Wow. I was about to come up completely empty this week, until I checked Lynn’s blog and found the Star Wars Guide to the Presidential Candidates. Whew! Thanks, Lynn!
One Hundred Movies!!! (31 through 40)
Zounds! More than a month has gone by…yeesh. So anyhow, when last we left this series, we’d explored 60 of my favorite movies. Let’s bump that up to 70 movies now, shall we?
40. The Crimson Pirate
A different kind of pirate flick, existing in its own kind of world, neither an Errol Flynn-style swashbuckler nor a Pirates of the Caribbean-style epic. This film is executed in fairly tongue-in-cheek manner, with Burt Lancaster as the pirate captain who finds himself involved in some derring-do, as all pirates do, I suppose. What makes this one different is the way the thrills take place: Lancaster employs some spectacular gymnastic ability in some pretty wild action sequences, some of which are downright hilarious. If you think pirate movies mostly involve crossed swords and blazing cannons, check this out. Sure, swords are crossed and cannons blaze here as well, but they’re not the focus they are in other films.
Signature moment: The Captain’s escape from certain drowning.
39. My Neighbor Totoro
This is a children’s film, quiet and contemplative, by Hayao Miyazaki, and it’s one of his very best. Two young girls move with their father to a new house in the country while their mother recovers from an unspecified illness at a hospital. While exploring their new neighborhood, the younger of the two girls discovers that the giant camphor tree outside their house is actually the dwelling of a great magical being called Totoro and his two smaller brothers, or mates, or friends, or something like that. Their adventures with Totoro involve planting magical seeds, flying through the air by midnight, and going for a ride on a giant bus that is shaped like a cat. It’s all pretty indescribable, but that makes it even more special.
Signature moment: Totoro discovers the pleasures of umbrellas.
38. Lethal Weapon
Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in one of my favorite action movies, with Glover playing the aging cop (Roger Murtaugh) who’s only looking to play it safe until retirement and Gibson as the suicidally depressed younger cop (Martin Riggs) who’s been deemed too dangerous for just about anything. The crime they’re called to solve is pretty pedestrian; the pleasure of the film is in the witty screenplay and the winning chemistry between Glover and Gibson, chemistry that would serve them well for three sequels (the first two of which are also, in my opinion, pretty good).
Signature moment: When Martin Riggs goes to a roof to talk down a jumper, with unorthodox results.
37. Jaws
I didn’t see this movie in full until I was sixteen years old, and I watched it on TBS on a Sunday afternoon, in its pan-and-scan, edited-for-television version, and I still jumped when the shark rose from the water in front of Roy Scheider. Now that‘s effective movie-making. The movie never really falters in its pacing, and though its much-cited masterstroke of keeping the shark relatively unseen until late in the film was mainly due to the fact that the mechanical shark they built didn’t work, the movie’s a masterwork of mood. It also features the first truly great score by John Williams (who, I might add, did not steal the theme from Dvorak).
Signature moment: “Smile, you son-of-a-bitch!”
36. The Man Without a Face
This was the first movie Mel Gibson directed, and for some reason it never did all that well, which has always bothered me because it’s very well-made, and it’s a far better meditation on the relationship between good teacher and curious student than the stunningly overrated Dead Poets Society. By the way, whatever became of Gaby Hoffman? I thought she was a very promising child actor. I wonder what she’s doing now.
Signature moment: Gibson and his young charge act out The Merchant of Venice in Gibson’s living room.
35. Stand By Me
I made a number of attempts to read Stephen King when I was in high school, and I never much got into him. This, coupled with the fact that just about all of the movies they made from his books for a long time were crap, led me to conclude that King is a hack. I started to wonder if I’d misjudged him when I saw Stand By Me, based on a King novella. It’s a solid, solid piece of storytelling, and highly insightful in its treatment of the dynamic between childhood friends who will inevitably drift apart in the end. I love the movie’s elegiac tone, and the only fault I’ve ever felt with it is in the bookending bits with Richard Dreyfuss; I’m not sure that learning Chris’s ultimate fate is really necessary.
Signature moment: It’s a small moment, easy to overlook, but the shopkeep who speaks to Wil Wheaton as if a life without football is incomprehensible always stands out in my mind when I think of this movie.
