February Words of Wisdom

His sense of service, intellectual curiosity, and capacity to squeeze fun out of any situation, were all irrepressible. That mischievous, inquiring twinkle was as bright at the end as when I first set eyes on him. --Queen Elizabeth II, speaking of her late husband Prince Phillip (I just thought it was such a lovely thing for her to say, and such a lovely thing for a person to have said about him.)

 

How much longer are you going to wait to demand the best for yourself? --Epictetus

 

Every act of beauty is a revolt against the modern world. --Caspar David Friedrich

 

Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going. --Jim Ryun 

 

Of this be sure: You do not find the happy life; you make it. --Thomas S. Monson

If you tell the truth, it becomes a part of your past. If you lie, it becomes a part of your future. --Unknown

 

When values are clear, decisions are easy. --John Spence 

 

Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. --Anthony Esolen

 

The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful. --Julius Evola 

Mystery is an intellectual process. But suspense is essentially an emotional process. --Alfred Hitchcock

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals. --Henry David Thoreau

No matter how disappointing people, places, things, or dreams that refuse to die (even when they should) might be...

H/T to Beautifully Broken, Poetically Healed on FB.

I'll explain later. Maybe. Probably not.

You Know Who strikes again, eh?

The Babylon Bee takes on the POS ruining our wonderful neighbors to the north.

Recent reading: "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood"

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson

The Big Goodbye looks at the struggle to create the classic film Chinatown by focusing on the four men responsible for bringing it to the big screen: screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, director Roman Polanski, and star Jack Nicholson.

The Hollywood that this quartet had fallen in love with and thrived in was coming to an end. One year to the day after Chinatown's release, Jaws hit the theaters and not only did Hollywood change the way they viewed successful films, but also how to make and market these films. Marketing departments and the Don Simpsons of the world were about to take over, replacing film-loving movie makers and the studios that had supported them with high-concept, often-lowbrow movies and summer blockbusters. 

After the triumph of Chinatown, Evans became a dinosaur, infamously dethroned at Paramount. Towne started using cocaine and went off the rails personally, and Polanski was infamously convicted of raping a thirteen year old girl and skipped town for exile in Europe. Nicholson would confirm his status as a great star with his next film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which earned him his first Oscar win (on his fifth nomination, the fourth being for Chinatown) and never looked back.

Wasson begins at the beginning, introducing the quartet by going back to their childhoods and giving the reader a look into what drove them personally and professionally. And of course, there is the inescapable and horrific story of the Manson murders, in which Polanski's wife Sharon Tate, their unborn son, and several others were brutally slaughtered, and its aftermath. 

A terrific book, especially if you're a fan of Hollywood and film history as I am.

The phone rang in the cutting room, and Lambro picked it up.

It was a girl's voice.

"You have the wrong extension," Lambro told her. "There's no Paul here."

"That's for me," Polanski said, reaching for the phone.

Lambro had earlier browsed an adult newspaper left in the cutting room, glancing at a personal ad, circled, fifteen-year-old girl, "confidential, likes relationships with European man in forties."

Note: Lambro is composer Phillip Lambro, who wrote the first score for Chinatown that was eventually jettisoned in favor of the Jerry Goldsmith score used in the final cut. Paul was the name Polanski and Tate intended to give to their unborn son.

40+ years after its comic strip debut, Bloom County gets the animated series treatment

I was a huge fan of Bloom County in the 1980's and had a bunch of the books, and now word comes that an animated series is in the works. If you're unfamiliar with Bloom County and its offbeat creator Berkeley Breathed, let Wikipedia explain it for you:

Bloom County is an American comic strip by Berkeley Breathed which originally ran from December 8, 1980, until August 6, 1989. It examined events in politics and culture through the viewpoint of a fanciful small town in Middle America, where children often have adult personalities and vocabularies and where animals can talk.

On July 12, 2015, Breathed started drawing Bloom County again. The first revived strip was pubished via Facebook on July 13, 2015.

Bloom County was so firmly rooted in the eighties it's hard to imagine it finally getting to TV forty years later. I scrolled through a few of the current Facebook comics and couldn't really get a feel for its updated sensibilities. It will be interesting to see how the animated series handles the 2020's. Will it be sharp, smart satire? Uber-woke? It's hard to say. Breathed won a Pulitzer for Bloom County back in the 80's, so he's no lightweight in the writing department. I guess time will tell, but I'd watch the hell out of a non-PC Bloom County.

From me to you...

💕💕💕Happy Day Before See's Candies Big Sale Day everyone!💕💕💕

Nailed it

It's been a while since I began a post with the words, "The Babylon Bee strikes again," but well, The Babylon Bee strikes again.

Because, yeah.

Great news - Kids in the Hall documentary on the way

Amazon Prime has nabbed the documentary The Kids in the Hall: Comedy Punks, a documentary that I had no idea was being done. GREAT news, but how is this the first I've heard of it?

No word on when the doc will hit the airwaves, but Amazon will also be airing the Kids' new series, an eight episode sketch comedy show that's been a long time coming. According to the Hollywood Reporter article, that show will debut "later this year". 

 

So much Kids! Such wonderful news! Makes ya wanna break out in song!

