old guy grumbling

 It's a lemon peel intact. No it's a plastic lemon head that you can squeeze to make its mouth move.  The squeezer would then be the voice of Mr Lemon, and if he were willing to learn the art of not moving his lips, why it could become a bit of a ventriloquist's show, well a bit, like if someone were, say, playing a harmonica he could use his discourses to to fill in between numbers to give his lips a rest,

Mainstream movies of my youth were not very good.  They were still under the heel of the Hay's code which was bad enough, but they were also very stiff and they were all pretty much alike, in the end the good got rewarded, the bad got punished, and love, love, love, always conquered everything.  It was like beer of the day, you could get Budweiser or Miller, or Schlitz, but they all tasted the same, if you wanted to get something good you had to get foreign beer, and to see good movies you had to see foreign films.  

The new boldness in the movies of the late sixties was like craft beer.  I used to go matinees a lot, and then I started going down to the video store.  The pattern of the fifties was still going on where you would hear a bit of buzz, and then the reviews would come out just as the movie was hitting town, and the movie people of the town saw them together about the same town and you could talk about them together over coffee or beers.  We were like a community.

The video store was fine but Netflix was even better because they had such a wide selection, almost any movie you could want to see they had it.  Later on they offered the streaming option, but I never opted for it because I like getting things in the mail, and those streaming things they never had deleted scenes and bloopers and director's narratives.  

But the DVD's that arrived in the mail began to skip, and when I complained nobody seemed to care.  And the library was not as extensive as it once was, and so I made the move to streaming.  But streaming turned out to have even fewer movies, it was mostly like Netflix tv shows that were better than regular tv, but not very much.

And now I have Prime too, long story I guess it will take up a post someday, but there are like twenty other streaming services and if you want to see a movie on them you have to pay a lot of dough, or get a trial subscription which you know you never will remember to cancel in time or maybe you just cannot get it at all.  So you no longer have a community of watchers, everybody is watching their own streaming services, and there is no common range of movies to discuss over the break table.

But of course there is no break table for us old guys.  You know I hated working and I am not tempted to ever do it again.  But work buddies, I rather miss them.

Anyway movies today, the way they are distributed, it sucks.  All I want to say this cloudy Monday morning.