Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (dir. Tim Burton, 1985). I was surprised, having never seen it, that it’s less transgressive than Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but I suppose that’s because the movie came first. It’s silly fun, with Paul Reubens as a man-child whose quest to recover his stolen bicycle takes him to the Alamo, a rodeo, a biker bar (home of Satan’s Helpers), and a movie studio. My favorite bits: breakfast à la Rube Goldberg, “Tequila” à la Pee-wee. With Milton Berle, James Brolin, Morgan Fairchild, Ed Herlihy (from the world of newsreels), Prof. Toru Tanaka (the professional wrestler), and many more. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Voice in the Mirror (dir. Harry Keller, 1958). Richard Egan stars as Jim Burton, a commercial artist and, since the death of his daughter, a deeply invested alcoholic. Though the movie never mentions Alcoholics Anonymous, the story is more or less a version of how that group began: with Burton and Bill Tobin (Arthur O’Connell) helping each other and, later, others. Julie London is Ellen Burton, a long-suffering and infinitely patient wife (and wage-earner); Walter Matthau is a doctor skeptical about what Jim’s chances of success. Strong atmospherics: real streets and bars, and what looks like a real and really grim apartment. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Man on a Tightrope (dir. Elia Kazan, 1953). “It’s one of two things: it’s the end for us, or it’s the beginning”: so says a circus master in Communist Czechoslovakia as he schemes his troupe’s way to freedom. Fredric March is Karel Černík, the circus master; Gloria Grahame is his indolent wife; and many circus folk play versions of themselves. Things sometimes get a little too contrived, a little too corny, but the fear and suspicion that permeate life in a police state are chillingly on display, and the grim black-and-white cinematography makes this movie feel unmistakably European, or at least not American. With Paul Hartman (Mayberry’s Emmett Clark), Pat Henning (Kayo Dugan of On the Waterfront) Adolphe Menjou, and Terry Moore (Marie of Come Back, Little Sheba). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Gentlemen’s Agreement (dir. Elia Kazan, 1947). Philip Green (Gregory Peck), a writer asked to write an magazine exposé of antisemitism in America, decides that the only way to do so is to pretend he’s Jewish and experience discrimination firsthand — which he does, though it’s always of a genteel, mannerly variety. The movie leaves antisemitism as something to be fought with individual acts of conscience: speaking up when someone says something offensive, making a call to ensure that a landlord or employer doesn’t discriminate. Running through the movie is a love story that joins — it’s no spoiler — Peck and Dorothy McGuire, but I think Celeste Holm’s witty Anne Dettrey would be a much more interesting partner. Screenplay by Moss Hart, and also starring John Garfield, June Havoc, Anne Revere, a young Dean Stockwell, and Jane Wyatt. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Greatest Night in Pop (dir. Bao Nguyen, 2024). Well, maybe — I think that the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show is a worthy contender. But this documentary is about a night, literally, the one during which “We Are the World” was recorded, a night stretching into the small hours of the morning. The song has never impressed me (“We’re saving our own lives”?), and the documentary is more than a bit self-congratulatory, but the details of how the project came together are endlessly fascinating. For instance: Stevie Wonder taught a helpless Bob Dylan how to sing his line, and Prince wrote a song about his non-participation: “Hello.” ★★★★ (N)

*

The Whole Gritty City (dir. Richard Barber and Andre Lambertson, 2013). Made in New Orleans: a documentary following the directors and student-musicians of three marching bands as they prepare for Mardi Gras. There’s childhood humor — two boys arguing about whether one of them can march for 29,000 hours; adolescent determination — a drum major giving his all for a dead teacher (killed in a drive-by shooting); and adult sorrow — a teacher, perhaps forty, who is now the only surviving member of a circle of eight friends: “I’m the last one living.” Running through the movie is a dedication to the joy of music despite all odds. But as you watch, you wonder what might be about to happen every time a car comes down the street. ★★★★ (DVD)

[I borrowed a DVD from a library, but the movie can be found onYouTube, free with ads.]

