, who should be a symbol of liberal authority because he’s defending the cause of education (“Knowledge Is Good.”) has allied himself with the blatantly Nixonian forces of the bullies and hypocrites of Omega Theta Pi.

Otter, Boone, Bluto, Pinto, Flounder and the rest are allowed to do just about whatever they want because they are rebelling against the types of people who brought us Vietnam and Watergate.

Jake and Elwood are pursued by characters who like Wormer are motivated by anger and a desire for personal revenge, the two state troopers, Jake’s jilted fiancee, the country-western band the Blues Brothers stole the gig from at Bob’s Country Bunker, the Illinois Nazis.  But their pursuers also include John Candy’s character, the cheerful, good-natured, unflappable, and unenrageable cop from the state board of corrections.

Burton Mercer’s job is to put Jake and Elwood in stir, and he’s quite comfortable with the idea that that’s where they belong.  They’ve broken the law.  Jake’s violated his parole in numerous ways.  Mercer’s going to arrest them and it won’t bother him to do it.  But he doesn’t take it personally.  He isn’t offended by Jake and Elwood’s law breaking.  He takes what I believe the nuns taught me is a very Catholic attitude, which is not simply to hate the crime but love the sinner; it’s to not love the crime but understand it and forgive it while not excusing it.

Mercer likes the Blues Brothers.  He gets a kick out of them.  It’s not clear whether or not he knows they’re on a mission from God, but he certainly doesn’t believe he’s on one himself.  Vengeance, anger, and self-righteousness are not in his job description.  It’s not a good idea to let people stick up gas stations and drive their cars through crowded shopping malls but Mercer sees how it could happen.

I know I’m pushing it but Mercer isn’t in the movie just to give John Candy something to do.  He’s in there so he can be played by John Candy.

The Blues Brothers is the beginning of Candy’s too short career of playing genuinely happy and big-hearted men, men who are happy because they have such big hearts.  Burton Mercer is not Del Griffith and The Blues Brothers is definitely not a John Hughes movie, but there’s a connection.

All through Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Steve Martin’s character pities himself for having to put up with Del and the first big change in him for the better is when he begins to not mind having to put up with Del.  But at that point he’s congratulating himself for being such a swell and magnanimous guy.

The real change comes when he realizes what a difficult time Del has had putting up with him and that Del has actually been the more tolerant and forgiving one.

This is a thread that runs through Candy’s better movies.  Del, Uncle Buck, and Danny Muldoon are men willing to forgive you before you’ve done them any wrong.  They are flawed men, in need of forgiveness themselves, but that’s the point.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Treat others as you would be treated.  Love your neighbor as you love yourself.  “Love one another as I have loved you.”

I’m probably reading this backwards into his role in The Blues Brother, and he doesn’t have any lines that support it, but Candy’s Burton Mercer seems to me a person who understands the difference between penance and punishment.

Penance is what sinners do to make up for their sins and part of that is accepting their just punishment.

But Catholicism has a Sacrament of Penance.  It doesn’t have a Sacrament of Punishment.

Catholics aren’t taught to see themselves as sinners in the hands of an angry God.

They are taught that a sign that theirs is a loving God is his willingness to forgive them their sins.

Jake and Elwood are punished in the end, but they are also forgiven.

And they are rewarded.

There’s another important aspect of Candy’s character.  He’s the only one of Jake and Elwood’s antagonists who appreciates their music.

At the end of the movie Jake and Elwood are still criminals who have to pay for their crimes.  But they are also something they weren’t at the beginning of the movie.

Musicians.

At the beginning of the movie the band hasn’t played together for three years, not since Jake went to prison.  They need to reassemble the band to save the orphanage, but their reward for saving the orphanage is putting the band back together.

It’s important that Jake and Elwood do not get to perform as the Blues Brothers until they are in the actual act of saving the orphanage with their singing. 

Yeah, they sing at Bob’s Country Bunker, but they don’t sing their music and they can’t call themselves the Blues Brothers.  They’re the Good Ol’ Blues Brothers Boys Band.

The rest of the time they are part of the audience or the chorus or backup singers for other acts.

