Six Summer Goals Achieved

You know how you always look forward to time off, and make grandiose plans for sucking the marrow out of every second, and then when the time finally comes you invariably squander it?  I do that constantly, but summer is the worst.  This year I decided to break down some of my larger goals and focus on making small progress on some of them. 

On May 22, I wrote a list of 27 things to do this summer.  I gave myself until the last day before I would go back to work–August 18–to do them.  Now, two of them were very poorly planned, so I really had 25 things to do. 

Out of those 25, I did 6.  A few others were close or in progress, but only 6 can be confidently checked off. 

Still, sadly, that makes this my most productive summer ever.

Here are the six things I did:

Fireproof: A Great “Mormon” Movie

My wife and I rented this movie for date night on Friday, and we were both struck by how powerful it was.  Fireproof is an independent film produced by a team of evangelical Christians.  To the best of my knowledge, no Latter-day Saints were involved in any aspect of it.  And it’s just about the best Mormon movie I’ve ever seen.

By which I mean that this film better reflects the values of Latter-day Saints about marriage and family than anything I’ve seen that actually was produced by Mormons.  Fireproof treats marriage overtly as a “covenant,” and praises it as a joyful and integral priority in life.  Fireproof also makes it stunningly clear that no relationship is whole and complete until God’s love is brought into it.  Indeed, none of the relatively few doctrinal statements in the film would be uncomfortable for any Latter-day Saint.

But it’s not a dry, didactic documentary.  When Fireproof was released last year, critics panned it, so you know right away that it’s probably pretty good. 

Recommended Reading: 2001: A Space Odyssey

Although I was first exposed to Kubrick’s classic film in high school, I was too sleepy/ dumb/ apathetic to pay much attention.  Despite that, I was pretty familiar with it, if only because of the ubiquitous references to it in pop culture (I can remember at least a few just from Sesame Street). 

A few years ago, I found myself planning for the last day of summer school, where I would spend the first half of the day reviewing and then administering a final exam, and the second half of the day grading it and filling out paperwork.  As the students would obviously be done with the course itself after the exam, an extraneous activity was needed to fill the time while I worked.  (Technically, administrations are supposed to have us give the exam and grade it during the second half of the last day, while we’re simultaneously supposed to continue doing regular class work with them–an expectation so impossibly ridiculous that nobody anywhere has ever tried to enforce it).

Not being a fan of time-wasting movies, I wanted something calm and cerebral for them to try.  Remembering 2001, I checked it out of the library.  As long and slow as it is, (and as much as I was trying to focus on my work, which I mercifully finished earlier than I’d expected to), I was dazzled by it, by all of it: the visuals, the music, the ambition of the story’s epic scope.  How could such a simple and simply-told movie be so fantastically overwhelming? 

Since then, this has been a landmark of art in my mind.  Thus it’s not surprising that, eventually, I’d read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, which he wrote at the same time as he and Kubrick wrote the screenplay. 

Recommended Viewing: Two Chinese Movies

Last month the local library district hosted a film festival on three consecutive Thursday nights, showing some Chinese movies that I hadn’t seen.  I was interested, but my schedule doesn’t allow me to just up and saunter over to the theater on a weeknight, so I found two of the movies at the library and watched them when I did have some time.

The Road Home was a fine movie, most especially as the screen debut of young Zhang Ziyi, who would go on to be the ”invincible sword goddess” in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  Here, she is a rural farm girl infatuated with a city slicker school teacher.  Her charmingly unselfconscious devotion is a breath of fresh air. 

In what was the movie’s most entertaining scene, she runs through the woods trying to catch up to the teacher as he’s being taken by a carriage back to the big city.  She rushes over and down wooded hills to cut off the carriage and give her crush the meal in a bowl that she’s lovingly prepared for him.  The camera tracks long shots of her running through the forest in thick snow pants, the only sound a deep corduroy zhoop-zhoop-zhoop.  Its simple romance–for emotion and for nature–is elemental. 