*

Island of Doomed Men (dir. Charles Barton, 1940). Peter Lorre plays a crazy man: Stephen Danel, the sadistic, ethnically ambiguous, vaguely gay owner of Dead Man’s Island, who purportedly gives jobs to paroled cons but in truth uses them as slave labor. Danel and his wife Lorraine (Rochelle Hudson) live on the island, in a house surrounded by an electric fence — Lorraine too is a prisoner. Things begin to change when “John Smith” (Robert Wilcox) shows up: he’s a wrongfully convicted, now paroled undercover agent (Agent 64) whose recommenced assignment is to smash Danel’s operation. Nagging question: If the authorities already know what Danel is up to, why send one person to infiltrate the island to begin with? ★★ (YT)

*

The Miami Story (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1954). The improbable premise: when Miami is overrun with mob activity, city council members tap a former gangster (Barry Sullivan) to clean things up by pretending to move in on the established rackets. While so doing, our hero also finds time to pursue a romance with a crime boss’s girlfriend’s sister (Beverly Garland, later of My Three Sons). Sullivan gets top billing, but it’s Luther Adler’s movie: as the head of the rackets, he is all brutality, with a girlfriend (Adele Jergens) who’s equally tough. A crime story told in the always appealing semi-documentary style, complete with an introductory talk by a Florida senator. ★★★ (YT)

*

Main Street After Dark (dir. Edward L. Cahn, 1945). A blue star hangs in the window, a mother knits, and a telegram arrives, with the news that a son is coming home — but from prison, not from the war. And when that mother listens to the police radio as she knits, you know you’re in for a darkly funny movie. This one’s about a small-time crime family, led by Ma Dibson (Selena Royle), preying on servicemen in a city’s nightspots. Edward Arnold is a delight as a police lieutenant who, like Porfiry Petrovich, is always showing up; Dan Duryea as Posey Dibson (Posey!) and Audrey Totter as Jessie Belle Dibson are two of Ma’s surly minions. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Houston Story (dir. William Castle, 1956). They were never going to run out of cities: here the crime is a plot to siphon oil from wells and sell it to shady distributors. We wanted to watch this one for Edward Arnold. and his performance as a second-tier crime boss satisfies — shifty eyes, sudden outbursts. But much of this movie remained a muddle, with a leading man and antagonist (Gene Barry and Paul Richards) who looked too damn similar. Adding value: Barbara Hale as a platinum-blonde singing “Put the Blame on Mame.” ★★ (YT)

*

The Barber of Little Rock (dir. John Hoffman and Christine Turner, 2023). A short Oscar-nominated documentary about the good works of Arlo Washington, a young Black Little Rock barber who created a barber school and People Trust, a 501c3 financial institution making small loans to community members. It is the only financial institution on its side of the interstate that divides the city, a point that makes the filmmakers’ larger point about the wealth gap between Black and white Americans. I was moved by the scenes in which residents explain their need for a loan and what what they hope to accomplish with the money. And then we see a mechanic working in his own shop, a beautician walking into her own salon. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Ministry of Fear (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944). From a Graham Greene novel, starring Ray Milland as a man who stops by a village fête, walks away with a cake that was meant for someone else, and finds himself in big trouble. An excellent noirish thriller, with a séance, spies, a great scene on a train, and strong overtones of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. This film makes conspicuous use of doors — one after another, each opening onto new trouble. My favorite moments: the man crumbling cake, Martha Penteel’s doorbell, light shining through a bullet hole. (These sentences mostly borrowed from a 2017 post.) ★★★★ (CC)

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The Internets, sometimes wonderful

Yesterday when I looked at my stats, I noticed visit after visit from the Czech Republic to a post about Gilmore Girls and phrasal verbs.

From a class learning English? Investigating, perhaps, the faux-rule about never ending a sentence with a preposition? Did a teacher find this post and pass it on to students? Did a student find it and pass it on to peers? I have no idea. But the Internets are sometimes wonderful.

But I must add: if this had happened ten or more years ago, someone would likely have taken the time to leave a comment. Then again, I didn’t write that post until 2017.

