Category: Entertainment

Must-Have Movies — Part 1

Entertainment

Earlier this week I talked about the benefits and/or wisdom of having all your favorite movies on DVD, against the possibility that they could be “canceled” (i.e. censored or maybe worse, bowdlerized) by The Usual Suspects.

So here’s the first part of a list of movies I think one should have in one’s video library, or the stars / directors thereof, just on case they appear on some lefty’s Enemy Of The People list.

Actors:

Clint Eastwood — pretty much any or all his movies (even Bridges Of Madison County , but not Paint Your Wagon )  because a) Clinty and b) the Left hates him for being a conservative.

John Wayne — ditto, except for the appalling The Conqueror  (Genghis Wayne?  No.)

Lee Marvin — ditto, except for Paint Your Wagon  as noted above, and especially The Dirty Dozen.

Steve McQueen — yeah, he was a wife-beater.  So he’ll be on someone’s list sooner or later.

Paul Newman — as an Eastern liberal, he’s probably not going to be “canceled” anytime soon, but everyone should have The Sting, Butch Cassidy, Hud and The Hustler  on their shelf anyway.

 

Directors:

John Frankenheimer — just about all his movies, but especially The Manchurian Candidate,  Birdman Of Alcatraz, Grand Prix  and Ronin.  Quite possibly the best action-movie director ever.

John Milius — we all know him from Red Dawn, of course, but there’s also Conan  and Flight  Of The Intruder.

Clint Eastwood — he’s already up as an actor, but his solo (non-acting) directing shouldn’t be ignored, either.  Think of Bird, Sully and American Sniper.

We’ll talk about specific must-have movies in the next part of the series.

Feel free to add your favorite “bodies of work” in Comments.  Leave specific movies till next time.

 

 

Hard Media

Entertainment

Seen at Insty:

I’ve never been a fan of “Cloud”-based entertainment, whether literature or movies, because it’s always seemed too easy for the “Cloud” to remove stuff that you’ve paid for — Kindle books, Amazon movies, etc. — at their own discretion / whim.  I don’t care that my well-filled bookcases take up a great deal of space in my apartment, or that they’d be a pain in the ass to move should I decide to live elsewhere;  I bought them, they’re my property forever, and nobody can take them from me.  Ditto movies.  I have a large number of DVDs of the movies I love and can watch over and over again — not too many modern ones, because today’s movies largely suck — and like my bookcases, my DVDs are eternal.  (I have a brand-new-in-the-box multi-format DVD player sitting in a closet in case the existing Philips gives up the ghost at some time in the future, and ALL my computers come with DVD players, just to be on the safe side.)

So when one of the great classic movies Gone With the Wind  risks being taken offline because it supposedly supports Teh EEEEEVIL Confederacy, I just shrug and move on, because GWTW  is very much part of my DVD movie collection.   And if it’s discovered that John Wayne or Humphrey Bogart once called someone a spic or nigger, and their works are therefore doomed to be consigned to the 1984 memory hole, my copies of Stagecoach  and Casablanca  are perfectly safe.

Just to prove that I’m comfortable living with apparent contradiction, though, I will admit to owning a copy of child-rapist Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, because it’s fucking brilliant even though the little dwarf Polack himself is reprehensible.  And even though I detest most of Woody Allen’s movies, I still have a copy of Midnight In Paris  because it too is a lovely movie, and it’s safe from the baying mob who have declared the mild-mannered director persona non grata  because he bonked someone he shouldn’t have, or something (I’m not familiar with the casus belli  against Allen, nor am I sufficiently interested in looking it up).

That’s the whole point.  The essence of all of this is choice — personal choice, not choice dictated by some foul censorship committee — and by going with the “physical media”, as Insty calls it, one is sheltered from the screaming assholes of political correctness.

And they’ll have to take my well-thumbed copy of Huckleberry Finn  from my cold dead hand (the other hand will be clutching an empty 1911).

Friday Night Movies

Entertainment

Everyone, and I mean everyone should watch Nicholas & Alexandra  on Amazon Prime tonight.  While the movie takes a few historical liberties, it nevertheless provides a chilling, and very timely warning of the consequences of revolution.

Most poignant is towards the end of the movie, where an accurate portrayal is given of the transfer of power from police to party functionaries, who do not need the law to function:  just an order from the local soviet.

Pleasant Surprises

Entertainment

I find Ricky Gervais’s comedy routines like a multi-layer cake made up of strawberry layers with the occasional Marmite layer mixed in:  some parts are wonderful, and others make you squinch your mouth up like you just bit into a lemon.

But his BBC-TV series After Life  (Netflix) is excellent, without reservation.  It is also amazingly funny:  at times dark and thought-provoking, and other times laugh-out-loud hilarious.  (That is, the first two seasons were brilliant;  but he’s just announced a third, in which he may jump the shark as these things so often do, or he may just have played out the premise, which is most often the case.)  A lot of people are annoyed by Gervais’s delivery and (sometimes) subject matter, but he’s probably the best comic writer extant so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The next pleasant surprise has been the BBC teen love story Normal People  (Hulu), even though it’s occasionally incomprehensible because of    and often-impenetrable Irish slang and accents.  Needless to say, I am not in the target demographic (still less psychographic) of the teen-angst genre (to put it mildly), but this show is lovely:  measured pacing, several relevant sub-plots, and sympathetic camera work.  I haven’t finished it yet, and I can’t wait to see the rest.

Speaking of dubious extra seasons, I see that Killing Eve  (which I’ve really enjoyed so far) is in its third — which, although I haven’t seen, I’m kinda pre-judging because I thought the final episode of the second season was a perfect ending for the show.  But no… Bobby’s going to come out of the shower and the thing will continue.  If I’m proved wrong, I’ll say so, but the odds are not good.

I am of the firm opinion that unless a show is completely episodic with no overarching storyline, it should end after its second season, almost without exception.  Even the incredible Hill Street Blues  (in my opinion, the greatest TV show ever made) got tired after its third season, and most other shows have to go on life support after two, because they’re only average.

But the above three offerings — Brit shows all — are good, despite my initial suspicion and misgivings.  If you haven’t already done so, give them a shot.

Exposure

Entertainment, Funny Stuff

I love reading Davis Thompson’s blog because he is an expert in les affaires de la Fisque, such as in this priceless piece:

After reading the news, it is time to attend to my indoor garden, to do the work of keeping my plants alive: the trimming and the watering and the fertilising. This work is meditation, a way of going on.

Yes, going on. Bravely, heroically, and despite the realisation that your preferred candidate lost an election, four years ago.

And then the defiant phrase,

My houseplant garden is a tiny national park that Donald Trump can never destroy.

By the way, today’s word is fixation.

Read the entire thing to get the full, intensive effect.

There is one small problem, though, with reading Thompson’s stuff, and that is that it exposes one to lunacy of all sorts:  Left-wing, feministical, academic and eco-freak, to name but some, and all with massive overlap between them.

Because I don’t read Slate or New Yorker, for example, I’m never exposed to such nonsense — but reading Thompson does do that, in the same way that playing with dogs, while wonderfully pleasurable, does expose one to their bad breath and fleas.

Nevertheless, go on and read such splendid pieces as the above, as well as Please Update Your Files And Lifestyles Accordingly (for extreme wokedom and snowflakery) and Land Of The Before Times (for extreme eco-hypocrisy).

Why should I be the only one exposed?