Yes, it was two years ago today that we here at the Monkey posted for the first time. What a wild trip it has been—we started with The General in 1927, crawled forward to 1933 and then allowed the tide of history to sweep us back into the first decade of film. But I promise we'll start moving forward again. One day. Maybe when the economy recovers ...
In any event, we here at the Monkey plan to party 'til dawn. Join us.
Venus Armida of the blog "They Had Faces!" has bestowed upon the Monkey the "Stylish Blogger Award"—hey, good for me! Like the Monkey, Venus has devoted herself to, in her own words, "discovering, and helping others discover, the cool interesting world of silent films." A worthwhile mission, if I may say so myself.
According to the rules of the award, I have to post a link to Venus's blog, reveal seven facts about myself and pass the award along to seven more stylish bloggers. The first is easy (done), the last well-nigh impossible, the second is as follows:
1. I've been watching the animated series Archer on FX recently. A cross between James Bond, Charlie Sheen and Brewster Rockit, Sterling Archer is the sort of spy who can't quite grasp why it's not a good idea to loudly announce he's a spy everywhere he goes.
"M as in—what?!" "Mancy. What'd you think I said?" "Nancy! You idiot!" "Oh. Yeah. I could see how you might—" "Tell me what to do!" "Uh, do you have parachutes?" "No!" "Because that would be, you know, problem solved."
The entire first season is available for instant streaming on Netflix.
2. Speaking of Cold War jibber jabber, I ran across this photo on Unexplained Cinema, a blog I follow and that you should follow, too:
Yes, I used to tell my toys the same thing, but I recently had an epiphany, that our solar system's sun will one day burn out and when it does, the human race will vanish from the universe like a soap bubble, which not only means that the whole of human endeavor is completely pointless, but also that I can safely skip my law school reunion later this week. Win-win.
3. By the way, the kid is reading from the wrong text—this is Marxism for beginners:
4. No, actually the epiphany was, as Thomas Boswell put it in the Washington Post sports section this morning, "Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you have." And I woke up recently and realized I am a happy man. Probably after napping with Katie-Bar-The-Door while watching The Thin Man for the hundredth time.
"Nickie, can you reach the water? No, I just—I don't want it. I just wanted to be sure you could reach it."
5. Just to underscore that I'm not a nihilist, I built this train layout for my brother's kids a couple of Christmases ago:
Nihilists rarely build train layouts for their brother's kids, especially at Christmas. It's like a rule or something.
6. Speaking of brothers, I have two, which you may have surmised from careful reading of this blog over the years. My older brother is the one who lives in Auburn and saw the Beatles play live. My younger brother has played drums and guitar live with some of the finest session musicians Nashville has to offer—which is to say, the finest in the world. As our former neighbor and lifelong friend Bobby Bare Jr. once sang, "In Nashville, Tennessee ... the world's greatest living guitar pickers can deliver you a pizza." Talk about the boulevard of broken dreams!
7. And lastly, a family portrait:
I'm more of a speak-no-evil kind of Monkey myself, but I've seen and heard plenty. And I keep meticulous notes. So don't get any ideas.
As for passing this award on to seven more bloggers, well, that's easier said than done—I follow something like 160 blogs and I like them all. There are a few, however, I owe a favor for various reasons; perhaps this will balance the books:
Almost missed it. Today is Thomas Edison's 164th birthday.
To read a bit about his not inconsiderable place in film history, click here.
Also, it's Tina Louise's birthday today. She's not 164. Which begs the question, Ginger or Mary Ann? I know the fashionable answer is Mary Ann, but I've always been a Ginger man, myself.
The results are in on the latest Monkey survey, "What first brought you to the Mythical Monkey?" Not surprisingly, the majority of you said you first arrived here either while searching for a photo (22) or by way of a link from another blog (also 22). We here at the Monkey do tend to overstuff our posts with pictures. But what would you rather look at, Louise Brooks or a long gray block of impenetrable text? That's what I thought.
Among the other answers, five of you admitted to being a friend or family member, and six of you claimed brain damage—the latter of which strikes me as either way too many or not nearly enough. Three arrived here while searching for info or a movie-specific review, one got here by way of a review on the Internet Movie Database, and four chose "other."
The one vote for "an interest in alternate Oscars" was cast by yours truly. Although I think many readers find the whole "alternate Oscar" concept, first championed by Danny Peary in his book of the same name, confusing or frankly irritating, the truth is, I wouldn't have started this blog at all except for my own obsession with "who should have won," and what little forward momentum this blog has comes strictly from my own desire to get to the next award. So I think for the time being, I'll stick with the current format even if I do wind up tweaking it a bit.
Amazingly, no one picked "word of mouth." I would have thought sitting around in a bar talking about movie blogs would rank higher, especially when "Lets go back to my place and read the Monkey together" is a proven pick-up line. (Proven in the same sense that many things on the internet are proven, which is to say I made it up.)