Feedback in e-mail

I’m no power user, but I always find something of interest when I listen to the Mac Power Users podcast. This morning, listening to episode 740 while out on a walk, I was happy to hear a tech person confirming the wisdom of one of the bits of advice — to reply and say thanks — in my post How to e-mail a professor. That’s the one bit in the post to which some readers have objected.

The guest in this MPU episode was Lee Garrett, product manager, productivity coach, and owner of ScreenCastsOnline. He described four elements of communication: sender, receiver, message, and feedback. Feedback, he says, is the element that people forget.

“If you don’t get feedback on the message that you sent, there’s no guarantee that that message has been received. I see this all the time ... and it’s one of the downfalls of e-mail and instant messaging.”

Exactly. Sending an e-mail should not feel like sending a message in a bottle.

[The relevant comments begin at 1:11:11. Granted, Garrett isn’t saying to say thanks, but he is saying to reply.]

Proust Barbie

Lucy Boynton reports that Proust Barbie was cut from Barbie because audiences didn’t get the joke: “it turns out that contemporary audiences don’t know who Proust is” (Rolling Stone).

This contemporary audience does. When our fambly saw Ratatouille some years ago, my kids had to calm me down when this Proust moment happened. (”Dad!“) I was going slightly bonkers in the theater.

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Long-term care insurance: my 2¢

Now that my mom's long-term care insurance (hereafter, “LTCI”) has run out, I feel free to offer some observations. My observations are drawn from experience with a single company, Genworth (hereafter, “the company”), and everyone’s mileage varies. My mom has beaten the house, but my suggestion, nevertheless, would be to avoid LTCI. Here’s why:

~ The premiums are expensive and become more so. Stop paying in and you lose everything you’ve already put in: it’s the sunk cost trap. (My mom’s last premium, four years ago: $10,000.) No one counted on so many people living long enough to try to collect.

~ It’s necessary to have a persistent (and probably much younger) advocate willing to spend considerable time submitting a claim, submitting and resubmitting power of attorney documentation and other paperwork, making repeated phone calls to check on claim status, to argue, to report changes in living circumstances, and to spend lots of time on hold.

~ The company may be reluctant to pay up. Filing a claim begins a “elimination period” of 100 days or more before the claim can be considered. Elimination indeed: the company is no doubt wagering that the policyholder might die as those days count down.

~ When the elimination period is over, the company may still be reluctant to pay up. The two conditions for honoring a claim: (1) inability to manage two of the five so-called activities of daily living (bathing, dressing, eating, “toileting,” “transferring”¹) or (2) severe cognitive impairment. Even a statement from a doctor of geriatric medicine on hospital letterhead may not be enough to convince the company that (1) applies, because the company will perform its own assessment of the policyholder by way of a Zoom call conducted by an outside agency. It’s reported that such assessments may take a policyholder’s answers to questions at face value, though it’s well known that people with dementia will give the “right” answers to questions whether or not those answers are true. As for (2), what counts as severe cognitive impairment seems to be highly subjective. A representative of the company, offering an example: “You don’t need to know what year it is to fulfill the tasks of daily living.” One need not be a thoroughgoing cynic to suspect that the company might use the fuzziness of (2) to avoid paying a claim. Notice, by the way, that making a phone call and managing medication are two activities of daily living glaringly absent from the list. Their inclusion would immediately give more claims a shot at (1).

~ It may be necessary to submit a second (or third? or fourth?) claim as the policyholder’s abilities diminish.

~ If the company does finally honor a claim, the persistent advocate will need to keep up month by month. The monthly cost of assisted living or memory care is borne by the policyholder. The advocate then sends the monthly bill to the company and waits for reimbursement to show up in a bank statement. This paperwork is the easy part of the job, after all earlier obstacles are overcome.

I’m happy that I could do the work of dealing with LTCI for my mom. I don’t begrudge a minute of the time. And I don’t mind going up against a bureaucracy. But it’s far wiser to invest money elsewhere.

A bit of browsing will confirm that my observations about this company are not unusual. But they’re the ones I’ve got.

¹ “Transferring”: sitting down, standing up.

