Sunday, January 26, 2014

The bumbling authorities mistake me and Cary Grant for someone else

Last night I was watching North by Northwest, the classic tale of a man mistaken by authorities for someone else.

I see that Brian at Catallaxy, a police officer from Victoria, was busy doing the same thing with me yesterday.   Don't put this bit of deduction on your resume to become a detective, Brian, because I have nothing to do with the Twitter account Catallaxy Comments.

Mind you, the aim of the account, to highlight some of the extreme content of threads at Catallaxy, seems quite worthy.  It annoys me that Andrew Bolt, for example, would not tolerate a huge number of comments at Catallaxy on his own blog, but is more than happy to continually refer his readers there where they can get their fill of what they can't say at his own place.   Yet he continually only points in his posts to nasty Left wing comments, never the nasty right wing ones from Catallaxy.  Hypocrite. 

But I don't think Catallaxy Comments is being implemented all that well.   The bar as to what makes it in the account is set too low, so that the most spectacularly stupid or offensive is just being overwhelmed  by the routine ratbaggery that appears there daily. 

If it were me running it, I would cut down the daily content.  I remember some of the classic offensive comments, perhaps the account holder should contact me for some of those to add...

Back to North by Northwest:   I was having an after dinner sip or 10 of some dessert wine while watching it last night when the kids said (as they usually do if I have more than 2 glasses of dinner at night) "don't get drunk!"  I said "hey, everyone in this film is drinking all the time; it's a good film to drink while watching it."

And this morning, I thought, yeah, it actually is the perfect movie for a drinking game with the simplest of rules - drink what Cary (or the other characters) are drinking - or are about to drink? - on screen.  (You can reduce the bourbon to just one nip, however, or you won't survive the night.)

From memory, here is how it would go:  I think he nearly has a cocktail in the bar where he is first mistaken for Kaplan, but is kidnapped before he drinks it.   Has at least a large glass of bourbon forced into him at the Townsend house.  Orders a Gibson on the train when meeting Eve Kendell.  A scotch and water (no ice) with her in the hotel in Chicago.  Has a cup of coffee before being fake shot at Mt Rushmore.  Asks the professor to get him a drink before he escapes from hospital in rapid city.  Eve has champagne "on the rocks" while waiting for the plane to arrive.

Yes, I can see you can get at least 4 pretty potent drinks into you over the course of the movie, with a break towards the end with a cup of coffee.  I think I might have missed some other drinking in the movie.  Next time I watch it (I have never listened to the Ernest Lehman commentary) I'll take notes.

1 comment:

nottrampis said...

North by Northwest is one of the great movies