they might be shot

I'm biting my nails this afternoon, very unsettled, makes me wonder if my nerves are shot.  Little things are bothering me.  Take this laptop, for instance.  It is so slow and weird lately that at this moment I'm tempted to throw the stupid thing out the window.

The day started great, you know how I love Sunday mornings anyway.  The problem with Sunday mornings is that there are too many choices of what to do, and sometimes too many choices makes me end up doing none of them, which makes me disappointed with myself.  Today, though, wasn't like that.  I started with a workout at the gym, then coffee at the Starbucks across the street from the gym, then I went to church (Plymouth Congregational, you remember).  I ran into Lee after the service, Lee getting a mention here because he is a good friend and also a regular reader of this blog (Hi, Lee!).

This afternoon, though, is, as I say, unsettled.  Maybe too much coffee, maybe a troubling email, maybe thinking about the work I could be doing if I went to the office.  Expecting company soon for Oscar-watching.  Might need to break out the vodka soon after that.

diverted to Iran

I wasn't able to escape to Europe yesterday, but I did manage to escape to a movie theater.

As you know, I'd already seen all the Best Picture Oscar nominees, so I picked a film that so many critics had picked for their 2011 Top Ten and yet wasn't nominated.  It should have been.  It is way better than the nominees.

A Separation is an Iranian film in Persian language with English subtitles.  It is nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and also for Best Original Screenplay.  It could easily win both awards.

The story centers around two families in present-day Iran.  It sort of lightly touches on some current political and religious aspects of Iranian life, but mostly it's an engrossing story about universal family and relationship issues.  At a time when so many political leaders are calling for bombing the heck out of Iran, sort of an Iraq-revisited -- again the "weapons of mass destruction" excuse -- and generally making all Iranian people into something evil, it's good to see the other Iran produce the most human film of the year.

escaping from stupid quotes, for one thing

Today as I work, I'm listening on my computer to a Sirius radio channel called "Escape"... and maybe it's because thoughts of Escape sounds particularly good today.

Where would I escape to if I could?  How about this?  -- catching tonight's non-stop flight from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Amsterdam?  After lingering in Amsterdam (my favorite city) for a few days, maybe some meandering through Europe with just a backpack, hopping trains to wherever I felt like going?  Stopping to see my friend Elke in Germany, skipping down to Italy, then back up through Spain and France, doing some writing in Paris?

It's nice to know Europe is there, if I could just somehow find my way back there.

Oh! -- and I just ran across this quote, made somewhere, sometime, by Mitt Romney:  "I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become."

Such talk, in its abject ignorance, reflects the worst of American has become.

competing with regis

A quote from a Golden Girls episode:
ROSE (Betty White):  I'm the most boring person on earth!
SOPHIA (Estelle Getty):  Did something happen to Regis Philbin??
*****
Today at the office we ordered a couple of pizzas for lunch.  That led to a discussion of whether my wanting one of them to be a plain cheese pizza (or, in my generous spirit of compromise, maybe with just some sausage or pepperoni) instead of both of them having tons of olives, green peppers, onions, and all that other crap made me a boring person.  It didn't help my case when I admitted that I also prefer plain potato chips to any of other snack and that my favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla.

But me boring?  HA! The true connoisseurs of pizza, chips and ice cream are right here in my corner.

Howard ranks the Oscar nominees

The Academy Awards are Sunday night, and I continued my tradition of seeing all the Best Picture nominees before the show, which means cramming a lot of movies into February.  Thanks goodness there were no insufferable nominees (think: Saving Private Ryan) this year.  Here, in my cinematically uneducated style, is how I would rank this year's choices, from "Most deserving to win the Best Picture Oscar" to "Lesser deserving."

