Browsed by
Category: entertainment

Shark Week!

Shark Week!

Comments 0 Comment

I don’t think it’s officially Shark Week, but it was shark week at my house yesterday as Celia and I took in last summer’s “The Meg.”

Imagine the largest Great White you can, multiply it by 10 and you have a megalodon, a prehistoric shark-like creature that was thought to be extinct but which (in this rousing tale) lives on in a hidden part of the ocean floor below a layer of gas.

When a band of explorers finds a way to permeate the barrier and descend into an eerie place deeper than the Mariana Trench, they find a shark so large that it eats the explorer’s roving pod for breakfast.

Celia and I had great fun trying to figure out who would be eaten and who would survive. We were right about half the time.

Wow, it’s good to have her home!

Tethered

Tethered

Comments 0 Comment

Last night I watched a movie called “Free Solo,” a
documentary that chronicled Alex Honnold’s untethered ascent of El Capitan in
Yosemite.  Using only his hands and feet — and most of
all his brain (which apparently has a less-responsive amygdala than most), Honnold was able to climb up the sheer face of the 3,000-foot cliff.
No ropes, no belts, buckles or belays. Just the man and the mountain.
By contrast, I recently ascended 400 feet in a balloon to see the temples of Angkor Wat. It couldn’t have
been safer. The balloon was tethered to the ground and the passengers were
encased in wire mesh. I was still weak in the knees.

And last night, I was weak-kneed again. It didn’t even help that I knew the guy survived. There’s something primitive about it, something hard-wired in us to recoil when we see another human being clinging precariously to a sheer rock face. 

No doubt about it, the untethered experience makes for great cinema — but when it comes to my own ascents, I’ll take them tethered every time. 

Downton Sandwich

Downton Sandwich

Comments 0 Comment

This winter I’ve continued my binge-watching spree, plunging back into Downton Abbey after catching up on Victoria. Time permitting, I head down to the basement beanbag chair after dinner for 45 to 60 minutes of immersion in another world.

Add in elliptical-machine morning-exercise sessions, which require that one watch something to make the minutes pass more quickly, and my days lately have become what I’ve come to think of as a “Downton sandwich”: Twenty minutes of Lord and Lady Grantham in the morning and 50 minutes of Lord and Lady Grantham in the evening.

In between I must dress myself, drive my own car to Metro, commute on an overcrowded train with people of all classes, work a long day, then come home to make my own dinner. Oh, the indignity! I’m sure the Dowager Countess Violet Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith) would say something to buck me up, something like, “Don’t be defeatist, dear. It is very middle-class,” one of her many splendid zingers.

Still, my “Downton sandwich” makes me think about the modern world that was shaking the estates of the rich and titled in post World War I Britain. Makes me compare my life with those of the people upstairs (and downstairs, too, but upstairs is more fun): Where is the ladies maid to do my hair every morning? Where is the cook to prepare me a scrumptious breakfast that will be brought to me in bed? Where is the butler to open the door and dispatch all those horrid telephone sales calls?

These service personnel are scattered to the four winds, I guess. They’ve become engineers and baristas, doctors and teachers. They’re living their own lives. Poor me: I’m left to fend for myself!

(Highclere Castle interior courtesy Culture Trip)

“Green Book” and More

“Green Book” and More

Comments 0 Comment

Over the weekend, as Virginia’s governor struggled for his political survival, I went to see a movie about race relations in 1962. It was difficult to watch “Green Book” and not understand the intense reactions to Gov. Northam’s yearbook page, which contains a photograph he’s now denying depicted him, with one person in a KKK hood and another in black face.

Northam has been a good governor so far, a rare Democratic moderate willing to work across the aisle. He’s gotten excellent reviews from people of all races. Which is why we should not drive the man from office for this affront. We should judge him by the totality of his actions and not by one unfortunate offense, something which, if it occurred at all, would not have carried the same weight then that it does today.

What I took from “Green Book” was not just the necessity for change but also the need for forgiveness, for learning to see the world from another’s perspective. Both men — the African-American pianist and the Italian-American driver — came to see the hollowness and futility of their positions. Both men changed.

What’s happened now is that we have hardened into such rigid postures that we can’t change; we can’t see the world from other perspectives. There are certain boxes that, once ticked, result in total elimination.

If we keep this up, it will drive even the last good people from the pursuit of public office. We are reaping what we have sown.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Binge-Watching

Binge-Watching

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday I spoke with a colleague. We discussed the government shutdown and other matters. She wondered aloud why more people aren’t up in arms about what’s happening to our country. I posited an answer: binge watching.

Of the two 20-century dystopian novels most in vogue when I was growing up, Brave New World was most on the money. Not for a moment underestimating 1984‘s Big Brother or the surveillance under which we now live, I think our peril lies in our pleasures, in our need for entertainment.

Enter binge-watching. In the last week, as my body has been trudging through January 2019, my mind and heart are lodged in Victorian England as I binge-watch the PBS series “Victoria.”  It’s a relatively innocent pleasure as pleasures go—and don’t get me wrong: I love it! But  I’ve noticed it makes me care a little less about present-day reality.

