Yesterday when the news came out that Monty Python member Terry Jones had passed, fellow member John Cleese tweeted "Two Down, Four To Go." I think Terry Gilliam tweeted the same line.
A number of folks posting online have said that they thought this was an insensitive thing to say/tweet. No. As others are pointing out, it was just the continuance of an ongoing joke the Pythons started when they subtitled their final performances (the ones at the O2 in London), "One Down, Five To Go." See it there on the banner?
When either Cleese, Gilliam, Idle or Palin dies, one or all of the others will post or proclaim, "Three Down, Three To Go" and so on. When the last of them joins the bleeding Choir Invisible, someone will tweet, "Six Down, Zero to Go." If the Python guys know anything, they know how to pay off a running gag. I suspect each of them would be hurt if their survivors didn't keep it going.
Like most of America, including all the Republican members of the Senate, I'm largely ignoring the impeachment trial currently underway. I don't know the odds of Trump actually being removed from office by it but I suspect they're around the same as the odds of me being his replacement.
There was a term that Republicans used incessantly during the Clinton impeachment — "the rule of law." I hope no one uses it this time because it's become pretty much inoperative in politics today, replaced by "the rule of retaining power." As Jonathan Chait said in this piece…
Trump of course opposes all mechanisms of accountability. Anybody who investigates Trump — the Department of Justice, Congress, a state attorney general, a judge presiding over a lawsuit by victims of his swindling — is corrupt, biased, engaging in a witch hunt, and so on.
"The rule of law" is of course meaningless if one does not recognize that laws are to prevail and that is clearly not the case any longer. And "corrupt" no longer means you can point to any law the person you're applying that to has broken. It now means they're not on your side.
I always find it genuinely sad when someone I'd thought was a Person of Principle turns out to be anything but. I'm sure I've mentioned how disappointed I've been over the years to watch Alan Dershowitz morph from a man who took courageous stands against hate crimes and white supremacists to a person who'll advocate damn near anything if it'll get him on camera and add to his fame…
"It certainly doesn't have to be a crime," he said in a television interview in 1998, during the impeachment controversy surrounding President Bill Clinton. "If you have somebody who completely corrupts the office of the president and abuses trust and who poses great danger to our liberty, you don't need a technical crime."
Now, he has a different view. "Without a crime there can be no impeachment," he said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, foreshadowing the formal brief presented Monday by Trump's legal team to the Senate.
He got into one of his famous brawls on CNN on Monday night. Host Anderson Cooper and the network's chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, confronted Dershowitz about his changed opinion. The resulting exchange wasn't pretty.
"So you were wrong then," Cooper said to Dershowitz.
"No, I wasn't wrong. I have a more sophisticated basis for my argument," he said, citing his research into the 1868 impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson. "It's very clear now that what you need is criminal-like behavior akin to bribery and treason."
Later, he insisted, "I wasn't wrong. I am just far more correct now than I was then." Which I guess is better than saying, "No, there was a Democratic president then and the guy being impeached now is a Republican."
It helps me to keep this in mind: In most law schools, they do war games — mock trials where the lawyers of the future practice being both prosecutors and defense attorneys. Law Student Smith argues that the defendant is guilty and Law Student Jones argues he's innocent. Then they take a five-minute break before trying the same case again, only this time Law Student Jones argues that the defendant is guilty and Law Student Smith argues he's innocent.
It's one of the reasons most people hate all lawyers except the one handling their case at the moment. You'd like to believe they stand for Truth and Justice and the bad guy being punished and the innocent guy being cleared. But really it's about winning. And only about winning.
Early bird hotel reservations are now available for Comic-Con International in San Diego this July. These are mostly for hotels some distance from the convention center and some of them are in San Diego only on a technicality. But they have rooms and they're not as expensive as the lodging you might (might!) later be able to secure at closer places. For info, check here. Me, I'm thinking of going into one of the rooms where I host panels and setting up one of those tents that homeless people live in.
And here's a page from the good folks at the unaffiliated-but-often-helpful San Diego-Comic Con Unofficial Blog. It'll give you a general overview of how housing works for the big event.
In the biggest surprise since Donald Trump last lied, I have been announced as a Special Guest at WonderCon 2020, which takes place in Anaheim from April 10 to 12. Hey, I'm not doing bad for a guy who doesn't have a favorite Marx Brothers movie.
For some inexplicable reason, they have also announced that cartoonist Sergio Aragonés will also be among the Special Guests. I will be doing most of the same panels I did last year and one or two new ones and I'll tell you about them once the schedule is set. It is still possible to order badges to this big event…something you can't say for Comic-Con International which, in case you don't know, is run by the same people. Details on how to be there are here.
A few days ago here, I offered the apparently-controversial opinion that of the movies starring the Marx Brothers, the best one to show someone unfamiliar with those boys is A Night at the Opera. If you're going to limit your choices to the films they made for Paramount, then Horse Feathers.
Somehow, about a dozen of you read that as me saying those are the best Marx Brothers movies and want to challenge me to a duel at ten paces for daring to suggest that Duck Soup was not the greatest movie they ever made. It may well be but that's not what I was discussing. I was discussing which film you show — as I need to do with my friend Amber — as an introduction to Groucho, Harpo and Chico, as well as the outside possibility of Zeppo.
And to the person who wrote me to ask, "No love for Monkey Business?" Yes, sure, absolutely. I love Monkey Business. I'm not really sure how the plot wraps up at the end…but then I was never entirely sure what the plot was in the first place but I still love Monkey Business. It has, in fact, my favorite scene in any Marx Siblings movie. I was going to link you to something I wrote here about it back in 2006 but I'll save you a click and reprint it here…
Let us review. The boys are stowaways on an ocean liner. They have no passports so they can't get off the ship. Zeppo gets hold of the passport of the great French entertainer Maurice Chevalier and somehow knows that the bearer of it can prove it's his by singing one of Chevalier's songs. Well, that's an obvious assumption now, isn't it? I mean, how else would the customs guys verify that the holder of a passport was indeed that person? They'd expect him to perform his big hit tune, right? So to get off the boat, all four Marxes are going to have to pretend to be someone they're not.
This is not quite ridiculous enough so let's make it worse: Since they have only the one passport, they'll all pretend to be the same person. Not only that but they're all going to pretend to be a well-known celebrity that none of them resembles in any way.
The Italian guy's going to tell them he's Maurice Chevalier. And after that doesn't work, the rude guy with the mustache and no French accent whatsoever is going to tell them he's Maurice Chevalier. Even the guy who doesn't talk is going to claim to be Maurice Chevalier…and he's really got a surefire plan. First, he'll bolster his chances of getting through by throwing around all the papers on the Customs Agents' table like a maniac. That will surely make the officials more likely to believe he's Maurice Chevalier. Then he'll mime to a record, assuming they won't notice the phonograph under his coat, nor wonder about the sudden appearance of musical accompaniment from nowhere. And then to really convince them, he'll mess up all their papers again and rubber stamp the customs agent's bald head. If that doesn't prove he's Maurice Chevalier, nothing will.
(And that's really the point of the whole scene: Nothing will. Harpo's chances of getting through aren't all that much worse than what Zeppo tried, which was to actually impersonate Maurice Chevalier.)
Chico Marx Maurice Chevalier
It's the perfect summary of what was wonderful about the Marxes. After spending the first half of the movie doing everything possible to avoid the security personnel on the liner, not one of the four brothers pauses to wonder if it's a good idea to go up to the ship's police and all claim to be someone that none of them could possibly be. Even after the plan has completely failed three times, Harpo doesn't hesitate to try it…and I think it yields one of the most beautiful, wonderful scenes anyone ever put into a movie. Because you can go through life doing things the logical way or you can do them the illogical way. Should you decide to do something the illogical way, the way that is almost certain not to work, you might as well make it all as illogical as humanly possible. If that isn't the best advice in the world then my name isn't Maurice Chevalier.
So there's love for Monkey Business. And the truth is that I kinda love something in every Marx Brothers movie — yes, even Love Happy — even if it's only watching one or more of those guys running around triumphing over weak material. I finally decided that the best way to deal with the question "What's your favorite Marx Brothers movie?" is to not have one.
It's not mandatory. You can't get through life without a driver's license, a Social Security number, a place to live, a means of earning a living, a complete collection of Groo the Wanderer, water, food, clothing, some means of transportation (these may not be in order of importance), oxygen (I probably should have put that near the top of the list) and a number of other things. But I stand before you on this blog as living proof that you can get by just fine without a favorite Marx Brothers movie. I do not have one.
If I did, it would be Duck Soup but I don't have one so it isn't.
