µ-Blog – Too long to tweet, too short to call a real post
Lately, I've been binge watching a lot of TV. Now if there is one single entity that is responsible for binge watching, it would have to be Netflix.
So when I'm binge watching on Netflix, about every fourth episode, it pops up this message that says:
Do you want to continue watching?
And it makes you click it before it will let me watch the next episode. Not only that, it doesn't load the continue watching thing until the credits completely finish, even though they've collapsed the credits so small you can't even read them. Like if you wanted to know who the guy at the bar was, you couldn't tell because it's so small. So you have to wait though the credits (you can't read) and the Fx logo and all that crap, and then it pulls up this thing that you have click through.
I'm like, Are you freaking kidding me? Don't you know I that I'm binge watching. You practically coined the term, yet you're stopping me right in the middle. Really?
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Thursday, January 12, 2017
First Batch of TCMFF Films/SpecialGuest Drop
Yesterday, TCM finally announced the first batch of films and special guests for the 2017 TCM Classic Film Festival (TCMFF), April 6 to 9, 2017. For what it's worth, these are my top 5 of what's been announced so far. I've been down this road often enough to know that anything I say here should be taken with a grain of salt. With 22 films announced, this would account for roughly a quarter of the films being shown. By the time the final schedule drops a few weeks out from the festival, it's likely that only one or two of these films will still make my top 5, but it is kind of fun to speculate, so here we go.
5. Palm Beach Story – Although not my favorite of the Preston Sturges film, it is still very good and bound to be even better on the big screen with an audience at TCMFF.
4. Beyond the Mouse: The 1930s Cartoons of Ub Iwerks – The historical presentations at TCMFF are usually spectacular, and I expect no less here. I'm a huge fan of cartoons. I grew up on a combination of Warner Brothers and Fleischer Studios cartoons everyday after school as a kid. This is a natural for me.
3. Speedy – This might have slipped under the radar. Yes, I do love silent comedies, and Speedy is of the best, but what really makes it for me is a live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, which will include junk percussion (I assume this means banging on pots and pans or similar) and musical saws. Bound to be a hoot.
2. Arsenic and Old Lace – This is one of my favorite comedies and one my favorite Cary Grant movies. Also, I have never seen it on the big screen. That makes for a winning combination in my book.
1. Born Yesterday – Again, one of my favorites and have never seen on the big screen. Even though I've seen it 30 times, I still laugh my butt off at it. Add to that a TCMFF audience and, hopefully, a vintage theater, and we're in store for a real treat.
5. Palm Beach Story – Although not my favorite of the Preston Sturges film, it is still very good and bound to be even better on the big screen with an audience at TCMFF.
4. Beyond the Mouse: The 1930s Cartoons of Ub Iwerks – The historical presentations at TCMFF are usually spectacular, and I expect no less here. I'm a huge fan of cartoons. I grew up on a combination of Warner Brothers and Fleischer Studios cartoons everyday after school as a kid. This is a natural for me.
3. Speedy – This might have slipped under the radar. Yes, I do love silent comedies, and Speedy is of the best, but what really makes it for me is a live accompaniment by the Alloy Orchestra, which will include junk percussion (I assume this means banging on pots and pans or similar) and musical saws. Bound to be a hoot.
2. Arsenic and Old Lace – This is one of my favorite comedies and one my favorite Cary Grant movies. Also, I have never seen it on the big screen. That makes for a winning combination in my book.
1. Born Yesterday – Again, one of my favorites and have never seen on the big screen. Even though I've seen it 30 times, I still laugh my butt off at it. Add to that a TCMFF audience and, hopefully, a vintage theater, and we're in store for a real treat.
Monday, January 2, 2017
The Year That Was
2016 is over, and thank God for that. I was going to title this, Screw You, 2016, but something made me decide to go a different way. It was a rough year for celebrities. I'm not going even going to try to recount all of them, just the ones that hit the hardest for me. Also, I tend not to get real bent out of shape when a celebrity in their 80s or 90s dies. I figure that we should be happy that they were blessed with a long life. It's when they are younger that it gets me.
We weren't even two weeks into the year when the first big one hit. On January 10, David Bowie died, two days after his 69th birthday. This one was tough for me. Most rock stars burn hot and then fade away. A handful burn so hot that the flame never goes out, and they just keep going. The Rolling Stones are a great example of this. Others reinvent themselves. ZZ Top reinvented themselves in the 1980s and sold way more records with music that couldn't hold a candle to their earlier work as a rock blues band in the 1970s. To their credit though, they are still going strong. I have one of the later albums, La Futura (2012) and it's every bit as good as anything they did in the 70s.
As rock stars go, David Bowie was unique. He was cutting edge, from the start and continued that way throughout his career. He was constantly evolving. In the 1980s, when he released, Let's Dance. He wasn't reinventing himself. That's where he just happened to be, in the center of it all.
My wife and I go to a Goth dance club. They play a lot of music that most people reading this will not have heard of, bands like Covenant, VNV Nation, and Assemblage 23. A lot of the time, they have two rooms. In the back room they tend to do a mix of older tracks from bands I just mentioned, but mix in 1980s stuff, mostly bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode, and New Order.
A couple of days before David Bowie died, we were at the club, and the last song before we left was, Fame, Bowie's first number 1 single. There it was a 40-year-old song, played in a club filled with people most whom hadn't been born when it was originally released in 1975, yet it sounded every bit as cutting edge as anything they played that night.
Less than a week after David Bowie passed away, Alan Rickman died, also at 69. As a classic movie person, I don't complain when people call newer work, classic. Well, I might if it's only five or ten years old. And I will definitely argue that something is not classic, because I don't think it's good enough to be called a classic. Alan Rickman's first big film role was Die Hard, a film that is now almost 30 years old. I have no problem calling Die Hard a classic, both in age and quality. Like Bowie, Rickman was too young to die. Then again there are no guarantees in life. We would like to think that everyone lives to their 80s or 90s. The truth is many die much much younger.
