Why Shouldn't I Start Blogging Again?

Cover of Funny People

It's not like my words are polluting the Gulf of Mexico (which puts the bar pretty low, but at least there's a bar).

Anyway, here's a thought. Since Netflix uses one's movie ratings to predict which movies you will like, a feature I do find useful when I'm in doubt, I now find myself putting up an early "in mind" rating as I watch a movie. This corresponds roughly to the practice I assume most reporters follow of grabbing onto a tentative lead as they report a single-interview story.

(You are not at ease until something is said or seen that would work as a lead. You do not want to become complacent and cease being vigilant for something better, but your anxiety level drops because you know you have, at least, *something*.)

Point is as E. and I recover from the virus we picked up traveling in the Great American South for the past two weeks, I watched some cable TV, including Judd Apatow's "Funny People." In the first half hour it earned a tentative four stars with its sour portrayal of Adam
Sandler as a hack comic actor -- which may not have been Apatow's intended reading --suffering from a terminal disease. But then AS is cured, and it became a kind of domestic comedy of reclaiming a lost love by breaking up her family, and my rating slid back to three stars, as any surprises in the script evaporated.

That's all I have to say, though (again) it applies to certain kinds of feature writing, which I will be teaching this fall. Better a flawed mishmash with bits of sparkle than coherent mediocrity -- for me anyway.

Good summer fun: thinking about what I am going to teach in the fall and hoping this time I will get it right, though considering what I have just written, better to get it really right some days at the cost of getting it really wrong others.

I can do that. I always have.

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Giving Thanks

Image via Wikipedia

I am thankful that I was born at such a time that black-and-white movies were not an affectation, but the best the filmmakers could do, at least the best they could do in the 30s and then the best they could do -- at least in the 40s and maybe in the first part of the 50s; I don't know enough to know that -- given the cost and difficulty of color.

I know my ignorance is showing here. I'm not really sure when color became a matter of choice -- one or the other; money's not object! -- but I do like to think that all those black-and-white movies I loved on TV were not some cranks effort to fight the last battle in a lost war, a war where the soldiers were all those ticket buyers who did want their color.

They say that kids now have no patience with the old black and white movies. They are just too odd for the kids, not the color of dreams (as they were for me) but the color of mold or ash or 'technical difficulties.' Well, I do love black and white. I'm thinking about it because over on Netflix instant, where I've paused it, "The Third Man" is racked up and ready to go. It's all shadows, mood, like the photos in newspapers used to be, the inside stuff of black and white photography.

Sure, it makes me feel old, but in just a little bit I'm not there any more, just the movie just the movie and the dream.

You know, I read the original "Third Man" in a Graham Greene omnibus I was assigned in grad school and the "hero" -- and never were quote marks used to greater or wiser effect -- gets the girl. But then again the original story was some kind of back story or treatment for the movie, as I recall. So when the hero got the girl in that version it was just Greene being soft, slumming.

Carol Reed had the best kind of "black and white" mind. All those lovely shadows, soft and hard at the same time.

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I Think They Call This a Teaching Moment

Those who think I hung the moon and subdivided the stars (with some arbitrage in there somewhere) recall that my students chose Vicky Cristina Barcelona, written and directed by Mr. Woody Allen, as the movie to review in my Arts Reporting and Reviewing class. I have not begun to grade the reviews yet, so in all innocence I asked Ricky what he thought of the movie.

Well, he said, I watched it in Italian.

Ah, I said.

And then he explained in some detail why this was the only version available at the last minute from Netflix. I did not fully understand the explanation, but students have long since learned the reward for intricate, perhaps impenetrable, explanations presented to teacher (like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its patron) is the teacher's inevitable exhausted retreat from further inquiry into circumstance and contingency.

With subtitles? I said, dead game to the last.

No, he said.

But you speak Italian? I said.

No, he said.

Well, there you go, I said. That's a clever angle from which to compose a review, I said, always supportive, particularly when the conversation turns surreal, perhaps Allen-esque, though perhaps more Perlman-esque, and thus in any case blogworthy.

A Google Suggests This is Witty But Not Literal

After midnight these days I am watching the 2nd season of "30 Rock" on Netflix instant. Maybe later I'll write about why I had avoided the show, but the point is I am now converted, a disciple and enthusiast.

An aversion hint: So many links to SNL in the 21st Century, during which it has grown consistently mediocre, lifeless and bland -- and I realize the marvelous Tina Fey was head writer for a chunk of SNL's recent decline. Which helps explain why I avoided "30 Rock."

(SNL's supposed Renaissance due to Tina Fey's return as Sarah Palin was only a blip. Count on it.)

One source of pleasure is that each episode of "30 Rock" has some genuinely droll dialogue, spoken quickly, a virtual throwaway. I will simply reproduce a Google hit from a search I made early this morning.

Any 30 rock fans out there? Anyway, i just watched this week's episode on tivo today. In it, Jack (Alec Baldwin) orders a "Nancy Drew" but he claims that when a man orders it, it's called a "Hardy Boy".

Recipe as follows:

1 part White Rum
2 parts Diet Ginger Ale
a splash of lime


I won't bother to deconstruct the joke other than noting it's an act of generosity to older viewers, who remember the originals. Also, I was snagged in the way one sometimes is by a series without a laugh track. I wondered if the cocktail were real. And thus I searched.

Note my elegant use of the subjunctive. I hope I don't have to revise later on.