34. Flash Gordon
What a cheerfully, deliriously fun movie this is! Seriously, it’s just a blast. I recently bought the DVD and watched it with some trepidation, thinking it couldn’t possibly live up to the hoot I’d had in the theater seeing it when I was nine, but no, it was just about as much fun as I remembered, if not moreso. Unbelievably goofy costume design, the two most wooden lead actors I’ve ever seen, some of the gonzoest action sequences ever filmed (that football fight especially), and production design that creates a look completely distinct from the reigning Star Wars and Star Trek look of SF films of the period. Oh, and the music by Queen? How can anyone not love it?
Signature moment: “Flash! I love you, but we only have eight more hours to save the Earth!”
33. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Steven Spielberg’s tale of the Indiana electrical worker who finds himself having visions of unearthly origin, ultimately leading him and others to a rendezvous with earthbound aliens, has been a favorite film of mine for years. What’s so great about this movie, as with Jaws, is the way Spielberg blends his mystery with the mundane, so that ordinary things take on ominous tones, such as when little Barry Guiler’s toys all start lighting up and moving for no reason. The John Williams score makes a fascinating progression from atonal mystery toward tonal glory at the end, and the visuals are as stunning as anything Spielberg or George Lucas have filmed since. It’s an amazing movie.
Signature moment: The abduction of Barry Guiler is one of the most unnerving film sequences I know. I’ve never been able to hear Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” without feeling a sense of dread, thanks to this one scene.
32. 2001: A Space Odyssey
I saw 2001 when I was only nine years old. It was screened at a science fiction convention that my sister and I attended in Portland, OR. I didn’t get it. At all. I didn’t understand the movie to save my life. I’m a young kid who’s all hopped up on Star Wars, and here’s this movie supposedly about space starting off with a bunch of apes in the beginning. Then we’re in space, but there’s this tall black thing on the moon…and then there’s a computer that goes nuts…and then the movie gets really trippy. No, I didn’t understand this movie at all. But what was weird was that I wanted to understand it; I didn’t hate it or feel bored. I’m still not sure I totally understand it, but I do think it’s one of the finest films of all time.
Signature moment: The waltz of the space ships, over “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”. There are a lot of film music fans who genuinely believe that the film would work better had Stanley Kubrick actually used the Alex North score that he rejected in favor of his classical music temp track, but I’ve never agreed.
31. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Well, I don’t know what I can possibly say about this movie other than to just note its place on the list and leave it at that. So that’s what I’m doing.
Signature moment: All of ’em. Picking a favorite moment from this movie is like picking the prettiest flower from a field full of poppies. Can’t do it.
And that’s all for this entry. Still no space-based swashbuckler movies! How long can this go on?!
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Worst Sentence Ever
Wow, this one’s bad. Something I’ve noticed from sports writers in recent years is a desperate need to throw in pop-culture references when writing sports commentary. Sometimes this works well, but other times, it just feels unbelievably forced, and this example’s amazingly bad. It’s from this article which argues that the Jaguars are going to need their ground game to perform well if they want to beat the Patriots (a proposition that’s so obvious one wonders why this article was needed in the first place; what’s next, arguing that the Jags will also want to have more points than the other guys when the game ends?). It’s a pretty pedestrian article, until two-thirds of the way through, when this happens:
It’s pretty simple — successfully running the ball provides a time-of-possession element that may be more crucial than anything we’ve seen since the halcyon days of Linda Blair.
Dude, you’re doing it wrong.
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What is SF?
A bunch of SF writers are asked to define SF; hilarity ensues.
My favorite two definitions that I recall are: “SF is whatever I point at when I say SF”, and “SF is when you push a button to make something impossible happen, while fantasy is when you wave your have to make something impossible happen.”
I think that Damon Knight said the former, but I don’t remember where I got the latter, so if anyone knows, feel free to give my memory a jog. Interestingly, that second definition still fails to classify Star Wars! Personally I consider Star Wars to be SF, although it’s so strongly shot through with fantastic tropes that maybe it’s best thought of as fantasy set in space instead of Middle Earth. But for some reason, that answer just doesn’t feel right to me.
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Grief
I wrote this essay a few months ago, hoping to have it published in The Buffalo News, but they rejected it. Maybe it was too much of a downer topic, but anyway, since as the editor of Byzantium’s Shores I can accept my own writing*, here it is. The topic is, of course, grief, something I’ve had cause to think an awful lot about in recent years, and not just for the obvious reasons, either.
