Rant #2,501: Too Much Time On My Hands

I guess that being unemployed--and on the road to early retirement--has given me the right to oversleep when I need to, so I did it again this morning.

It's become the same old, same old with me: get up, get dressed, eat breakfast, go on the Internet to both write my daily Rant and to look for jobs, take my son to work, and then proceed with the rest of the day.

Throw in physical therapy, doing my exercises, doing the laundry, and even sometimes cooking dinner, and I have a complete, unexciting day.

Repeat five days a week, and then wait for the weekend, where I slow things down a bit but still have things that I have to do.

This has given me, at times, too much time on my hands, as there comes a point in every day where I am "done" with what I am doing. Three is nothing more for me to do, so by that point--usually around 3 p.m. each day--I have to find other things to do.

Yes, I have watched some of those court shows, shows that when I was working I swore I would never watch if I took a day off and was home. This includes "The People's Court" and "Judge Judy," and at times--or more to the point on a daily basis--they are as grating as fingernails across a chalk board.

I do like Marilyn Milan, however. She is an absolutely beautiful late 50s woman, without any plastic surgery, and she handles her "People's Court" just like she handles her own physical beauty, naturally and with a lot of poise mixed in with a lot of panache. She gives people time to present their case, but she will come down on them, and come down on them hard, if they don't do what they are supposed to do to present their case.

She is fair, she appears to love what she does, and heck, as a very proud heterosexual male, she is the perfect eye candy for male viewers. And being that she is so smart and talented, in Milan you have the total package.

Then we have "Judge Judy," where you move over to reality. You have a 70-something, estremely brilliant multi-millionaire (she makes a reported $40 million a year from this show alone), who often deals with some of the biggest low-lifes I have ever seen on TV, settling disputes that even a 10-year-old should be able to see who is wrong and who is right.

And she does it with such a nasty disposition, as if you are impeding on her day for coming to her TV court. She is like the angry grandmother who is proud to tell the world that she is a grandmother, but at the same time, secretly, wants nothing to do with her grandkids.

Having been to family court and small claims court myself in the past, Judge Judy really is reality where Marilyn Milan is not. Judges can be rude and crude, and the judges that I have had in my cases have been as nasty as can be--just like Judge Judy is.

People find her entertaining, until they, themselves, have to go to one court or another, and then they see that Judge Judy is only the tip of the iceberg. There is a reason that the judge's seat looks down on the participants in an action, and people see that when they are in court themselves.

Yes, each of these hour-long shows kill two hours right there, leading up to dinner, but sometimes, I do veer a little off course during this period after I have been looking for work on and off since 6:30 or 7 a.m. in the morning--and still do throughout the day via my cellphone (I have been known to apply for jobs late into the evening by using my cellphone).

Yesterday, I really had had enough of these shows, so I found a grade-Z movie to watch, a then-notorious early 1960s film that made a name for itself back in the day, but using today's eyes, really is as tame as a drugged lion.

"The Bellboy and the Playgirls" was the first film ever directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who went on to greater fame with his work on "The Godfather" movies.

Legend has it that Coppola, then a film student, was brought into making this film watchable by American audiences. It began life as a German film starring European bombshell Karin Dor, but the distributors wanted to spice it up by making it an "art house" film, which at the time meant that it would play in adults-only movie houses.

Coppola added beautiful showgirls to the mix in color--the main part of the film is in black and white--and the showgirls included statuesque June Wilkinson, sort of a low-budget Marilyn Monroe type who had appeared in several magazines in various stages of dress.

Although the segments directed by Coppola featured some mild topless nudity, Coppola was told to feature Wilkinson in these portions of the film, namely her God-given assets. The problem was that at the time of filming, Wilkinson might have looked like she was in her mid-to-late 20s, but she was only 17 years old, so all he could do was focus on her covered-figure. She would late pose nude for Playboy magazine and appear in various stages of dress and undress in other films and magazines, but she was too young to do so here, throwing the entire gist of Coppola's work into a tizzy.

He even was given the opportunity to make due with the film by shooting a small portion of it in 3D--certainly one of the first American applications of this film technique, which has become standard in so many of today's movies.

Nonetheless, the movie gained a reputation as an adults-only film, and I guess for the early 1960s, seeing nudity on screen was so taboo that it was just that.

What Coppola did was craft the film for American audiences into a farce, where a hotel worker strives to be a house detective, and does so by investigating Wilkinson and the other girls featured in the film for prostitution. This is worked smack-dabbed into the original German film, where a virginal actress (Dor) refuses to do a stage play where her character jumps into bed at the drop of a hat.

The actress is then told stories about the ways of love throughout history, and she eventually agrees to do the part.

Don't ask.

Coppola was chided by his film school cohorts, who thought he sold out to get his foot in the door and his butt into the director's chait, and he fumbled around for several years until he finally was able to direct legitimate films. But it is interesting to see where he started out, and I had always wanted to see this film, more as a curiosity than anything else.

Coppola did what he could, but the film is absolutely horrible, hard to get through, and pretty boring, but I guess everyone has to start somewhere.

Like me at this point now in my life, I am at the bottom, but I am trying to work my way to the top.

Maybe Coppola has given me some inspiration.

No, I won't direct any nudie films, but I will strive to move up from the cesspool I am in now.

It is quite a struggle, but one way or the other, I will win out like he did.

I think I will, at least.