2021, Family, home, Media, Movies, TV, Uncategorized

Movie Wars

45 Comments

You all know I adore my mom.  And for the most part, we do quite well when we spend time together but the 9 days I spent in St. Louis did stretch our patience a few times. The place where we have the most friction is the television.  I’m happy to leave the tv off most of the time but Nonny has habits that she doesn’t want to relinquish.  This starts in the morning as she likes to watch the news.  I prefer my news in short, concentrated bursts and would really just like to read my news online.  Both the tragedy of the falling condo and the Bill Cosby reversal were in the news while I was there and both stories got re-hashed and re-hashed.  I was working in the morning so pretty much tried to tune it out but it was difficult.

The evenings caused more tension.  Nonny likes the Hallmark movies, especially the romances and the holiday films.  And I’m sure I’m not giving any of you news when I say that I detest the Hallmark Christmas movies (which are playing 24/7 beginning two weeks ago and through July).  This is not a secret to Nonny but despite my saying so more than once, she filed this fact away.  After a couple of nights we decided to switch back and forth.  First I would pick a movie, then she would pick a movie.  You’d think we’d both be adult enough for this solution, wouldn’t you?

She didn’t like Ant-Man and the Wasp at all.  I thought she might because the Ant-Man movies are much lighter than some of the other Marvel universe movies.  I was wrong.  She had trouble following the storyline and got impatient pretty quickly.  Then she chose one of her Christmas movies, although I know she’d already seen it because she recounted the plot to me in the first 10 minutes.  I pretty much ignored the movie, but she kept muting the tv during the commercials to “talk about it”.  I was more testy than I should have been.

I chose the old Woman in White with Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker and Gig Young.  How could this go wrong?  Well, the thought the Sydney Greenstreet character was too creepy and complained that she just didn’t like movies where the bad guys held so much sway over the good guys.  She got quite crabby.  But not as crabby as I got when she chose another Christmas movie.  I will admit that I pouted and decided it was a good time to do laundry; that took me out of the condo (laundry machines are across the hall) several times.  Unfortunately she was convinced that I needed to hear the song at the end of the movie and called me to come back to the living room.  Twice. 

Luckily I found How to Marry a Millionaire with Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable – this turned out to finally be something we could agree on.  It was funny (with great costumes) and since Nonny had seen it before, she already knew the plot line.  It was nice to have something we both enjoyed as our last movie of my trip.  I’m not sure what would have happened if I had stayed in St. Louis longer.  Is there such a thing as bad-movie-induced-matricide?

What’s the worst movie or tv show you’ve been subjected to lately?

45 thoughts on “Movie Wars”

  1. Oh my, vs, I think I understand why you were very glad to be back home. It’s bad enough to be subjected to someone else’s TV habits if they differ from your own, but having no place to escape to would be tough. I hope Nonny doesn’t also have hearing issues so that you had to endure the volume at a level uncomfortable to your ears?

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      1. Sherrilee, if you get a good lawyer, you should get your sentence considerably reduced.
        Without trying to be ingratiating, in all the pictures I’ve seen of you, you look really sweet. You’ve been sweet to me, you even said I could keep wearing that hat Jane wants me to chuck away. I believe you actually are sweet. So it’s hilarious to hear about you falling out with your Mom like this. I’m lucky to be in my own house, with things to occupy me while Jane watches her horrible stuff.

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        1. VS Is a voracious reader, has a sharp intellect, and is
          Opinionated. She is a great group leader. I am so fond of her. Sweet? Nope.

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        2. VS Is a voracious reader, has a sharp intellect, and is
          Opinionated. She is a great group leader. I am so fond of her. Sweet? Nope.

          Like

        6. Fenton-I appreciate your kind comments, Even if sweet isn’t an adjective I normally think of for myself

          Like

  2. my wife has become a solo tv pilot while i’ve been doing my delivery stuff and while she has always had her favorites (jaws, alien, jurassic park, she really goes for harry potter. now there are seven or eight of them but there are only seven or eight of them and they play so often that we laugh and make it a running joke that it’s a harry potter weekend said a cockney accent. it was funny a year ago and 2 years ago and three years ago. my wife is now grading papers online during all her waking hours as an adjunct professor for a couple of colleges online while her regular college gig is on summer break. she found a summer camp with pre-k to 1-2 graders that runs m-th 8-12 for june and july but other than that she’s sitting in front of the tv with it playing kind of like background music. well i ve never watched a harry potter start to finish at home that i can remember but it’s starting to get to me that this a/v wallpaper is running in place of real content. now if it were leave it to beaver or andy griffith the barney years i would be happy but we do share a live of old time tv with turner classics as the primary shared channel but now with netflix amazon hbo now and all the wonderful tv to choose from its like what brain numb do you want to inject to keep from dealing with life?

