Category Archives: Movies

Tottori Sand Dunes, 1992

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Pleasant spring-ish weekend. Sour old man winter will return again sometime soon, of course, but probably not in full force as spring slowly gains the upper hand.

Referring to the Tottori Sand Dunes, Wikipedia has this to say, among other things: “Each year, around two million visitors — mostly from within Japan and East Asia — visit the dunes.[citation needed]”

Maybe so. When we went there in March 1992, the place was pretty popular.Tottori Sand Dunes Tottori Sand Dunes Tottori Sand Dunes

The dunes aren’t that far from the heavily populated Kansai region — Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe — and they count as a novelty draw since Japan doesn’t a lot in the way of epic sand dunes. If that’s what you want to see, Tottori is the place to go. The dunes stretch nine miles from east to west, and are a little more than a mile wide. At their highest, they rise about 165 feet over the Sea of Japan.

“The Sendai River carries sediment from the nearby Chugoku Mountains that eventually washes out into the Sea of Japan,” JNTO says, along with images of the area wider than anything I have. “Strong sea currents and winds work together to push these sediments back onto the shore to form the sand dunes. These same intense winds continuously move and re-shape the dunes.”

The dunes supposedly inspired Kobo Abe’s novel, The Woman in the Dunes (砂の女 Suna no Onna, “Sand Woman”), which I haven’t read. Years ago I did see the 1964 movie based on the novel, which is a well known avant-garde film and, I thought, relentlessly grim. Fitting for a retelling of the Sisyphus myth.

Sink the Bismarck!

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I was surprised recently to find Sink the Bismarck! on YouTube, gratis, no commercials even. Did the copyright lapse? So over the last few days I’ve been watching it as time allows. I think I rented it on VHS in Japan nearly 30 years ago, but I’m not sure; might have seen it later.

Considering that the ships are obviously models, this is a movie that’s improved — to modern eyes, used to better effects — by being on a small screen. Much of the story involves talking, and occasionally the exposition pops through (especially at the beginning), but on the whole it’s fast-moving and, in its way, suspenseful. The main actors all do well, especially the leads.

Also, it’s reasonably accurate in terms of its history, though since the movie came out in 1960, it wasn’t up to speed on the fact that British intelligence had cracked German codes, or that the men on the Bismarck scuttled her at the very end. No matter, it’s been a good diversion from the pace of work and the woes of the nation.

Debris Under the Tree

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Another Christmas, come and gone. We opened presents in the morning that day, as usual.

Not as usual, we had a family Zoom in the afternoon. My brothers, and my nephews and their expanding families, Lilly, and Yuriko and Ann and I were all linked. A geographic diversity: Texas, New York, Washington state and Illinois. We had an enjoyable time, even if the connection was wonky occasionally.

Later in the day, our Christmas movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original version, of course. I hadn’t seen it in at least 30 years, but it was as good as I remember. The movie also inspired me to look up its source story, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, originally published in Astounding in 1940. No doubt a copy of that edition is somewhere in the house in San Antonio, among my father’s sizable collection of SF. I’d never read the story before, so I found in on line. I did know about its unnerving, surprise ending, however. I heard about it from a college friend years ago.

Another New Year’s Day has gone as well, featuring ice precipitation on top of an inch of two or snow that had fallen a few days earlier. Not enough to rise to the level of an ice storm, but enough to keep us within our walls, occasionally listening to the tap-tap-tap of ice hitting the ground or roof, but mostly paying attention to electronic entertainment, or lost in a book or two, for me including American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (Jon Meacham, 2009) that I put down this summer and which I’m finishing now, about half way through. Big things ahead: Old Hickory is going to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and go up against nullification, and win, along with a second term. He’s already set the Trail of Tears in motion.

Another One Bites the Dust

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Busy day, including an early evening errand that took me past a nearby Family Video location. What’s that? Looks dark in there. Also, there’s a fence around the building and its parking lot. With some kind of demolition equipment parked inside the fence.

I’d say that the store has bitten the dust. I hadn’t noticed, so it must have been a fairly recent occurrence. As indeed it was, along with some hundreds of other locations. But not that recent: about two months ago, according to the Journal & Topics. Guess I haven’t been paying attention.

“The entertainment business has suffered during COVID-19 and that trickled down to movie rentals, as Vale told the Journal & Topics,” the article notes. Vale was a manager with the chain.

“ ‘There aren’t any new releases right now and that plays a big role in our rentals,’ said Vale.”

New releases. That’s the thing about Family Video that I never quite took a cotton to, its walls of new releases. Three or four or a half dozen DVDs/Blu-rays each of the latest movie confection, only occasionally worth renting. In the center aisles were older titles, but even that selection was meager for someone with sometimes-eccentric tastes.

Sure, give the public what they want, etc. Who would ever thought that the Hollywood torrent would dwindle to a trickle? But as soon as the various casts and crews get their shots, the entertainment factories will be humming along again, if only to feed the on-demand beast. Too late to save the northwest suburban Family Video, though.

