“Nobody puts baby in the corner” changes ever-so-slightly with fatherhood

/

Things change when you have a child. You begin to feel differently about a multitude of life’s experiences.

The entire world takes on new meaning and nuance.

Take Dirty Dancing.

Pre-fatherhood, I watched Patrick Swayze tell Jerry Orbach that “Nobody puts baby in the corner” and thought, “Hell yeah, Johnny Castle! You let that patronizing old fool have a piece of your mind! He doesn’t deserve Baby for a daughter! Damn straight nobody puts Baby in a corner!”

Dirty-dancing-corner

Now that I’m a father, things have changed slightly.

Now I watch Patrick Swayze tell Jerry Orbach that “Nobody puts baby in the corner” and think, “If I were Jerry Orbach’s character, I would jam my steak knife into that greaser’s gut and twist it until he was dead at my feet. No one, and I mean no one, is going to tell me how to raise my daughter, let alone take her out from under my wing with a stupid line like that. Especially not some summer camp male slut dance instructor. Over my dead body, Johnny Castle.  Over my dead body, you pathetic piece of dance hall trash.”

See the difference?

Fatherhood changes everything.

My simple but effective solution to the idiots who text in the movie theater

/

The Star Telegram reports that 250-pound Dale Fout, who describes himself as “a pretty big guy, broad, not fat,” is suing 132-pound Brenda Godwin after she assaulted him for texting during a movie in a local theater. Mr. Fout states::

"I got a text, and I responded to it because it was something important. It was something that was on a deadline situation, OK. I held it against my chest purposely where I could barely see it. ... I could text but hide the majority of the light coming from the phone.

She said something. I couldn't make it out. That's why I turned. She was probably saying something like, 'Get off your phone.' I turned, and she pushed. She just happened to push my neck at the time my neck was in an awkward position. Kinda like having a little fender bender, and you get a little whiplash in your neck, you know."

According to Godwin, she reached over and tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention.

The police stated that they remain neutral in these situations but added that "assault by contact is usually not something like this. It's usually a shove."

There are lots of things wrong here.

First, Fout’s first two sentences:

"I got a text, and I responded to it because it was something important. It was something that was on a deadline situation, OK.”

No Dale, not okay.  If you are on a deadline, don’t go to the theater.

YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED TO TEXT DURING A MOVIE.

You are told so prior to the movie. I don’t care how close you held the phone to your chest.

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TEXT DURING A MOVIE.

If you’re on a deadline, stay home or set your goddamn phone to vibrate.  When you feel the vibration, get up and leave the theater. Then text.

YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TEXT DURING A MOVIE.

I also have a problem with a grown man suing a woman half his size for an assault which took place from a sitting position when, by his own admission, it did not include the punch or slap that he most certainly deserved.

A shove, Dale? From one bolted-down theater seat to another?

Have you forgotten what it is to be a man?

Texting in movie theaters has become an conundrum for me as well. When people choose to talk in theaters, either on the phone or to one another, I always go on the offensive to stop them. Standing up, I point myself in the direction of the offenders and let them have it, secure in the knowledge that the voices that I am hearing are surely being heard by others, and therefore I am doing everyone a favor by silencing them despite my temporary disruption.

phone movie

I received a round of applause once for letting two women in the back row have it.

I once frightened an entire group of teenagers from a theater for talking during the show.

But texting is new and challenging for me. Yes, the glow of the goddamn cellphone is disturbing me, but it might only be disturbing me. The phone might be angled in such a way that only I can see it. If I were to rise and verbally assault the offender, as I have done in the past, I might be creating an even larger disruption that the rest of the theater does not need or want.

And the glow of a cellphone can reach far and wide, so in order to stop these idiots like Dale from disturbing the movie, I might have to talk over two or three rows of people just to get the offenders attention.

It’s a real problem. I’m still not sure what to do in these case.

But I have a proposal:

I would like movie theaters to run a new “No texting” request prior to the movie. It would require the assistance of a well-known, well-respected, utterly unimpeachable actor.

I choose Matt Damon, but others will do as well.

matt damon Damon comes on the screen and says the following (in his original Boston accent):

Hi, I’m Matt Damon. Thanks for coming to the movies today. Listen folks, don’t turn on your cellphone until the movie is over. No talking, no texting, no checking IMDB halfway through the film to see what other movie you saw that guy in. None of that nonsense. Okay?

