bookmark_borderIntolerable Cruelty

Intolerable Cruelty

Ahhh remember the good old days. Cary Grant, Doris Day, those wonderful Saturday afternoon movies. Well it appears they are back, and it appears George Clooney has been watching Cary Grant. A wonderful scripted film, let down only by a lacklustre performance by Catherine Zeta-Jones who never really convinces as the ‘bad dame’ of the movie. Clooney, on the other hand, was on fine form and plays the rogueish charmer well, carrying the film along when needed. An enjoyable enough couple of hours, but a bit slow at times, and that was the most surprising thing for me, the pacing of the film was off. Several of the leaps into the more farcical elements of the story, which were funny, didn’t really match the rest of the movie for me.

We didn’t start the fire
A while back I said that I was going to use Billy Joel’s track to give my modern history a bit of an updating.

Seems I now have another little learning aid based on the same song. I wonder if Mr.Joel thought his song would live on in this kind of way…

“‘Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio.
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe. [chorus]
Rosenbergs, H-Bombs, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom, Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye.
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England’s got a new Queen, Maciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye. [chorus]
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev, Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc.
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dancron, Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock.
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team, Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland, Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev, Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez. [chorus]
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai.
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball, Starkwether, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide.
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia, Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go, U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy, Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo. [chorus]
Hemingway, Eichman, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion, Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania, Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson, Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex, J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say. [chorus]
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again, Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock.
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline, Ayatollah’s in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan.
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide, Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz, Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law, Rock and Roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore! [chorus]”

Phew.

What? I did say my muse had left me… (and I’m sure to get some interesting hits from Google now! 😉