Stormy Monday

It’s the first day of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial. Have a good rest of your day, sir!

Here’s a small section of Trump’s Saturday night fever in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania (my transcription):

”Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was, the battle of Gettysburg, what an unbelievable, I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious, and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. It, it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch and, eh, the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice that? — no longer in favor. Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill. They were fighting uphill. He said, wow, that was a big mistake. He lost his great general. And, eh, they were fighting. Never fight uphill, me boys! But it was too late.“

Imagine what he’d be like as a witness (which I don’t think is going to happen).

A portal

[419 West 36th Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I have to imagine that if anyone with children lived in this building, life must have been a constant battle: “Stay out of the tunnel!”

The archive photo has no date for this building, but its construction must have predated that of the Lincoln Tunnel. The building is now gone, and if you type its address into Google Maps, you get, yes, a chunk of the Lincoln Tunnel. And if you type lincoln tunnel into Google Maps and make a U-turn, you can ride one of its tubes all the way to Weehawken, New Jersey, against traffic. Even Tony Soprano couldn’t do that.

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More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[U-turn: in other words, turn the little person around before moving forward.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I found today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, dang near impossible at times. I slogged through and got it all, but it sparked no joy. I was happy though to be done, because doing this puzzle felt to me like doing homework.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

3-D, five letters, “One of many in night table drawers.” My first thought was NOVEL. But I was probably thinking of the New York Times “nightstand” holding books.

4-D, eight letters, “Not the parental disciplinarian.” Never heard of it. I need to bone up on my stereotypes.

5-D, three letters, “James P. Hoffa alma mater.” Is this answer likely to be known by anyone whose last name is something other than Hoffa?

8-D, nine letters, “Cockney, e.g.” I liked this one.

9-A, five letters, “Residential healthcare provider.” Like 4-D, this answer doesn’t sit well with me.

11-D, nine letters, “Green fish-and-chips side dish.” Is it really going to be — ? Yes, it’s going to be —.

13-D, four letters, “Like M. north of New York.” I didn’t understand until I typed the clue here.

23-D, five letters, “Italian word for ‘bowls.’” I can relate, not as a participant, but as an observer from a passing car.

32-A, eleven letters, “Fliers named for their blades.” I guess I learned something for future crossword use.

34-D, nine letters, “Alien monster.” See 32-A.

35-D, nine letters, “What's best on the block?” An easy one.

42-A, eleven letters, “Go together.” What an odd answer. A more apt clue might be “Go as one.”

43-D, seven letters, “The Buick stops here.” I was trying to recall an answer from some previous crossword, but no, that was ALERO, the last Oldsmobile produced. “Buick,” here for the sake of a pun, is weirdly specific in this clue.

53-D, five letters, “Many a pop.” My first thought was PEPSI. I find the logic of this clue a bit bizarre.

61-A, nine letters, “They have reduced carrying charges.” Nice one.

64-A, nine letters, “Base of some martial arts.” Also a nice one.

68-A, three letters, “Overfilled indicator.” SPILL won’t fit.

My favorite in this puzzle: 17-A, nine letters, “Many a United team supporter.” Just because I knew it.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Siduri and Marcus

Thinking about the joylessness of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations made me recall this passage from the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh story. Siduri, goddess and tavern-keeper at the edge of the world, speaks to Gilgamesh, who seeks a way out of the world of living and dying:

“When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man.”

Fear of death isn’t the problem for Marcus. But what he seems not to know is that life can be beautiful. And not mindlessly beautiful but beautiful even when or especially when one understands that it comes to an end.

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All OCA Gilgamesh posts (Pinboard)

[The Gilgamesh passage is from N.K. Sandars’s highly readable composite The Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Penguin, 1972). For a scholarly translation, try The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Maureen Gallery Kovacs (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). “Old Babylonian”: not what’s known as the Standard Version of the story.]

Bacon and Peanuts

[Peanuts, April 15, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

Remember oral reports? Sally is giving one on the importance of reading.

Yesterday’s Peanuts is today’s Peanuts.

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