Rose Oaks County Park

Shorts and 71°

Suddenly T-Shirt weather

In fact, the trail was NOT closed, but it wasn't great either. It's a walking trail in scrubby woods surrounding Ascension Genesys Hospital near Grand Blanc. Probably for recuperating patients to shuffle round. It's flat and tarmac and boring. But at least it's not muddy.

Film review: Dune (2021)

This would've made a really good silent movie.  It looks like a silent movie epic, with gigantic sets (or the appearance thereof) and huge vistas with a cast of thousands (even though they're most likely mostly CGI).  Also then the dialogue would be kept even more to a minimum, which, given its all-around clunkiness, couldn't be bad.  I'm not saying the performances are bad - some of them are very good (although Aquaman isn't great, but he's about right for a character with the ridiculous name of Duncan Idaho (sounds like a knockoff Indiana Jones)).  Probably the best is the least familiar face to me, the mother of Chalamet's Paul Atreides, who is a Swedish actress with a British name (thanks to her British mother) - Rebecca Ferguson.

Where to start with this film?  Well, for one thing, it's obviously way too condensed (despite being two and a half hours long, and only covering part of the book).  You barely get to know any of the characters, with the result that, despite the best efforts of the generally excellent cast, they appear like cardboard cutouts.  Why didn't they Game-of-Thrones this?  It's ideal for it.  Hell, it's basically Game of Thrones in space (or, to be fair, Game of Thrones is Dune on the ground).  As it is, we barely get to know Atreides senior (played by Oscar Isaac with a magnificent beard) 

before [spoiler alert] he meets his end attempting to poison the odious Baron Harkonnen.  (That's the other thing: this isn't exactly subtle: the goodies are beautiful (and mostly white), while the baddies are, yes, also mostly white, but it's a fish-belly kind of white, and they're just transparently evil and disgustingly ugly. 

Then, of course, there are the natives of Arakis (aka Dune, pronounced like Lorna's last name), the "fremen" (yes, I get it, they're free men) who in this version are a mix of all races, although the boss is Javier Bardem

(sharing a movie with Josh Brolin for the first time since No Country for Old Men - now there's a movie), and the Princess Leia type, who appears ridiculously briefly in this film, presumably to figure more prominently in the sequels, is the ubiquitous Zendaya.

Positive things to say: the space ships and general art and design of the various uniforms and architecture of the different planets and factions is fantastic.  One feels the thrill that one felt in the original Star Wars, of a real lived-in universe.  

It's a bit less shabby (by design) than that, but the various vessels have real weight and heft.  They feel massive.  And as a result, the battle scenes feel much more real and threatening.  And I love the little ornithopter things (basically dragonflies, or perhaps damselflies), although they look a good deal less practical than a good old helicopter.  We don't catch more than a glimpse of the giant sandworms (although there is a hint of one being ridden right at the end, which is pretty cool), but their menace is vividly conveyed in several tense scenes.

Things I don't like: the mystical mumbo-jumbo.  I don't particularly mind the Benne Gesserit (sp?) coven of witches, but it is a bit tiresome that their chosen one is male, when they're all female.  Are they where George Lucas got the idea of Jedi Knights/Sith Lords?  But the whole chosen one bit in general is a bit tired.  Ditto Paul's "visions".  Also, what the fuck is "spice"?  Is it a drug?  But then, how is it responsible for intergalactic travel?  And is it just red stuff mixed in with the sand?  Is it a mineral or organic in some way?  Scratch that, I don't really need to know.  But how many factions are there?  It's not just the Atreides and the Harkonnens, is it?  And where does the Emperor come in?  And why, in whatever century this is, is there an Emperor?  It's that weird Flash Gordon combination of past and future (compounded by the architecture, and the fact that everyone fights with swords (albeit with personal force fields (that don't seem to stop much, particular slow-moving things)).  Again, Star Wars looks more and more like a rip-off.  (Yes, I should know, but I'm one of the few people who has never read Dune.  I swear I tried once: I was stuck on four hour bus ride through Dorset, stopping every ten minutes, with only Dune to read, and I still couldn't get into it.  If the dialogue in the film is any indication of the repartee in the novel, I can see why.