The other day here, I was talking about sitting through a great many movies in one sitting and I said, "Today, I don't think I could make it through a double feature of anything." Here to challenge me on that is Ben Sternbach…
I'm going to challenge you on that. I've been reading your blog for a long time and I've seen how you race to see It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World every time any theater in L.A. shows it. That movie is 192 minutes. I've been to plenty of double features that ran that long or less. Do you still think you couldn't sit through a double feature of that length?
Good question, Ben. My reply starts by noting that 192 minutes was the length It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was when it was first released in 1963. The prints they run these days are more like 161.
But that's a minor point because if a 192-minute print did surface, I could easily sit through it and then ask if there's a second screening of it. And the thing is that I love that movie so much that the normal rules do not apply. You're not going to find a double feature of two movies that I enjoy as much as I enjoy that movie, nor could they have been such an important part of the first 67 years of my childhood — i.e., my entire life.
Also, two complete stories with beginnings, middles and ends are more work for the brain than one movie of the same length with one beginning, one middle and one end.
And finally, if I go to see two current movies on the same bill today, that's me at age 67, watching the picture but unable to hush the part of my brain that knows the seventeen different things I have to do when I get home. So when a film lags and loses my undivided attention even for a minute, my attention divides. My "must do" tasks diminish my patience more than it should. When I go see Mad World, that part of my brain goes on Silent and I'm just an eleven-year-old kid with nothing more pressing to do at home than sort out my comic books.
That's my reply to your challenge, Ben. But thanks. It was a good, logical challenge.
February 18, Warner Archive will bring out the first volume of Tex Avery's MGM cartoons on Blu Ray. I don't think too many animation fans will challenge me if I say that during his little Golden Age at that studio, Tex produced some of the funniest, most imaginative cartoons ever made and it's way overdue for them to be available in this format.
The hope is that Warner Archive will keep issuing these until all 67 cartoons he made for the studio are out but since there are only 19 of those cartoons on this Blu Ray…well, you do the math. I doubt Warner Archive is planning to bring out 3½ sets of these…but maybe there will be two volumes that each have 24 cartoons or three more that each have 16. One set with all 67 would have been even nicer but this is all minor quibbling.
Major quibbling is, of course, already starting. The following is in no way an attempt to stifle anyone's free speech but I have my First Amendment Right to suggest that one thing that is discouraging some folks in the home video biz from doing more releases of cartoons is that it's hard to do without getting bludgeoned. The bludgeoning is done by a small group of folks who love animation so much that they are livid when a DVD or Blu Ray release isn't done the way they think it should have been done. 95% perfect might as well be 0% with these people.
Never mind the need to bring these releases in on a budget that leaves them a good chance of showing a profit. Never mind the problems that may exist with less-than-ideal source material. (Some movie lovers — and I'm not just talking about cartoon fans — firmly believe that there is a pristine, uncut, perfect print of everything somewhere in the world and that if you haven't found it, it's just because you don't care enough about quality to look hard enough. I still sometimes run into someone who is utterly certain that there is a complete, virgin print of the original release version of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and why the hell didn't they put that out instead of the edited versions that they have? And exactly where is this print? They don't know but they do know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who claims to have one.)
We want what we love to be available but we also don't want to wait until it can be as absolutely perfect as inhumanly possible. We'd also like to have the studios spare no expense to remaster and restore our favorite films but not charge more to make back that unspared expense.
I think some folks are forgetting what seems to be the basic rule of the dwindling market for hard copies (DVD or Blu Ray) of films that will mostly be available in the future only via streaming. The rule is that if a lot of people buy it, you'll eventually put out an improved version of it with more restoration and more extras And if no one buys it? Well, there's a film for which there's no audience. No point spending a lot of money to bring that out in an upgraded release.
As I've been writing this, I've just received an e-mail from a cartoon fan who read the news of the Tex Avery set on another site and wants to launch a boycott. "These great cartoons," he writes, "deserve nothing less than a complete set in chronological order." I agree they do but I also understand the position of whoever at Warner Archive said, "Okay, we'll put out a Volume One and load it with the best stuff Tex did. If that doesn't sell, there isn't much point in doing more." I'd really like to see them do more.
The middle of last November, my buddy Jack Enyart passed away. This coming Sunday afternoon, January 26, I'm attending a memorial gathering for Jack here in Los Angeles. If you knew Jack and wish to attend, drop me a note and I'll see that you get all the information. There will be speeches and refreshments and a lot of good memories. That's this coming Sunday afternoon.
Yeah, I go to a lot of these and that causes me to hear a lot of people say things like, "This is what happens when you get old…all your friends start dying." Well maybe that's so but I wish folks would remember that it's also a matter of how many friends you have. The more friends you have, the more you're going to hear that some friend of yours has died. It's simple math.
