A Short Word About Racial Prejudice... and Pride

I wrote this back in 2000, before Tiger Woods had his "little" mishap or Barak Obama was elected president.  (And yes, we still have a problem):

Racial sensibilities don’t apply to this culture, and I’m not talking about racial hatred here, but rather racial pride.  The day we focus exclusively on a person’s abilities, and not on the color of skin (whether that focus is with hatred or love), then we will have achieved racial harmony.  When Tiger Woods’ African and Asian heritage makes not a difference, that is when we overcome prejudice; not necessarily when we stop hating other races, which I admit still needs to be done, but also when we stop loving races to a point where the race takes center stage over the individual and his or her abilities.  Would Tiger Woods be as popular, as much of a talked about celebrity, if he weren’t black/Asian?  Unlikely; of course, he’d still be mentioned in the world of sports for his excellence in golf, but his celebrity has actually gone beyond that now.  A big part of his popularity today is his cultural heritage, but that shouldn’t really make any difference.  Instead of being known as a Champion Golfer, he’s instead known as a Champion Black/Asian Golfer, and that’s too bad, and that’s what continues separating the races and continues promoting racial prejudice.  As long as race is considered a “big deal,” we will continue to be a racist society.  In other words, when America elects its first black or female president, people will say that we’re finally harmonious, but they’d be wrong.  Only when the president is black or a woman and it doesn’t matter will we be racially harmonious.  In the glorified future of Star Trek, it’s never an issue.  Miles O’Brien makes no distinction, good or bad, that his commander is black, or that is wife is Asian – didn’t even give it a second thought!  On Voyager, you won’t find B’Elana saying to Captain Janeway something like, “All right, my sister!  Equality for women, finally!”  If she did, Janeway’s first thought would probably be to send her down to sickbay to have the holographic Doctor find out what’s wrong with her.  They don’t make a production out of equality, it just exists.  Chakotay is second in command because of his abilities, and not because he’s of Native American Indian descent.  We are not at that level in this society in our racial hatred or pride.  I will admit, however, that we are better than we were before.  At least we no longer have slavery or blatant segregation.

The Oscars: A Look Back at Recent Best Picture Winners and Nominees

The Oscars are just minutes away, and anyone that has been following this blog for some of my movie reviews may notice I haven't seen a single one of the Best Picture nominees from this year.  But that doesn't mean I don't want to see them.  With the possible exception of Amour, a foreign film I know little about, the other 8 nominees are all films I'd like to see.  Lincoln, of course, is the front runner, but don't discount Argo, or even Zero Dark Thirty (remember Bigelow's win for The Hurt Locker a few years ago?):

Argo                                                                            Life of Pi
Beasts of the Southern Wild                                        Lincoln
Django Unchained                                                      Silver Linings Playbook
Les Misérables                                                             Zero Dark Thirty

Since I haven't seen any of these, which I now understand I could have seen at a recent theater which was running all ten films over the last two Saturdays, I decided to look back over the last 12 years to see what I thought of the Best Picture winners and nominees.  Here's how I broke down all of them:

I loved the following 20 films, and if you haven't seen them, you should definitely check them out:

Avatar
A Beautiful Mind
The Blind Side
Chicago
Chocolat
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Erin Brockavich
Finding Neverland
Gangs of New York
Gladiator 
The Help
Inception
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The King's Speech
Little Miss Sunshine
Midnight in Paris
Moulin Rouge
Slumdog Millionaire
Toy Story 3
Up



These 10 films I also liked, but not quite as much as those on the list above:

Atonement
The Aviator
Capote
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Fighter
Frost/Nixon
Gosford Park
Juno
Million Dollar Baby
The Social Network

These 5 films were merely okay:

Crash
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

The Queen
Seabiscuit
True Grit

And I didn't really care for these 4 films:

The Departed
The Hours
Mystic River
No Country for Old Men

Of the ones I haven't even seen yet, I most would like to check out these 10:

The Artist
District 9
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The Pianist

Precious
Ray 
The Reader
There Will Be Blood
War Horse

These 10 I just might like:

127 Hours
The Descendants
Hugo
Letters from Iwo Jima
Michael Clayton
Moneyball
Munich
A Serious Man
The Tree of Life
Up in the Air

These 10 films I really don't think I'd like:

Babel
Black Swan
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
An Education
Good Night, and Good Luck
In the Bedroom
Lost in Translation
Sideways
Traffic
Winter's Bone

These final three are a definite "No Thank You!" for their moral content, regardless of how well written and acted they may be:

Brokeback Mountain
The Kids Are All Right
Milk

So that's my little trip down recent Best Picture history.  Perhaps by next year, I'll know where this year's nominees stand with all the rest, and maybe I can watch some of those others I haven't seen yet!

