Today’s Rhyme ” The Old Man in the Velvet Coat” for me hits the land of Values Dissonance again. The poem doesn’t say anything about whether the “maid” (don’t know if that means girl or servant in the context, I went with the servant) wanted it or not… In fact it seems that the only thing that the rhyme disapproves of is the fact that the old man stiffed her with a coin she couldn’t spend… In other versions of this rhyme there’s more verses suggesting that the velvet coat was a way of making a foolish person look more important.
Well this starts the home stretch to the end of this thing, three quarters through. Feeling pumped.
The official working theme on this one was “Crime Comedies” but in the long run I’m not completely sure of how accurate that ended up… you all be the judge.
The first film my list Buffet froid (Cold Cuts) by Bertrand Blier features Gérard Depardieu as Alphonse Tram, an insomniac who spends his nights taking long walks. One night he finds a man he had talked to hours before in a subway dying with Alphonse’s knife. When he confesses to his only neighbor a police the man tells him to stop bothering him. Later his wife is murdered and this is treated equally nonchalantly
Things get really weird when the killier comes to his apartment to confess. Soon after that the police detective shows up only for the two to shake hands and share a glass of wine as if it was a normal get together. After that there is no turning back.
This movie is pure absurdity that doesn’t even pretend to make sense. Based on how Alphonse kept saying he didn’t sleep because of his nightmares I kept expecting him to wake up. Still, this has nice physical humor with a wonderfully cynical point of view.
My next film on my list Stand Up Guys is the story of two aging gangsters. Christopher Walken plays Doc a retired gangster who spends his time painting sunsets. Al Pacino plays his best friend, Val who just got out of prison after 28 years. It turns out Doc has been assigned to kill Val by another mobster who wants revenge who was killed in friendly fired during a heist. But Doc can’t bring himself to do it and stalls for time as he gives his friend one last night of fun.
Walked and Pacino have very good chemistry in this thing, but other than that the best thing I can say about this film is meh. It’s technically a comedy but it’s really no funnier than your average action flick. Sure there’s sone funny stuff regarding why you shouldn’t have more than the prescribed dosage of viagra, and a very straight laced bordelllo but otherwise, meh.
I had a rough start with today’s challenge, pulling a couple of incoherent almanac rhymes before I got to “Here’s a Health Unto Our Master” . I actually stumbled over it a couple of days ago but being off my game at the time put it back in the bin and pulled something else. Minutes later I realized I could do it as the toast it was. In hindsight I think it has a nice upstairs downstairs vibe to it, with the butler giving the toast.
Today’s rhyme, “Send Me a Ribbon” was another one of those ones that was really easy to conceive, and because it was that easy I dragged my feet for over an hour. I’ve been avoiding most of the poems about colors whenever I get them because of the black and white thing, but for this one I thought I could make it ambiguous whether the ribbon was blue or green.
From there the only problem I had was whether to go with “period” (i.e my poorly researched pseudo-Georgian blend) or contemporary I went with contemporary because I wanted to have a mailbox. Unfortunately my main idea involved a Bertie Wooster type who probably didn’t even remember his own color code, and regrettably with the modern vocabulary of men’s fashion I really can’t think of anything that says upperclass twit.
Today’s rhyme, In An Oak There Lived an Owl, should have been much easier. “Just draw a freaking owl” you say. Well, yes but even there I find myself falling back on pedantry. What kind of owl? I went through a list of British owls and the closest I could come to the “Whit to Whoo” is the Long-Eared Owl and drew it accordingly. Of course that research took way to much time for the constraints of this challenge, but what you’re going to do?
It also looks like the One Eyed Gunner is becoming a recurring character in this series.
