Riding the MABDR: Prelude – Some unfinished motorcycle business

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

This is one of a series of posts about riding the Mid Atlantic Backcountry Discovery Route with a couple of my old motorcycle friends.

Ralph at Elk Summit, Idaho BDR

Ralph at Elk Summit, Idaho BDR, July 2018.

Some of you may recall that back in July of 2018 my friend Howard and I attempted to ride the Idaho Backcountry Discovery Route (IDBDR), a combination of paved and unpaved roads motorcyclists ride with dual-sport or adventure bikes. Howard rode his big KTM adventure bike, and I rode a mid-sized Suzuki DR650 dual-sport. We both had a good trip through southeast and central Idaho to get us to the beginning of the BDR.

While Howard was an experienced off-road rider, this was all relatively new to me, and on our second day of off-pavement riding, I fell in some deep gravel and got some deep bruising to my leg and hip. I had no problem riding my motorcycle, but I couldn’t stand without crutches.  In the end I had to fly home and have my bike shipped back to Nebraska.

Needless to say, this was  not a satisfactory end to the adventure. But it forced me to re-examine what I was capable of doing. In the end, I decided to get a smaller, more nimble off-road bike. (In fact, I downsized both my touring bike and my off-road bike.)

"According to this unusual monument topped with a giant boot, 25 men and one woman are buried on the hill, killed by cross fire in a range war between the cowboys and homesteaders." NOTE - This is one of two different Boot Hills I will visit this year. (Boot Hill, 6/22/21)

This Boot Hill monument was located on a sandy minimum maintenance road I took to a Team Strange bonus location as practice for unpaved riding.

I purchased a new Honda CRF300L Rally a little over a year ago and spent a lot of time riding it on gravel and other unpaved roads. And I made plans to ride the Mid Atlantic Backcountry Discovery Route with Howard and first-time off-pavement rider Bishop Matt.

The Mid Atlantic Backcountry Discovery Route is a mix of roughly 50/50 unpaved and paved roads running from the Virginia – Tennessee border up to the Pennsylvania – New York border. (It is one of currently 11 BDRs spread out across eastern and western United States.) Our plan was to ride seven-and-a-half of the nine stages, taking us up to Waterville, PA before turning back south on paved roads to Morgantown and our regular lives.

Howard trailered his DR-Z 400 up to Morgantown, WV, as did I with the little Rally. The next morning we set off south on lovely, twisty West Virginia roads.  We picked up The Bishop at Camp Luther near Webster Springs, then continued on to spend the night near Damascus, VA where the MABDR would begin. (Yes, we met The Bishop on the road to Damascus. Am I the only one who finds that hilarious?) Matt would be riding a 400 cc Royal Enfield Himalayan.

My CRF300L Rally in the trailer

My CRF300L Rally (AKA Mouser – as in Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) loaded up in the trailer for the trip out east. I’m not a fan of trailering motorcycles, but I’m also not a fan of traveling 1,200 miles in two days on a 300 cc dual-sport. Note: the saddlebags will come off before leaving town.

pepperoni rolls cooling on a rack

Because I was driving to West Virginia, my road food had to be fresh-baked pepperoni rolls. It’s the rule! (Actually, some of these were ham rolls. That’s ok. It’s allowed.)

Ralph, Howard and The Bishop

Ralph, Howard, and Bishop Matthew Riegel meet up at Camp Luther on the road to Damascus.

From there we would launch our adventure….

You can find the whole story of our trip here, once all the sections have been posted.

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So you want to publish a book…

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

One question I get asked fairly often is how to go about getting a book published. This can be a complicated question as book publishing can cover a range of issues, but let’s take a look at some of the options. 

Option 1 – Get an agent to represent you.
This is the traditional method and is going to only work if you have a project with strong commercial possibilities. But it never hurts to try. Some publishers will talk directly to writers, but these days that’s a rarity. Some publishers do have time frames where unagented submissions will be read.  Others have direct-to-digital publishing programs that do not require agents submit even if the regular publishing program does.  Visit  agent/publisher websites for the most up-to-date information.

