Category: On Movies

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

It’s that time of year again: the annual debate over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie!

My personal opinion is that this one’s easy: yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. But a friend on Facebook made an interesting argument against Die Hard‘s Christmas status the other day, and I want to tease it out a little more. Basically his view is that there is nothing intrinsically Christmas to Die Hard, at least not in the same way that Christmas is intrinsic to Miracle on 34th Street (his example). Basically, my friend argues that you can’t have Miracle on 34th Street take place any other time of year, where Die Hard actually can take any time of year.

Now, I’m honestly not sure about my friend’s argument. I mean, Miracle on 34th Street does seem to require Christmas, but I’m sure you could tell pretty much the same story at some other time of year, though it would definitely require quite a bit of heavy lifting in the writing department to make it work. And could Die Hard take place any other time? Sure. Obviously it could. Hans Gruber and friends could just take over the building on Easter Sunday, or July 4. As I noted to my friend, I’ve seen Die Hard set at another time of year. It’s called Die Hard With a Vengeance.

My problem with my friend’s argument is that it’s deeply limiting as to what constitutes a “Christmas movie”. Does a Christmas movie have to involve Christmas to such a degree that it literally can’t take place any other time? I don’t think so. Die Hard isn’t just set at Christmastime; it intrinsically involves a lot of emotions that come to the fore at that time. Family concerns. Redemption. Getting home for the holidays, safe and sound. Are those ideas unique to Christmas? No, but they are most certainly central to Christmas. So, could Die Hard take place at some other time? Sure. But the Christmastime setting gives it a subtext that engages the emotions, doesn’t it? Die Hard has a lot going for it as a movie: it’s extremely well-made, a virtual masterpiece in its genre, but a lot of action movies are well-made. It’s the emotions that keep it so re-watchable now, 35 years or so after it came out; the Christmas setting is part of how Die Hard gets us to care about its characters.

So I would argue that yes, Die Hard is most definitely a Christmas movie. I also argue that the first Lethal Weapon movie, also set at Christmas, is a Christmas movie, for similar reasons, even though LW doesn’t push the Christmas subtext quite as hard as Die Hard. Still, LW makes Martin Riggs’s redemption and his finding meaning after his wife’s death one of the major emotional subplots, and that is very much informed by Christmas.

Now, how about Die Hard 2? It also takes place at Christmas! It’s also about getting home, and all the other stuff, isn’t it? Well, that one I think has less of a claim as a Christmas movie than the original, but for me that’s more because in that respect it doesn’t do much new with the Christmas theme from the first film. And that’s interesting to me, given how inventive and fresh Die Hard 2 actually is. That movie does not get enough credit for not repeating the first movie.

There’s another way for a movie to be a Christmas movie, but it’s a more nebulous one: it’s our own associations. Ultimately it’s up to us to decide what’s a Christmas movie, isn’t it? The Sound of Music has become a Christmas tradition, even though its story has nothing to do with Christmas at all. (On a more limited note, “My Favorite Things” has become a staple of Christmas songs, and there’s nothing about it at all that’s intrinsic to Christmas.) For me, My Fair Lady is a Christmas movie, because I watched it the first time right around Christmas and that’s just the association I have with it. And my beloved On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which takes place at Christmas, is absolutely a Christmas movie. And I’ll bet there are a lot of families who always watch some completely non-Christmas movie every year at Christmas, because of one tradition or another, so for them, that movie is a Christmas movie.

There are many ways to be a Christmas movie, and I think that’s a good thing. So: in conclusion Your Honor, I insist that Die Hard most certainly is a Christmas movie, and that therefore the score to Die Hard, composed by the wonderful and dearly-missed Michael Kamen, is by extension Christmas music. That being the case, I close with this suite.

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“The poor man can’t concentrate for more than an hour. YOU gave him four.”

The title quote comes from Amadeus, when Mozart protests to Salieri that his new opera, The Marriage of Figaro, has closed after just nine performances. The opera’s fate, according to the film, was doomed when Emperor Joseph II of Austria yawned during the fourth act.

Demands upon audiences have been a concern of artists for…well, pretty much forever, I suppose. When an orchestra puts, say, Mahler’s Third or Bruckner’s Eighth on the program, those symphonies take up the entire evening’s work. Do the performances include intermission? I honestly don’t know.

I’m thinking about this after reading Mark Evanier’s post about the new Martin Scorsese movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, which has a running time of 206 minutes: almost three and a half hours. The question is simply: Should movies like this have an intermission?

