Mocking Time

I just finished reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird.  I had always assumed the "mockingbird" too precious to kill was Tom Robinson, the black man falsely accused of raping the white trash daughter of the town's drunken lout.  Imagine my surprise when i discovered the "mockingbird" is, in fact, Boo Radley, the white town idiot and recluse, who has actually committed a crime - murder - but is not arrested or prosecuted - while innocent Tom is not only arrested, threatened with lynching, wrongfully convicted, and eventually shot dead while trying to escape from a prison farm to which he never should have sent in the first place.

No wonder they want their country back.

Is this the End?

This may be the demise of the Scarjo Hotness Meter.  Not because Scarjo (the redoubtable Miss Scarlett Johansson) is not on the 2012 Maxim Hot 100 List - she is, at number 17 - it is because the list is such a joke that ranking women on the list relative to Scarjo's current position is not only ridiculous but irrelevant.

If the editors of Maxim no longer care, why should I?  Who cares that cartoon mom Lois Griffin, number 85, is a +68 on the Hotness Meter?  LOIS GRIFFIN?  I mean, Rihanna is the first black woman on the list and she is number 32 (+15).  Zoe Saldana is 45 (+28) and LaLa Anthony is 93 (+76).

Meagan Good and Gabrielle Union didn't even make the list and, as always, Halle Berry and Rosario Dawson remain TOO HOT for the Scarjo Hotness Meter.

~(no)rave!

Westward Ho!

I am officially old. Girlfriend out of town and I spent a good chunk of my leisure time, yesterday, watching westerns on Encore's western channel. Watched episodes of Wagon Train with a young and virile Clint Eastwood; watched John Wayne and William Holden in The Horse Soldiers; set my DVR to capture The Ballad of Cable Hogue (in my opinion, one of Sam Peckinpah's best movies - not to mention Stella Stevens' and Jason Robards' - although I like him better in How the West Was Won)and the Sabata trilogy (starring Lee Van Cleef and Yul Brenner).

But i had the most fun watching something called 4 for Texas starring Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. This movie has many charms, prominent among them the decolletage of Anita Ekberg and the legs and everything else of Ursula Andress, but the thing that resonated with me was the performance of Edric Conner, a black man, co-starring as "Prince George," Dean Martin's coach driver and enforcer. The strapping Conner embodies his Prince with a screen dignity that is as rare as it is compelling. Prince George owns his coach and refuses to sell it to Martin - he is agreeable to renting it and his services, however, as he retains ownership of his rig and himself. It is forebear of the innate, self-contained nobility and virility Sidney Poitier will bring to the screen five years hence in movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night - except there is mischievous glint in Conner's eye that we will not witness on screen again until the heyday of Eddie Murphy. I am not a fan of what Sinatra became, but in the early to middle sixties he was on the side of the angels when it came to showcasing black actors on screen.

 ~rave!

Cross My Heart

I am in full NBA playoff mode (two games EVERY night!) but after the games on TNT I have had the pleasure of catching reruns of some of TNTs welcome characters (the night before I saw my first ever episode of Franklin and Bash and I gotta know, is there some new trend where every television law firm is run by an Afro-American MILF - Garcelle Beauvais on Bash and Gina Torres on Suits?).

Late last night I saw the best episode of Leverage I have ever seen.  I am up and down with this series.  Some episodes wow me while others leave me indifferent but last night's "Cross My Heart" episode from season four was great.  Everything from the cold start during a layover at the Cincinnati Airport to the two lives hanging in the balance drama - with several Sting-like twists in between - left me unable to go to bed (although it was already one am and I had to go to work in the morning)and showed Leverage's tight ensemble group at their best.

~rave!

Crowne Me

Has anybody seen Larry Crowne with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts?  Like most of the movie going public I avoided it like the plague when it was in the theaters.  Caught it on DirecTV and I found it quite engaging (and not just for the awesomely fetching Gugu Mbatha-Raw).  The movie prominently features Pam Grier (still fetching), Cedric the Entertainer, Taraji P. Henson and a slyly wicked turn by George Takei as Dr. Matsutani. In addition to Mr. Takei, there is a nice bit where one of Hank's speech classmates gives a two-minute dissertation on why Deep Space Nine is the best of the Star Trek series while dressed in full star fleet uniform.  This movie even makes me like Wilmer Valderrama and I HATE Wilmer Valderrama.

~rave!

Hulk Like Me

It turns out the problem with the two Hulk movies wasn't the CGI Hulks - because the one in the new Avengers movie is not significantly better than the one in the second Hulk movie - but the actors playing Dr. Bruce Banner. Mark Ruffalo wears the tortured soul of the good doctor as he brings a vulnerability, a fragile, bruised humanity to the character that has been missing since Bill Bixby played David Bruce Banner. He so inhabits the character that when Banner and Stark are going I.Q. to I.Q. on the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, you believe in his prodigious intellect and his overweening humanity, in way you wouldn't if the character had been played by one Eric Bana or one Edward Norton.

Wild Things

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Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak dead at 83. I used to read Where the Wild Things Are to my daughter (who is now 20) every night. She'd giggle every time I told her in my monster voice, "I could eat you up I love you so!" and every night we would conclude the book with me asking softly, "and who loved him most of all?" "His mommy," she would say before kissing me on my forehead and falling off to sleep. ~rave!