YouTube: a treasure trove of the good, the bad, the indifferent, the mediocre and the ugly. Actually, I rarely visit the place. The few videos I do watch on YouTube come as recommendations. This one appeared in my wife’s LiveJournal, posted by a friend of hers. I happened to peer over her shoulder and asked her, “What the heck is that?”
If like me you don’t understand Russian, you end up going to Google Translate to figure out the title of the video, which is “I am very glad, because I’m finally back home”. If I had to guess the title it would be, “I ingested ten times more Prozac than the doctor allowed.”
I mean, wow! For me, not even The Wedding Dance video can come close to this 2:41 little gem from what appears to be the glorious era of the Soviet Union. I am guessing it was made sometime in the 1970s when the Cold War was still grinding on and Comrade Brezhnev was in charge. It just reeks of plasticity and phoniness, yet it is somehow kind of compelling. I dare you to stop watching it in the middle.
The “singer” here is apparently a Russian named Eduard Hill. Hill is apparently obscure enough in America not even to merit a Wikipedia page, but he does have a Facebook fan page. It was weird enough that even Huffington Post picked it up. A check of Google did not reveal much about the guy. Eduard Hill, whose real name is apparently Eduard Anatolyevich, is still around, apparently living in Saint Petersburg. You can see an updated picture of him here. From what little I can find of the guy on the web, he apparently does not sing. Rather he mimes. This is obvious from watching the video. He could have used more rehearsal because his lip syncing is poor, to say the least.
Still, Hill is mesmerizing. Is he alive? Are there little puppet strings coming down from the rafters directing him when to smile? He looks all botoxed around the eyes. His smile looks like a doll maker stitched it onto his face. Then there is that goofy gate as he saunters onto the stage, not to mention the very cheesy visual effects. Apparently, he is glad to be home, which for most Russians back in the 1970s probably meant a gray cinderblock apartment complex. I guess the proper way to return home after a long trip is to dress in suit and tie.
As for the music, I have no idea who actually sings it, but it too is hypnotic and catchy like a TV commercial jingle. You may find yourself humming it in the car. Lyrics? You don’t need to know Russian, such much of it is “La la la, la la la, la la la la la.” Then there is the staging, such as it is. Where did they get that weird iron latticework? Moreover, why are there only three colors: brown, beige and yellow? Who is he waving to? His neighbors? If my neighbor were greeting me like this, I would be running to get a gun.
In short, this is exactly the sort of weird officially sponsored “entertainment” you would expect from the world’s biggest communist state back in the 1970s. While Hill looks plastic, some tiny part of him looks like he is having a root canal or a high colonic. It’s like someone has a pitch fork to his ass and that’s the only reason he’s smiling.
Whatever this is, it’s a gem. YouTube had best never delete it. It deserves its own weird immortality.
When like me you don’t watch much TV, you don’t have to be worried about being sucked into the latest TV miniseries. I knew about the Horatio Hornblower miniseries, but because I don’t watch TV I had only caught part of one episode on TV when it originally aired, and that only was because my sister told me about it. It was much more convenient for me, more than a decade after the first episode aired, to sit down and watch all eight episodes in a row over a few days while I convalesced.
Like with most miniseries, there is a mental disconnect between what you read in the books and the miniseries. My mental imagining of Horatio Hornblower was little like Ioan Gruffudd’s portray. Director Andrew Grieve’s version of the famous fiction 19th century British naval captain took some getting used to, but overall I very much liked it.
If there is a problem with the miniseries, it is that it covers the least interesting parts of the novels: Hornblower’s career starting as a midshipman through a commander. C.S. Forester actually started with the fifth book and wrote the novels that constituted his early years much later. To put it kindly, I suspect that like me most readers would agree that the latter half of the series was more interesting than the first half. This is in part because a naval captain can have a much more interesting time than a midshipman or lieutenant. The good news is that in the unlikely event that more of these adventures will make it onto film they should only get more interesting. This is because the finest novel in the series is probably the very first written, Beat to Quarters. The TV series ends just as Hornblower is promoted to Post Captain. Moreover, since Gruffudd is aging along with the character, if someone could produce Beat to Quarters, Gruffudd would be just about the perfect age to portray Hornblower, as Gruffudd is 36.
Turning a book into a TV series always involves a number of deviations from the books. If you have read the series a half dozen times like I have you will notice plenty. In spirit, the series is faithful to the series, and perhaps that’s what counts the most. The naval battles were rendered much better than I anticipated, as was life aboard a British naval ship at that time in general. If you watch the DVD extras, you realize the producers actually had to construct a frigate as well as a number of other ships. This is not an easy thing to do these days, as frigate building is something of a lost art. Moreover, constructing 19th century naval vessels is very expensive. So the same ship stands in for a number of ships because to really show the variation of naval ships would have been cost prohibitive. For example, most gun decks were below the main deck, not on the main deck. The ship in the TV series also looks suspiciously new and overly clean, which in fact it was at the time. Although sailors did their best to keep their ships shipshape, in reality most British naval ships of the period were creaky and barnacle encrusted.
Most of the characters are dead on. I particularly like Robert Lindsay as Sir Edward Pellew and Paul McGann as Lieutenant William Bush. Bush is a recurring character in the later novels. He becomes Hornblower’s sturdy and dependable right hand man. As for Gruffudd’s portrayal of Hornblower, his Hornblower shows a streak of friendliness as well as humanity that was absent in the books. In the books, we knew Hornblower felt this way, but he considered it unmanly to actually behave this way. In short, Hornblower becomes likeable, rather than the isolated and removed character portrayed in the books. As Forester made clear, Hornblower was a secret humanitarian (and by today’s standards would be a liberal) but in the British navy of the 19th century where discipline was foremost, it was frankly not allowed. Just as if you were a gay, you kept your humanitarian instincts deep in the closet.
It seems unlikely that more episodes will be made. After sponsoring eight episodes, A&E finally figured out they were too expensive to continue. The good news is that Gruffudd loved playing Hornblower and would be glad to make some more Hornblower movies. Presumably, he needs some underwriters. Sign me up to buy a few shares of any future Hornblower movies. It would be a pleasure as I age to watch Gruffudd act through the best part of the series. All the remaining books deserve to make it to film. Given the constraints of miniseries, they were not the epitome of a Hornblower realization for the screen, but they came close. My hope for a proper Hornblower movie with this cast is likely to remain a fantasy.
