Oscar Night

Ke Huy Quan reunited with Harrison Ford

I watched a little of the Oscars. I was touched by Ke Huy Quan's win for Best Supporting Actor although I haven't seen the movie.

I was dog sitting and my sister and brother-in-law arrived home a little after it began.

The Navalny "documentary" won. 

Only one person in a group of winners gets to speak, but they often seem unaware of this. A second person will try to talk and they crank up the music to drive them away. It keeps things moving but it's painful to watch in a different way.

Paulie Go! (2022)

Paulie Go is a socially awkward boy genius who creates a robotic toy car with an advancement in artificial intelligence. He gets in a van and drives cross country to find a professor who rejected him. 

The reclusive professor is somewhere in rural Minnesota. Paulie is picked up for driving his uncle's stolen van. His uncle won't press charges explaining on speaker phone how pitiful his poor nephew is and Paulie continues his search with the help of the sheriff's troubled daughter.

It looked like it'd be a pleasant movie, and it was, but it became a little more science fictiony than I expected.

If Paulie (Ethan Dizon) was a bit of a stereotype, Tracie Thoms plays a Black woman scientific genius and Madison Wolfe co-stars as a teen girl fisherman.

Getting Straight (1970)

I saw this movie a couple of times when I was in high school. They kept showing it at the university. I didn't realize they filmed it at the local community college.

Elliott Gould plays a former campus radical Vietnam Veteran who returns to college to get his teaching credential. He's trying to graduate. His professors are mad at him and he's trying to focus on school rather than political activism. He rails against his girlfriend (Candice Bergen's) petit bourgeois tendencies while pursuing a teaching career himself.

Things were very different back then. 

"Why, Harry? Why a teaching credential?" a friend asks.

"Money...money and power and little girls to molest!" he says. "It's a great life."

It was presumably a joke, but he shouted this on a crowded campus. And, come to think of it, he was teaching a freshman English class and sleeps with one of his students.

He calls his girlfriend a "dumb broad" at one point and there are a couple of anti-gay things. He was pretty stodgy for a radical.

He struggles to pay his $150 tuition, but that was over $1,000 in today's money. You could buy a ten-year-old car for $150 back then, but cars weren't built to last ten years in those days. Elliott Gould drives a 1958 Bel Air, only 12-years-old when this thing was filmed, but it was a hopeless wreck.

He probably wouldn't have been much of a teacher. He yells a lot and flies off the handle. If he had been a music major, it could have been a prequel to Mr Holland's Opus.

With Harrison Ford in a small role.

Robert Blake RIP

Maybe he was innocent. They never found the murder weapon. He was the obvious suspect but that's not really evidence.

If he murdered his horrible wife he was an idiot. His "alibi" was that he was fifty feet away for a minute or two while he went to get his gun. 

He was great in In Cold Blood and Electra Glide in Blue. One of the few actors left who worked with Humphrey Bogart. 

Robert Blake died yesterday at age 89.

The poor devil had a horrible childhood, then Leonard Maltin blamed him for how bad The Little Rascals became when MGM took over the series. 

Dark Shadows (2012) and Spencer (2021)

Two soap operas that didn't work for me

I'd watched old episodes of Dark Shadows on the streaming channel Pluto. It was an after-school soap opera from the late '60's. Came on at four o'clock. Kids would hurry home from school to watch. It was a little before my time. I wasn't old enough to get into it, but my sister had some friends who did and I learned recently that I have a cousin who loved it.

But it was a soap opera. A real soap opera on five days a week. Filmed live on tape. Every episode had a flubbed line here and there and sometimes the camera would pan too far and you could see past the edge of the set. But it was all dialogue, every scene a long conversation.

So I turned on the movie starring Johnny Depp. It was mostly a series of montages. I couldn't get into it. It had the same basic plot, but little in common with the original series.

Watched about half, turned it off and started Spencer, something about Princess Diana. But it was the same thing. There've been so many shows about her and the various royals. We know who they were and pretty much know what went on. But the movie was another trashy soap opera they tried to improve on by making it non-verbal. 

It looked impressive, but I want to hear their conniving.

 

Nobody (2021, Bob Odenkirk)

I thought it'd be comedic since it starred Bob Odenkirk, but it wasn't. Would any 58-year-old man do all that stuff even if he could? Very violent with implausible fight scenes that went on and on. 

A few things in it were reminiscent of Breaking Bad. There's a Dodge Challenger, there are pallets stacked with bundles of money, there's a dangerous old man in a nursing home. 

I'm not sure a guy pushing 60 would survive all those punches to the face. I wondered about that watching John Wayne's later movies--and he always smiled when people punched him. There was a woman in her 50's around here who decided to take up boxing. I guess she was in shape to do it, but she went into a coma after her first bout.

They were careful to make it clear that Bob Odenkirk did his own fight scenes.

Harry & Meghan

Someone kindly shared their Netflix log in information with me. They've had Netflix for years and almost never watched it, so Netflix still comes out way ahead. They've canceled it but still have two weeks to go.

To be honest, I turned this thing on and haven't paid close attention to it. I don't think I missed anything. It's stuff we already knew or safely assumed. Look at those people! Would you marry into that family? Harry and Meghan were right to get out, but it shouldn't take six hours to say why.

It's like most reality TV, about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.

I have Episode One on as I write this. They're talking about their second date. They met at a restaurant. Harry thinks something is funny.

"You were late," Harry explains.

"I was late?"

"Yes. Remember?"

A moment of spontaneous levity.

I can't sympathize with Harry at all. He's a killer and always walked around wearing stupid-looking uniforms. He even wore one to his wedding. Meghan wore a big giant wedding dress. Had to have children help carry it. 

We see them fleeing Canada in a private jet. They're going to California where they'll stay with a "friend" who's a rich guy they never met.