When a person we love dies, our friends and family surround us, offer us comfort, and pledge to do anything we ever need to get through the dark period. They laugh and cry with us as we remember the happy stories of the loved one we’ve lost, they put their arms around our shoulders and bring us meals because we’re too weak ourselves to cook, and they assure us that they are praying for us at their own home churches too. They come to the funeral, they pay their respects one last time, and then they go home. They have their own lives too, and life doesn’t stop for the living.
But what’s rarely acknowledged, or even realized, is that the for the bereaved, the funeral is just the beginning of grief. The funeral is easy. Everyone knows how to behave and how to talk to a funeral. We are not nearly as good at dealing with what comes after the funeral, when the grief settles in like an unwelcome guest.
These days, it’s hard to even notice that people around us are grieving. Gone are the days when rigid societal rules dictated how long grief would last, and when grief would be made obvious by the color of our clothes or of the drapes in the parlor. Sadly, also gone is our understanding that grief goes on not for weeks or months, but for years.
For we the grieving, it is not a temporary feeling but rather a semi-permanent state. It becomes a fact of who we are, which in turn becomes even more difficult in the face of a society that sometimes seems to believe that death and grief are not to be discussed any more than absolutely necessary. This leaves us feeling that our loved ones are best left unmentioned – or, worse, unremembered.
This is the worst of things. We want to talk about our loved ones! And not in the hushed or reverent tones best used for Saints, but in the messy tones of human feeling. We want to laugh anew at the happy stories, and we want to admit the things they did that made us so angry we could scream. We want to hear their names spoken. To know that they are still remembered, that their lives touched someone and continue to do so, is the best antidote to the sadness of grief.
So please, don’t avoid mentioning our loved ones for fear of unnecessarily reminding us of pain and anguish. Grief is not a wound we must forever fear re-opening.
And when we do cry, know that it is normal and natural. Put an arm around us and cry with us, in silence even; hugs given in silence are among the most underrated things we can do for one another. Don’t feel that you have to know the perfect thing to say, and don’t feel that you have to openly admit the inadequacy of the words that you do say. You can send a “Thinking of You” card with nothing more than just your signature inside.
Grief is probably the most burdensome of human emotions. But like all burdens, it is most easily borne when shared; and shared, it need not even be a burden at all.
End of sermon.
* You’d be surprised how often I write a post only to have my Inner Editor send me a nicely-phrased rejection letter.
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Grading the Folks
Since I can’t help myself when it comes to stealing quiz-things, here’s a quiz-thing from Messrs. Tosy and Cosh. Apparently this is supposed to gauge how advantaged you are when you enter adult life, or something like that. I’m not sure I buy the methodology, but hey, I’m always one for bolding stuff that applies to me!
So, the items, with occasional comment:
Father went to college
Father finished college
Mother went to college
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
Were the same or higher socio-economic class than your high school teachers (Geez, I have no idea. Some of ’em, probably. Others, probably not. I didn’t hang out with my teachers or go to their houses to see what kind of china they used or what cars they drove.)
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children’s books by a parent (Absolutely!)
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18 (Trumpet, piano, swimming)
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (Well, you don’t see too many long-haired hippie types in overalls on the teevee these days, so….)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18 (Yeah, what a good idea that was.)
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs (I wish I’d have gotten off my ass in college and found a part-time job to help out. This is one of few things I’d do differently if I got to re-live my life.)
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp (Ahhh, the Bristol Hills Music Camp! One of the greatest experiences of my life.)
Family vacations involved staying at hotels (Sometimes yes, sometimes it was the camper. Never really cared, as long as there was a pool and, when I got older, an arcade.)
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18 (I honestly don’t know. I never lacked for clothing, although I was never the one demanding the latest styles and whatnot. To this day, I have never owned a single pair of Levi’s.)
There was original art in your house when you were a child
You and your family lived in a single family house
Your parent(s) owned their own house(s) or apartment before you left home (I’m leaving this one unbolded because I genuinely don’t know when the mortgage got paid off, and I’m pretty sure that it was none of my business, anyway.)