Binge-watching a show is addictive. I’m absorbed in my show just as the denizens of Brave New World were absorbed by their walls. All I need now is a little soma.

(Photo: Courtesy PBS)

Downton Time

Downton Time

Comments 0 Comment

The Christmas ornaments are packed away. The tree is awaiting pickup by the street. The last fir needle is (I think) vacuumed off the floor.

All of which means … it’s Downton time. Or at least it used to be.

The urge to watch “Downton Abbey” had been growing in me for days. The U.S. airing of that show on PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” was always perfectly timed, I thought. It would begin here the first full weekend after the holidays, and was a perfect respite to the post-Christmas letdown.

No need to mourn it, though, not in the age of streaming. Last night, I settled down in the beanbag chair to watch Downton all over again, courtesy of Amazon Prime.

What a sight it was was after two years away—and eight years since the first episode: the opulence and the intrigue, the dresses and the jewelry, the upstairs and the downstairs. Seeing it again means I savor the details with full knowledge of what comes afterward: Lord Grantham’s generosity, Anna’s kindness to Bates.

It wasn’t until I glanced at the clock on the VCR player that it dawned on me what I’d done. It was 9 p.m. Without meaning to I was watching the show at exactly the same hour it always aired. As Downton often reminds us: Old habits die hard.

Tale of Tears

Tale of Tears

Comments 0 Comment

Speaking of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I watched it last night. It was the perfect way to end Boxing Day and our two-day celebration at my sister Ellen’s.


Every time I watch the movie (and I watch it almost every year), I’m glad I did. Not many movies hold up to multiple viewings, and the fact that this one does proves its depth of feeling and detail.

I woke up this morning thinking about George Bailey’s righteous indignation (“this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this town”), of the tender scene between George and his mother (played by the actress Beulah Bondi, who was Stewart’s mother on screen five different times) and of Uncle Billy’s animals (the pet crow was actually a pet raven named Jimmy, which Capra used in every film he made starting with “You Can’t Take it With You” in 1938). 

I learned these factoids this morning, and they make me marvel … but it was the beautiful and steady build-up of details last night that left me … as usual when I watch this movie, in tears …
Park Avenue Beat

Park Avenue Beat

Comments 0 Comment

For the last week or so, I’ve been watching old “Perry Mason” shows while exercising. It’s a fun distraction. The show has enough twists and turns that the rowing machine minutes speed by. I find myself comparing legal justice then and now, marveling at the cut of the men’s suits (which they wore at all times) and the women’s skirts (and white gloves), pondering the world that produced this show as much as the show itself.

There’s only one problem: I can’t get the Perry Mason theme song out of my mind. It’s with me when I walk, when I cook dinner or empty the dishwasher.  It’s even with me in the office.

It has a lot of moxie, this theme song. It’s decidedly tabloid, with a detective-magazine feel. Called “Park Avenue Beat,” the song was written to exude sophistication and toughness, Wikipedia informs me. It was composer Fred Steiner’s most well-known work.

All I know is … I wish it would go away.

Hooray For …

Hooray For …

Comments 0 Comment

I enjoyed the movies nominated for Best Picture this year more than I have any crop in years. Either I’m getting inured to the Zeitgeist, or there were more throwbacks. The latter, I think.

What was not a throwback was the ceremony itself. I realized at the end of it that what I look for in the Oscars is some kind of old-time glamour that hasn’t been there in years. Last year’s ceremony had such a shocking conclusion that it didn’t matter. The year before that I was probably too rattled to care.

But this year, I did notice, I did care and I did wonder. When things seem Not the Same, how much of it is because things are actually changing, how much is the raging of age (“nothing is as good as it used to be, dearie”) … and how much is a combination of the two?

(Danielle Darrieux from In Memoriam, Oscargo.com)

A Walker at Pemberley

A Walker at Pemberley

Comments 0 Comment

Over the weekend I watched one of my mainstays, the Pride and Prejudice miniseries that debuted in 1995 and never grows old.

What struck me this time around is how much time Miss Elizabeth Bennett spends traipsing around the countryside. She walks in all weathers and all terrains. She walks in the cold and the rain. She dirties her petticoat and muddies her shoes. She walks around the estate at Pemberley, where she runs into its owner, Mr. Darcy, fresh out of the lake and dripping wet.  It’s a scene to thrill every female English major’s heart!

Later, in dry clothes, Darcy escorts Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle around the estate, along crushed stone paths, through copses of trees. This all could have been mine, Elizabeth said to herself on an earlier tour of the house, having second thoughts about spurning Darcy’s proposal as she reevaluates his character — and his property!

But the quiet walk the couple shares bodes well for the future. And as the camera pans out, we see the placid beauty of the English countryside. I saved the last two episodes for another night. But I know this: One day Miss Elizabeth Bennett will be a walker at Pemberley.

(Lyme Park, Cheshire, where the lake scene was filmed.)