The Producers?

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I thought I’d have a new “Friday Fundamentals in Film” post ready for today but time and circumstances worked against me. The next one in the series is imminent, however.

I did, however, recently see a movie that will never make it to the FIF list, but I’ll describe it here as a warning and public service. The movie is The Producers: The Musical, a remake by Mel Brooks of his 1968 comedy classic, with the latest version essentially being a filming of the hit Broadway-musical version of the show.

I ordered the remake from Netflix with both anticipation and trepidation. I loved the original movie and was interested to see how it would look with a real budget, but I was concerned with how it some of my favorite scenes might translate into the modern version. The original was so off-the-wall and unlike anything else I’d ever seen (I don’t think I stumbled across it until the mid-70s) that I’ve always cherished it even though it looked as if it had been written in one weekend and filmed in two. The success of the Broadway version in recent years encouraged me. The fact that I hadn’t noticed the new movie when it was first released to the theaters, however, might have been telling.

The latest version is fast-paced and very slick looking. I will say that I like Nathan Lane as Max Bialystock better than Zero Mostel, but Matthew Broderick as Leo Bloom is no Gene Wilder; in fact, he couldn’t carry Wilder’s blanket. Broderick plays the same whiny nebbish he’s played in The Road to Wellville and The Stepford Wives (a long way from his role as Col. Robert Gould Shaw in Glory). Of course, the role calls for a whiny nebbish, but while Wilder made it funny, Broderick never rises above the annoying.

The best thing the movie did this go-round was to expand the role of Franz Liebkind, the erstwhile Nazi turned playwright. The best and funniest scenes involve Franz, played by Will Ferrell — and I should let you know that I normally cannot abide Will Ferrell. While I missed Dick Shawn as Hitler, the flower-power-hippie role as presented in the original movie obviously was too dated for this version, and updating to a gay parody was inspired. The problem was (as is often the failure with Brooks films) in beating the joke to death. Brooks at his best (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, imho) sets up the joke, gets the laugh and moves on to the next absurdity. At his worst (e.g., History of the World, Part 1 and Spaceballs – which even so has many funny scenes) you see the joke coming a long way off, it is carried on for way too long, and then repeated again and again. TPTM falls into this bog.

There are some good bits in the new version, and the movie is not bad as a Netflix rental, especially if you keep your expectations low (a service which I hope I have performed).

The fire which time

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I’ve been following the story about the fire that’s burning through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in northern Minnesota. It’s not like it was a big surprise or anything, the situation has been inevitable since a huge windstorm resulted in a massive blow-down of 400,000 acres of trees in 1999. Afterwards any cleanup was stymied by policies and politics. Necrophiliac tree-huggers strongly objected to letting logging companies clean out the deadfall and to the thought of second-hand exhaust from vehicles and chain saws (motors have long been banned from the BWCA) violating the pristine area. Meanwhile the Forest Service pretty much took the position that “Nature created the mess, let her clean it up.”

We were all just waiting for the unavoidable spark, conditioned by years of warnings from Smokey the Bear to dread forest fires and hoping that the inevitable wouldn’t result in a flaming holocaust. Now that it’s here, though, it’s looking as if it won’t be as catastrophic an event as some might have feared (unless you’re a species of endangered wood tick or similar trapped in the thousands of acres burned so far). While the sky in the area may not be as pristine as it was, it is generally acknowledged that an occasional fire is a good and necessary thing for the ecosystem. Or, as Kenneth Mars might have said in Young Frankenstein, “A riot (fire) is a terrible thing. Und I think it is high time ve had one!”

In reading the news, however, I think I’ve seen some similarities between what’s going on in the Boundary Waters and events in the few-boundaries Middle East. Certainly there’s been all kinds of kindling piled up for years in the area and politics and policies have prevented any serious effort to get in there and clean out the fuel. In fact, “controlled burns” of aggressions immediately followed by half-measure mediations have only increased the pressures. Conditioned by years of fears that a fight such as what is happening in Lebanon would lead to World War III, we all held our collective breath at first, but now it is looking as if the result may be clarity instead of calamity. And maybe just what the region needs.

