The old couch

Some UEFA Champions League matches are free to stream through ViX Deportes.

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Goodbye, goodbye to our long-serving couch – I used it the last ten years, after it was passed around by various members of my family, including myself on previous occasions. (Or so I believe; I’m not sure about that last detail.) Tonight, the couch is out beside the curb. It has become filthy and ragged, due to the children and the cats. It never was beautiful. Well, did it have “character?” No, it did not. But it did “tie the room together.”

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 40: Kingpin

I wonder if, when they made The Big Lebowski (1998), the Coen Brothers deliberately set out to one-up the Farrelly Brothers.

Nice comedy, I imagine the Coens saying. But here’s where Kingpin goes wrong.

A bowling movie should be about the LOOK of the sport.

Balls.

Pins.

Wood.

Those props deserve to be lavishly displayed.

Kingpin’s visual treatment of them is perfunctory.

Well – the Farrellies might reply – your own bowling movie isn’t really a BOWLING movie.

It has no sense of sporting drama.

WE showcase the slow tumbling of the pins.

The satisfying sound of the strike.

The agony of the 7–10 split.

Why aren’t THOSE things front-and-center in The Big Lebowski?

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Not that the Farrellies are bowling purists. Kingpin takes the slum-sport formula of movies like The Hustler and The Color of Money and lampoons it.

Bowling, not billiards. Otherwise, the elements are the same.

The general squalor.

A down-and-out virtuoso (Woody Harrelson).

The dame (Vanessa Angel).

The virtuoso’s pupil (Randy Quaid).

But Kingpin has a wild card: the pupil is a nice, strapping Amish farmer who is forced to hide his bowling from the disapproving community. This is what makes Kingpin original.

Other stuff – e.g., Bill Murray’s performance as Harrelson’s over-the-top nemesis – is funny, but it’s been done before.

And yes, it’s funny but unoriginal that the Harrelson character is a bowler with a maimed hand. 1996 was a good year for that sort of thing. Happy Gilmore and Shine are two other movies in which a precocious young man is mentored by an older virtuoso with a maimed hand.

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Anyway, what’s wrong with a little recycling? The Farrellies even recycle their own material. There’s a confrontation at a roadside diner that is pretty similar to a scene from Dumb and Dumber. That’s OK: in both movies, it works.

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Some viewers might take offense at the movie’s portrayal of the Amish. I think Kingpin is a pretty good satire of other cinematic portrayals of the Amish. Two of the funniest scenes – the milking scene and the barn-raising scene – are sly digs at Witness.

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I wish to conclude by praising Vanessa Angel. I don’t remember seeing her in anything else, but here she holds her own against Harrelson, Murray, and Quaid. You can watch those guys in plenty of other movies. Kingpin is Angel’s movie.

A messed-up world

Tonight, Karin and I watched The Big Lebowski. … And right now, as I type this, I’m listening to one of its best songs: “Gnomus,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

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This week, I had an especially good session with my eighth-grade tutee. We discussed the religious differences among Britain’s thirteen North American colonies. This required me to explain the relationship between being a Puritan and being a Protestant, which necessitated a survey of the Reformation.

First, I explained about Lutherans (led by Martin Luther) and Calvinists (led by John Calvin). “And then,” I said, “the English church also split away from the Roman Catholic church. This was so that King Henry VIII could divorce his wife.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

“Who was the leader of that church?”

“King Henry VIII. He also cut off some of his wives’ heads.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, I explained how Puritans and Quakers, among others, emerged from the Church of England.

“The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania. They allowed other Christians to settle in Pennsylvania, too.”

“Were different kinds of people allowed to settle in the other colonies?”

“Not all the colonies permitted more than one kind of Christian group. The Puritans kept Massachusetts pretty much just for the Puritans.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, we went over Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” – line by line, just about, because my tutee didn’t understand a lot of the vocabulary.

As she grasped the meaning of each sentence, she exclaimed: “That’s messed up!”

But I had trouble getting her to finish reading the story.

When she told me she’d gotten to the end, I asked her how the narrator had killed the old man.

“I don’t know.”

So we checked the relevant passage, and I told her what its words meant. “So,” I explained, “the narrator held the bed against the old man’s face until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”

“That’s messed up!”

“All right, now: where did the narrator hide the body?”

“I don’t know.”

For someone so taken with the messed-upness of the world in general, and of the story in particular, my tutee was remarkably incurious about the story’s major plot points.

Which, I thought, was a little messed up.