Month: March 2016

Roger is 63

“Grown-ups are making it up as they go along,”

Roger_shirt63. Three score and three. I’ve turned 21 for the third time. Or the forty-third time, depending on how you look at these things.

I saw this on my friend Steve Bissette’s Facebook page a while back – he’s a fellow March Piscean, FWIW – and I thought it both appropriate and true, though I’ve never seen the film:

“You think grown-ups have it all figured out? That’s just a hustle, kid. Grown-ups are making it up as they go along, just like you. You remember that, and you’ll do fine.”
– Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), MATINEE (1993)

Since I don’t actually blog on my birthday, or work on my birthday, I’ll leave you with the usual, which, now that I look back, I haven’t used in three years:

A quote from one of my favorite books, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit by Henri J.M. Nouwen, a Canadian theologian who died in 1996. (Copyright 1994, published by The Crossroad Publishing Company.)

I share this passage about birthdays, not only for my sake, but, I hope, for yours as well:

Birthdays need to be celebrated. I think it is more important to celebrate a birthday than a successful exam, a promotion, or a victory. Because to celebrate a birthday means to say to someone: “Thank you for being you.” Celebrating a birthday is exalting life and being glad for it. On a birthday we do not say: “Thanks for what you did, or said, or accomplished.” No, we say: “Thank you for being born and being among us.”
…
Celebrating a birthday reminds us of the goodness of life, and in this spirit we really need to celebrate people’s birthdays every day, by showing gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, gentleness, and affection. These are ways of saying: “It’s good that you are alive; it’s good that you are walking with me on this earth. Let’s be glad and rejoice. This is the day that God has made for us to be and to be together.”

 

Agree to disagree

Aren’t there objective facts anymore?

niceguysOne of my favorite bits on the most recent Academy Awards was when Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, costars of the violent comedy The Nice Guys, being released in May 2016, presented the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Gosling gives an inane definition of the category.

Crowe corrects him, explaining the category represents a screenplay adapted from another source such as a novel, play, short story, or TV show.

Gosling replies, “Agree to disagree. Let’s not fight, come on, we have two Academy Awards between us, it’s beneath us to argue.”

“Wait, you’ve won an Oscar?” asked Crowe, surprised.

“Well not when you put it like THAT, but you have two Academy Awards, so technically there’s two between us!” Gosling explained. “Can we go on and give this award so more people can have Oscars like we do?”

Crowe insists that he only has one award, but Gosling repeats, “Agree to disagree.”

“Look, mate, you can’t go around just saying—” Crowe responds, before Gosling cut him off to announce the nominees.

Crowe DOES have but one Oscar, for Gladiator (2000), though he had been nominated two other times, for The Insider (1999) and A Beautiful Mind (2001).

The bit, which you can watch here or here. I found it funny because it’s painfully true.

“Agree to disagree” is actually a reasonable position to take when it comes to opinions. But FACTS? Aren’t there objective facts anymore? They seem to be lost, quite often these days. We’re in a world where we seek, to quote a recent blog title, “News that agrees with you.”

Another thing I liked at the Oscars was the Best Picture winner. “Spotlight” Gets Investigative Journalism Right, the Truthout article says. Getting the story correct was important in 2001 and 2002 when the story was based. The reporters didn’t always get it right, but the goal was the truth.

And Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won her second Oscar for best documentary short, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, a film about “honor killings”, which are anything but honorable.

And Forget Leo, Ennio Morricone finally won an Oscar after 500 movie credits.

Music Throwback Saturday: Baby, I’m For Real

Marvin Gaye and this then-wife, Anna Gordy Gaye, wrote Baby, I’m for Real

originalsBack in 1990, there were three Motown compilations, now out of print, that I bought. 20 Hard to Find Motown Classics, Volume 1, like its two successors, featured songs by Motown singers who didn’t have enough hits to have their own “Greatest Hits” CDs. But most of the songs were hardly “hard to find.” Many had appeared in other Motown collections.

The three CDs were reissued together in 2001 in the UK as Tamla Motown: Big Hits & Hard to Find Classics, Vols. 1-3. A half dozen songs were dropped.

The first two songs on the first album were by a group called the Originals. The lead singer was Freddie Gorman, who was an early, and sometimes uncredited, songwriter for Motown. He also co-wrote (Just Like) Romeo and Juliet, which was recorded by another Detroit-based group, the Reflections.

Gorman joined The Originals, which was also comprised of lead tenor C.P. Spencer, second tenor Hank Dixon, and baritone Walter Gaines. Despite the talent, was long unable to get a hit, and ended up doing backing vocals for folks such as Stevie Wonder and David Ruffin.

Marvin Gaye took a shine to the group who had also backed him. He and this then-wife, Anna Gordy Gaye, wrote Baby, I’m for Real. Marvin “had protested to Motown CEO Berry Gordy that he wanted to produce his own material and he used the Originals to help get his point across that he can provide a hit.” The song reached number one on the Billboard Top Black Singles chart for five weeks, and reached number fourteen on the Pop Singles chart, eventually selling over a million copies.