I know.  I’m making more of the movie than it deserves or would deserve if it hadn’t been declared a Catholic classic.  The plot is pretty much an excuse to string together car crashes and music videos by James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Cab Calloway.  But the excuse is a good one.  The music is important.

And part of the music’s importance is its ability to bring people together and get them singing and dancing.

The music is shared joy.

Catholicism is not an apocalyptic religion.  The early Church was.  Jesus’ return was expected any day now.

Any month now…

Any year now…

Any decade…

By the early middle ages Church teaching was responding to what had become pretty clear.  The end of the world  and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven were probably a long way off.  Which meant there had to be something we’re meant to do with the time we have here on earth.  But what?

The answer I was taught was enjoy it.

And help others enjoy it.

Life is not one big party.  Life is pain and suffering most of the time.  We’re meant to take up our cross and follow him.  But we’re meant to do it cheerfully.

And we’re meant to help each other carry the load.  Simon of Cyrene isn’t a saint for nothing.

Catholicism, so I was taught, is a religion of shared pain.

It’s also a religion of shared joy.

When Calvinism took hold in England, its first order of business was to strip the joy out of the service and out of the church calendar.  No more music.  No more color and pageantry.  No more Christmas.

There’s a Puritanical streak in the Catholic Church and one of the maddening things about the Church’s perversity about sex is that this enforcement of joylessness is a case of the Church at odds with itself.

And of course the molestation scandal is about some men robbing children of joy and the Church hierarchs being fine with that.

This gets us into the question of who is the Church.  Is it us or is it the priests?  Is it Peter’s church or Paul’s?  St Francis’ or St Augustine’s?  Does it belong to the bishops who tried to sink health care reform or the nuns who tried to save it?

The Vatican newspaper doesn’t answer that.  All it says is that whoever else’s church it is, it’s also Jake and Elwood’s.

I hope that means that from here on out this will be included in the hymnals.

The Tattooed Attorney

In the cafe at Barnes & Noble involuntarily eavesdropping on a lawyer conferring by cell phone with a client.

Don’t think I’d like it if my lawyer broadcast it in public that I was being sued.

Lawyer’s middle-aged, going bald.  Wearing shorts and a tank top, with brown plastic framed reading glasses on the end of his nose.  Large tattoo of an eagle on his right bicep, large tattoo of a wolf on his left.

Almost reads like the opening of an Elmore Leonard novel, except that the case is a simple contract dispute.  Client’s a contractor of some sort being sued for not completing work he apparently believes he never promised to do.  Lawyer’s trying to establish if the client ever used the word “I” when he should have been using “we” when negotiating with the customer suing him.

Of course these things can lead to intrigue and bloodshed.  Maybe there are mob connections.  Mob money winding up in the wrong pockets.  A woman involved.

Conversation’s over.  Lawyer’s reading a book now.  Anxiety & Panic Attacks.

NOW we’re cooking!

If you claim to be a writer and can’t get a crime novel out of a tattooed lawyer operating out of a bookstore coffee bar who suffers from panic attacks give it up and get a job writing technical manuals

Accidents will happen, they’re only hit and run…

Updated.

Apparently there are plenty of Republicans in Congress who aren’t worried about facing campaign ads with the variation on the theme, The GOP Wants You to Pay for the Mess BP Made.

Good luck to them on that.  But the line many Republicans are taking is that we should go easy on BP because the Deepwater Horizon blow-out was an “accident.”

Without going there…

It might be an accident if you run a stop sign, but you’re still liable and you’re still going to get ticketed.

They’re adopting an adolescent’s conception of an accident.  If you didn’t mean it to happen, then it doesn’t matter how stupid, careless, selfish, disobedient, or irresponsible you were, you should be let of the hook with at worst a stern lecture and a promise that you won’t let it happen again.

But as Chris Hayes and digby note, corporations can do no wrong in some people’s eyes, while the rest of us can’t be punished enough for our mistakes.

Corporations are the spoiled favorite children in the Republican conception of the national family.  Everybody else is the scapegoated stepchild sent off to sleep in the fireplace or out in the barn, our job is to sweep the ashes and tend the hogs and we’d better not complain about it.

More from FDL’s Josh Nelson.

