Froggy Met a Princess

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

Door ToadSomewhere around 2004 Disney shut down their animation studio and disbanded it. The future was computer animation, not hand-drawn stuff. Their competitors found themselves awash with well-trained talent.

In 2009, Disney released a new hand-drawn cartoon, The Princess and the Frog. They built a whole new animation department. It uses computers, of course, but the important parts are still hand drawn.

It’s Disney’s first princess of color. If you don’t count Pocahontas, who I guess is not officially a princess and is a different kind “of color”. In the US were natives ever considered “colored” or were they just Indians?

In this case the prince is from India. So the British would consider him of color. In the US, I think we’d just think he was Indian.

It’s interesting that in the US it’s OK for Asians and Africans to mix romantically.

The voodoo man really reminds me of Samuel L. Jackson, but it’s not him. The white gal really reminds me of Rue McLanahan, but it’s not her. The white guy reminded me of John Goodman, and guess what?

(I was scarred by a Disney cartoon after I got out of college. It was Bambi, and so not the film I remembered from my youngster days. It seemed kinda creepy…)

The animation is pretty. The story is pretty good too. For once you get a lesson that includes the notion that working too hard and not paying attention to how good you got it is a bad thing! And the music by Randy Newman is fine, but I don’t recall any of the tunes.

I’m told they get Cajun and Creole confused, but I don’t know those things. I was personally a little disappointed with how the firefly’s love interest turned out, but that’s just the kind of romantic I am.

If you got a kid,  you could do worse than to put this in the disc player. If you don’t got a kid, it’s still an interesting choice. Who does the alligator remind you of?

Posted in Vidi | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Lars Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

watching paint peelMental illness in movies is usually just a metaphor. In the movies, people tend to recover. It’s uplifting.

Lars and the Real Girl is about this troubled guy who introduces a blow-up doll as his girlfriend. But it’s not what you think it is at all. It’s not crude. It’s heartfelt. And it reaches for big ideas, like what is love? how do you know when you’re grown up? what is community for?

And in the end you think that maybe he’s getting better. And maybe he is. But we’ll probably never know what happened on the next day…

I knew a guy like Lars once. But his mom didn’t die when he was born. He found her on the floor of the bathroom when he was six.  Later on, he had family, a wife and a little girl. But the little girl got sick. Everything tumbled out of control. And it was all just a figment of his imagination. A way for him to cope with what he thought life was. Just like Lars and his girlfriend.

It’s a little bit like a comedy. Things go wacky out of control, then get reined in with a procession. But really it’s just an upbeat drama. Ryan Gosling often gets on my nerves, but he’s spot-on here. His blinking is a wonder to behold.

If you need a double-feature, you could try Kathleen Quinlan’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. It’s your standard Hollywood mental illness flick. It’s based on a true life book, an autobiography. The main difference between the movie and the book, as I recall, is that in the book you actually understand why she never wants to leave her delusional world, no matter how bad it gets. She’s more alive there than in the real world. And though you know she gets better (after all, she wrote the autobiography) you also realize that she never recovers.

For a triple feature, try David and Lisa, an even earlier film. It stars the guy who would go on to be metamorphosed along with HAL9000 in the year 2001.

 

Posted in Vidi | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Thor’s Day Is Such a Crazy Lazy Day

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

Cold Day in TreeBefore the Thor movie began, there was a trailer for the upcoming Captain America. It shows a scrawny Steve Rogers turning into a buff & cut Captain A. So you know they used computers to make the actor scrawny. And they probably used computers to give an extra shine to his buffness. Later on during the Thor movie, when Thor is shirtless, I swear it’s the same chest that Captain America had. So I don’t think that you can trust what a guy looks like in the movies any more. Good thing they wouldn’t tweak a woman’s body that way.

Brannagh did a good job of making the Asgard parts serious, but not too Shakespearean. And I always love it when Anthony Perkins chews scenery. The music is not Wagnerian, which is sorta disappointing. Not very memorable either.

It’s odd that they went so far out of their way to de-mythologize it. It’s no longer a myth-based fantasy, but rather straightforward science fiction. The gods are aliens. So are the demons. And there’s an astrophysicist thrown in to explain it all. It works like magic!

At one point this guy walks up to Thor’s hammer. It’s stuck in a rock, like Excalibur. He tries to pull it out, and fails. The guy is played by J. Michael Straczynski, the guy who created and wrote most of Babylon 5. He also wrote for the Thor comic book, and had some success with it.

