IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 21 minutes, rated an astonishing 6.2 by 42 cast members.
Genre: Sy Fy, incredulity
Verdict: [Gasp!] ‘Corner Gas’ it is not.
A skilled veteran is recruited for one last mission. Heard that one before, Rambo? This Rambino is overweight, with combo mullet-mohawk hair, slurs, slovenly, and waddles. He is the man for the job!
He blasts off from planet somewhere that looks just like Ontario to Earth in a CGI-take to capture the science experiment gone wrong which is wandering around the Pre-Cambrian Shield (look it up) looking for a pizza place. Instead he finds idiots.
It is hard to go on because the fraternity brothers interrupted my study of this celluloid with their demands for the remoter to change channels. I had to hold them off with one hand and that limited the note-taking.
The back story is that presiding genius Erica Benedikty made a six-minute project called ‘Phobe’ in a media studies course (which has much to answer for). She parlayed that into a feature-length script and found a backer to invest, sit down, $500,000 dollars of some sort, American, Canadian, Hong Kong, Liberian, Namibian, New Zealand, Singaporean, Taiwan, who knows. Full marks for initiative.
Erica became producer as well as writer and set to work. With a hangover the putative investor woke up and pulled out, but she went ahead, adding director to her list of credits, on the Niagara Peninsula at St Catherines and transformed it into a community project. Everything was done by amateurs. Again full marks, this time for persistence.
The result is several steps below the worst of Roger Corman. Who would have thought that possible?
The lines are delivered flat. The scenes are in private homes, an empty high school hallway, public sidewalks, and — the most interesting — a steel mill.
The femme fatale that Rambino has to rescue from Phobe (on whom more in a moment) is Chubby, slow-witted, and out waddles him. Phobe wears platform shoes inside boots to elevate him, three layers of hunter’s camouflage over a parka to give him bulk, and an arc welder’s face mask to make him, well, look like a hockey goalie.
In the end after a mano-à-mano struggle at the steel mill where miraculously Chubby knows how to operate all the heavy equipment, ah huh, Rambino and Phobe bond. Together they turn on the evil scientists who Xenoed Phobe and zero them.
The list of credits is torn straight from the St. Catherine’s telephone book and just about as long. After this the Ontario Provincial Police impounded Erica’s director’s chair for her own safety.
9 December
1793 NYC: Noah Webster published New York’s first daily newspaper, the ‘American Minerva.’ A biography of Noah Webster, the dictionary man, is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1868 London: Traffic lights were installed outside the Palace of Westminster in London. Like railway signals, they used semaphore arms and were illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps.
1936 MCG: Australia all out for 58 v England in the Bodyline Ashes Tour. Don Bradman was out for duck (0). A rarity indeed for this Lord of the Bat. Not, however, a golden duck. Those who do not know what MCG means will never understand anyway.
1979 Geneva: WHO said smallpox had been eradicated by vaccination, not prayer.
1993 In low earth orbit: Hubble Telescope was repaired and put back into service and it remains in operation.
‘Frightened Lady’ (1940)
IMDb meta-data is run time 1 hair and 21 minutes, rated 6.4 by 190 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Predictable but diverting.
As the bodies fall in the Big House, Plod comes to investigate. The formidable chatelaine is uncooperative whereas her musical Lord son is is ever so friendly. Ever so.
Chatelaine wants to get him married off to her secretary, the Frightened Lady of the title, who hears strange sounds and sees creepy shadows that remind her of — shiver! — President Tiny. She and Lord are pals; nothing more. Two lurking footman who seem to have no duties are much present and just a shade short of insolent.
Then the chauffeur is murdered. Well, ‘So what?’ says lawyer Rudy for the Chatelaine? The lower orders will do that.
Plod is not so sure and insists on reading the script. He interrogates the suits of armour in the hall, and generally is never there when he is needed. He concludes the family doctor did it. Inconveniently, then the doctor is murdered and that blows Plod’s KPI clear-up rate.
There are more shadows and sounds. The lies are piled up with the abandon of Faux News. Lord Musician tittles and tattles. The eponymous lady screams, faints, and trips per the stereotypes of the day.
Spoiler alert.