My 9-year-old son was watching this one with me, and around this point he even said, “I wish I lived near a forest.  It would be so calm and peaceful to be able to just sit around and listen to the birds.”  So it runs in the family. 

Recommended Viewing: A Man For All Seasons

I’d actually seen this movie before.  When I was a senior in high school, an older man at my church started inviting me to watch some deep, classic movies with him and then talk about them.  For some reason, it never occurred to me to question why this casual acquaintance was taking such a sudden interest in me.  In retrospect, leaders at church probably saw how unstable I was and had asked him, a steady, intellectual sort with whom I might have some things in common, to take me under his wing and give me some support.  If it was an assignment, it sure never felt like it, and I’m glad we had that time together.

Anyway, one of the movies he introduced me to was A Man For All Seasons.  However, being a slacker teenager, I regret to admit that I feel asleep right away and was out the whole time.  I felt pretty bad, because I remember him telling me that it was his favorite movie. 

I just went back and watched it again yesterday, and now it’s one of my favorites, too.

Let me start with a minor observation: this is a very talky film, and therefore chiefly filmed indoors (or at least enclosed areas), and therefore has few outdoor or panoramic shots.  Still, the background and scenery that we do get is breathtaking.  The alternating snows and flowers of England are a joy to behold, and somehow these older movies capture them for us with a visceral liveliness that the more “sophisticated” current methods lack. 

Now, on to the star of the show.  Paul Scofield’s majestic turn as Sir Thomas More?  No, the dialogue. 

Five Classic Movies I’ve Seen In The Last Month

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

I heard an interview on the radio in the early 90’s with rap group Public Enemy where they were asked about cursing out John Wayne in one of their songs.  Chuck D said it was a protest against Wayne “going around shooting Indians” in his movies.

I thought about this as I watched She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, where Wayne stars as an old cavalry commander who finds himself about to retire just as a conflict is escalating with nearby Native American tribes.  At the end of the film, desperate to stop the brewing fighting, Wayne goes to see the old chief of the Indians.  Showing an easy familiarity with and respect for their culture, Wayne asks this longtime friend to help him stop the younger men from starting a war.  The old chief tells Wayne that there’s nothing they can do because they’re too old.  In one of the most moving, stereotype-defying quotes I’ve ever heard on film, Wayne chuckles and says, with the kind of gentle chiding we use to disagree with good friends, “Old men should stop wars.” 

Wayne then risks his career, just hours before retiring with full benefits and honors, to go against orders and lead a run on the Indians’ camp and chase their horses away, thus averting the crisis without violence. 

I suppose Chuck D never saw She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. 

Incidentally, it was a terrific movie.  I especially enjoyed the shots of a wagon company moving along the plains under a gathering thunderstorm.  Very atmospheric. 

 

Singin’ In The Rain

There’s a lot to recommend this classic musical.  First of all, it’s hilarious.  As Gene Kelly recounts his career at the beginning of the film, I was surprised to see such a relatively old movie sporting such a pitch-perfect satire of Hollywood’s excessive foibles.  Jean Hagen’s work as the ditsy, scheming, annoying-voiced bombshell is still unsurpassed.  That alone makes me wish more people would see this movie now: that character will always be funny.  And Donald O’Connor’s athletic slapstick during the “Make ‘Em Laugh” number was impressive as choreography and as comedy.  It certainly makes anything Jim Carrey or Jack Black has ever done look like child’s play.

 

Howard’s End

I was apprehensive about this one, because I was underwhelmed by Anthony Hopkins’ and Emma Thompson’s other joint effort, Remains of the Day.  I needn’t have been.  This slightly soap opera-y web of social criticism takes on class divisions in early 20th century Edwardian England.  This may be the only movie where the upper class British bad guys are actually portrayed realistically, even with some sympathy, and not just as cartoon monsters.  A young Helena Bonham Carter is a joy to watch as Thompson’s fiery younger sister, whose passion ranges from indignation to biting wit to spontaneous romance.  Really, it’s a wonder I didn’t like Pride and Prejudice more than I did. 

