All these dance programs on TV these days…
So they think they can dance?
They don’t even come close to this excerpt from the 1943 musical “Stormy Weather.” Fred Astaire supposedly said that this was the greatest dance number ever filmed.
Enjoy this. You won’t regret it.
p.s. In watching this again, I noticed that the band is playing live, in real time. How cool is that!
I just got the news of the Supreme Court decision today “upholding” the so-called second amendment right to bear arms. I have not had a chance to read the full opinions yet, but from the initial news summaries, it looks like all existing state and local gun control laws are in peril. My wife, Eileen (a very sharp lawyer), wonders whether the import and effect of the decision will allow any fracking yahoo to have a fully automatic weapon. I don’t know the answer to that yet, but when I find out I’ll let you all know. If you want to read the actual opinions [majority decision + concurring and dissenting separate opinions] jump right in.
Anyway, this ruling is yet but another sad chapter to the shameful saga of the rightwing attempt to dismantle our Constitution. By no means do I mean to criticize “laymen” for not realizing how important the courts are in shaping our society and individual lives, but I think it is fair to wish that the public as a whole would collectively tune in to the issue. In this regard, you must watch or read the great speech that Al Franken recently delivered on this subject. While many still write Franken off as some sort of gadfly, he is for real – believe me. Anyway, I usually shy away from giving you long watching/reading assignments, but this is one that is required.
Upshot: We need to be worrying as much or even more about who our Judges are as we do about who represents us in the Senate, Congress, and state/local elective offices.
[Post script: After publishing this post I thought that I might have been a bit presumptuous because I had only read the text of the Franken speech and not taken the 35 + minutes to watch it. So, I just watched the whole thing, and it fares even better in that milieu. It reminds me of FDR's great "Economic Royalists" speech. It's all great in the watching, but here is a portion that jumped out at me:
It’s important to recognize that, for some conservative legal activists, this is the whole point. Do they want to undercut abortion and immigration and Miranda rights? Sure. But those are just cherries on the sundae.
What conservative legal activists are really interested in is this question: What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation’s right to profit?
And their preferred answer is: None of them. Zero.
I just finished watching the final episode of season 7 of “MI-5.” This series is by far the best spy genre programming that exists in today’s TV milieu. It is a British production, which goes under the title “Spooks” in its original incarnation. I HIGHLY recommend it to everyone. Start with season one and go from there. The series has so many jaw-dropping moments I could not even begin to chronicle them. And, you have to be on your toes for every moment of dialog lest you miss a crucial fact or clue. The cast has been top-notch over all 7 years.
The point of my title to this post is that whenever I find a great TV series to recommend to my friends, I have this sense of very strong sense of envy, thinking of them getting to see it for the first time, unknown and pristine. I truly do envy them because I know that as much as I love each series, it would never be as good as the first time even if I chose to re-watch it.
By the way, this motif works best with TV series as opposed to one-off movies. Think of it as an intense affair of the heart as opposed to a one-night-stand.
Other series that make me have the same feeling of delicious envy when I recommend them:
Deadwood – Six Feet Under – Sopranos – Queer as Folk (US/Canadian version) - Rescue Me – The Shield –The Westwing - I, Claudius - Elizabeth R. (Glenda Jackson rules!) - Brideshead Revisited (the BBC series with Jeremy Irons, not the recent movie) – Battlestar Galactica (new funky version, which is fracking great) - Friday Night Lights (a true sleeper)
Watch on brothers and sisters,
~Tom
I’m up at our Tahoe/Donner house this weekend. Our neighbors across the way put something up on one of the lodge pole pines growing behind their place. Every time I walk by and look at it I smile.
A bit of Tolkien, right?
I’m on my way to the Tahoe/Donner place tonight for the weekend. I was out of town last weekend in Los Angeles at my nephew’s wedding. I will post something more significant while I’m up at the Tahoe place this weekend. Stand by…
~ tom
This BP gulf disaster is so outrageous. It’s a wonder Mother Earth hasn’t told us all to get the hell out. The whole situation is massively depressing. Having said that, I can also observe that laughter is a good antidote for depression.
Thanks to my friend Josh Feldman for pulling my coat to this hilarious and amazingly creative video.
~ Tom
I just viewed two movies on Blu-Ray CD’s from Netflix: “It’s Complicated” and “Crazy Heart.”
As readers to this blog know, I’m pretty much a sucker for most romantic comedies. I like them because they make me feel happy and because they have a predictable, comforting formula. One constant is that in one way or another there is always a monkey wrench thrown into the gears of the blooming romance, be it a seeming betrayal, an antic mix-up, or a dark secret revealed. And, almost always, the romance ends up back on track in the end.
With that said, “It’s Complicated” doesn’t quite follow that the formula, which makes it all the more interesting. The twist on the formula is the that main protagonists, Streep and Baldwin had been married for twenty years or so and then divorced for ten. They had no secrets, they had already gone through the betrayals, and they knew each other’s quirks so well that mix-ups didn’t really phase them that much. So, what the writers did was shunt the blooming romance to a third character, Steve Martin. That way they could work in one of the all-time great betrayal, antic mix-up scenes ever: the web cam fiasco. I’m still cracking up over it. But the other interesting break from formula was that the blooming romance did not get back on track. I fully expected that Streep and Martin would have the usual formulaic make up scene, but instead, Martin decides he cannot take the risk. True, the movie ends with the two of them under an umbrella, but we know it ain’t gonna happen. Anyway, it is a terrific movie in my book. If you want to read a good review of the movie, check out Michael Lally’s take.
“Crazy Heart” was also a surprise of sorts. After Bad Blake suffers the truly terrifying experience of losing his girl friend’s kid while he is drunk as usual, he hits bottom and cleans up in rehab. Now according to the formula for these types of movies he either gets back together with the girl friend (redemption), or is rejected and relapses (destruction). The nice, and surprising, thing about “Crazy Heart” is that after the beautiful rejection scene at the girl friend’s screen door, (with him naively expecting to resume the relationship), he does not fall off the wagon and go into a tailspin. Instead he stays sober and experiences happiness and prosperity in the end. Nice. My only criticism of the movie is casting Colin Farrell as “Tommy.” I just could not buy him in the role of a successful country western singer. But in the end, the movie IS Jeff Bridges, who certainly deserved his Oscar.
