(Originally posted on 1/27/2009)
Me and Eddie Templeton were walking down the street and shooting the breeze when--wait, have I introduced you to Eddie Templeton yet? You know Eddie, don't you? He just got his fifteenth ticket for parking in a handicapped space--remember? Let me quote him:
"I don't know what the hell's the matter with that cop! I told him I've got Premature Hunch Elbow!"
Anyway, me and Eddie were walking down the street, and he fell behind me for a moment.
"Hey, Jusko!"
I turned around. "Huh?"
"You dropped a quarter."
He picked it up and handed it to me.
"Thanks," I said.
I continued walking.
"Say, Eddie," I said. "What say you and I go over to the Looking-Glass Cafe and see if Garret and Marty's there?"
Eddie didn't answer.
"Eddie?"
I turned back around. Eddie was way behind me, still at the spot where I dropped my quarter. His arms were folded, and he was tapping his foot. He had an expectant look on his face.
I walked back over to him.
"Eddie," I said. "What gives?"
"I'm waiting," he said.
"Waiting? Waiting for what?"
"I'm waiting for God to shower me with fame and fortune and all the sex I can handle as reward for the good, just, and selfless deed I just performed."
He looked up toward the sky and started snapping his fingers impatiently.
I handed him my quarter.
"Here," I said. "I think you need this more than I do."
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Graphic Grandeur (Up the Down Staircase Edition)
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Vital Viewing (Girl Next Door Edition)

Those of you who know what Lana Turner, Kathryn Grayson, Donna Reed, and Esther Williams looked like in their primes may be saying to yourselves, "I don't blame Andy leavin' Polly for those babes! Why'd he always go back?" That's very unfair to Ann Rutherford, who was a very capable comic actress...OK, comic capability may not mean much when stacked (no pun intended) against Esther Williams in a bathing suit. But Ann-as-Polly had some considerable charms of her own. If you don't believe me, just watch this:
Wooo-wooo is right! The bigger question should be, why did Polly always take him back?
Labels:
Andy Hardy,
Ann Rutherford,
Mickey Rooney,
movies,
Polly Benedict
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
In Memoriam: Ray Bradbury 1920-2012

"First of all, I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. It was named so to represent the temperature at which paper ignites. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So The Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time--because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power."
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
"I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?"
"Good old wonderful Earth. Send me your hungry and your starved. Something, something - how does that poem go? Send me your hungry, old Earth. Here's Sam Parkhill, his hot dogs all boiled, his chili cooking, everything neat as a pin. Come on, you Earth, send me your rocket!"
“They walked still farther and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames."
“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around .... I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal.”
The picture on his back showed the Illustrated Man himself, with his fingers about my neck, choking me to death. I didn't wait for it to become clear and sharp and a definite picture.
(No shortage of quotes from this guy. I've barely scratched the surface--KJ)
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
"I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation?"
"Good old wonderful Earth. Send me your hungry and your starved. Something, something - how does that poem go? Send me your hungry, old Earth. Here's Sam Parkhill, his hot dogs all boiled, his chili cooking, everything neat as a pin. Come on, you Earth, send me your rocket!"
“They walked still farther and the girl said, "Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?"
"No. Houses have always been fireproof, take my word for it."
"Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames."
“Why aren't you in school? I see you every day wandering around."
"Oh, they don't miss me," she said. "I'm antisocial, they say. I don't mix. It's so strange. I'm very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn't it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this." She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. "Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don't think it's social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That's not social to me at all. It's a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it's wine when it's not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can't do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around .... I guess I'm everything they say I am, all right. I haven't any friends. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal.”
The picture on his back showed the Illustrated Man himself, with his fingers about my neck, choking me to death. I didn't wait for it to become clear and sharp and a definite picture.
(No shortage of quotes from this guy. I've barely scratched the surface--KJ)
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Framing Youth
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He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.
He's not even smiling in that picture! Still, Baxter might have been capable of believing in you as much as you wanted to believe in yourself. After all, he talked that youngster into coming back a star.
I wonder if there were any other stars from the silent era who could have played Gatsby. Rudolph Valentino? No. Gatsby may have been quite the lover, but as he was really James Gatz from North Dakota, you can forget the Latin part. Douglas Fairbanks? It would be kind of cool to see Jay Gatsby swing from the chandelier of his mansion and onto the grand staircase, where he engages Tom Buchanan to a sword duel, defeating him just in time to deliver the antidote to Daisy, locked in the wine cellar and slowly dying from pink champagne poisoning. OK, I'm joking around here, but it does show the difficulties that must be involved in finding the right actor to play Gatsby, who has a movie star aura about him, but can't resolve his problems in a typical movie star fashion.

