Movie review: “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol”

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Partner and I trundled off to the Lincoln Cinemaworld yesterday to see the new Mission: Impossible movie.  Normally I do not rush right out to see Tom Cruise movies; his personal life creeps me out, and I’m always afraid that Scientology is suddenly going to erupt out of his head and kill everyone in the vicinity.  But the previews looked entertaining, so –


Well, it’s a lot of fun, actually.  It never slows down for a moment.  There really aren’t any extraneous scenes; everything is plot-driven, and I never had any trouble figuring out what was happening, even when people were wrestling in the dark or chasing one another through a blinding sandstorm.


Partner pointed out that Tom (who’s also listed as producer) really doesn’t get mixed up with mediocre projects.  Tom takes care of his own image and products pretty scrupulously (with a few memorable clunkers thrown in; remember “Vanilla Sky”?)  The movie is beautifully directed by Brad Bird, who has mostly done animated films up to now, and who brings a beautiful floating quality to the cinematography.  The acting – well, Tom is mostly doing stunt work in this one.  His acting here appears to be mostly based on Mark Harmon’s character in “NCIS,” who registers most of his emotions by squinting cryptically off to one side of the camera.  (Harmon usually purses his lips as he does this; Cruise parts his lips in a sort of incredulous smile.  At least it’s different.)  Simon Pegg, of whom I am very fond, plays Comedy Relief; he overdoes it a little, but in a movie with this much going on, I suppose you need a maximum dose of everything.  Jeremy Renner, whom you will recall from “The Hurt Locker” and “The Town,” with his off-kilter good looks and nice dramatic intensity (and massively developed forearms, which I assume he built up while playing Hawkeye in the upcoming “Avengers” movie), adds most of the dramatic interest.  And Tom Wilkinson, of whom I am very fond, has a (sadly) brief role.


The movie made me nostalgic.  It reminded me of staying up late when I was a kid to watch the original “Mission: Impossible” on TV, with Peter Graves and Martin Landau and Barbara Bain.  It had a lot of the same improbable gimmicks: the clocks ticking down to zero while our heroes are trying to rewire the bomb, the disguises, the unheard-of gadgetry, the elaborate deceptions foiled just because someone arrives at the hotel ten minutes earlier than planned.  There’s a James Bond element too: the international espionage thing, the breathless scampering around the world (Budapest! Moscow! Dubai! Mumbai!).


And there’s a joke running through this movie that I sort of enjoyed: the equipment keeps breaking down.  The magical mask-making machine short-circuits; the communications network drops their calls; even the thing that’s supposed to self-destruct in five seconds needs a bop on the head from Tom.


The theater wasn’t very full yesterday: apparently everyone was watching that new exorcism thing.  But “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” is a romp, and a perfectly acceptable way to spend the afternoon. 


(Note: as the movie ended, we heard a woman behind us sobbing.  My goodness!  Some people take their movies so seriously!)

Don't worry, Movie Lady. Tom will be back in another Mission Impossible movie.

I guarantee it.

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For Sunday: "David Watts," by the Kinks

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This is a shout-out to my old friend Joanne, who introduced me to the Kinks.  Before I knew Joanne, I was familiar with a few of their songs -  “Lola” and “Apeman,” anyway -  but Joanne dragged me to a Kinks concert in 1978 in Lowell, Massachusetts, and they were wonderful.  They sang a mix of old and new: they sang "Superman” (which was new at the time), and they did an encore of “Ducks on the Wall” for old fans like Joanne.

 

 

We waited for them outside, and they greeted us – Ray Davies did, anyway – and he signed everything Joanne threw at him (including a copy of “Pippi Longstocking”).  He was indefatigable. 

 

 

This is a favorite song of Joanne’s, I know.  After long listening, it’s a favorite song of mine too.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

David_Watts.mp3 Listen on Posterous

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The "gotcha" question

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Back during the 2008 election period – especially after the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP candidate – I became exceptionally sensitive to the issue of the “gotcha question.”  A reporter asked Sarah a question about (I think) Pakistan, and she gave an honest and unguarded answer (which happened to coincide with Candidate Obama’s stand on the issue).  She later retracted her answer angrily, saying that she’d been asked a “gotcha” question by the media.

