November 14, 2021
I'm starting to clear out the backlog here at the Sunday Morning power rankings. Before delving into episodes past, let's talk briefly about movie previews.
There was a time in my life when Roger Ebert was my hero. I fancied myself a film buff and wanted to learn all about them and hopefully go on to either work on them or write about them. As with most things, it was a phase - I got a PhD in physics instead. (A humblebrag? Well, lets just say to this day I regret not dropping out of grad school...)
Anyway, back in the day who didn't love movie trailers? YouTube probably killed that excitement because now I'm plan on showing up to a movie 10 minutes after it's listed start time and then still complain when it hasn't started within another 10 minutes after that. In the before times, you never wanted to miss any preview trailers. For one, you got legitimately excited because you hadn't previously heard that such and such movie was coming out and it looked so cool. Also, sometimes the trailers were better than the movie itself. (Ah, the art of editing...) To this day, probably the movie trailer that made me most excited for a movie was The Fifth Element.
If you just watched it, you might say, what's so great about that?
The truth is that it probably isn't that great, but as I young sci-fi fan raised on Star(s) Trek and Wars, it just looked so different and visually interesting, I knew I wanted to see it.
True story: My sister thought it looked dumb. But by some random twist of fate (probably because she could drive and I couldn't), she saw the movie before I did. It is one of her favorite movies. She saw it a second time at a theater - I know because I went with her this time and I will always have a special fondness for it as well.
Look, I know the movie definitely has problematic elements to it (as does director Luc Besson in general). But it's such a wild and visually interesting ride that I choose to look past them and still see the movie through the eyes of the 13 year old that saw it in the summer of '97.
Which brings me to my experience of going to see Dune in theaters last week. The movie was good, but I probably had more fun watching the trailer for Licorice Pizza. I was so enchanted with it, I almost regretted turning cynical on movie trailers. I'll embed it here if you want to watch it, but not having it be a surprise that pops up before a movie you've gone to see starts rolling sort of undercuts my whole, "Hey, movie previews are still kind of fun." bit that I have going.
I didn't even realize it was PTA movie until the end of the trailer... and then I got really excited! But if you had given me 3 guesses as to who directed it prior to his name flashing across the screen, I probably would have got there.
In a future post, I'm going to have to do a Wes Anderson vs. PTA face Thunderdome-style face off. Maybe I should use my long weekend to watch Licorice Pizza and The French Dispatch in theaters to set that up. (Spoiler: Young me worshiped Wes Anderson, but who we kidding here. It's gonna end up being PTA.)
Anyway, after I got back from Phoenix, last week I watched the November 14, 2021 episode of Sunday Morning. Thus we must have
The CBS SUNDAY MORNING POWER RANKINGS
(Like Halloween, this is a recovery of an orphaned recap for posterity. I wrote the intro without actually doing the rankings during a busy November. So rankings with a short recap of the segments as best I can remember, written almost two months later is what follows.)
1) Lee Cowan
The Pacific northwest has a lot of trees and a lot rain. But somewhere in the Pacific northwest an old rotary phone (I own and old rotary phone. Am I a hipster for owning an old rotary phone? I know I'm a hipster, but is it for that specific reason.) is nailed to one of these frequently rained on trees. People make a pilgrimage out to phone to make "phone calls" to loved ones who have passed. "The longest of long distance phone calls," as Lee puts it. The phenomenon is apparently not unique as someone in Japan located a phone booth on a hill to converse with soul's lost in the 2011 tsunami.
Where's Jose Canseco when you need him? Lee's segment is devastating.
2) David Martin
Microdosing psychedelics, normally considered drugs of abuse, seems to be the en vogue treatment for mental illness these days. People (most of whom just kind of want to get high) will point out that psychedelics have been part of indigenous cultures (most of which, we've wiped out) for centuries. Ayahuasca gatherings occur regularly in central and South America and there's a whole tourism industry associated with it.
Call me crazy, but if Elon Musk and/or Joe Rogan are really into something, I tend to lean the other way purely on principle. I don't really care what rich white guys who are just dicking around with it have to say. Does it really help them? I don't know and I don't care. I'm not sure how much you can quantify how much microdosing improves the quality of life of a billionaire. He's a billionaire. He'll be fine.
However, a demonstration that MDMA can turn around around the life of a veteran with life-crippling PTSD and I'll agree that it serves a purpose beyond electronic music festivals and even makes me a little angry that the "War on Drugs" probably kiboshed anyone who wanted to do legitimate research into medical benefits until recently.
Also, I just like listening to David Martin talk.
If you haven't seen the documentary Free Solo, I'll wait while you go watch it.
...
It's good, right? I know it would have been cooler to see it on a big screen, but if it makes you feel any better I saw it on TV too.
The most striking scene of the movie to me was the scene where Jimmy Chin (and others) discuss their plans to film his friend Alex Honnold's free solo climb of El Capitan the night before it happens. Hanging over it all is the fact they might capture their friend falling to his death on camera. You kind of want to shout at the screen, "Someone put a stop to this madness!"
That madness is where Jimmy Chin lives. I don't know what drives him to do it, but he captures amazing stuff on camera. I mean it's nothing that you couldn't capture on a drone, except that if he didn't climb the cliffs and mountains that he does, you wouldn't see how small he looks next to or on top of them.
