Lemmings unwillingly launched to the sea

Lemmings don’t leap off cliffs and commit commit suicide as they migrate. 

It turns out that the phrase “like lemmings to the sea” is nonsense. 

The metaphor derives from the 1958 Academy Award winning Disney film White Wilderness, in which staged footage was shown with lemmings jumping to their death in a scene of faked mass migration. 

A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary revealed that the lemmings used for White Wilderness were actually flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, where they did not jump off the cliff, but were in fact launched off the cliff using a turntable.

And thus “like lemmings to the sea” was created. 

Lemmings flung into the sea and killed using a turntable? 

You can’t make this stuff up. 

Movies that are better than the book: Part 2

A quick update on yesterday’s post by the same name: It turns out that as I was writing my list, Jason Bailey at Flavorpill was making a list as well, and his is complete with video trailers, which makes my list look considerably less impressive.

Of course, his story can only be read by clicking through ten different pages, which I find incredibly annoying, so at least my post is easier to read.

We have some agreement in our lists as well.

My list, as you recall, included four films:

The Firm Forrest Gump Minority Report Fight Club

Yesterday I added Jaws to the list after several readers reminded me of the disparity between the book and the film (I actually re-read the book last summer). Specifically, there is a section in the book in which Ellen Brody is considering having an affair as her husband battles a man-eating shark, and I have found this plot line to be tedious and distracting.  Spielberg apparently felt the same way, since it does not appear in the film.

Also, the ending of the book is convoluted and anticlimactic at best, with the shark being dragged underwater by the sinking Orca.

Granted, it’s slightly more realistic than blowing up the shark by shooting the tank of compressed oxygen in his mouth, but the chunks of shark splashing around Brody in the final scene of the movie are priceless. So Jaws is now on my list.

And in terms of the Flavorpill piece, we agree on The Firm and Jaws.

Bailey also includes the following films with corresponding books that I have not read:

The Princess Bride (an overrated film) The Graduate Dr. Strangelove One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (mentioned by readers yesterday) MASH The Godfather (several readers insisted should be on my list)

Bailey also includes the film High Fidelity on his list, which I thought was excellent, but I did not think it distinguished itself enough from the book in order to be declared superior.

He included the film Stand By Me, which is based upon Stephen King’s novella The Body from a book that also contains the novella upon which The Shawshank Redemption is based.

Quite a book. On film rights alone, it probably paid King enough to be set for life.

A friend also suggested The Shawshank Redemption to me, and while both Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption are outstanding films and quite possibly better than their literary counterparts, I did not feel that they were better enough to make my list.

But I might change my mind on this over time.

Especially The Shawshank Redemption. Damn that movie is good.

I suspect that the rest of the films on Bailey’s list are probably better than their literary counterparts, which leaves me to wonder if I should ever read the book. I've been told that One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and The Godfather are excellent novels, but if the film versions are better, what is a guy with a million books to read and a limited amount of time to do?

Movies that are better than the book

I just finished reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. The movie, as you may know, is a classic. Genuinely great. And I feared that this would be one of those rare instances that the film is better than the book.

I almost didn’t read the book for this very reason. I bypassed it several times, choosing other books in favor of it, afraid of being disappointed.

But eventually I decided to read it, and I liked the book. I’m glad I read it. Unfortunately, I was right. The movie was much better.

 

Sacrilege, I know. But not unprecedented.

In my life, I have encountered three other films that were better than their literary counterparts.

The Firm by John Grisham. Though I loved the book, Grisham’s ending lacked the punch and surprise that the film provided. I was disappointed by the way the novel sort of petered out at the end, whereas the film captivated me until the final scene.

Forrest Gump by Winston Groom. The book was not good at all. In this case, I saw the film first and discovered much later on that it was based upon a book. How anyone could read that novel and create the Academy Award winning film based upon it is beyond me.

Minority Report by Philip Dick. The literary version is actually a short story, so it’s hard to fault the book for not measuring up to the movie, but it didn’t.  Dick’s version of the story reads more like a detective story set in the future,whereas the film is a more provocative look at the future through the lens of a detective story.

And now Fight Club joins my list. Like The Firm, I liked the book quite a bit, but like The Firm, the ending of the film far surpasses the ending of the novel. I also think that there are moments in the book that suffer from the limitation of first person narration that the film is able to avoid.

But that’s it. Four films better than the books after a lifetime of reading.

