Streamed DISNEY to see THE BEATLES, GET BACK. Hope it is worth it because the last time I streamed Disney I had trouble getting rid of it. And I am not even sure where I am being billed for it.
Loved WEST SIDE STORY. Especially the more realistic street scenes. The guy here who plays Riff was especially terrific. (Mike Faist) Sadly it seems to be completely bombing. It's already disappearing from theaters here.
I am always admitting I missed a lot of the music of the seventies and I think I know why. As I watched the documentary on SESAME STREET, I realized I knew every song they played. So apparently that was what I listened to in the seventies.
SHETLAND (BRIT BOX) is well done but I really like two or three episodes arcs and not a sixer. Characters from the first episodes are a vague memory now.
MAUD DIXON-not far enough along to know if I will like it. I loved the Ann Patchett essays though.
Found a wonderful new (to me) used book store near me. That is two stores now not far away and this one also carries new books. Megan's book was in the window. That made my day. And they didn't even know she was a Michigan girl.
Don't know if I can bear to watch STATION ELEVEN (HBO MAX). When I read it some years ago there was no pandemic going on. Awfully close to home now.
What about you?
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Haven't been to a theater for a while but some new openings are on my radar-Nightmare Alley. Licorice Pizza and the King's Men. Don't Look Up on Netflix and the Ricardos movie on HBO Max.
Got Britbox and watched the 4 episodes of Shetland that I had missed. Wanted gto finish Line of Duty they don't have season 4, just seasons 1,2,3,4. and 6. Acorn has 5. That' strange. Also been enjoying Curb Your enthusiasm.
Finished The Death Artist by Jonathan Sandlofer. Not as good as The Last Mona Lisa. I am picking up some art history though. Read The Writer's Crusade by Tom Roston. It's about Kurt Vonnegut and the writing of Slaughterhouse Five. Also been reading some stories by Alastar Reynolds.
Weather got crappy. Not much snow but a lot of wind keeping temps down.
And the Detroit Lions won and against a very good team. Will wonders never seize.
I doubt if I can repeat the lyrics to any seventies song but I sure can sing "Lady Bugs Went to the Lady Bug Picnic." SESAME STREET may or may not have helped my girls but it sure did a number on me.
I have probably seen RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER at least a dozen times but I don't remember it at all, the same with all such holiday animation/cartoons I watched with the girls and our grands. I deliberately blanked those suckers out. The subject came up Satuday while we were crafting (making Christmas ornaments, some of which were characters from that show) and neither Kitty nor I recognized the characters. The girls were astounded, given how many times we had watched the show with them. I firmly be;ieve the secret to good parenting is a selective memory. The ornaments actually came out looking prettu nifty; ours are on the tree as I type. We followed it up with chocolate Rolo cookies which we made (and ate) in an assembly line. Much laughter was involved.
Started STATION ELEVEN. Enjoying it but it is full of confusing jumps that I'm sure will come together in later episodes. Still watching HAWKEYE, WHEEL OF TIME, and BIG SKY, interspersed with old episodes of SEA OF SOULS. Kitty (Lord help her!) has been watching a few of the recent Christmas movies -- no, not DIE HARD.
It's been a short story week again, scattered across all genres. Yesterday I pulled out six Christmas anthologies -- four edited by Richard Dalby, one a compilation from AHMM and EQMM, and Otto Penzler's doorstop CHRISTMAS MYSTERIES. I'm indiscriminatly dipping into them for my Christmas Week reading; if I go beyond the 25th I may finish all of them by Epiphany.
Rainy and cold (okay, cool for anyone like me who was raised in New England) weather this week. Spent the week trying to avoid stores and crowds and traffic. There's some to be said to nesting at home this time of year.
Seems our national zeitgeist has taken a sharp turn to Crazytown. I may be wrong because I'm in Florida, home of Florida Man, Florida Woman, Ron DeSantis, and Matt Gaetz. Are things any saner out there in the real world? Because I'm a gentleman, I won't tell you my feelings about Joe Manchin, Mr. If-Florida-Had-Coal-He'd-Be-Living-Here.
But Christmas is coming and if the goose is not getting fat, then I am. May you have a happy and meaningful holiday, Patti. See you on the other side.
While WEST SIDE STORY is bombing, I attended a sold-out SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME. This new SPIDER-MAN movie just took in over $500 million in its opening weekend. For a MARVEL nerd like me, it was a glorious CHRISTMAS present! Some of the audience members were actually dressed up as Spider-Man or one of the other characters featured in the Spider-Man films. And, SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME scored a 99 on ROTTEN TOMATOES.