The Case of the Missing Article

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Got an email recently purporting to be from a financial services company that I do business with, X. It includes the X logo and small-letter verbiage directing me to visit the X web site in the normal way. Which I expect a lot of people don’t do, but rather click the message’s link.

The big lettering that forms the main message, with a highly visible link in the second sentence, says as follows, sic:

Thank you for your X account information. This message confirms your X account requires update.

To protect and keep your X account up to date, Please UPDATE YOUR X ACCOUNT immediately.

Ah, the want of an indefinite article gives the game away, if you didn’t know that companies like X don’t send messages like this anyway. As in, “your X account requires [an] update.” There’s also the matter of the errant capital letter in “Please.”

A missing article made me think of this scene. Remarkably enough, since I haven’t seen that movie since it was new in 1976. The scene was easy enough to find. I Googled “Murder by Death ar” (as in the first two letters of articles) and one of the auto-suggestions was “Murder by Death use your articles.”

Pre-Thanksgiving Travel Tips

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Peaked at about 65 degrees F today, which wasn’t too bad, though the wind was strong. A little cooler tomorrow, the NWS says, and then a string of days down toward freezing.

Back to posting around November 29. We aren’t going anywhere, but for us Thanksgiving hasn’t usually been a traveling holiday anyway. Got at least one Zoom with friends to look forward to, and conversations with Lilly.

We won’t be alone in sticking around at home. “Based on mid-October forecast models, AAA would have expected up to 50 million Americans to travel for Thanksgiving – a drop from 55 million in 2019,” AAA reports (for Memorial Day this year, the organization didn’t even publish an estimate).

“However, as the holiday approaches and Americans monitor the public health landscape, including rising COVID-19 positive case numbers, renewed quarantine restrictions and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) travel health notices, AAA expects the actual number of holiday travelers will be even lower.”

AAA also has advice for intrepid travelers who do brave the road, including what to do at hotels and when you rent a car. I have my own tips:

Hotels: Prior to any hotel stay, call ahead at least a dozen times, and ask very carefully and clearly, “Is it safe?” Like Laurence Olivier’s evil dentist in Marathon Man (see this hard-to-watch clip). Upon arrival, insist that the clerk throw the key card at you as you run through the lobby. Once in your room, don’t emerge for any reason. Close the curtains, take a two-hour shower and call the front desk a few more times to make sure it’s safe.

Rental cars: Under no circumstances approach the counter. Call from at least two city blocks away and explain that you want to car left another two blocks from your location, with the keys in the ignition and engine idling, so you don’t have to touch them. Once you reach the car, spray with disinfectant for at least 15 minutes, inside and out. Let dry for four hours and then you can drive it.

Just having fun with the current crisis. If you can’t do that, gloom will cloud your thoughts. At the same time, I’m not going to be one of those doorknobs who insists that a minor inconvenience like a mask is on par with a major abrogation of civil rights.

007 Sighting

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A blustery, cold, sometimes rainy weekend just passed. A classic northern November, in other words, and one of a number of reasons to stay home. Most of the time.

Spotted this truck on the street not long ago. A advertising tie-in between DHL and the Bond franchise that I didn’t know about before.
Apparently DHL has paid big bucks to be associated with the latest Bond movie, No Time to Die, whose release has been delayed to April, at the earliest, because now is No Time to Go To the Movies.

I’m not sure I’d want James Bond anywhere near my delivery vehicles. Let’s just say he has a long history of wrecking whatever mode of transit he finds himself in, or wrecking the vehicles of the bad guys chasing him, or both.

Hickory Street Parade, Denton, Texas, 1967 (Probably)

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I have a photo book holding a scattering of images made when my family lived in Denton, Texas, which was from 1965 to ’68. There are perhaps two dozen pictures. Photos were only made on special occasions, such as my birthday or when family visited from out of town.

Three of the pictures are of the Denton High School band, of which my brother Jay was a member, marching down Hickory St., which is the street our house was on, in 1967.  The edge of the photos says Aug 69, but that only means we didn’t get around to developing the film for almost two years.
Denton Texas Hickory Street Sept 13, 1967 That is not me sitting on a car in the first image. My mother must have taken the shots with our Instamatic 104, since I don’t think she would have been interested in fiddling with the more complicated cameras that my father left behind. Provided we had our Instamatic by then, which seems likely.

She stood on the sidewalk on Hickory St., probably near its intersection with Denton St.
At least, the angle of the third picture makes me think that’s where she stood. One the houses not far west of that point is still there, though deeper blue.

I must have watched the parade, but I have no memory of it. At the time I was six, and had just started first grade at Sam Houston Elementary School in Denton. I walked to school, so it wasn’t far away. There’s a school of that name still in the Denton ISD, but it’s far from where we lived and has a late 20th century look to it.

Thinking about it now, I suspect the school I went to was already old when I went there — maybe built in the ’20s to update whatever rudimentary facilities the town had before that. I expect the building I knew is long gone.

Also: here’s the house where we lived. The house is a different color now, but the enormous tree is still in the front yard! It seemed so vast to my boyhood self. Then again, it is pretty big. An old maple that produced huge leaves. Or was it an oak that produced huge acorns? Both kinds of trees were in the neighborhood and I would collect their scatterings.

