Odds and Sods

I’m about one-quarter way into the third (of 15) episodes of the 2005-2006 miniseries of Bleak House.

I think I’ve tried watching other productions of this and quickly got bored. This one is fortified with a pretty good cast which includes Charles Dance, Gillian Anderson, and (haven’t gotten to him yet) Alun Armstrong. But nearly all the fill-in characters are good. Burn Gorman is remarkably creepy as Guppy.

Although I’m not a big fan of Dickens, some of his naming conventions (if over the top) are amusing: Dedlock, Clamb, Tulkinghorn, Guppy, Flite, Smallweed, Skimpole, Bucket, Turveydrop, etc.

Whether this holds up for fifteen episodes (I doubt it) I’ll continue with it for now.

Anderson kind of plays it quietly haunted in sort of a plasticky sort of way.

Instead of watching the inane Super Bowl halftime show (or 2 or more hours of pregame), we watched Forrest Gump.

I'd watched this once before, probably 25 years ago. It still holds up. My favorite part by far is when Forrest catches some hippie dude slapping Jenny around. Forrest rushes in and pummels the guy's face with blow after blow. I almost came to my feet and applauded. I'm not kidding. I said to my brothers something like "There are several million people in America who need to have some conservative sense beaten into them."

However one feels about the war in Vietnam, these hippies were a waste of humanity. And I thought it was brave of the movie (at the time) to portray Jenny as such a classic case of the deeply hysterical woman chasing Mr. Goodbar while dousing herself in endless rounds of sex and drugs in order to somehow "find" herself.

Granted, Jenny had an abusive upbringing. She had reason to freak out a little. But I kept smiling my way through his picture as Robin Wright (Princess Buttercup) played the role of the screwed-up female to a tee. In many ways, the hippie generation (and feminism) was abusive to women. If man could invent yet another way to manipulate and use women, they could do no worse than to recreate the 60's "flower power" generation whereby the men (and others) convinced women that spreading there legs early and often was the key to "finding themselves."

Some of the Forrest Gump insertion-into-history was way over the top. But, generally, the movie was a nice mix of funny and poignant. And where the hell else are you going go to see a hippie get the crap beaten out of him?

Yeah, Lieutenant Dan is a great part of this movie. You get the culminating moment (spoiler) when he shows up out of the blue at Gump's wedding. Sinese clearly plays him as a changed man, the one Gump says "Finally made peace with god." He notes to Gump that he hadn't actually yet thanked him for saving his life.



Yeah, good scene. Didn't Northern, Eastern, and/or Western men once defend women? Those times are gone. When you look at the fecklessness of women's sports wherein they can't or won't defend themselves from men, that's not a lot of inspiration for men to step in and try to protect the women.

Jenny was a head-case. But she had that early bond with Forrest that never went away. But she was a modern woman in that dissatisfaction had become a way of life. She found her way out near the end but there were a lot of wasted miles.

Yes, cynicism has ruined the ability to both tell and enjoy a good story for many. Blame the usual suspects (Darwinism, Freudiansim, Marxism). The mindset instilled is that everything is a con. Nothing is real. Everything is fungible. Everything can be reduced to a meaningless nothing. And at the end of the day, nothing can rise above my personal experience. My Self is King of All.

To enjoy, say, Casablanca, I have to in some way acknowledge and accept that there are people braver than me, more noble than me, more capable than me, etc. This transaction has the potential to be uplifting because I can identify with the higher causes, the purer ethics, or the nobler personage.

But much of what passes for entertainment today is simply a means of flattering people. The Snowflake culture has come home to roost. The lowest common denominator is not much to shoot for when trying to tell a good story.



I certainly agree, which is why "woke" movies tend to do poorly. Although it's completely wrong to suppose we dislike films that have a message, we certainly don't like films that nag and hector.



Hmm. Never heard of the show Community.

Okay, I stopped reading after this writer said he was a fan of the very show he blames for much of the mess. Okie doke. Perhaps he goes on to comment about the most obvious change from decades ago (and someone measuring from the 1990's has little perspective).

It is arguable that the last true adult stopped being produced sometime around 1955. Yute Culture began to take over. "Don't trust anyone over 30." It has culminated not only in legions of young men rarely going out, rarely dating, and perhaps never marrying. It has led to a general infantilization of the culture.

This should be obvious and should be the first line of any article that talks about why pop culture entertainment is so degraded. It's completely obvious that a show made more 5-year-olds (Captain Kangaroo) is not going to work for adults.

But what happens when people rarely achieve an adult mindset with the requisite refinement of taste via experience, self-reflection, and wisdom? You then get the equivalent of Captain Kangaroo written in movies aimed at "adults." These are the Marvel movies, some of the dumbest movies ever created.

Do a simple thought experiment: Which actress of today (or the last 30 years) could stand in for Bette Davis? Granted, many of the roles she plays were of the ball-busting feminist kind. But she played an adult with adult feelings, sophisticated in thought and action – traits that are probably indecipherable by today's denuded viewers.

Another thing about cynicism, making everything a joke, etc. It's the same phenomenon seen most clearly in stand-up comedy of today vs. yesteryear. The lazy man's joke is the f-bomb...and streams of them. And the lazy screenwriter's tool is not taking anything seriously. Meaning and substance require work. And even more than that, they require having noble creative impulses. They need to come from a place more than a spoiled, self-absorbed child.