Summary: a beautiful, engrossing spectacle, despite two-dimensional characters.  You know, like Star Wars if Lucas had given a shit about making it look even slightly realistic (major point in Dune's favor: when they use lasers, they really act like lasers).  Only the Han Solo character gets killed off in the first film rather than the seventh.  See it on as big a screen as you can.

Snow's melted but the ice remains

Hogbacks with a time change

Clocks went forward at 2 AM, so it is either earlier or later than it seems.

Film review: Merrily We Go To Hell (1932)

 If this was a worse picture, it would have been more pleasant to watch.  That is, we watched this definitely (you can tell from the title alone) Pre-Code picture (part of a selection of Paramount Pre-Code films that arrived on the Criterion Channel this month) under the understanding that it would be a light-and-frothy, early screwball type film, as advertised.  But nooooo, it's a wrenching tale of a woman (Syliva Sidney) falling in love with a drunken newspaperman (Fredric March - is there any other kind?), 

helping him reform long enough to write a hit play, only to watch him go back to the bottle and his former lover when she is cast as the lead in said play.  Then she decides that instead of leaving him and going back to her (super-rich, Canning magnate) father (as the controlling father insists), she is going to match him at his own game.  So she takes to the bottle and the high life and starts going out with... a young Cary Grant!  

We see them arrive at a restaurant where hubby and the actress are already dining, and she and her date toast to the "holy state of matrimony–single lives, twin beds and triple bromides in the morning" (definitely Pre-Code).  But sadly (and unexpectedly, given the filmic conventions that have grown up since) her strategy doesn't succeed in winning back her husband, and she the lifestyle makes her weak and dizzy, and we see a doctor talking severely to her about "her condition".  But then the husband comes back to their apartment with a ton of friends (including the Other Woman) and it's the last straw, and she finally walks out on him, after giving him a speech about how he never told her he loved her (he always just says "I think you're swell").  This, of course, makes him realize he really does love her, and that and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a sequel to the play coming to him any time soon (probably because he had to sober up to write the first one) drives him away from his actress girlfriend (an icy Adrianne Allen, who, while she doesn't hold a candle to the lovely Sylvia Sidney, can certainly drop acid bon mots with aplomb), 

and New York, and back to the town everything started, Chicago, and his job at the paper back.  He sobers up and keeps trying to contact his wife, but his calls are blocked and his letters sent back unopened.  Then, one day, the gossip columnist whom he loathes (he knocked him down earlier in the film when he implied that he was marrying Sylvia Sidney for her money) shows him his latest column that reports that his wife has just checked into the maternity hospital.  Delighted, he dashes down there, only to find that she's lost the baby.  The father tries to stop him seeing her, lying that she refuses to see him, when in fact she's calling feverishly for him (strongly implying it was the father ensuring she never got the letters rather than her refusing to read them) and finally he gets to tell her he loves her.  Will she survive?  We don't discover, because the film ends there!  

As you can see, something of a downer.  If it was poorly made one might snicker at the melodrama, but both Sidney and March are very good and it's all-too-realistic.  Personally I don't see what she saw in him at the start, as he's obviously a lush when she meets him at a party, and the omens are all bad (such as when he passes out drunk before he can get to their engagement party, or when he loses the ring at their wedding and has to substitute a bottle-opener), 

but I guess he eventually rewards her faith in him... too late.  And I certainly got engrossed in it, and wanted to see how things turned out, which means that it's a good film - just not the one we wanted!  (Grant's role is very small, and I think he's also an actor in the play whose face you never see, because that definitely sounded like him.  But you can't miss those looks (and March is no slouch in that department, either).)  Oh, and the title comes from the main character's favorite toast.  

And also scandalized enough people to make it hard to advertise at the time, apparently.  Oh, and one more nugget: it was directed by Dorothy Arzner, who was, at the time, the only female director working in Hollywood.

Cold enough for deer to run across the lake

I tried to video the deer but it was set on camera, apparently. If you embiggen this picture greatly, you see the deer: