I do a lot of fretting/grumbling/navel-gazing here — well, everywhere, really — about getting older, feeling older, fearing I’ve lost touch with popular culture, being past my prime… hey, you’ve read the posts. But something occurred to me this morning:
In recent years, I’ve lost a lot of the weight I unwisely stacked on in my thirties.
Thanks to my LASIK surgery two weeks ago, I have my original, un-bespectacled face back.
In the next few months, we’ll be seeing a new Mad Max film, a new Jurassic Park film, a new Terminator, another Mission: Impossible, and, lest we forget, a new Star Wars episode.
And of course next year’s presidential election will likely be between a Clinton and a Bush.
You see where I’m going with this?
It’s like I’m young again!
Either that, or suffering a massive case of deja vu.
I honestly thought I had seen this one, I truly did. I mean, hell, who hasn’t seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s? It’s one of the all-time beloved film classics, a flick that routinely turns up on all the “top romantic movie” lists that proliferate this time of year, and the inspiration for a pretty decent pop song from the mid-1990s. So surely I, a self-proclaimed movie buff and champion of the old stuff, surely I must’ve crossed paths with it at some point, right? But alas, no. I really hadn’t seen it, which I figured out about halfway through a recent special-engagement theatrical screening when I realized I had absolutely no idea of how it was going to end. (Well, I had a general idea, of course; I’ve seen enough movies to know how they usually turn out, and my mama didn’t raise no fool. I just mean that I didn’t know the specifics of how the story was going to get there.) I guess I must’ve seen bits and pieces of it over the years, as well as all those photos of Audrey Hepburn in that black dress and designer sunglasses, with her hair up and her two-foot-long cigarette holder, as iconic an image as James Dean in his red jacket or Bogart in his trench coat, and somehow fooled myself into believing I knew the movie.
To cut to the chase, I liked it. It was a lovely evocation of a long-gone, more urbane world than the one we now live in, and it was genuinely funny in places and truly heartbreaking in others, and generally pretty smart overall. And “Moon River,” is, of course, one of the greatest, sweetest, saddest songs ever. Nevertheless, the film wasn’t quite what I thought it was, back when I thought I’d seen it before. Here are a few observations that may seem pretty elementary to fans of the film, but struck me as worth noting:
First and foremost, I finally see the appeal of Audrey Hepburn. I’ve long respected her as a Hollywood legend and old-school movie star, as well as a great humanitarian and, by all accounts, a damn nice person, but I never really got it when people would talk about how beautiful she was. I guess I always thought there was something a little too saintly and, frankly, sort of asexual in her later incarnation as a UNESCO spokesperson and a beloved institution. In Tiffany’s, though… ah, in Tiffany’s, she was vivacious and earthy and very, very human. I mean, this is not the face of a saint, is it?
I also see now that she was clearly the model for a character we now call the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the type of kooky free spirit that Zooey Deschanel has built an entire career on playing. Or rather, her Tiffany’s character Holly Golightly was the original MPDG, with one important distinction. While the MPDG’s usual role is to help a male protagonist grow as a person, or discover the joy of living or some such — think of Kirsten Dunst in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (the film that inspired critic Nathan Rabin to coin the term in the first place) or Natalie Portman in Garden State, or even Ruth Gordon in the cult classic Harold and Maude — in Tiffany’s, Holly is the broken character in need of help and growth. Rather than a person to admire or emulate, Holly is gradually revealed to be a miserable flake. Which leads me to my next point:
For a movie that’s usually described as a comedy and a great romance, it’s actually pretty bleak. Holly Golightly and her would-be suitor Paul (played by an achingly young George Peppard) are both unhappy with their lives, Holly badly hurts poor old Buddy Ebsen and openly pursues wealthier men for their money, the plot involves a drug ring and adultery, and I’m sorry but I just don’t buy the “happy” ending… as flighty as Holly has been revealed to be, I just can’t see her sticking with Paul for longer than a year or two.
And another thing: Breakfast at Tiffany’s is yet another classic that disproves the old lie that there wasn’t any sex in movies made before those nasty hippies came along and wrecked the studio system. Oh, sure, there isn’t a gratuitous scene of what Roger Ebert used to call “the old rumpy-pumpy,” but there is sex in this story, quite a lot of it, and none of it the sort conservatives would approve of. George Peppard’s Paul is a kept man who is being paid a stipend by the married woman he services. The scene in which Holly pops in through Paul’s window to get to know him takes place while he’s lounging in bed just after his “friend” has departed. (Yes, I did wonder what he might have had on, if anything, under the covers.) There’s a pretty strong suggestion that Holly, if not a full-time prostitute, has at least resorted to taking money for it on occasion. And what is going on in the film’s famous opening scene, in which Holly walks up a deserted street early in the morning, dressed in an evening gown, and eats a lonely breakfast of pastry and coffee in front of the windows of Tiffany’s jewelry store (hence the film’s title) if not a so-called “walk of shame?”
It sounds as if I’m pretty down on the film, but I’m not. As I said, I quite liked it, overall. I was just surprised by how different it was from my preconceived notions of it. There was one thing about the film, however, that really did rub me the wrong way, and that was Mickey Rooney’s shockingly insulting portrayal of a Japanese man. Good lord. Now, I’m generally pretty forgiving of Hollywood’s past racial insensitivity, and I’m not reflexively put off by white people playing other ethnicities, even though modern political correctness deems that an unforgivable sin. I really didn’t mind the idea of Johnny Depp as Tonto, and hell, I’m on record as a fan of Charlie Chan movies! But Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi is such a conglomeration of unflattering stereotypes that it’s impossible to overlook it. The buck teeth, the Coke-bottle glasses, the overly excitable personality, the fractured English… Yunioshi could have stepped right out of a World War II propaganda cartoon made 20 years earlier! Surely he was already an anachronism by the time Tiffany’s was made, in 1961! Seriously, if you cut all the scenes with Rooney, the movie would be surprisingly modern in its sensibilities, but every time this caricature appears, Tiffany’s suddenly creaks like your great-grandmother’s rocking chair. It’s the one truly regrettable flaw in an otherwise fine film.
Finally, a word about George Peppard. We Gen Xers know him from The A-Team, of course, when he was white-haired and a bit soft from age, but he had quite a different look when he was a hunky young leading man on the rise. I recently saw How the West Was Won (1962), and spent much of that film trying to figure out who he reminded me of. It finally clicked for me during Breakfast at Tiffany’s: young Peppard was a dead ringer for young Stephen Collins, who’s probably best known as the patriarch from the schmaltzy TV series Seventh Heaven, but is better remembered by we Trekkies for his role as Commander Will Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). I think he was probably about the same age then that Peppard was in Tiffany’s, and the resemblance is uncanny, to my eye:
Earlier today,I ran across this little mash-up of Norman Rockwell and Lucasfilm, and I was sufficiently amused to pass it along:
The Chinese characters on the menu in the background and the vaguely non-Western features of the waiter suggest this is supposed to be somewhere in the Orient, possibly the moment when Dr. Jones and Short Round first encounter each other in Shanghai (“He tried to pick my pocket”), or maybe just afterward when Indy is trying to figure out what to do with the boy. But that’s not what I thought at first glance.
Maybe it’s because I instantly recognized the Rockwell painting this is based on, and Rockwell’s work of course embodies pure Americana, but whatever the reason, I initially assumed this was an American diner. And as I’ve always had it in my head that Indy brought Short Round back to the States after their adventures in Temple of Doom, I found myself imagining Indy was saying something like this:
“Now, look, Shorty, we’ve had some fun times, but you’re in America now… you’ve got to go to school like all the other kids!”
Admit it, you can hear Harrison Ford’s voice saying that, can’t you?
Incidentally, it still bugs me that Short Round wasn’t in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, at least for a cameo during the final scene. Surely he would’ve showed up for his old pal and benefactor’s wedding day? Sallah, I can forgive… Cairo was a long way from the U.S. even in 1957, but if Shorty is (presumably) an American citizen now, then where the heck was he? Of course, it’s always possible that he and perhaps even Sallah did not survive the war…
I ran across this fun piece of fan art the other day that I thought was worth sharing:
The artist is a cat named Jonathan Harris, and here’s what he has to say about this piece:
Indiana Jones and the Rise of the Valkyrie featuring the Rocketeer.
18×24 Acrylic and color pencil on Watercolor paper.
Well, the comp is pretty much done. Maybe I can make this poster size this year We’ll see.
This little art idea came about out of love and frustration.
Love for the Indiana Jones franchise and all things Indy, for the Rocketeer and the late Dave Stevens, and lastly for the incomparable talent of Drew Struzan whose posters inspired the imagination of a 9 year old boy and the continuing artistic endeavors of a 39 year old man.
Frustration over the fact that the Indy (Harrison Ford) movie franchise may be never continue, that Dave Stevens is no longer with us to give us further adventures of the Rocketeer, and that Drew Struzan is semi-retired and Hollywood doesn’t seem interested in classic movie poster production.
But in my corner of the world, imagination and heart, they will always continue. Appreciation for what has come and imagination for what might always be.
Of course, Jonathan isn’t the first to imagine a meeting between two of pop culture’s most beloved 1930s adventurers. Just sayin’.
Time for our annual tradition here on Simple Tricks of recounting all the films, recorded TV content, books, and live performances I’ve experienced in the last year. As I’ve noted before, I have no idea if anybody else cares in the least about this, or if it’s just an exercise in tedious self-indulgence, but I like to remind myself where I’ve been over the past twelve months. I missed doing it last year due to this blog being out of commission, and the 2012 version was unfortunately one of the entries that evaporated when the blog failed, so I can’t really do much comparison with the previous couple years as I’ve done in the past, but I can at least list the titles and get the numbers.
FYI before we begin: An asterisk [*] before the title indicates something I’ve seen or read before. Bolded items in the home video sections are titles I own on either DVD or BluRay, or in a few cases, VHS tape.
Movies Seen in a Theater
Note: Much of my cinema-going this year was to special engagements of classics. What can I say, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see these films on the big screen, either again or, in many cases, for the first time. And besides, there just weren’t that many new releases that grabbed my attention. I’ll indicate where these screenings took place in brackets [ ] following the titles.
Saving Mr. Banks
American Hustle
* Lawrence of Arabia [Salt Lake Film Society’s “This Is Digital” celebration]
* Chicago [Cinemark Classic Series]
* The Shawshank Redemption [Cinemark Classic Series]
* The Nightmare Before Christmas [Cinemark Classic Series]
Interstellar
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1
Movies Seen on Home Video
Note: I used to grit my teeth and suffer through any movie I started, especially if I’d heard a lot of positive word of mouth or critical praise, on the logic that if everyone else thought it was good, then I needed to see it. But I’m getting much less shy in my grumpy middle age about shutting off the things that don’t engage me — life is too damn short, you know? I still don’t do it often, but there were a couple of titles this year I just couldn’t hack; I’ve indicated those with [ABANDONED].
Total Recall (2012)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch
* Raiders of the Lost Ark
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Where the Buffalo Roam [ABANDONED]
The Wolverine
The Hindenburg
Mary Poppins
After Porn Ends
The Keep
The World’s End
My Favorite Year
* Next of Kin
Appaloosa
Twilight (1998 Paul Newman film, NOT the sparkly vampire thing)
Slap Shot
Brubaker
* Dune
Nobody’s Fool
* Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1977 theatrical cut)
Citizens Band
Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
Joyride (1977)
Man of Steel
* Captain America: The First Avenger
The Way, Way Back
* The Godfather
* The Godfather, Part III
42
* Caddyshack
* The Big Chill
Downhill Racer
Mr. Moto’s Gamble
Mr. Moto Takes a Chance
Sound City
Behind the Candelabra
We Bought a Zoo
Silver Linings Playbook [ABANDONED]
Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)
The Legend of Hell House
* Duel
The Town that Dreaded Sundown
Dracula (1979)
Gog
Single White Female
The Dunwich Horror
Re-Animator
* The Sugarland Express
American Hot Wax
Europa Report
* Jaws
Charlie Chan in the Secret Service
Meatballs
Cat People (1982)
Cinerama’s Seven Wonders of the World
* A Christmas Story
* Bad Santa
* The Ref [VHS]
* Guardians of the Galaxy
Bettie Page Reveals All
Space Station 76
* Godzilla (2014)
* Battle Beyond the Stars
* Amadeus (Director’s Cut)
TV Content Seen on Home Video
Pole to Pole with Michael Palin (complete series)
Babylon 5 (seasons 1 through 4) [VHS]
