The picture is as good as it gets
I hope my mom doesn’t mind if I tell this story.
She and my dad bought a new TV. But we might return it, she said. The picture is distorted.
I offered to read the manual and explain how to change the settings.
Try to stream a program, I said. It’s easier to check the settings if the TV is in use.
The picture is fine when we stream things or play a local channel, she said. It looks all wrong when we play a DVD. Here is Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. See how broad he looks.
Mom, that just is how Jack Nicholson looks in As Good as It Gets. He wasn’t young anymore in the nineties.
We try another DVD: About Schmidt.
Look at him here!, my mom says. She pauses the movie. Look at how broad he is!
Mom, the picture is fine.
I remind her that Nicholson was even less young – that, consequently, he was even more broad – when he made About Schmidt. And that in the early scenes of that movie, he had to wear an unflattering business suit.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
At the library, I spotted a DVD of Annika, the new PBS/Masterpiece series in which the great Nicola Walker plays the lead detective of a made-up Glasgow policing team called the Marine Homicide Unit (it investigates murders committed on boats). DCI Annika Strandhed is quirkier than most. She draws extended analogies between the crimes she solves and Viking or Greek mythology, Ibsen’s plays, bridge-building, or whatever. To my considerable amusement, she relentlessly soliloquizes – as often as not, in front of her longsuffering subordinate detectives.
Annika reminds Karin & me of no one so much as Karin’s mother.
She and my dad bought a new TV. But we might return it, she said. The picture is distorted.
I offered to read the manual and explain how to change the settings.
Try to stream a program, I said. It’s easier to check the settings if the TV is in use.
The picture is fine when we stream things or play a local channel, she said. It looks all wrong when we play a DVD. Here is Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. See how broad he looks.
Mom, that just is how Jack Nicholson looks in As Good as It Gets. He wasn’t young anymore in the nineties.
We try another DVD: About Schmidt.
Look at him here!, my mom says. She pauses the movie. Look at how broad he is!
Mom, the picture is fine.
I remind her that Nicholson was even less young – that, consequently, he was even more broad – when he made About Schmidt. And that in the early scenes of that movie, he had to wear an unflattering business suit.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
At the library, I spotted a DVD of Annika, the new PBS/Masterpiece series in which the great Nicola Walker plays the lead detective of a made-up Glasgow policing team called the Marine Homicide Unit (it investigates murders committed on boats). DCI Annika Strandhed is quirkier than most. She draws extended analogies between the crimes she solves and Viking or Greek mythology, Ibsen’s plays, bridge-building, or whatever. To my considerable amusement, she relentlessly soliloquizes – as often as not, in front of her longsuffering subordinate detectives.
Annika reminds Karin & me of no one so much as Karin’s mother.