I remember having an intermission during a three-hour movie a handful of times in my life. I recall one during Gandhi, way back when, and during Dances With Wolves. In both cases, neither film was made with an intermission in mind, so the projection simply stopped around halfway through and a theater employee called out, “Intermission!” In each case, the stoppage was artificial and might have even hurt the story: Gandhi‘s came right after the harrowing sequence of the massacre at Amritsar, and the Dances one came right before the buffalo hunt. Neither film really suffered, exactly, but a much better experience came with My Fair Lady, which we saw a few years ago via Fathom Events. There was an intermission there, too, but the movie was made to end on a full stop before the intermission (it’s an adaptation of a Broadway show, after all), so the story reaches a satisfying point, goes to intermission, and then gets the ball rolling again once the intermission is over.

Mr. Evanier says the following:

In other words, my options are to experience it exactly the way Martin Scorsese would like it to be seen or to see it (1) the way its director wants it seen or (2) missing one or more chunks of the movie — including possibly key, important scenes — entirely or (3) seeing it on a smaller screen without the same undivided attention we muster in a movie theater but not in our dens and inserting pauses anywhere I, not Mr. Scorsese, would like. And let’s not forget (4) don’t see it at all.

Option #1 gives him close to total control of how I see his film.  Option #3 gives him absolutely none.  I don’t think Option #2 would please him.  If he thinks an intermission would distract from my enjoyment of his film, how would he like the fact that my bladder or I pick a random time to miss fifteen minutes of it?  And distract other audience members in the process of exiting and re-entering?

That seems to me a pretty accurate summation. He’s actually responding to an earlier article in Salon in which a writer specifically argues against intermissions:

One common argument in the pro-intermission column is that three-hour movies simply require breaks because people need breaks from long movies. I find that argument to be flimsy at best because why even go see a long movie in a theater if you already know you will need a break from it? If you know a film that long is being shown at a theater, maybe you should wait until the film is released on streaming so you can watch it in chunks. Is it normal to want to get up after sitting for a few hours? Absolutely, but does that mean you should go to a three-hour-long Scorsese film? I vote nah. Sometimes it’s easier to pick your battles instead of fighting to change a well-oiled machine that seems to be working for most moviegoers.

I may not be the biggest fanatic of three-hour-long movies, but I go to see them in the theater because I want that immersive moviegoing experience. I watched “Killers of the Flower Moon” this past Sunday and, yes, I did become tired after the second hour of the film. Yes, I did close my eyes for a short break to collect myself. But that’s OK, because it’s a long movie. Nobody is denying that. Let’s be real, I did it for “Oppenheimer,” too. But does that mean I need an intermission for a break to get a snack or go to the bathroom? Honestly, no. I never felt the need to get up out of my chair and take myself out of the insanely intense and heightened atmosphere that Scorsese masterfully crafted in this film.

If we are discussing the moviegoing experience entirely, some say that intermission will only increase the audience’s positive experiences at theaters. Intermissions will further prepare the audience to be more engaged in the film. To that, I argue that it will actually do the opposite — it has the potential to be detrimental to the moviegoing experience. Firstly, wouldn’t an intermission just make a three-hour moving-watching experience even longer? Secondly, filmmakers are against it because it may have the potential to alter their artistic vision for their films. To me, an intermission would interrupt the rhythm and flow of a perfect film like “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Directors, like Scorsese, have specific visions for how a film should be seen and if they don’t want intermissions we have to respect their artistic vision, because maybe they know what they’re talking about.

The Salon article is, I submit, deeply weird, in a lot of ways. The idea that an intermission is “detrimental to the moviegoing experience” just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Seeing My Fair Lady on the big screen was a revelatory experience for me, almost an exercise in pure joy. How was it lessened by having an intermission, especially since the film was made with an intermission in mind? For that matter, how were the other films I saw with intermissions artificially shoe-horned into the experience by the theater lessened? They weren’t.

You know what does detract from the experience? All that squirming as one realizes one might need to go relieve oneself. All that wondering: “Can I make it to the end of this?” That’s an actual breaking of the “immersive experience” of moviegoing, not to mention the actual act of finally getting up and going to the rest room. The rhythm and flow of a “perfect film” is interrupted anyway, so why not just build it in?

