Saturday

PotD  /  Social Commentary
Saturday Morning Trailer Time
March 19, 2016
charles i. letbetter - Saturday Morning Trailer Time

Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath. —Lyndon B. Johnson

 

charles i. letbetter - saturday morning trailer time

Saturday morning is a perfect time to catch up on the trailers for movies we don’t have time to see

Who doesn’t remember the joy of Saturday morning when we were kids? Anyone born before, oh, let’s say 2000 or so, probably still remembers getting up on Saturday mornings and binge watching cartoons while consuming large amounts of processed sugar in whatever form we could convince our parents to buy. For my brother and me, it was cold cereal. For my kids, it was french toast sticks. We would sit there and watch one cartoon show after another, sad when the networks switched to sports around noon, sometimes 11:00.

Kids today don’t understand why Saturday mornings were once so very special; they have Netflix and Cartoon Network and can watch animated programs anytime they want until their eyeballs bleed. Gone are the days of Bugs Bunny and friends, Hannah-Barbera’s predictability, and Sid & Marty Kroft’s strange puppetry. No wonder this generation of kids is so messed up: they don’t know the fear of a coyote possibly dropping an anvil on their heads.

Saturday was also once movie night. While new movies have typically been released on Fridays for more than 60 years, it’s still Saturday night, date night, that traditionally was the biggest movie draw. Again, that has been usurped by Netflix, streaming, and sheer exhaustion. We know we’re adults when we sit home on Saturday nights hoping the phone doesn’t ring.

There are also cost and time factors to going to the movies and for me, personally, that tends to limit my activity more than anything. Saturdays are often typical work days for me. By the time I get done, assuming there’s such a thing as done, I couldn’t stay awake through one no matter how good it might be. I still love movies, though. So, I’ve taken to watching trailers on Saturday mornings, typically early before the kids are up and I have to be concerned about the content. Not that I’ll ever get to actually watch any of the movies whose trailers excite me. I suppose they’ll eventually make it to Netflix. And no, it’s not lost on me that we now wait for movies to be on streaming services much like we once waited for them to be shown on network television.

Anyway, rather than just sitting here and talking about it for another 500 words, why don’t I just share some of the trailers I’m watching this morning? If you get to actually see the movies in theaters, please let me know how they were. My Netflix cue is already pretty full, so any help keeping that manageable is appreciated. I should probably also state that the presence of a trailer here does not imply endorsement of the movie. Even bad movies can have good trailers.

Here’s what I’m watching this morning.

X-Men: Apocolypse

Put this in your religious mythology pipe and smoke it. Could deities actually be mutants? And if so, what happens when that mutant deity isn’t a nice person? Probably something like this:

 

Ben-Hur

For anyone who remembers the original with Charleston Heston, there’s no way this version isn’t going to be a disappointment. Even with Morgan Freeman in the cast, the look and feel of the movie just isn’t the same. I’m also wondering if this isn’t another case of us knowing too much about a period for us to be entertained by its barbarity. Still, if you like action, and I do, this may have potential.

The Legend of Tarzan

I doubt Edgar Rice Burroughs ever imagined that he was penning the underlying premise for a stream of movies that continues to morph with every generation. Tarzan has been movie fodder almost from the very beginning of cinema. So, here’s another take, perhaps a little more real and with a very different concept of romance. Can it match the book? Probably not, but all those CGI animals could make it interesting.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Oh my. If ever there were a movie destined to become an instant classic, this may be it. Ransom Rigg’s novel has been a children’s favorite for years and now it gets the full Tim Burton treatment with all the special effects and interesting camera angles he brings to a story. Granted, I’m not sure this is going to be appropriate for little ones, but for anyone who is old enough to actually read and understand the book, this may well be a visual delight.

The Man Who Knew Infinity

Some movies we watch to escape. Some movies we watch for the spectacle. Then, there are those rare movies that inspire us. This movie has that potential. With the power of actors Jeremy Irons, Dav Patel, and Stephen Fry, amazing things could happen in this movie. We need a movie like this to not just be good, but life-altering. Let’s hope it achieves that goal.

