If life seems jolly rotten
There’s something you’ve forgotten
And that’s to laugh and smile and dance and sing
When you’re feeling in the dumps
Don’t be silly, chumps
Just purse your lips and whistle – that’s the thing
The word is about, there’s something evolving
Whatever may come, the world keeps revolving
They say the next big thing is here
That the revolution’s near
But to me, it seems quite clear
That it’s all just a little bit of history repeating
In movies, there are actors commonly referred to as “That Guy.” That Guy actors are fellas who never starred in much of anything, but seem to at least be in hundreds of movies. Movie producers and directors rely on them to be able to show up and bring something special to the film, even if their name doesn’t merit the marquee.
Let’s use the term in music this time. Otis Rush is not That Guy in this video. Otis never received the kind of notoriety that fellas like Muddy Waters or BB King, or even Albert King achieved. But he was hardly obscure, especially if you were a blues aficionado. In many ways, he was the most influential Chicago blues guitar player I can name. I played in blues bands in the seventies and eighties, and more people wanted to play like Otis Rush than anyone else.
But that drummer. Now he’s That Guy, that’s for sure, blues-wise. That’s Fred Below. You probably don’t know his name, but you know his music. All my guitar playing friends knew they wanted to sound like Otis Rush, but the drummers all ended up playing like Fred Below without even knowing it. He sort of invented the Chicago Blues drumming style.
If you think I’m exaggerating about Fred’s invisible notoriety, I’ll mention that it’s him you hear playing the drums on Johnny B. Goode, and a hearty helping of other Check Berry hits. He played with Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, and of course Otis Rush.
And you can try your whole life long to get your freak on every whichaway you want, and never equal his beret, cravat, and Van Dyke beard.
Waves of interest wash over the shores of Henry VIII and his bairns from time to time. It’s been mostly grrrl power entertainments lately, especially in the Elizabethan line. They’re a hard pass from me. Hell, Kenneth Branagh, who should know better, made Lizzy’s favorite playwright Shakespeare a drama queen literally, instead of just figuratively, in All Is True, the most obversely named movie I’ve ever encountered. Oh, yes, and it’s Shakespeare’s daughter who has all the talent. Ho hum.
But Henry Tudor the serial marrier is a fascinating topic, and moviemakers and teevee drones circle back to him like dogs to their recycled breakfasts. I think I’ve seen most all of them at one time or another, including old warhorses like The Private Lives of Henry VIII and Young Bess, with Charles Laughton nibbling ably at the Hampton Court scenery.
The latest (for me) assault on the topic was Wolf Hall, a decidedly uneven affair. Hack writer Hilary Mantel uses the same sort of approach to making a well-worn topic fresh that All Is True employs: it’s hard to write well, so I’ll write the polar opposite of well to get attention. I’m sort of staggered by the attempt in Wolf Hall to make Thomas Cromwell the saintly hero of the piece, and a sex machine to boot, and Thomas More the villain among a gaggle of villains. That’s quite a hill to die on after Robert Bolt has been on the case.
You can tell it’s a female take on the subject, because Tommy Cromwell is simply pursuing the deaths of umpteen men and women in a fit of pique over an oblique insult. Mark Rylance brings something fresh to the proceedings, and his subdued, nearly catatonic delivery suits the position of a court drone, scribbling away furiously and courting favor to make his way into the world of the beautiful people. He’s supposed to be smarter than all of them, of course. But then again, the captain of the football team never cares much if you got an A in algebra. He might eventually hire you to do algebra things he can’t be bothered with, but you’re never going to be on the team.
But it’s the portrayal of Hank in Wolf Hall that really bugs me. A skinny, slopeshouldered mopey Henry, alternatingly whispering and mumbling, goes beyond the beyonds in dramaturgy about a real person we know something about. One who looks like he’s still yelling in oil paintings of him.
So, who did it better? Who made Harry into the force onscreen that he was in real life? Let’s count down the top three, shall we?
3. Richard Burton in Anne of a Thousand Days
It was 1969, and if you needed someone to roar onscreen, Burton was your man. Peter O’Toole could yell with the best of them, but Burton could outsnarl anybody. Henry, the eighth of that name, was reportedly a charismatic dude, in addition to reminding people who was in charge by shortening them a bit when they blotted their copybooks. Burton showed an excellent hail fellow well met side to his Henry with his entourage, backslapping and joshing with everybody, but he’d turn on a dime if you crossed him.
Anne the three-year wonder has many of the usual suspects in the cast. Anthony Quayle is miscast as Wolseley, but does his best. Michael Hordern, as daddy Boleyn, steals a few scenes while selling his daughters down the Thames River. Genevieve Bujold, as Anne, gives as good as she gets, and holds her own while locked in the Panavision tiger cage with Burton, which isn’t easy. John Colicos, who was both a Klingon and a Cylon butt-buddy at one time or another, plays about the creepiest Thomas Cromwell ever.
2. Robert Shaw in A Man for All Seasons
A Man for All Seasons was a big hit in 1966. It won six Oscars, including Best Picture, screenplay, Best Actor for Paul Scofield, and it made fifteen times its production cost. The cast was uniformly excellent, and Wendy Hiller as Alice More and Robert Shaw as Hal were nominated for two more Oscars, but I guess they got tired of handing statues to good British actors and gave one to Walter Matthau, of all people, instead.
