Author: Roger

I'm a librarian. I hear music, even when it's not being played. I used to work at a comic book store, and it still informs my life. I won once on JEOPARDY! - ditto.

MOVIE REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

I loved Woody Allen’s pictures. Annie Hall is my favorite, but I’m also fond of many other of his films from the 1970s and 1980s. But at some point, somewhere in the mid-1990s, they became really hit or miss for me. Now I only go if they are reasonably reviewed. So when last year’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger got mediocre reviews, I just passed on it, unseen. Bad Woody is painful Woody, because it really reminds me of what was.

So when Midnight in Paris got some positive feedback, I got the Wife to go to the Spectrum Theatre for a Tuesday night show; the Daughter was at the grandparents’ house.

And I loved it. The Wife loved it. This is my favorite Woody film since perhaps Purple Rose of Cairo. But I have a difficult time talking about it because the less you know, the better it’ll be.

I will say that Midnight in Paris is about an engaged couple, Gil and Inez (Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams) visiting Paris. Gil is a hack Hollywood writer who wants to create something more substantial and is finding his current location serving as his muse. Her friend Paul (played wonderfully by Michael Sheen) defines “pedantic”. Carla Bruni, the first lady of France (pictured with Wilson and Allen), adds context as a tour guide.

But the best parts are driven by Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, and a group of actors I was unfamiliar with, especially Corey Stoll as Ernest. Not to mention Marion Cotillard, who I last saw as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose, who plays a pivotal role.

This isn’t exactly sunny Woody, but it is engaging Woody, an evolving Woody, or Woody proxy in the surprisingly believable Wilson, whose sole voiceover early on could have been spoken by the writer/director 30 years ago. The film also LOOKS brighter than most Allen films, which works here.

A is for Adam and Eve

What bothers me about the literal Creationists is not that they believe what they believe. It’s that a whole pseudoscience that was created around it.

Big fat caveat upfront; I don’t mean to make light of anyone’s faith, I’m just trying to understand.

Someone I know only online, who I suspect wouldn’t consider herself a particularly religious person, decided to read the Bible. She stopped after Genesis 2. She complained that there were two seemingly contradictory Creation stories. In Genesis 1, the creatures came, then the man and the woman. But in Genesis 2, you get the Adam’s rib version, where the man is seemingly created before the creatures, but definitely before the woman. I say “seemingly”, because the NIV version reads at v. 19 “Now the LORD God HAD formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man…”; the “had” suggests the possibility that the animal had already existed and that the man, hanging out in the garden, simply hadn’t seen them.

The problem, I contended, is that the person was reading the stories as history, as science, not allegory. If you read it as history, and Adam and Eve were in fact the first people, what does it mean in terms of their descendants? Who was Cain’s wife, and who were the people he feared might kill him in Genesis 4? That specific issue confounded me when I was a teenager, and was one of the items that indeed shook my faith at the time.

Once I realized it was not a literal history, it became much easier to understand.


This is why I’m quite puzzled by those who have decided to take Genesis 1 verbatim. The earth and all its creatures, including humans, were formed in six days – possible? Sure, in a “God can do anything” way, but not at all likely. And the order of the creation seems to mesh pretty well with the evolutionary cycle we’ve come to understand, albeit considerably longer. The word “day” may not have meant 24 hours; remember, no one wrote this down at the time, but rather learned it from the oral tradition, transcribing it relatively quite recently, in the last millennium Before the Christian Era. This philosophy, I’ve learned, is called progressive creationism.

What bothers me about the literal Creationists is not that they believe what they believe. It’s that a whole pseudoscience that was created around it, of people walking the earth with the dinosaurs only 4000 years ago, and the planet only 10,000, rather than humans being around for 50,000 to 200,000 years, the dinosaurs having been extinct for 65 million years, and the Earth itself being about 4.6 billion years old. How does this narrative conflict with “some vast eternal plan”, quoting Fiddler on the Roof?

I guess I’m saying that I don’t think science and creation are that much at odds. The shoehorning of a literal six-day earth making – that seems to be a lot more work.

Can someone please explain this to me? Oh, and check out this recent Doonesbury strip, which addresses the issue.

ABC Wednesday team – Round 9

Citation to top piece of artwork.

Martha Reeves Turns 70

The Vandellas are now her sisters: Lois, who joined in 1968, and Delphine, who joined in the mid- 1980s.

Martha Reeves and the Vandellas performed at an Alive at Five concert last month in Albany; I didn’t go, having family obligations. Otherwise, I would have, for sure.

The Times Union newspaper wrote an interesting pre-concert piece about Martha and Vandellas touring in the first Motown Review in 1962, and dealing with segregation.

“We stopped at a few gas stations where they said, ‘No, don’t come in here.’ The first time I ever saw a shotgun face-to-face was at one of those places. The man said, ‘Get back on that bus.’ And he came to the bus with a shotgun and said, ‘Don’t another one of you step on this property.’ I tell you, we learned how to go in the woods.”

She laughs about it now, 49 years later. “We served as, basically, Freedom Riders,” she says, referring to civil rights activists who challenged segregation in the South. “That was not our intent, because when we sat at lunch counters we weren’t trying to protest. We were hungry people, trying to get some nourishment.”

“It didn’t happen. They’d say, ‘No, go to the back door.’ I remember being served cold hot chocolate and cold hot dogs. We ate them gladly. … It was rough, but people received our music everywhere we went. When we got back to Detroit after three months, we knew that our records would be in the charts, and they were.”

There were two great Vandellas songs that rank among the best summer songs EVER:
(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave and Dancing in the Street.

But I was always partial to this Smokey Robinson-penned tune: No More Tearstained Make Up. Also from that Watchout! album (which I own), the hit Jimmy Mack.

The Vandellas are now her sisters: Lois, who joined in 1968, and Delphine, who joined in the mid-1980s. But the songs sound the same, Reeves says. I always thought the group, and especially Martha, was underappreciated.

Song: Expressway to Your Heart

Do you know what it is? It’s HOT. It’s especially sticky in our home office, which has this tiny desk fan only.

So I think I need to take a respite from blogging one day of the week, usually the Christian Sabbath. But I don’t want to leave you TOTALLY bereft. I’l pick a video that means summer to me, once a week from now through Labor Day weekend.

Today’s pick is Expressway to Your Heart by the Soul Survivors, described as a “garage-rock band from New York and Philadephia.” The record, on the Crimson label – no, I never heard of it either – was released in the summer of 1967. It debuted on the Billboard charts on September 2 and stayed there for 15 weeks, getting as high as number 4.

version
version in stereo
live version, backed by Hall & Oates in Philadelphia, on October 23, 2009

I’m always a sucker for a good musical bottom.

What TV Shows Are You Looking Forward To This Fall?

Are there any shows YOU are looking forward to?


I’ve been rereading the extensive list of shows that will be on ABC and CBS and NBC and FOX and the CW. I came to the conclusion that there probably isn’t a single new show that I’ll start watching. I’ve ODed on police procedurals, the comedies don’t sound particularly funny, and the few shows I might have given a chance to (ABC’s Pan Am, about the hassles of being an airline stewardess in the 1960s, for one) won’t last more than a month.

This is not such a bad thing, mind you. Every year for the last couple at least, I say I’m not going to add any more new shows to my DVR recording. two years ago, I lapsed and started to watch The Good Wife, but last year, nada. (I don’t think so, anyway.)

Are there any new shows YOU are looking forward to? I feel that I should be into FOX’s Terra Nova, especially with Steven Spielberg’s name attached, but I’m just not.

Ramblin' with Roger
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