by jphilo | Jul 9, 2010 | Reviews
One of the best things in life – other than having a houseful of company for a child’s wedding, which is what we have now, so this post will be short – is stumbling upon an author who writes beautifully. Not too long ago I stumbled upon Craig Johnson, a western writer who defies the formulas traditionally used in the genre.
His protagonist in Sheriff Walt Longmire, who grew up on a Wyoming ranch, and left the west to play football in college. Sounds pretty traditional until Johnson saddles him with an English major, a stint in Viet Nam, and a propensity for playing Fats Waller tunes on the piano. His sidekick is his gigantic best friend and fellow football player Henry, also known as “the Cheyenne Nation.”
With this house full of wedding company, I don’t have time to detail what makes him so good, but here are a few tantalizing tidbits:
- He knows cowboys, and he knows ranch country so his writing is authentic. 7 years of living in cowboy country way back when makes me hard to please in this area, and Johnson pleases me just fine.
- His descriptions of the remote setting of his novels are accurate and poetic, the best I’ve read in a long time.
- Walt Longmire is a complex character, so human I sometimes think he’s one of the ranchers we knew in our days out west.
- He skillfully weaves phrases like “I felt like I was leaking time” into his prose. Love them, love them, love them.
Johnson has written several books in the Walt Longmire series. So far I’ve read two – out of order, unfortunately – and can’t wait to go back and read them all in the order they were written. A recent review by Oline H. Cogdill says his newly released Junkyard Dogs is the best Sheriff Walt mystery yet.
But don’t take her word for it. Or mine either. Try Johnson out and see what you think. And don’t be surprised if you schedule a vacation in Wyoming after reading one or two of his novels. He’s that good.
by jphilo | Jul 1, 2010 | Reviews
The British actress, Patricia Routledge, has been one of our family’s faves since we first saw her in Keeping Up Appearances. She’s best known for her role as snobby Hyacinth Buckett in the sitcom that aired in the early 1990s. But she also had a long stage career, especially in musical theater, and appeared in several movies. Hiram and I spied her recently in the Sidney Poitier hit, To Sir with Love.
During a recent visit to a neighboring town, we visited the local library which has an extensive collection of American and British television DVDs. We came home with the first season of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates, which mystery buffs on this side of the big pond watched on the PBS Mystery series from 1995 to 1998. Who do you suppose plays Hetty, who on her sixtieth birthday decides she’s not with life and becomes a private investigator?
If you guessed Patricia Routledge you are, as the British say, spot on.
If Routledge played Hyacinth Buckett with a broad comedic brush 0 how else could she play such a character? – she portrayed Hetty with a finer, dramatic brush enhanced with frequent humorous strokes. Her relationship with her husband will make you chuckle, and her famous intuitions will leave you scratching your head. Her performances are a delight to watch.
Derek Benfield plays his role as Hetty’s grumpy, long suffering husband convincingly. You might recognize him from If her young assistant, Geoffrey Shawcroft, looks familiar to you, don’t be surprised. You’re seeing a much younger version, much taller of Dominic Monaghan. He was Merry, the tallest hobbit in the Lord of the Rings movies.
My only complaint about some of the episodes in the series is that they end rather abruptly, so abruptly that the mystery is sometimes solved in the sentence before the music rises and the final credits roll.
No matter how abrupt the endings, the series is worth watching. Patricia Routledge, who is still alive and kicking at age 81, is a national treasure you won’t want to miss.
by jphilo | Jun 24, 2010 | Reviews
Carol Burnett. Just saying her name conjures memories of the comedian whose influence has permeated much of my life. My childhood love of the stage began while watching her in the TV production of Once Upon a Mattress. The humor of The Carol Burnett Show tickled my adolescent funny bone. Her performance in Friendly Fire, as the mother of an Iowa soldier, changed my view of the Viet Nam War. Her role as Miss Hannigan in Annie always teases a smile and a shiver, no matter my mood.
After reading her first memoir, One More Time, my admiration for Burnett grew. No bitterness tinged the recounting of growing up with her eccentric grandmother in a one room flat. Though she didn’t sugar coating the poverty she experienced, the book was both funny and inspiring. So when my sister loaned me her signed copy of Burnett’s new memoir, This Time Together, I was delighted.
However, after finishing the book, I was a little disappointed. Don’t get me wrong. The book was enjoyable, full of funny vignettes about her brushes with the stars. Even after becoming a bonafide star, she grew starstruck around other Hollywood greats. In the presence of Cary Grant, she grew tongue-tied. When Joan Crawford wrote her a fan letter, Burnett didn’t know how to respond. When telling those stories, the comedian is as authentic and approachable as in her first book.
But unlike her first memoir, which told of her everyday life, family relationships, joys and disappointments, this one is mostly a series of chatty stories about Burnett’s public persona. Any references to family difficulties are brief and on the surface. Maybe they are too painful for her to delve into. Maybe she doesn’t want to dwell upon them. Maybe she wants to protect her family.
Those reasons are valid, and I understand them. But This Time Together didn’t live up to my expectations, perhaps because her first book was so good. It was still worth reading, because it’s by Carol Burnett, for Pete’s sake. But, it’s not worth reading again. I’m saving that luxury for One More Time…
I wonder if our library still has it.
by jphilo | Jun 15, 2010 | Reviews
Is this week’s news elevating your blood pressure? Are hallucinogenic drug looking like an attractive way to get your mind off the dismal state of national and world events? Believe me, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, NPR’s weekly comedy news show is just what the doctor ordered.