1.  Hugo.  Okay, call me sappy, but I think this is a terrific movie, 3D or not.  Martin Scorcese shows that he is a superior director no matter what kind of movie he makes.
2.  The Artist.  I admit that I've gone back and forth on this, and maybe tomorrow I would have picked The Artist as #1.  It's the most innovative of the nine nomineees, and it showed that a silent, black-and-white film can be very entertaining in the 21st Century.  The dog steals the movie.
3.  Midnight in Paris.  If you don't know who Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the other writers and artists in 1920s Paris were, you might be lost, but I hope that my blog readers do know who they were.  Woody Allen should get a Best Screenplay award.
4.  The Help.  Good book, good movie, my main complaint being that some of the characterizations, especially those of the white bigots, are just too cardboard, too stereotypical.  Octavia Spencer will win Best Supporting Actress.
5.  The Descendents.  This is a fine, solid movie, and with Hawaii and George Clooney, how can you go wrong?  Overall, though, I don't think it's a remarkable enough film to be a Best Picture.
6.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  I liked this film way more than I thought I would.  I think it would have been better with an actor other than Tom Hanks as the dad who dies on 9/11 -- he just never stopped being Tom Hanks.
7.  Moneyball.  Baseball, the Oakland A's with a tiny payroll, Brad Pitt.  It's a fun David-vs.-Goliath flick.
8.  War Horse.  Spielberg, please stop using that uplifting, manipulating John Williams music in your films!  It's so distracting and irritating!  Very real-feeling World-War-1-in-the-trenches scenes.  Loved the horse.
9.  The Tree of Life.  It's one of those movies where you get to the end and say to yourself, "What the heck was that about??"  It maybe deserves a Best Cinematography award, though.

That's it from here.  Please watch the show Sunday night so that I have somebody to chat with next Monday.  It's okay to skip the red-carpet pre-show though, which gets more annoying by the year.

whether to spend money on a future madonna

When he was cutting my hair today, Brian asked me if I'm going to the Madonna concert.  I guess he and his partner and planning to go.

'Told him my sister and my niece have been sort of trying to talk me into going with them and I'm on the fence.  I like Madonna okay, who wouldn't?  A lot of her '80s music still sounds good and so does her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor.  You know this concert will sell out, it will be a happening event.

But I'm such a spontaneous person, and here's the deal:  Tickets go on sale this month -- very soon, I assume -- and the concert is not until November!  It kinda gives me the shakes to plan that far ahead.  Help me out with this.

and the oscar goes to -- #3

The Oscars will be on next Sunday (finally, I know you are thinking), so this will be my last prior-year Oscar program clip for awhile. This is 1965, the awards for the years 1964: Bob Hope is the host, Sidney Poitier is the presenter, and Best Actress Julie Andrews' speech is very Julie Andrews.

Also, today is Presidents' Day, and I thought about saying something about that but I knew I couldn't top last year's Presidents' Day post, so here it is, if you want to see it again: http://hrdfax.blogspot.com/2011/02/from-washington-to-obama-in-less-than-4.html

extremely, incredibly

I try to avoid going to a movie in an outer-ring suburb, but we waited too long and that's the only place we could find Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close still playing, so we put up with young airheads as they moseyed through the cineplex and as they noisily moved from movie to movie obviously doing anything to get a little attention.  Remind me next time to get to a movie before it gets lost out there in oblivion.

But Ruthie and I were able to talk Tom and Joan into going with us, so we had a good time.  The movie, based on the Jonathan Safran Foer novel that I read several years ago and mostly forgot about, was better than I was expecting, the main weakness, in my uneducated mind, being that Tom Hanks was playing the part of the father who died on 9/11.  I don't mind Tom Hanks generally, but in this film he just never stopped being Tom Hanks, and that was a distraction from the story.  The character should have been played by an unknown actor.

And now I've seen all nine of the Best Picture Oscar nominees, my goal.  In a couple days, I'll rank them for you, "most deserving" of the Oscar to "least deserving".  I know you're waiting with bated breath.

the anti-contraceptive people

The Presidential campaign is getting more stupid by the day.  As the Republican candidates try to out-conservative each other, they have become obsessed about the "evils" of birth control and family planning.  To them, the part of the Obama health care law that more or less mandates health care plans to cover birth control options shows that he is anti-religion, anti-Catholic, certainly anti-family.

