Different Slants

Mary and I love to travel. Our first trip together lasted nearly nine years. In our 32 years together, we have been to 43 countries that I can think of.

Over that time we have developed a particular style of travel that we find most enjoyable. It includes taking no more stuff with us than we are comfortable carrying on our backs. In the photo above, we have everything we are taking on a 6 week trip to Europe. Immediately after the photo was taken, we walked to the train station to board a train to SFO.  The only things bought in Europe (that we could have packed) were a light jacket and an umbrella that we needed during our last week in Austria when the weather turned cold and rainy. Everything fit neatly in our backpacks with enough room left over for the souvenirs we brought home.

Our goal in travel is to experience the place we are visiting as fully as time allows. This leaves out the 5 star international hotels - they are the same everywhere. Besides, we are not wealthy people. It also means no cruise ships or tour buses. To the greatest extent practical, we travel on local public transportation and on foot. We have traveled by aerial gondola, automobile, bicycle, boat, bus, elephant, ferry, inclined railway, inner-tube, jeep, motorcycle, pickup truck, subway, train, tram, tuk-tuk or whatever else was available. (Read on …)

Doc Hollywood (1991) starring Michael J. Fox who was born in Western Canada in 1961, who is now 47 years old and sadly very ill with Parkinson’s disease, which terminated his career in the movies, is one of my favorite, romanticized views of small town life and the discovery of love when you weren’t looking for it. 

Fox is a skilled, overworked, underpaid, wise-ass, self-centered and tense emergency room doctor in a public hospital in New York City, repairing gunshot wounds, drug overdoses and other grim urban disasters who is totally unpopular with his fellow workers.   When he receives an inventation to join a very upscale plastic surgery practice in LA, he finds that no one wants to come to his farewell party, and he leaves his years long job without making a ripple.

That is our first impression of Fox, a subtle, sensitive, funny and very ingaging actor, whom audiences don’t so much like him as they want to adopt him.  Slight in stature at about 4′10″, he projects confidence, and irony and a willingness to endure what he cannot change, in this complicated story.

Eagarly leaving NYC behind on the Interstate going west, he encounters a road block far from any major urban areas and had to make a detour which takes him deeper into rural fantasyland in South Carolina.  He is driving his beloved snow white sports car, his prized possesion, and after suddenly missing a turn and becoming confused, plows into the white picket fence of the Mayor’s house.

Sentenced to community service, until his smashed up but rescuable car is repaired, by that Mayor, whom I believe is also the judge in a typical small town movie role where one character has multiple and unrelated jobs, just like in Baby Boom, (last week’s column) where the guy who comes to fix Diane Keaton’s dry well (or was it the roof?  Or both?  It doesn’t matter…)  is also the featured singer at the town dance.

After meeting a range of amusing townspeople, some who like him and some who scorn him as too stuck up for their little town, he is assigned to work with the very old but (naturally) beloved cranky Town Doc, who measures his wealth in babies born long ago who now are having their own babies, instead of material wealth.  His nickname, Doc Hollywood, is not attached to him with admiration.

There is a plan afoot, hatched by the devious Mayor and other co-conspirators, to somehow lure the dashing (to them) big city doctor to stay in their beautiful homey little town.  They even offer him a house, for free.  Not as chance, responds Fox, who yearns for the big bucks he will pile up reshaping floppy breasts, double chins and sagging rear ends.

                                                                                                     (Read on …)

Baby Boom (1987), one of my favorite fish-out-of-water romantic movies is closely related to Doc Hollywood (1991), both depicting very self-assured, smug, sophisticated, highly educated New York City people who unashamedly act openly condescending toward rural towns and types.

Both involve an unexpected re-evaluation of core values, re-categorizing old priorities and slowing w-a-a-a-a-a-y down.  Or, to quote Simon and Garfunkle (both men, unbelievably, now creeping toward seventy years old!) : Slow down! You move too fast! Got to make…the moment last…just kickin’ ’round the cobblestones………………

This week, I’ll attempt to transmit the magical romance that the first film, Baby Boom, bathes me in whenever I see it.  Farm Country real estate brokers ought to make seeing this sweet film a requirement before they show city people rural acreage, and perhaps make those buyers more aware of what already is, doesn’t need an injection of giant and ugly boxy architecture just because there’s so much land available at much cheaper than big city prices.  Just because a person can afford to dramatically change his surroundings doesn’t mean that is reason enough to do it.  Charm is a fragile thing.

Diane Keaton, the film’s star, unlike most film heroines is more linear than curvy, yet to me she conveys an irresistible allure of intelligence, spontaneity, unorthodox speech patterns and pronunciation, sexy indignation and exasperation, studied humorous theatricality in her movements and gestures and did I mention I think she’s beautiful?  Not just twenty years ago, but today too? 