What other 1940s actor could have played Jay Gatsby? Humphrey Bogart? Despite his wealth, Gatsby, in the end, was a beautiful loser. Alan Ladd could play beautiful losers. Bogart's forte was the homely winner. Errol Flynn? He had the smile. As for the rest, see Douglas Fairbanks, above.
One actor, no matter how good, does not a movie make. So how about the film as a whole? Despite its pulp fiction beginning, it threatens to turn into one long Sunday sermon. Even Gatsby turns Cotton Mather on us before falling face first in the swimming pool. Not that it gives us all that much sin to make the sermonizing worth it. For instance, the adulterous affair between Tom Buchanan (Barry Sullivan) and Mrytle Wilson (Shelley Winters, in her early blond bombshell phase) is inexplicably downplayed. In fact, had I not read the novel, I would have thought Tom was only into phone sex. Yes, I understand they couldn't show a man and a woman sharing the same bed back then. All I'm asking for is that they share the same scene. All I can think of is that the production code was so onerous back then, that even a character who was meant to be a total asshole still was expected to be faithful to his wife. Finally, there's Nick Carraway and Jordon Baker. MacDonald Carey is pretty good as Carraway, as the movie is pretty good to him, as he apparently finds true love with Baker, played by Ruth Hussey. She doesn't quite capture the cynical sophistication of Fitzgerald's character. I've seen Hussey accomplish that in other movies, so I tend to blame the script, which insists she be redeemed. How nice of the film to let the secondary characters live happily ever after. I wonder how come that never occurred to Fitzgerald.

Is there anybody else from the 1970s that could have played Jay Gatsby? The man who may have been the second biggest star of that era, Burt Reynolds, had the right smile for it, but can you imagine the Bandit letting somebody else drive his car?

