Godzilla and Barugon had a baby – and made Gamera jealous!

Godzilla – South Korea edition.

After an unnecessary prelude with a married couple, a rocket orbit for no reason (the filmmakers displaying their complete ineptitude on space program dialect), and an earthquake caused by a dropped nuke, all of which have no connection to one another, but somehow share the same movie-space – out pops YONGARY!

Looks like someone was paying attention to what made Godzilla movies tick: giant reptilian monster created by radiation, toy city destroyed, crowds fleeing, toy tanks, toy planes; even the spikes on Yongary’s back resemble the Christmas tree-like ornaments on Japan’s favorite wrecking ball. On the periphery, there’s the Scientist, the Soldier, the Politician – and the Annoying Kid who Saves the Day, who tells the army what to shoot, tells politicians how to politic, and tells scientists how to science.

When the earthquake seems to consciously head towards Seoul, one of the military guys says, “Science won’t help us now.” What do you even mean by that, Shinto freak? Do you know what “science” is? It’s a methodology, not a religion, or a set of instructions, you imbecile! One of them ponders, “When I was young, my grandparents used to tell me about a monster that caused earthquakes – Yongary.” Oh, so that’s the explanation. Yes, better than science.

In this South Korean promo, Yongary is treated for his anger issues and Godzilla complex.

Long before the internet, everyone in the movie suddenly knows to call that one-horned rubber suit “Yongary.” It walks on its hind feet, has a long tail and back spikes, blows fire and roars. Uh, sure it’s not that Japanese rubber, Godzilla?

The Annoying Kid named Ichio, who has a propensity for stealing his scientist friend’s inventions and using them to prank people, pilfers an “itching ray” and uses it on Yongary. Due to Yongary’s disco movements, Kid argues that Yongary must be good and pure and is only hungry for oil. Who exactly is this message for, Kid? Too little emotion too late, to try for the weepy finale of the original GODZILLA. Whereas GODZILLA was a parable about man’s hubris, YONGARY is about fending off plagiarism lawsuits from Toho Company.

You won’t weep, but you might be repulsed in horror, as Yongary is slaughtered barbarically. Missiles don’t work, fire doesn’t work, but some pesticide spray works wonders, as Yongary goes into convulsions, collapses, and bleeds out into a river. It’s downright gruesome for a kiddie demographic. Japanese women in helicopter giggling at his death throes, suddenly getting serious to make another Statement: “I wonder if he really meant to hurt us.”

Unlike this movie, which really meant to hurt us.

END

Pointy Birds.

Pointy birds, so pointy pointy.
Anoint my head. Anointy ‘nointy.
— Steve Martin, THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS.

Godzilla had Rodan, a giant marauding bird, so Gamera went one better and hatched Gaos – not just a giant bird, a giant pointy bird – from a volcano! With a head ornament styled after a shuriken star, and laser beams that slice things clean through, bird-bat-pointy-thing Gaos anoints GAMERA VS. GAOS as the most bloodthirsty of the Gamera movies.

In this third Gamera film it’s about time Daiei Studios reconfigured their tentpole property as “friend to children,” to pull in the grade school demographic that Toho Studios was exploiting via Godzilla (see: SON OF GODZILLA, released in the same year as GAOS). So Gamera saves little Eiichi the Annoying Kid (dubbed “Itchy” by the MST crew) from the clutches of Gaos, and lets Eiichi ride wheee on his carapace; then they get ice cream and wear party hats.

The stage is set for Gamera to be Mankind’s savior. His deathmatch opponent: Gaos. In their first battle, Gaos carves Gamera like a stuck pig, bleeding him with lasers. While Gamera recuperates underwater, Gaos goes on a rampage. For what – we’ll never know. The Japanese companies that churned out these daikaiju films seemed to reflect Japan’s pathological self-mutilating syndrome, like a compulsive cutter. The genre’s ongoing success meant people were watching these stinkers and gleaning something from them. There is no inherent “message,” nothing deep or reflective – just lasers, fire-breathing, pointy birds and anointy battle.

