On movies, trivia, "Lonesome Dove," "Slap Shot' & Paul Newman

Our 16-year-old had a friend over to watch movies. I asked what she had in mind. She said she hadn’t decided.

“May I make a suggestion?” I asked. “Watch ‘Lonesome Dove.’”

She’s too polite, for now, to swear at her old man, but her sarcastic response verged on spicy dialogue you’d hear in a Tarantino flick. I’m not sure what they watched, but it’s a safe bet the movie won’t be in heavy cable rotation 27 years after its release, as “Lonesome Dove” is and will remain in perpetuity. 

If I see it's on, I always click right to it and settle in for a scene or two. If it’s within 30 minutes of the scene where Gus and Call hang Jake Spoon, I sit and watch until the doomed rascal spurs his horse. It’s that good.

I’d intended to write about movies before the Oscars, but I either got busy or distracted watching “Lonesome Dove” for the 129th time. So here’s some thoughts on recent and otherwise relevant old movies, with most of it about the great Paul Newman.

• Last week was the 40th anniversary of the release of the movie “Slap Shot.” They had a cast reunion in nearby Johnstown where it was based. It is one of my favorite movies starring Newman, one of my favorite actors. The famous bus moon was filmed on the town square in nearby Ligonier, known for its presumptuous hoity-toityness. I almost showed the mooning scene to my daughters as a point of local interest, but was seized by a rare burst of parental propriety.

• “Hell or High Water” was maybe my favorite movie from the last year. It’s a modern Western, but the dialogue — real redneck Shakespeare — is crackling perfection. Impeccable soundtrack, too. I only know a handful of people who’ve seen the Jeff Bridges/Chris Pine/Ben Foster film. I think the title’s too cliche to snag interest.

• Recently watched “The Princess Bride” with the girls. Filled with charm and wit, it’s a family favorite. Many people know it’s a Rob Reiner film (FYI: Meathead turns 70 on Monday!) but fewer know the soundtrack was composed by none other than Mark Knopfler. He’d taken a Dire Straits sabbatical after being overwhelmed by the international success of  '85's “Brothers in Arms” and was looking for something quirky. This is one of those movies that makes me impatient to be a grandpa.

• “Lonesome Dove” stars Robert Duvall as “Augustus McCrae,” Tommy Lee Jones as “Woodrow Call” and Robert Urich as “Jake Spoon.” The mini-series is based on the 1985 Larry McMurtry novel, but started as a Hollywood screenplay pitched with Jimmy Stewart as McCrae, John Wayne as Call and Henry Ford as Spoon. It was nearly made but director John Ford advised Wayne to reject the script. Imagine “Lonesome Dove with Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda. Wow.

• While very few people saw “Hell or High Water,” mere handfuls have seen best actor nominee Viggo Mortensen in “Captain Fantastic.” I’d never even heard of it when Val brought it home and practically duct-taped me to a chair to watch it. I hated the first 10 minutes, but loved the last 90. Really fun, offbeat movie that jabs at many of our sacred cows.

• Interested in “Slap Shot” back story? My buddy Paul Peirce wrote this great story about Ligonier’s racy role in the classic. He says we need to see “Florence Foster Jenkins,” the film for which Meryl Streep was just nominated for best actress and we soon will. I do not disregard Paul’s recommendations when it comes to funny.

• My reverence for the McMurtry’s Gus McCrae character is such that I was insistent we name one of our children Augustus — and we have two females! I didn’t get my way with that, but he’s the reason the protagonist in my book, “The Last Baby Boomer,” is named McCrae. Why is he named Martin? It just seemed to fit.

• I was talking in the Tin Lizzy last night with a young couple who’d attended the “Slap Shot” festival in Johnstown. I mentioned how I believe Newman’s best movie is “Cool Hand Luke.” They’d never seen it. I told them, “Grab a 12-pack. You’re coming to my house right now.” I was kidding, but the day when I’m free to provide that kind of vital education to innocents the world will be a better place.