The 90's and "Wow": When I First Dipped My Toe Into the Christian Music Scene

Back in the mid 90's. when I was just beginning my Christian walk, I don't believe K-Love and all the Christian rock stations you can find these days really existed.  They started releasing the yearly Wow CD's right around that time, and after buying the first four, I was hooked, and I've been buying them ever since.  This post is from March of 2000, whild I was revisiting the first four I purchased and taking note of what I loved so much about them:

Before listening to my newly taped Wow 2000 in the car, I decided to re-listen to the first four.  Dare I say that these are the favorite tapes I own?

     These were exactly what I was looking for!  I don’t believe I’ll ever tire of them!  They are just nearly perfect, and such variety!  There is as much variety and talent on these tapes as in my entire secular pop music collection, yet because they sing of Jesus, these songs are even better than that! 

     Because of the Wow CDs, I am now a fan of Christian artists I had never heard of before.  The one exception was Amy Grant, who had had a few crossover hits recently.  My brother Scott and his kids had told me about Carmen, suggesting that I would probably really like his music, and I had also heard about dc Talk from my nephew Jason.  Yet I did not become an instant fan of these artists right away, even after buying the first few Wow Collections.  I usually found Carmen a bit too hip-hop half the time, and a bit too old-fashioned the other half of the time, but he eventually grew on me somewhat, particularly his songs featured on Wow.  I found Amy Grant to be mediocre pop at best before the Wows came along, but then I started to enjoy her more.  I thought Michael W. Smith sounded like “Weird Al” Yankovic much of the time, for both have the same vocal qualities (really!).  This shouldn’t be considered too much of a criticism on Smith’s part, however, because I actually think Yankovic is quite talented musically and vocally, and is often overlooked.  I took a chance ordering some tapes by Steven Curtis Chapman and Amy Grant’s husband, Gary Chapman (no relation to Steven Curtis), who MC’d the national country music countdown weekly on the radio and who had just won the Dove award for Male Vocalist of the Year.  I liked them both fine. 

     But over the years, as these artists have released songs here and then, some good, some not so good, I’ve slowly become fans of all of them.  Each has at the very least a few songs that I like a lot:

• Michael W. Smith for “Cry for Love,” “I’ll Lead You Home,” “Friends,” “Missing Person,” and “Love Me Good.”
• Amy Grant for the beautiful song “Children of the World,” and also “Carry You,” “Somewhere Down the Road,” and “Takes a Little Time.”
• Steven Curtis Chapman for “Lord of the Dance,” “Let Us Pray,” “I Will Not Go Quietly,” “The Walk,” and “Dive,” and also “Heaven in the Real World,” or “Speechless".
• Carmen for “R.I.O.T.,” “Step of Faith,” “Mission 3:16,” and a few other hits from his CDs, such as “There is a God,” and some of the CD I Surrender All where he sounds like Elvis, and that Mom just loves because he sounds like Elvis.
• Gary Chapman for a consistent folkish sound, such as on “Man After Your Own Heart” and “One of Two.”
• DC Talk for quite a few Wow hits.  I first heard them with “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” on Wow 1996, and decided to buy their album Jesus Freak based on that song and Jason’s recommendation, and although I was quite disappointed by that album, I have since liked some of the great numbers they’ve had on the other Wows, such as “Between You and Me,” “Colored People,” “Into Jesus,” and most recently, “Consume Me.”