For that matter, are we seriously maintaining that Martin Scorsese, one of the greatest cinematic storytellers in history, can’t structure his films to accommodate these simple needs? Especially when just about every other art form out there does? No Wagner opera is played without break. You can pause a movie at home at will. In a follow-up post, Mr. Evanier posts a comment by a correspondent:

As you are well aware, it is the rare stage production that does not have an intermission. I have never been to a professional performance that didn’t have one and in my amateur acting career, appeared in only one show that was done without an intermission — and that one was only about 75 minutes long. If stage directors and playwrights can keep the audience’s attention enough to have them come back from a 15 or 20 minute break, I fail to see why their cinematic counterparts cannot do the same.

Sports have half-times (even baseball has the seventh-inning stretch).

What the hell makes movies so special that they must be consumed in one singular and unbroken sitting? Seriously, literally no other art form or past-time makes this demand. What’s so sacredly immersive about seeing a movie that doesn’t apply to watching a television program, or attending a classical music concert or opera, or watching Shakespeare in the Park?

Further, why are movies the one art form where we put such primacy on “how it is meant to be seen”? That ship has pretty much sailed, right? Let’s be honest here: artists don’t really get any say at all in how we experience their work. If they did, the only way to hear Wagner’s Parsifal would be to go to Bayreuth. If they did, Shakespeare would only be done in a theater on the Thames. Am I going against the artist’s intent when I listen to music on recording as opposed to a live performance? How about if I read a novel on a Kindle by an author who died in 1952?

The artistic vision in a movie is what’s on the screen. Nothing more, and nothing less. How far does this go? Does Scorsese get to tell us not to see his movies in modern theaters with reclining seats?

These objections may sound extreme, but really, I do not get for the life of me why the moviegoing experience is so sacred, especially now that our living rooms are getting better and better at presenting movies. No, I don’t have a full size 32-feet-by-18-feet screen, but what of it? One of the best movies I’ve watched in the last year is Hugo, by none other than Martin Scorsese. Am I to believe that my experience watching it was so much the worse because I didn’t see it in a theater but in my own home? And when I hit the ‘pause’ button at home, am I really disrespecting the artistic intention of the filmmaker?

Anyway, yes, I feel that long movies should have intermissions, and moreover, that they should be constructed to put the intermission in a good place, story-wise. If they don’t want to do that, fine…but then I’m almost certainly not sitting through a movie that long at the theater again. For me, biology tends to trump artistic vision. Movies are an art, yes, and they are a wonderful art. But they are not an art that demands a unique degree of unbroken immersion in the experience, any more than one must read The Brothers Karamazov in one sitting to get the full Dostoevsky experience.

 

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LB

Netflix released a trailer for the upcoming movie Maestro today, and let me tell you…I am well-and-truly excited to see this movie. It will be on Netflix in late December, right in time for my Christmastime vacation. I’ve watched this trailer three times, and not only does it make me want to listen to Mahler’s Second, it also leaves me honestly astonished at how deeply Bradley Cooper seems to have disappeared into Leonard Bernstein. There are times in this trailer when the artifice is so convincing I can barely spot it.

Leonard Bernstein is one of my musical heroes–and my writing heroes, come to that–and I have the highest possible hopes for this film.

 

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Two sentences each on some movies we’ve watched recently

I don’t have much in depth to say about some of these, so I’ll limit myself to two sentences each!

::  Happiness for Beginners: This cheerful and utterly unsurprising rom-com, which unfolds on a hiking trip, is worth watching for some STUNNING nature shots. Keep the PAUSE button at the ready.

::  Always Be My Maybe: This, on the other hand, is a cheerful but actually occasionally surprising rom-com, featuring Randall Park and Ali Wong as Asian-American friends from youth who wander in and out of a relationship over the years. It has some big laughs, lots of heart, and a terrific cast.

::  Bridesmaids: I’ve no idea why, but I expected this to be a kind-of female-cast version of The Hangover. It isn’t, and that’s not a problem because it’s really good and Kristen Wiig is always a delight.

::  The Laundromat: I was completely flummoxed by this very strange film. I honestly don’t think I could assess it without a rewatch.

::  Bullet Train: This movie is so flat-out gonzo weird that I loved it. Imagine Pulp Fiction, on speed, on a bullet train in Asia.

::  How Do You Know: If you want a rom-com you won’t remember the next day, here you go. And that’s too bad, because the cast is fantastic.