Which reminds me of a true story from my law school days. At the end of one especially grueling semester, I held a film festival in my apartment—twenty-four consecutive hours of wholesome movie goodness, beginning at 11 in the morning and ending sometime after breakfast the following day. It turned into a bit of an event with something like fifty people showing up and camping out, including one woman I had never met who turned down a friend of mine for a date because she was "going to some guy's film festival."
There's a moral in there some place. I just don't know what it is.
You know a television show has run seriously off the rails when your wife turns to you and says, in all sincerity, "This would have made more sense with a llama."
Flu-ridden and snowbound yesterday afternoon, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watched a rerun of Lost in Space on the Family Net cable channel, specifically the infamous "Carrotman" episode, a.k.a. "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." For those of you old enough to remember Lost in Space, the Carrotman needs no introduction. For the rest of you, well, let's just say '60s camp never got any campier.
For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for useless trivia, the part of the Carrotman's sidekick, Willoughby, was originally to be played by a talking llama—yes, the kind with four legs, painted purple, no less. (It does not compute!) But the trained llama kept biting Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith) who finally refused to continue production. Which is a pity, because it really would have made more sense with a llama. But the llama was fired, a human was hired, and the series was cancelled two weeks later.
Oh, the pain, the pain.
You can watch "The Great Vegetable Rebellion" here at the Monkey, courtesy of Hulu.com.
"You have to go back to Lancelot Link's piano player to find anyone this ineffective at a keyboard."
He was referring specifically to a reporter for the New York Times but he could have been talking about me. I'm 171 movies and 4000 words into this essay about the film years 1906-1914, but I'm not any closer to being done than I was a week ago. I think what I'm going to do is throw in the towel and publish my notes bullet-fashion, the way I did for an unfinished essay about innovations in the use of sound back in 2009.
It's either that or stop blogging for the next six months. I don't see any other way.
In the meantime, does anyone else remember the Saturday morning kids show Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp? It was a live action show about a chimpanzee spy named Lancelot Link. He worked for the Agency to Prevent Evil ("APE"), had a girlfriend named Mata Hairy, and battled a parade of villains including Dr. Strangemind, Baron von Butcher, and other henchmen of CHUMP.
Here's a clip of their band, The Evolution Revolution:
Bonus Trivia: Lancelot Link was played by the same chimp who played the Bloop on television's Lost In Space.
This has nothing to do with anything other than my idle curiosity—what first brought you to the Mythical Monkey?
I'm a friend or family member Internet Movie Database review search for a photo search for info or review an interest in "alternate" Oscars A link from another blog brain damage word of mouth other
As always, you can vote in the poll at the top right-hand of the page.
If everything had gone to plan in 2010, this would be the post where I announce the Katie-Bar-The-Door nominees for the movie year 1936. Okay, so I'm a bit behind. But here are ten subjects I swear I'll write about before the calendar year is done.
Les Vampires Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford Pola Negri Rudolph Valentino The Thin Man Bette Davis Clark Gable Katharine Hepburn Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Alfred Hitchcock
... from Katie-Bar-The-Door and the Mythical Monkey.
Postscript: For those of you who've been around awhile, you may recognize this is a re-gift of last year's Christmas Eve post. How Scrooge-ly of me. And where are the substantive posts you've come to expect from the Monkey? Well, I'm working on it. "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." A surprising number of movies from that era are readily available and while watching them, I formed a hypothesis about D.W. Griffith and now I am testing it against the evidence. My friends who have seen me prepare for a court case know I am prone to disappear down this type of rabbit hole from time to time. Nothing to do but wait for me to climb back out of it again.
I don't know about you, but I love Thanksgiving. Always have, always will. To me, it's like Christmas only better, an excuse to hang out with the people you love and eat obscene amounts of food without the hassle of buying more junk nobody needs.
But clearly that's just me.
Anyway, there aren't a lot of good Thanksgiving-related movies out there, but here are my picks as the five best:
Miracle On 34th Street (the 1947 version, please)—This is the one Katie-Bar-The-Door and I watch every year as we're sleeping off lunch. The charming story of how Santa Claus came to town and wound up on trial for his sanity, Miracle on 34th Street starts at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade and is a great way to kick off the Christmas season (assuming that, like the Monkey, you refuse to acknowledge those decorations that have been up since Columbus Day).
Serve with warm pecan pie straight from the oven.
Hannah And Her Sisters (1986)—Woody Allen's surprisingly warm tale of three neurotic sisters and their equally neurotic love lives, bookended by sumptuous Thanksgiving celebrations straight out of a Martha Stewart wet dream. As a bonus, Woody learns life is worth living while watching the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.