     And over the years, I’ve also become a fan of other artists who have appeared on Wow or whose videos I’ve seen on the Christian TV channels.  Check out this extensive list of artists I like who I didn’t know of five years ago, and who I wouldn’t know now if it weren’t for Wow:  Twila Paris, Susan Ashton, Point of Grace, Margaret Becker, 4Him, Clay Crosse, Bryan Duncan, Kathy Troccoli, Cindy Morgan, Anointed, Audio Adrenaline, Sierra, Jars of Clay, Caedmon’s Call, Out of the Grey, Jaci Velasquez, Avalon, Crystal Lewis, Chris Rice, Fernando Ortega, The Waiting, Brother’s Keeper, and occasionally (so far) Wes King, Phil Keaggy, Phillips Craig & Dean, Wayne Watson, Ray Boltz, Rebecca St. James, Third Day, Aaron Jeoffrey, Out of Eden, Jennifer Knapp, Delirious?, The W’s, Smalltown Poets, Big Tent Revival, the Supertones, Nicole Nordeman, Natalie Grant, Michelle Tumes, Maire Brennan, and Al Denton.  That’s quite an impressive list of some of the best Christian artists of the last five years, and these Wows have really opened up a whole new door for me in the field of Christian music, a door I should have opened a long time ago.

     Here’s my list of my fifty favorite songs from the first four Wow CDs:

“Children of the World” by Amy Grant
“Stand” by Susan Ashton
“The Great Divide” by Point of Grace
“Deep Calling Deep” by Margaret Becker
“Build My World Around You” by Sandy Patty
“Go Light Your World” by Kathy Troccoli
“Step of Faith” by Carmen
“Taking My Time” by Ashton, Becker, and Dente
“Lord of the Dance” by Steven Curtis Chapman
“Between You and Me” by DC Talk
“Keep the Candle Burning” by Point of Grace
“Under the Influence” by Anointed
“Listen” by Cindy Morgan
“No Doubt” by Petra
“Walk on Water” by Audio Adrenaline
“True Devotion” by Margaret Becker
“Time to Believe” by Clay Crosse
“I Know You Know” by Sierra
“One Drop of Blood” by Ray Boltz
“Missing Person” by Michael W. Smith
“Mission 3:16” by Carmen
“We Can Make a Difference” by Jaci Velasquez
“Saving the World” by Clay Cross
“We Need Jesus” by Petra
“Let Us Pray” by Steven Curtis Chapman
“Circle of Friends” by Point of Grace

“The Measure of a Man” by 4Him
“Give It Up” by Avalon
“I Call Him Love” by Kathy Troccoli
“Adore You” by Anointed
“You Move Me” by Susan Ashton
“Love Me Good” by Michael W. Smith
“Undo Me” by Jennifer Knapp
“Deeper” by Delirious?
“The Devil is Bad” by The W’s
“R.I.O.T.” by Carmen
“Chevette” by Audio Adrenaline
“To Know You” by Nicole Nordeman
“Steady On” by Point of Grace
“God So Loved” by Jaci Velasquez
“Testify to Love” by Avalon
“I Will Not Go Quietly” by Steven Curtis Chapman
“Can’t Get Past the Evidence” by 4Him
“Lord I Believe in You” by Crystal Lewis
“The Power of a Moment” by Chris Rice
“He Will Make a Way” by Kathy Troccoli
“Strollin’ on the Water” by Bryan Duncan
“There is a God” by Natalie Grant
“Man After Your Own Heart” by Gary Chapman

& “Lord of the Eternity” by Fernando Ortega

 

And believe it or not, this list still feels incomplete.  That’s how much I love my Wows.  And the thing is, I didn’t know the Christian artists and music before, because it just wasn’t being played on the radio like it is now.  But after starting this collection, now I know them, and what’s more, I like them!  This is the collection I wouldn’t want to be without; you know, that “stranded on a desert island” sort of question.  This is the one set of music I’d want to have with me on a desert island.

Romeo and Juliet: Zeffirelli vs. Luhrmann

So Valentine's Day has come and gone, and for the holidays, I usually watch movies that have to do with the holiday, watching horror movies in October and Christmas movies in December and such.  That means February is the month for romances, and one of the all-time greatest romances, dating back to before the movies were even invented, is William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  So I watched the acclaimed 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version again, the one starring a very young Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, and then I watched, again, the modern Baz Luhrmann edition starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.  It's not Leo's and Claire's fault:  They were fine.  But there simply is no comparison!

Check out each of the music videos to get a taste for the tone of each:

Romeo & Juliet directed by Franco Zeffirelli

The website Time Out: New York, when listing the 25 best Shakespeare-to-screen adaptations (linked here), listed this Franco Zeffirelli version at number 10, stating that you probably saw this first in high school thanks to a lazy lit teacher.  I don’t think these reviewers know what they’re talking about!  Seeing that film in high school was the first time Shakespeare made any sense, and I loved how the writing – quite foreign to the ear of a high schooler raised on H.R. Puffenstuff and Speed Buggy cartoons – finally came alive and made sense.  Even if I couldn’t understand the language, I could follow the story because the actors imbued these strange words with the passion they deserved.  Now when I watch it, I can understand it all the more, and appreciate the art that went into it – both the Shakespeare play, and the Zeffirelli movie. 