Gamera realizes he needs to keep Gaos out in the sunrise to kill him. How does he figure that? Instinct, I guess. Or maybe it was the way the Gorbachev birthmark on Gaos’ head started throbbing. Anyway, he fails, and the military, taking orders from General Annoying Kid (due to his “riding on Gamera’s back” which gives him some kind of Access All Areas primacy), set up the roof of a building as a turntable with a blood fountain for Gaos to sup from to keep Gaos distracted while the sun is rising. Count Vlad the Impaler would be proud.

This too fails. In the final battle, its funny how Gaos “flies” without flapping his wings, as he picks up Gamera and keeps dropping him on his shell. We take it for granted that Gaos flies like Superman – through an act of will. But come on! It’s because it’s too hard to animate wing movements or to create a small model with moving wings. Especially with that Fucking Annoying Kid shouting “oochii otuki samu-san Gamaraaaaaaaa!” from the sidelines.

The team of Noriaki Yuasa (director) and Nisan Takahashi (writer) return for this bloody turtle battle, with Kôjirô Hongô (GAMERA VS BARUGON) returning as a leading man with no leading ladies and nothing to do.

Gamera eventually drags and drops Gaos into the volcano from whence he came. A simple fix, provided that Gaos lie still and take it like a bitch. Once again proving that… uh, Gamera is friend to children.

END

Cleanup on Aisle Dirty.

Classic! Explosive, action-packed, funny and filthy, THE DIRTY DOZEN is the best Boy’s Movie of the millennium! If you’re between 14 and 24, you will be inspired by this movie; it was the HALO 3 of its day.

In World War II, twelve American military convicts, each a different flavor of crazy, are snatched from the jaws of death row by a U.S. Army Major, for a suicide mission behind German enemy lines. Salt away in jail – or die free for your country. They all accept, all with the intent to try an escape at their first opportunity, but under the canny tutelage of the Major, slowly become a team. A ragtag team. That word invented here.

Lee Marvin is stoic Major Reisman, willing to bend orders to get his men in shape for the mission; overjoyed when they rebel against him using the collective “we”: ‘We’ don’t wanna shave; ‘we’ want hot water…

Charles Bronson is Wladislaw, a Polish scrapper with a death wish.

Big Jim Brown (“the greatest player in NFL history”) is Jefferson, who does an explosive endgame run that will live in legend long after his football career.

John Cassavetes is wild-eyed Victor Franko, the actual star of this movie, with the most lines and the definitive character arc.

Towering Clint Walker is gentle giant Posey, the “Lenny” who doesn’t know his own strength.

Telly Savalas is religious zealot Maggot, whose distaste for the wiles of women starts the siege on the German stronghold before schedule.

Donald Sutherland is slow-witted Pinkley, whose impersonation of a general would put the buck’s fizz up Robert Ryan’s knickers.

Robert Ryan is a straight-laced colonel who looks down on Major Reisman’s secret mission and his disheveled methods; in trying to prove his veteran soldiers are more effective than Reisman’s “dirty dozen” he is beaten like a red-headed step child.

Ernest Borgnine is a general who gets a big laugh out of Ryan’s knotted knickers.

Familiar face Richard Jaeckal is a sergeant, basically the same role he would play in the other underdog war movie of this decade, THE DEVIL’S BRIGADE (1968). George Kennedy mopes around as an observer.

And there’s Trini López. Whereas half the actual Dozen faded into obscurity in filmdom (besides those major stars covered), López is worthy of mention here only because he was the subject of the hands-down funniest joke in SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, when Tom Hanks complains about women falling into weepy tears over some romcom, then launching into an improvised tearful sonata on a scene from THE DIRTY DOZEN, unable to contain himself when Trini López “busted his neck while they were parachuting down behind Nazi lines… ”

Directed by Robert Aldrich, THE DIRTY DOZEN was made at a time when being in the military was not a giant wank. It was actually cool once. Seeing Bronson and Marvin and Cassavetes in that army green was inspiring. As Pacino might say in DONNIE BRASCO: “These are men are men.” Nowadays, the military brand has overrun the government and even the police force; military are given all manner of respect that they don’t deserve and simultaneously shown disrespect by the very government that utilizes their intimidation role; they’re hung with all manner of useless riot gear, they advertise their services as if they’re gods, we’re all meant to bow down and thank and worship every time their shadow passes over our pathetic non-military selves. As Rachel Maddow observes in her excellent book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (2013), America has become a nation at peace with perpetual war, and with every aspect of civil society accepting the drift towards a military-based society.