 

 

Speaking as someone who interviews people from time to time for a living, here are some comments on this, and on the current election cycle:

 

 

1)     There is no such thing as a “gotcha” question.  If you’re thinking of something like: “Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no!”, then you are living in a Marx Brothers universe.

2)     Asking a presidential candidate a question about politics, or foreign affairs, or economics, is perfectly fair.  All of these fall within the job requirements, you see.  Presidents have to work in all of those areas.  If you’re hiring someone for a job, you want to see how well they’ll do under stress, and if they know their stuff.  Sometimes you ask them hard questions.  “Why are you so great?” is a pointless question.  So is “Why is your opponent so wrong-headed?”  Both questions are just opportunities to let the candidate recite his/her talking points. 

3)     Tough questions are what it’s all about. Presidents get asked tough questions all the time.  Presidential candidates who whine about being asked tough questions aren’t really thinking about the job they’re seeking.

4)     Presidents are noted for handling tough questions with good humor and candor.   Really good presidents are able to defuse their questioners with charm and tact.  Roosevelt did it; Truman did it; Kennedy did it; Clinton did it; Reagan did it.  This is a valuable skill (see foreign relations, above).

5)     This one is for Herman Cain: being asked the capital of Uzbekistan is maybe a little bit of a Jeopardy! question, and not so much a foreign-policy question (although, ahem, even I know the answer to that one).  However: being asked about American flyover privileges or airbases in Uzbekistan is perfectly okay, since it has to do with what you will (maybe) be doing for the next four years.

6)     Only stupid people want a stupid president.

7)     Why would a clearly unintelligent / uninformed / untrained candidate (like Rick Perry, for example) run for the Presidency?  Presumably because someone told him that he could learn as he went along.  He’d be able to rely on his advisors and staff for the stuff he didn’t know, and he could rely on his gut for the important stuff.  Sound familiar?  Yes, I thought so. 

8)     Watch the Funny Or Die GOP Presidential Debate.  It says all this better than I ever could.  With Patrick Warburton and Leslie Jordan and Larry King yet.

9)     Presidents work for us, not us for them.  We’re the supervisors; we get a say in hiring them.  We get to ask the hard questions in the interview process.

 

 

I hope I live through this election year.  I honestly hope Romney gets the GOP nomination; he’s not electrifying, he’s like the Republican John Kerry.  If it’s someone (god forbid) like Santorum or Gingrich, I may have to drink strychnine. 

 

 

But don’t worry, everyone – the world ends in December, only a few weeks after the election!

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Movie review: "It Happened on Fifth Avenue"

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TCM recently showed a piece of fluff called “It Happened On Fifth Avenue.” 

 

 

It’s a post-WWII movie, and how!  A group of returned GIs are having a hard time finding jobs and housing.  They fall in with a charming worldly bum (Victor Moore) who tells them his secret to comfortable living: in the winter, rich people leave their Manhattan mansions and move south.  What’s to keep you from moving in?  No one will ever know . . .

 

 

Naturally Don DeFore, one of the GIs, has hooked up with Gale Storm, who’s actually the daughter of the millionaire (Charlie Ruggles) who owns this particular mansion.  A bit later, for various inane reasons, Charlie himself – the millionaire, the owner of the house – pretends to be a hobo and joins the group.

 

 

Complications (and hijinks) ensue. 

 

 

The film's populist tone surprised me.  Modern Hollywood would never make a film like this.  The real bum (Victor Moore) is constantly lecturing the disguised millionaire (Ruggles) on his behavior.  The constant message underneath is that rich people have too much stuff.  They have more than one house!  More than one everything!    In one scene, the poor ex-GIs try to purchase an old Army barracks as part of a business deal; the rich guy beats them to it, and his fat bowler-hatted representative orders everyone off the property.  The GIs, incensed, pelt the man with rotten produce (I guess they brought it with them).  In a Soviet movie – like one of Sergei Eisenstein’s movies – it would have been rocks, and bullets.  Here, it’s played for laughs.

 

 

Lots of myths are perpetuated here.  The millionaire turns out to be a benevolent guy.  The GIs are the salt of the earth.  Women are all about love.  Victor Moore, the career hobo, is portrayed as the best person of all: kind, thoughtful, and completely oblivious to reality.

 

 

Just like real life.

 

 

Isn’t that nice?