Not to short change the cast, but I was equally thrilled by the cinematography and score here.  Howard’s End reminds us just how subtly beautiful the English countryside is; verdant green is always gorgeous, especially when veiled by a misty gray breeze.  And the music!  The delicate piano throughout the film was more than just a complement, it was symbiotic.  This is one of the few movies of which I know where the music truly is that important, and stands well on its own (Hitchcock’s Rear Window is another example).  I could see myself buying this soundtrack and listening to it on the way home from work.

 

The 39 Steps

Speaking of Hitchcock, this was the latest entry in my efforts to screen his oeuvre.  This very early work is just typical, ordinary Hitch, which is to say, brilliant.  One of the great joys of seeing his movies is finding those elemental devices that influenced later cinema so thoroughly that it’s like discovering an ancient Ur-text (North By Northwest and Strangers On A Train might be the best examples here). 

Sadly, since we’ve all been raised on those derivative movies that are so saturated in Hitchcock’s legacy, seeing his original visions can leave us feeling flat, since the celluloid for which we have such nostalgia was usually so much more exaggerated than those earlier classics.  Such is sometimes the case with The 39 Steps, but it will still surprise you. 

Our Everyman protagonist is on the run from a sinister cabal of spies that he has haplessly crossed (naturally), and some of his exploits rely on more coincidence on his part and negligence on his enemies’ part than we would find credible today.  Still, the pacing and plotting here is taught, and the scene where our hero wows a crowd with an impromptu speech at a political convention as he evades the authorities is worth two hours of your life by itself.  And a tasteful “bedroom” scene where he is handcuffed to an equally hapless heroine is a touching reminder that this world used to be a simpler, sweeter place, and made for better entertainment than the lowest common denominator sludge we see today.

Last year I saw this movie in a bin at Wal Mart for a dollar.  I wish I would’ve gotten it.

 

Solaris

I’ve read that this 1972 science fiction psychodrama was Russia’s answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The similarities are obvious: these are both ambitious stories using space travel as a metaphor for humanity’s civilizational journey, though Kubrick’s was extroverted, whereas this Russian gem is almost painfully introverted.  The slow, moody pacing of both films certainly stresses our attention spans, but also allows us to savor the style of presentation, if not always the heavy handed ideas.

In fact, one scene in Solaris has an old cosmonaut being driven down a monotonous, sterile city highway, a scene which stretches on for minutes.  I started asking myself what the point of that was, until some sonic sound effects began erupting at us from the vanishing point of the road up ahead.  We were probably being taken into the cosmonaut’s quietly tortured psyche (as a result of a shocking experience at Solaris years before), but I couldn’t help but also be reminded of Dave Bowman’s psychedelic space flight at the end of 2001.  Two sides of the same coin, perhaps?

Solaris makes explicit references to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky near the end, and clearly wants to be taken as seriously.  I respect the audacity of a film this somber, but found much of its emotional pontificating to be trite.  Still, the film is well made and worthwhile, though not something I plan to see again.  But maybe I should; the last time I saw 2001 I got much more out of it than the first time.  I suppose films like this, slow and sparse as they are, might still need time to grow on you.

Recommended Viewing: The Straight Story

The Straight Story is an adult movie.  Not a dirty movie, but an adult movie, meaning that it’s meant for adults.  If it’s not adult in the sense that it has inappropriate content, then how is it adult?  In the sense that it deals with things that are most keenly felt and understood by those who have a lifetime of experience behind them–nostalgia, regret, philosophy, anxiety about living rightly and dying with dignity and purpose.  There’s nothing in it to offend anyone, but it would put anyone under 20 (or maybe 30, or, these days, perhaps 50) to sleep. 

The plot, based on a true story, concerns a very old man who is going to reconcile with his long-estranged brother in another state (before it’s too late), and he’s going on the only thing he can drive–a riding lawnmower.  It’s a mature film; like it’s protagonist, it knows where it’s going, and it’s in no hurry to get there with any fanciness or noise.  It’s The Odyssey on a small scale, but with no less heart. 

