Peppermint Hallmark

[Peanuts, November 22, 1970.]

Peppermint Patty (last name Reichardt I once heard) is watching a beauty contest. But I prefer to believe that she’s watching the Hallmark Channel.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard) : I am a prisoner of Hallmark Movies and Mysteries : Hallmark ex machina : The Bridge, continued : Shine on, Hallmark Channel : Sleigh Bells Ring

[Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts. This strip ran again this past Sunday. Extra credit if you recognize the source for “(last name Reichardt I once heard).”]

“Useful, poetic,” &c.

Rachel Peden writes of losing the battle against weeds but loving her garden “just the same”:

I Iove it on the day when the earth is prepared and I can take off my shoes and walk barefooted on the fresh, moist, sun-warmed soil. I love it when I put my shoes back on and begin to work, marking off rows and putting in seeds, and almost forgetting to stop in time to start supper. I love it when the first bean sprouts appear, the little bowed green heads first, then the two little green hands held up above the face. A garden makes me feel useful, poetic, comforted, overworked, justified for living, luxurious. I always promise to be faithful to this one, but every year the weeds are more faithful than I. After all, they have nothing else to do, of course.

Rachel Peden, The Land, the People (Bloomington, IN: Quarry Books, 2010).

As late as the first days of November, we still had tiny plum tomatoes growing. But the frost ended that. Our raised beds are now covered with cardboard and waiting for the spring. The first time it snows I want to sit with Elaine at the kitchen table and plan out next year’s crops.

Also from Rachel Peden
Against school consolidation : Dry goods, &c. : Inspiration for writing : “For pies and jelly and philosophy” : “On speaking terms with yourself”

The obvious

Amy Davidson Sorkin, writing in The New Yorker about “Liberals and Sexual Harassment”:

When Clinton ran for President in 2016, she may not have gauged how profoundly Bill Clinton’s record with women would hurt her.

Ya think? And:

As hard as it is to hear, particularly given the historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy and her laudable record on everything from climate change to children’s health, her nomination compromised the Democratic Party.

Ya think? And:

There were other choices, early on; perhaps one of the fourteen Democratic women in the Senate in 2015 might have emerged.

“Might have emerged” — if what?

There was another choice later on as well, but in Davidson Sorkin’s telling, there is no Bernie Sanders.

Timmy Martin, writer

A Dixon Ticonderoga works for most purposes. But not all. From the Lassie episode “The Contest” (September 20, 1959), as Timmy Martin prepares to write about What My Pet Means to Me:

“Where’s the pen and ink and good paper?”

Notice: the pen. One, for the house. It’s a dip pen.

Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

Nanski

[Click for a larger view.]

A Nancy parody, found in a sampler of MAD imitators. The titles on the TV screen: Khrushchev Knows Best, I Love Nikita, and Meet the Pravda.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[Khrushchev’s name might be misspelled in the comic. Too small to tell.]

Domestic comedy

“A Thanksgiving movie now? When it’s already almost Christmas?!”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

A pocket notebook sighting

[A Stranger in Town (dir. Roy Rowland, 1943).]

John Josephus Grant (Frank Morgan) looks at a blank page as he asks questions: Have you always lived in this state? Are you sure you’ve never lived in another state? Did you file your income tax this year? The man he’s questioning gets more and more worried. And then Grant explains:

“It’s an old trick that Justice Brandeis used to play. I read about it in Collier’s once. You see, it’s an unfortunate fact, Mr. Adams, but every man, even you and I, has done something that he doesn’t want anybody to know about. Now if you can make him think that you’re holding in your hand the skeleton in his closet — you’ve got him. Well, let’s say at least you’ve got him squirming, nervous, worried, as you were. But if that man happens to have a really guilty conscience. . . .”

What Grant doesn’t give away is that he didn’t read about this trick in Collier’s. He himself is a Supreme Court Justice, on vacation and incognito.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Twelve more movies

The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2017). A third-tier sculptor, two of his three wives, and his three adult children. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, perhaps, but here it’s a way very much influenced by Anton Chekhov, Woody Allen, and Wes Anderson. My favorite line: “You guys will never know what it’s like to be me in this family.” The all-star cast includes Candice Bergen, Judd Hirsch, Dustin Hoffman, Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, and Emma Thompson. But there’s less here than meets the eye.

*

A Stranger in Town (dir. Roy Rowland, 1943). A Supreme Court justice (Frank Morgan) travels incognito for a brief vacation and, still incognito, sets things right in a small town. The claustrophobia and corruption of small-town life are played for laughs, and justice wins in the end, just as in real life. At the one-stop shop for obscurities, YouTube.

*

Alimony (dir. Alfred Zeisler, 1949). Martha Vickers is the starring attraction in a sketchy lawyer’s scheme: have her marry a rich guy, frame him for infidelity, sue for divorce, and collect, yes, alimony, with the lawyer taking a cut. I especially liked the scenes of boarding house life and Leonid Kinskey’s comic turn as a theatrical producer. The movie moves toward Detour-like sordidness before steering (crazily) to a disappointingly wholesome ending. Another YouTube find.