 

 

Honestly, this movie made my skin crawl.  I had to switch away to the Jewelry Channel for a while, and look at opalite and cubic zirconia, just for a breather. 

 

 

But it made me realize also that things don’t change much.  It reminded me of the Occupy movement happening right now, and their outrageous notion that rich people have – unaccountably and irrationally and unfairly – too much stuff.

 

 

Who says movies aren’t educational?

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George M. Cohan

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Providence, in case you didn’t know, is the birthplace of vaudeville legend George M. Cohan.  He never really lived here; his parents were entertainers and happened to be here in Providence when he was born, on the third of July, 1878.  (Not the fourth of July, please note.  Please get that song out of your head.)

 

 

It’s amazing how prolific he was: he performed, composed, wrote shows.  We still know his songs: “Give My Regards To Broadway.”  “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”  “Mary Is A Grand Old Name.”  “You’re A Grand Old Flag.”  “Over There.”

 

 

There is a perfectly hideous statue of George down in Fox Point, a block away from George M. Cohan Boulevard.  It’s just the top half of him, from the waist up; he’s got his hat in his hand, and is (I think) supposed to be singing.  Why did the sculptor lop him off at the waist?  And why does he have that horrible grin on his face?

 

 

Much better is the living monument that James Cagney created for him.  In 1942’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and later when he reprised the role in 1955’s “The Seven Little Foys,” Cagney is a delight.  He is tough and funny and energetic, and he dances like a demon.

 

 

Funny what we know about people.  George M. Cohan was enormously famous in his time; then he became – what? – just a name.  Then he was revived by someone great like Cagney, who transformed the image brilliantly.  (I hope the real George M. was only half as entertaining as Cagney’s portrayal of him.  The story goes that Cohan, dying of cancer, saw Cagney’s performance in the 1942 movie, and said, “What an act to follow!)

 

 

Few now living probably remember Cohan as a performer.  Many of us know his songs.  Many of us have also seen Cagney as Cohan.

 

 

So what do we really know of him?

 

 

I ask myself this question a lot lately.  I think about what remains of us after we’re gone, and how we remember people who have died, and how those people are remembered after we’ve died.

 

 

It fades, children.  You end up with grotesque statues and strangely twisted stories.

 

 

But sometimes it flickers to life: you hear a good song, and see a good performance, and think: this guy must have been terrific.

 

 

Something inside me rejoiced when, recently, I watched “The Seven Little Foys,” with Cagney dancing down the table in his wonderful eccentric way.

 

 

Maybe good things, and important things, survive after all.

 

 

Let’s hope so.

 

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Getting rid of things

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Sometimes I watch “Hoarders,” which is a horrible TV show about people with houses full of neckties and Christmas ornaments and cats and small appliances and newspapers. These people continue to hoard until they have no room to move around, and the city threatens to condemn the house.

 

 

This is a little too high-powered for me.  There’s a milder show called “Clean House,” with Niecy Nash and Matt Iseman, which is a middle-school version of the same thing: the people don’t seem to be quite so mentally ill, and the end of the show seems to provide some relief.

 

 

After watching a few episodes of this, I invariably go on a cleaning spree.

 

 

I am not a tidy person.  Ask anyone.  My mother was a cleaning nut: she spent much of her day ensuring that the house was spotless, regardless of the fact that no one ever visited.  My three siblings and I did not inherit this characteristic from her.  My brother’s house is a ghastly mess like mine, with things lying all over the place and spare rooms full of junk; my sister Susan, may she rest in peace and not smite me for this, was not the cleanest soul in the world; and my late sister Darlene used to keep everything, including old newspapers and boxes, stacked all over the house.  Myself, I throw things any which way, both at home and in the office.  I find it comforting, in a rat’s-nest kind of way.

 

 

I don’t know.  Maybe Mom picked up after us too much, and we rebelled?  Or maybe the neatness thing skips a generation?

 

 

Anyway, “Clean House” always has a positive effect on me.  I start throwing things away, and cleaning, and sorting.  It’s salubrious.

 

 

Lately I have been feeling that way in general: feeling that I want to get rid of things.  I look around the apartment and see all kinds of things that Partner and I have accumulated, and so many of them are meaningless space-fillers.

 

 

We need to start getting rid of things.