And listen, if you do turn on your cellphone to talk or text, I am charging the rest of the theater audience, all of you decent, sane, reasonable people who would never be so stupid as to start texting or talking during a movie, to immediately put a stop to it. Call that idiot out. Tell them to put the damn phone away. Shame the jackass into doing the right thing. And feel secure in the knowledge that you will be supported by the rest of your theater going brethren. And me.  

Right everybody?

The people who make these movies have worked too hard to have their labors spoiled by some dumbass who can’t wait to text, and you have spent too much money to see this movie to let some dumbass spoil your enjoyment with his or her cellphone. 

Sometimes it’s easier to take a stand when you are given permission to and when you are guaranteed support. I hereby give you permission, and your fellow audience members are now charged with instantly supporting you.

Go ahead dimwit.  I dare you to text or talk now.   

Enjoy the movie, folks.

My friends think I’m crazy, but I honestly believe that a message like this, delivered by an actor like Damon, would solve almost all our talking and texting problems.

Admittedly, it probably would not have deterred Dale, but no solution is ever 100% effective.

Any man who is willing to sue a woman for a tap or even a shove in a movie theater after being stupid enough to text is beyond help.

In Dale’s case, the woman should have clobbered him.

And I think Matt Damon would agree.

Most improbable moment in Hollywood history comes from the classic film The Goonies

/

There have been many improbable moments in movie history, but I would argue that there is nothing more improbable than the final scene from The Goonies, in which Chunk invites Sloth to live with him.

Let’s put all custody issues aside, though they would be considerable.

Is the movie-goer really expected to believe that Chunk’s parents are going to assume responsibility for this inarticulate, mentally challenged, rage-prone man simply because their son loves him?

Presuming that this lower-middle class family has the space in their home for this seven-foot monster, the dental expenses alone would be astronomical.

Add to this the speech therapy, plastic surgery, job training and years of counseling that will be required in order to overcome the fact that he was physically and mentally abused by his siblings, rejected by his mother, forced to live in chains in the basement for most of his adult life, and is ultimately responsible for his family's incarceration.

sloth
sloth

Is this even within the means of Chunk’s parents?

Remember that this is a family who was about to lose their home to a wealthy land developer. Sure, they have the profit from the sale of some pirate jewels, but are we expected to believe that will be enough money after paying off the mortgages of half a dozen families to fund Sloth’s life of constant, continuous  care?

Or that Mikey, the owner of the jewels, would even be willing to provide such funding?

And what happens to Sloth when Chunk goes off to college?

His parents are stuck living with and caring for an enormous, mentally deficient man thanks to a spur-of-the-moment offer made by their son while in the throes of post-traumatic stress?

I don’t think so.

As a writer, the decision was simple:

Sloth should have died while saving the Goonies from certain death back in the cave or he should have been seen in the final frame of the movie, wearing an eye-patch and a pirate hat, steering One-Eyed Willy’s pirate ship on its final voyage.

Sloth might be the hero of the film, but let’s face it:

No one wants to live with him.

Even his mother kept him chained in the basement.

And while we’re on the subject of The Goonies, how the hell did director Richard Donner (and writers Stephen Spielberg and Chris Columbus) get away with naming his pirate One-Eyed Willy in a kid’s movie?

And please don’t tell me that any phallic allusions associated with that name did not exist in 1985, because they did. I was thirteen at the time and I remember cracking up every time someone said One-Eyed Willy’s name, and I still giggle sometimes when hearing it today.

What could Donner have been thinking?

Winnie the Pooh aborted. Too damn frightening.

/

My wife and I attempted to take our daughter to her first movie yesterday. In truth, Clara has been to many movies as an infant but has no recollection as she was asleep for all of them.

She attended two movies designed for mothers of little babies. Scheduled for the afternoon, the volume is turned down on these films, the lights are kept up, and a baby changing station is positioned in the front of the theater. Babies are able to sleep or nurse while moms (and this dad) are able to take in a movie.

The only problem is that the choice of films is sometimes questionable. My wife saw My Sister’s Keeper (which is supposedly heart-wrenching), and we saw The Time Traveler’s Wife together (which also ends badly).

Not the best choices for a bunch of hormonal, post-partum mothers.