January Words of Wisdom

Get at least eight hours of beauty sleep. Nine if you're ugly. --Betty White 

 

I feel sorry for the 90's, because it was never able to be anything much more than the hangover to the party that was the 80's. --Simon Le Bon

 

Be at peace with your eccentric oddities. Own the strange parts of you. It's what sets you apart from the rest. --Dede Hawkins

 

Give it time. Have patience and compassion for yourself. Find peace within yourself, respect yourself, smile with yourself, care for yourself, and love yourself. --Creig Crippen

 

I am the me I choose to be. --Sidney Poitier

 

If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be. --Epictetus 

 

Luxury must first be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury. --Coco Chanel

Giving yourself a little time to appreciate something that doesn't move as fast is very important. --Mindy Staton

People who weave lies will eventually get cuaght in the web of their own deceit. --Erin Chatters

 

It's strange how some people ignore the logic just because they believe what they like to believe and ignore the truth. --Oscar Auliq-Ice 

 

You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. --Carl Jung

 

The enemy wouldn't be attacking you if something very valuable wasn't inside of you. Thieves don't break into empty houses. --Unknown

 

Do not give in to evil, and proceed every more boldly. --Ludwig von Mises 

 

Your Feel Good Story of the Day: Bob Ross Edition

I saw this story in the Bob Ross documentary last year, but it had slipped my mind until a couple days ago when these popped up on my social media feed:

 

 

So cool. So inspiring. 

 

I forgot where I found this, so if it's yours let me know so I can give credit where credit is due.

"Yellowjackets" - The season finale "Dexter" fans deserved (SPOILERS!)

Props to Yellowjackets, which premiered a week after the return of Dexter: New Blood, and completely sucked me in from episode one. Last night the season finale aired and holy moly, I did not see any of that coming. Except for the fact that we'd already been tipped off that Jackie wasn't going to make it into the present day, so it was just a question of when and how she'd shuffle off this mortal coil back in the 1990's. And who would be the first cannibalized. I think both those questions have now been answered.

If you haven't seen the show, Yellowjackets is Alive meets Lord of the Flies with a 1990's high school girl's soccer team. And it is awesome. It is unlike anything else on television. I don't know where the show's creators have been all my life.

Like I mentioned last week, the Dexter: New Blood finale was a massive disappointment of epic proportions, so much so that it made the infamous original series finale look like a work of genius that at least allowed for more of our favorite sociopath serial killer, at least until that option came to a screeching halt last week. Not so with Yellowjackets, which did not disappoint and will not return fast enough for me. Luckily, Showtime has already ordered season two, so at least it's on its way.

Yellowjackets is the story of the survivors of a mid-1990's private plane crash that was carrying a high school girl's soccer team to the state championship. Lost in the wilderness, the girls will have to fight to survive. In the present day, we learn that some of them made it out alive. Some of them.

What the girls had to resort to to survive the nineteen months they were lost in the wilderness isn't laid out explicitly, but it's pretty obvious, especially since the opening scene shows a young girl running through a snowy forest, clearly running away from something in great terror, only to fall into a booby trap that impales her, and then we find she's not alone.

When we meet some of the survivors in present day, Shauna is a seemingly mind-numbed middle-class housewife who has no rapport with her teenage daughter and who learns that her husband is having an affair. Taissa Turner is running for state senate and lives what seems to be an opulent existence with her wife and their young son Sammy, who is exhibiting emotional issues. For starters, he has papered his bedroom window with drawings so as to hide from what he describes as an evil woman he keeps seeing in the tree outside his room. Nat is being sprung from what we can surmise is not her first trip to rehab. Misty, the weirdo of her high school class, is cheerfully and psychotically "caring" for residents of an old folks home and just being generally unhinged. 

We're lead to understand that while it's obvious that the girls didn't survive without resorting to extreme measures, it seems that today they still have secrets. Secrets that they are now being blackmailed with, requiring Shauna, Taissa, Nat and Misty to join forces to save themselves and their secrets.

Yellowjackets is understandably not for everyone. It is dark, sick, sadistic, terrifying, at times repellent, and promises even more horrors to come. And it's one of the best things on television right now.

Another thing that makes Yellowjackets so amazing is the casting. Not just the brilliance of putting Melanie Lynskey (Shauna), Christina Ricci (Misty), and Juliette Lewis (Nat) together in one show with amazing writing. I've been a fan of Lynskey's since her terrifying performance in Heavenly Creatures. Ricci made a great Lizzie Borden (one of many amazing entries on her resume) and while I've never been much of a fan of Lewis's (to me she was always Luke Wilson's odd-looking pervy girlfriend in Old School) she kicks out all the stops here. Ruthless in both being both badly aged and worn down physically and psychologically compared to the other women, it is an absolutely fearless performance in a role that grants her no relief. She looks awful, but is absolutely amazing. In a cast littered with award-worthy performances, if I had to pick one to win, it would be Lewis. Tawny Cypress, who I was previously unfamiliar with, holds her own in as the increasingly troubled Taissa.

There's also the amazing casting of the surviving girls as teenagers, back in the day. The younger cast is so solid it's mind-boggling. They also look enough like their older counterparts that it's easy to go back and forth between time frames with ease. If there's an Emmy for casting, they might as well just hand it to this show right now.

I will be eagerly awaiting the return of Yellowjackets the way I used to await the return of Dexter back in the good old days. 

 

This should be interesting: Spade and Carvey launch SNL podcast

I love behind the scenes stories, so this should be fun. David Spade and Dana Carvey are launching a podcast where they will discuss their experiences on Saturday Night Live. The podcast is called Fly on the Wall and launches January 12. You can subscribe now on iTunes.