YA came home from work yesterday asking if I had watched the Golden Globe ceremonies. When I looked at her blankly she asked if I had “heard” about them.
I actually don’t really know what the Golden Globes are. I mean, I know it’s yet another way for the over-paid and over-glamorized folks in Hollywood to pump up their egos, but other than that I don’t know what differentiates it from the Oscars.
One of my friends always makes a point of seeing all the movies that are up for the best picture Oscar. I’m pretty much 0 for 5 every year for the past 10 years. I did see Shape of Water on Christmas Day 2018 – I didn’t know anything about it at the time, just that it was showing at a good time for us. I didn’t actually like it very much so was surprised to find out a few weeks later than it was an Oscar contender.
Apparently the Oscar nominations are due out on January 25 although there are lots of websites trying to predict who will be on the leaderboard. Since the only movie I’ve been to in the last year is “Migration” (an animated film), I’m pretty sure I’m continuing my streak.
I’m fairly certain that none of my favorite movies have ever even been nominated for a big award, much less won one: To Catch a Thief, Moonstruck, Princess Bride, People Will Talk, Sneakers, Murder on the Orient Express (1974 version only), American Dreamer, Dial M for Murder….
Do you follow the Globes/Oscars/Sundances/Cannes, etc??? Do you have a favorite movie?
Remember last May when I watched all those killer tomato movies? I watched some of them online and so found a lot of assorted information, including several sites that said the initial movie was based on “the best-selling novel The Tomatoes of Wrath” by Paul Watkins. I couldn’t let that pass by, now could I?
Couldn’t find the title either in my library system or the inter-library loan, but I did find it online. Please don’t ask me why I thought this was a good use of $12 – I don’t remember what mania overtook me that day. It showed up promptly and then sat on my nightstand for several months.
I’m here to say that whoever says the movies were inspired by this book is a lunatic. The book is subtitled “Adventures of a Tentative Traveler” and there isn’t a killer tomato in sight. The chapter titled Tomatoes of Wrath is ostensibly the account of Watkins when he picked tomatoes for a day in California however most of the story is a reminiscence of the three days he spent sightseeing in San Francisco. And not a very well-constructed nor interesting reminiscence. (And I have to admit that after reading this chapter, I didn’t read the rest so I haven’t the vaguest idea WHY was traveling around with no money, hence needing to go out to pick tomatoes.)
When he finally gets back to the tomato picking, it is more of an expose (although a very short expose) on farmers vs. pickers and the injustices meted out by the tomato industry onto workers. On the next to the last page there was a mention of Grapes of Wrath, comparing the Joads’ struggle to survive picking fruit in California and how unfairly and unjustly they were treated. Hence the title of the chapter and the book.
All of this is to say, I didn’t like what I read of the book and to think that the Killer Tomato movies were inspired by it is ludicrous. After this critical review anybody still wants to borrow it, just let me know!
On Friday night my BFF, Sara, and I went to see Arsenic & Old Lace at Theatre in the Round over on the West Bank. This was Sara’s birthday present from me….we decided a few years back to give each other experiences instead of things for our birthdays. She chose Arsenic from a list of plays showing this fall. I was looking forward to it; I’ve seen the 1944 A&O starring Cary Grant and Boris Karloff several times and was interested in how the play would measure up.
I haven’t been to Theatre in the Round for many years. Actually except for theatre that has been gifted to me, I’ve hardly been to any theatre in years. (Single parenthood kind of whoops the-evening-entertainment-that-costs-money craving out of you.) When I first moved to the Twin Cities, I did volunteer ushering there for a couple of plays but full-time work while my wasband was searching for a job wore me down and I needed my nights back.
The production on Friday was quite nice. The entire play takes places in the living/dining room of the Brewster sisters; no-nonsense set and props (like the sisters) without too much bric-a-brac to pull your attention away. Lighting was pretty straight forward (nothing fancy like I see in Ben’s photos) and the sound was very good. If the actors were mic’ed, I couldn’t tell; we were in the third row and didn’t have any trouble hearing all the dialogue.
Casting was superb! Not that easy when one of the actors needs to resemble Teddy Roosevelt and another absolutely has to look like Boris Karloff (there are repeated mentions of this in the script). I was a little worried that that these two would be weak links, hired for their looks, but they were both great. Jonathan (the Boris look-alike) was particularly good. Both Brewster sisters were excellent; Abby had a great way of waving her arms to punctuate her lines that was very effectives. And a shout-out to the young woman who played Officer Brophy; she really sparkled in her role.
I was easily able to put aside my Cary Grant memories and enjoy the play on its merits. It was very funny and a couple of times I laughed enough to cry. The woman behind me snorted a few times!