One of the parts of  Babylon 5 that keeps coming back to me is how the war between the humans and the Minbari starts when the humans mistakenly kill the Minbari leader, and it drives the entire Minbari race mad. These previously rational people become murderously obsessed with ending the human race. But that was long ago.

The people I was with had problems with the 3D aspect of the film. They got headaches. My biggest problem was with character growth happening a little too fast. Or actually, all at once. When Thor realizes that he must sacrifice himself to save his friends, he also learns that you must not try to wipe out entire races. Where does that come from?

I realize that every movie since September 2001, one way or another, has been a metaphor. So is this one. It’s really obvious but not quite heavy-handed. And they used computer to make it look like things turned out better than they did.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Vidi | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Is There a Word?

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

dozing bubblesIt’s always about coffee, isn’t it?

On weekends, I make the stuff with a cone filter thingy. At the sink I pour freshly filtered water into my water kettle. I place the kettle on the stove, on the biggest burner. I turn that burner up to 11!

Soon the sound of white noise spreads throughout the house. It gets thicker and thicker. It becomes difficult to move, like you’re walking through marshmallow fluff.  The white noise from the kettle gets so loud that your ears begin ringing. That darned tintinabulationitis again!

Then just as quickly, it starts getting quiet as the water presently boils.

What’s that called? Is there a word for that? There oughta be a word for that enquieting.

That shift in sound just before the water boils is so important. It’s a signal. It’s almost time to pour the water into the coffee filter cone. Or the milk is almost done double-boiling before you cool it off some and stir in the yogurt starter. Or now you can get ready to add the noodles.

And while we’re at it, is there a word for that white-noise sound that water makes before it boils?

Is English missing out on something that other languages take for granted? Do other languages have words for these things? Boy do I wish that I’d studied comparative vocabulary in grad school.

If nobody else has a better word for it, may I suggest antici-whisper for the sound, and suspensurration for the lack of it. Or maybe simmer-roar and hushbubble. Or maybe simmersong and boildoze. I was up all night thinking these up. I just couldn’t stop!

OK, so I’m no Shakestaffe, and cannot invent useful new words. So I’ll just re-use old ones.

When it’s making the sound, the water is fretting. As it starts getting quiet, it’s beginning to doze.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Posted in Independent Research, Maybe I Worry Too Much | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Playin’ the Game

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

shaggy balesI love being manipulated by movies. Especially when I don’t see it coming, or when it’s done some way that I’m not used to.

We decided to watch Play the Game because Andy Griffith is in it. What could be more wholesome and good natured! We didn’t notice that the lights had changed.

IMDB says the tagline is “Andy Griffith like you have never seen him before.” It’s true. He says and does things that old people aren’t supposed to do in our culture.

Some of it’s kind of embarrassing and even immature. I am not watching this with my mom ever! Don’t watch it with your not-yet-sexually-active kids. Unless you don’t want to ever have grandchildren. That image of Andy having an orgasm, I just can’t get it out of my head. Darn worthless goggles.

It’s not like Andy has always played a sheriff.  He’s a really mean fellow in A Face in the Crowd. And I recall a TV movie in the 70’s where he sadistically hunted this hippie dude in the desert, then convincingly denied the whole thing when the law showed up. He would have got away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids! (Not really. Does anybody else remember this or have a name for it?) Somehow his charm always takes the edge off the vulgarity.

The main character is an immature car salesman. Andy is his painfully widowed grandpa. The car guy teaches his grandpa how to date women. Along the way the car guy learns a thing or two about life and love when he meets the gal he wants to settle down with. It sounds like your basic learn-a-life-lesson comedy. But it’s better than that.

First of all, Andy Griffith is a good actor. So are all the older folks in this movie. There’s Raymond’s mom from Everybody Loves Raymond, Doris Roberts. There’s Liz Sheridan, whom you’ll recognize.  Both Rance & Clint Howard are here. All these people are great! Marla Sokoloff is great! Juliette Jeffers is great. I’m not so in love with Paul Campbell as the car guy. But that could just be me. He kept reminding me of this guy on Battlestar Galactica. And he doesn’t have Bruce Campbell’s chin. Maybe if he’d just gain some weight…

What I really loved was how they tie the whole movie up in a bow. Every loose end, every unanswered question, all the motivations. It’s awesome.

There’s also a tacit comment on morality and how it’s not always based on reality. The effect that morality wants to have is not necessarily to have you behave morally. Hmmm, that’s not quite right. When you behave morally, it’s not necessarily that moral behavior that is the purpose of the morality, but the side-effects that it generates. Usually. Or words to that effect. Harumph.