Babylon 5 (season 5, completing the series)
The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Sixth Season
Trilogy of Terror (TV movie)
Full Circle with Michael Palin (complete series)
Sherlock (season 3)
Himalaya with Michael Palin (complete series)
Sahara with Michael Palin (complete series)
China Beach (season 1)
The Big Bang Theory: The Complete Seventh Season
Stephen Fry in America (complete series)
Babylon 5: In the Beginning (TV movie)
Babylon 5: Thirdspace (TV movie)
Babylon 5: The River of Souls (TV movie)
Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (TV movie)
Crusade: The Complete Series
WKRP in Cincinnati(season 1)
Books Completed (Fiction)
Note: You’ll notice that I read a whole mess of novels by Clive Cussler this year. I realized at some point that, despite my frequent mentions of his Dirk Pitt adventures, and strong opinions about that character, it had been years, decades even, since I’d read them, and I wondered how well they actually matched my memories of them. So I developed ambitions of doing a novel-by-novel survey of the series, much as Michael May has been doing with Ian Fleming’s Bond series over on his Adventureblog. Well, I read the books (half of them anyway), but didn’t get around to writing the entries. Typical of how the year went with regard to blogging…
Nobody’s Fool — Richard Russo
The Song of Forgotten Stars, Book Two: The Wisdomfold Path (unpublished manuscript) — Kelly Sedinger
* Pacific Vortex! — Clive Cussler
* The Mediterranean Caper — Cussler
* Iceberg — Cussler
* Raise the Titanic! — Cussler
* Vixen 03 — Cussler
* Night Probe! — Cussler
* Deep Six — Cussler
The Master Mind of Mars — Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Star Wars (graphic novel) — J.W. Rinzler (writer) and Mike Mayhew (artist)
Me and Orson Welles — Robert Kaplow
Prince Lestat — Anne Rice
Books Completed (Non-Fiction)
VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave — Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, and Martha Quinn, with Gavin Edwards
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution — Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks
What You Want is in the Limo: On the Road with Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and The Who in 1973, the Year the Sixties Died and the Modern Rock Star Was Born — Michael Walker
Sixteen years ago (good lord!), I was working my very first editorial/proofreading type job, at a company that produced certification tests for skilled trades that require a state license… plumbers, electricians, cosmetologists, that sort of thing. The company had just provided Internet access to all employees — quite a novelty at the time, at least for me — and I took full advantage of this powerful new tool to seek out every scrap of information I could find on the most important issue of the day: the new Star Wars movie coming out in 1999, the first one since Return of the Jedi had closed the original trilogy way back when I was in middle school.
Blogs were in their infancy then — I think Lileks and Scalzi had already set up shop in their respective fiefdoms, but that was about all — and there was no social media as we now know it. But there were message boards on every conceivable topic, and there was the official starwars.com site as well as an incredible fan page called theforce.net (which I’m very pleased to learn is still going strong, both on its original site as well as on Twitter and Facebook!), and I skimmed through them every morning before getting busy with my day’s work. I had downloaded fan-made wallpapers and a countdown-clock widget that silently ticked away the months until opening day.
But all of this was small potatoes next to the unprecedented opportunity provided by this new-fangled ‘net thingie one day in November 1998: to see the first trailer for the new movie without having to go to a theater. Remember, there was no YouTube at the time. This was big. As in, that’s-no-moon-that’s-a-space-station big. It took several hours to download the trailer across a painfully slow connection to an unoccupied terminal (my boss’ machine, if I recall correctly — I think she had the day off), and I sweated away the time working in my cubicle, getting up every ten minutes or so to check the progress, then going back to the proofreading and document formatting that suddenly seemed so utterly unimportant to me. I can’t imagine how many errors I made that day — Master Yoda would surely have chided me for not having my mind on where I was or what I was doing. But finally — finally! — the trailer was complete. I put on headphones so as not to reveal myself to my coworkers, who didn’t know I’d been sneaking into Cristina’s cubicle all day, and with a dry mouth and a pounding heart, I clicked “play.”
