Two-walk Wednesday!

Thanks to yet another bungle by the lab, Frederick had to have MORE blood drawn - in Ann Arbor yet - so we broke up the drive back by stopping off at Barton Nature Area Trail:

And then, after a spot of lunch at home, Holly Rec, which was a bit flooded...

Finding new routes around the Hogbacks

Arguing with myself

 I had the idea of doing this when it came time for my annual spring shearing.

Here's the full video.  (I can't watch it.  I am never being filmed in profile again.)

Film review (partial): The French Dispatch (2021)

 I have been a longtime Wes Anderson fan since the days of Rushmore.  Probably my favorite of his is Bottle Rocket, which is also his first, and it's been a bit downhill from there.  Bottle Rocket has laugh-out-loud moments and real heart.  It's quirky and charming.  Rushmore had a bit more heft (and a bit less charm) because its central character was so flawed (nowadays he'd be labeled an incel, I suspect).  But since then he's steadily dialed up the quirk and this most recent effort is positively charmless.  In fact, we couldn't finish it.  It's not just that it's picaresque - a series of vignettes in search of a movie - because the Coens did that with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and it was successful, with at least two of the segments being devastating.  It's more that it seems, I don't know, almost mean-spirited.  There's an underlying contempt for some of the characters (and outright misogyny in a couple of places - Anderson's never been good with women, but this one takes the stale cake) and the whimsy has just curdled.  There's not one character who isn't a single-note idea, and this despite the usual incredible cast.  (The atmosphere on Anderson sets must be amazing because not only does he keep attracting new A-listers (most notably the omnipresent Timothée Chalamet), the same crew of dependables (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Ed Norton, Bob Balaban...) keeps coming back for more.  And I have to say that, like the previous (far superior) effort, The Grand Budapest Hotel, it looks amazing.  But it rings completely hollow.  The dialogue is no longer merely precious, it's irritating.  The stories have no real point (other than, perhaps, aren't people silly?) and the characters don't reveal any universal types, they're just idiosyncratic without being amusing.  At this point I think the only way I'd watch another Wes Anderson movie would be if he was directing somebody else's script.  (And not just his adaptation of somebody else's book, because I don't like his version of The Fantastic Mr. Fox really much at all.  There's hope: I hated the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There (which had some of the same failings), and they have certainly produced some amazing films since.  But I'll take some wooing back.  At this point he's a lot less Coen Brothers and a lot more Woody Allen, who similarly seemed able to woo just about anybody to appear in increasingly similar films, where all the actors seemed driven to do imitations of him, just because that seems the only appropriate way to deliver his irritatingly mannered dialogue.

(The story we gave up on was the one that seemed to be referencing Les Evenement de Mai, but in a way that seemed positively sneering.  Also?  If you have a scene in your movie that is a direct ripoff of Mon Oncle, your movie damn well better be deserving, and this one certainly wasn't.)  Maybe if you have to watch this, watch it on a very big screen but in a foreign dub so you can't understand what they're saying.  It could only improve it, and you can enjoy the visuals (although you'll probably still cringe a bit at the kind of leering female nudity).

Following deer trails into the thorns, Grand Blanc Commons

Apparently the deer stole this realtor's sign.

Maybe finally Spring?

Bulbs starting to show themselves:

Big frog (alive but very dozy):

Film review: Design for Living (1933)

 

This 1933 film was based on the 1932 Noël Coward play, which was deemed too shocking to put on in England.  Apparently he wrote the play because of a promise he made two friends of his (the married couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontann) who were Americans he met in his first trip to New York in 1921 when all three were penniless.  They made a pact that when Coward was successful he would write a play as a starring vehicle for all three.  And this is it, only in the film version we have Fredric March (Tom Chambers), Gary Cooper (George Curtis) and Miriam Hopkins (Gilda (with a soft "G") Farrell).  In this telling, the men are best buddies, Americans living in France, who meet fellow American Gilda when she gets in their train carriage while they are snoozing.  She sketches them and when they wake up she is asleep, with her feet on the seat between them, and they find the sketches.  (She's a commercial artist and they are accompanied by sketches of Napoleon in long underwear for a campaign.)  There follows a several-minutes-long conversation in French, with no subtitles, which even in 1933 must have been unusual for a major Hollywood film, until she says "nuts" and the men realize they're all American.  George is an artist whose picture (of Lady Godiver riding a bicycle) she has seen in a gallery (and, immediately undermining his initial smugness, hated), while Tom is a struggling playwright.  

Very quickly, both men are smitten with Gilda and independently pursuing her.  This both alarms and annoys Max Plunkett (played by the seemingly-ubiquitous-in-films-of-this-era Edward Everett Horton), 

her boss in advertising and her "friend" of several years ("Ah," says Tom when Plunkett is confronting him, "so you never got to first base" - surely the first instance of somebody being accused of being "friendzoned").  Plunkett seems to know about both of them and visits them independently to warn them off, and in so doing uses a phrase (something to do with virtue and three square meals a day) so ridiculous that Tom puts it in his play, which inadvertently reveals to George (when Tom reads him the latest draft) that Plunkett has also confronted Tom.  Our heroes agree to forget Gilda, but instead she decides to move in with them and take them on as projects.  She will be their harshest critic, and there will be "no sex" (only kisses on the forehead allowed) 

but both of them will be driven to greatness.  And so it transpires.  Gilda gives Tom a bit of a leg up by taking his play "Good Night Bassington" to a booker in London and insisting that it was just the sort of play women would like.  The booker takes it on and thus Tom is summoned to London to help get the play up and running.  This disturbs the equilibrium of their little non-lovenest, and lickety split George and Gilda have dropped the "no sex" rule (this is not made explicit but it's pretty damn heavily hinted at, 

which is one of the many reasons (the whole menage a trois thing chief among them) that this film ran afoul of the Hayes code).  Tom is dictating a jaunty letter about his progress in London to them when he receives word of their decision, and sadly scraps his banter-filled missive for a simple "Good luck".  Bassington proves a massive success, and one night he spots Plunkett in the audience, who tells him that George is now a successful artist, albeit one whose income derives from painting portraits of rich capitalist pigs like him.  This motivates Tom to return to Paris, where he finds George absent (off on a commission in Venice) and he and Gilda quickly fall into each other's arms, and he is next seen joining her at breakfast in the clothes he wore the day before.  George returns unexpectedly (the rich lady didn't like him painting her double chin accurately) and an ugly scene breaks out which leads Gilda to leave both of them, because she knows when she's with one she is always missing the other.  Worse yet, she goes off and marries Plunkett!  The last act of the film is her miserable life of luxury back in the States with Plunkett and how the boys come to extricate her.  

The film ends (spoiler) with them all going off together, renewing their vows of "no sex" - hardly likely, given Gilda's apparent complete lack of resolve.

Apprently Ben Hecht considerably re-wrote Coward's play, making our heroes more goofballs and less the suave sophisticates of the originals, and I can't help but think it's better for it.  A very enjoyable Lubitsch number, with Miriam Hopkins perhaps the standout, sexy and saucy but also silly.

From Ben Gunn to Mark Twain to Jon Pertwee