Shaw would seem to be an odd choice to play Henry, but it paid off. He showed the mercurial nature of Henry to a tee, playing the clown, the friend, the statesman, and the bully, sometimes all in the same breath. You can see Scofield’s More trying to say as little as possible, because he knew to slip up meant a hatchet haircut. It’s funny, but the clip shows Shaw raging a bit, and then calming down, trying to find the right key to More’s lock. Right after the byplay shown in the clip, Henry loses his shit completely, and they hear him two zip codes over. Scofield either acts stunned, or maybe was actually stunned, by Shaw’s outburst. That’s a Henry we can get behind. Mostly because it’s not safe to be in front of him.
1. Keith Michell in the Six Wives of Henry the Eighth
Keith Michell played young Henry, middle aged Henry, and old Henry in this six-part TV series, and was completely believable as all of them. The series is somewhat uneven, since each episode was written by a different playwright. But the unevenness only spans from good to great.It’s basically a stage play, but then again, so was A Man for All Seasons. The TV budget sets and costumes don’t distract you from the action, which is mostly of the two heads talking variety.
Michell was an unusual choice to play Henry. He styled himself a song and dance man, and there are excruciating videos of him singing things like Mack the Knife with Julie Andrews extant on the internet. He does the bowler hat and cane thing and lumbers about like Herman Munster. Who knew his potential to appear larger than life? Someone did, and he delivered the Henry all others should be measured by.
You can vote for your favorite Henry in the comments, but please, no wagering.
Well, Tuesday has rolled around again. Trash Day. The single black plastic bag is out on the curb already. Oh, yes; we have a curb now. When we moved here, the road just sort of trailed off into the lawn. They repaved the street last year, and installed a sidewalk. Everyone still walks in the street. There are many mysteries in Maine.
Anyway, let’s clean out the browser bookmarks, with an eye toward additional mysteries:
Mechanical computers are cool. It’s a mystery why we’d ever rely on software to do this. If you had a watchmaker on board, you could fix this under fire. And he’d only take up one extra bunk. If the software went on the blink, you’d have to sail to India to pick up forty guys to patch the code. Wrong.
How Bad Design Killed 10 Sailors and Wrecked a Destroyer
In older ships, speed is basically controlled by a forward/backward joystick. Push it forward and the ship accelerates. Pull it back and the boat slows or goes in reverse. Less than a year before the accident, the McCain’s controls were replaced by a digital system that swapped out manual controls with touchscreens.
It’s a mystery why they didn’t have 40 coders from the Punjab onboard.
NASA acknowledges it cannot quantify risk of Starliner propulsion issues
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5. Their mission is the first crew test flight on Boeing’s capsule before NASA clears Starliner for regular crew rotation flights to the space station. But after software setbacks, parachute concerns, and previous problems with its propulsion system, Boeing’s Starliner program is running more than four years behind SpaceX’s Dragon crew spacecraft, which flew astronauts to the station for the first time in 2020.
Hmm. Software setbacks. It’s a mystery why Boeing doesn’t just install 40 extra seats on the next rocket to sort all that out. Er, 39. Someone named Suni is already up there.
The Feds Are Skirting the Fourth Amendment by Buying Data
The Supreme Court ruled in 2018’s Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people’s movements through their cellphone data.
But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enterprising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment.
It’s a mystery why anyone is surprised by this. I’m sure people will put this article on their Facefriends page, to complain about privacy some more.
‘Rare species’ not seen in the area for 50 years spotted on Arizona trail camera
While many associate the ocelot with “rain forests and maybe South America or Central America,” the felines do roam all the way north into Arizona and Texas, Ragan said.
It’s a mystery why I didn’t know that ocelots used to live in Arizona, then they didn’t, and now they do again, apparently.
The gigantic and unregulated power plants in the cloud
These cloud-based management platforms could, by accident, after a hack, or intentionally, simultaneously shut down all their millions of solar panels (permanently). And then the entire European electricity grid would collapse. Given the recent findings of fine ethical hackers (DivD) and the confirmation from Dutch electricity network manager (TSO) TenneT, this is not a theoretical scenario.
It’s a mystery why people don’t understand that when you hook up solar panels to the grid, the grid owns you, not the other way around.
Genghis Khan, born under the name Timüjin, was an unlikely candidate to unify the warring Mongol tribes of his homeland, much less found a vast empire. The future emperor was the son of an outcast family — a family abandoned by its clan to die on the steppes. Yet it appears that he came to believe that he was divinely destined to unify the world — all the land under Tengri, the sky god of his shamanistic religious tradition. In an ascent marked by incredible political and military savvy, he proceeded to defeat a long string of ever more powerful enemies.
It’s a mystery why more people get their info on Timujin by watching John Wayne and Susan Hayward movies, and don’t watch Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol movie instead. Especially since the whole thing’s on YouTub:
Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
Another niche upcoming TV set is the Telly. The company’s TVs are free but allow the startup to track their owners, and they have a secondary screen for showing ads, including when the TV is off (the secondary screen can also display information like the weather or sports scores). Telly’s prospective owners must answer a long series of questions, like if they’re registered to vote and who their cell phone provider is, with the data used for ad targeting. Telly has discussed further potential ways to commercialize TV watching, such as letting people earn gift cards by filling out surveys (also to help targeted advertising) on the TV.
It’s a mystery why anyone would allow this into their home. But plenty of people will. By the way, this is part of a real Sony patent:
It’s a mystery why you don’t just stream It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World from an mp4 file from a desktop hard drive, and ponder why the title of the movie was too optimistic.
Happy Tuesday, everyone. Don’t forget to put out the trash.
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