If you haven’t seen the series of eight you can always buy the DVD set, of course. By the end of the eighth episode, Duty, like me you might feel crestfallen that there simply are no more episodes to enjoy. The good news is that if you have not read the books, you will have the pleasure of reading them.
When you are convalescing and your domain does not extend much past your driveway because you cannot drive a car, you eventually end up watching DVDs and online movies. So here are some mini-reviews of movies I have seen while holed up.
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain (1995)
The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain certainly is an odd movie that is supposedly factual. It takes place in the fictional Welsh village of Ffynnon Garw, which is based on the actual Welsh village of Taff’s Well. There is a mountain just outside the village, or is it just a hill? Everyone assumes it is a mountain and boasts about their mountain (“The first mountain in Wales”) until during the First World War, two Englishmen come by to survey it for the government. One is Reginald Anson, played by the devilishly handsome Hugh Grant. Apparently, the RAF needs to know to make sure their planes don’t fly into it. The distinction between a hill and a mountain is apparently whether it exceeds one thousand feet. The village is crestfallen to discover that their mountain is sixteen feet below a thousand feet. Their village pride drives them to extremes, so they begin a major landscaping project to bring sod up the hill and make it big enough to qualify as a mountain.
There are a number of memorable characters in the movie, including Morgan “the Goat” (Colm Meaney). While the men are away at war spends his time bedding most of their wives. There is also the Rev. Robert Jones (Kenneth Griffith), the revered village vicar who feels called by God to make the village hill a mountain. Anson and his colleague end up boarding in a room at the tavern, and meet up with Betty (Tara Fitzgerald), whose job it becomes to distract the men while the villagers try to turn the hill into a mountain. In the process, the country girl Betty and city boy Reginald fall in love. Overall this is a gentle movie that feels quintessentially British, although really it is quintessentially Welsh. For a movie, its premise does not sound marketable but it is at least unique. Overall, it is likeable enough movie, worthy of a rental if you enjoy gentle romantic movies. As a light romance, it hovers somewhere between a B and an A. So I give it a 3.1 out of four stars.
The Last Detail (1973)
I remembered seeing The Last Detailwhen it first came out but it obviously did not make much of an impression because all these years later I decided to watch it again. It might have been my first R rated movie, which, if true, meant I passed myself off for seventeen. The movie has only three characters of note, all enlisted U.S. sailors: Billy Buddusky (Jack Nicholson), Mule Mulhall (an African American, played by Otis Young) and Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid). Billy and Mule have a temporary detail to haul Meadows to a naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Their journey by bus and train from the naval station in Norfolk takes them through many of the cities in the northeast.
Nicholson only plays one kind of character, so Buddusky is the smart-ass world-wise sailor. He feels sorry for Meadows, who was sentenced to eight years for trying to steal from the commander’s charity fund. Meadows is hopelessly naïve if not stupid, and is also a virgin. Buddusky convinces Mule to make their trip north a long one to make sure Meadows has a good time and gets laid before being locked in the clink for eight years. An unpretentious and gritty movie, it looks like it was not directed at all. Mainly the movie feels like a movie wherein Nicholson gets to do what he does best: be kind of oily and repulsive. As you might expect, Nicholson chews up the scenery, leaving the other actors more like bit players than supporting actors.
Their adventures include a New York whorehouse, observing some sort of vaguely Buddhist chanting ceremony and a wasted trip to the house of Meadow’s mother in lovely Camden, New Jersey. Although in color the movie feels like it is in black and white as it is typically murky outside. Moreover, the scenery in the bus depots and train stations are as ugly as these three sailors. Overall, I wished I had not seen the movie again and should have realized I had purged it from my brain for a reason. Frankly, it’s not that good and I’m surprised IMDB.com viewers give it 7.5 stars. Perhaps this is the sort of movie only enlisted people can appreciate. If you have to see it, take the time to find the late Gilda Radner as an extra in one of the scenes. This was before Saturday Night Live and she was an unknown. Otherwise, avoid. My rating: 2.5 out of four stars.
The Answer Man (Arlen Faber) (2009)
I generally enjoy a light romance so figured The Answer Man would pleasantly kill ninety minutes or so. While certainly not a bad romance, it’s not a good one either, principally because of Arlen Faber (Jeff Daniels) is a character not unlike Billy Buddusky, and is hard to love. The movie must have been renamed because IMDB shows the name as Arlen Faber. Perhaps it was renamed because the movie did so poorly in the box office.
Faber is a thoroughly annoying author who twenty years ago wrote a book where he reputedly had conversations with God. It sold millions of copies but turned him into a recluse. He hides in an attractive row house in Philadelphia. About his only contact with the outside world is his agent Terry (Nora Dunn), who is trying to get him to appear on the 20th anniversary of the publication of his book. In fact, Faber never had conversations with God. He made them up, and when he truly needed conversations with God because his Dad was dying of Alzheimer’s disease, the big guy stayed silent.
Shortly after the movie starts, his back gives out. He ends up (literally) crawling down the street and into Elizabeth’s (Lauren Graham) newly opened spine clinic. He immediately is enchanted with Elizabeth. Arlen’s only hobby seems to be trying to get rid of copies of his many books. He tries to give them away to a young twenty-something bookseller named Kris (Lou Taylor Pucci). Kris is recently out of rehab and is back living with his drunken father. He tries to manage the bookstore but it is failing and it looks like he will lose the store. The three sort of come together because they all have Arlen in common. Elizabeth and Arlen sort of fall in love, then sort of fall out of love, and Kris’s father dies suddenly. Arlen tries to be a father figure to Elizabeth’s boy. It’s all way too predictable. As much as I tried to imagine that Elizabeth and Arlen might fall for each other, I just couldn’t make the connection.
The movie is mildly amusing but truly nothing special as romance movies go and five times easier to figure out than the typical light romance, which means the movie is very shallow. You don’t need to avoid The Answer Man but there is no particular reason to seek it out either. If looking for a light romance, pick something else off the shelf. 2.8 out of four stars.
This original work of fiction was first written in 1981 for my mother, long before I met my wife or had any idea I would be a father. I was all of 24 when I wrote it. It has been revised a few times since then, most recently in 1993. I know one grown man who said it made him cry. It may be the best work of fiction I have every written. I should write more fiction. Enjoy. (c) 1981, 1988, 1993 by m...@occams-razor.info.
His vision was breathtakingly real.
