Things Hilarious in Retrospect: Answering Machines

Posted on May 22nd, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 22 May 2017.

Things hilarious in retrospect: when answering machines, the precursor of voice mail, were new, the outgoing messages people set were laborious explanations of the process. Remember your cool bachelor Uncle with all the gadgets who was the first person you knew to have one, how carefully he enunciated the introduction to this unfamiliar phenomenon? “Hello. You have reached the home telephone number of Joe Smith. Joe is either not home right now or unable to come to the phone. This is an electronic answering device which will record your message so that when he returns, he may see that you called and call you back. In a few seconds you will hear a beep. This beep is your prompt to speak. You will have fifteen seconds to relay every possible piece of information he might need…”

In short, like that computer voice in the background, at the end of so many sf/fantasy and action movies, telling everybody that the reactor will explode in 32 seconds.

And today: “Yo. What you want?” Or, just the beep.

In between, we had an era of allegedly comical outgoing messages, people of no particular wit trying for comedy routines and usually failing.

My second longest outgoing message ever was a verse of Bob Dylan’s “What Was It You Wanted,” which I deftly arranged so that I identified myself during the instrumental bridge before Dylan returned to ask the title question again; I had that for months, until subjected to a tearful plea to stop by my mother, who had come to dread calling me because she couldn’t take that message any more. (There were days, as every grown offspring can testify, where that was a feature, not a bug.)

The longest, which I kept replacing with others and then returning to out of necessity, was word for word the following:

I repeat. Word for word.

“Hello. You have reached the number of Adam Castro. You have not reached the number of Vera Castro. I do not know Vera Castro, I am not related to Vera Castro, I have no useful information as to where you can find Vera Castro. Vera Castro is a total enigma to me. I understand that Vera Castro owes money all over town but I am a completely different person. If you want to reach Vera Castro, I can only wish you good luck. If you want to reach Adam Castro, you know what to do at the beep.”

My parents complained about having to sit through that one, too, but unless I went on at that length the messages were always stern warnings that the collectors were coming after Vera Castro. Even that message was not enough to deter some of them; there were messages to the effect that they “knew” Vera Castro lived with me and were not fooled. Sometimes I would pick up the phone and say things like, “Sure, send the cops over, right away,” or, “Vera’s here, but she’s sewn into the chicken suit and is only subsisting on feed right now.” Still, that message, and only that message, deterred 90% of them.

Tags: Assholes, Bob Dylan, True Stories | Category True Stories

Part 1 of of 3: RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1966)

Posted on May 15th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 15 May 2016.

So today we hied our way to Best Buy to see how to spend a gift card burning a hole in our pockets, and among multiple acquisitions was the Blu-Ray boxed set of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN and its sequels.

Let me say this. THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is an inferior but judged on its own merits wholly commendable remake of Kurosawa’s SEVEN SAMURAI, itself by my mind the single greatest movie ever made. The sequels to the western have an advance reputation for increasing suckitude, more so for each new outing. The best way to look at this boxed set is the way I am, namely, that it is being acquired for THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, alone, and that the subsequent films are best viewed as DVD extras.

So today I watched the first of them, THE RETURN OF THE SEVEN, also known as RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1966), which cannot be that because four members of that group have not survived the gun battle at the end of the original film. Of the three who lived to the end then, only Yul Brynner returns to play the role he inhabited the first time, gunfighter Chris. Charisma vacuums Robert Fuller and Julian Mateos arrive to step into the shoes of other surviving characters once played by Steve McQueen and Horst Buchholz, respectively, but – especially in Fuller’s case – it may take you as long as half the film to suddenly realize, shit, that’s supposed to be Steve McQueen! The contrast is jaw-dropping, but it’s honestly not so bad, not with a fairly young Warren Oates arriving to play one of Brynner’s newer recruits on this new mission. Oates is great. But then he always was great.

The mission is – honest to betsy! – riding to save the very same town the gang went to so much trouble to rescue the first time out; honestly, it seems, the damn place gets invaded by a small army of rampaging bandits every few years, and it would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody involved if Chris just arrived with wagons and horses and took everybody somewhere the bandits weren’t.

That said, the real loss here is not McQueen and Coburn and Bronson and let us not forget Eli Wallach among other cast members of the original, but the loss of director John Sturges, who is a whole lot better than this one’s topkick, Burt Kennedy, at putting pieces of film together. During the first twenty minutes or so I repeatedly yelled at the screen for awful film editing. For instance, while the unlucky village is under attack at the start, the movie cuts to an image of three Mexican women, watching gravely from the sidelines. There is absolutely no sense that they’re feeling fear or alarm, just gravity. The same shot could have been used in a Bible movie, with the ladies of Bethlehem watching Jesus walking by, with or without crucifix. John Sturges would have yelled at them, “Abuelas! BE SCARED! Look horrified! DO SOMETHING!” This guy just said, “Okay, just stand there. Like you are. Cut! Perfect!”

Similarly, there’s a shot not much further in where another future Seven recruit who doesn’t amount to much proves his bravery and foolhardiness by crashing a bullfight. He thrusts his sword at an off-screen bull, who we don’t get to see die. Then he accepts the adulation of the crowd, which is fine, except that director Kennedy gives us a wide shot of the entire stadium complete with the strutting amateur matador and we can see enough to tell that there’s no goddamned dead bull in the dirt, anywhere. Not anywhere, anywhere.

There are some nice character bits, mostly involving Brynner’s Chris reacting with gravity to shit the other characters have to tell him. And some of those bits are well written. It helps that all of these bits are given to him and not to Robert Fuller, of whom I must say, that whenever he walks on screen, the only possible response is a forgetful, “Oh, yeah. Him.” Which honestly doesn’t happen in any movie Steve McQueen ever made.

Brynner is the film’s ace in the hole. I am therefore saddened to have to tell you, going in, that after this not very good sequel to a superb western which was itself a remake of what I and many others believe to be the SINGLE BEST MOVIE EVER MADE, Brynner escaped this franchise and never played the character again, unless you count his appearance in WESTWORLD. In the subsequent sequels, which are supposed to spiral further down from here, the character is played by George Kennedy and by Lee Van Cleef. I am usually kind to recasting, as witness my tolerance of James Bond and the Doctor, but I must say, honestly, the premise of a medical condition capable of turning Yul Brynner into George Kennedy leaves me reeling. (And I like George Kennedy.) I do not know yet if they recast Robert Fuller, let alone if his role is taken by a presence as far below him as he is below Steve McQueen; or if the direction becomes even sloppier than it is here, but honestly, if so, the mind reels. I guess you’ll find out as I penetrate deeper into the set.

Tags: Eli Wallach, Movies, Seven Samurai, Steve McQueen, The Magnificent Seven, Westerns, Yul Brynner | Category Movies

Just Noting

Posted on May 14th, 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro

I don’t think anybody’s paying enough attention here for this to be a big thing, but access problems have prevented me from updating this, my own site, for a bit. I am back. Whoop de doo.

| Category Uncategorized