So I doubt THE DIRTY DOZEN could be made again with the same efficacy. Movies like the Iraq-based THREE KINGS (1999) and Tarantino’s INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009) have tried to recapture that ragtag dynamic of a military team on an adventure, but war is not as breezy a topic as it was; these dynamics have been transferred to fantasy films like THE A-TEAM (2010) and THE AVENGERS (2012), where each protagonist has a different power to offer the team; all trying to recapture that DOZEN flavor and missing the mark (while hitting new ones).

They are the Superman trope in camo. And the Superman trope is simply the Jesus symbology. Is it any coincidence that at their last supper, where they recite their game plan over and over, the Dirty Dozen are seated along one side of the table? Lee Marvin as Christ. With the troublemaker Maggot seated in the position of Doubting Thomas; Charles Bronson seated in the position of The Mechanic, Sutherland is the Body Snatcher, Jim Brown in the position of Running Back and Trini Lopez as Mary Magdalene, the Holy Grail…

END

Baby moviemaking spawns baby monster.

After taking forever to get to any kind of point, SON OF GODZILLA eventually settles into insulting our intelligence with a mindlessly boring story of a “baby Godzilla” hatching, and its mother?/father? Godzilla protecting it from predators and teaching it The Way Of The Rubber Suit.

Shin’ichi Sekizawa proves his utter incompetence as a writer, and Jun Fukuda proves the same as director – which effectively got them work as Japan’s foremost team on churning out at least six more Godzilla films in the late 60s into the 70s.

Japanese scientists on an island (which will eventually be identified as THE “Monster Island” that would appear frequently in Godzilla movies) are experimenting with the weather. And with our patience. Almost one hour into their pointless tinkering something continues to not happen. A Reporter parachutes onto the island from out of nowhere for no reason, merely as a foil so that Head Scientist can exposit to him about the weather station, then Reporter is tweaked into the Hero, rescues the Girl and continues to annoy us by being in the film.

Three giant praying mantises dig up an egg, which hatches a disturbing blob of poo that looks nothing like Godzilla, which prompts Reporter to say, “Oouwah, it’s a baby Godzilla.” (Does this meaningless line annoy you as much as it does me? Godzilla is not a species designation – it’s a proper noun. Isn’t it? And it was derived to describe something the size of a whale. And the fact that these people – scientists! – don’t have a clue how to classify Godzilla means that all this time the Japanese have been aware of the Godzilla creature and not one scientist has thought to study it, or even speculate, on its place in the Linnaean classification system?)

I can’t tell the difference any more.

Whoa! Godzilla’s really let himself go for this one. Not only does he look like the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street, what’s with the overhanging beer-gut and those thunder-thighs?! Who’s in that suit? Honey Booboo’s mother? I can only suggest three things:

1) He’s still got his baby fat after hatching that egg;
2) His trainer must be on vacation;
3) He’s prepping for the role of an obese trailer park monster for his next film (i.e. Honey Booboo’s mother).

In keeping with the child-friendly nature of Godzilla in the late 60s, his son Minilla (or Minya, or Minira, as the monstrous-looking child-monster is called) befriends the locals.

Other monsters on this island (which would become a catchall location for dumping all Toho Company properties in time) are three giant mantises – dubbed “Gimantis” by the great and literate Reporter – and a spider named “Espika” or “Esa-Pekka Salonen” or something, which shoots alarming amounts of silly string at everything, not just prey that it intends to eat. Apparently, anything that moves sets off this creature’s silly string spinneret, which must be exhausting.

These guys and their weather experiment! Godzilla destroys their facility, yet they somehow manage to doctor the weather successfully into freezing, enabling their escape from the island. Which means there must have been a helluva lot of redundant buildings and superfluous equipment in that facility.

A ‘What Were They Thinking?’ moment.
Compare the headpiece from SON OF GODZILLA (1st pic)
with other headpieces from the same era.
Was it run over by a car and left out in the sun after it was washed?

Snow pounds down, freezing everything, including Godzilla holding his ugly little son paternally, buried alive under the unending tempest. On the escape raft, Reporter says, “They’ll hibernate, I guess, and wake up when it’s hot again.” Oh, you know that, do you? Telling us weeping kids that Godzilla is not dying of hypothermia in a freezing embrace with his offspring.