Fast forward to April, when Prince died at only 57. In some ways, Prince was a lot like Bowie in that he was always evolving. As a result, his music always seem fresh and interesting and edgy. He was definitely too young to leave us at 57. My favorite thing said about Prince after he died came from Dave Grohl, drummer from Nirvana and lead singer/guitarist from the Foo Fighters. Someone asked Grohl if he thought Prince was better guitarist than he was. It was a total bullshit question, designed to get Grohl to take a shot at an older musician, who was pretty much universally respect, after his death. Dave Grohl, class act that he is, said he thought Prince was a better drummer than he was.
Sure there were plenty of others between the deaths of David Bowie/Alan Rickman and Prince and more still by the end of the year. My point here was not to do a comprehensive list, but to talk about certain deaths that were important to me and maybe reflect on the nature of life and death at time of year when you tend to reflect on the nature of life and death.
December seemed to be really rough, among others, we lost the following:
We weren't even two weeks into the year when the first big one hit. On January 10, David Bowie died, two days after his 69th birthday. This one was tough for me. Most rock stars burn hot and then fade away. A handful burn so hot that the flame never goes out, and they just keep going. The Rolling Stones are a great example of this. Others reinvent themselves. ZZ Top reinvented themselves in the 1980s and sold way more records with music that couldn't hold a candle to their earlier work as a rock blues band in the 1970s. To their credit though, they are still going strong. I have one of the later albums, La Futura (2012) and it's every bit as good as anything they did in the 70s.
As rock stars go, David Bowie was unique. He was cutting edge, from the start and continued that way throughout his career. He was constantly evolving. In the 1980s, when he released, Let's Dance. He wasn't reinventing himself. That's where he just happened to be, in the center of it all.
My wife and I go to a Goth dance club. They play a lot of music that most people reading this will not have heard of, bands like Covenant, VNV Nation, and Assemblage 23. A lot of the time, they have two rooms. In the back room they tend to do a mix of older tracks from bands I just mentioned, but mix in 1980s stuff, mostly bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode, and New Order.
A couple of days before David Bowie died, we were at the club, and the last song before we left was, Fame, Bowie's first number 1 single. There it was a 40-year-old song, played in a club filled with people most whom hadn't been born when it was originally released in 1975, yet it sounded every bit as cutting edge as anything they played that night.
Less than a week after David Bowie passed away, Alan Rickman died, also at 69. As a classic movie person, I don't complain when people call newer work, classic. Well, I might if it's only five or ten years old. And I will definitely argue that something is not classic, because I don't think it's good enough to be called a classic. Alan Rickman's first big film role was Die Hard, a film that is now almost 30 years old. I have no problem calling Die Hard a classic, both in age and quality. Like Bowie, Rickman was too young to die. Then again there are no guarantees in life. We would like to think that everyone lives to their 80s or 90s. The truth is many die much much younger.
Fast forward to April, when Prince died at only 57. In some ways, Prince was a lot like Bowie in that he was always evolving. As a result, his music always seem fresh and interesting and edgy. He was definitely too young to leave us at 57. My favorite thing said about Prince after he died came from Dave Grohl, drummer from Nirvana and lead singer/guitarist from the Foo Fighters. Someone asked Grohl if he thought Prince was better guitarist than he was. It was a total bullshit question, designed to get Grohl to take a shot at an older musician, who was pretty much universally respect, after his death. Dave Grohl, class act that he is, said he thought Prince was a better drummer than he was.
Sure there were plenty of others between the deaths of David Bowie/Alan Rickman and Prince and more still by the end of the year. My point here was not to do a comprehensive list, but to talk about certain deaths that were important to me and maybe reflect on the nature of life and death at time of year when you tend to reflect on the nature of life and death.
December seemed to be really rough, among others, we lost the following:
- Alan Thicke – The death of the TV dad didn't really affect me. I mention it mostly because he died in December and was arguably the first in a wave of celebrity deaths. Coincidentally, he was also 69.
- Zsa Zsa Gabor – Again, this didn't affect me. I was more surprised to learn that she was still alive. Right after, I heard I found out she had been on life support for the last five years, not much of a life if you ask me.
- George Michael – Died on Christmas day, he was only 53, a year younger than me. Just a few days before that I had been trying to learn how to play, "Careless Whisper" on ukulele. Great song, great talent, taken way too soon. At this point, I'm thinking 2016 is being kind of a dick.
- Carrie Fisher – Died December 27, she was only 60. I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but she was good in the films. I posted a picture of her from The Blues Brothers, as Jake's bomb-, rocket-launcher-, and gun-toting ex-girlfriend.
- Debbie Reynolds (Carrie Fisher's mother) – Died the next day of a stroke. My wife said that if our daughter died before her, she would probably have a stroke too. Debbie Reynolds was a massive talent and had a great career. My favorite role of hers was as the backward country girl opposite tax collector Tony Randall in the 1959 comedy, The Mating Game.
Finally, today, January 2, I saw something that gave me a little perspective. I was on IMDB, trying to see if any classic movie people had a birthday today, none to speak of, at least none in the first two pages of 50 names each. I decided to see if any had died on this day. On January 2, 1963, both Dick Powell and Jack Carson died, both died of cancer on the same day. Dick Powell was 58, and Jack Carson was only 52.
People dying before their time is nothing new, and apparently, neither is celebrities dying in clusters. I've never been real big on New Year's resolutions, but if nothing else the one thing that 2016 has taught me, it's that we need appreciate the people around us, while they are still around, whether it's friends and family or the celebrities we admire.
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