“Thor”: a second look

 

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My friend Tab and I were having one of those meandering conversations the other day. We went from RuPaul to Laura Linney to “The Big C” to Idris Elba, the extremely versatile (and very handsome) actor who played Laura’s hotter-than-hell boyfriend in the first season of “The Big C.”  “I appreciate him,” I said. “Wow, do I appreciate him. It’s a shame they covered him up with so much fabric and costume jewelry in ‘Thor.’”

 

 

 

“Who was he in ‘Thor’?” Tab asked curiously.

 

 

“He was Heimdall,” I said, both proud of my knowledge and ashamed to show how much of a comic-book geek I am. “The guardian of the Rainbow Bridge.”

 

 

Tab giggled. “Rainbow Bridge,” he said. “Seriously. How gay can you get? All the gods and warriors are wearing accessories.”

 

 

I began to see his point. “Asgard’s sort of the biggest baddest gay club ever,” I said. “It fairly pulses with bad house music. And Heimdall’s the bouncer.”

 

 

“And,” Tab said, “do you remember that beam they travelled around in? I mean, my god, how phallic was that?”

 

“Also,” I mused, “Thor has a very big hammer. And he likes to hit things with it. Also he likes to go out drinking.”

 

 

(Side note: Thor does seem to like girls, or at least Natalie Portman. Natalie Portman is, however, a little – hm – boyish, especially with that short haircut. Also there’s a brief scene in the movie of Natalie and Thor serving their friends breakfast. Or could it be – gasp! – brunch?)

 

 

My god. Why didn’t I realize all this before?

 

 

No wonder I liked that movie so much.

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Movie review: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

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Partner and I saw the preview for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” several months ago. We began salivating at the mere sight of Judi Dench and Maggie Smith and Tom Wilkinson, and agreed on the spot that this was a must-see.

 

 

We made our pilgrimage to see it this weekend, as did lots of other oldsters. (I heard the lady behind us say: “It looks like an AARP meeting in here!”) We were seated behind a whole row of Red Hat Society members, who’d pulled out all the stops fashion-wise: not just red hats, but red scarves, red feather boas, red sequined purses, red fascinators. Throughout the theater there were wheelchairs, and walkers, and lots of querulous discussions about not being able to hear the dialogue.

 

 

But, my goodness, once the film started, you could have heard a pin drop in there.

 

 

The movie is a lot of fun. It follows seven people who decide to take a chance on a retirement hotel in Jaipur, India: Judi Dench as a sweet impoverished widow, Maggie Smith as a tough bigoted hip-replacement patient, Tom Wilkinson as a retired judge with a haunted look, Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton as a married couple on the lines of Richard and Hyacinth Bucket, Celia Imrie as a sassy flirt, and Ronald Pickup as a funny old satyr.

 

 

I’m not going to give you too many spoilers, but I can safely tell you that everyone finds India to be a life-changing experience. I can probably tell you also that there is at least one death, but (if you’re like me) you’ll be surprised when it happens. Dev Patel, from “Slumdog Millionaire,” is the hyperactively charming hotel manager; he’s adorable, if a little puppyish and bouncy. (Of course, in comparison with his co-stars – who have about 500 combined years of stage and movie experience – he’s bound to seem a little juvenile.)

 

 

The movie’s a fairy-tale, naturally; it’s absurd; it would never be like this in real life. India is presented as a kaleidoscopic whirl of life and color; one character refers to it as “squalid,” but we never see the squalor, only the charm.  As an American, I found the setting charming; I don’t know how I’d have reacted if I’d been an Indian. (I felt this way about “Outsourced” too, both the movie and the TV series; I thought they were great fun, but I wondered uneasily the whole time if I was enjoying the culture-clash stuff in the wrong way.)

 

 

But, back at the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, pretty much everything ends happily, and even dinosaurs like Partner and me need our happily-ever-after movies.

 

 

So pop in your dentures and grab your cane and go see it.