And he doesn’t die! Hooray! So much more pain to come, so many more Godzilla movies to be made…

END

A Grotesquerie – and not because of the freaks.

MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 fans will regard SHE FREAK as “the one that got away.” The MST 3K boys always regretted not being able to rib some stinkers that they just could not acquire the rights to. And SHE FREAK seems a likely prospect that could have been at the top of that pile.

The only interesting aspect of this garbage dump of a film, that gives it any excuse for existence, is that it is an attempt to remake Tod Browning’s disturbing 1932 paean, FREAKS. The same storyline: of a young gold-digger who seduces the owner of a freak show for his money, yet is repulsed by the freaks that he lavishes love upon; of how he dies and how she takes over his fortune and his freaks – and mistreats them until they turn on her.

Browning used real circus freaks in his controversial movie; the underlying message was that the people most “abnormal” were the supposedly “normal” people. In director Byron Mabe’s SHE FREAK, he uses no disfigured or limbless actors, no sideshow curiosities – just one midget (Felix Silla) and a montage showing a sword-swallower and an old lady who handles snakes, and I think the underlying message is that chicks with big tits can’t act.

SHE FREAK opens inside a carnival freak tent, where a woman screams in a manner that can only be described as indifferent. Then the whole movie is a flashback on what that woman saw…

Claire Brennen is big-chested blonde Jade, who leaves her dead-end job as a waitress to join a traveling carnival as a, uh, waitress. There she befriends the blonde stripper with the biggest tits (Lynn Courtney), called Moon, on accounta what she does to her audience every night — waitaminute! — since when do they have strippers at carnivals?! Moon tells Jade of the rich bachelor who runs the freak show, Steve St. John (Bill McKinney). And Jade sets her gold-digging sights on him. While satiating her blonde lust on one of the rugged crewhands, Blackie (Lee Raymond).

Director Mabe excites us with a five-minute montage of the carnival setting up: tents, crewhands, stakes in the ground, rides being constructed, men lifting girders. Riveting cinema. In fact, he has so much B-roll footage in the can, we see a montage of the carnival being struck as well. Another five minutes of your life well spent.

Jade is told, “Take an hour break,” and Mabe indicates this passage of time by showing Jade walking around the carnival – in a montage that lasts an hour. Then she visits the freak show and indicates her revulsion and fear by looking kind of concerned and half-running to Moon and trying to weep inconsolably.

Poor Bill McKinney, renowned character actor (“Squeal like a pig!” in DELIVERANCE) and Clint Eastwood Regular, somehow finds himself in this fart bubble, lending it a modicum of respectability, yet trapped in the editing and directing hell-mare and unable to raise the level of the production one iota.

As Steve, the eligible bachelor wallowing in cash, he woos Jade, through the cunning use of montage (walking hand in hand, ice cream, laughing on the park bench), and marries her in the next montage. Jade puts up with his freaks while wallowing in aforementioned cash. When Shorty (Silla) appears to talk to Steve, Jade is so repulsed we see her break the pencil she was pretending to write with.

That isn’t the only time the director gets creative. He goes for THE GRADUATE shot when Jade opens the door to her lover Blackie. We see Jade framed from below between Blackie’s open leathered legs, but no one – not even the most arrogant stud in the world – would stand with their legs that far apart unless they were trying to avoid dogshit.

The fight scene is priceless. Blackie versus Steve. No punches connecting, editing gone haywire, soundtrack annoying and irrelevant. Suddenly Steve has a knife sticking out of his torso with tomato sauce on it.

After the funeral montage, Jade inherits Steve’s wealth, his big car – and his freaks. She runs off Shorty, and the freaks turn on her, surrounding her ominously…

And at last we see what made that woman at the movie’s opening scream so indifferently: cut to Jade in a display pen, now a freak herself. Inexplicably. How did she get that way with the big eye and the pointy ears anyway? She has no mutated genes and I’m pretty sure the freaks don’t have access to gamma radiation. I guess they just surrounded her to freakishness. (Even the original FREAKS had an inexplicable fate for the cruel woman – but in the context of its morbid production, it worked nightmare wonders.)