What is interesting (and the reason it hasn’t blown up – yet) is that countries such as Eygpt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have, for the time being, apparently signed up for the International Don’t Call list and Hezbollah and Hamas are therefore having a hard time getting the “Arab street” to return their calls. Those three countries, and others in the region, have their own reasons for not being too concerned if the Shiites hit the fan if it serves to crimp Iran’s ambitions in the region. Instead, whatever adventurism on the parts of Hamas and Hezbollah may sparked this conflagration, it has literally blown up in their faces.

The problem for a guerilla operation is that it is in trouble when it gets entrenched. Once you, say, actually have a headquarters with a mailing address you can’t assume the old advantages still apply to you. Once your opponent musters the will they’ll be ringing your doorbell like Jehovah Witnesses and you’re going to get ALL the literature whether you like it or not. Similarly, I don’t think the old bail-out tactics are going to work. As long as Israel maintains the momentum and focuses only on southern Lebanon there likely won’t be much in the way of “World Opinion” cavalry to ride in to the rescue. I think the usual players are content to sit back and watch Iran and Syria’s proxies get slapped around a bit, knowing that when’s it all over they, too, will be free of a nuisance and will still have plenty of time to denounce Israel’s aggression.

Collateral damage is inevitable and unfortunate, but the real endangered species is the parasites that have lived off of the blood (and money) of others and used their neighbors as human shields. Still thinking they were playing by the old rules, Hezbollah has said that the only way they’ll lay down their weapons is if you pry them from their cold, dead fingers. Only this time the Israeli response was, “finally, a peace proposal we can support!”

You can’t take it with you — so some one else has to

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My grandmother just moved into an assisted-living center. It’s a nice place, the staff is great and she was the one who ultimately decided it was time so everything is generally acceptable. By my count, this is the fourth time she’s moved since she left the house after my grandfather died, and each time she’s had to shuck more things; not an easy thing for someone who’s a bit of a hoarder by nature.

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without,” was the motto of her generation, so nothing was ever parted with lightly. Bales of wire hangers from the dry-cleaners; stacks of empty Cool Whip containers (some even with lids), enough to stage a road show of the “500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins with plastic bowls as hats; plus many other treasures with stories that still have some miles left on them. Each move was like peeling off another layer or two of husk and now we’re down to the kernel and cob, with a few wisps of silk. The new place is the smallest yet and she’s down to the essentials, with still a few eccentricities such as the radio that hasn’t worked in no one knows how long. Some things were questioned during the pack-up but there is no one else in the family who can say they know what it is like to walk into a new room and know that it is this far and no further, last stop, and so slack is given.

The things left behind just don’t dissolve away, of course. When I was down there earlier this month Grammy’s previous apartment was still half-full of “things” that needed to be dealt with. It was like preparing for an estate sale, or hearing the reading of the will, but without someone dieing first. Still sad, though. “Dishes are going here, linens with so-and-so. What do you want? What can you take?” It’s almost overwhelming to me, seeing it for the first time, but my parents have been looking at it for weeks.

“What do you want? What can you take?“

My wife and daughters and I roam the rooms, lifting, turning, trying to imagine what we might do with this or how we’d use that. For the ladies it’s just so much stuff; there’s little here that they’ve ever seen or had a connection to. I’m using my eyes and my memory, looking for something to take away that has extra meaning. In a closet I find a couple of hats of a kind that my grandfather wore when gardening. My heart races as I pick them up, but they’re just hats. There isn’t any dirt or sweat stains on them, and they don’t smell like him. They’re just hats and I put them back on the shelf. I do end up with a few things, and my daughters find some jewelry they like. Patience finds some hats that look just funky enough for her. Faith picks up some linen napkins and some old lamps for her trousseau – transferring things from this last apartment that will ultimately go in a first apartment. My wife scores some cookie sheets and Tupperware and a huge measuring cup. It is just about all that we can fit in the car, yet it seems as if the stacks left in the rooms are barely diminished. Still plenty of room for ghosts, though, and everything must go eventually.

“What do you want? What can you take, please?”

We all go along all through our lives picking up things we want or have to have, generally parting only with the things that wear out or break down. Sure, we know that certain things are hopelessly out of style, or will never be used again, but we’ll deal with them “later” when we have “more time.” It all stretches out behind and around us as if we’re so many Marleys and we’re all so used to it that we hardly notice. It makes me wonder what my kids will want when I get to that place with no closet space. Will someone take the leather jacket? The golf clubs? The Monty Python tapes?

What will they want? What can they take?