Option 2 – Self-publish as a Kindle Original on Amazon.
It used to be that self-publishing was generally a scam that resulted with the writer being out a lot of money with a big pile of unsellable books in their basement.

But in the era of Kindle and other e-publishers, self-publishing is a relatively easy thing to do. You can get instructions on how to do it through Amazon here:

This can be as an e-book or as a print-on-demand paper book. This is relatively inexpensive to do (unless you bring in an outside professional to help you with it) and you get something like 70% of the revenue for yourself. This is a popular way for people to publish without a traditional publisher.

But keep in mind that most self-published books by first-time authors will bring in little income. Getting the manuscript published and for sale on Amazon is relatively easy; finding an audience for your book is hard.  There is, of course, the rare exception of people like Andy Weir and his break-out self-published The Martian. But cases like Weir’s are the exception.

Also, readers don’t like poorly edited books. You may need the services of a professional copyeditor.

Option 3 – Publish through a blog and social media.

If your goal is to get your story out and to get people interested in it, the best answer might be to serially publish it 1-or-3 times per week in a blog and then share the posts through social media such as Instagram or Twitter. If you get a lot of followers, you might decide to go ahead and publish it through Amazon or some other source. Or you might do a Kickstarter or other crowdfunding source.

Serial publishing through a blog and social media as a way of developing a project and building interest in it is done even by established writers. Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine, did this with his book The Long Tail.  The  audience he built through blogging about it helped turn the book into a bestseller.

Here’s where his blog started back in 2004 with his article “The Long Tail” from Wired magazine.

Start there with Anderson’s initial article and then you can step forward through his blog. Keep in mind that Anderson started out as the editor of Wired magazine and so had an established readership to begin with. Nevertheless, this was a great way for him to try out ideas for his book prior to publication.

I think this would be a good approach with something featuring meme-worthy content on shared media.

Option 4 – Publish a full-color book through a company like Shutterfly.

Printers like Shutterfly are an option for a photo or art book if you want a nice looking full-color book for a very limited number of people.  It is expensive, but it makes a nice keepsake. If you want to go with a more traditional self-published physical book, crowdsourcing the funding can be a good idea. But this will only work if you already have an established audience interested in your work.

So what do I do?

  • Start by writing your book.
    You can’t publish a book you haven’t written. So write daily. Set as a goal the number of  words you want to write each day, and try to do that, five days a week. Don’t worry if you aren’t happy with what you’ve written. Write anyway! As my Dear Wife’s friend Holly says, “You can’t fix a blank page.” In other words, get a first draft written, then worry about going back to fix it.
  • Figure on writing multiple drafts.
    My Dear Wife, author/co-author of more than 50 published novels, generally writes an outline followed by at least two drafts. For new material for my textbook (I’m now working on the ninth edition) I will write notes, a pre-rough draft of just trying to get a general narrative worked out, and then two or more drafts to get it into finished form.
  • Think about what you want to do with it.
    For me, I first send out much of my writing as blog posts. I’ve had this blog https://ralphehanson online since March of 2004 – That’s 18 years! Much of the stuff here has never found its way into publication, but a lot of it has. You may decide that publishing through a blog is enough. But putting your writing before the public is a good first step.
  • Don’t be afraid!
    Getting your thoughts/ideas/stories into written form is a worthwhile goal, in and of itself. Make getting your book written your first goal, because without getting it written, you will never get your book published.

So if you want to write a book, start writing!

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Kisses & Spanking, King Kong, Coppola, and Sherlock Holmes: A Year In Movies 2021 – Part 9

Posted on June 2, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.

