New Blog

It's been ten years since I regularly posted here, and I've decided to just let this one lie fallow.  Instead, I'm starting a new blog as a fresh start.  Hope to have some new content up there soon.

Contagious Yawning

 So, I was out walking the dog.  I yawned.  The dog yawned.  Then the cat (who had come up to see her friend the dog) also yawned.

Never knew that was a thing cross-species. Huh.

Emblematically Hollywood

Reading (skimming, really) Peter Manso's Mailer: His Life and Times, and came across this great line from Shelley Winters: "I knew that [Burt] Lancaster was being unfaithful to me with his wife."

And Yet Another Tough Old Animal

#5 in an ongoing series:

An Aussie mongrel named Jerry.

All creatures that on Earth do dwell . . .

Rio Bravo (1959)

Howard Hawkes movie, script co-written by Leigh Brackett. Stars the Duke as a Texas sherriff trying to keep a murderer in jail despite the efforts of the man's evil rancher brother to spring him. Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and fifties teen idol Ricky Nelson assist him. Angie Dickinson as the Duke's love interest.

John Wayne and Walter Brennan are John Wayne and Walter Brennan: their product rarely varies. Dean Martin is playing a drunk - what a stretch for him! Ricky Nelson is inadequate, but it hardly matters. Climax is nice little example of Chekhov's adage about guns on mantlepieces.

All in all, a pleasant, moderately entertaining Western, though with way too many longuers.

Still Another Tough Old Animal?

I'm still not sure if this article quite belongs in this sequence. After all, Koko is only 33 (just middle-aged in gorilla years), and her use of sign language to complain about her toothache is hardly stoic. Eating the business card, though, trumps all those caveats.

The Village: Brief Review

What an extraordinarily dumb movie. The most obvious explanations turn out to be the answer for both of the major mysteries.

And of course these "explanations" prove Shyamalan to be a pretty clueless city boy, as there's no way the radically circumscribed setup he depicts could really work, economically or psychologically.

This movie continues Shyamalan's downward slide. I admired Unbreakable more than most people, but I actively hated Signs and The Village amplifies that flick's flaws: ponderousness, turgid dialogue, and awkward allegory. You ain't the next Spielberg or Hitchcock yet, buddy, and if you keep this up, you never will be.