There's been a slight flurry of job-hunting activity around here, with an interview and some testing involved, so there haven't been any new posts in days. But while I wait on tenterhooks for news, I've got some time to read and watch. 

Number 99 on the AFI's Top 100 Movies of All Time is "Guess Who's Coming for Dinner." 1967. Spencer Tracy, Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn. Sritten by William Rose. Directed and produced by  tanley Kramer.

This is one of the movies I'd never seen before, although I had a fairly good idea of the main plot, just based on what I'd heard about it. Bright, young, attractive white woman meets somewhat older, professional, all-around-good-guy black man while on vacation, they fall in love, they get engaged. 

The movie takes place over the course of one day, the day in which the daughter brings her fiance home to meet her parents. The liberal parents who were careful to bring their daughter up without racial prejudice. The movie centers around the parents and their reactions to seeing what all their careful teaching has wrought. Their reactions are probably not what they thought they'd be. And they are forced to face the fact that they would rather their daughter not marry this man.

Poitier's character is almost too good to be true--a doctor, who  works overseas to help the poor and disadvantaged. It's as if they wanted to make sure there were no flaws in his character that Spencer and Hepburn, or Mr. and Mrs. Drayton, can possibly object to. 

Dr. Prentice's parents get invited to dinner. They aren't thrilled with the situation, either. A priest, a good family friend of the Drayton's, is more positive and encourages the parents to view the situation in a better light. 

In the end, the parents are won over by the love between their children. Or maybe a realization that things could be worse.

The movie does a good job of examining how the various characters examine the issue. They all raise some valid points against the marriage, including the speed (because Dr. Prentice needs to report to Switzerland for a new job in two weeks, the wedding would need to take place before then).

And it's thought-provoking on the subject of racism. Are you racist if you accept people of other races in every way except as the spouse of your child? Does considering the issues your child will have to deal with in a "mixed" marriage, and wishing they wouldn't have to deal with those, make you a racist or a realist? 

And on a side note, the Drayton women go through several costume changes throughout the movie and whoever did the costumes did a great job. I love to see contemporary clothing done well and enjoyed the costumes in this movie.

What I'm reading.

Another project for my unemployment is to go through my books. I'm afraid to count them, but I'm pretty sure I have more than a thousand books. And that's after winnowing out about 750 books in the last four years or so. I'm looking at all my books and trying to see if I can discard any of them. I'm running out of room to store them all and I'm pretty sure I'm not done buying new books.

That means that I have to re-read some of them. There's a ton of vintage science fiction that was at my dad's house and I have only recently brought to my place. 

Today's book: Other Times, Other Worlds, by John D. MacDonald. You might know MacDonald better as the writer of the Travis McGee detective series. He wrote many sci-fi short stories between 1940-1960. The collection is a little uneven--it is arranged chronologically, and you can see how his writing develops over time. 

A couple of stories stand out--those are the ones I remember having read before. "Common Denominator" where humans meet a race of aliens with no war, no crime and no hostility. And a very unique method of getting their race to that point. 

"The Big Contest" spotlights the loneliness of a alien set on Earth to observe human culture, and its attempts to fit in the only way it can. 

"Half-Past Eternity" has an interesting treatment of what could happen if one person could be speeded up, while the rest of humanity continued to move at the same pace. How would you eat? or drink? Would your clothes be able to move with you, or would they rip and tear from the super-speed? How would breathing and digestion be affected?

I'm keeping the book. 

What I'm watching.

If  you have streaming Netflix, be aware that they have added all the Star Trek series, except Deep Space 9 (and that's coming by the end of the year), to their streaming catalog. This is good news and bad news for me. Heck, I'm unemployed. It's good news because these series will be fun to watch. It's bad news, because it would be way too easy to make every day a Star Trek marathon day.

So far, I've only watched episodes from the original series and Next Generation. I'll confess right now that I watched the original series when it first aired, on my parents' small black and white TV set. I was young enough that a major punishment for me (on those rare occasions when I misbehaved) was to send me to bed before Star Trek came on. 

Notes on the original series: The uniforms are different colors. I mean, I know this intellectually. I have seen some of the episodes in re-runs on color TV. I've seen all the movies. But deep down in my brain somewhere, "Star Trek" means Kirk and Spock and McCoy in shades of grey. I have to keep adjusting my brain to this. 

Watching the show on a large flat-screen is a completely different experience to viewing the original episodes on a small black and white TV. You can see the control panels and what's on them! You can see the different colors on the sets! The little computer disks are different colors! You can see that Spock's skin is not the same color as human skin. Scotty looks so darned young--I guess I've gotten used to the older version in the movies.