     There’s a scene in this movie, when Romeo has killed Tybalt and lies crying “with his own tears made drunk” as Friar Laurence describes him, and when he mourns over all that has befallen him, the Friar urges him to see his fortune rather than his misery.  It could have been Romeo that died instead of Tybalt, and the Prince could have ordered Romeo found and executed instead of giving him a way out with exile, and the poetic way these things are said by the Friar, emphasizing the word “there” over and over, showing Romeo his blessings:

What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive,
For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead;
There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee,
But thou slew'st Tybalt; there are thou happy too:
The law that threaten'd death becomes thy friend
And turns it to exile; there art thou happy:
A pack of blessings lights upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love:
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

In another scene, Romeo spends the night with Juliet, and instead of talking plainly about the fact he has to leave at the break of day, lest Juliet's family finds him there, they instead talk about the singing of nightingales and larks ringing in the arrival of each, and when Juliet denies that it is finally day, and begs Romeo to stay, he, knowing it is day, decides he will do as Juliet wishes, and stay even if it means his death!

I have more care to stay than will to go:
Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.
How is't, my soul? let's talk; it is not day.

But when Juliet distinctly hears a lark, however, she realizes it is day, and that Romeo must flee, and says:

It is the lark that sings so out of tune,
Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps.
Some say the lark makes sweet division;
This doth not so, for she divideth us

It means so much more now that I can comprehend the meaning of their poetic words, and therefore it means all the more!  I can certainly see why Shakespeare is loved among English teachers, and I wish I had the time and inclination to get into him more than I have.  Alas, I haven’t read much; Hamlet, The Tempest, MacBeth, and a few others, and I’m a bit familiar with King Lear, Othello, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Henry V, and a few of his sonnets.  I’d like to know and understand him more.  For a writer, it certainly couldn’t hurt!

     This movie has stayed with me over the years, and I always had strong feelings about the death scenes at the end – they are quite powerful – and it makes this play actually surpass Hamlet for me as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.  Romeo believes Juliet dead, and drinks that poison, and then later, she sees him lying there and wishing for a drop of poison to help her afterward, then hearing noises and wishing to be brief, grabs his dagger, saying “Oh, happy dagger, this is thy sheath.  Rest there and let me die!”  I didn’t understand until much later that she was referring to herself as the sheath.  It stirred emotions in me I didn’t even know I had.  This is intelligent, thought provoking, and very emotional.  It makes me want to understand all of it so much more than I do!

Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann

I think Shakespeare himself would be appalled!  It’s almost like director Baz Luhrmanm said to himself, “I wonder how I can screw this up?”  It’s basically the same play, and the same words from Shakespeare (some of them anyway), and DiCaprio and Danes aren’t really all that bad in it.  It’s everything else that completely sucks!  Luhrmann pulled the same trick with Moulin Rouge, and in that case, it eventually worked… somehow.  But this movie was nearly a bastardization of Shakespeare’s play, and because it takes place in some freakish netherworld full of glitz and glam, with enough cross-dressers and heavily made up extras to populate ten John Waters movies, and the fast-paced, in-your-face editing style of the most garish music videos, to say it caters to a niche audience is to miss the point.  The two styles clash like most of the visuals in this movie.  The MTV crowd who might like the music and the gaudy fashions aren’t the type to like Shakespeare, and the refined Shakespeare crowd should find the abrasive and tasteless rendering deplorable, to say nothing of the fact that the screenwriters attempted to rewrite parts of the play, such as when Juliet wakes just in time to see Romeo down the poison, and he is still alive and speaking his final words when Juliet kills herself, this time with a gun to the temple! 

            What I liked about this movie was the Shakespeare play, which is good enough to stand on its own.  What I hated was everything else!

Allergies: Fatigue and Misery are Two of the Better Symptoms!

So...