The pace is slow enough for a viewer to realise only one person could be the culprit, and he is. The footman are so dumb they could not possibly have done ‘em in. All the Chatelaine’s scheming slows the pace and draws attention to her motivation. She is a good schemer to be sure but it becomes obvious that she is protecting….
Marius Goring gives a great performance as Lord of the Music. The comic relief plod is irritating. The supercilious doctor gets his comeuppance. The Frightened Lady gets the architect. The haughty chatelaine gets nothing.
‘The Fly and the Fly-Bottle’ (1961) by Ved Mehta
Good Reads meta-data is 269 pages rated 3.9 by 16 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction.
Verdict: A golden oldie.
A charming memoir of meetings with the lions of the British academic establishment at a time when the BBC gave them air time, parliamentarians asked them for audiences, and newspapers welcomed their words. The charm is in Mehta and not his interlocutors.
The subtitle is ‘Encounters with British Intellectuals,’ however all but two of his respondents were ensconced in academia. Few seemed troubled by teaching duties.
The book divides, more or less, into two parts. The first is a series of interviews with British philosophers like A. J. Ayer, Peter Strawson, and their ilk. The second is a parallel series of interviews with British historians, like Arnold Toynbee, A. J. P. Taylor, and the egregious Hugh Trevor-Roper (who went from strength to strength on ever so little), though he is rivalled by E.H. Carr for hubris.
It was indeed a small world since three-quarters of the beasts were in the Oxford zoo, with the remainder, bar a couple, in its Cambridge annex. Small, yes, and all the more venomous for it. The back-biting, the undermining swim beneath surface of the scathing public reviews of each others’ works and days. The pages of ‘Encounter,’ the ‘Listener,’ and the ‘Times’ positively bristled with their poisoned barbs.
It was all so monumentally unimportant that today it is all but forgotten, and a good thing, too. Yet the Platonic dialogues that they despised are still studied.
I loved the story of Hughie writing a long and venomous review of one of Taylor’s books and publishing it with much fanfare in ‘Encounter,’ and then sitting back in the expectation of a rejoinder from Taylor that he could reply to in another vituperative essay in ‘Encounter.’ Taylor did not bother to reply. What a deflation that much have been, like not making Richard Nixon’s Enemies List, despite all efforts!
Among the philosophers the major issue of interest to the laity is the conundrum of free will versus determinism, or in social sciencese: structure versus agency. Among the historians the parallel divide is between meaningful and accidental events.
Amid the nonsense and petty bickering made out to be something much more, there are many telling shafts. I liked historian Herbert Butterfield’s conviction that in teaching history (and political science) one is teaching future officials, diplomats, traders, tariff managers, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and so one must equip them to respond to the challenges they will face outside the classroom. Predictably when he uttered this view of academic responsibility in a public lecture he called down the wraith of the gowned gods upon his head who went on about their art for their art’s sake. As if. Few were troubled by teaching duties since they had very few.
Mehta’s ever so oblique and sly digs at his prestigious prey are desiccated. While much of their posturing is, well, posturing, it is well to remember that R. M. Hare’s arid ‘The Language of Morals’ (1951) was drafted while he was in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in Malaya. However, few of his contemporaries can lay claim to such courageous conviction.
The title is one of the bon mots Ludwig Wittgenstein tossed off, namely, that the task of philosophy was to lead the fly (us) out of the fly bottle (?). Every remark by this sage is totemic to acolytes, so there are many disputed interpretations of this aside, which Ludi no doubt forgot as soon as he said it.
Here is a sampler of the dross and the ore.
Richard Hare dismissed Continental philosophy holus-bolus opining that philosophy can only be taught by the tutorial method (51). Since that method was only used at Oxford and Cambridge it followed only graduates of those universities can be philosophers. He seemed to accept that conclusion when Mehta put it back to him. Since it has only been used there for a short time, there were no philosophers before that. Got it? Ergo Plato, Hegel, Sartre, Schlick, Rawls, and so on are not philosophers.
Wittgenstein thought of himself as a living philosophical problem (82). Amen. Wittgenstein thought only of himself full stop.
