The Month That Was - February 2022

Another month in the depth of winter. My only travel this month was to the frigid plains of Nebraska, but I hope to remedy that with a trip to warmer climes soon.  Winters can start out quite lovely.  A gentle blanket of snow can be picturesque.  There is football and hockey to watch.  No yard work staring you in the face. The cold can be bracing -- to a point.  The problem is that by the time February rolls around, the sun is gone, the Super Bowl is over, the white frosting of snow becomes a muddy gray, the wind will sear your ears, the road salt covers your car, and you'd do anything not have to bundle up for every outdoor activity.

Still, I've seen enough winters to know that it will end and I will survive and perhaps, one day, I'll spend a year without a winter.

There was also good news.  One mild day I was actually able to run 5k on my arthritic toe without too much pain.  I finished what I hope will be the last editing session on my next novel (although I have said that before).  I got to see some new friends and jostle with some highly energetic children.

I'm still above ground and as long as every month brings new engagement with the world, I'll count my blessings.

[Movies] Flick Check: No Time to Die

[Movies] Flick Check: The French Dispatch

[Books] Farewell P.J. 

[Tech, Cars] Stuff Status

[TV] Toob Notes: Reacher

[Movies] Flick Check: No Time to Die

Well, it appears that the intent of this is that James Bond is over. It's been 60 years since Dr. No so it's probably for the best.  The franchise has been quite a rollercoaster of quality.  Unexpectedly, the very best movies-as-movies happened in the final incarnation (Skyfall, Casino Royale) although the best portrayal and aesthetic remains The Connery.  Their cultural relevance dwindled long, long ago, and the attempt to rejigger the films as standard actioners never really panned out until the Daniel Craig ones I mentioned as the best.  The symbolism of Bond has been reviled and worshiped, often simultaneously.  And it all leads up to No Time to Die it seems.

Bluntly put, No Time to Die is not a good movie. Craig doesn't seem to know if he wants to play Bond or some sort of Chris Pratt character. The entire movie is a pastiche of Bond tropes.  The daffy, skin-showing, bond-girl who turns out to be an effective agent, the Q-armored Aston Martin, Bond as a rogue agent, a villainous madman bent on world domination from an island lair. Even the core personal story follows the plot of On Her Majesty's Secret Service right down to the "All the Time in the World" meme.

So, yeah, it's just as well that it ends. There really is no purpose to this franchise anymore.  Mission Impossible does everything better in this specific sub-genre and as for action films in general, Mad Max: Fury Road, any Avengers film, or even the Fast and Furious franchise, will put it to shame.

Personally, I would love to see them reboot Bond stories set back in the '60s.  Same aesthetic, same morality (or amorality); done seriously, like Mad Men was.  To quote Never Say Never Again, "I hope were in for some gratuitous sex and violence."

Since everyone else is going to do it, here are my thoughts on essential Bond films:

• Casino Royale and Skyfall are the best quality movies.  They are top notch action films that stand up well.  Many will also offer Pierce Brosnan's Goldeneye for quality and I will not gainsay them.

• Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger constitute the core of when The Connery burned bright and the cultural icon was made.

• Roger Moore had a couple of decent outings with Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun, but camp had long overtaken the franchise by then.

• The only campy one I really enjoyed was You Only Live Twice, which mashes up Bond and chopsocky and cranks the blatant sexism to 11.  Lousy as a movie, but it makes me grin.

• Timothy Dalton I barely remember.

• Pierce Brosnan got to do some great sequences but to my mind none of his were strong end-to-end.

• The most beautiful bond girls are not in the main canon, to be honest.  For that you must go to a Casino Royale parody from the '60s, which starred David Niven as Bond, Peter Sellers as Fake Bond, and Woody Allen as his little brother Jimmy Bond.  The movie was inane and incoherent, but the girls -- and there were many -- were ridiculously beautiful in that way women were in the 60s and are not today.

[Movies] Flick Check: The French Dispatch

I found this movie delightful.  It is the most Wes Anderson of Wes Anderson movies.  Effectively a paean to the halcyon days of the New Yorker under William Shawn it doubles as a love letter to the written word, the literary written word.  I love movies like Wes Anderson makes, and to a lesser extent the Coens, that are forthrightly self-conscious about their storytelling.  In a sense, there is no need to suspend disbelief here because belief in the film as representative of reality is never intended.  

Another thing I love about it is how it is all done in the service of the personal.  Love, grief, loneliness, resentment, aspiration, family -- the motivations of the characters are almost exclusively personal.  One particular section that is set during the Paris student uprisings in the 60s seems to explicitly belittle any political notions. The acting is as wonderful as you would expert given the hi-end cast.  A stand-out among stand-outs being Jeffery Wright as Roebuck Wright.

The audience that appreciates humanity and the written word over socio-political motivation and basic exposition is dwindling fast.  We have to be grateful for every breath of fresh air we get. I hesitate to recommend this movie to anyone. The vast majority of people would find it merely curious, or worse: boring.  Most movies are positioned for the largest audience possible. The French Dispatch is positioned for me.

[Books] Farewell P.J.