Clara also went to several drive-in movies with us, sleeping in the back seat while we caught a double feature.

Why the parents of infants don’t do this more often is beyond me.

Unfortunately, we had to abort our movie-going attempt yesterday when my daughter became semi-hysterical, screaming, “I want to go somewhere else! I want to go somewhere else!”

It was all a little overwhelming for her. The volume of the trailers was exceedingly loud and the theater was very dark.

Even on Mommy’s lap, it was a no-go.

But I learned a few interesting tidbits from our failed attempt:

1. Because my daughter has only watched programming on our local PBS station, she has never been exposed to a commercial before, and so the commercials shown prior to the movie were the first she had ever seen.  And they were loud, fast paced, and fairly frightening as a result.

2. Because my daughter has only watched programming on our local PBS station (and two animated films on the couch), she has not been exposed to the slapstick comedy and the danger and violence inherent in even the most benign of children’s movies. The preview for Puss in Boots scared the hell out of her, even while it was making my wife and me laugh out loud.

Red-eyed boars.

Guns firing off.

Puss crashing through a wooden box and being struck in the head by a boot.

Swordplay.

It’s all innocent enough, I think, for a kid exposed to this kind of entertainment before, but for Clara, it was overwhelming and terrifying.

3.  Even the animated short, The Ballad of Nessie, which opens the film, was too much for her. It told the story of Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, and how she is forced to leave her pond when golf course developers take over the land. No matter where Nessie goes, she cannot find a new home.  Eventually, she cries the tears that so many have told her to suppress, and in doing so, she creates a loch of her very own.

It was one of those stories that is 95% tragedy and 5% happiness, and that percentage was evident in my daughter’s reaction to the piece. As we left the theater, all Clara could talk about was how sad Nessie had been, and how she had cried and cried and cried. It took all of our efforts to convince her that Nessie was fine, now, and happily swimming in her own pond.

Unfortunately, Clara has an outstanding long term memory, so I suspect that it will be a long time before we can attempt another trip to the movies.

She will remember this harrowing experience for a very long time.

Perhaps we should’ve waited until she was older.

Maybe we could have entered the theater after the previews had finished.

It’s possible that a steady diet of PBS is not conducive to the viewing of mainstream Hollywood moviemaking.

Oh well. At least I won’t have to sit through a bunch of bad children’s movies for a while.

I also was left wondering about the two separate groups of adults (a foursome and a twosome)  who were also in the theater to watch this one hour Winnie the Pooh film without any children in tow.

These people exist? And if so, who the hell are they?

Desperately seeing an Ocean’s 11 answer

/

Ocean’s 11 aficionados, I have a question that I desperately want answered.

Here’s the scene:

Danny and Linus have knocked out the guards outside the vault with a smoke grenade. They bang on the vault door. Yen is in the vault, and he bangs as well, indicating that he is ready to go. Yen applies a single explosive charge on his side of the vault and Danny applies a circle of charges on his side. There is a brief moment of tension when Yen’s bandaged hand gets stuck in the vault and the detonator in Danny’s hand thankfully fails due to dead batteries, but eventually the door is blown off off and everyone is safe.

Here is what I am missing:

There are floor sensors in the vault. This is the reason Yen has been hired in the first place. He can leap from the cash cart to the vault door because he is an acrobat. But when they blow open the vault door, wouldn’t these floor sensors fire off, indicating the intruders?

How could they not?

Right?

So what am I missing?

This has been bothering me a lot.

Not quite as much as the notion that an EMP would temporarily disable power to the Vegas strip (an EMP permanently destroys any electronic device that it operating at the time of the pulse is released), but it’s a close second.

The EMP annoys me because it could have been easily fixed. There are any number of amusing ways in which Basher could have knocked out power to the casinos, so why would the writers specifically choose exceptionally faulty science to get the job done?

But at least I know that this is a mistake.

I keep feeling like there is an explanation to the floor sensor issue.

Someone ease my mind and explain what I am missing. Please?

This movie poster might be better than the book and the film. And the movie is great.

/

image Best movie poster ever.

If you can’t tell why, tilt your screen down.

Then say, “Whoa.”

If you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading immediately and go do so. You will be the better for it, and this poster will make a lot more sense to you.

And though I rarely say this, I’d advise you see the movie before reading the book. This is one of those exceptionally rare instances in which the film is much better than the book.