The quality was… not great. The image was tiny, just a postage-stamp really, and it kept breaking down into blocky pixels or outright freezing. But I was still catching glimpses of haunting imagery: mounted warriors materializing out of a mist, a chrome starship landed on a desert plain that could only have been Tatooine, ships flying over an alien city… exotic creatures, vehicles, and costumes, all of it new and yet weirdly familiar. And most importantly, I could hear. The audio was uninterrupted, and I could hear that familiar score by John Williams that still produces a Pavlovian response in my adrenal glands, and the buzz of lightsabers, the crack and pow of blasterfire, the roar of starship engines, and a line of dialog that seemed like I’d been waiting my whole life to hear: “Anakin Skywalker, meet… Obi Wan Kenobi.” And then Samuel L. Jackson, baddest of the bad, talking about some prophecy, followed by Yoda, my beloved Yoda, the irascible little Muppet whose zen-lite aphorisms I’d been parroting for years, making a speech that sent shivers down my spine: “Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate… leads to suffering.” And then a rising crescendo ending in the title card: Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
I remember sitting back in my chair after that first viewing and feeling twitchy with adrenaline. I felt like I had when I was nine and saw a TV commercial for the 1979 re-release of the original Star Wars, the one that had lodged in my brain like a triple-barbed fishhook a couple years before and still hasn’t let go of me even now in 2014; I saw that commercial and without even thinking about it, rose to my feet and ran as fast as I possibly could, so fast I nearly lost control and toppled face-forward from my momentum, clear out to the back pasture where my parents were working on a fence. They’d thought something was wrong when I raced up at that speed, thought I’d hurt myself or set the house on fire or something. I remember their blank expressions when I told them that everything was fine, Star Wars was coming back! For some reason, they just didn’t share my enthusiasm.
I watched the Phantom Menace trailer four more times before I finally went back to my own desk and tried, half-heartedly, to get back to work. It was Star Wars, all right. After all those years, it was a goddamned new Star Wars movie. The endless arguing about that movie and the ones to follow, the curdling of the Star Wars fan experience, was still far off in the future and, at the time, completely unimaginable to me. For that day, that afternoon, life was good. I was giddy. And I felt young.
I never thought I’d feel quite that same way about Star Wars again. Until this morning.
I’m sure everyone has already seen it by now, but let’s go ahead and watch it again. Just because. Ladies and gentlemen, the first teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens:
I’ll confess, my first thought as the trailer begins was, “Ah hell, Tatooine again? Can’t we see some place new this time?” And then when the first two human faces we see are an African-American man and a woman, my inner cynic said, “Oh, there’s the response to the criticism about a lack of diversity in the Star Wars universe” (which isn’t to say I don’t approve of increasing the diversity of Star Wars, but the prominent placement of these two in this trailer struck me as a little too on-the-nose, as if JJ Abrams is screaming out “Look! Look what I’ve done!”). But then that clunky-looking speeder bike takes off with another one of those great throbbing Star Wars engine sounds… and there are X-Wings skimming across a mountain lake at incredible speeds… and a wicked-looking medieval-longsword-style lightsaber… and John Williams’ brassy fanfare pressing hard on my pleasure button, and then… oh my lord, it’s the Falcon, climbing and diving and spiraling like never before, and who cares if the radar dish is square now, it’s my beautiful hunk-of-the-junk Falcon, and the adrenaline is surging and holy shit, I’m nine again running out to the back pasture of the Internet to tell everybody I know that Star Wars is coming back, after all these years, it’s a goddamned new Star Wars movie!
Yes, I’m easily excited. You’re just noticing?