You had your own room as a child (I don’t remember ever not having my own room.)
You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School (No cable, though, ran to my room, so I either used the aerial antenna on the house or just used the teevee as the “monitor” for my VIC-20.)
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (I never flew until college)
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family (OK, I’m cheating here, counting canoeing and kayaking trips as cruising. Hey, it’s what we did. A part of heaven had better be just like the Clarion and Youghiogheny Rivers, or I’m going to be mad when I get there!)
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (Not terribly often, but we did go. I still have a few very vivid memories of the year I was in kindergarten, and we went to Chicago to see the Treasures of King Tutankhamun. As I grew up, school took this function over more and more.)
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family. (Well, my parents generally didn’t tell me how much bills were, although I did hear the occasional kvetching over high bills or the like. Also, once we settled in Western New York in 1981, we used wood for our heating exclusively until the gas lines finally got laid up to my parents’ house, sometime while I was in college, I think. And even then they continued using wood for some years, until the wood stove itself gave up the ghost. I have fond memories of getting up on icy winter mornings and stoking the great iron beast with wood, of huddling around the stove as it heated up, of the terribly uneven heat of the thing as sometimes we’d overstoke the thing and end up with a ninety-degree house, of the cat who’d lick the stove when it wasn’t containing a fire [with no apparent ill effect, as that cat lived to be twenty] and the occasional hilarity when Dad would mislay his checkbook and invariably become convinced that he’d thrown it into the stove. [He never actually did turn out to have thrown it in there, so far as I can recall.])
Received a beating from my mother when she discovered a wire hanger in my closet. (I sure learned my lesson that day: plastic hangers, or nothing!)
(OK, that last one didn’t happen.)
So yeah: the Rockefellers we weren’t, but neither were we the Ingallses.
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Sentential Links #123
Wow. Been a while, eh?
:: You ever have a friend who is just… different when he/she drinks? I’m not saying that Jim Kirk has a problem, it’s just that I get uncomfortable around him when he drinks. So do my dogs. (The post is a couple of weeks old, but who cares?)
:: And they’re all gone now. I remain. I remember. Do they?
:: You know what they have on the cigarette package in Great Britain? In great big letters? (I have less and less sympathy for smokers these days, I have to admit.)
:: In some perverse tribute to you, I watched “High Fidelity”–or the parts I could see through my tears–tonight. (This blog continues to break my heart every time I read it.)
:: Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
:: Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan? (Salty language alert)
:: No one wants to read a blog that’s all flowers and rainbows and fuzzy bunnies. (So that explains the drop in my traffic over the last year! [rimshot] )
All for this week, as usual.
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Sunday Burst of Weirdness
How to serve your customers (if you hate them)
BuffaloGeek recently made a vehicle purchase at Joe Cecconi Chrysler, and the resulting transaction with Joe Cecconi Chrysler did not go well. It seems that the people at Joe Cecconi Chrysler consider customer service to have ended as soon as the vehicle is off the lot, and that any attempt by a customer to procure more service from Joe Cecconi Chrysler constitutes attempted theft of services or something similar. It appears that lying and refusing to talk to customers is the way things are done at Joe Cecconi Chrysler, which is a shame. It’s not like there are lots of other Chrysler dealerships in the region; why, Joe Cecconi Chrysler is just about the only place to by a Chrysler for a fifty-mile radius, so it’s not like the guys at Joe Cecconi Chrysler will miss out on commissions if word of the abysmal, combative, and downright rude customer service at Joe Cecconi Chrysler should get out.
So shop at Joe Cecconi Chrysler if you must, folks, but hold on to your wallets, and make sure you get all the service you think you’ll ever need before you sign the dotted line with the salespeople at Joe Cecconi Chrysler.
Remember that name: Joe Cecconi Chrysler. That’s a name you can trust.
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I-oh-way
When I was picking colleges, one small factor that led to me choosing to go to school in Iowa was the Iowa caucuses; I thought it would be really cool to be there for that entire process. This was in 1989, when I was about to graduate high school; I was anticipating the 1992 caucuses.
And then, when 1992 finally rolled around, Iowa’s own Senator Tom Harkin ran for the Democratic nomination, which meant that the Iowa caucuses meant absolutely nothing and New Hampshire became the big prize.
Oh well.
My point? I don’t have one, of course.