Never mind that, even among Catholics, polls show that 98% of sexually active Catholic women in the U.S. have used birth control methods banned by the Catholic Church -- rules made by theoretically celibate men, of course.  And, if they are using the Genesis legend as their reason for such oppressive beliefs -- God telling Adam and Eve to "be fruitful and multiply" -- consider that there were only two people then, now there are more than 7 billion.  Maybe they were a little too fruitful.

Rick Santorum, somehow a serious candidate for President, has said that sexual intercourse should only be for the intent of procreation.  Newt Gingrich says that Obama has declared war on the Catholic Church (I wonder if any of Gingrich's mistresses ever used birth control!).  What an embarrassment for this country that such talk is not laughed off the national stage.  I  miss the days when phrases like "population explosion" and "zero population growth" were part of a more intelligent dialogue.

a place where you can't blame the liquor

Hey there.  Hard to believe, but I took a day off, maybe to re-group (this was supposed to be my cruise week, you know), and am here at Mystic Lake Casino.  I used one of my free hotel nights, and it's only a half hour or so from home and a decent short getaway.  Work-wise, I'll make up for it over the weekend.

Mystic Lake has become quite a sprawling complex, and I like it even though it has a lot of slot machines that are too complicated for me to understand, so I mostly avoid them, which is a probably a good thing.  The hotel rooms are nice.  What is weird about Mystic Lake is that it is a totally alcohol-free facility -- booze isn't even allowed in the hotel rooms.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't alcohol-free gambling not what nature intended gambling to be?

madness continues

My month of seeing the Oscar nominees for Best Picture before the February 26th Academy Awards is going by quickly.  Out of the nine nominated films, I have just one more to see -- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close -- and I'm just waiting for my niece Ruthie, who is currently sick as a dog, to be able to leave her sick bed long enough to go to the movies with me.  If she isn't well by this weekend, she might have to wait for this movie to come out on DVD!  Not sure that I want her hacking her brains out in the seat next to me anyway, now that I think about it.. j/k, Ruthie!  :-)

I saw a good little film the other evening -- Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer -- about a man who "comes out of the closet" at age 75.  Christopher Plummer will certainly get my "vote" for Best Supporting Actor as the fun-loving late bloomer.

facebook as a weapon

There are many good things about having Facebook -- hooking up with people you haven't seen in forty years, for instance -- and there are just as many bad things.  You've read about the cyber-bullying and all that extreme abuse.  But there is also the personal contact that Facebook replaces, the way people can use it to hurt each other, and the way bad news is often transmitted these days.  People find reasons to "de-friend" each other or leave Facebook, offending in ways that didn't use to be possible.  I sometimes wonder if Facebook has peaked.  As soon as somebody gets pissed enough, they drop out, and, the way things are going, we will get all get pissed enough eventually.

eli's coming

Jerry picked me up for lunch today, and we decided to try the new Eli's restaurant (http://elisfoodandcocktails.com/) across the river.  For the past two or three years, the original Eli's, located just two blocks from the condo, has been our go-to place to eat when we can't think of anywhere else to go, and it seems to be the most popular small casual-eating place in the neighborhood.

I'm sure it was a big decision for them to open a second location, but sometimes ya gotta take a chance.  The new place has a cool feel (not as cool as the original, though), same good menu and food... a fine place to hang out and chat about life...

and the oscar goes to -- #2

It's April 1968, the Oscars for 1967 films. The show took place on April 10, postponed at the last minute from April 8 because of the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4. I was very into movies that year and it was just a couple weeks before I, the unwilling draftee, was inducted into the Army to be transformed into a killing machine.

In the Best Actor category, I was hoping for Dustin Hoffman to win for The Graduate, my second choice being Warren Beatty for Bonnie and Clyde. Rod Steiger was great in In the Heat of the Night, so it shouldn't have been surprising for me that he won, but I was anyway.

Audrey Hepburn is the presenter, cool as always.

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