Wisdom of the Sages
Episode VIII
August– Summer 2011
Hello People of the World;
Here we are in the middle of the summer season. Now, there is only a month and six days until the official beginning of the autumn season, with its cooler temperatures. Before you know it, we’ll be complaining about the snow that we’ll get during winter. Can you imagine?
Hmm. It seems that I forgot about a little announcement I was supposed to make in last month’s edition. But I was waiting on the paperwork to come in. It has, so here we go: I will be teaching a “Native Americans in Media” course at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside starting next month. I give much thanks to Rita Pyrillis, a friend and former instructor of the course, for recommending me for the teaching post. I’ll do my best to inform the masses.
Boy, if you thought I was smug and arrogant before, wait until they get a load of me. Let’s get started, shall we?
1:[ First item of the month: The trailer for the Lucasfilm Produced “Red Tails”, a fictionalized account of the Tuskegee Airmen hit the web. Take a peek here.
So far it’s been garnering a lot of positive feedback on the comments sections of various websites. The chief point made: “A Lucasfilm not attached to Star Wars or Indiana Jones? I’m in!” Same here. I am pretty glad Lucasfilm is trying something different. George Lucas once stated he was going to do smaller, personal films, but that has yet to happen.
2:[ I must be old because I just don’t get the reason behind cellular phone “apps”. Why do we need all this superfluous stuff added to the simplicity of a mobile phone? For the answer I asked my little (not-so-little) girls, and Sam said, “Because it’s convenient.”
Convenient for what, I did not ask. I still do not get their purposes. I jokingly asked if there was an app that helped me make phone calls. Sam said, “Yeah, it’s called ‘Phone Book’.”
She said that so coolly and slyly that I could not tell if she was for real or blatantly making fun of me, which makes her all the more cool in either sense. Anyways, I still don’t get cell phone apps. What happened to the concept of just calling and talking to another person?
Or maybe, I’m just old.
3:[ A Review of Captain America: The First Avenger: I was surprised at how very little resonated with me with this movie. While I enjoyed the humanity of Steve Rogers, everything else felt rushed or part of a “The Avengers” ad. I did not feel the romance really connected between Rogers and Peggy Carter, again, it felt rushed to get to the end so we can see him get stuck in the ice, so their radio exchange had no resonance to it, his sacrifice without weight, because we all knew he’d wake up in the present.
Speaking of rushed; did you know his handpicked team also had a name? Yeah they are The Howling Commandos, but you never got to know them beyond ethnic distinctions. Plus, I hate it when the bad guys have all the powerful technologies but can’t seem to aim it. The laser rifles should have torn the soldiers to bits, but they had worse marksmanship than Imperial Stormtroops.
The biggest problem for me with the last Iron Man movie, Thor and this is the rushed second halves. As if, we got the origins out of the way, let’s just get the climax of this one out of the way now to get to the “The Avengers” movie. There was only one “Cool Moment” that I saw in it: when the Red Skull sees Captain America fighting off his men and know they are outmatched, then begins setting all the self-destructs.
The villain recognizing the hero in stories always makes for a cool moment for me. Sometimes. The rest was perfunctory nonsense to get to the end, to get him stuck in the ice and brought into the present for “The Avengers”. It was such an awkward and rushed shift that the audience I saw the movie with laughed when Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) appeared on-screen. Really.
I also found myself pretty bored with “Cowboys & Aliens”, a genre-blending action film with Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford as the cowboys, fighting to “get my family back!” This graphic spells it all out better than I could.
But I should add that it’s never a good sign with me when I laugh out loud at the introduction of the Natives in the film. I just knew that Adam Beach’s character had to die just so Harrison Ford’s son’s Reset Button can get hit. Can we stop making Harrison Ford grumble, “I want my family/daughter/son/wife back!” please?
Again, Charlotte hit the nail on the head and this is what kills these types of genre benders for me; Charlotte asks afterwards, “You mean those aliens with all their technology and lasers cannot defeat cowboys and Indians with guns and spears? Man, they’re like the stormtroopers from Star Wars!” (Yeah, she said that!)
I was also surprised with how good “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” was. What had been predicted as a flop from its first announcement is a very solid, sort of pre-boot to the original Chuck Heston “classic”, that features James Franco as a “scientist” looking for the cure to Alzheimer’s to save his father. Instead, he finds that his medicine makes chimps smarter. He ends up adopting Caesar, a chimpanzee genetically enhanced via his mother’s exposure to the cure, who leads a group revolt against his jailers. Pretty neat reboot of the series. The CGI work from Weta is top-notch and the motion-capture performance from Andy Serkis is also first rate. Funnily enough, this is the only one of the three I’d recommend.
4:[ Of late I found myself carrying two bags to work. Yeah, that’s my way of lightening my load. I carry a “man purse” around and as Bonnie has pointed out on several occasions, it is frickin’ heavy. No wonder I have back problems, she exclaims. So, to solve this I took some of the material out of the larger bag and stuffed them into one of the summer bags we have at work. (The 2011 T7 Summer Program bag!) And in addition to what comes out of the first bag, I put in other stuff in there that I think I will need because now that I have a second bag, I have the room for it!
Yep, to make the load lighter, I fill up two bags with heavier stuff and carry those around. Bonnie suggested that I make a WotS Video about what I carry. So, look for that very soon….
5:[ Ah yes, settle in Readers for more of:
Adventures at the Coffee Shop!
+ My Bonnie remarked, “Only Starbucks could put a blob of cake on a stick and charge $2 for it.”