Director David Lynch, best known for “edgy, shocking” films, shows superbly restrained craftsmanship in this G-rated Disney fare.  He treats his hero, Alvin Straight, with unqualified respect, but doesn’t sugar coat the essential absurdity of the quest.  This Odyssey stars a stoic Don Quixote. 

Richard Farnsworth was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of Straight as stubborn but kindly, intent on maintaining his independence and earnest about being a good man.  His performance imbued the character with more humanity than most genuine humans I’ve known.  In one modestly humorous scene, Straight demurely yet assertively picks apart a repair bill for his lawnmower and gets the twins who had fixed it to lower their price, then adds a tasteful admonition to the younger men to treat each other better, his eyes clearly showing that his own brother weighs heavily on his mind. 

Another scene, the best in the film and one of the best ever filmed, suits the emotional landscape perfectly: Straight and another old timer sit in a bar, each nursing a mug of beer, and they start to quietly tell stories of especially painful memories of World War II.  These are the kinds of stories that you don’t just rattle off to the grandkids when they come to visit, and even in the company of another veteran, each man here sounds like he’s thinking out loud more than like he’s telling a story.  The scene is slow and quiet to the point of being somber, but it’s that very realistic sobriety that keeps such a serious subject from turning  into sentimental fluff. 

The brothers’ reunion at the end is shot just as simply as the rest of the film, lending it a credibility that more bombastic works lack.  Even after all we’ve seen Straight go through to get here, especially after it, these men deserve their privacy.  But, to labor something that should be obvious by now, theirs is not to be a teary-eyed Oprah-style reunion; rather, the two old men greet each other and quietly settle down on the porch to watch the stars.  No movie ever had a more appropriate ending. 

As much as I love The Straight Story now, as much as I’m grateful for a film that suggests such beautiful depth with such minimal pomp, which respects its viewers as much as its hero, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll love it even more as I age; that, like all good art, I’ll get even more out of it when I go back and watch it in another twenty or thirty years.

Paraders Of The Lost Art (Of Making Fun Movies)

I was 12 years old when Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out.  Though I remembered my parents taking my little brother and I to go see Temple of Doom at southern Nevada’s last drive-in (the bug scene scared the daylights out of us–I was part of the crowd whose soiled drawers created the PG-13 rating!), Last Crusade opened a whole new vista to me.  All that nerdy knowledge, all that rugged machismo, all that adventure, all because he loved history!  I was in.  I even read the novelization that my teacher got for her classroom.

Granted, my childhood archaeology phase was no more lasting than my lawyer phase (thank you, L.A. Law) or my astronaut ambitions (courtesy of Star Trek), but when I went to the library to learn what ancient civilizations were the least understood–and therefore offered the greatest chances for “fortune and glory”–the undisputed winner was the oldest American tribes: the Olmec and the Inca.  I picked up some books on those, as well as the Maya and Aztec. 

And several years later I fell in love with the Book of Mormon.  Hmm.

Anyway, back to Indiana Jones, my point with this anecdote is to introduce my connection to this series: unlike most men my age, I care more about Indiana Jones than I do about Star Wars (Has it struck anyone else that the wait between Return of the Jedi and the first prequel–16 years–produced people camping in lines for weeks, but that the wait between Last Crusade and Crystal Skull–three years longer at 19–hasn’t produced anywhere near that level of hysteria?  What gives?) .  Not surprisingly, then, as I drove to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this afternoon, I couldn’t shake off all the lukewarm reviews I’d read, and the nagging voice in the back of my mind chanting, Phantom Menace, Phantom Menace, Phantom Menace…

Please let me buck the trend and proclaim that Crystal Kingdom may well be the best of the four. 

First, I was overjoyed to see that after three movies dealing with mysterious artifacts of the Eastern Hemisphere, this one delved into that enchanted world I intended to explore when I was 12–Mesoamerica.  The movie uses this background quite competently.  It even incorporated some, uh, modern American mythology.