If you’re in the Twin Cities and up for a great night of theatre and comedy, I highly recommend it. I think it’s running for a few more weeks.
Tell me about a favorite theatre experience you’ve had!
To make that cauliflower salad I needed hazelnut oil. Not something I have sitting on my shelf. And, it turns out, not something that is all that easy to find. That’s how I ended up at my co-op (well, technically one of my co-ops… I have three different memberships) on a Tuesday morning. Although I can do errands whenever I want these days, I do find that I still end up with a lot of errands on the weekend.
The cashier at the co-op was a nice young man and when I checked out he very gently asked if anyone in my household was 50 or older. I laughed, pointed at myself and said “just me”. Apparently Tuesday is Senior Discount Day at the co-op. The discount was just enough to offset the ‘round-up’ that I always do when I shop there. As I was getting back into my car, I laughed a bit to myself thinking that they’ve probably had store-wide sensitivity training about asking folks if they are old enough for the senior discount. Maybe the “is anyone in your household” question was born there.
Aging, while not always the most fun I’ve had, isn’t a problem for me on principal. One of my favorite movie quotes is from People Will Talk with Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain. He plays a doctor and one of his elderly patients laments that it’s no fun to get old. Cary Grand replies “It’s even less fun if you don’t get to be old.”
The first time I got the senior discount was when I was 50, at a miniature golf course in Hayward, Wisconsin. It was listed on the price board and I asked for it. The second time was at Perkins when I turned 55. After that, I went home and sent my mother a sympathy card for having a daughter old enough to get the senior discount.
So the cashier didn’t need to pussyfoot around me about a senior discount. I’ll take any discount that anyone if willing to give me for having survived this long!
YA and I went to some friends’ home to have dinner last week. They live in an apartment with a security system; you ring their apartment and they buzz you in after you’ve identified yourselves. When Peter answered the ring, I said “Candygram for Mongo”. YA looked at me as if I had hot frogs on the loose.
I saw Blazing Saddles at the Grand Theatre in Northfield when it came out in 1974. I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair a couple of times. Like Star Wars, I went back two more nights in a row to see it again. Also like Star Wars (and Princess Bride and Romancing the Stone), I dragged various friends with me on those additional nights. I’m a huge Mel Brooks fan, starting way back in his early writing days of Show of Shows into his directing years of Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and up to 2000-Year-Old Man in the Year 2000. I love that he was politically incorrect about everybody and everything.
Mel Brooks has been on my mind since we had dinner at our friends’ home because, to my utter shock and dismay, neither of them had ever seen Blazing Saddles, they were with YA on the “hot frogs” theory. How is that possible to be an older adult in America and never had seen Blazing Saddles. Isn’t there a law against that. Turns out they’ve never seen Monty Python and the Holly Grail either. I may have to re-think my friendship with them. At least they have seen Princess Bride. I might have had to leave their apartment otherwise!
Yesterday was Mel Brooks birthday…. He is 97. He’s been retired for quite some time but is still alive and kicking. He gave an interview yesterday saying that he was glad to still be alive! I’m not sure there will ever be anyone else quite like him!
Tell me about movies you’ve seen REPEATEDLY. To the point that you quote them standing in apartment building lobbies.
Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you. Yesterday, after listening to the Attack of the Killer Tomatoes song (thank you, Wes), I went out in search of the movie and found four of them. I watched them all so that you never have to. The first one (Attack) got terrible reviews but the cast and crew had their tongues stuck in their cheeks so firmly that it was hard not to warm up to the film. I’m not even sure I can recount the plot (there just barely is one) but suffice it to say that tomatoes start killing people and are eventually overcome by a song named “Puberty Love”. The movie is filled from beginning to end with sight gags, bad puns and atrocious over-acting. I can understand why it has attained the status of “cult classic”.
The second film in the series is Return of the Killer Tomatoes. Two notable cast members stand out – John Astin as the mad scientist who supposedly was behind the killer tomato attacks in the first movie (although Astin was not in Attack). The other is a very young George Clooney who plays a pizza jock who is also a bit of a horn dog. Return, although made by the same crowd as Attack, takes itself more seriously which makes the movie not even remotely fun.
Killer Tomatoes Strike Back. John Astin is also back, this time trying to gain control of the world using brainwashing and thought control. Rick Rockwell plays the main character and the only redeeming thing about him is the wild assortment of Zumba pants he wears throughout. Oh – and the tomatoes get faces in this one. I will admit there is one very funny scene in which the bad tomatoes and Astin attempt to make a BLT with the female lead instead of slices of tomato.
