One day, years ago, at my parents’ house, I was flipping through the channels and landed on one of the movie channels playing The Producers. It was too far in to the movie to start watching it, but I paused long enough to catch the song “Springtime for Hitler.”
I never actually caught it again, though by the time the Broadway version of it took off I remembered what I’d seen and knew the basic idea behind it.
A few months ago – in June, I think – HBO2 was airing the latest movie version, so I decided to record it. After that it sat on my hard drive unwatched until yesterday, when, lacking anything better to do, I watched it.
I’ll say right up front that I don’t like musicals. Whatever capacity I have to suspend disbelief enough to allow me to enjoy things like science fiction and fantasy movies and novels and comic books just doesn’t stretch far enough to allow me to say, “Oh, they’ve just randomly started singing, with supporting music and no visible orchestra, and no one thinks that’s unusual. Hey, look, they’re dancing, too. And, despite being spontaneous, it’s all perfectly choreographed. Okay, that’s cool, I guess.”
Beyond the non sequitur aspect of people spontaneously bursting into song and dance, though, my other problem is that I just don’t enjoy song and dance.
But that’s just me, and if you’re into that sort of thing, good for you.
So given that I don’t actually care for its genre, what did I think of the actual movie?
Meh.
It wasn’t horrible, even with the singing and dancing, which are themselves inherently horrible as storytelling elements, and it had some entertaining bits, but the biggest problem I had with it was Matthew Broderick.
And honestly, it wasn’t him that I had a problem with, it was the fact that he wasn’t Gene Wilder.
See, very early on into the introduction of Borderick’s character, it became clear from some of his actions and dialogue that the role was probably written with Gene Wilder in mind. At the time I had no basis for thinking that other than knowing that Mel Brooks worked with Wilder so often, and that Gene Wilder would have been perfect for the part.
(After looking it up on IMDb, though, my suspicion was confirmed.)
Once I started picturing Gene Wilder in the role, there was pretty much nothing Broderick could do. After all, no one does Gene Wilder like the real deal, so seeing someone else even trying just rang false.
Apart from watching and not particularly enjoying the movie, I ventured out to Wal-Mart for no particular reason other than that I thought I needed to go there for something. Admittedly, there’s plenty of stuff I could buy, but there was nothing that I had any pressing need for, so I ended up not buying anything.
But now that I’m actually settled into the house and everything has been put away and unboxed and I have no cheap furniture to assemble or anything, I just don’t know what to do with myself and I feel like I should be going out and buying things, or doing something.
I’m sure that will pass once I have TV and Internet.
As Scott is off to Disney World with the family, I wasn’t going to be meeting him at the comic shop, so I decided I would stop there on the way, and also have lunch at Panera Bread to use the Wi-Fi to check mail and whatnot. On the way I got a call from Kathleen, so I invited her to meet me for lunch. She picked up Brian and we had lunch.
And that was the excitement for the day.
My Realtor had hired someone to come around for a few hours and do any work I needed done around the house, and he came by yesterday.
I didn’t really have too much for him to do, but I did have him mount my TV on the wall. It’s pretty cool, and he even fished the cables through the wall so that they’re not showing, but it does seem like it’s a little high. It’s also not perfectly centered, but that wasn’t possible given the layout of the studs, and it doesn’t really bother me, though the height is kind of bugging me.
It doesn’t actually impair viewing at all, it just seems like it should be lower.
I suppose that if it really starts to bother me I could have Brian or Scott come over and help me move it. After all, it would take less work to move it now that we know where the studs are.
We’ll see, I guess.
In any case, here are some pictures:
  |   |
No comments:
Post a Comment