J. L. Austin’s linguistic philosophy spread throughout the dominions and America, but not in England because Austin admitted too students from those places (85) [not on its merits], said one don in a huff. It is certainly true that it dominated the curriculum in my undergraduate and graduate education.
Mehta asked E. H. Carr to name historians he admired. ‘None’ was his reply (133). Well, one might suppose there was one, ‘E. H. Carr’ by name.
Taylor wrote, with prescience, of a world where emotions have replaced reason and hysteria has become meritorious (177). He foretold Fox News and President Tiny.
Another bon mot from Taylor: Perfection is always sterile (184). That might be the motto of utopia.
This traipsing through the groves comes to an abrupt stop. But then how could it end. Mehta adds a page and half at the end, drawing no conclusions. These essays were commissioned by the New Yorker and do not quite make a book. What Mehta does not tell the reader is that he became blind in India at four years old. There are a dozen or so of his titles on Amazon.
I read this on paper in the Forgotten Books reprint as picture above. That edition is not recommended because of missing text and omitted pages. I think I may have read some of it in graduate school as relief from analytic and linguistic philosophy.
By coincidence I started to read Robert Harris’s ‘Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries’ where Hugh Trevor-Roper again figures. Egregious to the last. The excuses are many and the facts are immutable.
‘No Hands on the Clock’ (1 December 1941)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.2 by 112 opinionators.
Genre: Krimi komedy
Verdict: Snappy
Boston Blackie (avant le nom) locates a missing heiress and marries her in Reno. Since he is already there, his boss gives him another missing person to find in Reno. He does this by locking his new bride in the bathroom, in the hotel room, and in a car. How anyone can be locked in any of these is beside the point. The sexism is surpassing. He locks her up to keep her out of trouble, he says.
She is feisty enough to get loose, to make him regret it but not enough to stop him from doing it again, and finally to save his bacon though it is too little, too late.
The missing man remains missing, and there is a secondary plot about mistaken identity that was lost on me.
There are many familiar faces from the time and genre: the feisty bride is Jean Parker, Rod Cameron towering over all, Grant Withers scowling, Keye Luke faking bad English, Dick Purcell for once acting, the glacial Astrid Allwyn being glacial, Doc Adams before med school, and those eyebrows on Oscar!
The title comes from a clock on a mortuary across the street from the hotel which has a large pendulum for seconds but no hands for the time. Symbolic? Yes. Of what? Dunno.
By 7 December I suppose audiences had other thing to think about, like the 2,000 widows created on Oahu in just under two hours.
‘First Men in the Moon’ (1964)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 6.7 by 4497 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Cavorite about! Be careful.
In 1968 when astronauts at last land on the moon, they find a Union Jack in a Victorian bottle. ‘Huh?’ is the scientific reaction. The political reaction is to slap D-Notices on the news.
H. G. Wells got there first with cavor! Ingenious. It is an anti-gravity paste whipped up in a motor and pestle. Belt up. Get set. Slather it on. Go!
Professor Cavor recruits his neighbour who wishes to escape debt collectors with his obliging girlfriend who wants a honeyMoon. She got it.
They bundle into his garden shed and off they go …’to the Moon, Alice!’
The green cheese is full of holes and they go into the moon, per the title: ‘In’ the moon.
In the cheese they find toiling beetles, not mice, who speak English and are not cooperative.
They escape to return, but keep it all secret for script reasons.
There is good humour, mannered turn-of-the-century charm, and a lot of special imagery from the masterful Ray Harryhausen. Lionel Jeffries as Cavor steals the show with his plucky determination and courageous conscience. Eye candy Martha Hyer is mostly locked away in the Victorian tradition, though she too is in the moon, despite that title. The screen play is from the golden typewriter of Nigel Kneale but….not his best work.
Well, I found it boring. Most of Wells’s social commentary was deleted. It seemed aimed at children which Wells’s story certainly was not. Nor was there any mystery in the flashbacks, perhaps because the pace is so slow.
8 December
1609 In Milan the Biblioteca Ambrosiana opened its reading room, the second public library of Europe. There are many claimants for the first public library in Europe, depending on definition of ‘library’ and ‘public.’
