Read in 2021

Back in 2020, I lamented that the year hadn't been great for reading, given the distractions of covid. I read nearly 8,000 words and hoped 2021 would be better.

Well, 2021 was different, that's for sure.

Re-reads are in bold. I don't feel bad re-reading, as I always find something new, or something old affects me in a new way.

Al Capone Shines my Shoes, by Gennifer Choldenko. 274 pages.

Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapsons Program in the World, by Ken Alibek and Stephen Handelman. 319 pages.

Design of Everyday Things, The; by Donald A. Norman. 257 pages.

Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Deep End, by Jeff Kinney. 217 pages.

Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw, by Jeff Kinney. 217 pages.

Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Meltdown, by Jeff Kinney. 217 pages.

Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, by Jeff Kinney. 217 pages.

Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett. 249 pages.

Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank, The; by Erma Bombeck. 256 pages.

Gulliver of Mars, by Edwin L. Arnold. 224 pages.

House of Dies Drear, The; by Virginia Hamilton. 279 pages.

Joachim a des Ennuis, by Sempe/Goscinny. 192 pages.

Le Petit Nicolas et les Copains, by Sempe/Goscinny. 192 pages.

Les Vacances du Petit Nicholas, by Sempe/Goscinny. 186 pages.

Matthew Looney's Voyage to the Earth, by Jerome Beatty Jr. 133 pages.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster; by Adam Higginbotham. 538 pages.

Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett. 353 pages.

Mort, by Terry Pratchett. 181 pages.

Mystery of Drear House, The; by Virginia Hamilton. 217 pages.

No Time Like the Future, by Michael J. Fox. 238 pages.

Peanuts by the Decade, the 1950s; by Charles Schulz. 490 pages.

See Here, Private Hargrove, by Marion Hargrove. 214 pages.

Snuff, by Terry Pratchett. 400 pages.

Under the Black Flag, by David Cordingly. 296 pages.

Who Moved My Cheese, by Dr. Spencer Johnson. 94 pages.

Page Total: 6,430

Lights, Please: 2021

 I can't say it any better than Charles Schulz, Lee Mendelson, and Bill Melendez said back in the 1960s.

YouTube Free Movies: Rockets Galore!

Rockets Galore!

Since I watched "Inn for Trouble" earlier this week YouTube has helpfully tossed a number of contemporary British films my way. For once, an algorithm is doing something right.

Today's is Rockets Galore from 1958. It's done in the style of "The Mouse that Roared" in that it's based on a comic novel about a small place, in this case the Scottish island of Todday, outsmarting the big guns (literally the British government, which wants to use Todday as a missile base). It's got the cast of eccentrics including a few who prattle on in idecipherable Gaelic.

It's a bit light on the comedy, I have to admit. Though it was fun to see as they panned through the island's inhabitants for reactions to a missile circling loudly over the island, the cutaways included a sheep dog, a sheep, and an incredibly wooly horse.

There is something fundamentally funny about watching a collection of rustic bumpkins pulling the wool over the bluebloods' eyes, however. Though making the crashed missile part of a bonfire seems ill advised.

I also love that it's filmed on location -- in this case on the island of Barra. These days, it would all be CGI. And I'm weary of that. Done right, CGI is wonderful. But in many, many cases it's done lazily because it's easier than doing the real thing.

Now they're dropping paratroopers on the clam-diggers.

There's some good anti-war conversation in the movie, coming from a nation only a decade removed from World War II and probably anxious to see the demilitarization, not re-militarization. Maybe that's where the humor -- and the hope -- comes through. And it's all resolved in a way that was probably clever back then, but old hat now: Conservation. I won't spoil the ending. Just go watch the movie.

There's that Cold War weariness, poked in the eyeballs.

But oops: I just spoiled the ending. Sorry.

YouTube Free Movies: "Inn for Trouble" and "Furry Vengeance"

Inn for Trouble

The one review I read on this film at IMDB decried it as a tired vessel for worn-out stars from The Larkins, a British situation comedy of the same 1960 vintage. Or something.

It could be since I'd never seen the show, I wasn't tainted by its worn-out premise, but I thought the film was a hoot.

I mean, it is pretty typical -- A man-boy married to a straightforward, harradin-ish wife, with other man-children in the family getting up to hijinx while the wife tries to keep everything together.

What I enjoyed the most was from the youngest man-child, Eddie Larkin, still living out his Boy-Scout days. He's forced to leave his post as Assistant Scoutmaster as his family runs off from London to run a pub as a reward for a long career in a brewery.

He camps, gets run over by a group fox-hunting, fails to start a fire by using a fire drill and recruits a local youth of indeterminate age as the nucleus of a new troop. They end up water-dowsing and, well, I won't spoil the film. But it was a fun look at Scouting in 1960s Britain, if even then at least the leaders were played as sissies.

I wish I knew more British character actors, because I'm sure this film is packed with them.