The follow-up, The Bells, was also produced by Marvin Gaye and was co-written by Gaye, Anna Gordy Gaye, Iris Gordy, and Elgie Stover. It featured the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, with Marvin on drums. The song went to #4 soul, #12 pop.

LISTEN to
Baby, I’m for Real: HERE or HERE
The Bells: HERE or HERE

The Coates book, Black-ish, & other things

Have you seen the common core math? [Note: I have. He’s not far wrong.]

coatesIt was days before our Albany presbyter (think bishop – but not really) was to lead the adult education class about race and white privilege and the book Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

That Thursday morning, I watched Black-ish, the ABC sitcom. (I’m a notorious TV time shifter.). And it was good, very good. Sojourners, a journal that “sits at the intersection of faith, politics, and culture,” noted that In Less Than Two Minutes, This Clip From ‘black-ish’ Explains Why Racism in America Isn’t Over. And the New York Times declared With Police Brutality Episode, ‘black-ish’ Shows How Sitcoms Can Still Matter.

Of course, the episode referenced the Coates book, even having the author on briefly. One of those shows that if you get a chance to see, you should. Oh, and read the book, which I should review, shouldn’t i?

A restless night

The night before, I had been watching Modern Family another ABC sitcom. The plot was about a thunderstorm knocking out the power. Suddenly, the loudest thunderclap I think I’d ever heard went off, and I quite literally jumped out of my chair, startled. I turned off the TV.

This blast woke up my household. While The Wife was able to return to sleep, the Daughter could not.

You know I don’t think I can write an excuse for school saying, “Daughter is a little fuzzy today because of thunder.” Heck, I was a little fuzzy myself.

3+3 does not equal 94

Somehow, I got sucked into a Facebook conversation about facts.

A: [who I know]: If I were your math teacher and you told me 3 + 3 = 94 and argued that you were right, I’d have to ask you if you had actually read your lesson in the book…

B: Well that depends on who is doing the math. Now you have to show the 15 steps you took to come up with that 6.

A: you mean I have to show that I’m holding up 3 fingers on each hand and counting them?

B: Have you seen the common core math? [Note: I have. He’s not far wrong.]

Eventually, I threw in my six cents.

“3+3=12 in base 4, 11 in base 5, and 10 in base 6. Just sayin’.”

A: In case anyone is wondering, Roger is a lot smarter than your average person – Not a good one to argue with. He was on Jeopardy.

Damn, I get a lot of mileage being on a game show nearly 20 years ago.

Movie review: Hail, Caesar!

What is it about kidnapping that the Coens embrace so readily?

hail-caesarI went with a couple of friends to the Spectrum Theatre on a Sunday afternoon to see the new Coen brothers movie Hail, Caesar!.

It “follows a day in the life of Eddie Mannix [Josh Brolin], a Hollywood fixer for Capitol Pictures in the 1950s, who cleans up and solves problems for big names and stars in the industry. But when studio star Baird Whitlock [George Clooney] disappears, Mannix has to deal with more than just the fix.”

When it was over, I smiled knowingly. I laughed a lot and thought it was a smart picture with nifty references to a Hollywood of a different era. But my two companions were confused! One said, “What did it MEAN?” And judging by the amazingly bad audience reaction on Rotten Tomatoes – only 45% positive, though 82% of the critics liked it – they were not alone.

A lot of the complaints I’ve read were that other films touched on the specifics of movie making better than Hail, Caesar! That may be true, but I enjoyed this particular iteration. As the review from NPR noted:

“Some of the best scenes hail from the films within the film. The best of these is No Dames!, a sailors-on-shore-leave musical starring Bert Gurney (Channing Tatum, who is really a pretty good dancer. Who knew?). This long segment is… [one of] the most delightful production number in a major motion picture… It’ll also make you miss the days long before the Age of Ultron, when movie titles had exclamation points instead of colons.

“Hail, Caesar!’s… pleasures are piecemeal and peculiar, like the way Sir Michael Gambon, the film’s narrator, elongates the phrase “in Westerly Malibu.” Or the way Tilda Swinton plays a pair of identical — and fiercely competitive — twin gossip columnists. Or the way that a workprint of Hail, Caesar! includes a title card reading DIVINE PRESENCE TO BE SHOT.”

Also great was Alden Ehrenreich, previously unknown to me, as Hobie Doyle, a western film star out of his element in a different genre film; Ralph Fiennes as movie director Laurence Laurentz; and Scarlett Johansson as an Esther Williams-type aquatic performer. Frances McDormand and Jonah Hill had small roles as a film editor and a “person.”

Two questions:

What is it about a kidnapping that the Coens embrace so readily, in Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, and Fargo?

Does one need to be a cinephile to enjoy Hail, Caesar!? I would not think so, but I could be wrong.

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