Everyone at my house wait waits all week for Saturday when we listen to wait wait. Host Peter Segal’s razor sharp wit and impeccable delivery make each week’s episode an auditory delight. Carl Castle’s newscaster voice (which he will record on your home answering machine if you win the quiz) adds dignity to the festivities, at least until his playfulness peeks through and destroys the illusion. And when the guest panelists get on a roll, we laugh so hard tears fall down our cheeks and snot runs out our noses.
If you haven’t yet listened to the weekend show, I feel sorry for you. Everyone needs a belly laugh now and then. wait wait delivers them by the truckload week after week. So check your local public radio station’s schedule to see when it airs. If your station doesn’t carry it, visit the wait wait…don’t tell me website where you can listen online or download the podcast. Give the show a try and when snot starts running out your nose, please leave a comment. It would be reassuring to know that whole goofy gang has the same effect on someone else, too.
If you want wait wait all week long, check their website where you’ll find a daily quiz. You can play and keep track of your score. The questions are hard, but the hints make it easy to choose the right answer and fool yourself into thinking you’re really, really smart. Which you will be if you listen to wait wait…don’t tell me!
Not because you’ll be current on current events, but because you know laughter is the best medicine.
by jphilo | Jun 11, 2010 | Reviews
I’ve been hankering for a Mary Tyler Moore marathon since April of 2008 when my sister and I took Mom on her 80th birthday trip to Savannah, Georgia. The condo we rented was stocked with several DVD sets, including the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Every evening we watched a few episodes, and the practice made me hungry for more. My hunger went unsatisfied until a few weeks ago, when I found the third season at our local library and promptly checked it out.
The series is as funny now as it was in the 1970s when I was in junior high and high school, totally dazzled by Mary Tyler Moore’s brave foray to the big city of Minneapolis as a single woman. (My sister says the show is the reason she eventually relocated to the Twin Cities!)
But the show is much more than Moore. Ed Asner plays her curmudgeonly boss to a tee, never allowing his character to become one-dimensional or predictable. Valerie Harper as best friend, Rhoda Morgenstern, goes through her weight loss transformation in the third season. (She was my inspiration to lose twenty pounds during my sophomore year of high school – her and the drama coach telling me to lose weight if I ever wanted the lead in a play.) Maury Slaughter, brought to life by Gavin McLeod, is Mary’s sympathetic workmate at WJM-TV News, constantly rubbed the wrong way by the egocentric anchorman Ted Baxter, played by Ted Knight.
When my daughter and almost son-in-law were here for a weekend, they fell in love with the series, too. The almost son-in-law was impressed by Ted Knight’s use of his entire body to communicate Ted Baxter’s self-centeredness and lack of intelligence. When Georgia Engel made her first appearance as Georgette Franklin (Ted’s future girlfriend and wife), my daughter commented,”You know, she would be perfect for Ted.” Their enthusiasm for the series proves its ability to reach across generations. The two of them stayed up late every night until they’d watched every episode.
My personal favorite character in the show is the self-engrossed Phyllis Lindstrom played by our very own Iowa girl, Cloris Leachman. Leachman’s timing is perfect, her posture is perfect, her expressions are perfect, her costumes are perfect. I could watch her and Ed Asner all day long.
No wonder The Mary Tyler Moore show won 29 Emmies and 3 Golden Globes. After revisiting the show this spring, I have just one question.
Why didn’t it win more?
by jphilo | Jun 3, 2010 | Reviews
During a recent browse through the DVDs at our local library, I happened upon the DVD for The Newhart Show. No, no – not The Bob Newhart Show from the 70s, the one set in Chicago. This was The Newhart Show set in small town Vermont, the one that ran from 1982 -1990.
Hmm, I thought, finally, Twenty-eight years later, I get to watch this show.
See, 1982 was the year our son was born, the year I was so tired I fell asleep halfway through any show we watched. We tuned in for some episodes in later years, and scant handful I watched from start to finish were enjoyable, though I couldn’t get used to perky Mary Frann as Newhart’s wife instead of stylish Suzanne Pleshette. Our viewership was spotty throughout the run of the series, and I was never as much a fan of The Newhart Show in quite the same way I’d been a Bob Newhart fan during high school and college.
To be honest, the first few episodes of the first season disappointed me. The show was videotaped, so it looked artificial and contrived. And I expected to see Julia Duffy and Peter Scolari in their roles as the quintessential shallow 80s yuppies. But they didn’t join the cast until the second and third seasons respectively, about the time I came out of my baby-induced stupor and could stay awake for an entire half hour show. So Jennifer Holmes as Leslie Vanderkellen, the responsible and intelligent maid, and Steven Kampmann as Kirk Devane, the chronic liar and owner of the scuzzy Minuteman Cafe, weren’t what I expected. The trio of Larry, Darryl and Darryl appear in only three episodes during the first season, and they are hilarious every time. No wonder they were written into the scripts more and more frequently over the years.
After a few episodes, I got used to everything. The writing improved steadily and so did the acting. As the series progressed and Tom Poston, who plays the George the handyman, and Bob Newhart as Dick Loudon, found their rhythm, I fell in love with the show. Both actors could do so much with an eyebrow lift, a blink, a smile, and a pause, they were a joy to watch. In fact, I think Tom Poston is one of the most underrated comic actors ever. Some notable stars – Ruth Gordon, Daniel J. Travanti and Jerry Van Dyke – made guest appearances, creating a time capsule of the early 80s.
I am now hooked on The Newhart Show, anxiously awaiting the release of seasons 2 – 6. I hope they’re here before we have grandchildren. Babies have a way of putting a crimp in my television watching plans!