Hat-tip to Greg Sargent.

Update: Republican Congressman Joe Barton made a campaign ad for the Democrats this morning.

Other Republicans were not amused.

“Mesmerizing the day”

Early morning milk run to the convenience store.  Greeted by a smiling man drinking his coffee in one of the booths by the windows.  Not drinking.  Sitting with.  He’s slouching back in the booth, his arms stretched across the orange table top, his coffee cup at the tips of his fingers.  His smile isn’t personal.  Everybody who comes in the store benefits.  His eyes aren’t with his smile.  The smile stops at the door.  His eyes look far beyond that, gazing on blue skies and children playing and lovers holding hands.  Totally blissed out, in other words.  Guy’s in his early forties, I’d guess, short, roundish, with a blond fu manchu, wearing a tank top and a paint-stained white baseball cap.

A tall old man turns from the counter with his own freshly poured cup of coffee.  Meets the smile head on.  He reminds me of our old family doctor so I hear a diagnostic note in his question to the blissed out housepainter.

“Are you all right?”

The painter pulls his gaze back from the blue skies, children, and lovers, focuses on the old doctor.  His smile actually broadens.

“I’m fine.  Lost in thought.”

“I can see that,” the old doctor says and this time I hear the diagnosis made and see him clamping his mouth shut against asking the housepainter what he took to aid him in getting lost in his thoughts.

The housepainter continues to smile.  His spins his coffee cup between the tips of his fingers.

“Just sitting here mesmerizing the day,” he says.  “Mesmerizing the day.”

My job is more of a job than your job

BP’s whining that curtailing offshore drilling will cost jobs.

You know what costs jobs?

Killing fish.

Polluting beaches.

Ruining the tourist industries of four or five states.

The A-Team steers clear of Hill Street and avoids St Elsewhere and Cheers

The A-Team movie is a big noisy mess, but that was the point.  The best thing about the movie is the way the four leads conjure up the spirits of the heroes of the TV show without resorting to impersonations.  There are moments when Liam Neeson actually seems to have been replaced on screen by the ghost of George Peppard and Bradley Cooper looks more like Face than Dirk Benedict ever did, which is kind of like saying that Bradley makes a better Dirk Benedict than Dirk Benedict.  If the movie sparks a revival of interest in the TV show I suspect that a lot of people are going to see Benedict as the impersonator.  This is not a tribute to Cooper’s acting or a knock on Benedict’s, because neither one was particularly challenged by the role.  It just says something about the difference between a movie star and a television star.

Sharlto Copley as Howling Mad Murdock is somewhat more howling mad than Dwight Schultz who always left open the possibility that his madness was an act or at least partly an act.  There’s no question that the movie’s Murdock is completely crazy.

If I’d written this right after seeing the movie the other day I’d have probably said something similar about Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as B.A. Baracus as I said about Cooper as Face, that he was better at being Mr T as B.A. than Mr T.  But it turns out that Mr T was better at being Mr T than I remembered, and I’ll get to that as soon as I finish up talking about the movie, which won’t be long since I’ve already said more about it than probably needs to be said.

Neeson, Cooper, Copley, and Jackson’s main acting challenge is to look as if they believe what they’re doing without over-selling it, slipping into parody going one way and camp going the other being the only serious technical hazards they had to overcome.

Otherwise, whatever comes close to real acting is handled by the two villains and by Jessica Biel as the movie’s token female lead who has to act as if her character’s being as beautiful as Jessica Biel is irrelevant to her role while still looking as beautiful as Jessica Biel.

The movie is about four overgrown boys having fun while blowing things up, which is what the TV show was about, and whether or not you’ll enjoy it depends on your mood and your tolerance for that sort of thing.  I was in an undemanding mood and I can tolerate that sort of thing, if it’s done competently and with a sense of humor.

Another factor that might come into play is what you felt about the TV show.

I wasn’t a fan.  There wasn’t a chance the movie was going to disappoint me by not being as “good” as the show or not being true to its spirit.  But there wasn’t a chance that it would surprise me by being “better” or somehow truer either.