 

 

So I clean a shelf here and a drawer there. The pantry closet, which doubles as Partner’s coat closet, is a disaster, but I always promise myself I’ll do that later.  We overbuy things: I was looking for a shower curtain liner in the closet the other night, and I found three. 

 

 

Day by day, I am tossing out the garbage and putting the trinkets into the Salvation Army box and giving away a few things here and there.

 

 

Invariably this makes me feel better.  I feel cleaner and lighter.

 

 

We come into the world with nothing.  It’s our natural state.  Probably we should revert to it.

 

 

Nah.

 

 

But I like thinking about it.

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Walking with a cane

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Partner tore a muscle in his thigh at Thanksgiving; it pained him grievously, and made it difficult for him to walk comfortably.

 

 

So he used a cane for a while.

 

 

We’re a three-cane family.  We both own formal canes that are basically varnished tree-branches, and I keep a regular old medical-supply cane in the umbrella stand for occasional use.  I have occasional attacks of sciatica – one’s coming on right now, actually – during which I walk painfully, with a strange posture.  One of my very sweetest co-workers said some years ago that she always knew when I was having a sciatica attack, because I “walked like I had a load in my pants.”

 

 

Charming.

 

 

Anyway, Partner was using his fancy cane when he went back to work after Thanksgiving.  One of his co-workers called him “Gandalf,” which I thought was hysterical, and I wish I’d thought of it first.  Myself, I like to use the regulation old-lady medical-supply cane; it looks stark and grandfatherly, and it tacitly reminds the children I work with that time is fleeting and the body crumbles.  Heh heh.

 

 

(My friend Patricia, now living in East Deerswamp, Massachusetts, has a much prettier cane, tinted lilac and patterned with lovely flower designs.  She was always a bit of a princess.  When she was still in the office with us, she’d jab us with it, unless we grabbed it away from her and jabbed her back.)

 

 

So Partner and I are tottering on into old age together.  Good!  Why not?  I saw a wonderful YouTube video recently of two old football players on stage together at a banquet; they’d been enemies/rivals decades ago, and the feud has never died; one tried to josh the other with some flowers, and the other struck out with his cane, and a fistfight ensued.

 

 

Which is the other reason a cane is handy.  It’s excellent for bopping people on the head.

 

 

Patricia would agree.  So would Partner.

 

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The emergency room

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We were at Rhode Island Hospital not long ago. One of the orderlies told us that the previous night had been terrible: gunshot victims, stabbings, all kinds of mayhem.  As it was, the emergency room was still crowded at 11:00 am on Saturday morning.  You can pretty much tell what’s wrong with people in an emergency room without asking: the woman in a wheelchair who’s coughing up a lung, the guy lying motionless on two chairs and wheezing from time to time, the stocky guy clutching his back and moaning from time to time. 

 

 

The triage system seemed inefficient: they take your photo ID and hold it – I suppose to keep people from walking out – and do a quick once-over, blood pressure and temperature, and ask a few questions.  Then they give back your ID card, and you sit and wait. 

 

 

It’s kind of like the DMV: if you’re looking for a method to isolate the best whiners in a group, this is it.  You can always hear people loudly complaining about how long they’ve waited, other people being taken first, etc.  (To be fair, they’re presumably trying to take the serious cases first, so the lady with foot pain probably isn’t going to get priority over the lady in the wheelchair who can’t breathe.) 

 

 

We quietly relocated ourselves from the coughing lady, who was spraying her contagion all over the southeast corner of the room, and waited.

 

 

The wait really wasn’t that long.  They called us, and we sat in the inner area (which means you’re in!), and we were put into a little examining room.  A tall shaven-headed nurse attended to us, as did a short bearded nurse wearing a polka-dotted smock.  Then the ER doctor – short, cute, funny, very buff, very bouncy and energetic – came in, did his thing, asked a few questions, and sent us off to the X-ray room.  After the X-rays, we waited for only a bit longer before Doctor Cutiepie came back– twice! – with prescriptions and advice, and sent us home.

 

 

Please note: every single person who dealt with us was cheerful and professional.  This was in a large hospital serving the run-down heart of a run-down East Coast city. 

 

 

And we came home feeling much better, and feeling that we’d received pretty good care.

 

 

It is amazing.

 

 

It is partly, of course, because Brown University and its medical school are right next door; there’s a steady stream of interns, residents, etc. 