It’s interesting to note that in three of the cases, I liked the book a lot but liked the film even more. There were also a bunch of instances in which I thought the movie was as good or almost as good as the book, but none were good enough to overtake the literary version of the story.

And now Charles Portis’s True Grit is sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read.  And once again, I’m worried. I just saw the Coen brothers’ version of the film and thought it was remarkable. I’m hoping the novel measures up.

We’ll see.

Any movies-better-than-the-book that you would like to suggest?

Always great or recently great?

Jeff Bridges career is having a revival of sorts, having been nominated for the Academy Award the last two years (Crazy Heart and True Grit). 

He was previously nominated for the Academy Award (almost always in a supporting role) several times over a thirty  year period (including for his role as the alien in the 1984 film Starman, which I simply cannot believe), but he has never received the kind of recognition or acclaim that has recently been bestowed upon him. 

It leads me to wonder:

Has Jeff Bridges developed into a better actor over the years and is being rightfully acknowledged for his newfound skill?

Or was the younger version of Jeff Bridges just as skilled an actor as this older Jeff Bridges but could not compete against the younger, better looking Hollywood stars such as Daniel Day Lewis, Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro and others.

Perhaps Academy Award winning roles such as Rooster Cogburn and Bad Blake were simply not available to the younger Jeff Bridges with the likes of Henry Fonda and Paul Newman running around, and it has only been in his older age that he has been able to steal these roles from his younger, better looking counterparts.

Maybe?

Red Dawn Moments

My wife recently watched Red Dawn for the first time. It’s my best friend’s favorite movie of all time, and while I like it, it has issues. Most glaring was the brother’s decision to attack the Russian-held town at the end of the film in order to create a distraction so that the last two members of their insurgent band could escape to Free America.

A diversion?

Had the Russians really sealed off tens of thousands of square miles of mountain terrain so tightly that a two-man attack on a town in the middle of the night would cause those Russian-held lines to open up?

I don’t think so.

But I digress.

It’s the opening the scene of the film that I want to address today. In it, Russian and Cuban paratroopers descend upon a high school in Calumet, Colorado. We see them landing from the interior of a classroom, where a history teacher is teaching a class of disinterested students. In mid-sentence, the teacher notices the paratroopers and assumes that they are US soldiers who have landed off course on a training mission. When he goes outside to investigate, he is shot and killed.

The war has begun.

And the kids never hear the end of the lesson.

This is what I call a Red Dawn Moment.

A Red Dawn Moment is any interruption that permanently prevents a person from completing an important task or garnering desired information.

When Stephen King was struck by a car and initially reported killed in 1999, I thought that his Red Dawn moment had come. In the midst of writing his Dark Tower series, a distracted driver had come along and prevented King from finishing his opus and prevented readers from ever learning the fate of Roland and his band of gunslingers.

Last weekend I judged the American Legion State Oratorical Contest in East Hartford, Connecticut. At the end of the contest, the two finalists were asked to rise so that the winner could be announced. But while the boys remained standing, awaiting their fate, two other Legionnaires delivered short speeches, making the wait for the winner feel excruciatingly long to me and most assuredly painful for the two finalists.

I’ve been in situations like this before, standing and waiting to discover if I had won, and they are long, awkward and painful moments indeed.

While waiting for the Legionnaire speeches to conclude, I thought about the idea of a Red Dawn Moment happening right then and there. I wondered what it would be like if Russian soldiers suddenly threw open the doors to the auditorium, announcing the start of World War III with machine gun fire and exploding grenades. The boys would duck as bullets flew and struck ancillary characters on stage. Audience members would flee for the exits, only to be gunned down by an anonymous Russian carrying an M-16.

Not me, of course. I would keep my head down and make a timely escape when no one was looking. The storyteller always survives.

Eventually, the two finalists would escape through a door behind the stage, where they would team up with the surviving oratorical contestants (including the two female contestants in order to provide a love interest) and head for the low-lying, somewhat populated Connecticut hills to wait the end of the war.

Through it all, neither boy would ever know who had won the contest.  Tempers would eventually flare over the rationing of supplies and the decision to head into town for news, and when they did, the questions over who had won the oratorical contest would arise again. A well-prepared, eight-minute debate would ensure, followed by a five minute off-the-cuff rebuttal, but no matter who was declared the winner, questions would remain. The mystery over who had won the contest would remain a subplot for the entire war, or at least until the two finalists were stupid enough to march back into Hartford armed with machine guns and soldier-launched missiles, intent on creating a diversion so that their remaining oratorical companions (one female and one male) could escape over the Connecticut line into Free Rhode Island.

