37/21
Features They Stooge to Conga (1943)
Line of Events
A generational story about families and the special place they live in, sharing love, loss, laughter and life.. Based on the comic book “Here”; by Richard McGuire. It was first published as a strip in the comic book magazine “Raw”; in 1989 and was expanded into a 300-page graphic novel in 2014. Richard’s father, at one point early in the film, names a few towns that he states are along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, when in fact they are all towns that are along Interstate 80 in PA, which had not even been built at the time.. [from trailer] Richard: You know, if you want, you could spend the rest of the night here.Margaret: I could spend the rest of my life here..
Clarinet Concerto, pt
1 and 2Written by Artie ShawPerformed by Artie Shaw and his orchestraCourtesy of RCA RecordsBy arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment. The most intriguing part of this film, to me, was the clever use of technology to jump back and forth in time – but not space – to show what happened in an unremarkable location in what is now New England from the age of the dinosaurs to the present day. The transitions are often accomplished by adding picture-in-picture windows over a central video clip and then jumping to a different time in some of the smaller windows before the entire screen shifts to that era. I will confess that the trick got old after a while, but I still found it at least occasionally clever. There were, however, problems for me, which some of the fourteen previous reviewers have already pointed out.
Or even the man who invents the Lazy Boy chair?
The main story – that of the Young family, through its three generations – is not particularly interesting. But the other minor stories that are woven into and out of it are really of no interest. Why should we care about one of Ben Franklin’s sons? Or the young Native American/Indian woman and her young lover? Nothing is done to tie those stories into the main one, and they are of no interest in themselves.
Nothing really ties these disparate stories together
This was especially true of the brief time spent with a young African-American couple who live in the house for an unspecified period of time in our modern era. (They have COVID masks.) All we really see of them is that the woman gets along well with her Latina housekeeper. And that the father at one point gives his son what we white people are told is “the talk”; in which the father tells his son how to behave when stopped by a white police officer so that he doesn’t get killed by him. This is almost a cliché, and none of my black friends have ever had this conversation with their parents. Since they’re not interesting on their own and don’t reinforce the main story, that’s a problem.
I wasn’t bored
I could even see myself watching this movie again on TV, where I could pause it for a break every now and then. But once in the theater, while it wasn’t boring, it was enough for me. From Alien: Romulus to Road House, take a look back at some of our favorite posters from 2024.
