Victor Mature as Doc Holliday confronts his destiny in My Darling Clementine directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp. Let’s start out with this statement of fact or, to put it another way, let’s start out with this unshakeable prejudice of mine: The best Doc Holliday of all the movie Doc Hollidays is Victor Mature in My Darling Clementine. Val Kilmer in Tombstone is very good. Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is, well, Kirk and Kirk being Kirk was almost never a bad deal. Dennis Quaid was all right in Wyatt Earp, although... | Continue »

Setting the bar very low for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. I'm a fan of the original series, but I'm not a purist. If legends like Robin Hood and King Arthur can be rewritten and revised for new generations, then there's nothing sacred about a TV show, and I don't see any reason why the characters from the original series can't be treated like, well, characters. Basil Rathbone was my father's Sherlock Holmes, but he learned to appreciate Jeremy Brett, and Brett was my Holmes but I'm looking forward to seeing what Robert Downey Jr does with the part. William Shatner... | Continue »

Counter. Lucky Chocolates. Saugerties, NY. December 30, 2007. (Click to enlarge.) | Continue »

Neil Gaiman's American Gods is one of my favorite novels of the last 10 years. It's gritty, ironic, exciting, grimly funny, satirical, bloody, and, despite the fact that many of the characters are...well...gods...true to life. I don't mean that it's realistic, although it is in its views of American life and culture. I mean that in it Gaiman shows an understanding of how people think and feel and believe that is true, His novel Stardust is nothing like American Gods. It's sentimental, earnest, full of incident but somehow still lacking in action, and as true to life as any fairy... | Continue »

One of my favorite pieces of evidence of my youthful precociousness is a line I came up with in high school. It’s so good that I’m sure I must have swiped it from somebody more grown-up and smarter (and perhaps deader) like Mark Twain. “A Puritan,” I wrote in my journal, “is someone who is convinced that somewhere there’s a party to which he wasn’t invited.” I still think it’s a good line, whether or not I thought it up myself or stole it. Puritans, from the day Crowmell closed the theaters till now, resent the idea that other people... | Continue »

Last couple of years at this time, the blonde and I have sent our mothers the same little gift to start the holiday season. We order it from a catalog company that specializes in dressing all Americans like prosperous New England farmers. Yesterday I called in to place the order. “Hi! Am I speaking to Lance Mannion?” the customer service rep said immediately upon picking up. “Um…yes.” I almost asked her how she knew it was me but I figured the company has our phone number on file. “How can I help you today, Mr Mannion?” Yep. She “Mistered” me.... | Continue »

You’d think conservatives would hate The Grapes of Wrath as much as liberals hate Atlas Shrugged. More, because Steinbeck’s novel is well-written and bears more than a passing acquaintance with economic and political realities and truths about human nature. Imagine how much more you’d dislike Atlas Shrugged if you actually liked it and had to admit it was a good novel? If Rand could write like this?: A gentle wind followed the rain clouds, driving them on northward, a wind that softly clashed the drying corn. a day went by and the wind increased, steady, unbroken by gusts. The dust... | Continue »

Wasting time bouncing around the web when I should be putting the finishing touches on my third rewrite of my review of The Cherry Orchard, I learned that word around the net is that the next Star Trek movie is going to feature as its villain, Khan Noonien Singh. If you don’t know who that is, you shouldn’t bother reading this post because if I have to tell you who Khan is that probably means I have to tell you what Star Trek is as well. Now, here’s my question. Why? The Khan story is probably as close to perfect... | Continue »

A murmuration of starlings. Photo by John Holmes via Wikipedia. Yesterday was the first seasonably cold day of winter so far around here, so naturally I spent my lunch hour getting the car washed. Not the best idea when the temperature’s below freezing and it wasn’t something I wanted to do. The day before a flock of starlings decided to take a rest stop on the telephone wires under which we’d parked the car in front of my inlaws’ house. Polka-dotted the whole wagon, stem to stern, starboard and larboard. I think some of them even got up inside the... | Continue »

Three eccentrics, a sheik, a scientist, and an investment broker (Amr Waked, Ewan McGregor, and Emily Blunt), plan to bring fly-fishing to the desert in Lasse Hallstrom’s not quite Local Hero-ish comedy, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Our choices for Friday night's feature for Family Movie Night were Fargo and The Hunt for Red October. The decision depended on whether Oliver Mannion wanted to turn Family Movie Night into homework. He didn’t. Sometimes we have themes for Family Movie Night. Couple summers back we watched a string of baseball movies. There was another stretch that was all Cary Grant. Sometimes... | Continue »

