1. In yesterday's post, I forgot to mention one of the Criterion Channel collections I looked into on Saturday. It does not include a person introducing it. It's a collection of documentaries directed by Lee Grant. All but one of the documentaries is about an hour long - her film about Kirk and Michael Douglas is a just over 90 minute feature. I've only watched one movie Lee Grant directed and it was superb. Back in 1981 and again in 1982, first in Portland and then in Eugene, I saw her brilliant movie, Tell Me a Riddle, based on Tillie Olsen's short story. The movie's portrayal of aging and of this aged couple facing marital challenges made a strong impact on me, not only because of the story, but because of the way Lee Grant told the story. I remember finding it daring and unwaveringly honest and authentic.
With this one movie of Lee Grant's having been so memorable, I look forward to watching these documentaries. I don't know if the father/son story of the Douglases tackles difficult social issues, but I know the hour long movies do. Lee Grant examines women in the labor force (The Wilmar 8), women in prison (When Women Kill), transgendered individuals in the 1980s (What Sex Am I?), domestic violence and battered women (Battered), and poverty in the 1980s (Down and Out in America).
2. As a celebration of Easter, Christy, Carol, Paul, Debbie, Molly, and I joined together at Carol and Paul's house this afternoon for family dinner.
We began our time together with a superb cocktail and appetizer. Paul made a pitcher of Cucumber Gin and Tonic and Carol made delicious deviled eggs.
After enjoying our drink and appetizer, we headed to the dining table. Debbie assembled a fresh and tasty salad combining arugula, bok choy, green onion, and apple, enhanced with a Dijon mustard vinaigrette. Carol slow cooked a leg of lamb together with potatoes. The lamb was tender and juicy and the potatoes were perfectly prepared and had absorbed meaty flavor from the lamb. I fixed a batch of gingered baby carrots, an easy to prepare blend of carrots, butter, fresh orange juice, honey, ginger powder, and crystallized ginger. For dessert, Christy baked a light and delicious cake called an Orange Creamsicle Poke Cake, an intriguing sheet cake infused with orange gelatin and topped with whipped cream and jello powder icing.
3. Back home after dinner, I settled into the Vizio room and, on Ethan Hawke's recommendation, I watched John Huston's bizarre, irreverent, farcical, subversive Western movie, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. A day or two ago, I wrote that I saw this movie while going to North Idaho College, not long after it came out. Seeing it again, I can see why it bewildered my nineteen year old self. I just wasn't mentally prepared to see a Western styled movie that was both making fun of and critiquing the Western genre, nor did I know what to make of the movie's absurdities: Bad Bob, the albino outlaw, was a way over the top mockery of the Western bad guy; I didn't know what to make of the beer guzzling bear in the middle of the movie; I just shook my head nearly fifty years ago when the movie suddenly presented a cheesy scene pastoral scene with a swing featuring Paul Newman and Victoria Principal, a scene that might have made sense in Love Story as Andy Williams sang a really cheesy song about marmalade, molasses, and honey; I couldn't understand why a movie would have this romantic interlude in the middle of a story about rampant hangings, willy nilly frontier justice, and a frontier judge's obsession with Lily Langtree.
But, now, in 2022, having experienced many more movies, books, plays, songs and other creations that are subversive, I could see that in this movie, the nonsense is the point, that John Huston decided to direct a movie that pokes fun at the Western, questions the mythologies of cowboys and the frontier, is absurd not reverent, and calls into question the values and dispensation of justice in the Old West. Tonight, this movie made me think of other similar movies that turn traditional stories, values, and ways of thinking upside down: MASH, Monty Python movies, Catch 22, Nashville, Harold and Maude, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Big Lebowski to name a few.
It was fun to watch The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean at this time in my life. I can see why its critics see the movie as a mess that misses the mark and I can see why Ethan Hawkes is so enthusiastic about this movie. I never recommend movies. I simply try to write about what I experience when I watch them.
Tonight I experienced one of the pleasures of being an older and more experienced person. I was much more receptive of this movie's messiness, its dissonances, the ways it plays horror off of farce, sadness off of absurdly comical scenes, and soft-hearted romanticism off of cold-blooded cruelty.
I enjoy being receptive, doing my best to enjoy movies for what they are and doing my best not to demand that a movie meet standards I have set before I even start watching. I let this movie work on me and I experienced a complex of feelings ranging from outrage to horror to sadness to delighting in its absurdities and its irreverence.
A limerick by Stu:
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