 

 

But still!

 

 

I am deeply grateful that I live in a place where high-level care is easily obtained, and affordable.

 

 

Is there any reason that good health care like this shouldn't be available to everyone?

 

 

(Ahem.  Political, political, political.  You get my message?)

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New Year's Day resolutions

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For a long time I was terrible at making (and keeping) resolutions.  Then, at last, I realized that I needed to make reasonable resolutions, rather than pie-in-the-sky type things. 

 

 

Here are my resolutions for 2012:

 

 

-        I will renew my passport, so that I can get the hell out of the country if the shit hits the fan.

-        I will consolidate my two big sloppy retirement accounts into one slightly neater retirement account, so that I can begin to think (reluctantly) about the Wonderful World of Retirement that awaits me, sometime around the year 2040.

-        I will try not to let the election year irk me too much, especially the Republican candidates, who have demonstrated that they will do anything – gay-bashing, maligning the Palestinian state, abusing the poor – if they think it will help them with the far-right base.  (And if you think you have it bad where you are, you should see the attack ads that are already airing here for the Massachusetts senatorial campaign.  Brutal and idiotic.)

-        Whoever wins the November presidential election, I will not commit suicide.

-        I will speak to the doctor again about my left kidney, which pains me frequently.

-        I will maintain my weight.

-        I will continue to go to the health club.

-        I will endeavor to keep my nose clean and my hands to myself.

-        I will try very hard not to get sick, partly because I do not enjoy being sick, and partly because I sincerely do not want to infect others (most especially Partner) with my nasty viral complaints.

-        I will try to live within my means.  (Ha!)

-        I will keep writing a blog a day, if it kills me.  (Actually I enjoy it.  It won’t kill me.  More likely it will help to keep me alive.)

-        On the same topic: I will try very hard to stay alive.  I enjoy being alive.  I like waking up and seeing Partner next to me in bed; I like seeing the sunlight on the rooftops when I walk to work in the morning; I like listening to Apollonia’s stories; I like eating pasta and tacos and burgers and ice cream.  I like baking.  I like reading the Financial Times, and doing the FT crossword puzzle, and winning the competition from time to time.   I like all kinds of things.  I would hate to give any of these things up.  I am going to try very hard to live long enough to see New Year’s Day 2013, though even writing that date makes me feel as if I’m in a science-fiction story set in the future.

 

 

But if the worst happens, and I don’t make it, I think of this scene from “The Simpsons:”

 

 

Grandpa Simpson is determined to prove that he’s still young and vital. He’s riding a bicycle.  He hits a bump, and catapults off his bike through the air, over a hedge, and into an open grave in a cemetery.  He disappears for a moment. Then we hear his voice from inside the grave: “You know,” he says, “this isn’t so bad. This is kind of peaceful.”

 

 

Peaceful sounds pretty good.

 

 

Happy new year, kids.

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New Year's Eve 2011: looking backward

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Here we are, standing in the ashes of another year.  How the hell did 2011 pass so quickly?

 

 

The years all begin to look alike, after you’ve seen fifty or so of them.  It took me a minute to recollect the notable / memorable things that happened this year:

 

 

-        Partner and I took some nice trips, twice to Cape Cod and once to Orlando (Disney / Universal, naturally).

-        We got through the year without serious illness or injury (not counting some violent viral episodes, and Partner’s little muscle sprain in November).

-        People passed away.  My uncle Sonny passed away in the Northwest.  A friend’s husband passed away after a long illness.  The husband of another friend passed away, after a similarly long illness.  My old boss Sharon, for whom I worked in the late 1980s and who was my colleague, neighbor and friend after that time, passed away suddenly in November.

-        I managed to keep track of the people who matter: my old college friend George, my old work friend Patricia who now lives in the wild country of northwestern Massachusetts, my old work friend Sylvia who works in the wild country down around the Rhode Island School of Design.

 

 

 

Partner and I have a little tradition: just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, we get together and hold hands so that we’re together when the new year begins.  And we both make a sincere wish that, a year from now, we will still be together, doing exactly the same thing.

 

 

It’s worked pretty well so far. 

 

 

I’m sure we’ll be doing it again this evening.

 

 

And, I hope, a year from now too.

 

 

Happy New Year’s Eve, kids.

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