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For Sunday: "I Heard It Through The Grapevine"

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I grew up with this song on the radio.  I really wasn’t listening to it very carefully.

 

 

Then it turned up in “The Big Chill,” and – ooh! – everybody thought it was great.

 

 

Then the song died into oblivion again.

 

 

Listen to it. It’s the percussion that does it. That compulsive drumbeat (which is perfect for the whole “grapevine” idea). And those raspy lyrics. It’s a wonderful end-of-relationship song.

 

 

Enjoy.                                     

 

 

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Customer service: the flip side

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I have written before about bad customer service.  In my young-and-foolish days I used to put up with it, thinking that I was a poor humble sap and that the cashiers and tellers were treating me badly because I somehow deserved it.  As I’ve aged, however, I’ve gotten smarter and crankier.  I have actually made a couple of customer-service people burst into flames when I focus my anger onto them.

 

 

A TD Bank recently opened in downtown Providence.  I was curious, and went in for some casual transactions.  They have lollipops! They have dog biscuits! They open the door for you!  They’re almost invariably cheerful!  (I’ve seen one of the tellers looking a little melancholy once or twice, but she didn’t take out her bad feeling on me, and I felt sympathetic for her.)

 

 

So I decided to join the TD revolution.

 

 

I could not have done better.  The folks at my old bank (whose name begins with a CITI and ends with a ZENS) were snarky and unpleasant when I closed out my account. The customer-service representative (a football-hero type, beefy and bluff) tried to talk me out of my decision, until I pointed out to him that he’d kept me waiting for several minutes while he chatted and flirted with a couple of the bank’s other employees.  At this point he became rather chilly with me. 

 

 

I am deliriously happy with TD Bank.  They’re cheaper, for one thing; their fees are much lower than those at my previous bank.  And the staff are cheerful, and they actually make a point of being helpful.  If I see someone in the bank wearing a nametag, I can actually ask him/her a question, and he/she will actually answer it, fully and helpfully, with a smile. 

 

 

I think my head might explode with joy. 

 

 

Now: if they opened up a few more branches in Rhode Island – preferably up here on the East Side of Providence – my life would be complete.

 

 

(Can this be true? Can the world actually be getting better?)

 

 

(I doubt it.)

 

 

(But I’ll take whatever I can get.)

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My mother, the killer

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We were a gun-totin’ family.  My father had at least half a dozen hunting rifles, of which he was very proud.  After his death, my mother kept one (loaded) in her bedroom, for emergencies.

 

 

Yes, I know. Mammy Yokum. Ma Kettle. But she knew how to use it.

 

 

She continually fought moles in her beloved garden; she set traps for them, mean little miniature bear-traps, stuffed down into their burrows.  (If you’ve ever seen a mole, you know how small and delicate they are.  But, to my mother, they were Lucifer incarnate, because they ruined her garden.) Sometimes, however, they triggered the traps and then ran away unharmed, and this infuriated her.  So she came up with the idea of chaining the trap to a metal post.

 

 

One morning she looked out the window to see the post rocking back and forth frantically.  Moles (as I said) are pretty small.  She’d obviously caught something much bigger.

 

 

It turned out to be a big mean angry badger.  It was caught fast, and it growled at her and ran back and forth, and tried to get free

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And she shot it dead.

 

 

Story number two:

 

 

On one of my visits to her in the earlyt 1990s, I woke in the middle of the night to hear an odd scraping sound outside. Mom’s house was miles from anywhere, out in the woods, so there was normally complete silence outside, apart from wind and rain and the howling of coyotes. I mentioned this at breakfast. She looked grim. “I heard it too,” she said. “Goddamned porcupine.  Chewing on the back steps. I’ll get it one of these days.”

 

 

(Editorial note: porcupines like to chew on wood that’s been handled by human beings. The wood gets impregnated with salt – generally from our sweat.  And porcupines are infatuated with salty wood.  They will eat the handles of axes and mallets and hammers, just to imbibe all the delicious salt that’s in there.)