Killer Tomatoes Eat France is thankfully the last of the series. This time John Astin escapes from prison and tries to take over the world by re-creating the French Revolution and proclaiming his minion Igor as King. Why this would result in world domination is never made clear. The most noteworthy thing about this one is that the tomatoes have gotten seriously ugly with bad teeth, the occasional eye patch and tongues (ick) and finally after all this time, they finally have the power of speech. There is one monster fire-breathing tomato but he/she doesn’t get much film time. Too bad.
I’m not recommending that anybody else waste their time watching any of these except maybe the original Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – if it’s cold out and you have an hour or so with nothing else planned. The others? Don’t even bother. They took a fun quirky idea and ran it straight into the ground.
The first real day of gardening for me includes attacking my creeping charlie. While I was working, I remembered the Godzilla comparison I wrote about a couple of years ago. But since getting rid of creeping Charlie is a good thing in my world, how could I be Godzilla, a horrible, scary, destructive monster.
I was thinking through all the Godzilla movies (yes, I’ve seen them all, even the Matthew Broderick) and it occurred to me that in the Japanese films, Godzilla went through a “nice-ification” over the years. In a few of the movies, Godzilla actually comes to the rescue by fighting off worse monsters (Mothra, Ghidorah, Gigan, Megalon, etc.) When Godzilla became a father in Son of Godzilla, he really mellowed.
This is a more common occurrence than you realize. I can think of a lot of characters who morph from the bad guys to good guys. M.A.S.H. is the best example; although Frank Burns never redeemed himself, Colonel Blake started off as a lame head of the unit before he sobered up and became beloved of this staff, then Charles started off as a pain-in-the-patoot and gradually became just one of the guys. Diagnosis Murder had a string of hospital administrators who started out as impediments and eventually became supporters of Dr. Sloan. Hamilton Berger, the DA on the first Perry Mason series eventually toned down his attitude and even asked Perry to represent a friend of his at one point. Lots of long-standing series went through this.
I’m glad I can still be Godzilla in my creeping Charlie battles without feeling guilty for destroying Tokyo!
Any bad guys that you actually like? Or morphed into someone you could like?
The Scrap documentary highlights people who have found uses for objects that are no longer needed. For eample, one of the stories involves a British man and his family who have restored more than 2000 British phone booths that have turned up in all sorts of locations in England. Another team of architects has turned abandoned ocean liners in a cafe and a church. I think it is great the documentary film maker also highlighted the sculptor in Lemmon.
Having been around farmsteads for much of my life, I can imagine that there is scrap metal galore to use for projects like this. I think about all the things that got thrown in the groves at my grandparents’ farms. You often see old corn pickers and threshing machines parked on top of hills out here as monuments to the past. I just think it is wonderful that he can do this in Lemmon.
Do you know any actively working artists? What are some ideas you would have for repurposing things we don’t use anymore, like telephone booths? Ever done much work with blow torches?
Normally I don’t click on things like “Worst Sitcoms of all Times” or “Hollywood Actors with Surprising Kung Fu Skills”. But for some reason, while waiting for a client call yesterday, I clicked on “Bad Movies We Love Anyway”. I hardly had the site open two minutes but it was enough time to see “VelociPastor”. No that is not a typo.
When I logged off work for the day, I couldn’t resist… found it on Peacock and within a few minutes had it going. It was dreadful. The basic story is that a pastor goes hiking and manages to hike into China (no discussion of WHY he was doing this), runs into a Chinese woman stabbed through the heart who gives him what she says is a “dragon tooth”. He cuts himself badly and apparently is infected with dinosaur DNA. Like Bruce Banner/Hulk, when he gets enraged he turns into a velociraptor. Initially he doesn’t remember these episodes but eventually learns to control it somewhat and becomes a crime fighter – a scaled crusader!
Very bad acting, some of the characters were dubbed, horrible dialog, every stereotype on the planet, unbelievable scenarios (the scumbag who murdered his parents comes to confession and the pastor kills him in the confessional). Of course, all the mayhem never leaves a drop of blood on him once he transforms back to human. Oh and he falls in love with the hooker who witnessed his first transformation and eventually dies in his arms. Half way through the movie, we also get ninjas bent on global domination and I’ll never forget the scene where the pastor and the hooker beat up all the ninjas in their underwear. When they eventually do show the whole transformation, it’s in a rubber dinosaur suit that doesn’t look anything like a velociraptor.
It was so awful it was kinda funny. Wouldn’t you have to TRY to make a movie this bad? Was this a “The Producers” situation, where they wanted to make a bad film so they wouldn’t have to pay investors back. Hard to imagine any other way this movie could have been made. Yet another bad movie that curiosity has driver me to that I will most likely never watch again.