Things bog down when I put more than five videos on a page, so we’ll have to stop there for now. After all, it is Saturday. You have things to do. I have things to do. The fantasy world of cartoons and movies can’t last forever, can it?

Well, there is always Netflix …

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PotD
#MakeMeThinkIn5Words
January 16, 2016
charles i. letbetter = #MakeMeThinkIn5Words

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.—George S. Patton

charles i. letbetter - #MakeMeThinkgIn5Words

Ah, the weekend! You made it and, quite fortunately, you’re still alive! This has been a very emotional week with the deaths of so many prominent people and we’ve all expended an abundance of energy mourning, fussing, remembering, arguing, and various other activities that, in the end, contributed to little more than the grayness of our hair. If all of 2016 is going to be this stressful, we’d just as soon go back to the previous year, please.

After such a difficult week, we thought it was time to have a little Twitter fun again this week. This time, the hashtag we’re playing with is #MakeMeThinkIn5Words, which, interestingly enough, involves six words, not five. The whole premise is to ask mind-challenging questions using only five words. This is interesting because, while the game fits well within Twitter’s 140 character limit, it comes at a time when the executives running the social media app are questioning expanding the limit to 10,000 words. Whatever would we do with all that space? There are advantages in being forced to be succinct.

Nonetheless, five words are our limit. We’ve seen some good ones already, such as, “What if Darth Vader sneezes?” and “What’s another word for thesaurus?” Even our friends at NPR got in on the game with tweets such as this:

Obviously, we’re going to have to put our thinking caps on for this one! So, let’s see what we can do:

(Sorry, couldn’t resist getting that one in early)

 

An old platitude involves the line, “you can win the battle and lose the war.” Maybe winning isn’t always everything. That is a very difficult concept to grasp when we live in such an aggressive that champions winning at all costs. Still, if you’ll give it a moment’s thought, I’m sure you can come up with a scenario in which winning on one level results in losing on another. For example, breaking the record for running the mile, but dying as you cross the finish line. 

 

No one really wants to die, and medical science is doing a lot to prolong our lives. But if we never died, would that not remove the need to procreate? Would we have to make sex illegal in order to survive? I can imagine life getting quite uncomfortable if we begin living too long.

 

I do my most serious thinking and research sitting right here in front of this computer. The more thinking I do, the more sedentary I am. The more sedentary I am, the more likely I am to snack on junk food. Knowing that there is a cherry turnover in the kitchen right now isn’t helping. I tend to consume more coffee and scotch when I’m thinking as well, which leads me to the possible consideration that thinking, ultimately, could kill me.

 

Frequent visitors know how I feel about the benefits to posing nude.However, we’ve not written about it yet this year, and we’re getting a lot of new visitors. Maybe we should write about it again. I need a different hook, though, don’t you think? We will need to revisit this question soon.

 

You know the concept already: If a man says something and no woman is around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or, more commonly, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Whether there can be reality without perception has been an arguable point for centuries. One can take sides, but the truth of the matter is that anything that might answer the question would amount to perception in some form, therefore the question is unanswerable. Bloody frustrating.

 

Another philosophy question because I’ve not seen them asked and they’re so much fun. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 – 1716) proposed that, “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” He based that statement on the concept that, prior to making the world, God must have considered every possible iteration, including one without hate and malice and other forms of evil, and decided that we were better off with them. A world void of evil, he thought, would rob man of free will. However, given that modern science no longer binds us to a mythological view of creation, does Leibniz’s concept still apply? Could the universe have done a better job of evolving?

 

Seriously, chocolate may honestly be the best food ever! Whether eating it by itself, or using it as a layer with other foods, it is difficult to imagine any situation that cannot be enhanced by chocolate. Even when it’s messy, it’s still good. What other food can come close to possibly comparing to the pleasure and satisfaction that chocolate brings? There are many great foods in the world, but none are going to beat chocolate.

I’m going to stop there because I think you fully understand how the game works now and should be able to carry on without my assistance. Be sure to follow me on Twitter (@charlesletbetter) and I’ll follow you back. Have a wonderful, thought-filled Saturday!

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