Because Morgan Freeman had already done it once

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Samuel L. Jackson will be the voice of God on a new CD version of the New Testament due to be released this September. (HT: Robbo at The Llama Butchers.)

It sounds logical; Morgan Freeman has already played God (and George Burns is dead), and the producers must have liked Jackson’s reading of “I will strike down upon them with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brother and you will know my name is THE LORD when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

I guess I buy it; about the only person cooler than Samuel L. Jackson is God, but doesn’t it make you kind of wonder who’s been cast for the other roles?

Who’s Satan, Mr. T — or Gilbert Gottfried? (Though I might characterize that voice as being more like Barry White’s.) How about Jon Lovitz as Judas, and William F. Buckley for the Apostle Paul?

As for voicing Jesus himself, Brad Pitt would be great box office, but I’d prefer E.F. Hutton. After all, as the old commercials always said, “When E.F.Hutton talks, people listen.”

Anchors aweigh. Never forget.

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There’s an interesting story that’s been going through the emails for a couple of months, but I haven’t read any accounts of it in the blogs. I got around to checking it out and I found out that not only is the story true (and pretty neat), there’s another eerie detail as well.

The main part of the story is that construction is about half-completed on the USS New York, a new amphibious assault ship for the Navy that will be launched next year. There are a couple of details that make this noteworthy: the ship is one of three such craft made to support special operations missions against terrorists, and all three ships bear a name associated with 9/11. The other two ships are the USS Arlington (for the Pentagon) and the USS Somerset (for the county were Flight 93 crashed). The coolest detail is that the New York’s bow is made from 24 tons of scrap steel salvaged from the Twin Towers and reforged. You can read the touching story here.


Artist rendering of USS New York (Northrop Grumman)

While the Navy used to name battleships after states of the union this practice is currently reserved for nuclear submarines, so resurrecting the name for an amphibious assault ship required an exception. In fact, there have been at least seven ships named the USS New York, and the last one was a sub (I know, a sub is really a boat, not a ship).

Here’s the eerie twist: after googling the name of the ship I discovered that prior to the submarine the last USS New York (BB-34) had been a battleship that had seen action in both World Wars. The keel of that battleship was laid on a very interesting date:

September 11, 1911.

Challenging Word of the Week: quotidian

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Quotidian

(kwoh TID ee un) adjective



Quotidian means “daily,” i.e., recurring every day, as in a quotidian report, and in that sense is synonymous with diurnal but only in the first meaning given under that entry, i.e., “daily,” as opposed to “daytime” used attributively. By extension, quotidian has acquired the second meaning of “everyday” in the sense of “ordinary, commonplace,” and in certain contexts, “trivial.” In this extension, it follows its Latin antecedent quotidianus (daily), which acquired the meaning “common, ordinary.” Things that go on day after day do become run-of-the-mill after a while. Variety is the spice, etc. The American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), in The Comedian as the Letter C, wrote: “…the quotidian saps philosophers.”



My example: The best bloggers disprove Stevens, being both quotable and quotidian.



From the book, “1000 Most Challenging Words” by Norman W. Schur, ©1987 by the Ballantine Reference Library, Random House. I post a weekly “Challenging Words” definition to call more attention to this delightful book and to promote interesting word usage in the blogosphere. I challenge other bloggers to work the current word into a post sometime in the coming week. If you manage to do so, please leave a comment or a link to where I can find it. Previous words in this series can be found under the appropriate Category heading in the right-hand sidebar.

What’s in a name? You might want to find out

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Today’s Strib has the details on the sentencing of a man who pled guilty to helping his wife and her teenaged sons kidnap two young women who where then prostituted and used as sex slaves until one escaped and brought the situation to light. Newspaper accounts suggest that the wife was the ringleader.

Lamiea Kerschbaum, Kerschbaum’s wife, has been charged with kidnapping and false imprisonment and is in the Ramsey County jail awaiting a competency hearing on July 26. She recently spent months at the state mental hospital in St. Peter being evaluated…

…Investigators think the Kerschbaums used pistol whippings, drugs and threats of voodoo to keep the girls under their control.

While her husband and one of her sons have pled guilty, Lamiea Kerschbaum’s trial has yet to begin.