His heart pounded. His heaving chest, anxious for more air, throbbed in furious pace with his heart. He felt the bite of cold metal bars sear his hands. A crisp Fall wind on his face felt like a peppermint in his mouth. He was hanging, hanging from parallel bars. His hi-topped monotoned sneakers fell like deadweight toward the wrinkled blacktop of the playground below.
Suddenly he was up to his ankles in water. He walked slowly up a sparkling brook bounded by grassy knolls. A lock of his dark curly hair swayed back and forth in front of his eyes as he walked. He looked through the water and found his feet were tightly buckled inside a pair of black galoshes. They carried him slowly upstream, disturbing sediment and minnows where he walked. A powerful undertow made his every step slow and laborious. He raised a boot to move forward but the current nearly made him lose his balance.
Now the brook vanished. His heavy eyes cast a sleepy glance over a windy and snow covered suburban street. His torso was warm despite the arctic weather, thanks to a new wool sweater beneath his husky overcoat. But his uncovered head offered no comfort from a savage northerly wind which flowed through his hair. “Crimeanetties! It’s cold!” his boyish voice said. There was nothing he could do but stumble forward with both gloved hands buried deep into his coat pockets. He wondered how long he could negotiate four heavy textbooks in the crock of one arm before they spilled onto the snow. He forced himself forward again. If only he had remembered his stocking cap! A tear involuntarily emerged with the full force of another gust on his face.
He was in school and inside it was gloriously warm. Even so he found himself pressed against a radiator grate. Its heat desensitized him to the frightful noise from his arriving classmates. A cold, half opened eye noted his fourth grade teacher, Miss Devonshire, hunched over her desk grading papers. He glanced out the window. Row upon crooked row of townhouses wound around the nearby hills like a terraced garden. Virtually all of them put out a trail of white smoke into a frosty blue morning sky.
A cry from somewhere … shrill … insistent. He turned away from his class, only for a moment.
It was too late. They had grown. Their half-innocence, their soft-as-cottonball faces were supplanted by long chins and studious expressions. Their hair was much longer and unkempt. But it was their clothes which really seemed strange: bell-bottom trousers for the boys and tightly wrapped miniskirts for the girls. And beads, lots of beads draped around the neck. The boys had long and powerful legs with huge bony feet stuffed inside suede shoes. Their legs flopped out from beneath their small desks and into the aisles.
It was incongruous to keep hearing this muffled but insistent crying…
So he stepped back.
For an indefinite moment he was delicately suspended between two worlds, both real. Each had the firmness of a cobweb. In one world Mary Alice Jordan was fiercely scratching her leg above her sandal strap. In the other an unfocused eye dimly read a luminous dial saying it was just before two in the morning.
Someone next to him was slowly turning in bed. From far away a shrill cry was piercing the silence. His wife was turning in bed again. Her semi-conscious hand fell comfortably over his shoulder.
The crying was continuing, distant but still insistent.
“Honey. It’s your turn.”
Snap! The cobweb gave way. He was sitting on the edge of their bed, his two bare feet apathetically but dutifully planted on the floor.
—–
Gary Howell had no intentions of settling down. He had dated many women but he felt both intimate and distant with them. For the most part his dates were satisfied with simple things like heartfelt whispers and passionate embraces. They never mentioned the word “love”, which suited him fine. He had plenty of school ahead of him. He had no time to fall in love.
But there had been special moments. One had been a moonlit summer stroll with a coed named Wendy along a quiet wooded path close to campus. His third date with Evelyn Offenbach recalled only the heady rush of manliness he felt when he rushed around the front of his car to snatch her door open. Once, for one fleeting and terrifying moment, he believed he was in love with Evelyn. But the feeling passed.
His first date with Sara Ann Coughlin had been an afterthought, a way to pleasantly unwind after concluding a tedious project at the lab. Sara struck him as an over-average sort of lass, and therefore an ideal date. Fun to be with, but no fuss. Her jet black hair was inordinately curly. She had a lean frame, deep sunken eyes and a too pointy nose. And Sara Ann had absolutely no taste in clothes. She preferred muted colors, rumpled sweaters and clogs (when they were in season.) Perhaps it was her consistently dismal apparel that made him think she was at the brink of poverty. That or the way her heels had become so worn she stood crooked.
During the dinner one of her false eyelashes made an unexpected appearance in her salad. Gary found himself trying to restrain a laugh and not succeeding. Sara gasped then threw her arms up in mock dismay at her horrible faux pas, much like an actress of the silent screen. Then she smiled sweetly, straightened herself and deftly removed her other eyelash. “Gary, you’ll have to forgive me. I will never be very good at being pretty. And I keep swearing I’ll never wear these things again. This is why, in case you’re interested!”
On their next date they journeyed to the cinema where they shared a large bucket of popcorn and each other. Their buttery fingers inadvertently found each others in the darkness. Instantly Gary forgot the movie. All he could think of, all he could feel was the joyful press of her hand in his. It was small and delicate hand and somehow familiar. Like Sara herself. It seemed impossible to remember any time so fantastically far in the past that she had not been there.
Their dates were riotous fun. They joked, they poked each other in the ribs, they pigged out on ice cream cones at Baskin Robbins, they talked, Lord they talked! But not often in words. A thousand lovely and delicate feelings were spoken from a mere sideways glance or a broken sentence. Some part of him was infuriated with Sara for causing this elation within him. He was a confirmed bachelor, dammit. He was studying for his Masters Degree, and it was good that Sara was graduating so he could concentrate on his studies. But a day apart from her was an eternity. A few minutes between classes doing something as dopey as holding hands sent him overflowing with energy and his spirit soaring.
How could it be that he could be so enamored by a woman, such a plain woman, as Sara Ann? So swiftly she grabbed hold of his heart yet so gently that he was hardly aware it was happening. The girl of his dreams was supposed to be tall and intellectual and refined. Sara Ann was none of these things.
He was not in love with her.
Oh god yes he was hopelessly in love with her.
In time his feelings did lessen slightly as familiarity set in. But they never went away. And one day he was surprised to find himself saying that he loved her, and she smiled shyly back and said she loved him too. He knew of no reasons to marry her except that he loved her and wanted to always be with her.
And even after a marriage and a child nothing really dimmed their magic.
—–
Until he discovered his mortality.
His death was something he had always been intellectually certain would happen someday. But he did not worry about it because he had never felt old.
