How to know you missed the culture shift...

  My mother was the BIG Christmas Spirit in our home, she loved buying gifts all year long, was putting money in Christmas accounts for all of us so we would have money for gifts. And in the end, she would buy necessaries (underwear and socks) and wrap them in Fancy paper to add the the pile of stuff under the tree. There have been a few great gifts that I have worked hard to give, but not as many as my mother. The holidays were special, homey, and never commercial. Seems many Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays were spent days on the road going to Minnesota, to see the grandparents and have a white Christmas.

  One thing I never wanted was to waste my time going to a movie on Christmas Day or even just shortly after... I could wait. But this year there is Imitation Game, Unbroken, American Sniper, and Into the Woods. Unbroken is the one I will for sure see, and probably own, will likely own the others also. They make some great movies, often about subjects that shouldn't sell. I never would have seen Chariots of Fire, but just happened by it on video long after the theater circuit. I don't read reviews - nor had I read the book.  What got me thinking was the movie The Interview, about a comedy about assassinating the Glorious Leader of  the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Now, having seen the trailers - it was not a movie I was ever going to see, having chased North Korean soldiers and raiders in the Republic, having waited for release of the Pueblo crew, having an idea that leadership has to be earned... well, I don't think North Korea is funny.

  They do seem to have all the advantages as they struck at Sony, the Japanese company that bought into American film industry. I don't care about the controversy. I am saddened by what passes for humor in the film and entertainment industry. I am of a different era and miss Carol Burnett, Red Skeleton and Bill Cosby. It seems like I am avoiding much of the current younger humor, but I wasn't into some of the harder humor of my era, either. There were days when I laughed because the alternative was to cry, and men don't cry, difficult to shoot straight with tears fogging the view. Edgier comedy, to make the audience squirm - not my kind of comedy, I liked the type that made me think, George Carlin and his wonder at words and how they relate to us. Baseball and Football.

No, I won't go see movies on Christmas Day.