“The L Word” — Lame or Loser or Both?

It is easy to understand the popularity of “The L Word.” Theoretically, of course.

A healthy segment of the American populace adores looking at attractive women without their clothes on, watching them making love, making sex, making eyes at their girlfriends’ girlfriends and generally carrying on as people love their soap opera stars to do.

The Game - It’s The Only Place To Be

My future brother-in-law sidled up to me Christmas Eve at the family gathering. Surrounded by the detritus of wrapping paper, he looked me in the eye and accused me — good-naturedly, I think — of, well, his words: “You’re brainwashing my daughter.”

Can We Get A Medic????

Where’s the M*A*S*H unit when we really need it?  The homies are wounded, hardly walking for heaven’s sake, let alone ballin’ like they should.

Oh, that’s right, Hawkeye and Trapper John are off playing golf, those scoundrels. Well, here’s hoping they get back quick. They’d better. Hot Lips needs help. Send a copter for them.

Otherwise March Madness be March Sadness ‘round here.

21st Century Schizoid Man On The Couch

Robert, we’ve been sitting here 20 minutes. Besides mumbling about “crossing patterns,” all you’ve done is doodle on a pad and write down names. Would you like to share?

It’s Bobby, not Robert. Nobody calls me Robert. Nobody has ever called me Robert. Understand?

The Yearbook Photo That Still Haunts

For a moment let’s simply suppose we’ve never seen the photo before. For this exercise’s sake, let’s forget what we’ve read about Robbie Hawkins.

Erase from memory how he walked into an Omaha mall the week before last. How he took the escalator to the third floor of the tony department store Von Maur filled with holiday shoppers being serenaded by the store’s signature live pianist. How he then pulled out an AK47 and started spraying bullets around the room. How he killed eight very innocent people and then aimed the rifle’s nozzle at himself, ending the carnage and his own misery.

Movies I Love, Part V: “Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”

Stanley Kubrick is not especially known for his sense of humor. In fact, his resume is replete with ponderous works delving into the BIG issues without much dimming perspective. All of which makes Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb more remarkable.

It is at once one of the great films ever made, one of the funniest comedies ever made, one of the most incisive political indictments ever made, a satire most incisive and one of the more visually compelling films ever made. Black and white has never been more resonant.

Movies I Love, Part IV: “Brazil”

In Brazil, Katherine Helmond plays Jonathan Pryce’s mother. In one of the more incisive (and insightful) running gags in the film, she gets more and more plastic surgery as the movie progresses. Until her face falls off. Literally.

While that isn’t really what this invigorating film is about, it does underscore the cockamamie brilliance of Terry Gilliam’s vision of the future. Which, truth be told, is now. And that whole time warp is also part of the trip.

Review of “I’m Not There”

Even having lived it, it’s hard to describe the genesis of the Bob Dylan mythos in a way that could explain such obsessive observations as Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There.

I first heard Dylan — literally — while hauling my foot locker down the hall as I entered my freshman dorm in the fall of ‘63. My dorm counselor in the next room had that first eponymous album on the box. Being young, impressionable, inclined toward rebellion, ready to break out of my prepster malaise, I grabbed hold of the guy who was to be the bard of my generation.

I wasn’t alone. Far from it.

B. Young Lesson For Cards In Vegas

It is the nature of the place, Las Vegas. With arid desert sprawling in all directions and a grand canyon in one of such magnificence it’s hard to fathom it was created in just one day, the area was discovered to be an oasis centuries ago by Spaniards traveling north from Tejas. The area has always been about survive and advance.

The Vegas of dumbfounding excess, the Vegas that turned the seven deadly sins into a design for glitzkrieg business success, that Vegas the world has come to know is but 50 years old.

Movies I Love, Part III: “The In-Laws”

Frankly I love everything about The In-Laws. (Do not be confused. I am most certainly talking about the 1979 original, not the deplorable, unnecessary, heretical remake of a year of so ago.) It is among a handful of my favorite flicks of all time.

As much as anything I love the hook behind the film. Alan Arkin and Peter Falk were/ are major buddies They simply wanted to make a movie where the premise would be that Falk annoys Arkin all the time. From that idea the cockamamie plot evolved.

Falk is Vince Ricardo, a renegade, appreciably off kilter CIA operative. He was, he says, part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Arkin is Sheldon Kornpett, a nebbish New York city dentist. Falk’s son is to marry Arkin’s daughter. They meet for the first time a couple of days before the wedding. Falk shows up at Arkin’s office and asks him a small favor. At which point the movie flies.

Movies I Love, Part II: “The Year of Living Dangerously”

One of the most intriguing characters in all of film is that of Billy Kwan in Peter Weir’s 1982 masterpiece, The Year of Living Dangerously.

The film is set in the turmoil of Sukarno’s Indonesia in the mid 1960’s. The dictator is trying to hang on, while the forces of change and poverty have turned the exotic locale into a tempest. Kwan is a photographer/ liason/ fixer. Kwan knows everybody from government officials to drivers to those mired in the poverty of the political regime. He is everywhere in his Hawaiian print shirts.

Movies I Love, Part I: “Diva”

One guy’s opinion is that the character Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) is the coolest guy in all of film. His self-stated satori is the “art of toast.” He lives in a way cool, sparely furnished Paris loft with a bathtub in the middle, plenty of room for his muse — fetching Vietnamese ingenue/ kleptomaniac Alba (Thuy An Luu) — to blithely rollerskate about. He spends his days in a state of sublime existential sangfroid, piecing together an oversized crossword puzzle of a crashing wave. Or waxing on about the art of cutting a baguette. When he steps out of self-contained serenity, he drives a classic cream Citroen. He has more than one, a necessity you will discover near the end of the movie.

Gorodish is but one of the reasons why the film Diva is the first in a new regular series here — called “Movies I Love.” –heralding older films I, uh, well, uh, love. And you might too.