As you’ve no doubt noticed, there are quite a few old
newspapers piled up in the driveway of the blog…and while I have been occupied
with an outside project or two, the inactivity is due mainly to sloth, which
may very well be my favorite of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh on
myself.
I’ve written a piece or two at
the Radio Spirits blog—commemorating the anniversaries of
Night
Beat and
The
Adventures of Superman—and that review of
Without
Warning! (1952) I alluded to in
my
last post is now up at ClassicFlix…though this is cheating a bit; I wrote
that last year.
I’ve not been idle in the movie-watching department,
however; I took advantage of the Netflix trial period to catch two
documentaries that I had read about in past reviews and mentally attached to my
“must-see” list. Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five (2012) was most
assuredly time well-spent (my father had a dissenting opinion, and rose from
his recliner about a half-hour into the movie), but I can’t say the same for Room 237 (2012)—a quirky offering that
reads entirely too much into Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) (one individual posits that Shining is an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans while
another argues that it’s an admission that Kubrick faked the moon landing for
the television audience back in 1969). I
probably would have enjoyed 237 more
if I had a higher opinion of Shining,
whose cult has eluded me ever since I saw it back in the day. I also watched a couple of movies that I DVR’d
during a free Showtime weekend: Lee
Daniels’ The Butler (2013) features a performance from Forest Whitaker that
surpasses his Oscar-winning turn in The
Last King of Scotland (2006) (seriously, he’s first-rate…but the film
itself has problems). I was also amazed
at how much I enjoyed Philomena
(2013), which I didn’t think I would but I identified most strongly with Steve
Coogan’s atheist journalist, who lends a helping hand to a woman (Judi Dench)
who had her son stolen from the nuns at the convent in which she was placed after
her teen pregnancy. (I recorded this one
for Mom, who’s quite the fan of Dame Judi; she loved it, and even my Dad stuck
around for it.)
In the classic movie arena on Netflix, I got to see
Raw Deal (1948) in its entirety; the
first time I watched it back in the 90s I dozed off a couple of times due to
lack of rest.
(Sensational noir with
TDOY faves Claire Trevor and Marsha
Hunt.)
I also enjoyed
The River’s Edge (1957), which a couple
of folks recommended to me via Facebook after I posted a link to a Salon.com
article about the
other River’s Edge (from 1986), which I
revisited at about the same time (DVR’d it from the MGM HD channel).
The 1957
Edge
features Ray Milland at his nastiest, though I was so underwhelmed by Anthony Quinn
I was kind of hoping sexy red-headed Debra Paget would wind up with Ray.
(I always forget Paget is in
House of Strangers, which I caught on
Fox Movie Channel this morning.)
The bulk of the classic movies I’ve caught
lately emanates (of course) via The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™,
where I’ve been in the throes of a mini-John Barrymore festival with viewings
of
Svengali (1931),
The Mad Genius (1931) and
Counsellor at Law (1933; this one is a
piperoo).
I’ve been trying to “clean up”
the DVR of late; I caught
Doubt
(2008) courtesy of TCM (good performances but I wanted to hit Meryl Streep’s
nun with a ruler) and Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage
Far From Heaven (2002) via Cinemax (another movie that I thought
would be cinematic vegetable but instead was a most gratifying experience).
I also mentioned in the last blog post a bit o’trouble with
the AT&T U-Verse people.
We signed
up with U-Verse in mid-January of 2014, and both Los Parentes Yesteryear and I
knew that when our year was up, the amount of money we generously give them
each month to maintain contact with the outside world would increase…so I
called U-Verse to see if I could do a little shrewd horse trading.
AT&T and other cable-like folks really don’t
want you to leave; when you call them and state “We’re going to cancel our
service” they immediately transfer you to what they call a “retention
specialist,” who’s prepared to do whatever it takes to keep you doing bidness
with them.
Mostly lying their asses
off.
(Oh, I forgot to explain this to
Mom the day I called U-Verse, by the way; I thought she was going to have a
heart attack when I said “We’re going to cancel our service.”)
The U-Verse rep explains to me that if we agree to take on
their U-Voice service for a year we could expect to be paying roughly the same
monthly rate for TV and Internet. Truth
be told, I wasn’t particularly wild about doing this—we use Magic Jack as our
phone service (and you don’t even want to get me started on that, or we’ll be
here for a lifetime)—but Mom had made it clear that it was either re-negotiate
or go back to Charter. (Talk about being
in Hell with your back broken.) So,
under the auspices of it being a “second emergency landline” (the rep’s phrase—not
mine) I agree to the deal, and ask how much effort it will take to get this set
up. No problemo, he says in his faux
Spanish—all I have to do is plug our phone into the phone jack of the U-Verse
modem the following day.
I’m sure once I got off the phone with this mook he and his
fellow retention specialists had a hearty guffaw at my expense…because when I
followed the instructions he gave me the set-up refused to work, and so I had
to call Customer Service to find out what the hell was going on.
That is when I learned that the order to
start the U-Voice had been bumped up to January 22 (I made the call on the 16th)…and
what’s more, I would have to wait until U-Verse sends me another modem via
UPS.
(The modem we had was, I thought,
perfectly fine…but they argued we need one with a battery backup.)
The January 22 deadline came and went, and
was then bumped up to the 26th.
February
7 was the next date after the 26th had passed.
In the meantime, because we’ve not started the U-Voice, the
amount of our service soars to a level that generates much profanity from Ma
and Pa Shreve. I had been proactive in
watching the bill online to see if it would change, and when it did I spoke to
another service rep, who assured me we would not see this amount on the paper
statement they send us. Well, he
lied. He lied a lot. (That’s where the parental swearing came into
play.) After I got the bill, I called
U-Verse and spoke with a woman who told me that this was the amount we would be
paying from now on. Then I started
swearing, and asked to speak to a supervisor to straighten things out.
As of this post, we have received the modem; I was able to
connect it with little trouble (well, except I had to reset the wireless connection—that
was a small pain in the tuchus) and in AT&T’s favor, sending them the modem
back isn’t too difficult—you just drop it off at a UPS store, fill out a metric
ton of paperwork, and they box it up for you.
But the U-Verse experience left a sour taste in our collective mouths
here at Rancho Yesteryear; Mom has already said we’re crawling back to Charter
next year, something I thought I’d
never
hear from her.
I saw
this
article at Raw Story, Salon and a few other places (it was originally
published at Alternet)—it explains why the cable industry is so horrible (they
single out
Bombast Comcast, a company so loathsome they’ve started to
refer to themselves as “Xfinity”), and tells a few jaw-dropping tales of
mistreated customers.
If anyone out
there in Blogland is employed in that capacity…you should really look into
getting into a more honorable line of work, like cooking meth or working for the
USPS.
