Month: June 2013

Movie Review: 42

What Jackie Robinson went through was precisely why he’s honored every April 15, with every Major League player wearing #42.

Haven’t written a movie review lately because I haven’t been to the cinema since the Oscar-nominated short films four months ago. The last full-length film I saw, with the Daughter, was Wreck-It Ralph in February; the last non-animated full-length film I saw, with the Wife, was Silver Linings Playbook back in January.

One of the movies I most wanted to see was 42, based on the life of baseball legend Jackie Robinson. I remember watching the TV show The View back in April from a hospital bed and being annoyed that my doctor came in, to discharge me, no less. It was just at the point I wanted to listen to the interview of Chadwick Bosemen who played Jackie in the movie; at least I got to see Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers who brought him from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues in 1945 to the Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal in 1946 to the big leagues on April 15, 1947i.

Finally, got a free Sunday afternoon, so I look at the Thursday preview section in the local newspaper and discover the movie has just left the Spectrum, my favorite venue. But it’s playing at the nearby Madison Theatre, so off the Wife and I go, leaving the Daughter with a child watcher.

This has never happened before – we are the ONLY people in the theater. The movie was supposed to start at 4:05; finally, the previews began at 4:10. (My goodness, we’re SO not seeing GrownUps 2.) This allowed more talking than we would normally do, mostly on her part. (Yes, Eddie Stanky was that guy’s name.)

Much of what you might have read about the film is true:
The baseball scenes seem very authentic. There is a specific incident involving Robinson and his teammate Pee Wee Reese (Lucas Black) in Cincinnati in particular that resonated; my daughter had given me a book a couple of years ago about that very story.
Boseman was very good as Jackie, sometimes conveying emotion just with a look in his eyes.
Nicole Beharie had the sufficient moxie to please the real Rachel Robinson, who is still alive.
The story, in a lot of ways is more about how others reacted to Jackie: Rickey; the black newspaper reporter Wendell Smith (Andre Holland) hired by Rickey to be his “Boswell;” the racist players and managers and crowds. In part, that’s a function of Ford being a bigger star than Boseman. It’s also true that because Jackie had to control his temper in that first year in the big leagues, one didn’t get to hear too much of Jackie’s real thoughts during the first year in the formerly white major leagues.
* Yes, if there were Lifetime movie stations for sports, this might fit in; I don’t mean that pejoratively.

On the other hand, I did note some who said that it was too much about Robinson’s ordeal and not enough about the man; I reject that criticism in that what he went through was precisely why he’s honored every April 15, with every Major League player wearing #42. I also don’t accept the notion that it should have been about a period wider than 1945 to 1947. A film about his later political involvement is a different movie.

Finally, I was only mildly distracted by the number of TV actors I recognized: Chris Meloni from one of those Law & Order shows as manager Leo Durocher; T.R. Knight and James Pickens Jr. from Grey’s Anatomy as a Dodgers executive and a Florida man showing Jackie some hospitality, respectively; and John C. McGinley from Scrubs as Red Barber. Didn’t recognize, though, Max Gail from Barney Miller.

All in all, I recommend the film 42. A solid triple – I mean, three out of four stars. More than that, I might show this to the Daughter when it shows up on DVD, which I imagine will be soon.

Not wanting to know the criminals’ names?

There’s a contingent out there who seem to relish the blow-by-blow of crimes, many of which I don’t know how they became national news.

I’ve noticed, particularly on Facebook, that after some particularly grievous, horrific crime – the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook, CT elementary school shootings, the Aurora, CO movie theater shootings – there is this contingent of folks who argue that we ought not to mention the names of the accused, but should instead focus solely on the victims. It’s as though by not saying the names of the perpetrators or alleged ones, it would deny them the fame they presumably wanted; this phenomenon exists even when the presumed criminal is already dead, such as in the Sandy Hook situation. And this call for a wall of silence, on Facebook especially, seems particularly insistent.

In my lifetime, I don’t remember people saying we oughtn’t to mention the name of Lee Harvey Oswald (presumed killer of JFK) or Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler). The first time I ever recall hearing this involved the killing of John Lennon, where certain fans, even writing about his death, to this day, won’t mention Mark David Chapman, as though, by not mentioning him, it would undo the events of December 8, 1980.

On the other hand, there’s another contingent out there who seem to relish the blow-by-blow of crimes, many of which I don’t know how they became national news. I read that Jodi Arias was convicted of murder last month and that it was heavily covered by CNN, especially by that legal vulture Nancy Grace – her I do not like – yet I have no idea why this particular case is so significant (and don’t care to find out).

In this group seems to be the folks who debated where Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s remains should be buried; he was the elder brother accused in the Boston Marathon bombing. Frankly, I thought this was rather bizarre. There have been worse criminals who nevertheless have been interred.

It seems that if we don’t know the motivation and methodology of some of these major crimes, we can’t have that supposed “national debate” on gun control, mental health, and violence generally. But some of the blow-by-blows seem merely of prurient interest, and unbecoming. One wants a balance; of course, where that balance lies varies greatly among the citizenry.

Dream three-hour night of television

In my mind Frasier was just an odd continuation of Cheers.

