fun stuff: Summer movies

After reading all the doom and gloom of politics do you need something amusing? I did. So go read A Bad Case of Summer Movies from today's Washington Post. Number 5 was my favorite:

5.You can't remember if Johnny Depp is imitating Keith Richards or if Keith Richards is imitating Johnny Depp.

In other words, as part and parcel of their general quality of kitsch, summer movies are almost always full of a kind of smirky in-jokiness. It's their imprimatur of insincerity, their nod to critics and other boring elitists who wander in like naifs, that their makers are really too smart for this sort of garbage. The Johnny Depp thing is a perfect example: Hired by Disney in the original to play a dashing, vivid heroic pirate Jack Sparrow, he confounded everyone by offering up a decadent Keith Richards impersonation, sending up the great Rolling Stone's cadaverous visage and debauched self-awareness. He seems to have single-handedly brought irony to the world of the Summer Movie and the director Gore Verbinski and his screenwriters noticed how big a gag it was and therefore have cast the actual Keith Richards in the third film.

Clint Eastwood's new movies

I have not been able to see a movie in a theater since Superman. I am learning how hard it is to see movies with small children and I am pretty sure that Eastwood's new movies are not quite the proper ones to take a five and ten year old to see. That said every review makes me want to see them both. Here is one from the New York Review of Books:

But Clint Eastwood is the first director, to my knowledge, who has made two films of the same battle, showing both sides from the perspective of individual soldiers with fully developed characters. Deftly, without polemics or heavy-handed messages, he has broken all the rules of the traditional patriotic war movie genre and created two superb films, one in English, the other in Japanese: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The latter, in my view, is a masterpiece

.

A long, long way from Rowdy Yates.

Finally, some fun stuff

Having expelled the crankiness of the morning, I'd like to share some fun stuff I found:

John Wayne in Glasgow

Pop music in Britain (and this should warm the hearts of anyone who remembers vinyl)

Clint Eastwood's new movie (I've not had time to see any movies at the theater since King Kong but I want to see this one and Casino Royale).

Highland High School's girl's basketball team.

And a horror movie to look forward to - Last Man on Earth.

Fishing in Scotland here and here.

Antidotes to a gloomy day.