CSotD: The Glitter of Hollywood
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Bizarro gets lead position the day after April Fool's Day because the only connection I have to the horror of bulk glitter is that moment, I think now passed, when greeting cards would disgorge a shot of little foil/plastic crap into your lap, which came across as a practical joke.
It's possible that girls thought it was festive, but I didn't have little girls.
I had little boys, for which I am grateful because little boys just run around beating each other up and breaking things, while little girls practice endless psychological warfare on each other, steal all the scissors and hide them in their rooms and will festoon your entire house with glitter.
Also, I am convinced that they echolocate.
I have little girls living next door and they're very nice kids, but when they run around and play, they scream at a level I wish only the dog could hear, but, alas, it's not quite hypersonic. It's more like that scene in "Splash" when Madison says her real name and all the TV sets explode.
We'll get back to Madison in a minute, but one of the worst things that ever happened was when glitter went from being something that was glued to greeting cards and became available loose, and in bulk, as in Bizarro.
Glitter in bulk was once a special effect and, in fact, I had a small plastic bag of glitter which I got at a Dr. John concert when he was in his Gris Gris Gumbo Ya Ya stage and would hurl the stuff into the audience while playing hypnotically wonderful stuff such that you could walk into a Dr. John concert completely straight and you'd be tripping by the third song.
And covered with glitter if you were in the first three rows.
But then little girls got their hands on it and began to make glitter part of everyone's everyday life, literally: They even wore it in their makeup.
Now, instead of an occasional greeting card dumping it into your lap, the damn stuff is everywhere and has gone from being festive to being an environmental hazard.
No joke, and I could have posted Robert Ariail's editorial cartoon as a juxtaposition with Bizarro, because glitter is a microplastic like the tiny scrubbing bits of plastic in some toothpastes and face washes, and there is a move to ban glitter before it ends up in the ocean and then in our food chain.
We are entering the Anthropocene Epoch, in which humans have a significant impact not just on weather but on water quality, animal life and other aspects of the environment.
And glitter may not be a major factor, but it's certainly a preventable one.
But I'm not adding the "get off my lawn" tagline, because I actually enjoy having little girls running around the neighborhood.
If only they didn't have to scream and shed glitter while doing it.
And I promised to get back to Madison and to do that, we simply feature a Looks Good On Paper that you will not be able to unsee and, more to the point, unhear any time anyone mentions that movie.
Which won all sorts of awards but which I don't have to see because, first of all, I'm a single guy living a glitter-free lifestyle that does not require that all movies be soaking in testosterone but also means they don't have to be marinated in estrogen.
And, besides, I saw "Splash" when it came out in 1984 and I don't like remakes.
Which brings us to Sally Forth, with which I agree but with some caveats.
Netflix and the up-front offerings of Amazon are clearly not geared to anyone who has been watching movies for more than about 15 years, though, if you dig deeply enough, you can find many good films in the vaults of Amazon.
I watched the for-real "Thomas Crown Affair" recently, and it was just as wonderful as I remember even though I wasn't deeply in love this time.
Which contrasts with "Charly" which doesn't hold up nearly as well if you aren't 19 and in the company of someone terrific, though it's still a pretty good flick.
Both of them, being 1968 releases, have that screen-within-screen montage sequence that the Czech film movement pioneered, only it seems randomly inserted in "Charly" and is much more organic in "Thomas Crown."
Which isn't the point. The point is that nobody is going to serve these films up for you. You must know they exist and make a Herculean effort to find them.
There is a service called Filmstruck that does offer great films, including the Criterion films but also things like Casablanca, and it's not screamingly expensive, but you shouldn't have to subscribe to a third stream just to get good movies.
All we need is honesty.
What I'd like is to add "The Real One" in parentheses when it's on TV or offered in a list, so that you would see "The Heartbreak Kid (The Real One)" and know that it was the one with Charles Grodin and Cybil Shepherd and not the cheesy pointless one with Ben Stiller.
Though it gets a bit confusing with "The Maltese Falcon," since the "real" one is the remake with Bogart and Mary Astor, not the original which starred Bebe Daniels, seen here with Harrison Ford though probably not the one you're thinking of and not in that movie.
Or you could add "The One With Steve Martin," which covers "Father of the Bride," "Cheaper By the Dozen" and "Pennies From Heaven." Martin doesn't do remakes or even homages. He just steals titles.
And I don't know what to do about "Mutiny on the Bounty," since all three are pretty good.
De Laurentiis called his "The Bounty." Maybe the Laughton/Gable one could be "Mutiny." and the Howard/Brando one could have the full title.
Though it's more often a question of weeding out stinkers than selecting the best.
They don't edit'em like this anymore
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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