*

Stranger Things, second season (dir. Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer, Shawn Levy, Andrew Stanton, Rebecca Thomas, 2017). I described the first season of Stranger Things as Ghostwriter meets E.T. The second season might be described as Ghostwriter meets E.T. meets Theseus-and-the-Minotaur meets The Exorcist. Darker, scarier than the first season, and excellent fun. Caution: contains nougat.

*

My Cousin Vinny (dir. Jonathan Lynn, 1992). Someone recommended this wonderful comedy to Elaine. Somehow we had never seen it. Someday you should see it if you haven’t. A neophyte Brooklyn lawyer, or “lawyer” (Joe Pesci), travels to Alabama to defend his cousin and his cousin’s friend, two college fellows wrongly accused of murder. It’s a good thing that Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) comes along. I’m not surprised to learn that lawyers love this film. But I am surprised to learn that the film is used in teaching law.

*

One of Us (dir. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, 2017). The documentarians of Detropia and Jesus Camp look at the struggles of three ex-Hasidim: Etty, a mother of seven who’s fled an abusive husband; Luzer, a struggling actor; and Ari, a young man who was raped as a child and is now bedeviled by drugs. Each has grown up without skills of work and social life; each now tries to establish an identity apart from an insular culture of surveillance and intimidation that demands absolute conformity to its rules. (Talk about fundamentalism: Etty shows the filmmakers a son’s reading primer in which every girl’s face has been blacked out.) As the film makes clear, the cost of leaving the community can be very high.

*

The Exception (dir. David Leveaux, 2016). Love and espionage in wartime. Christopher Plummer plays Kaiser Wilhelm in exile in the Netherlands. In his grand house, an affair begins between a German officer (Jai Courtney) and a maid (Lily James). The narrative is somewhat predictable, but with moments of genuine suspense. Best scene: dinner with Himmler, as the Kaiser meets the new order.

*

Maudie (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2016). The life of Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins), self-taught Canadian artist. Lewis suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and lived in rural isolation and poverty, married to a man who here seems at times emotionally inert, at other times downright abusive. Is Ethan Hawke’s brutish Everett Lewis a just representation of Maud’s husband? Is Maud’s inarticulateness (which seems to suggest intellectual disability) a just representation of her character? I don’t know. Worth watching, but the film leaves so many matters unaddressed, including the first thirty-odd years of Lewis’s life.

*

20th Century Women (dir. Mike Mills, 2016). It is 1979 in Santa Barbara. Annette Bening plays Dorothea Fields, a divorced mother, a Salem smoker, the first female drafting technician at the Continental Can Company, and the owner of a rambling old house with boarders. To raise her fourteen-year-old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), Dorothea enlists the help of her boarder Abbie (Greta Gerwig) and the girl next door, Julie (Elle Fanning). Dorothea’s male boarder William (Billy Crudup), all mustache and chambray, is put to other purposes. The film moves from character to character, as if from room to room (with title cards giving each character’s name and year of birth), and is much more about character than “action.” Most of the events in the film, I realize, arrive in the form of conversations. Exceedingly well written and acted.

*

Notorious (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1946). Ingrid Bergman as Alicia Huberman, daughter of a Nazi spy, recruited by American intelligence to infiltrate a group of post-war Nazis in Brazil. Cary Grant is Devlin, the American agent who loves her. Claude Rains is Alex Sebastian, a Nazi in Brazil, also in love with Alicia. (Ick.) The Bergman–Grant scenes make Notorious the most erotic Hitchcock film I’ve seen. But it’s Leopoldine Konstantin, as Alex’s mother, who steals the show.

*

Rear Window (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). I remember the excitement when this film, Vertigo, and three others returned to theaters in the 1980s. Why not watch yet again? Or better — why not watch the people across the courtyard, and watch Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly watch the people across the courtyard? Something I don’t think I’d noticed before: the bamboo shades (think theater curtain) go down during the closing credits. And Thelma Ritter’s lines: “In the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker. Any of those bikini bombshells you’re always watching worth a red-hot poker?” How’d they get that past the censors?

*

The Promise (dir. Terry George, 2016). A love triangle — a journalist, a governess, a medical student — in the time of the Armenian genocide. Early on, the film’s lavish attention to beautiful costumes and sets threatens to displace attention from the characters. Later, events themselves make the characters seem less and less important. Some descriptions of the film speak of a love triangle “set against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide.” But what does it mean to think of genocide as a backdrop? To my mind, the most moving scene in the film is the final one, one that has nothing to do with the triangle. As the movies teach us, the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

“The long and short of it”

[Alonzo Mourning and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.]

On the PBS NewsHour tonight, hopeful words from Alonzo Mourning, talking with Charlayne Hunter-Gault: “What sportsmanship can teach us about healing racial divides.” I trust that everyone involved saw the sweet incongruity in these pull-away shots.

[Mourning uses the phrase “the long and short of it” in the course of the conversation.]

Grammar and patriarchy

In The New York Times, Carmel McCoubrey writes about nouns and gender and French: “Toppling the Grammar Patriarchy.” With a sidetrip into singular they.