There had been warning signs. Getting married was in itself a sobering experience. It had been very strange to suddenly be referred to as “her husband”. When Sara announced she was pregnant he spent the better part of a week trying to accept the fact that he was capable of something so fantastic as reproduction. Adolescence had clearly come to an end.
But this feeling was altogether different. It was so powerful it caught him in mid stride as he ambled down the boardwalk by the lake. For a terrified moment he thought he felt his heart stop. Then it began to race abnormally. An involuntary shiver shot down his spine. His prescription bag spilled onto the dock. He stood for one long and painful moment hardly able to move with one hand cupped over his palpitating heart. From his brain the message was urgent and insistent. You are getting old, Gary. And you are going to die.
This is silly, he thought. I am still young! I am only twenty seven! But the message was overwhelming. You are getting old. You will die someday.
On a bench overlooking the lake, amid the squawk of the ducks and the splattering from the fountain, he grimly forced himself to do the arithmetic. He had lived over a quarter century; a full third of his life was over and unrecoverable. What he could remember of his past seemed squeezed into his brain with the brevity of a Fox-Movietone newsreel. The lesson was obvious: the rest of his life would fly by just as fast, maybe faster. And there was nothing he could do. He could not even slow it a bit.
“I’m not getting old,” he decided uncertainly. He stumbled forward, almost forgetting to retrieve his prescription. Alone in his living room, sunk deep into the loveseat, he stared blankly out into the cluster. The room was quiet although he was dimly aware of the chirps from the birds behind the open window. He was alone. God, he was so alone. He wanted Sara’s caresses on his cheek, he wanted to be held tightly and told that he was special and he was loved and especially that he was not going to die. But Sara had gone with their daughter Vicki to the pediatrician and would not be back for hours. And he also knew even Sara could not really help him. Nothing was forever, not even Sara.
His heart continued to race for a long time. But the utter terror of that moment would never completely go away.
—-
“Gary. Please. The baby.”
With considerable effort he got on his feet. One hand firmly clasped the nightstand to secure his balance. With a conscious lunge he moved through the darkened bedroom and hallway and into his daughter’s room.
He cautiously lifted his child into his arms, subliminally aware of the press of her hot and vibrant flesh against his. He stroked her on the head while she continued to cry. “Don’t fuss. Bottle’s coming soon, I promise. It’s okay. It’s okay.” With his free hand he found her formula and placed it in the microwave. The timer rang. He tested its temperature with a dollop of milk on his hand. Just right. Into her tiny mouth. Her crying finally abated into grateful swallows.
Now they were in their darkened living room. Vicki was cradled in his arm busy swallowing her formula. There was a delightful pattern of moonlight on the carpet, otherwise the room was as dark as it was quiet. What little light filtered through the trees seemed as soft and gentle as his daughter’s suckling. She was then as he would always remember her: close and snug against his chest. In the dark room she was mostly hidden deep in the shadow, yet there were hints of her angelic appearance. He could make out faint impressions of her tightly sealed eyes and her small pouty lips. She hugged the bottle so gratefully.
And — how sweet! — she placed one hand around his small finger. She knew him even at six weeks: the man who gives her food, the kind gentle man who hold her bottle so steadily, the man who loved her so dearly: her father.
Father. He expected for a moment this thought would again unleash the terror of his mortality, but it did not. The gentle press of his daughter’s impossibly tiny fingers overwhelmed this morbid reflection.
It was two-fifteen in the a.m. and time had finally frozen. Just my daughter and I, he thought. The silence was as beautiful as a symphony. The oddball hour was curiously invigorating.
And as he sat nursing her he suddenly felt the warmth of his Mother’s arms and the moist, half-forgotten press of her lips on his cheek. How many years had that been? How long since she had died so suddenly? He was not sure; he knew it did not matter. Mom was here now. He sensed her gentle kiss again, now on his forehead.
He withdrew the empty bottle from Vicki’s mouth and gently smothered his daughter with his own gentle embrace. She reached forward and pawed at the stubble on his cheeks, but his abrasiveness did not seem to frighten her. Suddenly she was full and wanted to yield to instant sleep. She did not want to be put over her father’s shoulder. She was oblivious to her own burping and the stream of saliva flowing onto her bib. She fell asleep in mid pat.
At length she was back into her crib. He gave her a gentle kiss on her forehead. Would she someday remember too?
“Gary? How is she?”
“She’s fine.” Their words were swallowed up by the silent walls.
“Umm, did she take her formula?”
“Uh huh.” He slipped between the sheets again and unconsciously snuggled up to his wife. Oh! The press of her warm flesh against was still lovely to feel!
The silence and her warmth yielded to sleep.
And slowly he felt the cobwebs of the other world again and he had returned.
How bad can a movie be in the 21st century? It can be so bad that you, who probably never tried to write or direct anything, can make something better than the 2004 direct to video “movie” Suburban Sasquatch.
With a movie this bad it is hard to know if it was made intentionally bad or whether the auteur behind the film Dave Wascavage may have honestly thought he had a gift for writing and directing horror movies. I think I can safely say that Hollywood will not be calling Dave Wascavage. One thing is for sure: the movie has Dave’s fingerprints all over it. It is full of various friends of Dave, none of whom are actors. It is also full of Dave’s relatives, including his grandmother. Dave is also in his own movie in at least two roles, one as a fisherman who ends up on his backside in a creek and later on wearing a ridiculous blond wig that I suspect he borrowed from grandma. It is written, produced, directed and has very “special” effects by Dave Wascavage. Seriously the scroll at the end has Dave’s name in most of the credits. Suburban Sasquatch is something bordering on genius on how to create a myopic, intensely bad “film”. In short, if you are a bad movie buff, you had better try to get it. And yes, you can rent it from Netflix.
Wascavage is apparently vying to be the Edward D. Wood of 21st century auteur cinema. Wood, as dreadful as his films like Plan 9 from Outer Spaceand Glen or Glenda were, at least had some general sense of direction. For example, in any scene the director draws an imaginary line across the scene. The camera stays on one side of the line. This is to prevent the viewer from getting confused, for example, having person A on the left side of the frame in one shot and on the right side in another. Wascavage obviously never studied cinema, so he feels free to confuse the viewer. Naturally, Wascavage was also the cinematographer. So you end up with very unusual camera framings. For example, if a person were looking stage right, most cinematographers would frame the actor on the left. Wascavage though throws convention out the window and feels free in to put the person on the right side of the frame looking right while leaving a whole lot of nothing on the left of the frame.
