Cheaper By The Dozen

Another Cheaper by the Dozen?

by

I ranted a while ago about the Cheaper by the Dozen film, a bastardization of one of my childhood favorite books, vowing not to see the results.

It’s time for another vow — this time, sadly, for Cheaper by the Dozen 2.

Never, never, never. The only even vaguely interesting pieces of the trailer were two quarter-second long shots of girls in bikinis…and since if I ever feel the need to see that I can do a quick Flickr search, that takes care of that.

Would someone please just forcibly retire Steve Martin and put us all out of our misery?

They used to be funny…

by

When did Steve Martin stop being funny? It had to be sometime after 1991, when he wrote and starred in one of my personal favorite films, L.A. Story. I found out some time ago that Prairie hadn’t ever seen L.A. Story, finally managed to remember that while we were wandering through Blockbuster, and got to introduce her to it this weekend. As I expected, she loved it.

Still, I’d watched Bowfinger, a more recent Steve Martin comedy, earlier in the week and had been singularly unimpressed with it. Neither Steve Martin nor Eddie Murphy are nearly as funny as they used to be — in fact, these days I generally tend to avoid movies with either of them. Admittedly, Eddie Murphy has done some worthwhile voice work lately, as Donkey in the Shrek films and as Mushu in Disney’s Mulan, but his recent live-action work (Daddy Day Care? Dr. Doolittle?)…well, even the trailers make me cringe. Meanwhile, Martin, who has two of my favorite films in his past — L.A. Story and Roxanne — has been turning out such quality fare as Cheaper By the Dozen and Bringing Down the House (I’ll admit that I haven’t seen either of those — but again, the trailers don’t give me any reason to bother).

A shame, really.

iTunes “Blues Line” by Toyes, The from the album Toyes, The (1996, 4:13).

Cheaper By the Dozen

by

I absolutely, uncategorically, and unquestionably refuse to go see the Cheaper By the Dozen movie currently playing in the theaters.

The original book by Frank Gilbreth and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey was one of my favorite books growing up. It’s the true story of the Gilbreths, a turn of the century family unlike any other. Father was an efficiency expert, hired by companies to examine their work processes and find ways to speed up production — and he ran his life and his household by the same standards as his business. His wife shared in his duties, giving lectures on efficiency techniques (no small feat for a woman in 1917), and continued her husband’s work and business after he died. Then, there were their children — all twelve of them.

At first, when I saw that there was going to be a new movie made from the book, I was interested. Then, I found out that it starred Steve Martin, and I began to worry. Then I saw the previews, and my fears were confirmed — in the name of “modernization”, the story I loved as a kid has been gutted to the point where apparently the only connection to the original source material is the number of children. Such a shame.

I was ranting about this to Prairie after seeing the preview a while back, and while she could sympathize with my frustration, she couldn’t empathize, never having read the book. So, one of her Christmas presents from me this year was her own copy of Cheaper By the Dozen. She’s been reading it off and on all evening as I’ve been dinking around on the computer, and I’m constantly hearing her start to giggle (or out and out laugh) at one passage or another. I love it when something I loved so much when I was younger gives someone else the giggles as they read it for the first time.

Book recommendation: Cheaper By the Dozen

by

This post on BoingBoing reminded me of a book I haven’t read in years, but that I loved when I was a kid, and can highly recommend: Cheaper by the Dozen.

It’s the story of the Gilbreth family — dad, mom, and their twelve redheaded children — set in the early 1900’s. Mr. Gilbreth was an “efficiency expert”, obsessed with finding the most efficient ways to do everything in life, down to timing with a stopwatch whether buttoning a shirt was faster from the top down or the bottom up. I’ve just added the book to my Amazon wishlist, and will pick it up in a while, it’s long past time to re-read it.