I cannot find a trailer for the film, so the YouTube link I used to watch it is here instead.

And technically I didn't find it on the "YouTube Free Movies" thread, but nevertheless, it caught my attention.

Furry Vengeance

This is a 2010 Brendan Frasier vehicle, which should have been a warning.

I'm not sure what this film was, or what its intended audience is. Is it a kids' film? A preaching on the continued human invasion of the natural world? Or a gigantic mistake that I would regret for the rest of the day?

It was sort of all three.

There were enough smashes and crotch shots to entertain the boy kiddies, and maybe enough cute animals to entertain the girls. And there was a rather weak love sub-plot involving two teenagers where the eco-conscious message could be brought in.

But the film, at the end, is utterly forgettable.

Except for Brendan Frasier. I'm pretty sure he had fun making it. Maybe he ought to go Full Rambo more often. So if you want to watch someone having fun while making a really stupid movie, this one's for you.

Also, it should be noted that while the film did not use animals in sunglasses in their promotional material, this did show up in the movie:

The environmentalist message is a bit wearisome at points, particularly at the beginning when the clearly conservative and smarmy land developer representative is driven off the road by an animal-produced Rube Goldberg machine, which sends him and his Porche off a cliff but not before a raccoon is able to hand him back the cigar butt he flicked out the window.

There's also a poorly-built plot point where they try to show the land being developed has long been cursed by animals willing to go to extreme means to shove humanity out, including cavemen, a Puritain, and a hippie, all played by Frasier.

Here's the trailer, so you know what you're in for:

YouTube Free Movies: "The Italian Job," and "Jingle All the Way"

The Italian Job

On the heels of watching The Muppet Christmas Carol with the family last night, I decided I was still in a Michael Caine mood, so I chose 1969's The Italian Job from the list today.

It is, shall we say, a muddle.

For me, what makes heist movies work are the characters. Introduce the characters to me well, and then do an incredible heist, and you've got me hooked.

The heist in this film is pretty good, with a lot of action, some fun cinematography, and what you'd expect from a car chase.

The characterizations, not so much. We get to see Michael Caine's character developed a bit. And you get a little bit of Benny Hill's character -- enough to know he likes the ladies chubby. But that's about it. All the rest of the characters, you could swap them in and out of roles and the movie would be about the same. There's quite a bit going on in the first half of the film, but little of it has to do with establishing characters.

Also, the editing is really choppy. In once scene, they're all shown leaving their mansion hideout. Then one's at the airport, getting his moll out of the action. Another's getting arrested -- Benny Hill, for feeling up a lady. Then they're back at the mansion hideout leaving again, or so I assume. Maybe I don't really know who's coming and going. But the film does a pretty poor job of maintaining continuity.

One of the plot points has to do with changing a reel-t-reel tape at a power plant, or something, as part of the heist. They show the exchange. Then the keep cutting to some kind of control center to show monitors going off or something, but all of the dialogue -- except for one scene -- is done in Italian. It's hard to know what's going on.

Apparently, there's a Mark Wahlberg remake, which might be worth looking at, but based on the trailer, I'm a bit dubious.

I wanted to like this film. But at the end, it was just too muddled to like.

It also has what might be the most annoying rallying movie theme song I've ever heard. And, given it's the '60s, some really questionable hair:

Jingle All the Way

This is a throwback to 1996, and it shows. There were THREE phone calls placed from public payphones in this film. THREE. And as a Christmas movie, it does hit all the Hollywood holiday buttons:

1. No mention of Jesus or Christianity; it's secular all the way ho ho ho.

2. Dad, played by Ahnold Schwarzenneger, is an incompetent workaholic.

3. The town -- which at one point feels smallish, then has a small downtown skyline, then a HUGE downtown skyline -- drips with holiday trimmings with EVERY house decorated to the hilt and lots of piles of snow but nobody has frosty breath and there's a threatened ice storm and it's night and then it's day and there are people caroling in FULL DICKENSIAN REGALIA.

Oh, folks, it was bad. They were going through the motions of making a Christmas movie and they really wanted it to have a heart, but the heart was that the kid gave away the toy he wanted because Dad became a full-fledge copy of the toy, and will probably go back to his incompetence after the New Year.

Do not watch.

Leave Schulz Out of It

 

I culled this from Facebook earlier this week, just to talk about it.

I've loved Peanuts since I was a very young child. I saw myself in Charlie Brown, sometimes in Linus. But everywhere I looked, I saw a creation that understood some of the anxieties children faced, even if I didn't know I was facing anxieties at all.

So it kinda makes me mad, seeing stuff like this.

Linus never said this. Don't put words in his mouth. Leave Charles Schulz out of whatever it is you're talking about.

Because this isn't the comics page. This is using a beloved (by some) comic strip character in propaganda. And we all know how I feel about using things as propaganda.

