What's going on in the life of Tommy Acuff

Last weekend, we had our annual gathering of bloggers, at my friend Eric's house.  I'll be honest, I don't know if anybody in attendance is still writing online regularly, outside of the Facespace.  Teresa still does, from time to time, but I think sharing on the smaller social media engines usually suffices for most, nowadays.

Me, too, I reckon.

I was a little sad at this gathering.  A lot of our little tribe have left this plane of existence.  Steve and Kevin are the two I miss most.  Jabu, Denny and Matt, too.  A lot of the old tribe have moved on to other pursuits.  It's not the big raucous gathering it used to be. 

Such is life, I reckon.

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The local theater, the Athens Movie Palace, ran a really fun little promotion this month running some old school horror flicks.  A couple of the Universal monster flicks: Dracula and the Invisible Man, a John Carpenter favorite, Halloween, and last night, Hitchcock's Psycho.

I was really jazzed about the opportunity to see the first three on the screen, and was pleased with Psycho, but come Sunday, I was actually on the fence about going to see.  I'm glad we went....even in black and white, it's very visually pleasing on the Big Screen.

My buddy Steven brought his son Connor, and it was the first time Connor had seen the flick, which he enjoyed.  It hit me that I was probably around his age the first time I saw it.  I'd missed it up until the day Dr. Badger showed it in his film class.  At that point, the movie was about 35 or 36 years old.

For no reason in particular, I noted that an equivalent, in age if not intent, for 2025 might be Field of Dreams?  or Goodfellas?

Time's a funny thing.

(No it's not).

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I did also take the time to watch Kathryn Bigelow's House of Dynamite on Netflix yesterday.  Boy, that's a hard one to Monday Morning Quarterback.  I kept comparing it to Annie Jacobsen's really terrific and horribly terrifying Nuclear War: a Scenario, which deals with roughly the same issue at its start:  an ICBM is launched carrying a nuclear warhead.  HoD's scenario is different in that we don't know who's fired this mystery missile, or where it's headed (to start with).  

My only complaint with Jacobsen's book was how clinical it felt, though that's only a minor quibble.

House of Dynamite is a little different, except that as the movie is basically playing the same 18 minute segment over from various points of view, some of the emotional weight feels incongruous, or out of place....and even tacked on like an afterthought.

That said, I don't know how you improve it, even from my amateur's seat.  It just feels like such a huge, terrifying thing to tackle, that I don't know that you tackle it adequately on Netflix money.

My main quibble is with the decision to leave politics at the wayside.

I didn't necessarily enjoy Idris Elba as the POTUS casting about for guidance in his role as Leader of the Free World, but neither did I think it was off the mark.  I guess that's part of my trouble with the nuclear button in general:  you absolutely NEED a man of conscience in that role, but it's going to be a man of conscience who has the most trouble wrapping his head around the issue.

 

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I worry about things like that with the current administration.

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A lot.

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