Miscellaneous: Blast From The Past

Last night Rosemarie and I went out to celebrate our wedding anniversary. The restaurant still featured the Gibson on its drinks menu, so naturally we had to order a couple.

There’s nothing quite like biting into a pickled cocktail onion that’s been steeping in gin and vermouth. By the time I finished mine I was weeping copiously and had been visited by the baby Jesus and every member of the Partridge Family. Including Reuben Kincaid.

Movie: Lawless Heart (2001)

The brilliant actor Bill Nighy has made his reputation playing outré parts like a dissipated rocker, the lord of the undead, a middle-class zombie and the designer of Norway. It’s a treat, then, to see him inhabit the role of a befuddled mere mortal like the rest of us.

A man in a small English town dies, and we trace the overlapping fallout in the lives of three other men: his lover, his vagabond cousin, and Nighy as his brother-in-law. Unlike other films that mimic RASHOMON, here the structure pays off, as acts that seem callous or inexplicable from one perspective make perfect sense when seen from the other side.

LAWLESS HEART had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical release, but it turns up on cable regularly. It’s a small movie, and in its own way almost perfect.

TV: The Fall Season

In the pleasant surprise department, ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and THE OFFICE were renewed. EYES, alas, was not.

ABC also announced COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, starring Geena Davis as the first female President of the United States. Which means that one of the great crushes of my youth is now old enough to be cast as the leader of the free world.

Some guys would take this news as an intimation of their own mortality. I plan to go another way. I think ABC should embrace its CHARLIE’S ANGELS glory days and fill out the Davis administration with other ‘80s bombshells. The all-babe cabinet.

Put Ellen Barkin in charge of the Department of Defense so she can show Rummy how it’s done. I hereby nominate Mimi Rogers as Attorney General. And Kim Jong Il would be putty in the hands of Secretary of State Jennifer Tilly.

Well, I’d watch.