Reopening The Crypt

Well, I have something of a legitimate reason for stopping for so long. I moved again. I moved out of the isolated, depressing situation I was living in and into a better and more close in neighborhood in Bethesda, and my landlord is an old acquaintance to boot. There are drawbacks to this place mainly that I have a lot less storage room and had to get rid of all my albums and a bunch of CDs, DVDs and books to boot. I still have a lot of stuff though I have no clue as to exactly what. I found some software, Music Collector, that will let me properly catalog all my CDs and that has become a slow, ongoing project.

Culturally I'm still relying heavily on Netflix. I can't get WGN from here so no more "Corner Gas" but the DVD sets are supposed to be getting an American release soon. I did stumble across a disc of another amazing Canadian series, "Robson Arms", that features a couple of the "Corner Gas" actors. Hopefully I'll get around to talking about the few other DVDs I've seen that I think are worth discussing, Hallelujah, The Fugitive and The Pink Panther Cartoon Collection.

Canadian Prairie Humor

I've got a lot of things to catch up on talking about like The L Word, Puppets Who Kill and Looney Tunes Volume Four, but I've got to start somewhere and I might as well start with a Canadian TV sitcom called Corner Gas.

When you think about SCTV, Jim Carrey and all the people who have come out of Saturday Night Live, you realize a lot of funny people have come out of Canada in the last thirty years. When you watch some Canadian TV comedies though you start to think they've kept the best stuff for themselves. I'm thinking of The Red Green Show, Puppets Who Kill and especially Corner Gas.

The setup for this show is incredibly basic. It's basically about a man who runs a gas station in a small town called Dog River out on the western Canadian prairie and his circle, the woman who works for him at the station, his parents, his best friend, the woman who runs the diner next door and the town's two-man police force. The show is built on simple premises like the arivall of the town's first ATM machine, a lost American tourist, a curling competition and tearing down a barn. Yet this show is very funny. The writers fit the dialogue together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle so that one conversation can forward three plots and still be funny. It's also refreshing to see a comedy that isn't all about fat guys trying to get laid or adult guys trying to act like teenagers. All the characters here are at different levels of dumb or quirky so you don't feel like you're watching the same viewpoint coming out of four or five people's mouths. Also it doesn't hurt that the cast includes one stone cold hottie, Gabrielle Miller, the woman on the left in the picture, who plays Lacey, the owner of the diner.

Will Hays was right

Last night I learned something. I watched two old silent filns directex by Cecil B. Demille, The Whispering Shadow and Old Wives For New. They were both made in the 1917 - 1918 time frame but they couldn't have been more different. Whispering Shadow was a typical for the time moralistic melodrama with a convoluted plot which climaxes in a man being executed for his own murder to protect his wife who had unknowingly become a bigamist by marrying the state's governor. Old Wives was another proposition entirely, a movie that proves it wasn't just off screen scandals that brought about the institution of the Production Code and the Hays Office in 1920.

It was the story of a successful man with a fat, lazy wife who falls in love with the pretty owner of a dress shop. There was little conventional morally about this film. In the course of things a man is shot by a jealous girlfriend. She is given some money and sent away by the hero and there is no hint she ever pays for her crime. The man's widow shows no sadness even as she shops for her mourning wardrobe. Another "professional mistress" is paid off. The fat wife eventually divorces her husband and marries a goldigger. There's even a bit of women runnging around in scantily clad nightgowns. There is no hint whatsoever of any remorse or "home and hearth" stuff. DeMille did things like this in the 20's but it was shock to see it starting this early especially without a trace of moralizing.

Thinning Of The Herd

One thing I can say, I'm learning what sorts of movies I don't like. I've been striking out a lot lately with DVDs. I rented "Sordid Lives" because it featured "Olivia Newton-John as a lesbian cowgirl" and hated it. It was nothing but a bunch of tired camp and cliched wacky Texas characters. "Antoineta", a Carlos Saura film that starred Isabelle Adjani and Hanna Schygulla, suffered from a lack of characterization and motivation. Then there was "A Woman With Red Hair" a Japanese "pink" film that was just there. I did watch a classic British thriller, "Green For Danger" that was fun. I'm hoping for better soon. I still have "Sweet Movie" and "Billy Budd" to get through right now, plus I'm off the next couple of weeks so I should have time to watch a bunch of things, maybe even go to an honest to god movie theater.

All The World Is Sad And Dreary...

I hate getting sick. I spent the entire last seven days with a bad cold which seemed to be exacerbated by blood pressure problems. I couldn't even concentrate about my ongoing problems, not that I can do anything about them anyway. I got someone to recommend some therapists to me. This may be my last chance to save myself so I hope I find someone who can help me.