That, my friends, if the kind of Red Dawn moment that runs through my head on an almost daily basis.

The lesson:

Don’t keep people waiting.  You never know when World War III will begin.

The Hills Have Eyes FOR YOU.

I should visit my sister more often. She is a treasure-trove of blog ideas, bizarre subplots and characters for my books. She lives her life in a way like no one I have ever known, and the people who filter in and out of her life are remarkable in their oddity and ineptitude. Case in point:

Have you seen the film The Hills Have Eyes? I saw Wes Craven’s 1977 original and bits and pieces of the 2006 remake, both which center upon a band of psychotic mutants who target a family in the New Mexico desert after their car breaks down.

An odd premise considering it involves the inexplicable existence of mutants in an otherwise normal world, but it was creepy nonetheless.

My sister recently watched the remake of the film, despite the lasting and traumatic impact that horror films have always had on her. A film like The Hills Have Eyes scares the bejeezus out of her, and yet she watches films like this just the same.

That’s Kelli.

After watching the film, the following typical, Kelli-like instances occurred.

Incident #1

Upon arriving home after midnight, Kelli opened the door to her car and was greeted with an inhuman howling and screaming that terrified her. She closed and locked her car door and immediately called the police, reporting that someone who “sounds like The Hills Have Eyes People is outside my house, and I can’t get inside.”

A police officer came to investigate the disturbance and escort my sister into her apartment. Upon arriving, he asked Kelli to step out of her car, and when the howling began again, he asked if that was the sound that had frightened her.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

“That’s two cats having sex,” the police officer informed her.

Incident #2

About a week after watching the film, Kelli received a friend request on her MySpace account from an unknown person living in New Mexico, which will apparently be forever known to Kelli as The Land of The Hills Have Eyes people.

The random and inexplicable friend request frightened her so much that she deleted her entire MySpace account, which she probably should have done a long time ago anyway.

I have a friend who lives in New Mexico, and I am pondering the idea of having him send anonymous notes through the mail with messages like:

We can see you.

We have eyes, you know.

Did you realize that you live on a hill?

It would be hilarious, but I expect it might kill her, too.

Be little again: The best prayer

I am not religious (though I am a minister), which makes this a little odd. And it comes from the film that was considered the most violent film by the Guinness Book of Records and The National Coalition on Television Violence, with a rate of 134 acts of violence per hour, or 2.23 per minute, which makes it odder still.

But regardless of my personal belief and it’s violent context, I love this prayer from the film Red Dawn:

These were good friends. Take them away from here... someplace safe... where this world's war never happened. And as we remember... please let them forget, O Lord... so they can be little again.

Take away the reference to World War III (unless it’s unfortunately relevant) and it is almost perfect.

It wasn’t as good as I remembered

Helen Slater’s physical appearance clearly had a lot to do with my thirteen year old appreciation for The Legend of Billy Jean. It just wasn’t that good.

After this evening viewing of the film, my wife said the following:

“Things like making sense didn’t matter when they made this movie”

“It had a moment of Are You There God. It’s Me Margaret. And a little bit of Teen Witch. And a lot of 80's. It was just bad.”

In addition to her observations, I also noted that:

• All gunshots in the Billy Jean universe strike the shoulder region and result in simple shoulder slings.
• Billy Jean’s inexplicable donning of a wet suit for her prerecorded “Fair is fair” message to the media was clearly done in deference to the zipper down the front of the suit and the director’s decision to leave it open.

Why a wet suit was available poolside remains a mystery.

• The underground railroad of short haired girls and bike dudes featured during the Pat Benatar Invincible montage could stand alone as classic camp, including its Thunderdome-like ending.
• What do writers and directors do without the now-defunct television store fronts filled with dozens of TVs conveniently tuned to the evening news in order for their protagonists to see themselves as misidentified fugitives and renegade outlaws?

How could one ever hope to fill such a void?

The Legend of Billie Jean: Fingers crossed it’s as good as I remember.

In 1985 I went to the movies and saw the film The Legend of Billie Jean. I remember liking it a lot, but I was fourteen years old at the time, so my standards regarding the quality of a film were possibly questionable. The movie stars Helen Slater as a rebel teenager who gets in trouble with the law over a scooter repair.

Sort of a teenage version of Thelma and Louise. Except events center on a scooter repair.

The movie’s tagline was:

When you're seventeen, people think they can do anything to you. Billie Jean is about to prove them wrong.