Perhaps Wascavage was channeling director Phil Tucker who in 1953 released the turgid dreck Robot Monster on unsuspecting cinemagoers. In Robot Monster, we had a guy wearing a gorilla suit who was supposed to be an alien from outer space. You could tell from the space helmet on his head. In Suburban Sasquatch we have Sasquatch as a guy in a gorilla suit as well, except his mouth never moves. Sasquatch only says one thing, which sounds sort of like “roar” kind of garbled in a couple of changing pitches.
Wascavage did all of his own special effects so we get really crappy effects, such as of a car window being digitally shattered. His tightly edited sequences, such as you can see in the video insert, demonstrate that even the most basic aspects of directing are blithely ignored. As Sasquatch unexpectedly assaults a car, we see sequences of the car both moving and the car standing still.
The blood and guts effects in the movie are hilariously awful. They are so fake that not even a preschooler would be fooled. Sasquatch is really good at ripping off people’s limbs. When he rips off a guys arm, it is painfully obvious the real arm is stuffed under the guy’s coat. The limbs clearly come off a mannequin. You can tell from the pins in the socket joints.
As for the acting, there is none, of course. Sue Lynn Sanchez as the Indian Talla at least sounds sincere and speaks coherently. Dialog is rambling, frequently improvised and rarely makes much sense. There are times when the actors seem to be reading from an off camera script. As for plot, well, apparently Sasquatch decides to terrorize areas in suburban Pennsylvania where Wascavage lives because that’s what he does, except it is not the least bit terrorizing. Moreover, this Sasquatch can fade between visible and invisible. Bullets seem to have no effect on him. It takes the brave Indian woman Talla, wearing a short skirt and living, not in a teepee, but in a cheap tent from Wal-Mart in someone’s back yard, to hunt down Sasquatch with her spear and magic helmet, er, sorry, wrong cartoon, her bow and arrow, that looks like it was bought from Toys R Us.
The plot comes with an intrepid reporter who is constantly berated by his editor. It also includes a sheriff who moved to Pennsylvania to escape a Sasquatch that had been terrorizing his old neighborhood. Who could make this up? It makes absolutely no sense, but nothing about this movie makes any sense. It is laughingly bad in every respect, but perhaps it reaches its nadir with the dialog, which is rambling and rarely makes much in the way of sense.
This is essentially a movie made by a guy using any relative, friend and casual acquaintance he can con into “acting” for the price of a few beers. To call it amateur is to praise it. I have seen amateur movies and amateur theater and sometimes amateur can be good, or at least have good spots. (The Blair Witch Project comes to mind.) Nothing about this movie is commendable.
Like Craigslist Casual Encounters, it is a complete waste of time. However, it is instructive into just how badly some piece of crap like this can be made. It fails spectacularly on every single level.
I am really hoping this was made to be a bad movie. If so, Wascavage is a genius, but it feels too authentic to be a deliberately made “bad” movie. Watch the extras on the DVD and see Dave’s grandmother explain her role. It sure sounds like it was done with some pretense that it might ascend from the gutter. If only it were good enough for the gutter. This “movie” really rests in the sewer.
If you are a fan of bad movies like we are, you should definitely see it. If you are looking for an excuse to get drunk and laugh, Suburban Sasquatch will do the trick. Otherwise, anything you can do will be a better use of your time, and this includes picking your nose.
My thanks to my nephew Ryan for introducing me to Suburban Sasquatch. It appears that there is a genetic predisposition for bad movies in my family that has been passed down to the latest generation.
Usually big budget special effects intensive movies leave me unimpressed. I am happy to say that was not the case with James Cameron’s hugely expensive movie Avatar, now playing everywhere. Moreover, for a change I can say that the public agrees with me, to the tune of more than a billion dollars in revenue so far worldwide and doubtless much more to come.
While certainly not a perfect movie, Avatar is an amazing wonder of state of the art special effects married with a world (Pandora) so biodiverse and culturally rich that it has the depth of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. To achieve it, James Cameron spent much of the last decade imagining Pandora and spending gobs of money to hire all sorts of artists, linguists, anthropologists and other scientists to render a wholly plausible alternative world. He then had to merge this all together with a good script and great talent to make it actually work on the screen. The result is a tour de force, an accomplishment that if it does not get Cameron Best Director at the Academy Awards will be a travesty.
Weta, the company that did the special effects for TheLord of the Rings movies, has had ten years to perfect computer-generated imagery. The ten years were well spent. Avatar is the first movie where I can honestly say the result is so richly realized that I can no longer tell CGI from live action. You will see none of the digital jerkiness you saw ten years ago when Gollum was rendered for The Lord of the Rings. If you can afford to spend a few hundreds of millions of dollars on CGI for a movie, you can render a world that exists only in a computer and still make it wholly plausible. What is amazing is that Cameron manages to pull off not just a technical triumph, but he also manages to integrate all the live action elements into a compelling and well-acted story.
You have to get to the end of the movie (or to have read the reviews) to name the flaws in this movie. To some the long battle sequences at the end of the movie will seem tedious. The real flaw (and certainly not a fatal one) is that the characters have little depth. This is because this is essentially the noble savage story, which has been retold many times. This is the white man landing in the New World and finding the natives offensive because they are not like them and don’t particularly want to play nice. Not to give too much away but at least in Avatar it quickly becomes clear that the humans (for the most part) are the savages, bent on destroying a rich, highly integrated world in the pursuit of some highly prized mineral. Pandora is really Gaia, the mythical world that is one giant living organism. (In reality, the Earth is also Gaia, it is just that most of us refuse to see it or believe it.)
So you get super muscled characters like Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) to whom the native extra-tall, blue-tinted and human-like creatures of the woods (the Na’vi) will always be brutes. Even if they are not, he does not care and has no problem destroying anyone who gets in his way. You also get Sigourney Weaver as Doctor Grace Augustine, a legendary expert on the Na’vi and Na’vi sympathizer. Naturally, she quickly butts heads with Colonel Quaritch. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is sent to Pandora to attempt to become trusted by the Na’vi and to be Quaritch’s mole. He does this by living in a simulator where he directs his avatar remotely. In this case, an avatar is a cloned Na’vi that Jake directs from his simulator. The simulator is really more of an interface and it is so good that he effectively becomes his clone. Jake learns all about the subtle ways of the Na’vi and their complex culture. He is soon befriended and coached by Neytiri (Zoe Saldana, a.k.a. Lieutenant Uhura from the recently released Star Trek movie). And you guessed it: Jake soon begins to bond with the Na’vi, falls in love with Neytiri and in time turns against his own race. He begins what looks like an impossible quest to save both the Na’vi and Pandora from his own species, which will stop at nothing to get at Pandora’s minerals.