Kiss Me Kate (1953), directed by George Sidney and staring Kathryn Grayson, Howard Keel and the legendary Ann Miller. (Miller is a legend both for her great dancing and for the line in Rocky Horror Picture Show where Columbia does a bit of tap and then yells, “Eat your heart out, Ann Miller!“)

It’s a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew with a framing story of the leads being divorced but working together on a musical staging of Shrew. The show is pretty badly dated (The movie poster features Keel spanking Grayson), but the dancing by Ann Miller and a very young Bob Fosse is fantastic, as is the music by Cole Porter.

Kong Skull Island (2017), directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts; starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, and John C. Reilly. This is the second film in the Legendary Picture’s MonsterVerse that has brought back Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, and others in a modern series based on classic monster movies. This one is set primarily in the early 1970s with Jackson playing a an army commander leading an expedition to collect … well, you know who. Aside from giving the movie the look of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the script has several nods to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, which Apocalypse Now was loosely based on. Character names include James Conrad (a reference to the author) and Hank Marlow (reference to the narrator of Darkness.) This was a re-watch for me, having seen it in theaters when it first came out. (We’ll be back to the series before 2021 is out…)

Rewatching Skull Island, got me thinking again about Apocalypse Now and its troubled shoot. So I used this as an opportunity to re-watch Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness  about the disastrous production of an amazing film. (I know, the film is actually directed by Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper, and Eleanor Coppola, but I still think of it has her film.)

If after watching this you still want more about the production of Apocalypse Now, I would also highly recommend the audio book version of Along The Way,  narrated by Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. While the primary focus of the book is about the father and son filming The Way, it deals extensively with the time the two spent together while Sheen was filming AN.)

And finally, we dip back into the old movie catalog with a screening of The Woman in Green (1945), one of a series of Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies from the 1940s. My late mum-in-law was a big fan of these films, so when we stumbled across it on Amazon Prime, we had to take a look.

Coming up next – A mixed bag of action and comedy films from the 1940s to 1980s.

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Riding with Strangers 2022 – Trails to Rails Scavenger Hunt Part 1

Posted on May 31, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

Trails to Rails 2022 Grand TourFor the last several years, each summer I do a national-scale motorcycle scavenger hunt run by a  motorcycle club out of Minnesota known as Team Strange. Each year it has a theme. This year’s Grand Tour is called Trails to Rails and has us looking for steam locomotives. We get one point for each locomotive on exhibit and five points for ones actually running.

There are also a few other sites that are worth more points, such as Golden Spike National Historical Park in Utah where the Central Pacific  and Union Pacific railroads came together.

I collected my first images for this tour during a recent visit to my family up in the Twin Cities area. (Strangely enough, this is the home of Team Strange!)

These first two come from small towns I passed through in Minnesota on my way north and east. (Taking these photos was a bit challenging because I left the clip-on weight that’s supposed to go on the bottom of my rally flag at home. Thanks to the awesome Hammy Tan for my Hammy Stick used to hold my flag!)

Currie, MN 5_15_22

01 – End-O-Line Railroad Park, Currie, MN, 5/15/22

02 Tracy, MN 5_15_22

02 – Wheels Across the Prairie Museum, Tracy, MN 5/15/22

I then picked up a couple of images in St. Paul, not far from where my brother lives. The first of these was easy to get – parked in front of a urgent care clinic with a handy parking lot.

03 Bandana Square St Paul MN 5_18_22

03 – Bandana Square, St. Paul, MN 5/18/22

And then there was engine hiding at the Minnesota Transportation Museum. One of the rules for the tour is that your motorcycle, rally flag and locomotive all have to be in the same photo. The problem is that the locomotive is largely hidden behind a passenger car. But I spent too much time circling the buildings and rail yard where this train was parked, and I was going to find away to get this picture.

Technology to the rescue.

With a panoramic photo on my iPhone I was just able to get them all into a single image. You will have to click on the photo below to really be able to see it all.