It remains to be seen if the actual story is any good, of course, if our original-trilogy heroes will be integral or just appear in glorified cameos, if The Force Awakens will move the Star Wars mythos forward in any meaningful way or just be a superficial compilation of action set-pieces designed to satisfy a generation of rabid fanboys whose main priority is whether things look cool… but for the first time since hearing that JJ Abrams was attached to this project, I am cautiously optimistic. Judging an entire movie from a minute and a half of out-of-context footage is dangerous, I know, but it looks like the directorial quirks that so annoyed me on other Abrams films are absent here (I caught only a couple of lens flares during the Falcon sequence, when it would be natural to see such effects as the camera passes the sun… or suns, I suppose, since we’re flying over Tatooine). And of course the writing team that made such a hash of my other beloved space-opera franchise on Abrams’ Star Trek didn’t have anything to do with The Force Awakens (I’m still not impressed with that title, by the way). So maybe, just maybe…
In the meantime, whatever comes a year from now, I’m savoring today, this feeling, this excitement, this reminder of youth.
***
Postscript: Incidentally, the Phantom Menace trailer I talk about above was a huge milestone in the way movies are now marketed as well as how the Internet now functions. It’s a pretty fascinating story, actually… read more about it here.)
This week’s selection is something a little different, not least of which because I can’t actually embed the video here. You’ll have to click through to this page to see it. The song you’ll hear there is “The Last Goodbye,” written and performed by the actor Billy Boyd and which will play over the end credits of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies when it opens next month. Five Armies is, of course, the concluding chapter of Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on JRR Tolkien’s beloved The Hobbit, and Jackson’s sixth epic film set in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.
I’ll confess that I haven’t been anywhere near as captivated by the Hobbit films as I was with the earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy. I think Jackson made a tremendous mistake in trying to expand a relatively modest children’s book into a sprawling epic. The story could’ve been told in one or possibly two films at most, and probably in much more concise films (i.e., shorter ones), too. The result is that the Hobbit trilogy feels much like Bilbo Baggins described himself in The Fellowship of the Ring: stretched thin like butter scraped over too much bread. Where The Lord of the Rings trilogy carried the joy and wonder of discovering a place we somehow always knew existed but never thought we’d actually see, the Hobbit movies have a tired, been-there-done-that quality to them. Honestly, I don’t even remember the first two with any degree of clarity (I only saw them once each, as opposed to the LOTR trilogy, which I’ve watched several times), and I view the coming of the third chapter with more a sense of weary obligation than enthused anticipation.
That said, Jackson’s vision of Middle-Earth does feel like a real place to me, as real in my mind and yet as tantalizingly inaccessible as Tatooine or the bridge of the original starship Enterprise, or the hometown I grew up in that is now so changed I no longer recognize it as the place I once roamed on my red Schwinn with the banana seat. And knowing that The Battle of the Five Armies is the last time we’ll get to visit this wonderful landscape — at least as its been realized by Jackson and his people — saddens me. Billy Boyd’s song and the video that accompanies it — currently an Entertainment Weekly exclusive, hence the need to click over to that page — capitalizes on this sentiment. And it’s devastatingly bittersweet and lovely.
If you ever loved the cinematic Middle-Earth, even if you’ve grown weary of hobbits and orcs after five movies… give it a view.
How I came to see this odd little film will take a bit of explaining, so if you’ll bear with me…
My lovely Anne’s all-time favorite books are Diana Gabaldon‘s Outlander series, a sequence of eight (and counting!) doorstop-sized tomes and various shorter ancillary works that combine time travel, historical adventure, and bodice-ripping (or perhaps I should say “kilt lifting”) romance against the backdrop of Scotland’s Jacobite Revolution and its aftermath. The first book in the series has now been adapted into a television series for the Starz cable network; it debuted about a month ago and stars a young chap named Sam Heughan as hunky highlander Jamie Fraser.
Anne and I have only seen the first episode of this Outlander series, because we don’t have cable and Starz has elected to keep the series off the legitimate streaming services, for some reason. (I’m sure we could find it somewhere out there in the InterTubes, but as you all know, I’m an analog kind of guy, which means I’m not very skilled at tracking down such things.) But this hasn’t prevented Anne from getting involved with a local Outlander fan group on Facebook. Recently, a member of that group proposed trying to arrange a screening of a film Heughan made a couple years ago, a British indie project called Emulsion, for Salt Lake-areafans. It turns out there’s an online service that will set up one-time screenings of such obscurities if you can pre-sell enough tickets to make it worthwhile. Who knew, right? Anyhow, getting Emulsion here required several people to buy more seats than they in fact had bodies to fill, but in the end, the effort succeeded. Tuesday night, I was one of only four or five men in an auditorium otherwise populated by women, watching a movie I otherwise probably never would’ve heard of, let alone bothered to see. (Hey, Anne has supported me in my fannish interests so often over the past 20 years, the least I can do is return the favor once in a while!)
