Got younger (maybe) grandkids? Lost at trying to find a good, clean, decent movie for the evening?

…and if you don’t have grandkids, invite one of your baby-sitting friends who does over for the evening.

You would think from the title alone this is going to be some corny, cliched, sentimental, and silly.

And oh, it is …but in all the good ways.

My Dog Skip.

Bring tissue. There will be tears. Guaranteed.

…but you won’t mind.

You’ll probably sit quietly through the credits, afterward, even. Remembering stuff. With a smile.

A nice Shiraz or Merlot afterwards …or a decent Cab’ (maybe after you’ve trundled those grandkids off to bed: timing is all) will add a soft glow to the reflection and quiet conversation later.

…bet you add it to your annual Christmas season movie list, too.

Afterwards, I looked him up, and found out he is a Southern Episcopalian, still a Christian believer. Amazing that the Hollyweird gang revere him so.

The female lead in this one, as well as the treatment of “colored” and indians, is really quite modern — again, suggesting that a lot of the elements of equality were already on their way through the pipeline, and there was just a limit as to how fast and how far major social changes could take place.

========================
Consider two movies:
That Way With Women (1947)

Mother Is A Freshman (1949)
========================

Hard to find these two, but if you do, it’s an interesting contrast between the female leads, and I believe they show, along with certain other things, that women in the 40s had equality — and Hollywood conspired to take it away from them.

TWWW — a young ex-soldier (Dane Clark, a John Garfield clone at the time) comes back to his hometown looking for work. He encounters, and hits it off with, Sydney Greenstreet, a wealthy ex-businessman who has retired due to ill-health, but who is feeling antsy. He agrees to be a silent partner as the soldier buys a service station to run, as long as he can put in some work in it. Enter his daughter (Martha Vickers) who is against him working. Sparks fly. Romance ensues.

Notable, I think, for the female lead.

She is sassy, strong willed, completely competent and self-assured… able to handle herself and to talk on an even keel on any subject with any man she meets. She wears a Rosalind Russell type hair style (practical, not requiring a great deal of upkeep), a loose skirt and practical heels (You can see her breaking into a run if she had to).

Now… MIAF:
A young widow, whose late husband arranged a trust fund for her, has managed to irresponsibly plow through the entire year’s allowance… and it’s ONLY AUGUST! Her daughter is in college. She has only one option open to her. Her grandmother left an endowment to pay the college expenses for any woman with the same name as the grandmother. Her mother had that name, and she was given that name (though she never went to college). She decided, though, that her daughter was NOT going to have that name… Rendering her ineligible for the endowment. Cue the Loony Tunes theme, here.

Solution? The mother has to go to college to collect the money to make it through the next five months. The family lawyer, a nice enough nebbish (played by Rudy Vallee, a perfectly nebbishy kind of guy) entreats her to marry him, he could and would happily take care of her as she expects. But she’s not interested. I mean… he’s a nebbish.

While in college, she meets hunky professor Michaels (Van Johnson). Light romantic comedy ensues.

Now, consider the female lead, here.

Useless, brain dead, helpless — she can’t even control her basic spending to match a reasonable income-payment schedule. She NEEDS a man!

Hairstyle — early Kim Novak, requiring the regular spending of substantial time at the hair dresser’s about 3 times a week. Clothes — pearls (of course!), tight hoop skirts, and very impractical heels. If she was being chased by Jack the Ripper, she’s dogmeat — she could not possibly run.

Two depictions of women in films — only two years apart. By 1949, gone, for the most part, is the Rosalind Russell/Lauren Bacall type of self-assured, capable women. In her place is the Kim Novak archetype. VERY dependent on the men in her life to care for her.

Ode To Joy Flashmob…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBaHPND2QJg

I’m not sure my opinion is “generalizable” since I first saw it in the theaters, so it can be argued as colored by early formation — I usually am able to override that, but I recently re-watched it about 5-odd years ago and it seemed to still be halfway decent.

I believe it showed *VIETNAM* the way you describe but wasn’t so blind as to suggest what you did, and it showed the soldiers as more than mindless idiots. It showed them as humans in an ephed up situation… and no matter how you slice it, that’s what Vietnam wound up being… through no fault of the soldiers.

So give it a chance, if you get the chance to see it.

Whale Rider
LA Confidential
American Gangster
Man on Fire
Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Patriot
Proof of Life
Under the Tuscan Sun
The Missing

and many more.

I’m guessing from reading the plot and character devlopment that I would find it much like all the other Vietnam films I’ve seen. The producers and writers all try to show the war as evil with no value of any kind. They show the GIs as mostly canon fodder who get fed into a meat grinder because of screwed up government policies of intervening willy nilly all over the world. The South Vietnamese are always corrupt and not worth our efforts to help them remain non-Communists. In the course of the war the grunts are always somewhat noble,(though often corrupted by the end) the non-coms and officers a sorry bunch. The films are about as anti-war as films are able to get because in the writers/producers minds it was an evil, immoral, useless war. That point of view has its place, but it has been the only point of view I’ve seen.

“Flight of the Intruder” had its moments as a representation of the Navy air war in Vietnam. But it also had stereotypical characters,(which I have seen in their many variations during my service) unbelievable plot twists to juice the story, and some imperfect technical details. So, my reaction to it was about what the Iraq vets had to “The Hurt Locker.” Even though air combat is high adrenaline, there are many more hours of being between missions, getting aircraft fixed, planning, briefing, weather delays, etc. The real thing would not be that interesting in a movie. Thus the dramatic license. In spite of said dramatic license “Flight….” just did not have the intensity of feelings for me that “The Hurt Locker” provided. Maybe I’m just getting old and soft. ;> )

I’m not surprised, I’m just not a big fan of multifunction devices… particularly for techs still in a lot of flux — they made, for example, TVs with built-in DVDs — So what do you do when the DVD goes bad… or the TV goes bad… or you want to get a bigger, better screen? The Roku’s qualities are great, at this time — what happens when there is some new format it can’t handle?

Moreover, a cuisinart-breadmaker-toaster-oven combo might be nice and compact, but what happens when one of them fails?

There are advantages to all-in-one units but there are certain arenas I think it pays to avoid ‘em.

Well, I don’t want to spoil that either. Let’s just say he was an uncle with a shady past visiting his sister’s family. Looking it up I remember now that it was called “Shadow of a Doubt”. And checking further, I see that it is also available in full version on YouTube.

Shadow of a Doubt