fine whine

So now it's 2006. Our plans fell through, and Jessica and the cat abandoned me so I rang in this year by myself (well, I suppose the people apparently detonating small explosives count too since they sounded awfully close).

Which isn't that big of a deal, anyway. It's just another night; one that divides the days dates are written with a twelve at the beginning and one number at the end*, and then dates with a one at the beginning and that old number plus one at the end. Big deal. I write about ten checks a year.

I watch a lot of movies, though, and tonight was no exception. First in the lineup was the 1976 Bad news Bears and, even though it maybe wasn't an out-of-the-park home run, it wasn't just a caught pop fly.

Enough with the baseball terminology. Thankfully the movie doesn't dwell in it, instead focusing on some well-played kids (even if they can't play the game all that well) and a surprisingly good Walter Matthau. He's an actor that has turned in many a good role (Hopscotch is one of the more underrated gems of the Criterion Collection) and here as a casual alcoholic he's just as good as ever. His changes of heart may be a bit sudden, but never as jarring as they might otherwise be in the hands of someone else. The kids, though, prove to be just as much up to the task, including an impressive Tatum O'Neal (who, in doing nothing impressive after Paper moon, may have been cast as the 'old pro' brought in to help out the amateurs in something of a canny, if unintended move), though many a fair-haired buck-toothed boy gets mixed up with another. The movie stands apart from other underdog movies for many a reason, and most make it worth watching. I may check out the remake sometime, just to see what seasoned vets like Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thornton can do with the same material, but I'm in no hurry. This one's good enough.

To end the year on a more serious note, I next watched Woody Allen's Hannah and her sisters. This wasn't the first time I'd grabbed it at the library; I'd often checked it out but had lighter fare to watch first, or just wanted something less, well, less about three sisters and their romantic entanglements in New York City. But in Woody Allen's hands it's not nearly as bad as something sounding like that could be.

After all, imagine Nora Ephron tackling the same idea. Or don't.

The way Allen writes it it's touching, clever, intelligent and funny, and well worth watching. Almost every character is convincingly fleshed out, and Woody's neurotic nebbish has rarely been more believable. Michael Caine is a bit creepy as an adulterous husband, and it's difficult to pin down if he's playing an American or Brit or someone from somewhere else, for all that matters. In the end it's not about where everybody came from, but where they end up and how they get there that matters, and everybody, Woody and Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest and Sam Waterston and Michael Caine and Max Von Sydow (whose severe artist criticizes TV at one point, his comments no less timely now than they were then; the title of this post is a quote from the scene) and Carrie Fisher and all the rest make for a great movie about love and families and everything in between.

I split my viewing of it, however, to catch the yearly ball-dropping in Times Square. I'm no longer certain why I do this other than to know the correct moment the year turns, since my watches and clocks are all different. I don't care about the people on TV, don't watch the flavor-of-the-month performances and interviews before and after the drop, and don't want to think about all of the garbage littering the Square after the millions file out.

They mentioned that a literal ton (2000 pounds) of confetti was to be thrown on the crowd, they with their big balloons and streamers and promotional hats and stupid, stupid, stupid '2006' glasses, and I could see the few empty inches of pavement behind the announcers (somehow I ended up seeing Carson Daly instead of Dick Clark. The new year came anyway) already covered in garbage even before the climactic last moments.

And for what? Some of those people had been standing around since noon, and that's not even considering the travel time that most of them, out-of-towners, also endured. And without public restrooms, apparently. So they came all that way, and waited all that time, and they couldn't give a crap.

Har har. Happy New Year, for what it's worth.

* I refer, of course, to the dreadful 'month day, year' notation that has so caught Americans' fancy. Why, oh why, ask I, can't we use the much nicer, more logical 'day month year' that so much of the rest of the world uses?