A bonus for me is that they have the original, uncut pilot to the series--"The Cage." Not the chopped up version later used in "The Menagerie," but the real, official pilot. So that was interesting to watch. And to compare to "The Menagerie," just to see what they cut out of that.

I've watched the first three episodes, "The Man Trap," "Charlie X," and "Where No Man Has Gone Before." It's interesting that two of the episodes involve characters with super powers which humans can't really tame or control. Death and banishment to an alien world under the control of aliens are the only ways to free human kind of the menace. The alien in "The Man Trap" just wants salt, but appears unable to wait for it to be given, and must steal it from human bodies, requiring that it must, in the end, be killed as well. 

For NextGen, I've watched the first three episodes. The pilot, "Encounter at Farpoint," has an alien with super powers, but instead of just killing humans, he puts the crew of the Enterprise on trial, as representatives of the human race. Fortunately, the human crew manages to figure out the secret of Farpoint Station, free a captive alien life form and win the trial. So here, the crew outwits the super powered alien at his own game, instead of trying to kill or banish him, which they probably couldn't do anyway.

This episode is also notable for the min-skirts worn not only by Deana Troi, but by several of the male crew members as well. Sadly, the mini-skirts disappear by the third or fourth episode, if I recall correctly. 

The second episode, "The Naked Now," reprises the original series "The Naked Time." And  we get the first instance of Wesley saving the ship, but only after he has been the one to put it in danger in the first place. My guess is that this episode was designed to show us a bit about the characters and their personalities, as well as to clear up the question of just how fully functional Data really is.

"Code of Honor" really hammers home the message that women in Star Trek society are treated the same as men. It's just one of many first season episodes that delivers its message perhaps a little too strongly. Tasha has to fight the wife of the alien leader to the death--which she is able to do only because the Enterprise has the technology to bring someone back from the dead. So the wife is killed, fulfilling the rules of the battle, but then brought back to life, fulfilling the need of the humans not to take the life of another living being. The fight staging is awkward, the dialogue in many places is stilted beyond belief, but we are introduced to the concept of saving a life after it is gone, and the lengths to which the crew will go to preserve the honor of everyone involved. And get the vaccine which is so desperately needed. 

I’m starting the movie watch by using the American Film Institute’s 100 Years. . .100 Movies list, which was published in 1998.  I’m going to start at the bottom of the list and work my way up. It’ll be interesting, because I haven’t seen the majority of these films.

I am not a film critic. I’ve never taken a class in film studies. What you’re getting here is just my thoughts about the movies, as I approached them as just an ordinary person.

The first film (number 100 on the list) is Yankee Doodle Dandy, from 1942. It stars James Cagney, Joan Leslie, Walter Huston and Richard Whorf, and features Irene Manning, George Tobias, Rosemary DeCamp and Jeanne Cagney. It’s in black and white.

The story is a somewhat fictionalized account of the life of George M. Cohan, actor and writer. It’s bookended at the start and finish with a visit to the White House and the President and the award of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Cohen is, at the time, playing the President in a Broadway show. There are song and dance numbers showcasing Cohen’s talents.

I listened to the comments on the DVD. I’m not sure I’ll be doing this with all the movies, but I found these comments useful, explaining things like the fact that Cohen was actually married twice, but his two wives were combined into one character for the film and his divorce was not discussed in the film at all.The bio-pic is not my favorite movie genre, because I think that too much of the actual life story of the subject needs to be changed to fit into the limited time allowed for a movie. Too many details need to be altered to make the story understandable in a medium which does not allow for showing an individual's thoughts, only his or her actions. But if you step back from a desire for historical accuracy, this is an enjoyable film about a stubborn, opinionated, talented man and his struggle to be a success.

Prior to watching this, I had no idea Cohen wrote “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” or “Over There,” or  “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

It’s a fun watch. You can really see the difference between filming styles of the 40s and today—very static shots, not a lot of camera movement. And I know a lot of people don’t like watching black and white movies. But it’s worth a look, maybe around the 4^th of July for a bit of patriotism.

As I write this, I'm unemployed. And looking for some structure to my day, to keep me sane until I get a new job.

So I've set myself three goals--to read every book I own that I haven't read yet (at last count that's over 20 books), to read a bunch of books I've always wanted to read, and to watch the AFA Top 100 movies.

I thought I'd comment on these as I read and watch them, to create a log of what I'm doing with all this spare time on my hands. Job hunting can only occupy so many hours in the day, and if I'm not busy with something the rest of the time, the panic of unemployment rises up and threatens to strangle me.