What’s the absolute worst movie you’ve ever seen? And why?
The end of another year, pretty fitting that it happens on the last day of the week. It just fits the calendar so nicely and it feels so right that the last day of the year, the last day of the month, also ends on the last day of the week. And then we begin another month, another week, another year on the first day of the week. No open squares, it just all seems better that way.
The end of the year, all the old hackneyed, banal phrases of closing out another chapter, turning the page, another chance to try it again. But they still apply.
On the farm I will collect mileage from all the vehicles and the hours on the tractors and the lawnmower, the four-wheeler, the gator, and even the total gallons on the diesel barrel pump. I put all the data in my spreadsheet to compare with the other years. (At one point I believe we had to report the mileage to our accountant and there must’ve been a deduction for farm mileage or something. Now it’s just all under the standard deduction but I have always enjoyed keeping track of things like that). I also have our farm balance sheet that I will spend the next month working on. It’s fun for me; I like compiling the data and seeing the changes, adding pretty colors, and formatting it.
During 2022, I kept track of how many dozens of eggs I moved out of the house. It was easier keeping track of the dozens going out then it was the eggs coming in. The last few weeks I haven’t actually moved very many, so counting the eight dozen I have on the counter now, I moved 320 dozen eggs. That’s kind of impressive. That’s 3480 eggs. Which averages 10 eggs per day for an entire year. Back in October I only moved about 10 dozen, while between March and August it was upwards of 30 per month. If you count all the chickens around here, which is somewhere between 40 and 50, 10 eggs per day doesn’t seem like enough. I never said I was looking for efficiency, I’ve always said it was a chicken retirement farm.
I’ve also been getting crop inputs finalized for next year. Prepaid some fertilizer, locked in prices on some other products, and finalizing my seed orders. It’s discouraging that fertilizer and chemicals are as expensive this year as last. Hope for another good year of crop production and prices. I expect prices will have to crash and we’ll all take a loss one year before things will come down again.
A lot of the stuff we do before the end of the calendar year so that I can take the financial expense this year. There’s also typically a discount on pricing when you order sooner. My seed company discount goes until mid-January, and I expect to be driving again by then so I will get that done at that point. We paid off all of this year‘s crop loans, paid off another small loan on my truck, and paid a good chunk of an operating loan. Also, at the end of the year the equity checks come in from the various co-ops that we belong to. March 2023 will be 19 years since I sold the milk cows. The dairy co-op that we sold to, AMPI, has a 20 year payback on their equity and so for the last 18 years I’ve been getting a check for a few hundred dollars from the dairy co-op even though there has not been a milk cow on the farm. The check this year was for $200. There’s $2.48 remaining in my equity. Seems to me it would’ve made more sense to just add it on too this year‘s check. But whatever, one more check from the milk cows.
We are all glad the weather has finally warmed up. The ducks finally got out of the pond and actually came back up in the yard. Chickens, squirrels, pheasants, and lots of birds are out and about and enjoying it. The show has melted off the deck so I can go out there and walk around a bit.
I am getting along very well on my knew knee. (Gnu G-knee!) And the 37 staples were removed from the incision on Thursday. The doctor gave me a good report. A few days prior to that Kelly took me out for a ride in the gator, it was just nice to get out of the house. She even took me over to the shop and I got up in the tractors. Just to say I could. Again, after all the trouble I had the spring and summer, I didn’t really think this would stop me, but it still felt good to get in there. I sort of expect to be driving again this weekend and I may have to take over snow clearing duties soon.
Prior to the surgery I had to remove the two earrings that I wear. I asked daughter to put them in. She doesn’t have pierced ears, and she’s never done earrings before and I thought this would be good practice for her. As a guy, I can’t get them in myself, I generally ask Kelly. Daughter got one in and Kelly got the second one.
Years ago when I was giving a farm tour to some elementary school kids, a little girl asked me about the ear tags that I put in the calves ears. I was kneeling down and face-to-face with her and I told her it was like getting your ears pierced. I have a very vivid memory of her looking to my ears at the same moment I Iooked to hers. I had earrings, she didn’t and I thought to myself, this is a fascinating little discussion and I wondered if she’s going to go home and ask to get her ears pierced.
One of the movies I watched this week was ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’. One of those movies I’ve heard about and seen bits of, but never seen the whole thing. I enjoyed it. I also watched ‘All That Jazz’ for the 349th time. I was home alone so I had it loud to make it the best it could be. And I picked some new bits out of it. I never get tired of that movie.
Trail Baboon 