 

 

Within a few weeks after my return to Providence, Mom told me the following story:

 

 

She started waiting for the porcupine, and finally one evening, she surprised it, and came out of the house toting her rifle.  Being a smart little porcupine, he flattened himself against the house, reasoning that Mom wouldn’t be so stupid as to shoot into her own house. 

 

 

He didn’t realize how resourceful she was.  She put down her rifle, picked up a broom, and started spanking him.

 

 

Squalling, he ran from her, out into the yard.

 

 

And then she shot him.

 

 

I come from tough stock, people. 

 

 

Beware.

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Brushes with celebrity

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We’ve all had brushes with celebrities. Working at a large East Coast university has brought lots of them my way.  Some years ago I was in a bookstore in downtown Providence at lunchtime, and I was trying to look at something on a lower shelf, and a tall lanky balding older guy was trying to look at the same shelf, and we got in each other’s way. And we glared at each other.  And – oh Jesus – it was Peter Boyle.

 

 

Partner and I like strolling in Manhattan, and one day we had a twofer: an Edie Falco sighting in a pastry shop (everybody in the place was on his/her cell phone, reporting that Edie was only two tables away!), and a Brad Garrett sighting on Broadway (he was eighteen inches taller than everyone else, and he was fairly radiating don’t-even-think-about-approaching-me!).  Also Daniel Davis, Niles from “The Nanny,” who’d been in the production of “La Cage aux Folles” we’d just seen, smiling in the rain, signing autographs.  Also the guy who played the mayor on “Gilmore Girls,” in line for “Spamalot,” bitchy and gossipy.

 

 

A friend here in Rhode Island is acquainted with a major local politician; she babysits her dogs, for god’s sake.  They were in a burger joint together, and the girl behind the counter squinted at Major Politician oddly. “I’ve seen you on TV,” she said. “Or in the newspaper. Right?”

 

 

Major Politician smiled. “Probably you have,” she said. “I’m Major Politician.”

 

 

The girl thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know who that is.”

 

 

Ah well.

 

 

But sometimes there is a perfect celebrity moment:

 

 

One of my acquaintances is lucky enough to be acquainted with the immortal Candice Bergen.  They were in a local Starbucks, and the barista said: “You look just like Murphy Brown.”

 

 

And Candice Bergen said, without batting an eye: “You know, a lot of people tell me that.”

 

 

Perfect.

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Missing children, Nancy Grace, and Dan Abrams

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Partner and I get up at 7:00 am or a little after. We have slightly different routines. I go into the living room, read my email and drink my coffee; he stays in the bedroom, reads his email, watches “Good Morning America,” and drinks his coffee.

 

 

Naturally I can hear most of the dialogue.

 

 

At 7:30am, “Good Morning America” almost invariably features a story about a missing child.  The child is almost always white, by the way. They usually have the irrational Nancy Grace and the mostly-imperturbable Dan Abrams doing Point Counterpoint on the subject.

 

 

Naturally there’s no real information.  Nancy always assumes the worst, and declares it, and announces that anyone who disagrees with her is a fool and an ivory-tower intellectual and a goddamned liberal.

 

 

Dan Abrams usually points out, mildly, that all the facts aren’t in, and more work needs to be done on the case.

 

 

Nancy explodes, calls Dan an ivory-tower intellectual and a goddamned liberal, and wants to know why more isn’t being done to bring this case to its (obvious) conclusion.

 

 

Some thoughts:

 

 

-        I wonder how many missing children there are in the USA today. 

-        I wonder how many of them are non-white. 

-        I wonder why we so seldom hear about the non-white missing children on “Good Morning America,” and I wonder if it’s because they’re just not considered to be so angelically adorable.

-        I wonder that they pair the astonishingly illogical Nancy Grace with the perfectly reasonable Dan Abrams, and allow her to snarl at him idiotically, just for the sake of TV entertainment.

-        I wonder what percentage of these poor children are ever located.

 

 

And finally: I wonder that the TV doesn’t actually explode with the whole idiotic illogicality of the thing.