It turns out that though the plot is shallow, it really doesn’t matter because the acting is good enough, the story engaging enough, the world is so richly detailed and the CGI is so amazing. It could have been a better movie with a wee bit more time and attention to the plot and characterization but in a project this massive, I guess something had to give.
I recently reviewed Up in the Air and said I expected Avatar to be not quite as good. Trying to compare the two is like comparing apples and oranges. Both are well acted and well directed. However, the movies each serve different kinds of audiences. Up in the Air is the more human of movies and is certainly better acted and has a more thoughtful and engaging story. Nevertheless, by leaps and bounds Avatar is the better-imagined movie and is so visually rich and dense that even with its minor flaws it turns out to be marginally better.
If you haven’t seen Avatar, you should. This is one of those movies where you really should pay extra to see it in 3D, as it actually adds something to the film. The characters may be largely stereotypes, but it fully engages you and should leave you feeling breathless.
Great job. Mr. Cameron. You may not win the gold for Avatar, but you definitely deserve the silver. Thanks for making one of the few extremely expensive movies where not only did I feel that I got my money’s worth, but where I should have left a hefty tip.
If Mel Brooks can make a hit Broadway musical from his 1968 movie The Producers, then he should be able to do the same with his much more popular 1974 movie Young Frankenstein, right? Just in case the idea was not a good one, to even the odds why not add your wife and the famous choreographer Susan Stroman to direct and choreography the show as she did in The Producers?
As they say, lightning never strikes the same place twice, so the odds were always long that Young Frankenstein would do as well as the phenomenally successful musical version of The Producers. That is the case with Young Frankenstein, at least the touring version now in the Opera House at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. There are times when you wonder if it was directed by Max Bialystock, the infamous bad musical producer immortalized in The Producers rather than Susan Stroman. Okay, it’s not that bad and the truth is the musical gets better as it goes along, and it ends pretty well. Young Frankenstein though is certainly not great, and I have a hard time even giving it a passing grade. It bears the mark of a musical that was made simply because it could be made and not because there was any compelling reason to stage it.
In a way, seeing such a crass musical in the ornate setting of the Kennedy Center’s Opera House lowered my opinion of the Kennedy Center. After all, I have seen many a lavish staging of a musical or opera on this stage, perhaps most memorably a staging of Tosca by the Met back in the mid 1980s. In an exhibit as you enter the Opera House, you can see one of the exquisite gowns from that staging. However, you take your seats to watch a musical with no pretense at being high art but that is high on the things that Mel Brooks thinks is funny but which are really incredibly sophomoric. These include cute women in dresses with low bodices and high libidos and allusions to the monster’s massive sexual organs.
None of this is a surprise to those who have seen the movie. In fact, the musical really adds nothing new to the movie at all and is rife with the same gags that were in the movie. What you don’t get of course is Gene Wilder as Young Frankenstein, Madeleine Kahn as his puritanical fiancé Elizabeth, Marty Feldman as Igor, Cloris Leachman as Frau Blücher or Teri Garr as the bosomy lab assistant Inga.
Instead, you get a generally good cast working with substandard material. For example, you will find Brad Oscar (who was a regular in The Producers on Broadway) in the rather minor role of Inspector Kemp. Roger Bart plays the young Doctor Frankenstein, and comes across as more of a wisecracker than Gene Wilder’s portrayal. Most of the rest of the cast seems to be working hard to imitate the characters in the filmed version, and this includes Beth Curry as Elizabeth and Joanna Glushak as Frau Blücher. We do get some variations. Cory English as Igor does not even attempt to emulate Marty Feldman. Peter Boyle played the original monster in 1974. In this version, we get Shuler Hensley who, film critics may note, has played Frankenstein before in the 2004 film Van Helsing.
As you might expect there are strobe lights aplenty, a mad scientist’s workshop decently rendered and theatrical fog in some of the sequences. As for the music, sadly, there is really nothing memorable. Since we go to musicals mostly to hear music, the musical cannot help but disappoint.
The musical only has a few things going for it. First, Roger Bart is rather fun in the pivotal role of Young Frankenstein. Second, if you can make it to the second act you will find it is much better than the first act, but not enough to redeem it altogether. The most surprising actor in this musical is none other than Shuler Hensley. Unfortunately, the monster does not really have a chance to graduate beyond one-dimensional acting until late in the show when he becomes half civilized. Hensley does a great job, when he is finally allowed, of blending the dichotomy of the bestial monster with the emerging civilized monster. At times, he is quite a stitch. It’s just a shame that he does not get a chance to really act until near the end.
So this musical is not The Producers. Do not go to see it on the expectation that it will be anywhere near as much fun as that musical. Its story is much more pedestrian and far less interesting. In The Producers, we got some really weird and compelling characters. There is no equivalent to Leo Bloom or Max Bialystock in this musical. These characters are stereotypes. The Producers is a comedy of bad intentions gone awry. Young Frankenstein as a musical adds nothing to the material and leaves you with nothing memorable to hum on your way home. It feels tawdry in a way The Producers did not. If it had to be staged somewhere, it is better staged in a burlesque house than in a place as ornate as the Opera House at the Kennedy Center.
If you are a huge Mel Brooks fan, you may want to see the show just to say you saw it, but you will invariably be disappointed. The Producers reached very lofty heights indeed. Young Frankenstein tries to make you think that you are getting a lot more value from your two plus hours in the theater than you are actually getting.
My advice: just stay away. There has to be much better theater in the region than Young Frankenstein, and it is likely to be both better and cost less.
Some part of me understands the world of Ryan Bingham, the jet-setting businessman portrayed in the movie Up in the Air by George Clooney. Ryan spends most of his life either in the air or inhabiting the cozy little world of frequent flier clubs. Many of us have opportunities for business travel. My half dozen or so trips a year more than scratch the itch to roam. In fact, it does not take many trips before one American city seems pretty much like all the others. Bingham spends all but 46 days a year on the road. He has mastered frequent flier clubs and is boldly working toward reaching American Airlines Ten Million Mile Frequent Flier Club, a very exclusive club with only six previous members. Hotel and airport life have become his home. It is only when he returns to his rarely used apartment in Omaha that he feels uncomfortable. He yearns for 35,000 feet, airport tarmac and the chance to add more frequent flier miles.