If you want to cut down on the number of friends' memorial services you're invited to attend, it's real easy. Just have fewer friends.
This morning, I was up in San Francisco for a darned good reason: To speak at a lovely memorial service for one of the best human beings it has ever been my pleasure/honor/privilege (they all apply) to know…Lee Mendelson. I wrote about Lee here and here and here and here, and as I read them over now, I don't think any of them sufficiently conveyed just what a wise, kind man I knew him to be.
Yes, he produced the they'll-rerun-it-forever TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas and dozens of other Peanuts specials. Yes, he gave us other animated shows with characters like Garfield and Cathy and Mother Goose & Grimm, as well as dozens of live-action documentaries and films and specials. Yes, he had awards galore. All of that is true and it was all mentioned at the memorial today — a memorial, I should mention that was lavishly and lovingly produced by his kids. Maybe good producing skills are hereditary.
But we also talked about Lee the Man…the very human human being. In a time when there is way too much coarseness and shouting and knifing on this planet, it was wonderful to hear the stories about working with Lee.
And you know what else is wonderful to hear? David Benoit at the piano…maybe the best jazz musician working today. He did the music on many of Lee's shows and he took the time to be there and to talk about his association with Lee and to favor us with a recital. I was three feet from him as he was playing "Linus and Lucy" and I could feel the ripple effect as some in the room felt the electricity and others dove for the Kleenex. I will remember that performance for a long time.
There were touching words from Lee's past associates and members of the Mendelson family. His widow Ploenta delivered one of the most emotional and real speeches I've ever heard at this kind of event, and later, I got up and said some silly things. I was also pleased to see Phil Roman there. As recounted here, Lee helped Phil to establish one of the best animation studios in town and he, like all of us, was there to pay his respects.
There were so many great stories. I wish you'd all had the chance to know this guy.
Your advice about not binging on Tex Avery cartoons reminded me of something that happened when someone at a RPG get-together said he'd never seen a Marx Brothers movie. Another guy and I — both of us at least familiar with the Brothers and their work — started recommending movies. The guy looked thoughtful and said he'd try to watch those the coming weekend.
The other fan and I looked at each other, looked back at him, and in close to a chorus said, "Don't binge on those. You'd never survive."
We both recommended A Night at the Opera as our first choice. Which is probably not surprising.
That's the one I would have picked. There are Marx Brothers snobs who say it's the Paramount films or nothing. While I agree that what's wonderful about the Marx Brothers is more wonderful in their Paramount films, I refuse to whittle their legacy down to just five films, the first of which ain't all that wonderful. A Night at the Opera is, I think, the perfect introductory film for someone who's never seen a Marx Brothers movie.
This is something I've had to think about because my friend Amber has never seen a Marx Brothers movie. One of these days, she's going to accompany me to a performance of Frank Ferrante's show and it would be nice if she saw the real Groucho in action before she sees the impersonator. I could have shown her any of the Marx movies on the DVD player in my den but I also think one's introduction to them should be when one is surrounded by a live, laughing audience. So I may have to settle for whatever film some local theater chooses to show and that seems to mainly be the Paramounts.
Of those, my pick would be Horse Feathers. If someone doesn't love that film, there's no point in showing them any other one. It's like if you go to a new Italian restaurant. You should order the spaghetti and meatballs because if they can't make that wonderful, it's a waste of time to try the veal parmigiana. By the way, A Night in Casablanca has about as many laughs in it as an order of veal parmigiana.
Also by the way: I mentioned that when I went to that Tex Avery marathon, I discovered my limit for Tex Avery cartoons watched in one sitting was seven. I also once went to a marathon of Max Fleischer Betty Boop cartoons and my breaking point on those was five.
A bunch of my friends once went to an all-day screening of all the James Bond films in the order of release. We intended to stay to the end, which then would have meant through Diamonds Are Forever. But by the end of Goldfinger, I began to feel like someone was torturing me to get me to divulge top secret information and I wound up fleeing halfway through Thunderball. Today, I don't think I could make it through a double feature of anything.
I really like CNN Legal Analyst Jeffrey Toobin and I think most of his predictions are spot-on. But let's note that eighteen months ago, he was firmly predicting that Roe v. Wade would be gone by now. I think he forgot to take into account that if they're going to do it, they're not going to do it when re-electing Donald Trump is a higher priority…