04 Minnesota Trasportation Museum St Paul MN 5_18_22 Panoramic Photo

04 Minnesota Transportation Museum St Paul MN 5_18_22 – Click on photo to see full sized.

My final locomotive of this trip was in Pawnee Park in Columbus, NE. (For those of you with good memories, that’s also where I got a photo of the Higgins Boat Memorial for last year’s tour.)

05 Pawnee Park Columbus NE 5_19_22

05 Pawnee Park Columbus NE 5/19/22

Many more to come…

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Questions Worth Asking (Maybe) – Smartphone privacy, SCOTUS leaks, scholastic censorship, COVID-19 & stress release

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

Lots of questions need to be asked and answered this week:

Would your smartphone know if you had an abortion?
Quite possibly, and that information would likely be for sale. 

Is this week’s leak of the potential Roe v. Wade reconsideration really unprecedented?
SCOTUS leaks are rare, but they have happened occasionally over the years. Details from media law professor Jonathan Peters:

Why do school administrations censor high school newspapers?
Because they can get away with it. (H/T to Adam Steinbaugh for sharing this.)

Are we still vulnerable to super spreader events when large numbers of people get together without masks?

And finally – what does NPR political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben do for stress release?
You’ll need the sound up for this one.

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8, 10 & 39 – Numerical titles cover a variety of sins over the years: A Year In Movies 2021 – Part 8

Posted on May 5, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.

I sometimes have to stretch to have a theme to connect the movies together that I’m going to talk about, but this batch was pretty easy to bring together under the banner of numeric titles – in fact, these could all sound like they came together in an episode of the rather strange and wonderful TV series LOST. (Remember 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 & 42?)

We watched these movies in reverse chronological order but forward numerical order. So enough of this nonsense – let’s look at the movies.

Ocean’s 8 is the fourth movie in the Ocean’s “trilogy“…

Hold on a minute before we go any further. There was never an “Ocean’s 11 Trilogy.” Just having three films in a series does not make it a trilogy – It just means that the first two movies in the series were successful enough to lead to a third movie. Now, obviously – Lord of the Rings was a trilogy — A connected series of three films that told a coherent story. The Hobbit was a bad collection of three movies that tried to tell a mostly coherent story – it too was a trilogy. What really drives me crazy is after labeling a three-movie series as a trilogy, the filmmakers go back and make a fourth movie in the series, which simply makes them all… a series.

Ok, where were we, oh yes, Ocean’s 8  (2018) is the fourth movie in a fun heist series originally anchored by George Clooney as the freshly released-from-prison Danny Ocean who wants to rob a casino. O8 takes the premise that Sandra Bullock plays Danny’s sister Debbie, who has just been released from prison and wants to… Yeah, you get the picture.

Only this time it’s told with an all-female core cast of Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Rihanna, and Helena Bonham Carter. The film tells a really familiar story but with this all-star cast of incredibly talented women performers, it’s an absolute hoot. It’s not about originality, it’s about all the fun we have getting to the end of the story.

Ten Little Indians (1965/66) is an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None directed by George Pollock that includes teen heartthrob Fabian in the cast. This is one of five movie and television adaptations of the novel, along with one stage version, in which the guests at a remote house are killed, one by one. It’s a fun movie with a runtime of under 90 minutes for those who are Christie (or Fabian) fans.

I think that movies with a runtime under an hour-and-a-half are a whole genre to themselves. There’s a lot to be said for telling mystery/thriller story quickly, without any excess. Among my favorites in this category are the original Japanese anime Ghost in the Shell, the German thriller Run Lola Run that manages to tell the same story three times in 80 minutes, and the American shark thriller The Shallows.

The 39 Steps (1935), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, is an early thriller by Hitch (who is likely the most viewed director for us during 2021) that tells the story of an ordinary man getting caught up in an elaborate plot to steal British intelligence secrets by a shadowy group known as the 39 Steps. This movie has all the elements we have come to expect in a Hitchcock thriller – the everyman caught up in extraordinary events, a mysterious McGuffin that everyone seems to want, and a cameo by the director that fans watch for carefully.