That part of his job is bliss. Less so is his actual work. He is hired to fire people. Its what his company does and in a depressed economy, he has never had more work. He has firing down to a science and has become largely inured to the devastation he inflicts on people he does not know. Come 5 p.m. he tunes it all out. If this is the price he has to pay to live a detached life, he is happy to do so. In the process, he has nearly disconnected himself from any meaningful relationships. The sole exception is his sister Kara, who nags him to take pictures of places he visits as a present to her daughter and her fiancé who are about to get married.
Two karmic forces will rock Ryan’s serene world on the road. One is an attractive late thirty something woman Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) who he meets in an airport bar and who spends nearly as much time on traveling as he does. They instantly click and work through their complex travel plans to find time to intersect, trade their war stories and make love. The other is a young woman who recently joined Ryan’s firm, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). She has convinced the CEO that their business could be much more profitable if the firing process could be done remotely using videoconference technology. This causes a breach in Ryan’s comfy world on the road. So he takes Natalie on the road with him so she can learn for herself why her idea will not work.
Given the dehumanizing work that Ryan does, it is not surprising that nonstop business travel works so well for him. It allows him to detach from virtually all relationships. His family is whomever he meets on the road. In spite of himself, he finds himself increasingly drawn toward Alex. While he preaches the virtue of detached relationships, almost unwillingly he finds himself wanting to spend more time with Alex than their frantic schedules will allow. After all, how can he resist when Alex tells him, “Think of me as you with a vagina.”
Clooney is at the top of his form in this movie and glides through the subtleties of his role with what appears to be a reflexive adroitness. For a long time it is hard to know whether to admire or revile Ryan Bingham. He understands that life and relationships are complicated, and has no interest or patience for dealing with the many permutations that come with relationships like marriage. After a while, we understand that he is paying a price for living a detached life. When Alex arrives in his life, he slowly begins to understand that there is value in having a partner in life, although it takes until the very end of the movie for him to truly understand the karmic lesson life will dish out at him.
Up in the Air is something of a parable for our 21st century information age and the pitfalls that are inherent in the virtualized and ephemeral relationships many inhabit these days. Reputedly, this movie will be one of the Best Picture nominees. I personally do not think it merits the award, but the movie is clearly topical, interesting and engaging at least for those of us who do any amount of regular business travel. It is also at times funny and touching. If it has particular virtues, it is that it depends on acting rather than fancy special effects to deliver its value. I have yet to see Avatar, but I suspect this one will be the better movie.
Number Six is back, along with Number Two, and along with many other villagers who have numbers but not names. The Village, which used to be on a mysterious island somewhere, is now in the middle of the desert yet has all the conveniences of modern life. Patrick McGoohan (the original Number Six) unfortunately went to meet his maker earlier this year at the age of 80. In his place is Jim Caviezel, who has starred in a number of prominent movies and actually played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ. This Number Six (or just Six) doesn’t work for the British Secret Service, but for some murky company based in New York City called Summakor. The company spends a lot of time monitoring people. Also, it’s a really good idea not to resign from Summakor unless retiring to a sterile village in the middle of nowhere is your idea of fun.
In the original series, the character playing Number Two usually switched with every episode. In this abbreviated mini-series version of The Prisoner (just six episodes) we have a recurring Number Two played by Sir Ian McKellen. This Number Two does not seem quite as obsessed about Number Six as in the original series. Yet, somehow this Number Six often ends up spending his nights in a clinic where dubious things are done to him largely without his knowledge.
In short, this is not your father’s The Prisoner. Yet of course it is creepy, just in different ways. This village comes complete with families, schools, and even village tours. Rover, the big amorphous weather balloon straight from the id is still around to try to frighten those trying to escape, but for the most part these villagers are too torn up inside from dealing with the surreal life in The Village to do much in the way of escaping. For most of them, the plasticity of The Village is ripping their souls apart.
In many ways, this version of The Prisoner is creepier. Gene therapy was not even in Patrick McGoohan’s wildest nightmares back in 1967, although in both versions we have many really long needles puncturing open flesh. Whatever Summakor is up to, they are good at getting people to forget their past lives, but not so good at making them hide some internal often-inchoate angst.
In many ways, this version is more of a homage to the final episodes of the original The Prisoner, as it operates on a much more metaphorical level. In the original show, you knew The Village was an actual place. In this version, it soon becomes clear that The Village may exist wholly in our minds. Using many flashbacks, we can see that many of the people who populated Six’s life when he lived in New York are also in The Village, although it takes him a long time to understand this.
This Village comes complete with its own underground, in this case a place where you can go to let off some steam, have some illicit sex and engage in activities like congregating with your fellow homosexuals that are not allowed on land. One of the villagers with sexual preference issues is 11-12 (Jamie Campbell Bower), the son of Number Two. His largely comatose mother spends much of six episodes mysteriously in bed in Two’s palatial home.
In this version, Six does try to escape a few times but seems much more engaged in Village life, and even helps spy on his fellow villagers. Mysterious holes open up on the grounds of The Village, sometimes swallowing up villagers. There is love to be found in The Village, but it is hard to know if it is real or genetically induced.
For me the best parts of this miniseries are the flashbacks to New York, particularly with Lucy (Haylee Atwell), a fellow employee of Summakor who has a brief but intense relationship with Six. Over the course of six episodes, Six’s past starts to fill in. For those of you who have seen the original series, in some ways its ending parallels that version, but in some ways not. This village is more a metaphor of modern society, man’s place in it, and the relationship if any between reality and detached consciousness.
Whether you find it better or worse than the original will depend in part on whether you saw the original. In many ways this version, while shorter, is better. In other ways, it is not quite as engaging or as fun. It is a delight to spend six episodes with Sir Ian McKellen because he is such a fine actor, but he is not your classic, obsessive Number Two. Rather he is more like a village caretaker, but why? To find out, watch all six episodes. I have seen all six episodes, all of which may not have yet been broadcast here in the states. I have my ways.
I doubt anyone who sticks with this version will be disappointed. I was not that happy with Jim Caviezel as Number Six, but at least he was more human and emotionally expressive than Patrick McGoohan’s ultra stoic version of Six. Instead, enjoy the minor characters. Ruth Wilson as 313 and Jamie Campbell Bower as 11-12 are particularly excellent.
