New England winter: streetlit snow drifting photogenically over glass-black ice. I have the heat cranked up in order to keep the temperature in the house a solid ten degrees below the setting. Hestia sunlamps beside my computer. We have now received condolence cards from all three veterinary practices in Autolycus' life.
I have never under any conditions of stress lost the ability to read for pleasure, but my ability to watch movies and TV has proven much more fragile. This month, almost nothing. Last night![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I cautiously tuned in to and were thoroughly delighted by Bullshot (1983), a brilliantly stupid spoof of H. C. McNeile's Bulldog Drummond translated from a popular and long-running fringe stage play with the three writer-stars intact and the rest of the cast filled in with priceless ringers, plus a theme song by parts of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. It is the kind of comedy which is satire and panto and Harold Lloyd and Aristophanes in a cocktail shaker which is also on fire and if a joke doesn't work it's already in the rear view mirror of half a dozen others. It sets up obvious groaners and then no one sees the toppers coming. Everything looks like a modestly cromulent heritage film and everyone is playing to the cheap seats and national stereotypes. Alan Shearman and Diz White are especially to be commended not just for their commitments of physical and vocal comedy—there are takes in this film that can't be believed even when seen—but for cartooning their archetypes so exactly that their performances are constantly blundering about in the uncanny valley between irony and sincerity, just as Hugh "Bullshot" Crummond can calculate a trajectory from the glint of a monocle while failing to notice his arch-enemy sneaking behind him at lunch and Rosemary Fenton has no fear of heights or tarantulas and her scones should have been internationally prohibited at the end of the last war. Highly recommended, cinematic dumbassery at its finest. The giant octopus? The Venus flytrap corsage? Thanks, HandMade Films.
Otherwise I tapped out after the first act of The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) even though it actually is as unusual an American WWII film as I have been reading for years and didn't get any farther with the intended compromise of The Rear Gunner (1943)—one of the training films made by Burgess Meredith while serving as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces, before he was released from active duty in order to be available for The Story of G.I. Joe—than realizing from the credits that it also contained Ronald Reagan. Life is too short for movies containing Ronald Reagan, even ones also containing Tom Neal and Dane Clark so early in his career he's still credited as Bernard Zanville.
Seriously, I loved David Canfield's "Cary Grant and Randolph Scott's Hollywood Story: 'Our Souls Did Touch'" both for its detailed research and its willingness to believe in relationships existing romantically between the preferred categories of officially platonic or equally sexual. Less seriously, the still of the two of them and Irene Dunne in My Favorite Wife (1940) looks like a meme in the making.
I have never under any conditions of stress lost the ability to read for pleasure, but my ability to watch movies and TV has proven much more fragile. This month, almost nothing. Last night
spatch and I cautiously tuned in to and were thoroughly delighted by Bullshot (1983), a brilliantly stupid spoof of H. C. McNeile's Bulldog Drummond translated from a popular and long-running fringe stage play with the three writer-stars intact and the rest of the cast filled in with priceless ringers, plus a theme song by parts of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. It is the kind of comedy which is satire and panto and Harold Lloyd and Aristophanes in a cocktail shaker which is also on fire and if a joke doesn't work it's already in the rear view mirror of half a dozen others. It sets up obvious groaners and then no one sees the toppers coming. Everything looks like a modestly cromulent heritage film and everyone is playing to the cheap seats and national stereotypes. Alan Shearman and Diz White are especially to be commended not just for their commitments of physical and vocal comedy—there are takes in this film that can't be believed even when seen—but for cartooning their archetypes so exactly that their performances are constantly blundering about in the uncanny valley between irony and sincerity, just as Hugh "Bullshot" Crummond can calculate a trajectory from the glint of a monocle while failing to notice his arch-enemy sneaking behind him at lunch and Rosemary Fenton has no fear of heights or tarantulas and her scones should have been internationally prohibited at the end of the last war. Highly recommended, cinematic dumbassery at its finest. The giant octopus? The Venus flytrap corsage? Thanks, HandMade Films.Otherwise I tapped out after the first act of The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) even though it actually is as unusual an American WWII film as I have been reading for years and didn't get any farther with the intended compromise of The Rear Gunner (1943)—one of the training films made by Burgess Meredith while serving as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces, before he was released from active duty in order to be available for The Story of G.I. Joe—than realizing from the credits that it also contained Ronald Reagan. Life is too short for movies containing Ronald Reagan, even ones also containing Tom Neal and Dane Clark so early in his career he's still credited as Bernard Zanville.
Seriously, I loved David Canfield's "Cary Grant and Randolph Scott's Hollywood Story: 'Our Souls Did Touch'" both for its detailed research and its willingness to believe in relationships existing romantically between the preferred categories of officially platonic or equally sexual. Less seriously, the still of the two of them and Irene Dunne in My Favorite Wife (1940) looks like a meme in the making.