But I suspect that if you were a kid and a fan in the 1980s, like the two women in their thirties who were the only ones besides the blonde and me who stayed through the end credits to see the joke for fans waiting there, the movie’s greatest pleasure will be how much it reminds you of how you felt when you used to watch the TV show when you loved it best.

Now…

The Mannion guys got a kick out of the movie.  But they’d never seen a single episode of the TV show and in fact only knew of the show as the source of a thousand Mr T jokes.  The movie made them curious, and as it turned out, the show is available to watch instantly on Netflix.  So Sunday night, that’s what we did.

I now understand why there were so many shots of cars flipping over in the movie.

Like I said, I wasn’t a fan of the show.  I had nothing against it.  Just never got in the habit of watching it.   I can’t swear to it, but I probably never watched more than a handful of episodes all the way through.  I saw what I saw of it by accident, in snatches, because it was on somewhere, in a bar, or at a friend’s place when I happened to passing through.  So I don’t have strong memories of what the show was like.  My sense was that it was sort of a poor but muy macho man’s Mission: Impossible with jokes and car crashes and many more things blowing up.

Somebody would find themselves in an improbable scrape, they’d hire the A-Team to get them out of it, Hannibal would come up with a plan that would require B.A. to build something, Murdock to fly something that wasn’t meant to do barrel rolls or nose dives and make it do barrel rolls and nose dives, and Face to charm or con someone, the plan would go awry, a new plan would be improvised, that wouldn’t quite do the trick, and then the A-Team would shoot, punch, and detonate their way out.

We watched the pilot, a two-parter, and I was stunned.

It was a big, noisy mess.

The movie’s a big noisy mess, but that was on purpose.

The pilot was just sloppy.

It looked as though it was made with the aesthetic of an Ed Wood film, as if the producers said to the crew, “We don’t have a script and we’ve got zero budget, but we’ve got this much film, we’ve got these costumes, we’ve got this location, we’ve got this many hours of daylight left, and we’ve got three cars we can wreck.  What can we do with it all?”

At certain points it looked as though the storyboard was put together from snapshots of producer Stephen J. Cannell’s kids playing with their army men.

“How did your guy get up there?”

“He jumped.”

“He jumped twenty feet straight up?”

“Maybe he used a rope.”

“Where’d he get the rope?”

“It was just lying there.”

“Ok.  Makes sense to me.  But how did he get the rope anchored up top?”

“Grappling hook?”

“Where’d that come from?”

“He made it out of this crowbar that was over there!”

“Cool!  How’s he get down?”

“Helicopter!”

“Way cool!”

The hokey, jokey dialogue sounded as if it had been written on the spot, the writer, the producer, and the director leaning over scrap paper on the trunk of a car while they figured out what the characters needed to say to explain how they happened to be in the position of needing to punch, shoot, or detonate their way into or out of a situation that had been created solely for the purpose of having the characters needing to punch, shoot, or detonate.

It’s not as though I was expecting great art.  But I wasn’t expecting something so cheerfully and casually under-written.

Were all the episodes like that?

It didn’t take me long to figure out why I was surprised by the lackadaisical production values.

It was because it had been a long time since I’d watched any television that didn’t aspire to be more than…um…television.

The A-Team premiered in 1983, a year after Cheers and St Elsewhere, two years after Hill Street Blues, a year ahead of Miami Vice, the fall after M*A*S*H said goodbye, farewell, and amen.

There had always been well-written, well-directed, and well-acted television shows.  What made these shows different was that all at once TV audiences were presented with a group of shows that were more like movies in a particular and significant way.

The characters and their situations changed.

Not just from season to season either.

From episode to episode.

If you missed last week’s episode, you started this week’s somewhat lost.

That’s why some version of this became a feature of the opening of so many shows:

“Previously, on Hill Street Blues…”

Something began to be built into TV shows that had never been there before.

An ending.

And endings meant beginnings that set things in motion towards those endings.

Stories.

Stories that continued through individual episodes.  Stories that existed apart from individual episodes.  Stories that individual episodes were designed to advance.

Television had changed.

For the better.

And apparently the change is permanent.  At least it has continued up to now.

The passengers of the S.S. Minnow were never going to get off that island.  The survivors of Oceanic Flight 815…well, lots of them got off their island the hard way as Lost made its way towards its storyline’s end.