The only real drawback to this version is that the story felt too rushed. To fully explore this village and its many permutations and eccentricities, they needed a more leisurely seventeen episodes, like the original series. Perhaps there will be a sequel to this miniseries where we get to learn more. Without giving any plot points away, I can say that at the end you will find out there is a new Number Two in charge.
For your amusement, here are a few mini-reviews of movies and shows I have seen recently.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
If you put George Clooney, Ewan McGreggor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey in the same movie will it necessarily be funny? To me this was the existential question of The Men Who Stare at Goats. Funny is as funny does, and this movie does have its funny moments. However, this is no Borat or Brüno. Its humor is far subtler. Whether you will find it humorous or not depends in large part on whether you think its premise is humorous.
Its premise is that during the 1970s the U.S. military, afraid that the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War in the new psychic operations battlefield, decided to invest some time and money of its own to create a set of New Age psychic warriors. The movie does have some loose basis in fact. Jim Channon, a Lieutenant Colonel who served in Vietnam proposed a First Earth Battalion to the Pentagon. This new force would win the hearts and minds of the enemy by using tactics like positive vibrations and sparkly eyes. In real life, this did not get much beyond a Pentagon sponsored mailing list. In the movie, George Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, the most gifted of this allegedly defunct Special Forces unit. Among his talents is that he can stare at a goat with such intensity that it will keel over dead.
Ann Arbor Daily Telegram reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGreggor) runs into Cassady in the country of Jordon, who he soon associates with a crazy man he interviewed back in Michigan who told him about this Special Force. Before you know it, both he and Cassady are venturing into Iraq. Cassady apparently is on special assignment. Cassady uses his dubious psychological skills to outwit a few kidnappers, but they end up lost in the desert eventually, only to discover that a psychic corps is already out there. However, this group was contracted out, like much of our War in Iraq. The movie comes complete with lots of flashbacks where we meet the corps legendary founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who is clearly playing Jim Channon.
The movie is strange but just plausible enough to suspend disbelief. It’s not a bad way to spend 94 minutes in a theater. It will keep your attention as well as keep you mildly amused. Ultimately, it tries too hard to make a movie out of a premise that has little humor in it. The main reason to see the movie is to see Clooney, McGreggor, Bridges and Spacey interact on screen and do their best with this thin material. I found myself chuckling at times but this is not one of those movies where you are on the floor laughing. It is probably worth renting but is nothing overly special. It is clearly aimed at the Catch-22 crowd. I give it a modest 2.8 points on my 4-point scale.
Paper Clips (2004)
I did not know what to expect of this documentary, but since it was on my sister’s Netflix list and she liked it, I added it to mine. Whitwell, Tennessee is the unlikely location for a story about understanding the Holocaust. Two teachers were looking for a project for students at the Whitwell middle school that would help them understand the magnitude of the Holocaust. Whitwell is one of these mostly lily white towns in the middle of Appalachia, and seemingly not fertile territory for empathizing with the plight of the Jews or learning about discrimination in general.
To help the students understand the magnitude of the Holocaust, the teachers start the students on a project to collect six million paperclips, one for every Jew killed in the Holocaust. The students start writing various people and organizations looking for donations of paperclips. At first, the paperclips trickle in, and then become a torrent. Each contribution is counted and meticulously cataloged. Soon, rooms are bulging with paperclips and the press is starting to pay attention.
The students make friends with actual Holocaust victims, who come to share their story. Over several years, succeeding classes of middle schoolers continue the project. Eventually the school receives an authentic boxcar that was used to transport Jews to concentration camps. It is turned into a memorial and filled, of course, with paperclips. You can visit the mini memorial today if life takes you through Whitwell, Tennessee.
The documentary succeeds in helping students insulated from the ugliness of much of the world understand the prejudice and discrimination inflicted on different people far removed from them. They open bridges into a wider world that they would otherwise not come in contact with. If the documentary has a flaw, it is that despite its premise it is not particularly engaging. It could have done with a lot less saccharine music. Still, it is an unusual story and worthy of capturing. If I were teaching in middle school it would be required viewing by my students
I’ll leave it unrated. If you feel you need a lesson in empathy, it is worth seeing.
The Music Man at The Kennedy Center
When you go to hear a musical in concert, particularly with a pops orchestra, you should not set your expectations too high. Last Friday, we took my father (age 83) to The Kennedy Center to hear the music from the musical The Music Man performed live by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marvin Hamlisch. The Music Man is his favorite musical. Growing up we often heard the sound track to The Music Man during our languid Sunday mornings.
What we got was a greatly abbreviated version of The Music Man, partially staged in front of the orchestra. Shirley Jones, who played Marian the Librarian in the 1962 movie, was part of the cast. At 75, Ms. Jones is way too old to play Marian, and arguably way too old to play Mrs. Paroo, Marian’s mother. Actually, Rebecca Luker who sang and performed Marian’s part is also too old to play Marian, who is supposed to be 26. (Ms. Luker is 48.) It didn’t really matter though. Luker was terrific in the part, and made me wish I had seen her perform the full musical on Broadway back in 2000. Patrick Cassidy, the son of Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, played Professor Harold Hill. He also directed the performance. Cassidy’s performance was not particularly noteworthy, but nothing for which he should feel ashamed.
The Washington Post found little to like about the concert except for Ms. Luker. The Post misses the point. The point of the concert was for us to hear Ms. Luker, enjoy an afternoon with the NSO Pops, check out Shirley Jones (who is aging very gracefully) and have a good time during a busy holiday weekend. I certainly had no expectations that I would be seeing anything of Broadway quality, which is why it was so nice to have Ms. Luker doing such an excellent job both singing and acting in the part. It was also nice to be four rows from both performers on a blustery November afternoon. After the performance, both Shirley Jones and Patrick Cassidy shared a few intimacies with the audience. Ms. Jones was pregnant with Patrick when The Music Man was being filmed. During the final intimate scene at the footbridge, Robert Preston felt Patrick kick and exclaimed, “What was that!” Twenty years later, Patrick related that he finally got a chance to meet Robert Preston. “Without missing a beat,” he said, “Mr. Preston said, ‘We already met.’”
The real treat for me was simply to see my father dabbing his eyes during the performance. It is hard to touch someone’s heart but on this one rare occasion, I fully succeeded. I am glad I was there to enjoy these moments with the best father a son could ever want.
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