Written and directed by Suki Singh, Emulsion is basically a modern-day film noir, in which Heughan plays a young man whose wife disappeared from their car in a parking lot — or car park, as they say on the other side of the pond — while he was making a phone call. A year later, we find him still obsessively trying to figure out what happened to her… when he’s not just plain obsessing over her. The movie is visually striking, even beautiful in its way — that’s no surprise considering Singh’s background in commercials and music videos — but it’s also pretty damn baffling and deeply unsettling in a way that’s hard to articulate.
Of course, noir films almost always hinge on the idea that things are not what they appear, and this often makes them confusing to watch. For example, I defy anybody to explain The Big Sleep to me in a way that makes sense, and yet it is widely considered a film classic (by me too, for the record). And unlike The Big Sleep, Emulsion actually does provide answers at the end, and they actually do make (some) sense of what we’ve just seen. But the real question when you’re watching a film like this is not so much whether the conclusion makes sense but whether it satisfies. Was it worth taking this journey that left you scratching your head at every stop? The Big Sleep makes the journey worthwhile by being so damn stylish and entertaining along the way that the muddled story ultimately isn’t all that important. Emulsion, though… I’m just not sure the payoff is worth the 89 preceding minutes of “WTF?” As I quipped to our friends when the house lights came up, it was like watching a feature-length ad for Calvin Klein Eternity.
But I will give credit where it’s due: Sam Heughan wears an old-fashioned three-piece suit and hat well. He’s a fine-looking man.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering which of the Guardians of the Galaxy was my favorite, it turned out to be the one I was initially the most uncertain about:
I’ll be the first to admit that a computer-generated talking raccoon with a badass attitude and a fetish for large, complicated weapons is pretty damn ridiculous, even in the best-case scenario. There’s a thousand reasons why such a character could turn out to be really, really lame (not least of which is that his voice is provided by Bradley Cooper, an actor I find very, very difficult to like). Happily, though, he works. He works very well, stealing nearly every scene he’s in, and he even gets a couple of sensitive, introspective moments that will break your heart. As unlikely as it sounds, this guy is the new Han Solo. Seriously.
But here’s something interesting I learned about old Rocket Raccoon the other day: he was created in 1976 by a comic-book writer named Bill Mantlo. My ears immediately pricked up when I ran across that little factoid, because Mantlo was also the guy behind one of my favorite comic titles when I was a kid, a trippy series based on a line of popular toys (but oh, so much better than that implies!) called The Micronauts. I’ve written before on this blog about The Micronauts and Bill Mantlo… and the sad story of what happened to him. (The short version, if you don’t feel like clicking the link, is that he was struck by a hit-and-run driver in 1992 and suffered severe brain damage. He now lives in an assisted-care facility and requires constant, around-the-clock attention.)
Well, there’s a heartwarming sidebar to the success of the Guardians movie. Even though Mantlo’s contribution was work-for-hire, meaning he doesn’t own Rocket, Disney and Marvel Studios made sure he got namechecked in the film’s closing credits. And in a show of good old-fashioned human decency, they even arranged for a private screening of the movie for him. According to his brother and legal guardian Michael:
Bill thoroughly enjoyed it, giving it his HIGHEST COMPLIMENT (the BIG “THUMB’S UP!”), and when the credits rolled, his face was locked into the HUGEST SMILE I HAVE EVER SEEN HIM WEAR (along with one or two tears of joy)! This was the GREATEST DAY OF THE LAST 22 YEARS for me, our family, and most importantly, BILL MANTLO!
I can only imagine how satisfying it must be for somebody to see one of their creations — a work-for-hire job from 40 years ago, no less — come to life on the screen, and to know it’s going to reach millions, maybe even billions, of people before it’s all done. That he now has audiences who weren’t even born in 1976 about to discover and love his work… For someone who frankly has lost almost everything a human being has to lose… well, it’s got to be hugely emotional. And hugely gratifying. I’m so glad Bill was able to see that, to have one little moment of victory in a day-to-day existence that’s otherwise pretty bleak.