Diane is furiously readying the house for the arrival of Patrick and Katie on Wednesday. I'll be moving boxes of books out of Patrick's room today (but they'll return when Patrick departs around December 30).
We woke up to a dusting of snow--maybe an inch--but the weather-guessers predict a Green Christmas as temps climb into the 40s. Covid-19 rates are moving in the Wrong Direction. Time to hunker down...again. Merry Christmas and stay safe!
I agree on SHETLAND. One of the reasons I prefer VERA (besides that she is a great character) is that it is six individual shows rather than a six-episode arc. Or they should do it like DALGLEISH (or MIDSOMER MURDERS), as some of the other British shows do - two parts, 45 minutes each. Some of the Italian THOU SHALT NOT KILL (which we finished last night) shows are like that too.
We finished several things (including HANNA, which is done after three series). Started THE TEAM (MHz Choice), which is like CROSSING LINES, a show Jackie liked when it ran several years ago. It is an international team of cops from different European countries dealing with crimes in more than one place. The team is cops from Denmark (Lars Mikkelsen), Germany and Belgium. A lot is in English, of course, though there are subtitles. It's good without being great, at least after two episodes. It ran originally in 2015, the second series (different cast, according to Wikipedia) in 2018. Eight episodes and it is one ongoing story. The problem is, I am tired of human trafficking and prostitution stories.
We're finally watching HUNTERS (Prime), with an over the top Al Pacino leading a team of Nazi hunters in late 1970s New York. It has a real Tarantino-esque feel at times, but so far is worth watching. Carol Kane, Saul Rubinek, Logan Lerman, and an evil but occasionally amusing Dylan Baker in another wacky turn as a Nazi hiding out in Virginia.
Somehow I never tried Chris O'Dowd's MOONE BOY (Acorn, I think), which ran for three series of six each from 2012 to 2015, until now. I've always liked O'Dowd and he narrates parts of this as the imaginary friend of 12 year old Martin Moore (semi-autobiographical, apparently), growing up in the west of Ireland in 1989. To me it has a similar feel to it of DERRY GIRLS, which is high praise indeed. If you need silly fun you could do much worse.
We finished the Finnish BORDERTOWN (Netflix, three series) a while ago (it may or may not influence you to know that Stephen King was a fan), about intuitive, almost autistic savant cop Kari Sorjonen, a while ago. Now Netflix has a made for them movie sequel called BORDERTOWN: MURAL MURDERS, bringing back Kari and his erstwhile partner Lena Jaakkola, both of their daughters, and the serial killer who was the first one dealt with in the show. If you like Ville Virtanen as Kari Sorjonen, you'll want to see it.
We are trying to stay in as much as possible and be extra careful about Omicron, since we have less than two weeks before we leave for Florida and we don't want to get sick now. I'm also trying to get as many books read before the end of the year as possible.
We have our Christmas and New Year's Eve television lined up. We should be able to watch Netflix and Prime in the apartment in Florida this year.
The best show at doing longer arcs is LINE OF DUTY. I ended up liking the SHETLAND, series three but mostly because of the interpersonal relationships and he is such a likable guy. I also just found that MOONE BOY and it is a treat.
Megan is going to take a rapid response antigen home test before she arrives on Thursday as she has been around people testing positive of late. It will be a very sad Christmas if she can't come.
Somewhere there is a doc on Vonnegut. I have to relocate it.
Finished the first episode on the Beatles and I had no idea at how much Paul was the leader.
Back in the early '80s, when I got my first VCR, I started watching as many movies as I could, using things like Maltin's annual TV MOVIES books, Don Miller's B MOVIES, THE PSYCHOTRONIC GUIDE..., etc. I made long lists of things I wanted to see, but I would also record nearly anything from the 1930s and 1940s (especially B movies) that I hadn't seen previously. This culminated in 1984 with me watching 535 movies for the first time. One of them on my list that I caught on a late night showing was one that was supposedly "lost," the Australia OUTBACK (1971), Canadian Ted Kotcheff's filming of WAKE IN FRIGHT (the original title). This one almost blew me away. Simon Bond is a young schoolteacher at a horrible little school out in the far outback of New South Wales, on his way to Sydney for Christmas break, who - fatefully - spends the night before his flight in the outback town of Bundanyabba (based on the real Broken Hill), with disastrous results. Chips Rafferty (in his last role), Jack Thompson, and Donald Pleasence also had key roles.
