My fourteen-year-old had some friends over tonight. We have limited space in our apartment and the writing I was doing was not going so well with the racket of their talking and joking and watching YouTube videos they found hysterical.
So I went and turned the TV on and ended up switching channels between the Broncos/Patriots game, the Miss America contest and ADAM'S RIB. I don't watch sports much anymore, hardly at all. But when a post season game offers up the kind of drama that matches the Patriots' star quarterback who throws perfectly against the Broncos quarterback who throws poorly but has managed to make it this far with last minute "miracles" as many of his fans see it that help his team with unexpected come from behind wins in the last quarter or in overtime. Well, seemed like it might be an interesting thing to witness.
I don't watch beauty pageants anymore either, but there it was trying to present itself as all contemporary and almost post-feminist, while still being the same old campy throwdown of lockjawed smiles and tearful finale. Well, it seemed worth a look.
And Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn in ADAM'S RIB, well, I can always watch them.
And in the end, it was ADAM'S RIB that seemed more relevant to these times and its challenges, as well as more watchable and more satisfying. The game was a a fiasco. Tom Brady threw mostly straight and true and broke a record for most touchdown passes thrown in the first half of a post season game, or something like that, as the announcers tried to make football fans statistic freaks like their baseball counterparts. It was actually embarrassing. The Broncos seemed to fall apart almost immediately, and Tebow's miraculous last minute save was nowhere in sight. So for all his fundamentalist Christian followers does this mean God wanted the Patriots to humiliate the Broncos and Tebow, who flaunts his religion in ways that the Gospels he touts actually discourage?
As for Miss America, I could think of many women of all ages, in fact a lot of them women I know well, who are more lovely to look at, more naturally beautiful and poised and intelligent and accomplished. And I bet any of us could find a young woman in our own communities more beautiful more accomplished more etc. Though it wasn't their faults. Some of them were obviously working very hard to try and achieve this goal presented as somehow a giant accomplishment though in the end it seemed totally arbitrary and totally canned.
The little of it I watched was embarrassing too. The answers to the judges questions, the few I caught, were better than the old days, thank God, and the questions more relevant and challenging, but the "swimsuit" display, which the announcer tried to foist off as a competition for health or something, made me feel so bad for these women traipsing across a stage in bikinis, that for the most part weren't very flattering, I went back to ADAM'S RIB and watched some real women—Hepburn and Judy Holiday, as well as many of the minor characters—represent something much more worthy of crowning with accolades.
Weird night. But at least we won't have to read and hear about Tebow until next Fall.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
15 comments:
My toddler grandson is visiting while his parents are winter camping. (in a cabin) So, the football game was background, but I saw enough of it to reenforce that Tebow is at best a mediocre quarterback on a, at times, good team. All the Fox "War against Christians" hype ignored that. I too am glad I won't have to hear much about him to next season. Although I am sure he will make the talk show/tv circuit.
Lal--You've encapsulated a major cultural gap here. There's an immense, unbridgeable chasm between the intelligent, sophisticated Hollywood comedies of the 30s, 40s, and 50s and the completely banal but wannabe-up-to-date beauty contest and the hyper-hyped athletic contests of professional football at the playoff/championship stage. "Adam's Rib," it seems to me, was hands-down your best viewing choice.
Bob B.
I hope you're wrong about the talk show circuit Tom, I didn't even think of that!
And Bob, the amazing thing about seeing ADAM'S RIB again was how advanced some of the thinking in it was and how backward some was (and not just in the whole gender wars feminism vs. sexism main theme). By itself it encapsulated the exact chasm you refer to between the intelligent, sophisticated and the banal, wannabe, hyper-hyped, in your aptly chosen descriptive terms.
Still having a bad head cold after nearly two weeks, I didn't have the energy to do anything but to try to watch the game for similar reasons as you. But that didn't last long as I'm just not a sports guy.
The beauty pageant was out of the question and while I have never enjoyed any Hepburn-Tracy movie, "Adam's Rib" is always reminding me of its message and that's distracting.
Then I tried "The Searchers" on AMC. In the past I could acknowledge the ugly undercurrent to it while at the same time admiring several other elements to it. But that's no longer the case since reading the John Ford biography. What a creep.
And then it got worse. After "Adam's Rib" was over "The Last Hurrah" came on. Spencer Tracy directed by John Ford in the most talky, boring, pious and outdated film about politics ever made.
I could go on but I'm starting to sound like a crank.
Sorry you're not feeling so well K. I spent years denying T.S. Eliot's and Hemingway's importance in poetry and prose and their influence on me because I'd found out what racists and anti-semites they were. And I hated Pound's politics and later met and worked with and more a lot of movie makers and music makers and poets and writers and such. Many of whom I found deplorable human beings but still couldn't help often digging their work. That was a dilemma I couldn't solve for years until I finally accepted that the spirit works in mysterious ways and maybe the karma of their stupid opinions and sometimes actions was balanced out by the more positive aspects of their creative endeavors, A long way of saying though I despised John Wayne's politics, which put me off The Searchers for too many years, I finally acknowledged his skills as a movie star exemplified in films like The Searchers.
And one never knows what anyone else is struggling with. Maybe Wayne and Ford (or for that matter Miles Davis who was my idol when I was a young musician but turns out from his bio he was often a sexist jerk when it came to women etc.) actually were a lot better than the people who raised them or influenced them or the demons they may have been fighting (like sone one can see how long it's taken me to correct all the typos I made writing this comment—though I'll leave in the one at the beginning of this parenthetical aside where I typed "sone" when my brain was ordering my fingers to type "no")!
Mike - my guess is that Fox will have Tebow on next week. Silly Fox and Friends would be my guess and/or Bill O'Reilly/Hannity. But they will use him as a way to continue their "War on Christianity" theme. Might as well drag that out as long as they can and as long as their audience will buy it.
http://news.yahoo.com/perry-urges-no-criminal-charges-over-marines-video-170256198.html
unbelievable...
Sorry to go off subject here, but everyone needs to see this and pass it around like gravy at Thanksgiving:
http://timtpost.com/2012/01/10/comprehensive-achievements-of-obamacare-care-to-share-it-with-the-54-who-favor-repealing-it/
On the sports beat, I remember a comment Noam Chomsky made (can't remember where), after listening to spots radio. He was amazed at how brilliant some of the fan analysis (including statistics, strategy, etc.) was of the games. He concluded that that problem is not that people are lacking brains, but that their intellectual energy is being displaced.
Great links Robert, great point Jerome.
You picked the wrong game, brother. My beloved Forty Niners, pulling it out in the last 9 seconds was one of the best games I have ever seen. I still can't believe it happened.
Sorry I missed it. But I caught part of the Giants victory, first time i actually got engaged in a football game in years. But the "jynts" meant a lot to some in my clan when I was a kid so it was fun to see them win.
To the deleted Constitutional ex-spurt, the first and fourteenth amendment provide a basis for the Constitutionality of collective bargaining. And the majority of states support it as well. States' rights. Citizen's rights. Of the people, by the people, FOR THE PEOPLE.
Below is a link to Jimmy Fallon doing "Tebowie". A pretty funny send up of Tebow sung by Fallon as David Bowie. Not his best musical parody, but still worth a listen/look.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPViSZRcnn8&feature=player_embedded#!
Post a Comment