The DVD thing hasn't been too great lately. I tried watching the movie "Palindromes" but that was too depressing even for me. I also watched Andrei Tarkovsky's last film, "The Sacrifice". I could appreciate it but it didn't really get to me. This time around I at least have the third disc of "Paranoia Agent", a Japanese anime I genuinely think is brilliant. I also got a sample of the old "Untouchables" series which may be interesting to watch with mature eyes.

Let My Cat and Mouse Go!

I saw something unexpected channel surfing last Sunday. Cartoon Network was having a marathon of Tom & Jerry cartoons. This was surprising because Cartoon Network stopped showing classic cartoons years ago but a commercial for an upcoming Tom & Jerry Nutcracker Suite cartoon soon made the reasoning clear. Unlike Popeye or the Warner Brothers gang, Tom & Jerry are still considered viable properties for a kid audience which makes sense. The cartoons are all action and the main characters never speak. Plus their motivations are so primal they can still make sense to a young audience.

Sadly this means their classic work doesn't get the loving treatment Bugs, Daffy, Popeye and Droopy have gotten. Those DVD sets are aimed at adult collectors so they contain uncut cartoons with all the excessive violence, unrestrained steroetyping and other "bad things" that an adult viewer can take in context. Tom & Jerry have to be bowlderized for the kiddies. So their three DVD sets take the shorts out of chronological order, repeat some , edit others and at the last minute Warner even decided that two of them were so henious they couldn't ever be released on home video, lest the little tykes be corrupted. All nonsense of course but that's what happens when the powers that be think they can still squeeze some bucks out of the kiddie market for a particular property.

Watching the cartoons now I got more of an appreciation of what they were about, the over the top slapstick that bordered on sadism, the way the relationship between Tom and Jerry became more of a grudging friendship as time went on, something that Chuck Jones never understood since he jsut replicated the Coyote - Roadrunner dynamic when he did his version. I also enjoyed a couple of the few T&Js where dialogue was a factor, "Solid Serenade" where Tom wooed a female cat by playing a standup bass and singing "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby", and "Pecos Pest" which guest starred Doodles Weaver as the voice of Jerry's Cousin Pecos who stopped off on his way to a TV appearance to rehearse his whacked out version of "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" or maybe he called it "C-C-C-Cranbo!"

Visiting The Past

I've finally gotten around to the reason I bought the "Jazz Singer" DVD, the bonus disc of old Vitaphone Talkie musical shorts. It's an interesting trip. The performances aren't too campy. Most are quite good remembering the styles of the time. It is fascinating though that most of the shorts include at least one risque song with lyrics like "She may step out but she won't give in." It's not that big a shock when you think about it. At that point Warners was just experimenting and getting the shorts out there. Nobody thought about playing to small towns with more conservative mores. It's another thing that gives a lie to how straight-laced things supposedly were way back when.
The biggest musical surprise so far has been The Ingenues, an all-woman orchestra where violins, cello, harp, banjos, accordions, and a bassoon were used in addition to the usual big band equipment with every woman playing two or three instruments.

Then there is this other, very strange film I saw. Every now and then I'll run into something like "Project A-Ko" or "Super Milk Chan" that reminds how flat out weird Japanese pop culture can get. I saw a lulu last night, "The Glamourous Life Of Sachiko Hanai". This was a simple little story about a Tokyo call girl who gets shot in the head, becomes a genius as a result and gets involved in a spy plot involving a clone of President Bush's finger when she isn't tearing off her clothes and having sex at every opportunity. This American edition had a self imposed rating of "Seriously F***ed Up" and it was well-deserved. The movie was completely insane and I'm kind of surprised it doesn't have more of a reputation. There is one scene where they show panic aboard a nuclear aircraft carrier by waving G.I. Joe dolls in front of a still picture of a military command center. By the time that shows up it seems perfectly normal.

24 Big Uns

I could talk about a lot of things like the anti-smoking ad I saw which was based on the false premise that in the 1970's the Muppets were largely aimed at a kid audience or the court ruling that finally overturned the age restriction record keeping for adult videos but I don't feel like it right now. My main focus for the next few weeks will be the 24 CDs I was just sent for reviewing by Cadence. I'm disappointed when I only get a few, but sheesh! I should be careful what I wish for. There seems to be an incredible mix of stuff, some big bands, some vocalists, some free improv. Right now I'm listening to a solo piano CD by Bobby Few and there are a few other big names in this batch (at least, big to me) like Karin Krog, Lee Konitz, Veryan Weston and Sakoto Fuji.

As for movies I just finished muddling through two X-rated films directed by Doris Wishman. They were even more incoherent and random than her usual work which may be because the X-rated material was supposedly added on later without her involvement. I'm suspicious of that claim because these movies broke into a sex scene every five minutes and while, some did have only the thinnest ties to the main storyline and characters, others were obviously germane to the movie. In one of them, "Come To Me My Love", two different characters are killed while naked and immediately after having sex. That doesn't come off like an addition.