Choosing between Phil and Marilyn
If my column seems a little different today it is because I was
bitten by a mosquito and have contracted East Nile Virus. Anyone
can get West Nile Virus, become ill and croak. As my luck, as with
all my life, the bite from the East Nile mosquito makes you happy,
positive and downright giddy. I feel like a 21-year-old, but my
wife won’t let me have one. (Editor: please add drum roll.)
Choosing between Phil and Marilyn
If my column seems a little different today it is because I was bitten by a mosquito and have contracted East Nile Virus. Anyone can get West Nile Virus, become ill and croak. As my luck, as with all my life, the bite from the East Nile mosquito makes you happy, positive and downright giddy. I feel like a 21-year-old, but my wife won’t let me have one. (Editor: please add drum roll.)
When Howard Taormino managed the Granada Theater he worked hard to book those great artsy fartsy films. Of course, the Premiere could devote their smallest auditorium to great films like “The Waitress” and foreign films but you have to hire someone who knows something about quality movies and how to book them. And that takes a little work. Why work at all when all you have to do is sit on your fat corporate butt and book yet another slasher movie that will keep some teens off the streets for a couple of hours?
I know I’m getting old, reason No. 69. Dustin Hoffman just turned 70. I saw him in person when he was 63 and he still looked like the kid Mrs. Robinson wanted to – and finally did – seduce. Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson, and here’s to you, Benjamin. You gave us all hope. Aye chee waa waa, Dustin Hoffman 70 years old … what does that make Mrs. Robinson?
When I was a kid I always shared a bedroom with several of my brothers. Tito always had the radio on to sports, especially baseball. I didn’t care for baseball but I did get to know all the names of the players. One of Tito’s favorites was Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto who was also the roommate of Yankee Joe DiMaggio. When Rizzuto went to the World Series team in the sky last week the Lost Angeles Times remembered a quote attributed to Yogi Berra when he heard that Joe DiMaggio had married Marilyn Monroe: “I don’t know if it’s a good thing for baseball, but it sure beats the hell out of rooming with Phil Rizzuto.”
Now let’s see … go to bed with Marilyn Monroe, go to bed with Phil Rizzuto. For me it would be a tossup.
Remembering Phil Rizzuto was remembering when baseball was still a sport, when sports were still a sport. Just reading about the trial of that college football punter who stabbed the first team punter in the thigh. Sorry parents, when you teach your kids that winning is the only thing sometimes your children believe you.
We just finished a sentencing phase down here where a young boy killed a fellow baseball player with a bat because he gloated after a win. So you keep telling your kid that winning is the only thing.
While all of you are watching “Spiderman 3,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Shrek the Third,” “Rush Hour 3,” “Bourne Identity 3,” I am happily catching up on great films whose story, plotlines and characters are fresh. If you missed “Breach” at the theater and if you live in Hollister you probably did, go to your favorite quality video store or Blockbuster and rent it. You will be riveted at this true spy story that makes Bourne, well, boring.
Chris Cooper should have won an Oscar for this but the Academy members were too busy watching fiction like “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Sicko,” which would have you believe the health care system is better in Cuba than in the United States. How many stories have you read of American citizens building rafts heading for Cuba for a better life? Aye chee waa waa, is that a raft heading for Cuba? No, it’s just Michael Moore swimming in a plush pool in a Miami hotel. Why shouldn’t he with all the money he has made in this filthy capitalistic society that he abhors? What a whore.
Just what we needed: another version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Even Nicole Kidman and the best James Bond ever, Daniel Craig, couldn’t save this box office bomb. Why should they be able to? It would be like trying to remake “Gone With the Wind,” or “The Graduate” – why try?
Again, head for a good video store or Blockbuster and rent the original 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” I was just 16 and started dating Nancy and we were on our way to San Jose to catch a movie when we drove through downtown Morgan Hill as the freeway wasn’t built yet and we had to. Why else go through Morgan Hill?
When I saw their little Granada Theater was showing “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” I couldn’t believe it as I had just read a great review in the San Francisco Call-Bulletin. Why it was playing in Morgan Hill I don’t know except that films, unlike today, crept slowly from big city runs to the country and apparently the body snatcher was on his way to Hollister. But having grown up in Hollister I would say he was too late.
The Granada at that time was still a single screen theater but nothing like Hollister’s State Theater with its huge curved CinemaScope screen and wrap-around stereo with a balcony and loge section. But the little theater was a perfect setting for the eerie “Body Snatcher” which is everything the Call-Bulletin said it was. Three remakes later and it is still the best. It was filmed in glorious black-and-white in SuperScope, a cheapo version of Cinema Scope, and was directed by Don Siegel of “Dirty Harry” fame and starred Kevin McCarthy who I saw a few years ago as he came out of the Pig ‘n’ Whistle restaurant next to the world-famous Egyptian Theater here on Hollywood Boulevard.
Let’s see now, go to bed with Marilyn Monroe or Phil Rizzuto? I still lean towards Phil. Well, have you ever slept with Marilyn Monroe? What? That guy from Hollister still claims he had plucked her thistle when she was the artichoke queen of Castroville.