Anyway, see the movie with a loved one that you don’t get embarrassed in front of too easily.  Then discuss the implications. This is great date movie if you ask me! It lays it all right out there for discussion.

Could be the 2nd movie in a double-feature with Lovely, Still. Or if you don’t want so much drama with that, choose Waitress and see Andy say slightly less crude things.

Posted in Maybe I Worry Too Much, Vidi | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Cookie’s Fortunate

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

swamp thingsIt’s got a dumb name, if you ask me, but nevertheless you’ve got to see Cookie’s Fortune. It’s a film from 1999 starring Liv Tyler, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles S. Dutton, Lyle Lovett, and a whole bunch of other folks you’ll recognize.

It’s kind of a murder mystery in Gulf-coast Mississippi, but not really. And it’s a character study of several characters, so it’s also sort of a comedy.

It was directed by Robert Altman, the guy who did the M*A*S*H movie and Nashville (which I still haven’t seen yet: I’m saving it). My introduction to Altman was Popeye starring Robin Williams (music by my hero Harry Nilsson) and the lesser-known Brewster McCloud (which makes a great double-feature with Harold and Maude, but that wasn’t directed by Altman no matter what people tell you). Another one that I never hear folks talking about is 3 Women, which has Shelley Duvall tellingly driving around with her dress caught in her car door. His final flick was A Prairie Home Companion, which in some ways has nothing to do with Garrison Keilor’s Prairie Home Companion on the radio, even though he wrote the script and stars in the film…

What makes Altman movies so great is that there’s always so much going on. Every character onscreen has a backstory that you can find out about if you just pay enough attention. He’s famous for overlapping dialogue, but honestly I think he’s just trying to tell you as much as possible in the alloted time.

Supposedly much of the acting in Altman’s movies was ad libbed. I don’t see how, because everything always ties back together so well, but then if you’re good you can probably just do stuff like that….

For Cookie’s Fortune, you’ll quit seeing the actors right after you start watching. Instead you’ll be seeing full-blown characters, full-blown people, that you’ve met somewhere before. You know all these folks!

You seldom see the sheriff’s lips move, but you know all about his lifelong fishing adventures. Everybody’s actions make so much sense! The lawyer has to play King Herod because he’s such a showman, yet nobody notices!

This is a great introduction to Altman’s work, so be fortunate and watch it! It’s even better the second time.

Posted in Vidi | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Re-Learning to Live Pt 2

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

corn for as far as the eye can seeSo what really is the best way to eat?

Michael Pollan famously said “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Go ahead and read or re-read the whole article, I can wait. It’s definitely worth it.

So basically you want to buy food, not edible foodlike products. You shouldn’t buy things with ingredients. The food you buy should be the ingredient. Pre-processing is not a good thing. So should you be milling your own flour maybe? Or is just a little bit of processing OK? Maybe as long as it remains whole grainy and not all tighty whitey?

My wife has type O blood. Somewhere on the interwebs somebody says that O types are more susceptible to lectroids. (That’s not really their name, but I don’t want my post to increase the confusion over them in the search engines.)

Turns out these lectroids are in all grains, but especially wheat. They’re even in quinoa, which technically isn’t a grain because it’s not a grass. (Or maybe they’re not in quinoa. There are differing reports.) Red lectroids are the way plants fight to keep folks from eating their best reproductive parts.  Beans have them too. So it’s mainly in the seeds. But fruit and tubers of plants in the nightshade family, peppers and tomatoes and potatoes, have them too.

Red lectroids are even in dairy products! Presumably because the cows ate the grains and are passing the toxins along.

There are all sorts of different kinds of lectroids. Some people say that the black ones are even good for you! And with a little allspice they’re also tasty. But other people dispute this, saying all lectroids are bad, or that the distinction is erroneous. Maybe we’ll see, or maybe the confusion will just continue to spread for a while.

Anyway, my wife, always the experimentor, cut out all the the lectroids that she could find.  Earlier in her life career she’d sworn off grains and beans because they’ve got too many carbs. So this time she only had to get rid of tomatoes and peppers. There was some question whether sweet potatoes actually contain red lectroids or maybe black ones. She didn’t give up her sweet potatoes.

Three months later her blood work comes back all A’s. Pretty good for a Type O. So maybe there is something to these lectroids after all. Or maybe it’s just all the extra cucumbers we’ve been eating…

 

Posted in Independent Research, Maybe I Worry Too Much | Tagged | Leave a comment

Re-Learning to Live Pt 1

Posted on May 21, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

I sleep now.My wife thinks she’s going through a mid-life crisis. I’ve been going through one since I was thirteen, and I think that she’s wrong.

