Queenan Country

So, this last weekend, on one of the little jaunts the wife and I took with Frank and Ami, I found a great little book called Queenan Country by Joe Queenan. It's a little bit guide book and little bit memoir, but it's a heck of a lot comedy and a heck of a lot anglophile. It's a trip around Britain with one of America's leading wits and it's great. Highly recommended.

Last night, while still getting 10+ hours of sleep, the wife and I watched Take The Money and Run, which she'd never seen before. (Side note, I considered calling this blog, The Continuing Cinematic Education of Margaret Pitrone, but then I realized I was stealing the blog name and patronizing my wife, so I demurred.) The film is a good one, though. Woody is in fine form and looking YOUNG! The gag with the soap gun is always a winner and the running gag with the broken glasses is chuckle-worthy, but boy-o-boy has MTV ever altered the way one watches comedy. This has some good chuckles, and they happen with regularity, but not with frequency. It's maybe 90 minutes long, but there are only, say, 18 good gags. Not a terrible ratio, but not what one expects from a comedy these days.

I have a couple of more in depth reviews started but not finished, and I'm hoping to be able to get to them today or tomorrow. This weekend you might get a review of stand-up comedy AND of a comic book convention, so keep your fingers crossed!