Coming Attractions: A Shakespearean musical, King Kong meets Apocalypse Now, and a classic detective story.

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What is the DeSantis v. Disney battle really about?

Posted on April 25, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

Note: See bottom of post for updates on this story.

It’s been hard to miss the recent battle going on between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state’s largest employer – Disney Corp.  Gov. DeSantis wants to take away tax management privileges from areas developed by Disney over the last 50 years because Disney has been critical of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation promoted by the governor.

There are multiple levels to this battle that are worth digging into as we try to understand what’s going on.

The core of this fight is that Disney CEO Bob Chapek was forced by employee pressure to speak out forcefully against a new Florida law that forbids talking about issues related to sexual orientation and identity in kindergarten through fourth grade classes.  This has been known by critics as the “Don’t say gay” law. These critics say that the law could prevent grade school teachers from talking about their same-sex spouse if a student asked who they were married to.

The Florida legislature, under prompting from Gov. DeSantis, responded quickly by passing a bill that strips Disney of its ability to self-govern a huge area of property surrounding the  company’s theme parks in retribution for being too “woke.” (Disney has a diverse work force and has a long history of having gay pride days and events at their parks.)

 

Headline from LA Times about Disney and Anaheim.Now, one doesn’t have to love Gov. DeSantis to believe that perhaps Disney has too much control over the areas they operate. After all, Disney was involved in a fight with the government and local media of Anaheim, Calif. a few years back over special property taxes. Hint: It didn’t end well for Disney. In this case, Disney was trying to control what local news outlets were publishing about a property tax deal by keeping LA Times critics from attending the studio’s movie screenings. The Times refused to back down and got support from news outlets across the country. In the end, Disney quit trying to control what the paper had to say about the company and its taxes. Please note that this was settled not on legal grounds; Disney simply didn’t have enough power to bend the press to their will.

So how is Florida retaliating against Disney to punish them for opposing this  anti-LGBTQ+ bill? To answer that requires us to go back in time a bit. Sarah Rumpf, writing for the MediaIte blog, tells the story of how in the mid-1960s, Disney was proposing building a giant new theme park in Florida. The company quietly bought up 39 square miles of space that would come to include “the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Animal Kingdom, plus numerous Disney hotels, restaurants, and retails stores.”

This space would become the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID). A 1967 Florida state law created the district to give Disney essentially all the powers of a local government. They could collect taxes (and pay some of them to the state) as well as develop infrastructure like roads, fire protection, power plants, sewage treatment and the like. (Allegedly Disney even had the right to build a nuclear power plant! They never even considered doing so, but still…) They could also take on debt for development of the area and collect more taxes than would normally be allowed to pay for all of these. (Disney would essentially be taxing itself in order to pay for infrastructure.)  While I would never want to argue about the ethics of Disney’s behavior, they clearly have done a good job of taking care of their property.

In other words, the Reedy Creek project follows a standard conservative model of allowing private industry to take over functions of government in the name of more efficiency. And regardless of what you think about these partnerships in general, this one seems to have worked relatively well. While RCID is the most prominent development district in Florida, it is far from the only one – the state has literally hundreds of them, though few are as big as Disney’s.

Now one could argue that Disney doesn’t deserve this special treatment because it’s bad for the Florida economy or for business competition. But Gov. DeSantis has made it abundantly clear that he is doing this specifically to punish Disney for being critical of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. In fact, Republican legislators have offered to rescind the bill if Disney were willing to back off from its opposition. (It doesn’t take effect until 2023.)