• Coincidentally, I cooked spaghetti dinner last night with “Newman’s Own” Sockarooni Sauce. It was delicious. His namesake charity also makes salad dressing, salsa, barbecue sauce, licorice, mints, mayo and nearly a two dozen other food stuffs. Founded in 1982 with the motto’d intention that “100 percent of profits” go to charity, the company has given $485 million to needy causes. “I’ve always been lucky in life,” Newman said. “Sharing one’s good fortune with others is just the right thing to do.”

• Before entering the World War II as a turret gunner above the Pacific, Newman briefly attended Ohio University. I write about my experiences there in the “party boy” link below.

• He won an 1986 Oscar for “The Color Money,” but Newman was much better in “The Hustler,” “The Sting,” “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid,” and, oh, my, “The Verdict.” His worst movie? “Quintet” from 1979, one of the few movies I ever walked out on. Boring as hell.

• Paul Newman was on Richard Nixon’s 1971 “enemies list,” but Charles Manson wasn’t. Know who else was on it? Tony Randall! I promise to dig into this one day.

• And, finally, here’s a song in search of a soundtrack. It’s Tom Russell’s “Ash Wednesday.”

Related …

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America’s greatest actor is … John Goodman?

1993, Hollywood’s best year

The real reason gay marriage is a bad idea

I am outraged by the recklessness of the New York state legislature. They have committed an obscenity against those of us who revere moral behavior.

Gays in New York are now allowed to legally marry. It’s disgraceful and ought to be reversed immediately.

Only then we can take steps to make traditional opposite sex marriage illegal.

Eliminating marriage would reduce domestic crime, unhappiness and render unemployable scores of leech-like divorce attorneys. It would slash exorbitant health care expenditures as men and women were given sexual incentive to stay fit throughout their lives.

People of all ages would be much more particular about diet and exercise if they knew something better could come along -- and they were within their rights to joyfully jump their bones.

More marriage?

America has too many marriages and not enough love.

The virtues of the same sex marriage argument obscures the fact that marriage between any two people who don’t enjoy bowling together is an historically bad idea.

People don’t need laws assisting them in getting together. Zoo creatures have more refined mating customs.

What we need are easier ways to pry us all apart.

A good start would be to outlaw binding marriage.

I just spent about an hour in the presence of a miserably married man who’s been betrothed to the same woman for nearly 30 years. They have two wonderful adult children, a comfortable living and peer respect of all who know them.

And they hate each other.

I’ve been shrewdly able to discern this because he told me, “She hates me. She thinks I’m lazy, I drink too much and never do anything around the house.”

For a moment I grew alarmed he was married to my wife. That’s straight from the pages of her script.

Then he resorted to one of the most telling indicators of a loveless marriage: spousal mimicry.

I’ve never seen marital love survive when one spouse becomes so consumed with hate that he or she turns Frank Caliendo in trying to portray just how awful their spouse has become.

No matter how lovely the woman, how mellifluous her voice, the mimic makes her sound like some hag parrot with a cracker caught in her throat.

“You’re a bum! You’re always burpin’ beer! You’re bald! Bald! Squawk! Squawk!”

If the two of them had not been so matrimonially shackled, he’d have probably said in a reasonable voice, “Yeah, the old lady and I are splitting up. We had a good run, two good kids, but the magic’s gone. Thirty years, that’s enough.”

Instead, the two will remain married and miserable. It’s a terribly sad situation for all involved.

Except for me, of course.

It just cracks me up to a see any guy get all bug-eyed and cartoon sounding whenever he wants to describe what his wife perceives are his shortcomings.

I wonder if his wife is somewhere adopting an ape-like demeanor to convey in guttural grunts what she sees as his flaws.

And these were two people once so madly in love they looked soulfully into each others’ eyes and said, “Honey, let’s get married! We’ll live happily ever after!”

My wife and I have been together since 1990. We dated for two years, lived together for four and have been married since 1996 (I think that adds up).