Three movies in three days

/

In  the past week, I saw three movies. One with my wife and two with friends. Here are my thoughts, minus any spoilers:

Bridesmaids: Extremely funny movie. My only issue with the film is one I often have with films like this:

Am I really expected to believe that the best looking, smartest and funniest woman in the film can’t find a decent guy to date?

I have the same problem with the television comedy 30 Rock. Tina Fey’s character, Liz Lemon, is supposed to be unattractive, but Tina Fey is actually the best looking woman in the cast. So every joke or sight gag made to further exploit Liz Lemon’s supposed unattractiveness falls flat for me.

I don’t buy it.

If you want your female characters to be unattractive, and you want the audience to believe that  they are having difficulty finding good men, stop choosing beautiful, funny, smart women to play the parts.

I actually had a couple other issues with the film, but as we were walking from the theater to the car, my wife said, “I don’t want to hear what you thought was wrong with that movie. Don’t ruin it for me.”

I’ve been known to do this from time to time, so I’ll abide by her request and remain silent.

The Hangover II: I saw the first Hangover at the drive-in with my wife while my infant daughter was sleeping in the backseat, so perhaps this influenced my opinion of the movie, but I thought the first film was funny but not as incredibly funny as so many others thought.

By contrast, I saw The Hangover II with three friends, two of whom were drunk, at a midnight showing and thought the movie was absolutely hilarious.

It was clear that a story line involving the bride’s brother was cut out during the editing process, which left a gaping hole in the center of the film, but it was still funny as hell and more than made up for the dangling story line.

X Men: First Class: I saw the first two X-Men films and thought that were good. I have never been a comic book guy, but I thought the movies were entertaining enough.

Not entertaining enough, mind you, to see the third and fourth installments of the franchise. But good enough to not hate myself for seeing them.

X-Men: First Class was also good, but it read more like a documentary than an actual film. Seeking to fill in the back story of more than a half a dozen characters, there was no central character in the film, and so there was no one to whom audiences could attach their loyalties. As a result, scenes were especially short throughout the movie and there was little depth to any specific story line.

I also thought there were elements of the film, including a bad guy’s submarine, that reminded me more of something from an Austin Powers film. The story is set in the 1960’s, so this makes sense on one level, but I thought it was overdone and slightly outrageous. This works in a comedy like Austin Powers but less so in a serious superhero movie about the Cuban missile crisis.

It was weird.

The real end to Dead Poet’s Society

/

We all know the ending of Dead Poet’s Society. Right? If you don’t, shame on you. Go watch the movie. I’m about to spoil it.

dead poets

At the end of the film, a handful of boys who are compelled by the school's administration to falsely testify against their teacher take a stand (literally), demonstrating their allegiance to for him in a moving tribute to his teaching.

I'd embed the clip if I could, but Disney owns the film and doesn't allow it to exist on the Internet. How stupid of them.

But here’s my question:

What happens when these boys graduate from high school or perhaps college? What do they do once the shackles of the their restricted teenage existences are thrown off?

I always find it amusing to watch high school teachers and college professors, both in film and real life, treat students unjustly.

What are these educators thinking?

Do they fail to realize that these seventeen year old students will soon be eighteen, and soon after that twenty-one year old adults?

Do they forget that these young men and women, once powerless to fight the system, could soon return, seeking retribution and vengeance?

I like to think that the boys from the Dead Poet’s Society, Knox and Charlie and Meeks and Pitts, return to Welton Academy as young men three years after Mr. Keating's dismissal, demanding justice. I like to imagine them barging into the headmaster’s office, shoving his indignant ass back down into a chair, and telling him that they are not children anymore.

“You can’t bully us with threats of expulsion and the arm-twisting of our parents anymore, old man! Did you really think that we were going to forget the lies you forced us to tell? Did you really think you could bully boys who were about to become men and not pay a price?”

And then I like to imagine those boys-turned-men spending every waking hour of their lives for the next six months ensuring that the headmaster is fired and Mr. Keating’s reputation is restored.

And I’d like to see Charlie kick Cameron’s ass once more.

The symbolic standing-on-desks moment was nice, but I like to think that it's only the beginning of something much more satisfying.

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.

fight club fight-club-poster

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.

red_dawn teacher

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.

the hills have eyes

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.

red_dawn

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?