I digress. Why was there a parade on that day in Denton, Texas? One possibility is that it was part of the September 13 publicity celebration for the regional premiere of Bonnie and Clyde, which was at a movie theater near the courthouse, only a few blocks to the east of where we lived. Parts of the movie were filmed in North Texas, near Denton, in places that could easily pass for 30 years earlier. The University of North Texas published an article a few years ago about the filming and the regional premiere.

Some of the stars of the movie rode in a small motorcade down Hickory to the courthouse square, and naturally the high school band had to be part of it. If my mother took any pictures of the movie stars, they’ve been lost. But I seriously doubt she did. Taking pictures of her son’s band is one thing, but actors in a movie (I suspect) she had no interest in seeing? Naah.

Thursday Mishmash

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Warm and dry lately. Very warm sometimes. Luckily, our deck has an umbrella for shade.

Spring on Jupiter or Mars? Never mind, here’s summer on Saturn. At least in its northern hemisphere. Seasons are long there are probably don’t involve relaxing moments on back yard decks. Anyway, a thing of great beauty.“This image is taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project,” the NASA text says. “OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system’s gas giant planets. In Saturn’s case, astronomers continue tracking shifting weather patterns and storms.”

For contrast, an older observation of Saturn. Another thing of beauty.
Plate X from The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings 1881-1882, these days posted at Wikimedia.

Closer to home, at Schaumburg Town Square.
Schaumburg Town SquareRubber-Tipped CraneThe sculpture is “Rubber Tipped Crane,” by Christine Rojek. Installed in 2012. Lilly said she hadn’t remembered seeing it before, but I did. Rojek also did “Ecce Hora” not far away.

Our latest Star Trek episode — we’re still watching about one a week — was “Squire of Gothos,” an early example of kidnap Kirk (and maybe Spock and others) and make him (them) outfight or outwit some adversary. This was a particularly good example of that kind of plot, including a deus ex machina ending that actually worked pretty well.

Our latest movie: The Shining. I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I remember it drew in some crowds in the summer of ’80, because when we got to the theater, only front-row seats were available. So I got to experience the Overlook Hotel in all its surreal, horror-infused glory as an enormous wall of light towering over me.

Always good to watch Jack Nicholson do what he does, in this case descend into homicidal madness. I also thought Shelley Duvall’s parallel track — her increasing freaked-out-ness, you might say — was on target. Her character has been mocked as whiny and weak, but she and her son survived.

So the movie holds up fairly well (and I don’t care at all what Stephen King thought of it). Still, not Kubrick’s best. What could possibly top Dr. Strangelove or 2001? But worth watching again after 40 years.

Thursday Clouds &c

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Warm day with plenty of cumulus clouds.

Wet spring has transitioned to a dryish summer so far, though we’ve had a few rainy moments lately. The day we were at Devil’s Lake SP, scattered thunderstorms were predicted, and maybe somebody got some, but we only experienced a little rain driving home that afternoon.

Made an unusual find at Devil’s Lake last week: a visitor guide that’s actually worth a damn. Though no writer names are given, Capital Newspapers in Baraboo published it for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, so it might have been a staff effort. That is, people who have some skill in writing.

So it has practical information — such as how to rent a boat or picnic shelter, activity schedules (clearly published before the pandemic), safety tips, and some well-done maps — but also readable information about the park, such as about the effigy mounds in the park (we didn’t see those), the threat of the dread emerald ash borer, a history of rock quarries in the area, and plans for a new interpretive center.

Also, a short item about the name of the lake. The Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) name is rendered as Ta-wa-cun-chuk-dah or Da-wa-kah-char-gra, which “was translated in its most sensational form (for that era) as Devil’s Lake,” the article notes. It could have been Spirit Lake, Sacred Lake or Holy Lake.

That era being the 19th century, when “reporters produced superlative accounts of Devil’s Lake and reproduced legends (sometimes manufactured) to match… By 1872… the Green County Republican newspaper reported, ‘Had the lake been christened by any other name, it would not have attracted so many people.’ ”

Just another example of Victorian marketing, in other words.

Nothing if not variety: the movies we’ve watched lately have included a selection of musicals, all so different in form and content that I wonder at the elasticity of the term musical. They include Chicago, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rocketman, and High School Musical 2.

As a sort of fictionalized musical biopic, the colorfully entertaining Rocketman at least made me appreciate just how ubiquitous Elton John was on the radio of my youth. I already knew that, of course, but hadn’t given it any thought in a long time. Also, it inspired me to look up a few clips of the musician himself, illustrating his piano virtuosity.

As for High School Musical 2, the girls are fond of that 2007 movie as part of their relatively recent childhood. I agreed to watch it all the way through, which I never had. The Mouse clearly put time and money into the thing, and the tunes and choreography were accomplished enough, so I didn’t mind watching. But without a sentimental attachment, its resemblance to a fully realized musical is that of a taxidermied animal to a living one.