Tod Browning’s FREAKS showed that all the people in his movie were abnormal in their own way; Byron Mabe’s SHE FREAK shows that all the people who made his movie are abnormal in every way.

END

Before Eddie Murphy, there was MISTER Tibbs.

Eddie Murphy’s proclamation of being a “nigger with a badge” in 48 HRS., though a wrecking ball for its time, pales when weighed against the first “nigger with a badge” to do some real psychological damage to white supremacy – Sidney Poitier in IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT.

Poitier is Virgil Tibbs (“They call me MISTER Tibbs!”), an African-American that brings the black badge down hard on white rednecks in a podunk Mississippi town.

In this town so racist that the word “boy” has two syllables (“bo-auy”), a rich white man is murdered in the heat of the Mississippi night. Tibbs is arrested – guilty of being Black And Nearby – but it turns out he is a respected Philadelphia homicide detective, so is begrudgingly asked to help with the murder case.

Rod Steiger is police captain Gillespie (looking very much like Skipper from GILLIGAN’S ISLAND), who spends most of the film in a livid racist rage for Tibbs being, a) black, and b) smarter than him.

But HEAT OF THE NIGHT is racist with a heart of complex tolerance, for Gillespie wants Tibbs gone because he raises the ire of the unsheeted Klan folk who populate the backwater town just by his presence. Also, though Gillespie fights Tibbs every frustrating step of the way, he must admit to himself that the murder case is being progressed by Tibbs in a manner that none of his own knucklehead deputies possibly could. And when Gillespie makes tentative steps toward respecting Tibbs, Nick Nolte’s dialogue (from the same film, 48 HRS.) serves to demonstrate Tibbs’s response, “We ain’t partners, we ain’t brothers, and we ain’t friends!”

The aged soundtrack (produced by Quincy Jones, title song sung by Ray Charles) sometimes comes off like a TV episode of THE ROCKFORD FILES.

HEAT OF THE NIGHT is a murder mystery first, with racism an added obstacle that Tibbs must navigate. Of course, the greatest slap in the face to racism comes with a literal slap in the face. When Tibbs accuses a wealthy old bigoted land owner, Endicott (Larry Gates), of murdering the rich white man, Endicott unexpectedly slaps Tibbs across the face hard. And then – the unbelievable happens – Tibbs immediately bitchslaps Endicott back!

Both slaps so fierce and unexpected that they take a second to sink in: a black man in racist Mississippi has slapped an old white man who keeps veritable slaves on his cotton plantation. They stare each other down, no one knowing what to do; not Gillespie, not Endicott, not Tibbs, with Endicott ultimately threatening Tibbs, “There was a time I could have had you shot!”

The racism was inculcated, inground, it was taken for granted that the “niggra” was inferior. There was no doubt. And from the snide pronunciation “niggra” (which we presume developed from “negro”) it was only a short hooded skip to “nigger.”

But they didn’t count on the black Brando. (Or was Brando the white Poitier?) Poitier doesn’t just speak his dialogue, he unleashes it. It attacks you with a hard pipe.

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT swept the 1968 Academy Awards. That’s when everyone started calling him MISTER Poitier.

END

Still Racist After All These Years…

I’m not racist – I have a black president.
— Dane Cook, Isolated Incident, 2009.

Affluent, white, liberal, San Franciscan parents, Matt and Christina Drayton (Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn) are stunned when their free-spirited daughter, Joanna (Katharine Houghton), returns from her holiday abroad, bringing home a “negro,” Dr. John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), whom she intends to marry after only a 10-day courtship. Racial wackiness ensues.

No Pants Required

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER is meant to be a hammer against racism. Unfortunately, it only illustrates the filmmakers’ racism without them even realizing it. In one line of dialogue, the film put its foot in its big whitey mouth:

Joanna, the enabled white girl, says, “It never occurred to me that I would fall in love with a Negro.”

Did she just say that? Oh no, she di’nt! That was this movie’s version of, “I have a black friend.”

We can’t fault her for “negro,” as that was the terminology of the day; we’re angling on her attitude and phrasing – the amazement in her statement, as if interracial feelings are “unnatural”; as if she was brought up to fall in love with the “right” race and somehow went all liberal and fell in love with a “forbidden” species. (As ignorant as Republican mannequin-faced moron, Rick Santorum in 2009, equating homosexuality to gateway drugs, as if a man loving another man would lead to men marrying dogs.)