The video clips of Mitt Romney delivering what James Wolcott compares to Alec Baldwin’s big speech in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross is being parsed and parsed again sixteen ways from Sunday all over the internet today, with most of the parsing focused on why the 47 percent of the country Mitt dismisses as takers aren’t taking or if they are it’s because they really need to. It'll need Bill Clinton to sell this as a Democratic campaign theme and he’s probably gearing up to do it already. But right now it’s just wonkery that makes us liberals... | Continue »

I turned back, leading the way to my office and wondering how long a man with my kind of temper could survive. By any sane reckoning I should already be dead and buried.---private eye Leonid McGill, regretting mouthing off to a cop. Yeah, McGill, I was wondering the same thing. Man fifty-five years old with a temper like yours who has spent practically his entire life in the company of violent and conscienceless men in the habit of carrying guns and using them? You’d think by your age you’d have popped off a dozen times at the worst possible moment... | Continue »

Here in Mannionville, or pretty much anywhere, 2009 wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, and 2010 doesn’t look to be a whole lot more fun so far. When things start to wear on me, I try to remind myself that, bad as it gets, there’s always someone who has it worse, because that’s what my mother taught me to do. And when I forget, life has a way of making me remember it. Back in the fall, when I was fighting my way through another bout of self-pity, my father-in-law had a stroke. He’s recovering pretty well although his right... | Continue »

President-elect Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff the other day got me thinking about The Magnificent Seven. Not about the plot. No cheap comparisons there, please. Cool, quiet, dangerous man in black leads a band of heroes into town to save the peasants from the bandits who have been terrorizing them, that has no relation to... Um... Ok. Nevermind. I really wasn't thinking about the plot. I was thinking about the characters, and not about them as specific individuals in a particular story so much as archetypes in an epic. Try this. Barack Obama is to... | Continue »

The only person for whom the house was in any way special was Arthur Dent, and that was only because it happened to be the one he lived in. He had lived in it for about three years, ever since he had moved out of London because it made him nervous and irritable. ---from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses have lived in the neighborhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most... | Continue »

We taped Law and Order's season finale and didn't get around to watching it until Saturday night. I wish we'd given it the skip. This is twice in a row now Dick Wolf's dumped an ADA in a way that seems designed as much to humiliate and punish the actress as to explain the departure of an important character. Elisabeth Rohm got off lightly compared to Annie Parisse. Wolf canned Rohm in an afterthought, as if to say, "By the way, I forget to mention it. You're boring and who cares if you're pretty and have great legs, you're cold... | Continue »

Sometimes I think I read Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone novels just to annoy myself and give myself something to grouse about here. I groused about Trouble in Paradise. And I groused about Stone Cold. After Stone Cold I told myself that was it, no more. But commenter Scott Klebe convinced me to give Stone another chance. Scott's point was that while the plots of the Stone novels are implausible, Stone himself was a more realistic character than Parker's other and more famous detective hero, Spenser . Scott's right. Spenser isn't human. He's superhuman. But it's more than his physical... | Continue »

The A-Team movie is a big noisy mess, but that was the point. The best thing about the movie is the way the four leads conjure up the spirits of the heroes of the TV show without resorting to impersonations. There are moments when Liam Neeson actually seems to have been replaced on screen by the ghost of George Peppard and Bradley Cooper looks more like Face than Dirk Benedict ever did, which is kind of like saying that Bradley makes a better Dirk Benedict than Dirk Benedict. If the movie sparks a revival of interest in the TV show... | Continue »

Watched an episode of Rumpole of the Bailey last night, Rumpole’s Return, in which Rumpole’s client, an accountant accused of murder, refuses to cooperate in his own defense because he thinks God wants him punished and has intervened with a miracle to make sure he’s found guilty. The accountant’s innocent, of course, but he’d fled from a religious cult after discovering it was a con designed to separate the desperately lonely and lost from their money and put it in the pockets of the “master.” The master put a hit on the accountant to shut him up but the would-be... | Continue »

In Timequake , the book by Kurt Vonnegut I'm just finishing up reading, Vonnegut says there are two kinds of writers. Swoopers and bashers. He's a basher, he says. "Swoopers write a story quickly," Vonnegut says, "higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done, they're done." "Writers who are swoopers," he says, "find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting,... | Continue »