There you go! More to come after we’ve watched some more stuff! Lately we’ve been plowing through Never Have I Ever…, which we’re loving and which we’re almost done with, as well as old episodes of Cutthroat Kitchen. And of course, MasterChef, which remains as full of shit as ever. The third season of Only Murders in the Building is unfolding as I write this, and four episodes in, this go-round is more uneven than the last two, though it does seem like in the last two episodes the mystery is starting to lock in, after quite a bit of backstage filler material. But the cast and the production is still perfect and I’d watch this trio of leads if they just recited old Presidential speeches, and not the good speeches, either. We’re talking Chester Arthur here.

As John Oliver likes to say, “Moving on….”

 

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No, Robert AND Bruce. Not Robert THE Bruce. That’s different.

I’ve seen a few of these photos surfacing online the last few months, and they make me really happy because there’s a kind of absurdity going on. These are behind-the-scenes snapshots from JAWS, featuring actor Robert Shaw and “Bruce” the Shark, in between takes. Bruce, if you didn’t know, was the name lovingly bestowed upon the mechanical shark they made for the movie, which ended up not working half the time, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rely on implied-shots, shadows, oblique techniques and other ways of creating the sense that the shark was there without actually showing that the shark was there. It’s generally accepted that the difficulties with the model are a big reason why the movie ended up as good as it is.

I love these shots because they have a kind of absurdity to them, as if Bruce was really a living part of the cast, waiting for his next take like everyone else. They just scream out to be captioned, so:

“Come on, Bob, sing it with me! ‘Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies….” “Shut UP, Bruce.”
“I mean, it was a great fight scene and all, but you gotta admit, Bob, the way your character in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE lets James Bond get one up on him is kinda lame.” “I didn’t write it, Bruce.”

 

“Haha, in your big speech you’re supposed to say ‘We delivered the bomb’ but you make it sound like ‘We delivered the bum’! Hahaha…ouch, please get your hand off my eye! It’s not REALLY like a doll’s eye!” “Too bad, Bruce.”

As John Oliver always says, “Moving on….”

 

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Japanese STAR WARS art

Check this out:

I that poster for Star Wars on Twitter earlier today, and I wanted some more information: was this an actual poster used to advertise the movie in Japan, or was this one artist’s flight-of-fancy? Many artists create “unofficial” movie posters for favorite films, so I wondered if that’s what this was.

No, it was not.

Artist Noriyoshi Ohrai made these three posters for Japanese dubbed versions of all three Original Trilogy movies, and they are glorious:

I wonder what made the artist opt for a more “minimalistic” approach for Return of the Jedi, only choosing to show C-3PO and R2-D2 in front of a wonderful cosmic background, with what are clearly the main lightsaber blades of the movie at the sides. Still, it’s a fascinating artistic choice, and I’m glad these posters came to my attention today.

More of Noriyushi’s artwork here. These posters weren’t the only time he had Star Wars as his subject! And much of his other work is breathtaking. I might need to see if there’s a book collecting his work available….

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Searching for Jose Iturbi

Seventy-eight years ago today, the movie Anchors Aweigh was released.

Anchors Aweigh might not be quite remembered as one of the classic musicals, but it’s a damned good one, if a bit overstuffed and overcomplicated in its story. The story: two Navy sailors, played by Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, are on leave in Hollywood. Kelly is a ladies’ man, while Sinatra has no luck with the ladies (you can tell right there the level of movie fantasy we’re engaging), and they strike out for a night on the town, with lots of implied debauchery (at least for Kelly). But they are brought in by cops to help out a kid, played by a nine-year-old Dean Stockwell, who thinks he’s going to join the Navy. They take him home and meet the kid’s mother, who is a young singer who wants to sing in the movies. Our sailors somehow (it’s been a while since I saw the movie) get the idea that telling the mom that they can help her because they know famous composer/conductor/pianist Jose Iturbi (which they don’t), and all manner of shenanigans ensue. First Sinatra is in love with the mom, but then he falls out of love with her and in love with a waitress, while Kelly falls in love with the mom too, and the kid is there, and…yeah, it’s a really convoluted story for a movie of this type! But all of that is mainly set dressing for the songs, and Anchors Aweigh has a ton of them, each one with a lot of charm. The most famous number is probably the fantasy sequence in which Gene Kelly dances with an animated Jerry the Mouse…but they’re all nice, including this one, where Kelly and Sinatra tell some sailor buddies all about their wild exploits with a couple of girls.

Spoiler: this is all bullshit. None of this happened, but they gotta save face, right?

