tele: Mrs Slocombe

Mollie Sugden, the incomparable actress who plays Mrs. Slocombe on Are You Being Served? has passed away. BBC obituary is here.

Are You Being Served? was one of my favorite British comedies as a child. My father loved television, and he loved British sit coms. We would watch all the British comedies on PBS on Sunday nights. Mrs. Slocombe's poufy, wildly dyed hair and old fashioned manners made me laugh. She was always spot on absurd and just the little bit irrevently joyful.

film: the hangover

A cross between a Quentin Tarantino film circa 4 Rooms and a Judd Apatow bromance comedy with the stoner jokes excised, the Hangover wasn't actually as bad as I thought a comedy about a bachelor party gone awry in Las Vegas could have been. No where near as funny as Forgetting Sarah Marshall (that could have something to do with my affection for Jason Segel and the abusrd brillance of the Dracula puppet musical), but it had a certain charm. I liked the fact that although the movie was about a bachelor party (and as the closing credits explicitly shows, strippers and sex were involved), the film itself nearly eschews all mention of marriage being a killer of masculinity. There's one bit of dialogue with Bradely Cooper's character discussing how marriage will kill the groom slowly, but it's played for laughs not for seriousness. (Plus, I have a hard time buying Cooper as a complete reprobate; the first two seasons of Alias pretty much have cemented him as a good guy in my head.) The film never reinforces this motif; in fact, his character seems like a happily married man and father at the end. Ed Helm's character shouldn't marry his obnoxious, controlling girlfriend, but the film doesn't make this a point about marriage in general, just about the girlfirend. I both liked and disliked the fact that Doug (Justin Bartha) ended up stuck on the roof for a day and a half. Smartly (and here the Tarantino comparison comes in) nothing that was shown in the scene of the hotel room, except for the chicken, goes unexplained. This narrative tightness and closure gives the film momentum. The fact that the film spend most of its time tracing the night of debauchery versus actually showing it helps here. There is a lightness to the film that it would lose; the closing credit coda actually reinforces that. The story of the aftermath is much better than the story of how they got there.

politics: gail collins's new niche

I think Gail Collins might have a new niche in the sphere of political commentary: lambasting loony politicians. Her spot on analysis of the Mark Sanford situation is here. Althougth, she should have added Rick Perry to the loony governor list.

football: nicknames

So why can't the USA have a cool nickname like Bafana Bafana or the Socceroos. UMNT just doesn't have a single ounce of coolness to it.

And yes, I realize three football posts in one day from somone who has not blogged in over year is both obsessive and overload.

football: the political argument

Apparently even a soccer match, even an important one, cannot occur without the attendant political commentary from the right and the left. Gary Schmidt's argument that Americans don't follow football seems superious at best. I know he's streching for that old canard that because the socialist nations in Europe and Latin America play soccer, Americans need to abhor the sport, but his point about football not being democratic because it allows dogged teams to prevent other, presumably better teams from scoring is just plain odd. I'll admit the USA didn't attack anywhere near as much as Spain did, but they just plain out defended them.

football: tim howard

It's no secret that part of the reason I watch international football has markedly less to do with national pride and more to do with, well, the cuteness of the players. I've had a soft spot for footballers ever since that 8 am calculus class with half of my undergraduate soccer team. So, it's not suprising that I find Tim Howard attractive.

I find the whole USMNT dropped dead gorgeous, however, when they manage to pull off wins like they did against Spain yesterday in Bloemfontein, South Africa. (Side bar: I'm really enjoying saying the word Bloemfontein for unknown reasons.) It was remarkable. They shouldn't have won. They had just slinked their way into the semi-finals. As much as I love the USMNT, they weren't the best team on the field last night. They didn't control the ball, they didn't have the finesse of Spain, or the speed. But, none of that mattered. They held the line. The whole team held the line, diving in front of balls, players, and everything else. Tim Howard was a big part of that.

sanford

When I thought Mark Sanford's disappearance was, well, just a guy ducking out of being governor for a week, it was amusing. It was fun to speculate on just what took this guy to Argentina and how he would go about ditching his security detail. Now that I know it was about an affair, it's gone from being a funny story about politicians run amok to being sordid in the worst possible way. I can't help but feel sorry for all involved and angry about a culture that requires repentant confessions from public figures without really listening to them. Gail Collins had a great column on this when Eliot Spitzer made his confession last summer, and thank you Sanford for not putting your wife on camera with you to share in your public humiliation. Sanford's political career is probably over, and I kind of miss the blase guy I had in my head who said "see you suckahs later" and hopped on a plane to Buenos Aires.