I first saw this film as a child many many years ago. I watched it again recently. It's a slapstick comedy with a side order of The Battle of the Sexes. This film works the same side of the street as films like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or later works like Smokey and the Bandit. The scene that stuck in my head was when an angry feminist challenges the hero to a dueling match, snidely announcing that she was the Women's International Fencing Champion. Nonplussed the hero accepts the challenge, swiftly defeats her and coolly reminds her that he was the Men's International Fencing Champion. You would never see a scene like that in any major film today. And if you did, it wouldn't be good natured, as this film is. Men and women can complain and snark all they want but neither is possible without each other. Although the film is humorous it's not quite the anarchic over the top style of The Three Stooges, at least not until the end. So although I enjoyed watching the film for old times' sake it was rarely laugh out loud funny. I had some smiles and a few chuckles though. By modern standards this film is pretty tame on sex and violence. There is slapstick violence and Natalie Wood in a few (well more than a few) revealing outfits but that's it. At the beginning of the 20th century Leslie Gallant III (Tony Curtis) is a daredevil. He's always dressed in white, supremely confident, polite and protective of women, children and the downtrodden.
I would like to think that as an adult I would be smart enough to stay far away from a one ton bison. I also like to think that if a child of mine were in danger I would run to try to save that child instead of running to save myself. But one never knows, does one. I'm glad the girl in the below video is okay. I can't blame her for being so close to a large wild animal. She's only nine years old. I don't expect her to be full of wisdom and smarts. She just got here. I do blame her parents for being stupid enough to allow this event to occur. News flash. Wild animals are well, WILD.
I support public and private sector workplace affirmative action programs. Due to this country's history many people have a strong preference for their own and a disdain for black intelligence and competence. We live in a very segregated society. People who live separate residential and personal lives are as a group often unable or unwilling to judge co-workers, business partners, or new hires solely by potential and results. Humans usually don't work that way. Whether it is law firm partners who find more errors in associates' work if they think the associate is Black, hiring agents who sight unseen reject candidates with "Black" names, people that just tell someone straight out that they don't hire their kind, immigrants who won't hire Black people, managers more willing to hire white felons than Blacks without criminal records, workplace bigotry and stereotyping remains a huge problem. It's partly why the black unemployment rate has stubbornly remained twice that of whites for about as long as the metric has been recorded. If you're Black and haven't experienced any workplace funny business, congratulations but I think your number just hasn't come up yet. It will soon. We do need standards. Properly done, affirmative action's should make people define and enforce objective standards. If a company hires an incompetent Black person, I won't cry when that person is fired, demoted or transferred. But evaluating job performance can be opaque and biased. A person who excels in one role or with one set of people can fail in a different role or with different co-workers. Measuring educational performance is different. This brings us to Stuyvesant High School.
This is an intermittently humorous though predictable romantic comedy that deftly weaves through some dark passageways before returning to the crowd pleasing formula that typifies the genre. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy must reexamine his life choices and triumph over internal challenges and fears. Hopefully transformed, newly confident boy goes after girl again hoping for second chance. This film's hero is Charlie (Martin Freeman), a forty something unmarried schlub librarian who works in the Brooklyn Public Library. His sad sack co-workers like Charlie. They wonder if Charlie's gay or asexual because Charlie is never seen in the company of women, nor does he come in on Mondays talking about weekend dates with beautiful ladies. Charlie is neither gay nor asexual. Charlie's problem, which is (not quite hilariously) depicted at the wedding of his little sister Liza (Shannon Woodward) is that he suffers from cataplexy. Any strong emotions, in Charlie's case joy is usually the culprit, trigger blackouts, loss of muscle control, and fainting. It's incurable and embarrassing. At Liza's wedding Charlie fainted and took out at least four people.
Neil Marshall directed Dog Soldiers which you really should see and this film which you really should not. Marshall also directed HBO A Game of Thrones Episodes "Blackwater" and "Watchers on the Wall" so it's not as if he's not a talented director with both work he's written and that which he didn't. Marshall's presence is the reason I decided to give this film a look see. However there's really no better way than to describe this film than as rancid. If a film could smell this smells like a puppy's create accident mixed with spoiled Limburger cheese and rotting Durian fruit. Having thought about this for a while I am surprised that after reviewing the finished product the studio and/or producers didn't just tell everyone involved thanks for your work, here's your check but there's no way we can release this film. I think the major problem is that this is a reboot of something that didn't really need to be rebooted. The original Hellboy was very much a personal vision of baroque/gothic/steampunkish Lovecraftian horror fantasy lovingly and lavishly created for the screen by director Guillermo Del Toro and interpreted by hulking everyman actor Ron Pearlman. When the studio couldn't come to terms with both of those men for another sequel they went to reboot mode.
I have always been amazed and somewhat amused by criminals who do really stupid things for really small rewards. This could be a school board member who agrees to take a $200 bribe in order to steer business to a favored company and ends up serving 10 years in prison as a result. Or in this case I was wondering why, at a time when gasoline is not cheap, a woman would apparently decide to drive roughly 35 miles from Garden City, Michigan to Pittsfield Township, Michigan in order to attempt to snatch a purse from a 93 year old woman. A Garden City woman has been charged with stealing a purse from a 93-year-old woman in a Pittsfield Township parking lot, according to authorities. Police said the incident happened at 4:30 p.m. Sunday in the 3000 block of Packard Road in Pittsfield Township.
I thought that this book was a bait and switch. A button man is of course an older term for mobster, or specifically a hitman/enforcer/bodyguard. As the fictional Willie Cicci told us "The boss says to push a button on a guy, I push a button". Later, as the term button man fell out of use, someone who had his "button" was someone who was a full and formal member of an Italian-American organized crime family. This book's title and intro made me think this book would be about early organized crime. Well it was and wasn't. What this book really is a fictionalized hagiography to the author's deceased grandfather, a Jewish garment district business owner and later tycoon. Organized crime makes many people think of the Italian-American variety, the Mafia. Up until at least the 1940s organized crime was just as much a Jewish-American venture. In fact arguably the Jewish syndicate was more powerful. Gangsters like Dutch Schultz, Arnold Rothstein, Bugsy Siegel, Gurrah Shapiro, Little Augie Orgen, Meyer Lansky, and Lepke Buchalter were just as infamous and as violent as their Italian-American counterparts. Hollywood has tended to downplay this. Some Jewish creatives believe that an overemphasis on Italian-American macho criminality has left the Jewish-American image too closely identified with the brainy, sarcastic nebbish, as typified by Woody Allen. These writers want to remind us that for better or worse Jews could be tough guys as well. Meyer Lansky was a hoodlum but he also violently broke up Nazi meetings in New York and beyond. I don't know that Gross feels that way but in his afterword he references as inspirations some writers who do. This story follows the life choices of Morris Rabishevsky (Raab) and his brothers. The Rabishevksy brothers grow up in horrible poverty on New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century. Their father dies early; another brother dies in an accident.