+ I don’t mind being rushed by the baristas, especially when they have a long line to deal with. I am usually fourth or fifth in line and there are people in front of me making the most complicated demands. When it is my turn, they instantly know my order (A large sweetened iced coffee for all of you assassins.) that they state my order and I tell them yes for the sake of making the line move along for them….
+ Seriously, Mister Mercedes-Benz, parking in a spot clearly not marked as a parking spot? Then, he just stands there and smokes a cigarette. What a jackass.
+ I see the never having what I order at the Village Crossing Barnes & Noble coffee shop streak continues. I am wondering if a rise of apes would improve services? Your thoughts?
6:[ This gives me hope: What do Andy Lau, Jet Li, Tony Leung, Donnie Yen, Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-Fat all have in common besides being in some of the greatest Asian action/war/epic/dramatic movies of all time? Besides continuing to be the biggest box office draws in their homeland and all of Southeast Asia? Besides, endearing themselves to US audiences with their cool and style and roles and participation in some of the greatest action movies ever?
They are all in their late-forties to mid-fifties in age. That’s what. American actors take notes. The youngest of this bunch is 48 and the eldest is 57. I’m just a punk when it comes to these guys. I have a lot of time yet….
7:[ And now Wisdom of the Sages presents:
“An Ever-growing List of Things That MUST Stop!”
+ For the last few times I’ve crossed the street in front of my building, a car will zoom past and yell something at me as if I’m blithely standing in front of their car making a nuisance of myself. Don’t get me wrong, traffic is horrific on Ridge at Rush Period (no long Rush Hour) and I am also very aware that pedestrians have the right-of-way once they are in the crosswalk. Well, there is a cross walk at the street junction in front of my building.
But this has not stopped drivers from speeding by and yelling at me like I am purposely in their way. I usually wait until there is absolutely no oncoming traffic in either direction before I even step into the crosswalk. But during the rush, I have to wait on traffic gaps. When a gap occurs I check the other side to see if there are coming cars. If not, I plunge ahead. Lately though, I have been crossing with a car way down the street, obviously they have enough time and room to slow down for any pedestrians that step into the cross walk. But, no….
As they pass me they have to yell at me as if I didn’t care nor see them coming down the street. There was plenty of space and time to see me. One jerk yelled “Whoa!” as if he had to swerve to miss me. I was securely across the street by the time he passed, such was the space and time I had. Another was a young lady saying “HELL-LOOO?” as if I didn’t see them. Again, I was already across the street once they passed. So, that disregard to crosswalk pedestrians needs to stop….
+ Again, what’s with the perfectly able-bodied parking in the disabled space to get a “Quick Coffee”? That needs to stop. Seriously. Starbucks coffee isn’t THAT good! Besides, just because there is a handicapped vehicle parked in the “normal” spots, doesn’t mean that you can take the handicapped space “just because”. Sheesh, this needs to stop. Simple consideration has gone out the door….
8:[ I believe my Bonnie just coined the term “Berg-y” when describing the types of “Art Films” she wished at one point to be a fan of. To explain: we were talking about how our tastes in movies have changed since our high school/college days. She loves movies like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Unforgiven”, mostly westerns and how when she was in college she never thought she would. She wanted to like the “foreign” films, the bleak, black and white “Berg-y” films.
She was eluding to “Ingmar Bergman” I thought. But she actually said “murky”. To which I said, “The difference being?”
She replied, “Well, yeah okay… ‘Berg-y’.”
So, she coined a new term for the overly pretentious, self-serious, nonsensical, art house films that people tolerate rather than enjoy. So, Berg-y.
9:[ From the “This Just In” Department: Nothing really stood out for me here in this category this month. On the way home today I was on the Purple Line heading for Howard when the train stops at Jarvis for signals. I look out the window at the Elite Auto Repair and in their garage there was a play going on. I thought it was pretty cool for the city to stage something like that at a auto body repair place. It was a part of this. I had hoped to go see the show later on but tonight was the final performance….
10:[ Last Item of the Month: So there I was, standing in the Seven-Eleven downtown grabbing a coffee. I noticed two things: one) they now have animated menus and ad boards in most stores now. They are basically HD TVs that play ads or menu items for the store. Which led me to this observation: We don’t watch TV Programs anymore, we watch TVs. In that, I mean as long as a TV-like machination is spewing colors, sounds and motions, we will sit there and watch it.
I noticed this one day at a local Dunkin’ Donuts. They had four HD TVs lined up and on the center two they had animated menus. Cool. On the outer two were ads for their special deals and specific menu items. There was another family in there with me and we all kept looking to the boards watching them like TVs and all they had were bouncing pancake sausage bites and pouring coffee shots. Weird.
Two) I noticed in one of the ads in the Seven-Eleven, they have Slurpee cups depicting Pro Wrestling “Super Stars”. I don’t know which, WWE or iMPACT! But one of the wrestlers shown was a guy called “The Miz”. Which made me laugh out loud because all my Wind River Rez peeps know the local colloquialism for an overly flirtatious, self-center chick is “Miz”, as in “This one, stop acting like a miz.” Or, “Yee, is that your new miz?”
So, seeing a big, manly wrestler called “The Miz” makes me laugh every time.
That will do it for this month.
I begin my class next month, so feel free to wish me luck. I am a touch nervous about it as I usually feel underprepared but I will follow my own advice, it is probably easier than I think. I hope you are all doing well and whatnot. Feel free to leave a comment, a question, a contradiction or a disagreement. I’ll let ya.
In closing I need to mention the recent passing of Dale Smith. I considered him a mentor and a father figure to me. He was stern and exacting when it came to your performance on-air. I am a better person for it. I owe him much and will never forget him.
Until Next Time, “I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control everything really are.”
© 2011 Ernest M. Whiteman III
