We tried to watch ET with the kids a few weeks ago, and the first 20-30 minutes was so astonishingly tense and eerie that it scared the bejeebus out of the kids and they all cried and we ended up turning it off.
Also the word "triumph" no longer registers as "triumph" at first glance.
Tell me, what have you nailed most satisfactorily?
Are you asking me to name names?
From Every Little Step (a documentary about A Chorus Line) another remarkable audition*
* one the most memorable scenes in the movie and I appreciated the clip which allows you to see the contrast with the way the role was originally played. You only see a little bit of it in that except, but there's a longer clip which shows that, in the original, that scene was much angrier.
I don't even have kids and watching the tears roll off his cheeks was upsetting enough that I almost couldn't watch to the end (although I'm glad I did, because his smile after breaking was the payoff). It's a sign of how bad the world has gotten that I can no longer enjoy a cynical laugh over crying children.
1: I wanna say I was 9 (?) when I saw E.T. and my memory is that between the creepy tension in the beginning and the emotional roller-coaster through the end, it was very nearly more than I could take. I cried copiously and repeatedly during the movie, left in a state of shock, and couldn't stop thinking about some upsetting images for weeks after. I've never seen it since and don't know how it would play now as a film to my adult eyes, but yeah it fucked me up for a sec as a kid so you probably did the right thing calling it off.
I was too afraid because the cops were carrying walkie talkies instead of guns. Cops so cruel they weren't even allowed guns must be horrible.
Youtube constantly tries to get me to watch this and I am resistant.
Hey I saw that revival of A Chorus Line. (Ok, I did not love it but like what can ever live up to a thousand years of listening to the OCR?)
Not in quite the right mood to think of something I really nailed. I guess I used to sometimes go to the not that great piano bar in SF and make my friend who plays there accompany me in "The Ladies Who Lunch" and I doubt I was very in tune and I often couldn't hear him very well so I was rhythmically all over the place and I regularly forgot which verse came after which other verse but once or twice I was pretty "on" and one or two tired queens like me would be sitting at the piano singing along and raising their glasses at the end and I was pretty sure I had gotten something quite right.
I can't remember ever enjoying E.T. E.T. himself was very disturbing to look at, I was very disturbed by his ability to talk, and the story had only a few moments that weren't tense or scary somehow. I'm less than 10 years too young for it, but my impression is that somehow a children's movie with the same actual appeal to children as Spike Jonze's "Where The Wild Things Are" became the most beloved movie of a decade.
The clip in 4 is great, I love the casting director's reaction. (Also: the actor is adorable.)
I don't think I've seen A Chorus Line, but I know the song where they are like, "Fame, I'm going to live forever...."
"First when there's nothing
But a slow glowing dream
That your fear seems to hide
Deep inside your mind..."
So we bought our first and only home in the Summer of 1991. We put up quite a lot of shelves in the basement in the first few weeks. About half were rtaken down or fell down over the years, but few that remain were, in fact, satisfactorily nailed.
Well, Alexandra Petri nailed this.
Show me this reassuring picture that you see! I wish to be reassured! I refuse to indulge in any confident statements about the future save to go so far as to say that the election will occur, is, indeed, occurring, and all the ballots shall, I hope, be counted -- and already "hope" has entered into it! The nervous, fluttering thing at the bottom of Pandora's box. Gentlemen, continue. Show me these polls, and models, that reassure you so. Not merely the reassurance engendered by such polls as say, "I intend to vote for so and so," and "Were the election held today, I would -- " for Man intends many things he does not undertake, and for many the election is Not held today.
Five Thirty Eight, you say! Yes, I shall look. Hold it nearer to the candle -- I am feebler than I was.
When I was like 4 my grandmother asked my older brother the riddle, "What starts with T, ends with T, and is full of tea?" and I said, "I know! Extraterrestrial!"
When I was like 4 my grandmother asked my older brother the riddle, "What starts with T, ends with T, and is full of tea?" and I said, "I know! Extraterrestrial!"
When my kids were young there was a period where I would take them all with me on Saturday morning to do miscellaneous shopping or hihing or something to get us all out of the house at least. We would often end up at a Wendy's at a local shopping plaza that had a sunroom they all liked. They all had their own idiosyncratic order (and I mine, of course) but at least it never changed. One morning I snapped it off with perfect cadence, pauses, and emphases. The clerk replied, "Oh, we!l ordered!" All downhill since.
I consider a trip from my in-laws ( Bergen County near the GW Bridge) to Pittsburgh (a little over 6 hours) during the same time period which we made with zero stops for food , gas or potty breaks to be a close second.
(On the other hand, I did once manage to make 2 of 3 kids vomit on the same trip when I got tired of the freeways and took some back roads.) Fortunately my wife had a big empty Swizzler container in the car for just such eventualities.
I was a big, mostly full, plastic tub of Twizzlers on my counter right now. Pandemic supplies.