Light Blogging...Paul Newman's Fault

Blogging has been light, I apologize...to all three of you. There have been other things going on in my life.

Just a few general things...the EUR has come back down from its January rally, which I said to stay tuned for while admitting I had gotten the near term outlook way wrong. I still beleive that Europe is not a good place for global capital to flow to these days given their policies. There isn't even a glimmer of hope, so the outlook for the EUR for the balance of the year has to be down. I did note that it is worth watching Angie Merkel closely, and she may still work out well but she'll have to eat her Wheaties because Germans just threw a French-style hissy fit of a strike over the idea that they might have to work 40 hours just like everybody else. Monthly trade data and the fickleness of currency traders will make it a wild ride but the fundamental trend is down in my opinion, trade deficit-schmeficit.

I had a glorious night the other night watching a Paul Newman fest on TCM...Cat On a Hot Tin Roof followed by Absence of Malice. Where to begin? Even I, red-blooded-heterosexual American male, had at first a hard time figuring out who was hotter - the young Paul Newman as Brick or Liz Taylor, as his nubile, young wife; but, the plunging neck line of that white dress that Liz sported in the last few scenes cleared up the temporary confusion. Many great lines in COAHTR, but of course the two that resonated with me were:
- Big Mama: "Why, I wouldn't trust a man that didn't take a drink now and then."
- Big Daddy: "...Europe ain't nothing but a wore-out auction, just a great big fire sale, the whole rotten thing..."

Off-hand, I don't know when COAHTR was written but it seems pretty sad that Tennessee Williams felt this way and that not alot has changed, to wit I read a quote from a Frenchman recently that asserted that France was in the process of taking its rightful place in the world as a museum for Chinese tourists. Sad.

Next, AOM. Wow. I forgot how good this movie is. Hollywood is simply incapable of making this kind of movie today. Actually, Hollywood just made the antithesis of this movie. George Clooney's Goodnight and Good Luck lionized the media as saints, and yet had no memorable performances or intrigue to speak of. AOM takes the print media to task for soullessness and sloppiness. In AOM Sally Field plays the ostensibly hard-charging, modern, progressive career gal, who doesn't "need to be courted" at age 34 (she'll just bang you if she so chooses, and have an abortion, cause it ain't no big deal) but yet gets taken for a career-ending ride because she is so dumb and has bought into some idealisitic journalism gibberish about the public's right to know. Then there is ole' Paul Himself as a close-to-the-vest, sly and unyielding defender of his marginally good name. But my favorite character though, is Sally Field's editor who extols the virtue of being an editor by claiming that it gets him away from people and keeps him in the office. Self-imposed isolation really is bliss, apparently. OK, maybe big city print media was out of touch in 1980, but not today, right? And then finally there is the magestically opened can of Whoop-Ass that Wilfred Brimley opens at the end of the film, that no currently working actor could hold a candle to (although was it really that easy to fire a government employee back then?).

Clearly, I don't do these two great films justice. If you're like me and you forgot what a great movie looks like, take a trip back...