Anyway, Anchors Aweigh is a terrific movie. It’s not a great one, but it’s got a lot going for it and in fact the good stuff in it is so good and so plentiful that you forgive the movie’s flaws.

 

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“Welcome to Jurassic Park”: a theatrical experience so bad I remember it as much as the movie

Thirty years ago yesterday, Jurassic Park opened in theaters, after quite a lot of hype. I remember at the time the general reaction initially was “Pretty good, not Spielberg’s best, but a really solid effort, but too bad he didn’t have the kinds of technical difficulties on this movie that kept him from showing too much of the shark in Jaws because that created the film’s mood,” yada yada yada.

I always found that criticism a bit wrong-headed, but I had to wait until the second time I saw the movie to figure out how I felt about it, because the first screening I attended was so abysmally awful, thanks to the theater, that I felt it unfair to judge the movie based on that screening.

There used to be a hotel in Olean, NY called the Castle Inn. It was, apparently at one time, quite a place: a very large restaurant with numerous medieval-themed dining rooms and the exterior made to look like a castle, and then a whole lot of “luxurious” rooms in several buildings. (Here’s a history of the place, which was apparently quite the going concern in the mid-20th century. I suppose it had the usual charm of the 20th-century over-the-top roadside attractions like Wall Drug and others.) The place had a pool, and a nine-hole golf course out back, and…a movie theater. The Castle Cinema. When we first moved there, the Castle Cinema was basically a large single-screen theater that wasn’t that bad.

But ten years later? It was terrible.

The decline began when the owners decided that they could obviously make more money by adding a second screen. However, there was no way to add to the existing building, which was hemmed in on its lot. So they did the next best thing: they cut the existing building in half, so you had two shoe-box style auditoriums side-by-side, each with its own screen.

Obviously this reduced the screen size significantly: each auditorium had what I’m sure is the smallest movie theater screen I’ve ever seen. I imagine that some rich folks own teevees with larger screens.

And the new wall between the two auditoriums was not sound-proofed very well, a problem which the owners got around by turning the volume on the movies down.

Also, if you remember reading Roger Ebert’s writings back in the day, one of his biggest pet peeves about movie theaters was theater owners who tried to penny-pinch by turning down the brightness on their projectors, thinking to not have to buy expensive movie-projector bulbs as often. This resulted in films often looking terrible.

That’s what happened to Jurassic Park the first time I saw it: the Castle Cinema made it a murky, hard-to-hear crap-fest, instead of the rip-roaring fun man-versus-nature adventure movie it actually was.

Oh! The Castle Cinema would have ONE guy working. Doing EVERYTHING. He’d sell some tickets, and then when the popcorn line got long enough, he’d slide over and do that for a bit. Eventually he’d break away and go turn the damned movie on. This meant that movies at the Castle never started on time, and they frequently started twenty minutes or more late. And that screwed things up because the Castle never advertised movie start times with any thought given to the movies’ actual running times; unless it was a three-hour film, they advertised four screenings a day: 2, 4, 7, and 9 o’clocks. Jurassic Park is 127 minutes long, so guess how that turned out.

In short, the Castle Cinema was a horrible place to see a movie, and not long after the Jurassic Park debacle, during which entire plot points were missed entirely because we either couldn’t hear the dialog explaining them or see the events displaying them (since half the movie takes place at night), I ended up seeing the movie again at a mall theater in Buffalo. (A General Cinema theater, precisely…and I’m pretty sure General Cinema has gone away too, but they at least could show a movie well.) In fact, seeing Jurassic Park there so irritated me that I refused to see movies at the Castle again. If a movie I wanted to see played at that theater, I would drive to Buffalo to see it.

The Castle Cinema is long gone now, as is the Castle Inn, the Castle Restaurant, and the Castle Golf Course. When we moved to the Olean area in 1981, Olean itself had already peaked and was on the decline. But the signs of the peak were still in evidence in the businesses that existed (and soon started failing), the vibrant (for then) downtown street, several factories, and connections to larger businesses in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and farther away, New York City.

But back to the movie: the second time I saw Jurassic Park, I got it.