She’s decided that it’s time to re-learn how to live. Shouldn’t we all be doing more of that? On an on-going basis, on and on, all the time. On.

She’s been experimenting with aiming the head of the bed in new and different directions. Well, the same old four cardinal directions. But our house isn’t laid out in a standard North/South, East/West sort of way. It’s more Northwest/Southeasty. If the head of the bed is aiming North, then it’s in the center of the  room and the foot of the bed is in a corner.

We’ve tried all four directions. Multiple times. When camping, I’ve had to break out the compass to make sure our heads were screwed on straight, or something. After months of this, she examined all the data and determined that it doesn’t really seem to make any difference. I’m thinking that we must need a new bed.

How many people do you know that have taken the trouble to see what direction they sleep best in?

My dad used to tell my mom, “You can move the furniture around any way you like any time you like. But please never move the bed. Pick a place and leave it there.” I guess he didn’t want to have trouble finding the bed in the dark.

I know that there were times during our testing that I couldn’t figure out how to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It always seemed to be off at the wrong angle.  Mostly I could find my way back to bed, except for Head Facing East. That was a really long walk and I tended to get lost. So maybe dad had a point. Or maybe I don’t.

Anyway, no real harm done. That is, nothing that won’t heal or clean up. Eventually.

 

Posted in Independent Research, Maybe I Worry Too Much | Leave a comment

Non-native Eradication

Posted on May 19, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

Full Service CasinoAround these parts we have Native American casinos. A lot of once big-time musical acts show up there. And every few miles there’s a smaller gaming center, so you’re never too far away from slot machines or less expensive cigarettes.

Some people think that organized gambling is immoral and just ends up bringing bad behavior into the community. I don’t really have an opinion either way. There’s plenty of other things, it seems to me, encouraging bad deeds that folks never complain about. And while some folks are losing their money, other folks are getting community centers and medical clinics built. The Great Circle of Life. I recall a wise man once saying that life is a crapshoot. So there’s already gambling involved anyway.

The other day I thought I was having a really bad day. I took off from work extra early. The air was very clear. It was my intention to drive to the nearest mountaintop and stare far into the distance until the wisdom came gushing in.

Not five miles down the road my cell phone rang. It was my wife. How did she know, already? I answered, and she said, “Do you still prefer to hear bad news sooner rather than later?” So it turns out we were both having a bad day.

I drove home and picked her up. Two folks can’t sit on top of a mountaintop waiting for wisdom. It’s just wrong. It violates some mythic code. So instead we went to the nearest national park. The plan was to walk this trail that goes around this lake. We both had fond memories of that trail and that lake.

Pulling into the parking area, there was the smell of a wood grill burning, and the whole place looked completely different. It was like the lake had gone bald. Hardly any trees stood around it any more. The trail no longer had any shade. While you walk, the sun irradiates you the whole time like a leaky microwave oven set on high. Bring a hat.

Why would they do this to a once beautiful lake?

On closer inspection there was a sign. “Your recovery dollars at work.” The area was being returned to native prairie. The non-native Eastern red cedar had to go. So they chopped them all down. Then they burnt the logs. The few native trees appear to have died in the fire.

What a metaphor for what we both were feeling.

Later on, when we’d returned home, I told the story to this guy I know. He’s part Chickasaw, I think. “What were they thinking?!” I said. “Most of the people here aren’t native, and you don’t see them being hacked down and set on fire!”

Without humor or joy, this fellow said, “Isn’t that what the gaming centers are for?”

Posted in Independent Research, Maybe I Worry Too Much | Tagged | Leave a comment

Trans-Canine Engenderism

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Lyle Verbilion

what kind of dog is this?We have this dog named Lady.

Do you have any idea what kind of dog she is? Seriously, we’d love to know! The hair surrounding her ears makes her ears look major huge.

So I had this dream. For some reason, Lady changed into this 30-something year old guy. The hair growing along the sides of his forehead was really long, reminiscent of Lady’s ears. He was from Houston, Texas.

Eventually everybody notices something’s different. My family tries to have a conversation about Lady, who’s this guy with funny hair.  Nobody seems to be bothered that our dog is a human. Nobody seems to mind his hairdo. The issue we are having is how to talk about Lady’s gender. Our original dog was female. She turned into this guy. We’re arguing whether or not Lady is a him now.

Go figure. Like there isn’t anything more important to do. And now that Lady is a human, why don’t we just go to the horses mouth (as it were)?!

It’s been a quiet week in my  hometown…

Posted in Independent Research, Maybe I Worry Too Much | Tagged , | Leave a comment