Well, she’s the dream schiksa to me.  Endlessly interesting to watch on the big screen, and the little one, too.

She’s an account manager of some big name companies in a high-powered marketing firm, who has chosen to remaine single because she’s ‘married to her career’ and no man she’s met yet has the stuff to deter her from her hungry ambition to dominate her surroundings and be universally recognized for her accomplishments.  She is the self-described “Tiger-Lady” and buddy— better stay out of her way.

(Read on …)

Warning: The following post meets the definition of infomercial.

For many of us, email has become part of our daily lives. It has become an essential tool for communications with others around the world. The things we discuss through email are often the same things we might otherwise discuss through postal mail or on the telephone. Email has also become a source of irritation because some people has chosen to abuse it by sending mountains of spam. (Many more people are unwitting accomplices and don’t even know it.)

What most people do not realize is that sending an email message is like sending a postcard. It can be easily read by any number of people who can access it by way of it passing through their equipment or, who just happen to be connected to the same “wires” it travels along on its path from sender to recipient. Most people who could read others’ emails don’t but the few who do, are likely to do so for the worst reasons.

You are probably saying to yourself, “I don’t care if somebody reads my email. I have nothing to hide.” But just because you are not doing anything illegal, immoral, or shameful, does not mean you would be comfortable if you found your messages copied on the walls of a public restroom. (Read on …)

In Shining Through (1992), Melanie Griffith plays a different sort of ethnic role than she did in last week’s review (KCK, # 6) of A Stranger Among Us (1992).                          

In the first film, she portrayed an undercover cop pretending to be a returning member of a Jewish Hasid sect in New York City.  So…she was an actor pretending to be someone, who was also pretending to be someone else. 

Which by some eerie coincidence is exactly  what she does in the next film. 

In the second film, she’s a young woman in pre-World War II days, about 1940, living near the US Capital.  Her mother is Irish, this time, and her father is Jewish.  She also has Jewish cousins living a fragile existence in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.  Although she doesn’t assume any obvious or familiar ethnic stereo-typical mannerisms to establish that she’s a young East-Coast Jewish girl–which is a good thing to me–the filmmakers must have assumed that the audience would take it on faith that she was who she was supposed to be.

Melanie’s character also has an encyclopedic knowledge of all sorts of obscure movie plots from that post-Depression time and earlier, and that is a key element in the overall story.  All her clever ideas, ways of saving herself when in great danger and the way she chooses to complete the complex and perilous task she is entrusted to do, are derived from moments she’s remembered from the uncountable movies she’s seen.

Well, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a mind like that, totally filled with memories of thousands of movies.  It seems like you’d have to be a Cyborg to retain all that minutia.  Pass the oil, please, Arnold….  (Read on …)

On the topic of: Unexpected Pleasures of viewing  sexy blonde actresses pretending to be Jewish (excluding Marilyn Monroe – who would be 82 now if she was still living — and who converted before she married Arthur Miller, in July 1956, and the stunning Scarlett Johansson, who doesn’t need to)  I offer the delectable:

                               Melanie Griffith

Who, in an interesting example of strategic career choices, decided to make movies about these exotic Biblical people, twice.

In A stranger Among Us  (1992), she play a tough cop who goes undercover by assuming the identity of a Hasidic single woman who has ’strayed’ from the sect and then chooses to return to it.  This allows her to have no connections to any of the other Hasidic communities in the Northeastern US area and therefore eliminating any way of tracing who she was, if some suspicious person wanted to do that. 

She is first introduced as gorgeous, physically competent, brave, very effective with a gun and sexually free young woman, but whose life is going nowhere.  She comes across as vaguely unhappy and aimless.  But, of course, still well built.

Then a murder occurs in a New York City’s Jewish Hasidic community and she is assigned to find out who did it–a difficult task in the insular, extremely observant religious community.  

After she is allowed to live in a kind of dorm as a single woman with no money, and gradually blends in with the sharply gender-divided responsibilities each person assumes, she displays a kind of fascination with what she learns and wonders why the women put up with so many restrictions on their freedom of choice, or in other words, the unrestricted  life Melanie is living.

Besides being a murder mystery, the movie is a glimpse into a seldom seen on the screen, every day frozen-in-time world of the Hasids, who also speak Yiddish almost exclusively among themselves, but not around Melanie.  Yiddish–a Middle-European dialect that arose about a thousand years ago as millions of Jews gradually migrated north and east from their original Middle Eastern homeland–is a blend of German, Polish and Hebrew.                                                 (Read on …)