Is it worth risking life and limb to prove the all conquering spirit of humanity? To paraphrase JFK, we choose to do these things, not because they are easy but because they are hard. Jimmy Chin chooses to climb real mountains, but hopefully most of can claim to climb our own mountains metaphorically speaking.
The thing I like about metaphorical mountains is that I don't die when I fall off of them. At least not yet.
4) Rita Braver
Rita interviewed Andrew Garfield. The first of two celebrity interviews in this episode. I'm probably not ever going to watch Tick, Tick … BOOM!, but I might get around to watching The Eyes of Tammy Faye at some point. I've also never seen Rent on stage or on film. I think time spent hanging out with the theater kids in high school sort of killed any urge I might of had. (Tick, Tick … BOOM! is a musical celebrating the short life of the man who wrote Rent and died the day it premiered.)
There has to be some reasoning to why Rita gets a higher spot than Kelefa Sanneh's interview of Halle Berry. I think it comes down to the story of how Lin-Manuel Miranda cast Garfield in the lead role. He was impressed by his performance in Angels in America, but didn't know if he could sing. So he asked a massage therapist they had in common (natch, celebrities... amiright?) if Andrew could sing. "Of course he can!" was the response. Andrew Garfield never sang for a stage or screen role previously.
It's a good story. One I'm sure they got tired of repeating while promoting the movie.
5) Otters!, Dean Stockwell (tie)
I love otters so much tgat I seriously thought about giving the nature segment the #1 spot. I honestly have thought about that many times over the past year, but the form must be observed. Here's something from my summer travels that made me happy - possibly my favorite part of the Smithsonian National Zoo.
I know that animals in their natural habitat are far preferable to animals in captivity, but if the Smithsonian National Zoo isn't ethically run, that what hope do have? Just drink the in joy that all otters are. That's only 20 seconds of the maybe 5 minutes I spent watching that otter swim. If my shaky cinematography isn't up to snuff, by all means enjoy otters in the wild caught on tape in service of Sunday Morning's moment of nature. (I kind of think the otters know they're being filmed.)
Dean Stockwell got a mention in the Sunday Passage. It would have been on while I was aged 5-9, so I don't remember an awful lot about it, I do remember it probably being one of the first prime time shows I watched, so Dean Stockwell as Al, is always cherished, if fuzzy, childhood memory. Also his casting in the resurrected Battlestar Galactica was something of a stroke of genius.
6) Jane Pauley
Jane hosted, so I feel like she needed to make the list somewhere. The form must be observed.
So Halle Berry has taken up MMA. I think she might have gotten a little obsessed with it after her roll in John Wick 3. I love the John Wick movies (who doesn't?) and while she was a welcome addition to the John Wick-verse, she's no Peter Serafinowicz (who is?) - he played The Sommelier. Kelefa interview was in promotion of her MMA themed directorial debut, Bruised. (Didn't see it. Probably not going to see it.) Halle Berry has an Oscar, but I've never seen Monster's Ball, so I'll just have to take it on faith that she's very good in it. I went through her filmography to see if I had a favorite Halle Berry movie and I couldn't find one where she was the lead that I would have actually watched. She was a Bond girl and and X-Man (X-Person?), Catwoman (again, never saw it)... I guess John Wick 3 is probably my favorite movie she's been in.
As a bit, Halle "wrestles" Kelefa to the ground in the interview. I guess you can insert a joke here about what Kelefa's wife must think of him being wrestled to the ground by a beautiful woman, but his wife is a professional chef who makes a damn fine apple pie, as demonstrated on the show previously.
Given the choice (and to be clear, no such choice is being offered and I'm sure I'm being a bit sexist just for typing this), I don't see how you can pass on the apple pie.
8) Luke Burbank
Luke gives a humorous take on surviving Thanksgiving. Mine was survived, but I did perhaps leave slightly early for everyone's benefit after slightly over indulging in our annual ode to gluttony. The extra piece of pecan pie was a bridge too far, but I loooooooooove pecan pie. Not as much as I looooooooooove it's close relative Derby pie though.
Someday I'll get an answer as to why Luke does so many food-centric segments.
I had forgotten the details of this segment so I just rewatched it.
Summary: A Kentucky woman finds an army uniform in a dumpster and makes it her own personal quest to reunite with the owner. The army officer they belonged took had taken his own life - he suffered from PTSD (tying into David Martin's segment). She finds his surviving family in Texas and reunites the uniform with the soldier's son, who misses, and is very proud of, his Dad.
I guess this whole episode was devastating.
10) Ted Koppel, Seth Doane (tie)
So this episode was aired before the emergence of omicron, but at this point I'm entirely COVID-ed out. Even at this point, when Koppel interviewed Fauci, I was like, "Another Fauci interview? Hadn't Koppel already interviewed him? Or at least someone from Sunday Morning? At this point, I'm not going back to check because I really don't care. Let it be know that the day Fauci, decided to go with the black turtleneck and sport coat ensemble was the day he officially jumped the shark.
Seth drops in to tell us that Portugal is 98% vaccinated. Rebuttal:
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