But as Augustus McCrae told the young cowboys in “Lonesome Dove,” “What’s good for me ain’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.”

I expect we’re in it for the long haul. We love each other, laugh together and still enjoy each other’s company.

Ours is a marital bliss that will endure forever.

It had better.

I don’t do imitations.

And I’m usually too lazy and too drunk to put together a really compelling puppet show.

A magnificent life of impoverished leisure

I realized I had a problem with excessive leisure when on Tuesday afternoons I’d start concluding all my e-mails with, “And have a great weekend!”

Tuesday around 4 p.m. seemed to me to herald the start of the weekend.

I guess it was because Tuesday mornings were really productive. Mondays were not. Wednesdays I’d kind of wind down from that whirlwind of Tuesday activity. Thursdays we’d golf and Fridays, well, who the hell works on Fridays? 

There have been times when I’ve been really busy. There hasn’t been one of those since 2007.

I remember hearing someone expounding about their workload and an endless string of 18-hour days.

I said, man, I don’t think I’ve worked 18 hours this year.

It was March.

One of my favorite one-panel cartoons -- I think it was Bizarro and it sounds like Bizarro -- is where a sidewalk bum says to a passing business gent, “Here I’ve got all this time and no money and you’ve got all that money and no time.”

I’m that bum only with spiffy Tommy Bahama shirts and a better haircut.

Really, who would argue I’m not better off being so magnificently underemployed?

Our daughters (almost 10 and 4) are precocious delights right now. My golf game is improving, we enjoy time with family and friends. Life is great.

Just one problem. 

Care to take a wild guess what that is?

Yes, it’s no money.

I look back at the last three years and am astounded I’ve been able to skate along on the thin ice that is what for lack of a better word I call my career.

I’ve done some teaching, written carefree features for various publications and systematically been wiping out what was left of my paltry life savings to pay for things like golf, Steeler tickets, sushi and fifths of fine bourbon whisky.

I still do enough travel features for credible publications I’m still showered with invitations to fancy resorts. So the time of my impoverished leisure coincides with opportunities to travel for free to some of the world’s most glamorous destinations.

I recently read Larry McMurtry’s biography, “Literary Life: A Second Memoir.” In it he says every time he visits a fortune teller, and he says he frequently does, the seers always tell him the same thing: you’ll never be rich and you’ll never be poor.

I don’t believe it for a minute, but it’s such a colorful lie I’m thinking of thieving it for myself.

Really, it applies more to me than the author of one of my favorite books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.” He’s certainly rich by any writer’s standard.

I mention all this glorious leisure because I’m rubbing my aching muscles from what may have been the hardest I’ve worked all year and it happened on Labor Day.

I trimmed and mowed the lawn, chopped wood, sanded four chairs my wife wants to refinish, made a half-assed doggie gate for the new pup, and assembled from scratch an enormous trampoline for the kids (Day 1 tramp tally: four hours of fun, one split lip, one bruised forehead, and about 28 combined tears from pain and trampoline tantrums).

I have four book proposals that are getting interest and I’m optimistic one or more will soon bear fruit. I don’t consider any of my writing labor. Right now, it’s a kind of like a hobby, like butterfly collecting.

Who knows? Maybe one of the books will be successful and I’ll be drawn into a world of literary activity.

But for now my life on this day after Labor Day, about six hours from the launch of my weekend, reminds me of an automotive analogy. I’m barreling down a winding interstate with the accelerator floored, the gas gauge hard on “E.”

It’s scary, but there’s an undeniable exhilaration.

I’m hopeful one day I’ll become a conventional success with stable income, a vast readership and lavish literary perks.

And I’m reasonably certain if that day ever comes, I’ll look with satisfaction at all I’ve gained after so many lean years.

Then I’ll think back in wistful melancholy at all I’ve lost.

Merry March Madness!

You can judge how much a guy dislikes any given holiday based on the number of greeting cards he has to send or see.