There are a number of questions raised by this case:

  • Does taking away the right to govern themselves violate Disney’s corporate free speech rights? 
    Hard to say. Florida clearly has the right to revoke special tax districts. But can they shut one down to punish the company for speaking out against the governor? That’s a whole ‘nother question.
  • Team Rodent, by Carl HiaasenHaven’t progressives been critical of Disney, too? 
    They sure have, especially when it comes to real estate development. Long-time Miami Herald columnist and comic novel writer Carl Hiaasen wrote critically about Disney’s real estate dealings in a short book called Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World.
  • Is Disney going to pack up and leave Florida over this? 
    I don’t see how. A theme park is not a fungible asset. You can’t just move it somewhere else.

Updates

4/27/22

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Movies on Twitter: Representation, Nimona Rescued from Disney, & Respect for Animation

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

I know, I know, this is my third consecutive post on movies, and the next one is likely to be about movies, too. Little obsessed with them lately. We’ll get back to exciting media corporate mergers soon, I promise!

Why representation matters – You can’t cover a culture with one movie.

Really interesting thread on diversity and inclusion in the movies – in this case – Asian American/Canadian… One movie can’t carry the load of a whole culture. We need little movies like The Farewell and big movies like Ten Rings.

Disney turns Nimona loose to Netflix for completion.

Nimona has been rescued from Disney’s shutdown of Blue Sky Studios and has found a new home at Netflix. (Blue Sky was an edgier animation studio that belonged to Fox before Disney bought the studio out.) I know nothing about it other than everyone on Animation Twitter has been going nuts about it. As for me – I’m excited based on this one frame that is circulating.

One last commentary on how Oscar mistreated animation (again) this year.

I’m not complaining about the winners. While Encanto might not have been my first choice, it was a worthy winner for best feature animation. And The Windshield Wiper’s mediation on love was a great choice for short animation.

What bothered me was how the animation presenters mocked the genre they were supposed to be honoring. Here’s a great post about Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Mitchells vs. the Machines) on how Hollywood could treat animation right.

And finally… here’s Oscar-winning animated short The Windshield Wiper

The Windshield Wiper

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1952’s The Narrow Margin is a noir thrill ride: A Year in Movies 2021 – Part 7

Posted on April 6, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.

Dear Wife and I love older movies, especially the film noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. Film noir means literally “black film,” and these are typically black & white crime dramas with lots of shadows that take place at night in the dark places of men’s and women’s hearts.

Things never turn out well for our anti-heroes and heroines, in large part because the Production Code (also known as the Hays Code) said that criminals could never get away with their bad behavior – they always had to pay. In some of the movies we will look at in later editions of this series we’ll see that the writers and directors sometimes had to go to elaborate (and fascinating) lengths to come up with an ending that would satisfy both audiences and the Code rules.

This time I’d like to talk about one of our favorites from our year of movies:

The Narrow Margin, 1952, directed by Richard Fleischer; starring Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor and Jacqueline White. We saw it, as we so often do, on Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley program with an introduction and afterword from host Eddie Muller, one of the leading writers on noir.

Narrow Margin is the story of an LAPD detective sergeant who is assigned to protect a mob boss’s widow who is traveling by train from Chicago to Los Angeles to testify in a trial. Throughout the movie the detective, his colleagues, and the widow are all menaced by assassins who will do anything to stop her from testifying. If you are going to watch this movie, don’t do any digging about the plot before watching. You don’t want to spoil any of the numerous twists and turns it takes.

The film goes at a breakneck pace, with much of the action taking place within the narrow confines of a transcontinental train. It also moves quickly because it has a running time of only 71 minutes – impossible to believe today in this age of bloated, over-long movies. Narrow Margin was considered a “B movie” with a low budget, fast shoot, and a cast of relative unknowns, but it rises above its humble roots to be one of the most exciting movies we saw in 2021.

In March of this year Dear Wife and I also got to see the 1990 remake of The Narrow Margin by thriller director Peter Hyams; starring Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, James B. Sikking, J.T. Walsh and M. Emmet Walsh. The plot is roughly the same as the 1952 original, but it’s moved up north with much of the action taking place in the Canadian Rockies.  Although the movie bombed in the box office, we still thought it was a lot of fun. And with a 97-minute run-time, it mostly maintains the tight pace of the original.