After twenty years Marshall Dillon was still keeping the peace in Dodge City, with each episode not picking up where the last one left off but starting at pretty much exactly the same point where the last episode started.

I can’t even begin to catalog the changes in Seth Bullock’s personal and professional lives over the course of three seasons of a mere twelve episodes each.

It wouldn’t have mattered if the show had lasted twenty years and the original Battlestar Galactica never made it to Earth (although, didn’t it finally?).  But right from the first episode of the updated Battlestar Galactica we knew that the fleet was either going to make it to Earth or that it would fail to, spectacularly and disastrously, but that either way that would be the end of the series.  The old show had the job of postponing its promised finale.  The new show was about reaching its ending, whatever that would be. 

What this meant is that TV shows were being produced with the expectation that audiences would be paying attention.

And audiences who were paying attention were going to demand that what they were paying attention to was worth the attention.  They would notice when the producers tried to slip things by them.  They would want shows to reward them, not cheat them, for their time.

Pretty much, they would want what they got when they went to a decent movie.

Wasn’t long before they were getting more than they were getting from movies, but that had to wait for the 1990s when the A-Team had gone off the air.

This improvement in quality wasn’t universal.  Chewing gum for the eyes was still manufactured on network assembly lines.  The A-Team shared the TV Guide listings with the shows I mentioned but also with Air Wolf, Knight Rider, The Love Boat, The Fall Guy, and Who’s the Boss?

But even lighter fare, like Magnum P.I., Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, and Moonlighting included story arcs and were more tightly written and more smartly directed than similar shows of a decade before, and I’m thinking of some of the better shows of the 70s too, The Rockford Files and Columbo, not just Police Woman and Starsky and Hutch.

I don’t know all the factors that contributed to this improvement, which of course wasn’t universal---television as a whole didn’t get that much better, there was just more of the better stuff on television---but I’d guess that cable and VCRs had a lot to do with it.

All of a sudden audiences had choices.

Network TV shows no longer competed only with each other for eyeballs.  They competed with re-runs of classic TV shows and movies.  A show competed with itself in that now that it could be taped and watched whenever viewers had the time and the desire and that meant they could fast-forward through the commercials which producers and networks wouldn’t want because that would make advertisers unhappy.

So shows had to give viewers a compelling reason to watch in real time and sit through the commercials.  More had to be going on.  There had to be something to talk about the next day with other people who had watched in real time.

On the other hand, you now had an audience that could pay attention because they could watch a show they’d taped when they had time to pay attention and they needed something worth paying attention to so they would remember and bother to watch shows they’d taped.

Story arcs, multiple story arcs, two and three parters, cliffhangers, new characters coming, old characters going,  all these became more common, and because they gave the producers, writers, and actors more to work with that mean better acting, better writing, better directing, and higher budgets.  Higher budgets don’t automatically translate into higher production values but they usually did.  More and more TV shows began to look like movies.

Like I said, these changes and trends weren’t universal.  And there’s still Fox and the CW and reality shows and the CSI franchise and far too many vampires.  But over the last twenty years, and more so over the last ten, I’ve gotten used to watching certain kinds of shows, shows that require attention and that reward that attention by not making me feel as though I’d have been better off watching a movie or reading a book.  Not that all I ever watch are shows on the level of The Sopranos or The Wire---of which there have only been two anyway, The Sopranos and The Wire---I have favorites I watch just for the escapist fun of it.  But it’s been a long time since I’ve watched anything like The A-Team, which judging by what we saw the other night was a show made to be watched the way I watched it back in the 80s---in snatches, with half an eye, as a time-waster, and purely for the fun of what it offered.

Big, noisy messes made by overgrown boys playing army and having the time of their lives. 

Jim Wormold’s chipped edges

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust.  You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked.  You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.  But somehow, through no virtue of his own, he had never taken that course.  Lack of character perhaps.  Schools were said to construct character by chipping off the edges.  His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character---only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art.

---from Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene.

Another view from my “office”

Forgot I took this one.  Work took me here last week.  Monday morning, around ten.  June 7, 2010.