I’ll be honest. I don’t remember the scooter at all. I’m sure it fits in seamlessly with the highly evolved plot, but it sounds a little odd without context.

The film also stars Christian Slater (not related to Helen, though their mutual appearance in the film would lead some people to assume that they are brother and sister to this day) and a host of B-level movie stars from the 1980's, including Yeardley Smith, Dean Stockwell and Peter Coyote.

Not exactly an all-star cast, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Right?

The movie comes up often in conversation because of the movie’s soundtrack, which featured Pat Benetar’s Invincible, a song specifically written for the film. Whenever I hear the song, I am compelled to ask whoever is around if they ever saw the film, and I have yet to meet anyone who did.

Not one.

Based upon my wife’s most recent response to this question, I suspect that I may have asked it more than once.

So I decided to purchase a copy of the film for her to watch, so the cheese would no longer stand alone.

It wasn’t easy. The movie was never released to DVD, even though Yeardley Smith said in a recent interview that she had recorded a DVD commentary in 2008 and that the DVD was supposed to have been released that same year. In 2009, Columbia Pictures released the film to Europe, and after much finagling, I finally managed to purchase a copy.

With a bowl of ice cream in hand, we are about to watch it.

I’m a little afraid.

I’m starting to regret tracking the film down in the first place.

I fear that it will be terrible and all of these years of searching for someone who watched The Legend of Billie Jean will be for naught.

Fingers crossed, I’m hitting Play now.

Nothing like an ominous hammer cock

I watch a lot of partial movies on AMC while I am working out. Depending on the elliptical machine, I often have closed captioning automatically turned on for the film. It turns out that the captioning can be quite amusing, particularly when it comes to captioning the sounds in a movie.

How a deaf person is supposed to interpret the description of a sound that he or she has never heard before is beyond my understanding, but the descriptions are still fun and often provide an additional level of entertainment to the film.

While watching a western this week, I saw the following captions:

Sonorous beer fizzing (used just prior to a gunfight)

Frisking about (used to describe the unseen activity taking place in the saloon below the protagonist’s bedroom)

How drinking, gambling, shouting and piano playing became frisking about is also beyond my comprehension.

Ominous hammer cock (used to describe the thumbing back of the hammer on a pistol prior to firing, though the description certainly allows for a variety of interpretations)

Not cool. I think. Actually, maybe it’s very cool.

It’s hard to imagine that this was unintentional.  Right?

Maybe? 

I’m not sure. 

My question is this:

If it is intentional, is it wrong?

If little kids are unable to pick up on the hidden message on a conscious level or even understand its meaning, is this a problem?

My first reaction was less than favorable, but then I remembered that I am the teacher who wants to develop subliminally-based broadcasting software for my classroom Smartboard that flashes messages to my students like:

Work hard.

Mr. Dicks knows all.

Don’t interrupt.

7 x 8 = 56

Homework is cool.

Can I begrudge a film studio’s attempt to make a children's movie more appealing to the adults who have to accompany their kids to the theater?

If intentional, it’s deceitful and and a little crass, but it’s clever, too, and clever usually wins in my book.

Top Gun and Homer Simpson? What’s next?

I have a hard time fearing the economic power of China after learning that China Central Television ripped off explosions from Top Gun in order to show off a Chinese J-10 fighter plane firing a missile during maneuvers and destroying another aircraft. I realize that the Chinese are famous for ignoring copyright, but this is ridiculous.

And not the first time.

“In a previous case in 2007, China's state-run Xinhua news agency issued a news story about a discovery related to multiple sclerosis, which was accompanied by an X-ray showing the head of cartoon character Homer Simpson.”

What’s next?

Moonraker footage to support claims that they landed men (and scantily-clad women) on the Moon?

My daughter may be in communication with aliens

Yesterday morning Clara began systematically removing balls from the ball pit and placing them in various kitchen accouterments.  

Later in the day, at her birthday party at her aunt’s house, she did this:

 

Remember Richard Dreyfuss’s character and his obsession with Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Dreyfuss’s character spent hours creating models of a mountain that he had never seen before, in potting soil, clay and most famously, mashed potatoes. Until he saw an image of the mountain on a news broadcast, he had no idea what he was doing or why.

For those of you not familiar with the film, Devil’s Mountain was the ultimate landing site of the alien spaceship.

Clara’s behavior with the balls and the pretzels reminded me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Inexplicable, seemingly obsessive, varying in medium, and yet somehow somehow methodical and with a sense of order and purpose as well.