Serve with a nice Bordeaux aged in Anton Chekhov's wine cellar.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)—Roger Ebert's favorite Thanksgiving Day movie, it's a classic odd couple comedy from John Hughes, starring an uptight Steve Martin and the slovenly salt of the earth John Candy as two men desperately trying to get home for the holidays. "How do they know which way we're going?" Tart and funny with all the sugar backloaded to the last five minutes.
Serve with all the trimmings.
Home For The Holidays (1995)—My literary agent, Jill, thinks this is the best Thanksgiving movie ever. It's a comedy filled with hostility, anxiety, irrational grievances and all the unfulfilled familial expectations you could ever want. Not to mention someone gets a turkey dumped in their lap. In other words, it's a documentary of the typical American Thanksgiving dinner.
Serve with bile and battery acid.
The Ice Storm (1997)—Alcoholism, wife swapping, teenage sex—and the best Thanksgiving toast ever. If you grew up in a lunatic asylum or are simply nostalgic for the free-love Seventies, this is the movie for you. Stars Joan Allen and Kevin Kline (sans moustache, and you know what that means).
I'm back from my long, long road trip with my brother and three nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie, or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly), and as expected, I didn't do any work on the blog. I know most people these days remain in constant contact with i-phones this and i-pads that, but not the Monkey—when I travel, I travel like Christopher Columbus, that is to say, alone, out of the reach of civilization, ready to sail blindly off the edge of the earth into the celestial abyss.
It's the only way to fly.
But I'm back now and I don't anticipate any more interruptions, at least not for the rest of 2010. With any luck, I can respond to some of the comments you fine, fine folks left while I was gone and after that, I'll post my essay on the best comedy/musical of 1932-33.
... where x equals the number of years, at my current pace of covering three movie years every calendar year, to reach what I call "convergence"—that is to say, when I'll be reviewing movies in the theaters rather than writing history.
Math is not my strong suit (why do you think I went to law school), but it works out to 38.5.
Faithful reader hanner_da_nanner of Hanner's Blog Mmkay has tagged me with the latest internet meme called "Tag You're It." The rules are simple: I answer eight questions she asks, come up with eight questions of my own, and tag eight more people. I was going to leave it until after I posted my essay about Paul Muni, but then I started thinking about it, which, of course, is always a mistake.
As the man said, "Don't think, you'll only hurt the ballclub."
Her questions and my answers:
1-Who was your mentor growing up? What about now? I can't say I've ever had an Obi-Wan-Kenobi style mentor, but I've learned an awful lot from people with names like Katie-Bar-The-Door, Mister Muleboy, Bellotoot, Susan, my brothers Tom and Steve, but first and foremost Robert Osborne. 2-If you had a shopping spree at one store, which store would it be? My very favorite store, Amazon.com.
3-If you could own any pet, what would you have, and what would you name it? Why, this little doggie right here ... 4-If you could start any business, what would you start? Monkey Business, of course.
5-Dream vacation spot? Anywhere Katie-Bar-The-Door is. 6-If you started a charity, what would it be for? I'd like to give essays about movies to all the little children of the world. Or food. Food would also be good.
7-What's on your Christmas list this year? After eight straight Christmases on the road, spending Christmas at home. Everything else is icing on the sugar cookies.
8-What are/would you be for Halloween? Rich. And my eight questions: 1) You're walking down the street when a talking penguin asks you for a movie recommendation. Assuming you're wearing your favorite shoes, which pair are you wearing?
2) If you had to live one day from your life over and over again, which musical instrument would you learn how to play? 3) This one courtesy of Eddie Izzard: Cake or death? [see it below]
4) Which is your favorite railroad in a game of Monopoly?
5) Tapas in Barcelona or moules et frites in Paris? 6) If you were nougat, would you want to be covered in milk-, dark- or white-chocolate?
7) If you could be any character from a movie, who would be your co-star? 8) You're coming to bat in a major league game for the first time—what's your theme song?
I don't think I'm allowed to tag hanner back again, so I'm picking the last eight bloggers not named hanner_da_nanner who left comments on my blog. That'll teach you.
We got 30.2 inches of snow between lunchtime Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon. Woke up this morning to find this in my front yard. And there's another one right next to it. So no blogging today, but lots of shoveling.
The neighborhood kids have turned the taller of the two into the best combination snow fort/slide you've ever seen. We've never had a mountain named after us before.
Yes, it was two years ago today that we here at the Monkey posted for the first time. What a wild trip it has been—we started with The General in 1927, crawled forward to 1933 and then allowed the tide of history to sweep us back into the first decade of film. But I promise we'll start moving forward again. One day. Maybe when the economy recovers ...