Someone asked Ken Levine, who wrote for the TV sitcoms Cheers, Frasier, MASH, and several other shows: “What’s your dream three-hour night of television, including any shows from any decade, including now.” He explained: “I’m going to cheat. I’m just going to concentrate on comedies. Dramas take up two slots. So here are my all-time favorite sitcoms.”
8:00 THE HONEYMOONERS
8:30 THE BILKO SHOW
9:00 THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW
9:30 THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW
10:00 MASH
10:30 CHEERS

Keeping that in mind, I picked:
The Simpsons – OK I haven’t watched more than thrice in the last decade, but those first years are strong enough
The Dick van Dyke Show – compare and contrast the family dynamic of these first two shows
The Mary Tyler Moore Show – and back-to-back MTM
Barney Miller – one of those perennially underrated shows
MASH – even though it should have ended when Radar went home early in season 8, rather than dragging on a couple more years
Twilight Zone Hey, I have this (and Van Dyke) on DVD

But his respondents had some great cheats. One wrote: “My 10 o’clock hour would be a rotating mix like Four in One (1970-71) or its successor the NBC Mystery Movie, but would involve the hour-long MTM shows: Lou Grant, The White Shadow, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, etc.” I rather like that, even that short-lived James Earl Jones show called Paris. And indeed, if I could do the same with the comedies, all the better; Mary Tyler Moore would share the slot with Newhart, WKRP in Cincinnati, even The Tony Randall Show, in which he played a judge.

Also, in my mind, Frasier was just an odd continuation of Cheers. With that cheat:

The Dick Van Dyke Show
The MTM sitcoms
Cheers/Frasier
Twilight Zone
The MTM dramas

What would YOU pick?
***
A production number from the 1986 Emmy Awards. “It’s a mess of TV stars singing snatches of — or merely walking on to — their shows’ theme songs.”

 

The Chinese lesson

It was interesting that, along with their titles, I was given the delegates’ dates of birth.

Delegation at NYS SBDC, March 18, 2013

A couple of months back, I was asked to speak to a Chinese delegation from Shenzhen province about these aspects in the United States: “statistics system in government organizations (structure, operation, management, what they do, etc.)” and the “government division responsible for business registration (when the division established, its history, etc.)” and “a brief overview of the business registration file or database establishment (industry categories, quantity, the geographical distribution of industries, employees, etc.)”

I dutifully prepared some remarks. Some of the questions were lost in translation, I feared. Others were quite overlapping. On the other hand, I DID discover that the NYS Department of State, which registers corporations in the state, was established shortly after the Declaration of Independence.

It was interesting that, along with their titles, I was given the delegates’ dates of birth, which ran from 1958 to 1975

Do you know what was THE most popular thing I talked about? It was after the session was ostensibly over, and they were talking about their itinerary, going to New York City. It was going to be 70F, but they didn’t know what that meant in Celsius. I started feverishly writing two columns by hand on a board in the room:
F/C
32/0
41/5
50/10
59/15
68/20
77/25
86/30
They were SO excited by this information that they started taking pictures of it.

Later, they gave me this lovely scarf in appreciation for my assistance.

Speaking of international, I went to an import/export workshop recently, and the presenter indicated that most products needed to ship in metric units, such as milliliters and kilograms. The instructor said, rhetorically, “I mean, who else besides the United States even USES our system of weights and measures?” I said, with assurance, “Liberia and Burma.” I was remembering the map from this blog post from a little less than three years ago.

Gee, even I learn something from my blog posts, occasionally.

 

D-Day, as in discovery

Finding myself agreeing with Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

There’s a blogger called Altonian, who is writing a lot about The War Years in England, most recently: “Alton received its fair share of evacuees during the war, most of which came from London.” With my life proceeding as it has, I had not sought to follow any more bloggers. But I saw him comment on the blogs of both Berowne AND Sharp Little Pencil; both of them I met on ABC Wednesday, which, BTW, you can join too.

Berowne, BTW, generally takes a movie or play, changes it up, and sees if you can recognize it. For his current entry, I must admit, I didn’t recognize the movie until he gave a vital hint. Only then was it obvious to me. (I never saw the movie, having fallen asleep watching it on video.)

Amy at Sharp Little Pencil has been writing a string of great poems: a political rant -I don’t rant nearly so well; her manic depression, which she has dealt with; surviving sexual abuse, which she has also dealt with; and a celebration, all in this calendar month.

Appreciated LoveSong: SamuraiFrog and Rainy Days and Mondays on Splotchy’s site. Even without his obsession for Paul Williams, I got to the same place with the song.

Re: ABC Wednesday, I had to deal with a load of spam on the site, all fairly recent. It was a pain; yet its removal felt very cleansing, not as irritating as you would think.

I was struck when Melanie wrote: “It isn’t easy to be still- even when you are sick and can’t move much! That’s because stillness is also a quality of soul.”

I realized, as much as anything, the recent Supreme Court ruling, which states that police can routinely take DNA samples from people who are arrested but not yet convicted of a crime, operates the efficiency over justice model. Finding myself agreeing with Antonin Scalia: “Make no mistake about it. Because of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason. But the proud men who wrote the charter of our liberties would not have been so eager to open their mouths for royal inspection.” Faster – when it tramples on the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure – is not better.
***
Some recent passings:

Frank Lautenberg, the Last of the New Deal Liberals. The New Jersey Democrat was the last WWII soldier left in Congress. Interesting that Governor Christie has called a special election in October, rather than saving the taxpayer dollars money, by holding it in November. Interesting political calculation.

There would be no ALL IN THE FAMILY without Jean Stapleton.

I used to love to read the syndicated column of Andrew M. Greeley: Priest, Author, Scholar, Scold.

David “Deacon” Jones was the original sackmaster of the National Football League. When I think of the original Fearsome Foursome on the LA Rams, I recall Jones, who the Hall of Fame defensive end who later had his own foundation to help kids; the late Merlin Olsen, who eventually showed up on Little House on the Prairie and other programs; and the still living Rosey Grier, who also played for the NY Giants, and liked to knit. Always seemed to forget the late Lamar Lundy, for some reason.

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