Any other 1970s actresses that could have played Daisy instead? Faye Dunaway possibly. Julie Christie maybe. Perhaps Diane Keaton...OK, I apologize, but I can't mention Keaton AND Mia Farrow, without dragging Woody Allen into it. Allen has always had a fascination with the 1920s. Several of his movies have taken place then, and almost all of them have had music from the period on the soundtrack, even Sleeper, which took place 200 years in the future! I have this theory that Woody fell in love with Mia after watching this film and seeing her in all that '20s get-up. Maybe he even though he could be a short, bespectacled Gatsby to her Daisy. Now we are talking romantic illusion, because Gatsby never had designs on Daisy's daughter. Remember, the book was written by F Scott Fitzgerald, not Tennessee Williams.
Other than the two leads, how's the rest of the movie hold up? Without me having experienced it first hand, they seemed to have captured the 1920s fairly accurately, especially Gatsby's parties. And the supporting cast is OK. Sam Waterson is a fine Nick Carraway, though he's less proactive in the role than MacDonald Carey. In fact, other than his off-screen narration, which tapers off after a while, Waterson's performance is a series of reaction shots. But they're very good reaction shots, and in keeping with his character, who's mostly an observer. The beautiful Lois Chiles is the perfect Jordon Baker. Karen Black goes seemingly all-out slutty as Myrtle Wilson, until she reminds us her affair with Tom is one lower-class woman's hopeless attempt at upward mobility. Scott Wilson is all right as George Wilson. And the man who portrayed George in the 1949 movie, Howard Da Silva, appears here as Meyer Wolfsheim, Gatsby's amiable underworld business partner. Edward Herriman is amusing as Klipspringer, the same part which Elisha Cook Jr was miscast in the '49 movie (or, he would have been miscast had the script been more faithful to the book.) Finally, there's Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan. Though the thin actor doesn't look the part (Fitzgerald described Tom as being a powerfully-built former college football star), who else from the 1970s could have played such a dick so well?
What really sinks the '74 version in the end is, that for a movie based on a novel of which the paperback version isn't even 200 pages, it's either too long, too slow or both. How to explain this discrepancy? This movie is of the long-pause school of film making. Now, that's fine for some films. In fact, it's fine for quite a few. But The Great Gatsby should be timed to the syncopated rhythms of the Jazz Age, not the Snooze Age. Also, this movie becomes more humorless as it plods along. Now, The Great Gatsby is not a comic novel, but it does have a fair amount of wit, usually in Fitzgerald's/Carraway's descriptions of people, places, things, and situations. I know, a movie has to show, not describe. Well, the camera wasn't witty enough.
I'm skipping over the 2000 made-for-TV movie. Writing about one version I haven't seen is enough (if anyone reading has seen that version, feel free to give a critique of it in the comment section. For that matter, any octogenarians out there who've seen the now-lost silent version, your reviews are welcome also.)
This brings us to 2012. As I said at the outset, a new version is out in December. Here's the trailer, folks:
Now, I should be a little more objective when reviewing a trailer, shouldn't I? First off, that didn't sound like 1920s-era music on the that little bit of soundtrack we heard, did it? Maybe the producers should have asked Woody Allen if he could lend them something from his collection. Also, I understand this movie is in 3D. Now we'll all be afforded the opportunity to get run over by Daisy Buchanan. Speaking of which, in an ill-fated post I had up for about a half hour Monday night (6/4/2012), I extolled the choice of Nicole Kidman in the role of Daisy. Turns out she's not in the movie, as I was sidetracked by a phony, fan-made trailer. Someone by the name of Carey Mulligan plays Daisy instead. I know, "someone" sounds like a bit of a put-down. In fact, I found out that she's a highly regarded actress. I've just never seen her in anything, as out of touch as I am with current cinema (watching 50-year old movies has proven much more cost effective in these recessionary times.) Mulligan is certainly attractive enough, and much closer in age to Daisy than the 40-something Kidman, but I can't help but feel a bit disappointed. If there's any actress of the past two decades that could inspire all-consuming passion, it's Nicole Kidman. Just what is it about those downslope brows, small blue eyes, and that grin, anyway? But back to Carey Mulligan. In the "official" trailer, above, I see that she's billed third, behind Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire (whom I'm guessing plays Nick Carraway.) Perhaps that's as it should be. To paraphrase myself, Daisy is of equal billing only in Gatsby's eyes.
Now, how about Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby? I don't know. This may be something the actor has no control over, but doesn't DiCaprio always look like he's scowling to you?
Jay Gatsby never scowled!
Well, now let me mull that over. While Fitzgerald is purposely vague about it in order to maintain the mystery of the character, Jay Gatsby seems to have made his fortune illegally. His business partners were crooks, including one who apparently fixed the 1919 World Series (that really happened, though in Fitzgerald's book the perpetrator is fictional.) Gatsby wouldn't have been beaming giddily like an Up With People performer around such lowlifes. No, he would have wanted to show them that he was just as tough as they were. Sometimes that toughness came out even when he was among the highlifes:
I glanced at Daisy, who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband, and at Jordan, who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby — and was startled at his expression. He looked — and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden — as if he had “killed a man.” For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.OK, so Gatsby would have occasionally scowled. But there's so much more to him than that. No doubt this is a man ruthless enough to swim with, and maybe even occasionally take a bite out of, the sharks. Yet does he do it for material gain? Sure, there's the mansion and silk shirts and Rolls Royce, but those are merely majestic means to an idealized end: the heart of a pretty rich girl he knew for a couple of weeks before going off to fight the Great War. And that's why Gatsby never lost his smile. So, can DiCaprio smile?
Yeah, I guess he can.
I don't know if I'm going to see this movie when it comes out in December or not. It depends on how much money I have in my pocket at the time (I'm sure Christmas will demand its share.) I may just end up watching it on DVD, or maybe cable if I can ever afford it again. Or, at some distant date, maybe even this very computer. Sure, I'll miss out on the 3D, but so what?
The Great Gatsby done right should yield many more dimensions than a paltry three.
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