Indiana Jones was never meant to be taken literally–the series is an homage to the melodramatic serials of Spielberg’s childhood.  Think Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.   So it’s perfectly natural that this movie should be a take-off of 50’s B-movies.  It does this with a delightful tongue in cheek; this movie perfectly balances the boyish appeal of silly excitement with the need for Indy to actually be 20 years older.  Magic.

The movie also had tasteful imagery that conjured vague allusions to all three of the previous films (as well as overt references to the Ark, and to incidents from the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles).  One friend of mine caught shades of the X Files, another points to Close Encounters of the Third Kind; those are both solid inspirations here, though I’m partial to using Stargate as a metaphor, myself. 

Incidentally, [WARNING: minor spoiler alert] the bit with the ants, though exaggerated, is essentially realistic.  Actually, mass ant migrations can be much, much larger than implied in the film, and plenty destructive.  This gets trotted out in sci-fi and horror films every now and then (such as Charlton Heston’s The Naked Jungle and, as I recall, an episode of MacGyver), and was a worthy entry in Indy’s pest-antagonist roll. 

Also, the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull that Indy says he and Oxley were obsessed with as kids is likewise real, and one of the weirdest things I’ve ever read about.  Give yourself some goosebumps and look it up: http://www.mitchell-hedges.com/.

Some critics say that computer animation was too heavy here, especially given the painstaking realism of the first three movies.  Over-use of CGI is the bane of this decade–the late 20th and early 21st century-era will be remembered as an awkward adolescence in the use of computer animation in movies.  The end of The Mummy Returns (which is a very appropriate comparison here, for those of you who have seen Crystal Skull), almost ruins its climax with so much CGI that it looks like a cartoon.  I’m happy to report that CGI in Crystal Skull is responsible and used sparingly. 

Before I go on too much more, let me say that I don’t just remember Last Crusade, I remember the vicious nit-picking it suffered for everything from its perceived resemblance to Raiders to its allegedly lame humor…both views that have been corrected by the light of hindsight.  I rest easy knowing that all the nay-sayers of Crystal Skull will likewise come around and, in another twenty years, acknowledge that this entry in the series is equal to any other, and might even be better.

Recommended Viewing: Rio Bravo

I recently read this excellent essay from Dissent, about the humanizing, community-oriented aspect of the old John Wayne movie, Rio Bravo: http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=996.  In my ongoing efforts to become as much of an old-fashioned, out-of-touch iconoclast as possible, I’ve been wanting to get into some John Wayne movies for a while, never having seen one.  After reading this intriguing essay, I checked it out of the library.

Wow.

The author of that essay was right, but only came up short in that he didn’t go far enough in praising this brawny, brainy masterpiece.  I’ve long felt that older movies have more heart and guts than most current movies, and now I’ve found the epitome of that argument.

Rio Bravo is more than just “humanizing.”  It’s a thoughtful, intense morality tale of self-sacrifice, honor, and redemption.  Dean Martin as a drunk deputy is more believable than most any other role I’ve ever seen any actor play.  (And he even gets to drawl out a mellow cowboy tune near the end!)

Martin’s character is just one example of the sympathetic yet firm psychology of this film.  When Martin’s deputy seems about to relapse, Wayne’s sheriff character gets curt with him.  Another character takes him to task for it, and Wayne can only impatiently head for the door and mutter, “Be nice and he’ll just fall apart in small pieces.” 

Just as much as Casablanca (or an episode of Gilmore Girls), Rio Bravo is built on a foundation of sharp dialogue (in fact, one of the surprises of this film for those of us new to classic Westerns is how much more narrative, character development, and good old fashioned dialogue there is than action; the effect is to make the action all the more startling).  In particular, the frequent battles of wits between Wayne and slightly-bad girl Angie Dickinson are worthy of anything Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan were ever in together, only twice as good. 

Next on my to-do list: The Alamo, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers. 

There is one problem with going back to enjoy the classics, though.  Once you have, you realize just how weak everything that you’ve been raised by the media to appreciate for the last twenty years truly is.  Oh well.  Give me Rio Bravo over the latest testosterone fantasy any day.

Final Grade: A+