One final note: Bill’s care is enormously expensive, and he has very little human contact beyond his caregivers, so Mike Mantlo encourages fans to contribute whatever they can, large or small, to help out, and also to reach out to Bill with a card or letter. I would like to make the same request of my Loyal Readers. If you enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, if Rocket and Groot cracked you up and touched your heart, if you have an action figure or a bobble head or a t-shirt with this character on it, send Bill a few bucks. The cost of a movie ticket perhaps. Give up an extra screening of the movie for the guy who helped make it happen. And send him a card to let him know how much we love that little furball… to let him know he’s not forgotten, and he’s not alone. That’s what I intend to do as soon as I finish this.
Details on donating and how to contact Bill can be found here. I hope you’ll consider it. We all love these stories about heroes saving the universe. But more and more I think true heroism comes from just reaching out to another individual human being, and offering to help even if we really can’t do much…
This entry is far beyond its window of relevance, considering there’s now probably only about a dozen people left on the planet who haven’t seen it yet, but for whatever it’s worth, I really, really enjoyed Guardians of the Galaxy, the latest entry in the interconnected film franchise that’s come to be known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was everything I hoped it would be, and everything I’ve been craving for a while: a feel-good space adventure with likable heroes — hey, remember those?! — and a healthy sense of humor, balanced with just enough pathos and epic scope to keep the whole thing from tilting over the edge into outright comedy.
While I enjoyed the story and characters, honestly, a lot of the appeal for me was the environment of this movie. Like its distant ancestor, the original Star Wars, Guardians drops the viewer into a fully realized, busy, populated universe where it feels as if every individual on the screen has some life off the screen. We get the feeling that there are a billion stories in this universe and we’re only focusing on this one handful of characters for a while, that we could easily shift our focus to those guys over there and it would turn out to be just as entertaining. That sounds like no big deal, but it’s a trick very few sci-fi movies — very few movies in general, when you think about it — manage to pull off. I found myself really appreciating the sensation of verisimilitude, the feeling that I could crawl inside this movie and walk around and meet people. And since I had absolutely no background with this property going in, I also had the pleasure of discovering something entirely new. As much as I’ve enjoyed the other Marvel films — Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, as well as the X-Men movies (same comic-book publisher, different movie studio) — I already knew who those characters were and the rough outlines of their most famous adventures, so the pleasure I felt with those movies came from seeing how successfully they brought life to the familiar. Guardians, on the other hand, was a clean slate for me, and I dug the things it filled up with.
In addition, I liked the overall look of Guardians. It’s kind of a weird observation, but I was deeply struck by the way one of the main locations, the planet Xandar, was such a bright and sunny place, where the police aircraft are a shining gold and citizens wear brightly colored clothing. Such a refreshing change from the desaturated, grayscale visuals and perpetual nighttime setting of so many science fiction films in recent years.
I have to mention the soundtrack, naturally, which consists mostly of upbeat, bubblegum-flavored pop tunes from the 1970s. Kudos to director James Gunn for choosing just the right songs to evoke a mood, and for working with that old music I love so much instead of ironically mocking it.
About the only complaint I have with Guardians is one you’ve heard before, which is that the big action scenes are unfortunately cut in the jittery, zoom-in/zoom-out, lots-of-crap-flying-around, which-way-am-I-supposed-to-look style that’s been the vogue for the past decade or so, ever since those damned Bourne movies. I hate to admit this, because I’m fairly certain it’s a sign I’m getting old, but I simply can’t tell what the hell is going on in action scenes these days. Guardians wasn’t as bad in this regard as other flicks I’ve seen, but there were a couple of shots (mostly in the segment involving a dogfight in and around a place called Knowhere) that I had a lot of difficulty following.
Still, that’s nitpicking compared to the overall level of joy I received from this film. Honestly, how could I not love a space movie that references the Kevin Bacon classic Footloose? Am I right? And of course the cameo everybody’s been talking about absolutely made my night. Whoever thought we’d see that guy on the big screen again, in any form?