NEW FEATURE: YouTube Free Movies. "Shattered Glass" and "Kangaroo Jack"

Starting a new and exciting feature here at Mister Fweem's blog. Or retreading something I've done here before and just not branded all that well. Or something.

Here's the premise: YouTube is offering free movies with ads. Probably trying to compete with Netflix and other streaming services for eyeballs, particularly as they're offering questionable movies in their free category to bait you into renting more quality content from their paid service.

Because I'm cheap, I go for the free. But, you know, I pay for it in other ways.

So this installment features two films:

Shattered Glass

This 2003 film tells the story of Stephen Glass, a writer for The New Republic who fabricated the majority of the stories he wrote for the magazine. It stars Hayden Christensen, who apparently is making a career of playing whiny, unlikable characters. (Seriously, if I had a co-worker who said "Are you mad at me" as often and as pathetically as Christensen plays Glass, I'd want to die.)

I'll admit to watching YouTube highlights of the film many times. When I watched the full film, I realized I hadn't missed much by watching just the highlight reels.

The film tries to tell a story or something about honesty and integrity, but as the flashback moments come almost exclusively through the eyes of Glass, it's more a tale of hubris and regret. And maybe that's the real message of the film.

So, my recommendation: Skip the film, watch the highlights. Unless you don't know the story, then watch the film.

Kangaroo Jack

This film, also from 2003, carries a warning in the trailer: The kangaroo wears sunglasses.

I have long had a rule that says if an animal is featured in a film's promotional material and at any time that animal is shown wearing sunglasses, it's best to avoid that movie as they are universally bad. I remember seeing previews for the film and thinking, "Yeah, this might work. But SUNGLASSES ON THE KANGAROO."

Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try.

And stinkerino.

First of all, the premise that these two mooks have valid passports enabling them to travel to Australia at a moment's notice is laughable.

And then there's the traveling to Australia montage: Koalas, check. Kangaroos, check. Ayers Rock, check, Men at Work (and you know what song I'm taking about because in Americans' view, they only ever wrote one song), check. Drinking game at an Outback bar, check. Trouble with Aussie slang, check. Finding an American who can help them bridge the two worlds, check. This move hit all the pre-packaged Australian cultural hot buttons, right down to worrying if the dingoes they see ate someone's baby.

I couldn't finish, once the juvenile humor in a PG-rated film got too crass. I mean, I didn't have high expectations to begin with, and I was not wrong. And Christopher Walken was in this. Did he owe somebody a favor? I mean, there might have been other big-name actors in the film, but as an officially out-of-it Gen X fud, I didn't recognize any of them.

And I didn't care. Because what I saw was bad.

Also, I don't recall watching a single ad in this film, even though it was on YouTube's free with ads channel. Apparently, no brand wanted to besmirch itself with an animal-in-sunglasses movie either.

So, my recommendation: Stick with the sunglasses rule; it will never steer you wrong.

Addendum: Just discovered this film won the "Favorite Fart in A Movie" category in the 2004 Kids' Choice Awards. Just to let you know what caliber of film you'd be watching if you choose to break the Sunglasses Rule.

Blog Posting: Historically, in the Toilet

So I have been on this blog since December 2007.

Some of it has gone well. Some has not. If I exclude 2007, which I definitely should, 2021 marks the year with the fewest blog posts, viz:

(I learned how to make this graph, by the way, by listening to a YouTube video narrated by Emo Phillips.

The numbers here will be a bit off, seeing as the count for 2021 doesn't include this post or any subsequent posts, but it's not likely I'm going to have a blogging explosion in the last few weeks of the year.

I don't even know why I'm writing this except:

1. I like graphs.

2. Hey, one more blog post for 2021.

So do with this information what you will.

Joke Goes Unappreciated

So I saw this ad on Facebook earlier today. Since it was targeted at East Idaho, I figured it deserved an East Idaho response:

Went back to the ad a little later and saw:

1. My comment had been deleted.

2. The ad had been changed to not permit comments.

Cut the Twaddle

 

There's a lot of twaddle out there.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone who is even the slightest bit aware of the mess of thought that's out there.

Yet . . .

What bugs me the most are the usurpings.

In my church, we have a nice message called "The Family -- A Proclamation to the World." Not everyone likes it, of course, but it's something I generally agree with.

There's a Facebook group under the same name that's passing a lot of twaddle in the name of the proclamation. And I don't like it.

They seem to pass on a lot of right-wing twaddle. And it embarrasses me. They're usurping the family proclamation to try to score political points. It's not a good look. If you want to preach your politics -- and I don't care what stripe it is -- do it on your own dime, under your own name, without turning something good into political propaganda.

And I'm here on my blog saying it, because we live in an archipelago of thought now online. Saying this on Facebook wouldn't do any good, because of the pilers-on coming in to naysay and attack what you're saying. Which is their right. But should we be quiet just because it's the loud that win the arguments just by being loud?

I guess it's not a fight I'm willing to pick. But it still embarrasses me.