The plan was, and has been all along, to find stuff in my old journals to post in my blog midweek, and to post something more recent on the weekends.  Since I've been posting about the movies from last year I liked the most, or was the most disappointed by, that means I've been writing some more recent stuff in my journal from January that I haven't posted yet, like this entry from January 17th where I talk a little bit about what ails me (and since then, I've gotten even worse, just getting over a horrible cold compounded by severe allergies that turned into an raging ear infection):

From http://www.m.webmd.com/allergies, this
is not my eye: Sometimes, mine look worse!

There are times I don’t feel well.  I don’t know if I’m tired, or depressed, or just suffering from allergies, or maybe all three, but today is one of those days.  I feel like crying.  My eyes are puffy, I can’t get my hair right, the shirt I was going to wear is too small, I broke the button off my slacks trying to button it over this gut, the new shirt I put on I don’t particularly like, and I had to iron it because the collar looked horrible.  The ironing board is full of clothes so I had to try to iron around them or move them.  I had to kill a spider right by the computer just now.  I have a bad headache and my eyes are still puffy and watery and I have to go to work in less than an hour.  My eyes look terrible.  I look terrible!  I feel terrible.  I just got back from Bellco because my CD is maturing.  The woman I talked to now wants me to speak with a specialist about consolidating all my accounts, but I’m not sure if that’s what I want to do, or if I want to do it through Bellco.  Financial advisors that are affiliated with one bank have an agenda for that bank, don’t they?

     I’ve just felt unreal today.  I will try to cheer up before I head out the door again, but this morning all seems like a dream.  Mom went bowling and then up the hill with Rose, and I got up and watched the first episode of season 3 of SYFY’s Being Human before having my troubles described above.  (I still like the show, but it seems to be getting too dark, with all that really creepy stuff going on - Aiden in a coffin, then used as a blood bank, and all those other diseased vampires, and that gross witch, and Josh and Nora having to dig up two old corpses to bring Sally back from limbo).

     I’m starting to feel a little hungry, and I’ve got to do my exercises before I go and check the mail, so I better get crackin’!  But I still have this horrible headache!

     And after retrieving the mail and eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I can now pretty much determine that most of it is from these dreadful sinuses and allergies.  Thank God I’m seeing an allergist on Monday!

Why I'm Not All That Fond of Gambling

Mom got to go to Vegas again!  I’d like to go sometime!  I’m no gambler, but I love sight-seeing, and there are plenty of sights of see in Vegas.  Mom spends most of her time either playing the slots or walking from place to place to play the slots.  Meals for her are probably just a diversion, or “pit-stops” to gain sustenance to play more slots, and you can even play Keno while you eat!

     Personally, I don’t like gambling.  At the risk of sounding like Spock, I like things that are more logical and sure, and more entertaining.  Gambling is rather unsure and adversarial.  I’d much rather spend my time with loved ones watching the pirate battle at Treasure Island or going to the Star Trek Experience, or even watching those two swishy, Swedish guys with the big cats than being stuck trying to outguess the mechanical slots or risk my money at the blackjack table alongside serious gamblers who don’t like inexperienced newcomers.  Although the games themselves can be entertaining, once you add the other joy-sucking players, and add the element of gambling, staking your hard earned money on chance, I start to dislike it.  For one thing, there are just too many variables.  How much should I bet?  How long should I stay at this game or this slot if I’m winning?  How long should I stay if I’m losing?  Should I increase or decrease my bets, and if so, why, and by how much?  Should I try a new slot or game, or have I stayed at this one long enough to determine that I’m not going to win?  What if I make the wrong choice?  What is the right choice?  It’s just too unscientific and irresolute of a thing!

     The frustrating part, for me, is that there are no logical answers to these questions that will allow me to win – there’s no assurities, and that’s the very nature of gambling.  You could play the slots in exactly the same way on two separate days, and have completely different outcomes.  I just don’t like that element of pure chance… and with my money on the line… and I don’t like the gambling games or the whole experience enough just by themselves to write off losing a bunch of money by saying that I at least enjoyed the playing of the games, and had fun even though I lost.  There are so many other things I’d rather do with my time and my money than to spend days or nights playing cards or the slots.