1660 The first actress to appear on an English stage was Desdemona in ‘Othello’ at the Thomas Killigrew’s Vere Street Theatre. Her name was not recorded to protect her reputation. Killigrew was an impresario who innovated in many ways.
1813 – Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7 in A major” premiered in Vienna with Ludi at the rostrum at a charity concert for wounded soldiers from the Napoleonic wars.
1991 The Belavezha Accords was signed by Ukraine, Russian Federation, and Belarus. Though members soon fell into conflict among themselves, the Accords were the obituary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1917-1991).
2004 The two-page Cuzco Declaration was signed in Peru to establish a South American Community of Nations for summit meetings on health, agriculture, trade, defence, policing, free movement of people, terrorism, energy, tariffs, and other matters of mutual interest. The membership fluctuates with regime changes. The Passport Mercosul arose from it to facilitate the free movement of people. I have seen a few in hand while waiting in passport control lines at airports.
7 December
185 Chinese Emperor Lo-Yang observed and recorded supernova (MSH 15-52). Astronomers still study the remnants of MSH 15-52. Observing the stars was not a hobby for the Emperor. It was part of his duties to take note of the heavens and the portents therein revealed that might affect the realm.
1941 English-Speaking Harvard educated, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto reluctantly gave the Go (Tora) order. Below is the cable sent under fire from Pearl Harbor. The operator was killed a few minutes later. Having seen the industrial capacity of the United States first hand, Admiral Yamamoto realised the prospects were slim and counselled against war. He was overruled and he obeyed. He was killed during the war.
1960 The first episode of the longest running TV soap opera “Coronation Street” was broadcast by the BBC. It is up to 9,716 episodes and counting. Below is the logo upon entering its 50th year.
1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor by air, land, and sea. Blind eyes were turned in Canberra and elsewhere. Because several Australian journalists were killed in the ensuing conflict, the media rehashes it regularly with nothing new but righteous indignation.
1979 ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ premier and heralded the revitalisation of the franchise. I saw in Boston upon release.
6 December
1735 London: The first recorded appendectomy was performed at St George’s Hospital. I had one of those with anaesthetic unlike the chap portrayed.
1784 London: His Majesty’s Government authorised the transportation of convicts to Australia. Pitt the Younger was Prime Minister. With the loss of the American colonies transportation there was precluded. 60,000 had been transported to Georgia and Maryland. Now it the turn of Botany Bay.
1917 Halifax: a Norwegian tanker and a French munitions ship collided in the harbour and blew up in the Halifax Explosion that killed 2,000, injured another 9,000, left 25,000 homeless in the north Atlantic coast winter and flattened all of the port and much of the city. Meanwhile the long lists of the dead, wounded, and missing on the Western Front continued to come. The explosion provides the backdrop to Hugh MacLennan’s novel ‘Barometer Rising.’ Been there in January!
1921 The Anglo-Irish Treaty made Ireland a sovereign dominion. The conflict had begun with the Easter Rising on 1916 which was crushed, but led to the 1919 birth of the IRA and its campaign. This settlement did not stick and more conflict followed among the Irish and with the British.
1973 Gerald Ford was sworn in as Vice President, unelected, who went on to be an unelected President with a second unelected Vice President in Nelson Rockefeller. Unique in all three respects. He was born in Omaha.
5 December –
1766 London: Christie’s held the first sale in Pall Mall. Still going there at home and around the world.
1831 D.C.: Former President John Quincy Adams took a seat in the House of Representatives where his many accomplishments include creation of the Smithsonian Institute(s) and defending the mutineers of the Amistad. He died at his desk in Congress. He did more good as a representative than as a president. A biography of JQA is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Go there for further enlightenment.
1909 Sydney: George Taylor made the first heavier-than-air flight in Australia in a glider from the sand hills at Narrabeen. He made 20 flights that day of 100 to 250 metres. The Child Bride grew up in those environs.
1945 Florida: Flight 19 left Fort Lauderdale for a three-hour training fight and flew into legend in the Bermuda Triangle to became the ‘Lost Squadron.’ The incident is demystified in the book below.
1952 London: The Great Smog began and lasted until March of 1953. Thousands died in accidents and respiratory ailments.
