Kip Kiplinger reviews "Casablanca"

It's noir hijinks galore for tough guy Humphrey Bogart and legendary Swedish film maker Ingmar Bergman as they share a cabin on the good ship Casablanca. Pre-dating the similarly fated Titanic by a good 10 years the Casablanca was doomed not by a menacing iceburg but, instead, by a rift in the time/space continuum. Special appearances by Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead...the latter, you know, having lost a finger on his right hand in a bloody table saw incident that some of you who live in the Cedar Valley plains will recognize as the stuff of legend.

The film adaptation of what had originally been a best selling book, translated into 73 different languages, it was the subject of discussion in every major liberal intellectual gathering of the last who knows you count 'em number of years. Directed by the beautiful, talented and sexy as all get out, ladies and gentlemen I present once again to you, the fantabuloisly fantastic Ms. Ingrid Bergman.

And she shows up and the place blows up, you shoulda known that gonna happen by the muscle in my tone. When she's walkin' she's stalkin', I be quiet when she talking, it ain't yo' fault, man, for caring more than I do, it ain't yo' fault, Joe, for taking up my spare time. My friend, I forgive you every time. This is the kind of bullshit nonsense you ain't got to worry about. You put that bullshit on me, everybody...you put that nonsense on me. You don't wanna know her, cuz if you got to know her, you'd realize that no one really knows her,

Ah, but "Casablamca". we were kind of talking about Casablanca, weren't we? What was the general consesus? More or less tragic than Titanic? I'm going to say more for no other reason than that I don't judge tragedy on that kind of scale. A single unjust death is every bit as deplorable as a holocaust. You must accept this as truth for it is through the voice of the very God you serve that I confront you now, much in the same manner as I got to know the prophet Neale Donald Walsh. He was open to my voice. I know you are open to my voice too.

Do you want to know how I know?

By the wonder I see in your eyes as you gaze into the night time sky with the pink moon shining finally come to get us all. Pink pink pink pink...pink moon. None of the people who were onboard the "good ship" Casablance on that fateful March evening would ever get to hear Nick Drake. Or the Beatles. Or Sigur Ros. The people on board "Bogart's Boat" (as the redheads christened it) most surely had the equivalent doses of wonder and sorrow, heartache and joy, nausea and bliss, those redheads really had a way with taking some of the sting out of any situation in which the sting was in need of being excised. The film adaptation is very obviously trying to get a feel for the old school with this mashed potato.

In a scene reminiscent of (or more likely ripped off from) Bergman's masterpiece The Seventh Seal, Bogart and the director himself indulge in a friendly game of chess. For all Bogart knew they still had a deal pending from a previous encounter so he was happy to wager a higher amount than he normally would have been comfortable betting. And that self destructive style of dental hygiene you've been perfecting has been getting extremely good reviews in every conceivable venue. It looks as if you've finally found a way to incorporate this disturbing obsession you have with

to be continued