Coming up next: 8, 10, 39!

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1976’s King Kong to 2019’s Godzilla King of the Monsters: A Year in Movies 2021 – Part 6

Posted on March 22, 2022 by Ralph Hanson

In December of 2020, when it became clear we were not going to be returning to normal life any time soon, we purchased a big honking 55-inch 4K TV and settled in for a year of watching movies at home. By Dec. 31, 2021, we had watched 236 movies either together or separately. This is one of series of blog posts about those films.

No fancy introduction this time. Just an assortment of four movies framed by a pair of prominent monster stories.

1976’s edition of King Kong, directed by John Guillermin, starring Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin and Jessica Lange. For whatever reason — nostalgia, watching it for the first time at age 16, some great actors (it was Jessica Lange’s starring debut!) — this is my favorite of the Big Monkey movies. It also has added poignancy from featuring a very early look at the recently completed World Trade Center’s twin towers. It carries an emotional wallop now that the film maker never could have anticipated. But I won’t call it a guilty pleasure movie given that even the ever-acerbic New Yorker movie critic Pauline Kael liked it. (Watched this with my dear Mum-in-Law, who liked monster movies, too.)

Witness to Murder, 1954, directed by Roy Rowland; starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Sanders and Gary Merrill.  This is of the woman-sees-a-murder-and-no-one-believes-her genre, an is a fun film noir. It also includes the ever-popular “denazified Nazi” bad guy. Unfortunately for Stanwyck and the rest of the cast, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window came out at about the same time and  likely took away audiences. Still, it’s a fun little period thriller.

That Hamilton Woman, 1941, directed by Alexander Korda; starring Viven Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Most Americans will have heard of Trafalgar Square and might know that it has something to do with the Napoleonic Wars era. A more engaged person will know that it’s a memorial to Admiral Horatio Nelson. But you might need to be a bit of Napoleonic-era nerd to know about Nelson’s scandalous affair with Lady Emma Hamilton. This film tells the story through flashbacks of the rise and catastrophic fall of Lady Hamilton. It also functioned as a World War II propaganda film to make people more sympathetic toward Britain. More than a bit soapy, but a lot of fun. (Again, one that was just for Mum-in-Law and me.)

Family Plot, 1976,  directed by Alfred Hitchcock; staring Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane and Karen Black. A late-career black comedy from Hitchcock, it features a post-Jaws, pre-Star Wars score from John Williams – the only score he would do for Hitch. (I don’t have a count of how many Hitchcock films we saw in 2021, but his films would almost certainly be the most frequent director for us.) BTW, this has one of those fun Hitchcock-hosted trailers. You want to see this.

Sealed Cargo, 1951, directed by Alfred L. Werker; staring Dana Andrews, Claude Raines, and Carla Balenda. A fun World War II story of about an American fisherman (Andrews) going up against a German U-boat in a rather far-fetched story that also involves a square-rigged Danish ship. Along with seeing a lot of Hitchcock movies, we also saw a lot of fighting-the-Nazis movies as well.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters, 2019, directed by Michael Dougherty, staring Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins and Charles Dance. Part of the Titan series of monster films set in the common universe of the 2014 Godzilla reboot. There have been a number of films in this series, and we’ll be watching more of them before the year is out. I first saw King of the Monsters in the theater and wasn’t overly impressed. Then I listened to the audiobook of the novelization of the movie, and I started liking it a lot better. It has a fun cast with Vera Farmiga from Bates Motel, Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things, Bradley Whitford from Tick, Tick…BOOM!, and Charles Dance from Game of Thrones. Stupid fun, if you aren’t expecting too much from it. And with that, we are back to roughly where we started with 1976’s King Kong.

Coming up next: One of the most exciting noirs we saw in 2021

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