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The recirculation of things

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I wrote recently about the "100 Things Challenge." I got a lovely response from a new WordPress blogger who writes under the name LearnShareChange, about how difficult it is to get rid of things because of our sentimental attachments to them.

 

 

How horribly true!

 

 

I love things, all kinds of things.  I am sentimental about them.  I have odd little things from my childhood, things that (somehow!) I have saved for almost fifty years.  One is a prize from a bag of Fritos sometime in the early 1960s, a little plastic coin with a picture of Laika the Russian space dog. It was a Heroes of Space series, and I loved that little dog.

 

 

Over the years, I have accumulated so many more things.  Books, and collectibles, and clothes, and gadgets.  Bags of them, boxes of them.

 

 

But – and here’s the funny thing about it – when someone sees one of my things and says: “I really like that,” I almost invariably give it to them.  Without hesitation.

 

 

They are startled, but they almost always take it.

 

 

My dear friend Sylvia calls this “the recirculation of things.”  She’s a collector too: dolls, toys, all kinds of things.  But she’s the way I am.  She wants things to keep moving.  (Her husband passed away last year, and she spent a lot of time giving away things afterward; she's given me some lovely silver spoons, and a set of Bugs Bunny tumblers.)  She (like me) loves to own things, and see them, and have them for a while, but that’s usually enough: when someone else says that they like the thing, she gives it to them. 

 

 

Usually.

 

 

As do I.

 

 

I love toys.  I adore stuffed animals.  I even keep them in the office.  But when I see the child of a co-worker admiring one of the funny little bears up on the shelf, I usually let them know that, if there’s an animal they can’t live without, I will let them take it.

 

 

Naturally!

 

 

They are just things.  Just silly things.  I suppose there are a few things in the house I couldn’t stand to live without: my Laika coin, and my old teddy bear.  And I think my brother still has my moon-globe in his garage; I was given it for Xmas 1969, five months after the first moon landing, and I still think about it. (I should ask him about that.)  And a handful of other things, small things mostly, with family significance, mostly worthless. 

 

 

Those things I will never give away.

 

 

Everything else, you can have, I think. 

 

 

Fifty years from now, it won’t matter to me a bit.

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Cory Booker

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Hey, Cory Booker. It was very neat of you to pull that woman out of that burning building. And I loved the way in which you addressed Chris Christie on gay marriage. (I’m always thrilled when I see Democrat politicians doing worthwhile things.)

 

 

What the hell were you thinking about on May 20 on “Meet The Press”?

 

 

You sniped at the President’s anti-big business stance, saying that it “nauseated” you.

 

 

But you were, and are, a designated surrogate for the President when you speak.

 

 

Did you remember that on May 20 on “Meet the Press”? Did you realize that you were on television?

 

 

You spent most or all of last week apologizing for what you said, and (contrariwise) defending what you said. You said you were entitled to a mistake, and that it was no big deal

 

 

Meanwhile, the Republicans are gloating and using your words to advance their own position.

 

 

Hmph.

 

 

We had such high hopes for you.

 

 

And now you turn out to be a nudnik after all.

 

 

Ah well.

 

 

(It’s a shame. You were nice-looking, and smart. Until you opened your stupid yap.)

 

 

We’ll find someone else to take your place.

 

 

Bye now.

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For Sunday: a morose Danish take on Donald Duck (not for kids! NFSW!)

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Maybe you’ve read some of the Stieg Larsson books about that tattooed girl who kills bad people. Maybe you’ve seen “The Killing,” with its quiet Danish take on murder.

 

 

So: do you picture Scandinavians as morose neo-Nazi drug-dealing murderers?

 

 

Okay.  Then this video is for you.

 

 

This video is by a Danish comedy group.  It’s Donald Duck and his nephews, and Daisy, and Goofy, and Uncle Scrooge, as you’ve never seen them.  Just so you know: it’s definitely not for kids, and NSFW.

 

 

Enjoy.

 

 

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