The afore-mentioned critique that the film needed to show less dinosaur has always struck me as an odd one. Yes, that accident of a poorly-functioning shark model led to increased tension and suspense in Jaws, but Jurassic Park isn’t Jaws. The earlier film was about a single monster terrorizing the people of Amity; this film isn’t really a monster film at all. Jurassic Park is about what happens when two apex predators come into contact with one another, and the advisability of scientific “progress” at all costs. Sure, parts of Jurassic Park are definitely monster-movie-ish, but I don’t think the movie is actually a monster movie at all. The dinosaurs, the movie tells us, are not malevolent creatures bent on eating humans; they’re animals, created and thrust into an ecosystem that has evolved beyond them.

Jurassic Park is a much less subtle film than Jaws was; where Jaws suggests its themes, Jurassic Park states them outright and often, usually via some good dialog put in the mouth of Jeff Goldblum. While you can’t go wrong with giving Jeff Goldblum things to say, the film’s constant pointing out of what a bad idea it is to resurrect dinosaurs gets a bit repetitious. Still, it’s worth it to hear lines like “Yeah, but John, if the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.”

Being a Steven Spielberg movie, Jurassic Park delves into issues of parenthood. By now we’re out of the realm of kids from broken homes, and instead we’re focusing on a scientist who has little desire to be around children…so of course, he’s forced to spend the movie escorting two kids through the most dangerous theme park on the planet. Mostly this works, once the actual thrills start; the movie gets a lot of the cloying material out of the way early, thankfully. After that, it’s all Movie Relationship Magic, because what better way to form bonds with other people and learn truths about oneself than through shared life-threatening danger?

Jurassic Park‘s build is slow. We don’t really see any dinosaurs until around twenty minutes or so into the film, and when we do, rather than make them scary, Spielberg makes them objects of wonder. This is a wise choice. First of all, it is wondrous; few cinematic reveals top those jeeps coming to the top of the rise and Sam Neill lazily looking off to the left and then suddenly realizing just what is happening. And that thing he says! That wonderful thing he says when he realizes that his own scientific hypotheses regarding dinosaurs are being confirmed: “They move in herds…they do move in herds.”

Laura Dern’s character is a bit short-changed by the film; she does strike a blow against “sexism in survival situations”, but she doesn’t get much by way of opportunity to demonstrate that as a scientist she is every bit as smart as the Sam Neill character. At least she is capable and strong; the movie doesn’t make her into a shrieking damsel-in-distress. But aside from her desire to study the sick triceratops, she doesn’t get much chance to be the expert here. That’s a shame. And it’s kind of telling that the movie’s credits list Neill’s character as “Dr. Grant”, while it lists hers as “Ellie”.

Some of Jurassic Park does seem admittedly dated today, particularly the hacker girl’s recognition of the software: “It’s a Unix system! I know this!” Though she isn’t really doing any real hacking; we don’t see her boot up a command-line interface and start typing madly in an effort to retake control of the system. No, she just mouses her way through a GUI file system until she finds the one for the security systems.

These are all pretty minor complaints, though, because the movie is otherwise full of moments that never fail to thrill me when I watch the film. The T-Rex attack is still harrowing to this day–and was there ever a more whoa visual effect than the T-Rex’s pupils contracting when he leans down and the flashlight is in his eyes? And you can’t beat the entire last act, with the velociraptors on the loose, all the way from “Clever girl!” to “Unless they figure out how to open doors” to the raptor with the genetic code being projected onto its face.

Jurassic Park absolutely did show me things I’d never seen before in a movie, and it cranked the bar upward several more notches. It was certainly much easier to think of dinosaurs in a real, living way after this movie came out. Of course, like all such blockbusters, Jurassic Park sired a franchise of sequels, only one of which–the first one, The Lost World: Jurassic Park–I have actually seen. That sequel is a much more uneven movie than the original, and it has some escapes that are simply not believable, but it’s not without its charms. I have no idea where the franchise has gone since then, but that’s OK; I’ve still got the original. I’m not totally sure if Jurassic Park is a classic, but…people still remember it and it’s still watched, so maybe it is.

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Chang chang changitty-chang shu-bop, that’s the way it should be! (Thoughts on GREASE at 45)

Yesterday we saw Grease at a Fathom Events screening, for its 45th anniversary. Wow.

I saw Grease in its original theatrical run, back when I was six or seven (depending on when it was out). I went with my sister, and I remember digging the movie quite a bit. After all, I was a kid and Happy Days was regular viewing so this 1950s-nostalgia flick was something I could understand, for the most part. There were cool songs and whatnot, funny stuff along the way, and toward the end two guys even get pies in the face! What wasn’t to like?