Lamiea? That sounds an awful lot like one of the recent “Challenging Word of the Week” entries I posted back in May. An excerpt:

Lamia
(LAY mee uh)noun

The lamiae, in classical mythology, were a race of monsters with female heads and breasts and the bodies of serpents, who enticed young people and little children in order to devour them. The story went that the original lamia was a Queen of Libya with whom Jupiter fell in love. Juno became furiously jealous and stole the children of the queen, who went mad and vowed vengeance on all children. Lamia became a term for any vampire or she-demon. The literal meaning of lamia in Greek is “female man-eater.” In medieval times, witches were sometimes called lamiae.

Note to soon-to-be parents considering names for your impending children: if you see “Lamiea” or something similar in the baby name book you just might want to cross that one off the list.

Good luck, comrade

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Chad the Elder apparently is on assignment in Russia. His post about flying into Chelyabinsk reminded me of some favorite passages about Russia from P.J. O’Rourke’s book, Eat the Rich:

In the old days, the soda pop tasted like soap, the soap lathered like toilet paper, the toilet paper could be used to sand furniture, the furniture was as comfortable as a pile of canned goods, the canned goods had the flavor of a Solzhenitsyn novel, and a Solzhenitsyn novel got you arrested if you owned one. Now the Russians have discovered brand names…

My six-hour flight to Siberia took two days. Airline employees circulated with walkie-talkies. Not satisfied with individual screw-ups, they apparently wanted to coordinate them.

“Everything’s unready to go in the cockpit.”
“Roger that. We’ve got the baggage lost.”
“Seat selection’s a mess.”
“Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Catering’s not f*****d up yet.”

Granted, O’Rourke may not turn a comedic phrase as deftly as Vlad Putin, but I’ve always kind of liked him. I hope conditions have improved since that was written.

Good luck, Chad.

Your mileage may differ

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My first job was pumping gas at my father’s gas station, back in 1970. The price per gallon fluctuated, but was usually around 34 cents. Gas stations competed for customers then, offering full service window-washing and offers to check the oil and tires. We also awarded Top Valu stamps and frequently gave out promotional gifts like glassware and steakknives, or had game pieces to attract repeat customers.

When the ’73 OPEC oil embargo came along the availability of gasoline dropped, the price shot up, and my dad happily trashed the Top Valu stamp machine. The new price of gas was shocking – as much as 42 or 44 cents per gallon (41.9 and 43.9 cents, actually), and consumers were very price sensitive. We once had our price at .41 and our driveway was crammed with cars while the driveway of the station across the street — at .43 — was as barren as the ANWR during the caribou’s non-breeding season. As I recall, I was also making less than $2 an hour back then.

Ah, the good old days, eh?

Not necessarily, even with gas pushing or exceeding $3 per gallon. A National Policy Analysis report by David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research has an interesting comparison between the price of gas and other commodities in April of 1981 and today. According to data he cites from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average cost of a gallon of regular unleaded gas (sans taxes) in ’81 was around $1.26, which would be $2.83 in inflation-adjusted dollars today. Yet the average cost per gallon of regular unleaded (pre-tax) in May of this year was $2.29, about 19% below the adjusted cost. Furthermore, he indicates that in the late 70s and early 80s the adjusted cost was regularly over $2 per gallon, while the .25 per gallon pre-tax cost of gasoline in 1922 is the equivalent of $3 today.

By comparison, the report shows that a half-gallon of milk in 1981 cost $1.12, and $2.09 in May of this year. Both milk and gasoline have increased at slower rates than inflation over this time, but milk prices have increased at a slightly greater rate than gasoline. I figure we don’t notice this so much because we rarely buy 20 gallons of milk a week. (But can you imagine a “Got Gas?” advertising campaign?)

Another popular commodity, bread, has also increased 103 percent in the past 25 years, which is about 8% below the rate of inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of postage-stamps offered by our government-run monopoly have just about matched inflation over the same period.

While it’s never fun to pay out the big bucks at the gas station, the impact on the family budget hasn’t been as extreme as it might appear. Furthermore, we can be very glad that our cars don’t run on bottled water, which on a gallon-to-gallon basis is nearly three times that of gasoline. As Ridenour notes:

If I’m not mistaken, water is the most abundant resource on the planet, it is not controlled by a cartel, its known reserves are not limited primarily to volatile areas of the world and it requires substantially less refinement than gasoline to bring to market.

Anyone interested in getting into the Big Water bidness with me?