A charming domestic scene on the Minuteman Bikeway in Lexington

I love these Moms who get out on the bike path to rollerblade along with their babies in strollers. The go zooming off, rocking it in Mom-shorts and flashing some of the smeariest most ineptly executed tattoos in Middlesex County.

I swear, the minute the Great and General Court legalized tattoo parlors Rhode Island and New Hampshire staged a quiet pogrom and exiled only their worst tattoo artists to the Bay State.
I cannot other account for the proliferation of flaming skulls and celtic crosses that look like they were applied with a Sharpie indelible marker.

A Proclamation:

That hereafter the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend be known henceforth as "Squalus Day" set aside as a remembrance of all those members of the United States Armed Forces who died on active duty during peacetime.

They too, paid the ultimate sacrifice and the Commonwealth is hereby encouraged to remember those soldiers and sailors in their thoughts and prayers.

Duly proclaimed under my authority as a Marshal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (self anointed) on this day the 29th of May in the year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Ten.

Long Live the Republic
Long Live the Commonwealth

Pick of the Week:

Undoubtedly it has to be the "John Ford goes to War" retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive on Quincy Street in Cambridge this weekend.
If ya wanna git yer war on, this is the place to go...



The funny thing about the John Ford series at the HFA is how much I am enjoying his clear misfires, oh don't get me wrong, "The Searchers" is the "Citizen Kane" of westerns, but for all that I got plenty love for stuff like "The Fugitive" (1947), Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and even a complete catastrophe like "Seven Women" (1966).
Hell I'm waiting for "The Fugitive" to come out in a definitive Criterion collection edition!
The reason for this perverse affinity for Ford's critically unheralded films is simple, sometimes a great man, a directorial genius with a lo-ong filmography reveals something more of himself when a film goes off a cliff.
In "The Fugitive" Ford surrenders to his every repressed Murnau-style expressionistic impulse no matter how inappropriate, in Sergeant Rutledge Ford attempts to single handed summon to life a black action hero (the incomparable Woody Strode) a full ten years before the genre would ever be viable and in "Seven Women", the melancholy final film to a storied career a last ardent valentine to all the actresses and women of strength he'd flirted with artistically over a forty year span.
So it goes without saying I'll be at "Donovan's Reef" tomorrow night, I hear it's nothing but an ode to drinking and bar fights with Lee Marvin and John Wayne doing the duties, I can't wait.

What would Abraham Lincoln make of Jack Bauer?

Jack that eager torturer's apprentice from the TV show "24"?

Compare his Bauer for extraordinary interrogation measures with Lincoln's refusal to shoot deserters from the Union Army on grounds that the mere threat might frighten the poor souls to death.
Just sayin'...

Iron Man 2 (2010)

You know why they can churn these sequels out so damn quickly? Beacause it is simply the same script as the original with a rewritten subplot one new additional character and the same climax bolstered by like twenty five hostile robots and another armored antagonist.
Oh and somewhere in the middle there is some dollar book Freudian daddy issues for hero Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) to confront, I mean they have to pace the explosions and mayhem somehow.
Nobody seems to mind this because the cast is so god-damned good, from Robert Downey Junior to Gwyneth Paltrow down to Sam Rockwell and even Scarlett Johansson (who had maybe fifteen lines in the whole damn movie), all this rubbish is acted with consummate panache'.
But you know what? When it comes to tent pole super hero movies, casting is destiny. When the actors click even tedious junk like Super-Man III works, when the casting fails you have Daredevil or even worse The Fantastic Four.
Wen you haven't a shred of originality, a stellar cast seems to be a key element, object lesson going forward for anyone wanting revitalize the Superman franchise among others.

Kick Ass (2010)

Based on the outraged and appalled review in "The New Yorker", I was expecting "Kick Ass" to come off like Pasolini's Salo mixed in with the classic West-n-Ward Batman.
So of course on the basis of the revulsion of the New Yorker, I ran right out to see dis sumbitch.
Alas it was a good action movie even a great one, nebbisher high schul geek (Aaron Johnson, a kid with a future sez I) becomes overhyped amatuer super hero only to fall in with the serious all up heroes and villians...but was I appalled and outraged?
No.
God-damn New Yorker, played me like a yokel.
I had to make do with strong fight scenes (with real choreography that makes sense and wasn't overcranked past the point of incoherence) and a scene stealing performance from newcomer Chloe Moretz as the foulmouthed omnicompetent junior super heroine, Hit Girl.
If Young Miss Moretz doesn't end up in the Lindsay Lohan wing of the Robert Downey Jr Center, she may have a real career ahead of her in action films.
In all, I liked it, fun, sickening violent and funny, I even overlooked Nick Cage's baaa-ad Adam West impersonation.
No one can do the West, no one.
Sorry Nick.
My one regret is that I did not see this at the Drive In, ah well ya can't have everything....

Idle thought:

All of earthquake ravaged Haiti could be clothed and likely fed indefinitely on the money that Hollywood has spent to date trying to convince the American People that Sarah Jessica Parker is a sex symbol to put Cleopatra to shame.

Gotta love Calvin Borel

on the ground he is sh*t kicker in extremis, but just put him the saddle of a thoroughbred racer and he instantly transforms into Nietzsche's superman!
And today at the Kentucky Derby he did it again, defied a soupy track, a blazing sun and a cavalry charge of nineteen other horse to carry the day at Churchill Downs for a third time atop "Super Saver".
Even as I write this he is showboating happily and boasting that "Super Saver" is the horse that'll get him the coveted and looo-ong vacant Triple Crown.
Ghod I love it when Lunacy and Ambition team up to take on the world.