In 2001, the Australian Text Editions reprinted Kenneth Cook's original 1961 novel WAKE IN FRIGHT, with an introduction by Peter Temple and I finally got around to reading it over the weekend, after having bought it several years ago. It is a short and very fast read, a real nightmare of a book. Definitely recommended.
Jeff-Wake in Fright is now streaming on several services.
I don't mind the longer story arcs. And for some reason I couldn't get into Vera.
Is it the 1971 movie version or the new miniseries?
By the time of GET BACK, McCartney was definitely the most Type A of the Beatles, and the one most concerned about having a continuing hugely commercial career. Or so I've gathered over the years. I have to wonder to what extent it bothered him that Ringo had the first solo hit.
Clearly, a lot of your music engagement was driven by the kids, Patti! Family osmosis tends to work at us. Having just seen STREET GANG myself, I was struck by how much of the early series, in the NET/pre-PBS days, I recalled. And the passage of the first "Gordon" to and through the series.
AMERICAN MASTERS on PBS tis apparently still waiting for their episode: https://www.vulture.com/2015/02/kurt-vonnegut-documentary.html
But there was this on PBS stations: https://www.pbs.org/video/wfyi-arts-programs-writers-roots-kurt-vonneguts-indianapolis/
The miniseries, Jeff...the film is Off the Market. Cash in if you can...I certainly didn't pick up some of my books with thoughts of how they'd be selling for hundreds of dollars, at least among online vendors Wishing Hard; most obviously at the moment Ida Chittum's TALES OF TERROR and Walter Tevis's FAR FROM HOME (happily, the latter is currently in print in a reasonably-priced omnibus, and a larger collection of Tevis stories was promised; the Chittum isn't first-rate, but clearly made an impression on young readers).
I remember Gordon leaving SS and I don't think we understood why at the time. I can also sing music from Mr Rogers and Electric Company and it occurs to me we have our own version of too much screen time even then. I think those shows were repeated in the afternoon. I hope it was mostly background music and we didn't watch it all day long.
That film sounds vaguely familiar, Jeff. Well, not even vaguely. It seems like something I might have seen in the last ten years.
Todd-According to IMDB Wake in Fright, the 1971 movie is listed as available on several different sites including Tubi which I just double checked and it's there.
Here it is the week leading into Christmas, and Covid is still a huge problem. I hope Megan can visit you!
We’ve had steady rain for days, which is a good thing, and then our first snow of the season, but it didn’t stick and after a couple of hours turned to rain. We have outside Christmas lights up, and are decorated inside as much as we’re going to, just a little 4 foot artificial tree, lights but no ornaments due to Pongo, to whom everything that hangs or moves is a toy. Cats!
We watched The Andromeda Strain on TCM last week, Barbara hadn’t seen it before and we both enjoyed it. We’ll watch one of the versions of A Christmas Carol sometime this week. TCM is our only “special” station, as we already pay $240 month for cable without the extra cost of the plus channels, Hulu, etc.
Barbara read State of Terror by Clinton and Penny and really liked it a lot. Then she finished a recent Grisham, and is reading the latest William Kent Krueger, Lightning Strike now. I’m reading a Christmas short story collection, but not sure if I’ll have a post on it Wednesday.
Hope you’re enjoying the season. Be good!
I really wish I had TCM. You can only get it on my cable system if you buy a sports package. Don't ask me why.
Sorry, Steve and Jeff--I took Jeff's query about the film to be about LET IT BE/GET BACK. Half asleep, as frequently of late.
Enjoyed Shetland Season 6. but agree that the six eipsode story arc was a bit long the way they did it. Glad they started filming seven just after they finished six so one hopes they have a lot done by now.
And the rest of this season of Vera starts 1/9.
Many folks here have quit wearing masks. Scott and I broke home confinement today and went to our local Dallas library branch to pick up our holds. About a dozen patrons beside us. I counted ten folks not wearing masks, while staff as well as Scott and I and a couple of other folks wore masks. Grabbed our stuff and got out. They still offer the drive thru option where the bring out your holds and put the bags of books in the trunk and we may have to go back to doing that. I like walking the shelves as best as I can with my cane, but the risk may just be too high again.
Then there is the fact that none of my seventeen neighbors have been vaccinated at all. Several have had Covid deaths in their families and friends. Several of the neighbors belive that the vaccine kills within a year and have told me they were waiting to see if we are alive after the original vaccination date of 4/6. If we are still alive next May, then they will go ahead and get vaccinated.
This assumes they are not dead from it.
And I really hate that Chevrolet ad with the Dad and the restored wife's car. Rips me apart every time. Can not change the channel fast enough.
KRT
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