Briefs for August 2, 2017

I probably should have mentioned the passing of Sam Shepard earlier. He died last week aged 73. He was a playwright and sometimes actor, starting a long romantic relationship with Jessica Lange when they worked together on Frances, and being nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar himself for playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. That's one of those movies I haven't seen since sometime in the late 80s. My uncle, who managed the local Cinema 1-2-3 back in the days when theaters didn't have 895842758072857842582 screens, got a lot of prints of various movies so I saw a lot of 80s movies I probably shouldn't have seen until later. (I didn't find Neighbors funny; I was probably much too young for it.)

I haven't seen Dunkirk, since I very rarely go to the movie theater. I don't really have the time, and I generally don't have much desire to see movies since the local sixtyplex shows comic book and effects movies that tend to have a teal and orange color palette. But what I find interesting is how it's really riling up certain people for political reasons. Apparently, celebrating the heroism of the little guy in the UK circa 1940 is evil or something. Jellybean counters are whining and shrieking about the fact that the people at Dunkirk were white. And then there are the people whining that the people involved in the evacuation were male. I know that the links don't lead to traditional movie critics, but I've read enough nonsense like that from regular critics over the years that I tend not to care about what the critics think. I think the last straw was the movie critic on CBS Sunday Morning using the movie Con/Air (that's how long ago it was) to go on a rant about education spending.

Having said all that, if I have a furlough day from work I might use it to go see Dunkirk. The other thing that somebody (a regular person, not a paid reviewer) mentioned was being surprised that it's only 107 minutes. I looked at what the local sixtyplex was showing and much of it was two hours and longer.