Venus Armida of the blog "They Had Faces!" has bestowed upon the Monkey the "Stylish Blogger Award"—hey, good for me! Like the Monkey, Venus has devoted herself to, in her own words, "discovering, and helping others discover, the cool interesting world of silent films." A worthwhile mission, if I may say so myself.
"M as in—what?!"
Yes, I used to tell my toys the same thing, but I recently had an epiphany, that our solar system's sun will one day burn out and when it does, the human race will vanish from the universe like a soap bubble, which not only means that the whole of human endeavor is completely pointless, but also that I can safely skip my law school reunion later this week. Win-win.
4. No, actually the epiphany was, as Thomas Boswell put it in the Washington Post sports section this morning, "Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you have." And I woke up recently and realized I am a happy man. Probably after napping with Katie-Bar-The-Door while watching The Thin Man for the hundredth time.
5. Just to underscore that I'm not a nihilist, I built this train layout for my brother's kids a couple of Christmases ago:
Nihilists rarely build train layouts for their brother's kids, especially at Christmas. It's like a rule or something.
7. And lastly, a family portrait:
I'm more of a speak-no-evil kind of Monkey myself, but I've seen and heard plenty. And I keep meticulous notes. So don't get any ideas.
Almost missed it. Today is Thomas Edison's 164th birthday.
The results are in on the latest Monkey survey, "What first brought you to the Mythical Monkey?" Not surprisingly, the majority of you said you first arrived here either while searching for a photo (22) or by way of a link from another blog (also 22). We here at the Monkey do tend to overstuff our posts with pictures. But what would you rather look at, Louise Brooks or a long gray block of impenetrable text? That's what I thought.
The one vote for "an interest in alternate Oscars" was cast by yours truly. Although I think many readers find the whole "alternate Oscar" concept, first championed by Danny Peary in his book of the same name, confusing or frankly irritating, the truth is, I wouldn't have started this blog at all except for my own obsession with "who should have won," and what little forward momentum this blog has comes strictly from my own desire to get to the next award. So I think for the time being, I'll stick with the current format even if I do wind up tweaking it a bit.
Which reminds me of a true story from my law school days. At the end of one especially grueling semester, I held a film festival in my apartment—twenty-four consecutive hours of wholesome movie goodness, beginning at 11 in the morning and ending sometime after breakfast the following day. It turned into a bit of an event with something like fifty people showing up and camping out, including one woman I had never met who turned down a friend of mine for a date because she was "going to some guy's film festival."
You know a television show has run seriously off the rails when your wife turns to you and says, in all sincerity, "This would have made more sense with a llama."
For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for useless trivia, the part of the Carrotman's sidekick, Willoughby, was originally to be played by a talking llama—yes, the kind with four legs, painted purple, no less. (It does not compute!) But the trained llama kept biting Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith) who finally refused to continue production. Which is a pity, because it really would have made more sense with a llama. But the llama was fired, a human was hired, and the series was cancelled two weeks later.
"You have to go back to Lancelot Link's piano player to find anyone this ineffective at a keyboard."
It's either that or stop blogging for the next six months. I don't see any other way.
This has nothing to do with anything other than my idle curiosity—what first brought you to the Mythical Monkey?
Happy New Year.
Postscript: For those of you who've been around awhile, you may recognize this is a re-gift of last year's Christmas Eve post. How Scrooge-ly of me. And where are the substantive posts you've come to expect from the Monkey? Well, I'm working on it. "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." A surprising number of movies from that era are readily available and while watching them, I formed a hypothesis about D.W. Griffith and now I am testing it against the evidence. My friends who have seen me prepare for a court case know I am prone to disappear down this type of rabbit hole from time to time. Nothing to do but wait for me to climb back out of it again.
I don't know about you, but I love Thanksgiving. Always have, always will. To me, it's like Christmas only better, an excuse to hang out with the people you love and eat obscene amounts of food without the hassle of buying more junk nobody needs.
I'm back from my long, long road trip with my brother and three nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie, or perhaps Moe, Larry and Curly), and as expected, I didn't do any work on the blog. I know most people these days remain in constant contact with i-phones this and i-pads that, but not the Monkey—when I travel, I travel like Christopher Columbus, that is to say, alone, out of the reach of civilization, ready to sail blindly off the edge of the earth into the celestial abyss.
1933 + 3x = 2010 + x
Here's another equation:
Faithful reader hanner_da_nanner of Hanner's Blog Mmkay has tagged me with the latest internet meme called "Tag You're It." The rules are simple: I answer eight questions she asks, come up with eight questions of my own, and tag eight more people. I was going to leave it until after I posted my essay about Paul Muni, but then I started thinking about it, which, of course, is always a mistake.
We got 30.2 inches of snow between lunchtime Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday afternoon. Woke up this morning to find this in my front yard. And there's another one right next to it. So no blogging today, but lots of shoveling.