The movie does not collapse for her ignorance, but we are now aware that no matter how “noble” the intentions of the filmmakers, their hearts still pump slaver blood.

GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER is well made and Tracy and Poitier are compelling, imbued with grace, humor and intelligence. Movie is meant to showcase the younger generation as open-minded enough to consider mixed marriages (of course, that generation are now picking up Social Security). The irony is that the supposed bigots (the Draytons, painted as mildly unaccepting at first) and the supposed reverse-racists (John’s black parents) – are NOT. The biggest bigot is the person who represented what the filmmakers thought of themselves (tolerant, intelligent, hip) – Joanna!

And the filmmakers keep proving my point: In portraying Poitier as an accomplished doctor, writer William Rose and director Stanley Kramer think they can now get away with stereotyping Isabel Sanford, the Draytons’ black maid, Tillie, straight from a Shirley Temple movie or GONE WITH THE WIND, widening her eyes and exclaiming such “negro-isms” as, “Yassuh, Missy! Dem white folks sho’ be!” or “I don’ unnerstand nothin’ no mo’!” Yes, that’s exactly how African-Americans talk!

Why is Hepburn always in soft-focus and Beah Richards (the black mother), never in soft focus? Massa’s filter don’t work on dem colored folk, suh?

Of course, the filmmakers counteract their racism by having a secret weapon in Poitier, whose dynamo presence and ferocious animal energy more than made up for their latent bigotry. The Black Brando. Poitier’s Dr. Prentice doesn’t just speak, he spanks us with his whipcord dialogue, telling his disapproving dad, “Not until your whole generation has laid down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs!” When his dad reminds him that if he married a white girl “in 16 states, you’d be criminals,” he retorts, “You think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man!” Statements like these make the movie the dambuster it is.

Matt Drayton admonishes his overactor priest friend (Cecil Kelloway) that the young couple have, “boxed me into a corner!” which they have, “threatening” marriage by leaving for Switzerland that night and marrying when they get there. Drayton maintains he will not act irresponsibly. He feels that Dr. Prentice, a traveler, mover and shaker in his 30s, may just be mismatched with his 23-year-old hourglass-shaped, fiery-haired, arm-candy daughter.

Not being an adult during this movie’s release, I have no visceral understanding of the impact it would have had on society. The priest says melodramatically, “The youth ARE this country. They’ll change this stinking world,” and Drayton replies, “Sure, maybe in 50 years – but not in your lifetime!”

He was wrong, in a good sense: Obama’s election came 41 years after this film’s release.

The filmmakers’ naïveté bleeds through again, as the priest claims “colored marriages last longer because of the extra effort required” – which is demonstrably untrue, even for those days.

But then – that is the point that everyone is missing: this young couple is MARRYING after only 10 days. As ridiculous an institution as marriage is, it should not be undertaken so frivolously by those who supposedly take it seriously; they’re chaining their ankles to the state without even having slept together (brave for its day to bring up this point). The movie would have wrapped more satisfactorily had all the parents just said, “No, you idiots shouldn’t get married NOT because of your races, but because NO ONE should get married after 10 days. Move in together first, give it a few months and get back to us – then we’ll give you our blessing or advice.”

In the film’s final minutes, “Spencer Tracy the man” shines through. All pretense of movie character Drayton seems lost as Tracy goes Tracy for the last time onscreen (he would die just days after wrapping this movie) and gives a monumental, minutes-long monologue that sums up the whole movie and half the Earth: he addresses everyone’s fears (“100 million people in this country will be shocked, offended and appalled at the two of you”) and concerns (“There is absolutely nothing that your son feels for my daughter that I didn’t feel for my Christina”). He mentions race only as an academic point, not a personal gripe. He leans toward preachy (“feel sorry for those people for their prejudices and bigotry and blind hatred”), dives headlong into maudlin (“two wonderful people who happen to fall in love and have a pigmentation problem”), and eventually skews the focus away from race by accusing his wife of being clouded by romance for the couple and not seeing all the angles – then concluding the young couple should be married “as long as they’re in love.” Uh, if that’s not clouded by romance himself…

And then they have dinner. Prepared by their black servant.

END