- From my journal, March 2000

10 More Movies I Didn't Like: 2012, Part 2

Once more, these are movies I saw last year and picked as some of the worst.  Like most people, I'm not a film critic, and I don't get to see all the films I want to see in the year it was released, which basically means these lists are full of films from just about anytime, including a few new ones and even some old black and white movies that I wouldn't say were classics.  Other than Jingle All the Way, I had never seen any of these films before, even though Mom insists I saw The Snake Pit with her before.  If I did, it didn't leave an impression.  Once again, the titles link to trailers and clips.  If you want to see what other films I saw in 2012 that I really liked or didn't like, see my blog posts linked here, here, and here.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

These Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies are kind of dark and spastic.  I like Robert Downey Jr.  I also like Jude Law.  But I didn’t much care for the first Sherlock Holmes movie they were in because I didn’t think they were right for the parts of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.  I’ve never actually read the detective stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so I don't really know, but if the literary characters are at all like the previous incarnations I’ve seen of them on film, then these new versions by Downey Jr. and Law miss the mark.  I’m also not much of a fan of director Guy Ritchie' slick action sequences and wild camera movements.  These don’t seem to fit the tone of what I have seen before either.  I could be wrong since I've never read the original novels, but it seems to me that these filmmakers have taken Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters, mysteries, and time period, and gussied them up for the multi-plex crowd.

Gonehttp://youtu.be/hWPM0uS1SO8

This is an ultimately forgettable thriller, not really different, and not as good, as just about any episode of CSI or Law & Order.  The main character played by Amanda Seyfried was a bit of an idiot!  Thinking a psycho killer has abducted her sister, she ducks the cops ant then plays right into his hands!  If you want to see a similar film that does this kind of thing right, check out The Brave One starring Jodie Foster.

Presenting Lily Mars

This film’s title isn’t among those that are usually brought up as the best from Hollywood’s Golden Age or as a classic example of an old MGM musical.  Garland and Heflin were just fine in it, yet it’s such an old bit of black and white musical fluff, I basically forgot most of it in less than a month!

Trekkies

I love Star Trek, and so do the people in this documentary, so I should share in the revelry here, right?  Wrong!  I may step on some toes when I say this, but it’s really no secret that many (though certainly not most or all) of Star Trek’s biggest fans aren’t dealing with a full deck, and they bring nothing but embarrassment to the fan base.  I’m not saying I’m really all that much better, but some of us don’t obsess to the point of wearing a Starfleet uniform to jury duty or having your ears surgically altered to look like a Vulcan.  I love getting lost in the fantasy of it all as well, but we have to draw a line somewhere, don’t we?  They just don’t know where to draw it, so before long, like liberals gone wild, everything is acceptable, whether it’s trying to turn your apartment into a replica of the Enterprise bridge or scooting around town in a facsimile of Capt. Pike’s futuristic wheelchair from the episode “The Menagerie” while you collect trivial props and toys.  The stars all try to make some sense of these ultra-Trek geeks, about what it is that draws them to Star Trek, and the film takes a weird fascination in all of it, but I’m much more satisfied sticking with my somewhat more restrained and cerebral appreciation of all things Trek.  Still, that dentist’s office was actually kind of cool!

The Snake Pit

Olivia de Havilland plays a woman in an insane asylum, and unlike other great films about such places, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Frances, and Changeling, in this case, she really IS nuts!  Mark Stevens as her long suffering husband is merely perfunctory, but it is Leo Genn as the intelligent and caring psychologist who leaves a bit more of a lasting impression.  De Havilland gave a great performance as well, but the film doesn’t have quite the dramatic punch as the one’s I listed above concerning asylums, and as such movies go, I yet preferred such modern films as Twelve Monkeys, Awakenings, Shutter Island, and even The Boy Who Could Fly, which touched on it briefly, tenderly, and harrowingly with the character of Eric.

The Woman in Black

I had high hopes for this.  The previews made it look like a pretty chilling ghost story starring Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame, taking on his first post-Harry adult role, though wisely in another genre piece.  I was still expecting more.  A lot more!  I may be somewhat desensitized to horror, like most people, but I believe the problem with the movie can be summed up in the rather cold and unemotional ending, when [SPOILER ALERT] the ghost appears yet again (whenever she appears, people die) and Radcliffe’s character Arthur Kipps dashes to save his young son from a train.  He doesn’t make it, and no they don’t show it.  What they do show is he and his son meeting his dead wife and following her into the great beyond.  You’d think something like that should be more emotional.  You would think that, but you’d be wrong.  They got the gothic mood just about right, but it still basically could have been more – scarier, and more definitely more emotional – but it simply wasn’t.

