Look at this — before Jackie Robinson, they didn’t let black guys play major league baseball!

Right . . . that was 70 years ago, in the 1940s. Let’s move on already.

You know what else they did in the 1940s? They rounded up Japanese Americans, just took them right out of their homes and their jobs, and stuck them into “relocation camps.”

When’s the last time you heard a Japanese person talk about relocation camps? They don’t talk about relocation camps because they’re too busy being engineers and doctors and businessmen and raising their families and sending their kids to top universities.

You can focus your mind on what other people did a long time ago or you can focus your mind on what you’re doing right now.

Let’s move on already.

Rating:

Footnote: We’ve come full circle on blacks in baseball. The defending World Series champion San Francisco Giants don’t have a single black player on their current roster (although some of the Latin players are pretty dark). Black men can play baseball if they want to but they don’t want to.

There comes a time when our eyes are opened and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted.

This movie brought a lot of joy to my weekend.

Highly recommended!

Now I know how Santa delivers all the presents in one night!

By the way, if you like to avoid the crowds, Thanksgiving night is a great time to go to the movies! Everyone’s either in a food coma or resting up for Black Friday shopping.

We went to the 9:30 show at the Irvine Marketplace. There was no ticket line, no one in the lobby, one girl working the box office and one at the snack bar.

The box office girl had to work double because there was no ticket taker on duty. Instead of just selling the tickets and handing them to us, she also tore them in half and said, “You’re in Theater 2.”

“We’re in Theater 2,” I repeated for the boy’s benefit.

“Are you sure she didn’t say we’re the only two people in the theater?” he asked.

Recommended!

A movie about making a movie . . .

The director says, “Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.”

Highly recommended!

Kathie Moffat: Oh, Jeff, I don’t want to die!
Jeff Bailey: Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I’m gonna die last.

The absence of sentimentality is essential to the film noir.

Everyone was so young in this one: Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas. Great black-and-white cinematography and a classic final scene with the girl and the kid at the gas station.

Rating: Five stars (out of five)

Are you kidding?! I’d rather take a shower with my mom than watch this crap.

Only an idiot who knows nothing about life thinks that being married or unmarried has anything to do with happiness.

You’ll be just as miserable either way, albeit for different reasons.

Thanks to Netflix, I’m catching up on movies that I never got around to seeing. It’s a long list because I don’t see a lot of movies.

Almost Famous

With the exception of the boy’s mom, there aren’t any interesting characters in this movie. It’s like spending two hours with uninteresting people.

The Lester Bangs character doesn’t count because Lester Bangs was an actual person who was interesting in real life. You don’t get credit as a writer/filmmaker for creating an interesting Lester Bangs character.

Cameron Crowe seems to have learned his directorial style from an Olive Garden commercial.

Great soundtrack.

Rating: Blah.

The Big Lebowski

Look at the scene and ask yourself “Is it dramatic? Is it essential? Does it advance the plot?

Answer truthfully.

If the answer is “No” write it again or throw it out.

— David Mamet

This movie has interesting characters and snappy dialogue. I laughed a couple of times. But most of the scenes are just dropped in randomly out of nowhere.

My wife fell asleep early on as we were watching this. When she woke up she asked me what happened.

I said, “The girl wasn’t really kidnapped.” What else is there to say?

If you removed all the scenes (and characters) that aren’t essential and don’t advance the plot, there might be a good movie left, but it would be a very short movie.

The soundtrack includes a couple of songs I really like but rarely hear — “The Man in Me” by Bob Dylan, and (a cover of) “Dead Flowers,” originally by The Rolling Stones.

Rating: Crock of shit

Rushmore

Now this is a great movie.

Rating: Highly recommended!

Good story, good music, brilliant editing and cinematography.

One of the things I don’t like about movies is that conflict, even in feel-good movies about love and destiny, is too often resolved with violence, whereas much of the dramatic tension in real life stems from the number of people you’d like to physically assault but can’t.

Rating: Four stars (out of five).

It’s sad to see Clint Eastwood get old but somebody’s got to do it.

It seemed to me as far back as Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire that while other actors were trying to stay artificially young forever, no one else was putting on screen an honest portrayal of what it’s like to be an old man, what it’s like to feel yourself diminished.

And that was 15 years ago, when Eastwood was in his early 60s. He’s now 78 and looks it.

I was trying to think of another leading actor who’s doing roles where the central fact about the character is that he’s gotten old and tired and scared . . .

Robert De Niro? No, he’s still doing the same cops and mobsters roles he’s been doing for decades.

Al Pacino? Dustin Hoffman? No. Same roles, plus they’re both around 70 years old with absurd fake pompadours piled on top of their heads. In order to do these roles, you can’t be someone with cosmetic surgery and fake hair who has to use makeup effects to look his own age.

I once read where Michael Douglas is proud of the fact that he has taken on “challenging” roles. You want a challenge? Knock it off with the facelifts and the young wife and show people what it’s really like to get old.

They can’t even admit it to themselves, these guys.

Jack Nicholson? He looks his age, but he’s doing wacky old guy roles in Rob Reiner and Adam Sandler movies. Eccentrics. Not the same thing.

Sylvester Stallone? He’s only 60 but you can tell already that he’s not going to do it. He’s still making Rocky and Rambo movies, for god’s sake.

Rating: Four stars (out of five). I added one star for Clint Eastwood being the only man brave enough to get old in front of a camera.

I love movies about dogs! Wait — is Owen Wilson in that? I HATE Owen Wilson!

Whenever I meet a new bitch at the dog park, the first thing I ask her is “Do you think Owen Wilson is funny?”

And if she says yes, I am OUTTA there.

Rating: Two paws down.

— Lightning

It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

— Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

Haven’t seen it. Might see it . . . not sure yet. I’ve seen the trailer though and I’ll tell you something: Heath Ledger is TERRIBLE!

That’s not acting! Put the same makeup on somebody else, give ‘em a script, let ‘em read the same lines . . . there’s a million people who could do the same thing.

You don’t think so? You don’t think Heath Ledger knew that? Why do you think he’s dead of an overdose?

Entertainment for mental patients

I was a student at Cal State Fullerton in 1976 when Ed Allaway went berserk, shooting nine of his co-workers in the university library, killing seven.

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