So far, there are no “Happy March Madness!” greeting cards.

And, make no mistake, March Madness is the number one guy holiday on the whole guy calendar. It has gambling, drinking, saturation coverage and the kind of buddy-buddy camaraderie that’s been absent from even professional football ever since the NFL decided to feminize the sport with women’s outreach programs and things like Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.

I have gainfully employed friends who are taking the day off because their employers don’t put March Madness on equal footing with all the repressive religious holidays that involve sermons and in-laws.

So, of course, I’m taking today off, too. Instead of falling short of my thrice-weekly goal to write one coherent 750-word blog post, I’m posting this multitude of shorter, equally incoherent ones.

And I’ll leave it to you gainfully employed folks to wonder what a guy who doesn’t do or earn anything does differently when he takes a day off from whatever it is he does or doesn’t do.

• If the people who sold beer and booze with ads that earnestly urge “Please Drink Responsibly” were the least bit honest they’d say, “Please drink lots -- just don’t get caught breaking anything!”

• There are well-regarded sitcoms with million-dollar budgets and squads of witty writers that fail to produce anything as funny as either of the Old Spice deodorant commercials involving the black guy on the white horse and the dashing gent who makes an elegant meat portrait out of carved turkey for his girlfriend. If I didn’t already use Old Spice, I’d be switching.

• As a proud alumnus, I couldn’t be more thrilled about the Ohio University upset over Georgetown. It’s the biggest victory in the school’s history. I just had to fill out a questionnaire that asked the offbeat query: “Where would you most like to be?” I put “1985” because it was my senior year at OU in Athens, Ohio. I don’t want to diminish all my other years, but it was just such a great time and, for better or worse, Athens was where I became who I am. Still, I’m happy right where I am. But putting “1985” sounded like a more creative answer than “Outer Banks” or something new agey like “Stuck in a Moment.”

• I like to joke that the only thing I learned during my four years at OU was to never mix Ouzo and beer. It’s an exaggeration, of course, but the essence of the wisdom should not be overlooked: Mixing beer and the volcanic Greek liqueur will inevitably lead a foolhardy drinker to wake up in a strange place, with a killer hangover and no recollection of what happened to his or her pants.

• Anyone who thinks the election of our first black president has done anything to dent our historic racism ought to spend an afternoon watching college basketball in a bar full of rednecks like the one where I imbibe. Your average redneck bases for whom he is rooting solely on the number of blacks on each team. It doesn’t matter if they look like gansta rappers or young Denzel Washingtons. If they’re black, the redneck wants them to lose.

• Still, these are great guys and I prefer their company to that of many more fair-minded bores. It just says something about where the country is right now. And, yes, there’s this: They think Sarah Palin’s going to be a really swell president.

• I’ll be following the recent celebrity breakups of Sandra Bullock and the effervescent Kate Winslet. Too soon for me to play matchmaker, but I’ll figure it all out soon enough. I prefer Winslett to Bullock, but if either of them ends up with Jon Gosselin I’m canceling my People magazine subscription.

• Me and the boys back in Athens used to think we were great wits when we’d say things like, “You can’t spell Ouzo without OU.”

• I’d love to know how many days Tiger Woods devoted to saving his family. By his returning to golf so soon, it’s clear saving his family is driving him right back to the lifestyle that jeopardized it in the first place. I love my wife and kids, but one of the reasons I don’t want to do anything to jeopardize my family is because I know I’d be forced to spend more time with them. We already spend plenty of time together. Any more and they’d be sick of me and all those friendly rednecks would be the poorer without access to my enlightened insights.

• But I wouldn’t recommend the way I live to many others. It’s like the great Capt. Augustus McCrae says in one of my favorite books, “Lonesome Dove.” “Boys, what’s good for me, ain’t necessarily good for the weak-minded.”

• You can’t spell bourbon, voudka or Scoutch without OU either. See, I learned something in Athens!

• Merry March Madness to one and all!