Cabin in the Woods

I can hear the fanboys now!  As if what I said about hardcore Star Trek fans wasn't enough!  I was so, so hoping that this movie was as good as everybody was saying it was.  In a way, it was better – not better than I was hoping, but better than the usual mundane sort of monster movie that would inspire a title like Cabin in the Woods.  They tried so very hard to make it better.  However, when the big secret is revealed [SPOILER ALERT], that a group of scientists in an underground cavern are using these young people as personality prototypes (jock, scholar, fool, bimbo, virgin) to sacrifice to and appease some ancient demons so that their gateway to earth isn’t opened, the main monster is yet another derivative of the zombie, with an undead backwoods family stalking the victims.  I understand this is a comment on the types of movies that are popular these days (everything in here is a comment on modern horror films, hence, as with Scream, its appeal), but the main villains throughout are still derivative zombies.  The end has all hell break loose, literally, as the “fool” stoner and the virgin manage to make it into the underground, where they manage to unleash ALL the monsters to attack the scientists – giant spiders and snakes, evil clowns, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, zombies – it left me with a feeling of “If only the entire movie were more like this.”  The scene with the merman at the end, where Bradley Whitford’s character, who has been complaining all along that they “never use the merman,” is attacked by this same creature sums up what is both great and not so great about this movie.  It’s a clever come-uppance, but the actual creature and death scene isn’t all that scary or funny.  Cabin in the Woods has so much going for it, trying to bend that fourth wall and make comments about today’s horror movie scene, but doing this sort of thing doesn’t automatically make it good.  Still, I suspect that maybe it’s one of those movies I will have to watch more than once to fully comprehend and appreciate.  Who knows:  One day, I might even like it enough to buy it.  Hey, it happened with The Matrix and Moulin Rouge!

A Christmas Wish
Christmas with a Capital 'C'

Every Christmas, we watch what have become our Christmastime staples:  National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, A Christmas Story, Elf, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Polar Express, possibly one or two of the old black & white classics, and perhaps a version of A Christmas Carol.  Occasionally, for variety, a few other films will enter into the mix, and along with all of these, there are always a ton of made-for-TV Christmas movies every year for the Hallmark Channel, or ABC Family, or released on video and sold at the Family Christian Bookstore.  And every year, it is these quite amusing and harmless little piffles that wind up on my stinkers list, for being nothing more than quite forgettable yet amusing and harmless little piffles.  Occasionally, one of these manages to break through and make more of an impression, such as The Christmas Cottage that I saw last year, and loved, despite realizing it is of this made-for-TV variety.  A Christmas Wish is an “After School Special” type about a single stepmom, played by 80’s B-movie queen Kristy Swanson, who moves her three adorable young children to a small town to start over, and Christmas with a Capital C stars Ted McGinley, the “kiss of death” for television series he became a part of before they folded, and Daniel Baldwin, the husky older bro among all the Baldwin boys, more famous for his off-screen drug habits and his famous siblings than for anything he did in front of a movie camera.  The story gets uncomfortably preachy at times, sometimes embarrassingly so, just as the first movie gets quite unbelievably maudlin and saccharine for its own good.  They actually weren’t all THAT bad, but here they sit on this list, and I doubt if anyone would even notice, or care.  That, more than anything else, is probably why they’re here.  To put it another way, I sincerely doubt they will wind up on anyone’s all-time favorite Christmas movies list, and if they perchance do, then I would ask, “Why these?  Why not any of the other dozens of made-for-TV Christmas movies that Hallmark plays every year?”

Jingle All the Way

Can you say "garish"!  This is NOT a Christmas classic, nor should it be!  Jingle All the Way is an obnoxious Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy that pits him against Sinbad as a crazed mailman as they each try to get a hold of a latest toy craze for their kids, a Turboman doll.  This film displays the worst, commercial side of Christmas throughout, and I’m not just talking about the main character’s crazed fighting for that doll, but also the lengths a movie studio will go to to sell their latest Christmas extravaganza!  After breaking into a neighbor’s house to steal his doll, and getting caught (and “hilariously” chased by an angry reindeer!), he somehow winds up in a Turboman suit for a big parade and with Sinbad dressing as Turboman’s nemesis.  The two begin to have a superhero scuffle that includes flying and shooting lazars and all the things you might expect from a cinematic superhero, but not a guy merely dressed like one!  I’m all for suspension of disbelief (I am a Star Trek fan, after all), but come on!  Arnold Schwarzenegger has made some great movies over the years, but almost none of them have been comedies.