When The Wife and I were first dating, at some point Grease came up, and it’s been one of her favorite movies all the time I’ve known her, even though–get this–her parents wouldn’t let her see it when she was a kid, because of its sexual content. Now, Grease was rated PG, but might well have been a PG-13 if that had been an option at the time. Nobody in it comes anywhere near uttering a profane word, but…yeah, sexual jokes abound. They’re there.

But hey, I got through it OK! I don’t know if my parents were unaware of how much sexual content is in Grease, or if they simply thought, “Meh, he’s a 2nd grader, he’s not gonna understand any of it.” Because that’s what happened: every bit of it went over my head. All I saw was leather-rocking boys and sweater-rocking girls and a teen romance and some really good songs and there’s a big dance scene at the end of the second act and there are cool cars and a big car race where the guy who drives the black car that shoots fire out its back end loses and so on. A scene where Jeff Conaway has to stop fooling around in the back seat of his car with Stockard Channing? I figured they were just kissing a lot. There’s a bit where Conaway pulls something out of his wallet but it’s broken and they go right on kissing; I didn’t know what that was. Later on Stockard Channing says to one of her friends, “I feel like a defective typewriter. I skipped a period.” Did 2nd grade me know what that meant? Not a chance!

Honestly, my Grease experience leads me to believe that a whole damn lot of American parents are simply too uptight about what their kids are watching.

But anyway, some random thoughts on the movie:

::  My favorite of the supporting cast is Marty Maraschino (played by Dinah Manoff). She’s cute as shit, but she has this constant air of not quite knowing what she’s doing. I love when Sandy asks her for some paper from her correspondence box, and Marty hands her some but then says, “Wait!” while she spritzes the paper with perfume for Sandy.

::  We all make fun of movies and teevee shows where they have adults well into their 20s playing teens, but this one goes especially far, what with all the 5-o’clock shadow.

::  The sequence where Danny (John Travolta) is trying to figure out what sport he can do, under the coach’s guidance, is one of the underrated comedic sequences of all time. That whole sequence always cracks me up.

::  At the end, is Kenickie standing on the ground watching Danny and Sandy fly away in Greased Lightning and thinking, “Hey! That’s my car!”

::  At the risk of stating the obvious, Grease‘s songs are all great. Every one of them. I couldn’t name a favorite if I tried…well, that’s not quite true, since my favorite is very clearly “You’re the One That I Want”, but naming a second favorite? Can’t do it.

::  Speaking of the Danny-trying-sports sequence as an underrated comedy gem, why isn’t “Beauty School Dropout” remembered as a classic comedic song? Because it is.

::  The “Thunder Road” sequence isn’t the best, is it? The circumstance that leads to Danny driving instead of Kenickie is as goofy a contrivance as I’ve ever seen, and to this day I’m never sure exactly why the other guy loses. Is it that he drives through the water while Danny jumps over it, gumming up his engine? Is that it? No idea.

::  You want an example of a story that works perfectly despite giving us almost zero backstory? Grease is it. What history does Danny have with Rizzo? or with Cha Cha? We’re never told much of anything about these characters or their lives. And we don’t need to be! Does any of it matter? Nope!

::  Grease is shot very well, and it has some cool choreography. It’s a beautiful film to look at, especially during the musical numbers.

::  There’s a certain wistful quality to seeing the movies of your youth gradually become “the classic old movies”, isn’t there? I overheard one kid, who had been seeing the movie with his parents, asking them afterwards, “Why is it called Grease?” So they had to explain that to him. But more than that, it’s realizing how much of the cast is already gone. Olivia Newton-John’s death last year was deeply sad, but looking through the cast, it’s shocking to me how many have passed. Jeff Conaway (Kenickie), Dennis Stewart (Leo, the guy driving the black car with the fire jets), Annette Charles (Cha Cha)…all gone.

Ultimately Grease is not about any great insights into youth; it has nothing especially deep to say. It doesn’t need to. All it wants to be is fun and to leave you exiting the theater a bit more bouncy than you were when you went in, and if you’re humming a good tune or two as you go, so much the better. And that’s not so bad a thing for a film to be.

See you in five years for your fiftieth, Grease!

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Something funny for Friday

The Wife and I are going to dinner tonight, so I don’t have much time for insightful blogging tonight. So I’ll share something I randomly saw today in my social media perambulations: The entire Lord of the Rings film trilogy, edited down to every instance of Legolas speaking directly to Frodo:

Make some popcorn! Two kernels oughta do it.

 

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