1. As I pondered what to cook this afternoon so that Debbie would have food ready at home after her full week of working with third graders, my first thought was to make a fish chowder. To do that, however, I'd need to go to the store and buy some potatoes and I didn't feel like going to the store.
Then I remembered I had a clump of ground beef in the freezer and I went online and found a simple recipe for chili. This would not be a chili cooking contest winner, but it would be comforting and sustaining.
All I had to do was brown the ground beef, add half a chopped onion and a garlic clove to the meat, and let the onion cook until soft. I then added a can of pinto beans and a can of diced tomatoes to the pot and added chili powder and a little white vinegar. That was it. I let this chili simmer until Debbie arrived home and it worked, especially with a few saltine crackers.
2. On Twitter today, someone who goes by the name of FilmNoirSally asked her hive of followers to name their favorite femme fatale. I couldn't answer the question myself, but a lot of people did and they named characters in movies I've watched recently and opened me up to some new possibilities.
FilmNoirSally kicked off the thread by naming Sherry Peatty, played by Marie Windsor, in Stanley Kubrick's 1956 heist movie, The Killing.
I hadn't heard of Marie Windsor, so I did some clicking around and learned more about her and became intrigued with what I read about The Killing.
So I watched it tonight.
The movie tells the story of a steely man, Johnny Clay (metaphorical last name), played by Sterling Hayden, who has just been released from prison after five years and is desperate to make some quick money and run away with his lover and start life over again.
His plan? Gather a team of men and pull off a heist of a horse racing track, steal all that money laid down by bettors.
They want to make a killing.
The Killing is directed by a young Stanley Kubrick, just 27 or 28 years old.
The claustrophobic black and white interiors of the movie with their deep shadows reflect how each of the men Johnny Clay recruited is trapped in some dark circumstance in his life. There's a cop in debt over his head to a loan shark; there's a weak man married to woman who hates him and he believes quick wealth would please her and save their marriage; there's a bartender with a desperately ill wife who wants quick money to pay for her medical care; you get the point.
Kubrick tells this story with voice over narration, as if the planning and execution of the heist were itself a horse race. Kubrick also fractures the chronology of the story. It moves back and forth in time, repeats certain scenes. It's a brilliant way of accounting for the numerous things that have to happen at just the right time in order for this heist to succeed.
I would love to tell how it all works out and reflect on what I think Kubrick is getting at regarding human nature and some truths about life itself in this movie, but that would mean spoiling the plot and I'm not going to do that.
3. Sterling Hayden had played the lead in earlier heist movie, John Huston's Asphalt Jungle (1950). I was going to watch it tonight, but, at 10:00, I decided it was too late to start another movie.
Instead, I read reviews and analyses of The Killing, and, in turn, read articles about how this movie anticipated elements of movie making Kubrick would refine and develop over the course of his directorial career.
I'm not articulate enough about these things to sum them up, but I was fascinated by what I read and glad that recently I've watched two of Kubrick's early movies, The Killing and Paths of Glory, making it so that I could, to some degree, understand the material I was reading.
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