Maybe it’s a sign?

My wife, who is afraid of aliens and even the thought of them, will not be happy to hear my suppositions.

Mammoths, octopi and a whole bunch of spoons

Three random observations: 1. Anyone who criticizes Alanis Morissette’s song "Ironic" for its lack of irony is an intellectual douchebag. It’s a four minute pop song. It need not be held up to a literary standard.

And sure, “...ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” is not ironic by the truest definition of the word, but it seems pretty damn ironic to me.

2. I know it was based upon the Ian Fleming novel, but how does the movie Octopussy get made with its original title?

3.  Woolly mammoths returning to the world? It’s about time.

iCarly trumps Robert Frost and Val Kilmer

I am reading Shakespeare’s Richard II to my students. On Friday we came across the phrase “rue the day” in the text. I was prepared to tell them all about Frost’s poem Dust of Snow:

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

I also planned on briefly reviewing the excellent “rue the day” reference from the 1985 film Real Genius.

But when I asked if anyone knew what the phrase “rue the day” might mean, almost every hand in the class went up.

Had they studied Frost in fourth grade?

Did they recently view a Val Kilmer film retrospective at the local college theater?

No. They had all learned the phrase from something called iCarly, which I initially thought was a video game. Apparently an episode of the program featured the phrase rather prominently.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Three very different films

I watched three movies over the course of the last two days. Here is my brief summation of each film: Tron Legacy:  Dumb and fun. Kind of like the girl you are willing to date but never get serious with.

The Social Network: You leave the theater wondering if Zuckerberg has Asperger's Syndrome or is simply a jerk (the last line of the film seems to imply the latter, but it was a stinker of a last line, and I remain unconvinced). You also find yourself wishing that real life dialogue was as bristling and witty as Aaron Sorkin envisions. But that happens with every Sorkin script.

The King’s Speech: The Karate Kid meets speech therapy. I am fairly certain that the real King George VI was not this funny nor this pathetic.

For the record, I thought The Social Network and The King’s Speech were outstanding, and Tron Legacy was a suitable afternoon diversion.

Avoid ambiguity in the demise of a character

I don’t mind endings that make you wonder what might happen to a character had another scene been written or filmed. Both Something Missing and Unexpectedly, Milo end with the protagonist’s future in doubt. But at least you know that both protagonists will have a future.

What I despise are endings in which the existence of the protagonist in a subsequent scene is in doubt.

This is why the last episode of The Sopranos annoyed me.

Either kill Tony or don’t. Don’t avoid taking a position on the matter by creating some multi-layered scene that might be interpreted as Tony’s eminent death but might not.

This was a mobster show. Whack the guy or don’t.

This is why I didn’t like the ending to The Wrestler.

Yes, it’s very likely that the viewer is meant to assume that Randy dies at the end of the film, but again, his fate is ultimately left to interpretation.

Does he suffer another heart attack as he dives off the top ropes?

Possibly. Probably.

But aren’t there medical personnel on hand?

Didn’t he survive his first heart attack?

Kill him or don’t.

Ambiguity in the possible death of a character is an act of cowardice on the writer’s part.

If my nightmares weren’t already consumed by armed robbers and gunshots to the head, this would most assuredly be my nightly psychological torment

I want to see this film but it’s being released in just five cities.

How annoying.

Important parental service announcement

I have to admit that I have had similar concerns for my daughter.

Hearts in Atlantis: A fine name for an entirely different film

Have you seen the movie Hearts in Atlantis starring Anthony Hopkins? It’s a movie about a man with a mysterious power who is being hunted by “low men.” It’s an adaptation of a Stephen King novel by the same name, and though I am a huge fan of King’s work, I hadn’t gotten around to read the book until recently.

Turns out that Hearts in Atlantis (the book) is actually a collection of five short stories centered in the 1960’s, and the title of the book is also the title of the second story in the book.

But this is not the story from which the movie was adapted.

The story upon which the movie is based is titled “Low Men in Yellow Coats.” "Hearts in Atlantis" is the short story of some college boys who fall in love with and become addicted to the card game hearts (and is a tremendous short story).  there is nothing about hearts or card games or college boys in the film whatsoever.

I can understand renaming a movie that is based upon a book, as producers did when they adapted Stephen King’s short story "The Body" into the film Stand By Me or when they adapted his short story “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” and renamed it Shawshank Redemption.

But to name the movie after the wrong short story seems pretty stupid.