By Morris Dean
Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (aka "Moms Mabley: I Got Somethin' to Tell You," 2013)
My wife remembered Moms Mabley (1894-1975) as I did, as a bawdy, toothless old black comedian you couldn't dislike for being completely spellbound by her. (She also reminded me of my mother, who didn't have any teeth either.) We didn't know anything else about Moms. She was performing in the twenties, so when we saw her on television in the fifties or sixties (we don't remember when precisely), she was around 60-70. We didn't know she had been raped (more than once). We didn't know that off-stage, she was "Mr. Mom."
But most of all, weep in your heart for the loss of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Kennedy, when you see her perform "Abraham, Martin, & John" at a circle of friends hosted by Sammy Davis Jr. She throws in a line for Bobby as well. The following performance of it was on a 1969 Merv Griffin Show:
Jarmusch's movie is a lushly costumed, campy, tragi-comical tale of a pair of literate, sensitive, musical, restricted-diet, night-traveling, day-sleeping, mysteriously financed, loyal, resourceful, crowd-shunning, visionary, vampire lovers. Gosh, I watched a "vampire movie"?!
They've been around for many years, if not since the days of the original Adam & Eve. Among Eve's friends is Kit (played by John Hurt), who is none other than Christopher Marlowe, who we didn't suspect was a vampire, and who, in Jarmusch's tale anyway, wrote the works of Shakespeare – but if you didn't actually die when everyone thought you did, then you might have, mighten you?
Kit knows a reliable hospital from which he can get his daily ration (and Eve's), and Adam, too, has connections in Detroit. After all, it's too risky now to go sucking people's blood directly. But tell that to Eve's little sister, Ava, who is after all a wild young person who hasn't learned prudence....
.jpg)
"The Great Bear," I was surprised to learn, refers to the Great Bear Rainforest, a remote region of temperate rain forest in Canada, on the British Columbia Coast between Vancouver Island and Southeast Alaska, where the wildlife is surprising in that the actual great bears (black, grizzly, and "white spirit") aren't at the top of the food chain, but the small bear-hunting wolves are – apparently because of their group cunning and fierce loyalty to one another.
But all of them feed on the wild salmon, whose chances grow fainter with those of the mammals, as the top predator of them all, man, continues to build his roads and remove ancient trees. It's a perilous life for more innocent creatures and, in the end, we have to sense, perilous for oblivious man too, in his haughty, non-sustainable ways.
The documentary's tale is ten years old, when a cadre of dedicated scientists, a wilderness detective squad, were racing to prove that the Great Bear Rain Forest must be protected. It was there that National Geographic embarked on its 250-mile adventure....
You can actually (or you could at the time of this writing) see it on Youtube:
This TV series, set in early 1960s England and centered around the doctors and nurses in a gynecology ward, revolves around a mystery whose solution was for me an epiphany: that the suave chief gynecological surgeon, Otto Powell (played by Jack Davenport, the perfectly neurotic and endearing Steve in Coupling [reviewed on March 16]) was something other than he had been portrayed:
We have seen him throughout as a socially well-placed and supremely self-confident man, with a solicitous, sincere, but completely professional bedside manner. He has an attractive, graceful wife, and their son is bright and well-mannered.
But, what's this?, he's pursuing one of the nurses romantically? And he and his anaesthetist, Charlie Enderbury (who is puzzlingly beholden to Dr. Powell owing to something from a dark past?), perform abortions – but only for the health of the mother.
And, when an ominous police detective shows up (played more and more passionately by Iain Glen the deeper we get into his motivations), we are conditioned to believe that he (and his wife and Enderbury?) have committed a crime years ago, and the Powells' son was somehow involved.
But, to say more along that line would be, well, giving away the epiphany of this fully satisfying series....
| Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean |
I remember seeing moms also. Never new she was a he, but it makes sense given the times she/he lived in.
ReplyDelete