The best line from Matt Labash's obituary for P.J. O'Rourke: "Good writers make you want to read, Great writers make you want to write."  P.J. O'Rourke made me want to write. He had one keen eye inherited from Tom Wolfe, and one gimlet eye inherited from Hunter Thompson. But he didn't eviscerate his targets like Wolfe or stink bomb them like Thompson.  He simply laughed at them. No -- scratch that. He laughed with them. However ridiculous his targets came out, he never suggested that he was any better, in fact he often targeted the man in the mirror.  He once pointed out that Hunter Thompson schtick was being a crazy guy looking at normalcy.  His schtick was being a normal guy facing all the crazy.  As a result, no matter how incisive and biting his critique, you had to love him.  In the end, this made his words all the more powerful.  It was a remarkable thing to see.

Me taking up writing back then was me saying "I want to be able to do that."  I am comparatively weak sauce, but I like to think my first three books were absolutely in that vein.  You can get a feel for how much he influenced me by searching the early days of this blog (largely greater than 15 years ago) for all the references to him.

I'm lucky to have lived during his tenure on Earth, and hope he's found all the good bars in Heaven.

[Tech, Cars] Stuff Status

I got a new phone.  The old Moto G6 was beginning to show signs of failure, it was out of storage space, and it had become slower than dial-up to get anything done over wi-fi. I should have retired it earlier.

My frugal, "you don't need that" upbringing prevents me from buying a flagship phone, although I desperately lust after a Z Fold.  I take pains to limit the amount of Apple and Google in my life, or at least bias myself against adding any more, so I skipped iPhones and Pixels even though, in the strictest sense, they would have been #1 and #2 respectively in a purely practical decision.

In the end, I settled on a superseded, sub-flagship phone: the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE 5G. Essentially, it's the flagship phone circa 2020. It is a revelation in comparison to ye Olde Moto.  I was surprised to find I actually had 5G service in most places. (I was under the impression that 5G was still in slow roll out and rare beyond key cities). It's fast enough that I have to remind myself to check for wifi wherever I go…yes, I still don't have an unlimited plan. 

It's a sweet phone.  Recommended.  Mine is a lovely shade of red so I had to spring for a clear Otterbox to show it off.

Next, I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't time to get into the car market.  I know prices are through the roof, but hear me out.  My Acura has been occasionally frustrating, but mostly astonishing. 

In its life it has left me stranded twice.  The first time was an Electronic Power Steering failure.  I had purchased an extended warranty so it didn't cost me anything but the tow to the dealer.  Interestingly, this turned out to be such an issue with my model that Acrua extended the manufacturer's warranty to cover it.  The second time it seems some water got into the battery and froze it -- if you know anything about modern cars, you know everything is dependent on the electrical system, even brakes and transmission, so a dead battery is a dead car.  Had I known it was the battery I could have replaced it myself, but there was no telling and frankly, if your electrical system is down, you'll be lucky to get your car out of Park.

Still, whenever I drive it I am impressed with its overall excellence.  It has 135k miles and it is as tight and rattle-free as when I bought it 7 years ago. The engine is strong and responsive.  I gather it is the same engine you could find in a V-6 Accord, but slightly more displacement and a more aggressive tuning.  It's a real joy -- smooth and powerful and refined at all times.  Handling and steering and dead on precise.  Honestly, I think a skilled driver (not me) could really do amazing things with it. It is utterly rock solid and wonderful to drive. But…

The user interface is waaay out of date.  No Android auto.  Navigation and phone interfaces from 20 years ago.  It gets good mileage; mid-twenties overall, but requires premium fuel (I just filled the tank at $4+/gal).  It is not particularly roomy, certainly less roomy than my old Camrys, and low on storage.  Bags for three travelers at most, anything more and someone will have a bag on their lap. Trips to Lowes are nearly pointless.

Frankly, I think if I had Android Auto I would readily accept the other issues. At the moment the key is that with prices up where they are, I will likely never get as much money for a trade-in.  Anything new will be correspondingly expensive to buy but there is an alternative I'm twirling around in my brain.  

Suppose I was to do a one-pay lease.  A one-pay lease is where you lease a car, but you pay the entire lease up front.  You save on your lease this way because you get out of all the interest payments baked into it.  You should still pay less than an outright purchase and you can gamble that when it comes time to turn in in 2 or 3 years cars will be more plentiful and available and prices may have come down to reasonable levels.

I haven't pulled the trigger yet but I am pursuing this line of thought.

The last piece of stuff I need to replace is my laptop.  Keys are starting to fail, there is power supply weirdness, and bluetooth has become dubious.  I have no thoughts on this at the moment other than the Surfaces look appealing, so I guess I'll spare you a third rant in this post.  Lucky you.  For now.

[TV] Toob Notes: Reacher

Reacher was not especially coherent or particularly well done, although I did enjoy it in a time-wasting sort of way.  More significant to me is that it seems like a validation of something I said a few months ago.  Specifically, the medium of TV, which reigned artistically supreme at the outset of this century, has regressed 50 years.  We are back in the '70s with game shows galore, cheesy soaps about corrupt business people, and instead of bad sci-fi we have bad fantasy.  Reacher is the dramatic equivalent of loner private-eyes who take no prisoners in the name of personal justice. Kind of a hyper-violent mash-up of Mannix and Then Came Bronson. And like most of those old shows, dramatically it's crap.  If there is a positive side, at least it's not woke. We once had The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood all at the same time. Now "at least it's not woke" makes the cut. Season 2 should come next year.