    this is us, suits, and a couple of others keep me trying to get caught up but i get lost in where i am and end up watching the same season over and over and enjoying it until i remember i’ve already seen this part. i suspect my brain is wandering while i’m sitting in my living room.
    i just started up my tuesday movie night with my moms again two weeks ago. into the heights is fantastic. available on tv but much better on the big screen

    off tonight to something my sister who decided to join our tuesday outing picked out. a documentary on something of interest i think

    this is us next time at your moms vs. wonderful soulful and not sappy, should satisfy you both

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  3. Just the other night I found the movie ‘Yellowbeard’ on TV. It’s co-written and starred Graham Chapman (of Monty Python fame) and it featured several members of the wonderful Monty Python crew. Reading up on it from IMDB, several actors called it the worst movie ever written, but they sure had fun doing it.
    I didn’t think it was that bad; I’ve seen worse. This was kinda fun.

    All the reality TV shows; those are the worst.

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I have gone to great lengths to avoid the situation you describe, VS. You have my sympathy. No wonder you are so glad to return home. I also see your caring for Nonny as a true act of love, given all this.

    Having to watch stuff I don’t like is too much for me. Just about anything on Fox drives me crazy. Actually, almost anything on MSNBC is equally intense, I just agree with those viewpoints. I do not like the “in your face” and repetitive style. I am not a prospect for cable news viewing, to be sure.

    Seven years ago (11 months, 2 weeks and 3 days, but who’s counting) I visited my aunt and uncle who are Fox watchers. They always have it on at top volume. My uncle then combined that with a conversation about a sensitive family situation in which my mother tangled me since early childhood. That was the end of that visit and I have not gone back to visit since. The situation itself was the beginning of the ongoing conflict with my mother, so for my uncle to raise the issue was a bonehead move. Fox News in the background was just the stuff of a horror movie for me. My uncle has a habit of doing this with his favorite people, then he does not understand why these people never talk to him again.

    It is dark and rumbling where I am. Hoping for rain!

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  5. I consider visiting with someone to be worth doing right, an act that precludes watching television together. When someone enters my apartment, all electronic devices are muted so I can give that person my full attention.

    But visiting older people presents unique challenges. Many seniors rely on the noise of television or radio shows to fend off loneliness. Old folks are creatures of habit, too, so when a visitor pops into their world it is hard for them to switch to visitor mode and turn off the program.

    My daughter struggled to form a relationship with her mother’s mother in her later years. Grandma Esther almost never turned off the television. Then Molly learned to time her visits to coincide with “Wheel of Fortune,” a quiz show that invites viewer participation. It was the ideal television show for a shared experience, both of them shouting answers at the screen. When the show was over, grandmother and grandchild could bake cookies, for sugar was another interest they shared.

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    1. Just jumping in to clarify. We didn’t have the TV on all the time at Nonny’s condo. This was mostly a morning issue and an evening issue.

      And I will give myself extra points by teaching Nonny how to use the iN Demand function so she could get to more movies.

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  6. I mostly avoid TV other than live sports, a few sitcoms, NCIS (my wife makes me watch it!), and the occasional old movie that I stumble upon near the beginning while channel surfing.

    Much like I considered the advent of MTV to be the beginning of the end of quality popular music, I feel that the advent of “reality” TV shows is the beginning of the end of quality television. Yes, outlets like Netflix produce some decent shows but overall, with 24 hours to fill each day on hundreds of individual stations, by nature the amount of average and lousy shows will increase (it’s a bell curve to me but the skew is driving toward the crap end of the spectrum.).

    Give me a good book any day.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  7. The basic concept of reality TV is that at least some moments of real life are inherently more interesting than stuff people make up. But with almost every reality television show the producers and directors cannot help themselves: they must warp and shape the story so it has more conflict and interest.

    Example: Clarkson’s Farm. In this new series on Netflix, Jeremy Clarkson decides to farm his land, only he doesn’t know **** about farming. The show worked fairly well, but the producers jacked up the scripts by making Clarkson so obtuse and arrogant that he ignored sound advice, making each segment predictable and hokey.

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    1. Reality TV can never be real because you are expected to forget that there happens to be a camera crew and sound engineers present to capture the “reality”. Also, reality isn’t scripted.
      Reality TV is just low budget productions with non-professional actors pretending not to act.

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  8. On my own, I don’t watch much television. I never watch during the day and I can’t abide the talking head news presenters no matter what perspective they represent. I have never watched any televised sports.
    Left to my own devices I have difficulty finding anything worthy of my time.

    Robin likes to have the television on while she works on her projects. Fortunately she has a television in her upstairs studio where she can do that. Her taste runs toward police procedural crime dramas and quasi soap opera family dramas, I think. Sitting downstairs I can hear a lot of crying and screaming and shooting and explosions.

    When we sit together in the evening our viewing choices can be mildly contentious. I relinquish all the television controls to Robin and frankly I am often at a loss when she wants me to choose something. I don’t know what I like but I know pretty quickly what I don’t like. Since, unlike Sherrilee, I can’t tune out and read with the TV on, I have to leave the room and that frustrates Robin but I can’t help it.

    We do manage to find some series that we both can watch—crime dramas where at least one or more of the characters is interesting—or “reality” shows like the cooking competitions where there’s no pretense of reality and miscellaneous other quirky things.

    The worst television shows I’ve been subjected to lately are the ones that after five or ten minutes I say “I don’t think I can stomach any more of this” and we look for something else.

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    1. Bill, I love your description of the sound effects you get downstairs.
      In the years before Isaac was born, I had time to go into my little workshop in the evenings and mess about with various things. Except that I knew Jane was on the sofa watching TV, and what better place to be, than close beside her, even though I had to put up with her erratic and unpredictable use of the controller. I could easily have ignored it, and read, but she sat on the right hand side, where the table lamp was. I sat on the left, with too narrow a gap between the sofa and the wall to put anything, such as a standard lamp, or a small table with a lamp. Jane likes soft lighting, so the overhead light wasn’t bright enough to comfortably read by. I used to think, I should think how to fix this, so I can read. Well, anyway, we don’t live at that house now.

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  9. I cannot bear reality shows, and just one aspect is the use of voiceovers suggesting that the common or garden activity being indulged in is causing someone a problem, “Can they do it?” sort of thing. All the terrible things that might go wrong, and only do because the producers said so. Better to read about Ben doing it properly, with only the occasional slip.
    But the worst thing I had to put up with was when Jane had a spell of watching soap operas. Our most famous ones in England were “Coronation Street” and “East Enders.”
    I would literally leave the house until they were over. A friend claimed that her therapist advised her to watch “East Enders,” whether it was to learn how real life should be, I don’t really know. That’s therapy?

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    1. East Enders- where everyone seems to make a living by having a rolling rack of clothes they pull out into the street and sell to each other.

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      1. All meals are eaten in the cafe.
        Large business transactions are paid for with brown paper envelopes full of cash.

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  10. The Happening. Horrible.
    An apocalyptic science fiction movie starring Mark Wahlberg as a high school science teacher.
    Lots of Wahlberg’s wrinkled brow acting.

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  11. I have trouble naming the worst movies I’ve ever seen because some of them I get good comic value out of. The Cat People. Just dreadful. But I’ve watched it twice because it’s so bad. There is something else where the mad scientist in the jungle was experimenting and accidentally turned himself into a large crocodile man. I don’t even remember the name of that one. Again so bad that I can’t say it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

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    1. I remember one execrable movie—I can’t even remember its title—where a scientist developed an antidote for evolution.

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  12. Daughter watches a lot of movies. Now that we can stream shows, she’s added some Disney TV shows.
    There are some prime time TV shows we all watch as family, and some that are just her and Kelly. I am reticent, OH YES, I am reticent, to join some of their shows because I don’t feel like I have the time to get involved with ‘The Good Doctor’ or the last 4 Harry Potter movies. Or any of the Lord of the Rings movies.
    I get the TV at 10:00 for the local news and then the late night shows, but I constantly channel surf too, so if I find something more interesting I’ll watch that.
    Kelly likes the HGTV stuff, but without cable, it’s only the repeats she finds on Netflix or Hulu.

    There are commercials I can’t stand more than movies. Anytime the pillow guy comes on I mute or turn it. For a while it was the Burger King commercial with the giant King head. There was some Subway commercials a long time ago that I hated.

    Daughter has some kids animal movies that are terrible. (She has her rotation, this today’s movie will play repeatedly for a couple days, then back to the bottom of the stack until next time)
    Just about anything with puppies is bad. Or the ‘Hotel Transylvania’ I won’t even watch. The first was OK. Now they’re at sequel 3 or 4 and they’re just juvenile and I can’t stand it.

    Back when my Mother-In-law used to stay with us, she liked her cop shows at night. I just went to the other room.
    Over at my moms, her vision is pretty bad so she only turns on the TV to listen to a ball game, or maybe music if she can find it.

    Bad Movies: ‘Tank Girl’ comes to mind.
    Yet, just because the critics hate it, doesn’t mean I will. (See ‘Yellowbeard’ above). I recall not hating ‘Istar’. I still don’t know why that got such a bad rap.

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  13. Husband and I don’t watch TV much at all, maybe a handful of times a year. We don’t subscribe to any streaming services. We don’t go to movies, either. Our movie theater in town is quite abysmal. Our TV is in the basement. We are either reading, cooking, or gardening. Perhaps this will change when I retire. At the moment we are having down time at daughter’s apartment prior to dinner at an Argentinian steak house. Tomorrow we go to the Olympic Rain Forest.

    I was expecting to testify in court tomorrow over the phone for a case back home, but the opposing counsel objected to my doing that, so I don’t have to search for cell phone service on the Olympic Peninsula. I guess phone service there is terrible.

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