Reviewing Movies

Watched the movie once again. Criminal organizations have long used children to do their dirty work because if caught they’ll get off lightly. The Canadian Young-Offenders Act has been accused of fostering this belief. Terrorist groups and guerrilla armies like children because they are malleable and make fanatical fighters. Brendan Behan was so recruited by the IRA and found himself confined to Borstal Prison for boys. As played by Michael York the Prison Administrator was a fair-minded disciplinarian who believed in rehabilitation and treated his charges with the same respect he expected from them in return. As Behan Shawn Hatosy brings a nascent Irish legend to life. The movie makes of a negative experience a positive rebirth.

Having visited Madison County, Iowa gives the Clint Eastwood/Meryl Streep movie The Bridges of Madison County an entirely new perspective. For one thing I’ve smelt the rich black loamy soil and witnessed the gently rolling countryside and dusty dirt roads. There really is a place called Winterset, the County Seat but it is interesting that no mention of Marion Morrison’s birthplace a quarter-mile from one of the bridges is made but then Eastwood directed. Farm dogs really do believe they own the roads and although roads are marked these days and signs direct tourists to the area’s second biggest attraction after the new John Wayne Museum the roads remain unpaved, winding, and washboard. The directions seem accurate. One caveat, only one of the remaining bridges is still used for through traffic most having been moved to safer locations and due to vandalism all need video surveillance to prevent pyromania.

The movie proceeds at a leisurely pace the brother and sister who are learning about their Mother’s “Affair” inter-spaced with the main event. The movie would have one believe that this couple’s 4-day tryst marked an urbane world-traveling photographer for life. The other poignancy is that of Francesca a war-bride who gave up a love of the fine arts and teaching to dedicate herself to being a farm wife and raising two children amid a narrow gossiping one-note community. May I confess that in my travels I’ve found a hardcover copy of the Robert Waller book that I need now to read so I can compare. Eastwood starred, directed, and produced this effort.

And so having read the book through I have rewatched the movie. The book is the work of one man Yann Martel and tells of a sea journey involving a Bengal Tiger and one boy played by a nineteen-year-old that in the movie production took 40,000 people over a year to create. Hard to believe the entire ocean journey was shot in a gigantic water tank. First reaction is, I don’t remember reading that in the book. Whether or not the story makes you believe in God the idea of someone surviving the two years ocean currents would take to carry one across the Pacific in essential solitary confinement is nearly impossible to believe. The tiger.... ?

The shots of the zoo in India are gorgeous. Many of the ocean shots are elegiac, the night shots of the stars in particular. Oceanic fluorescence and luminescence at night are a wonder to behold. The Pacific covers over one third of our planet’s surface and can produce storms with winds of nearly 200 mph and rogue waves capable of eating even the largest ships. Storms at sea make one feel hollow, infinitesimal, powerless. The vastness of this ocean on a calm day as seen from sea level in a lifeboat, mind numbing. All this the movie attempts to reproduce. Should be seen on a large screen but protect your hearing.

Based on a short story by Annie Proulx. No self-respecting cattle wrangler would call a sheep herd a cowboy, sheep being despised for what they do to turf. Ennis Del Mar hitch-hikes into town, Jack Twist arrives in beaten down old pickup with a run-on motor. Both arrive with little more than the shirts on their backs. Ennis’ parents killed themselves on the only turn on a 43-mile straightaway, Jack’s are distant and repressed. There is nothing delicate about their love-making resulting as it does in black eyes and bloody noses. They would not be the first gay men to try to disguise their proclivities in marriage. Neither succeeds well in the deception Ennis’s resulting in divorce, Jack as Ennis is told in the version the widow was given while the actual events are portrayed on screen, died. The tragedy of their lives is that they live in a part of the world that is homophobic to this day and in a profession that is particularly so. Ennis ends up drifting from one dead-end job to another while Jack marries into wealth but with a father-in-law who hates his guts. The final scene in which Ennis visits Jack’s parents and finds his unwashed blood-stained shirt in Jack’s childhood bedroom is hauntingly poignant. Theirs was a life of missed opportunities but Jack ultimately died for the reasons Ennis feared.

When people use the expression, they don’t make ‘em like they used to they could truly be talking about movies like Gone With the Wind, Doctor Zhivago, or The Ten Commandments. Made in an age before computers and CGI these movies featured casts of thousands and special effects that were cutting edge at their time. Movies that unfold seemingly in real time with running lengths in excess of 3 hours they had Overtures, Intermission, and Exit music. The credits began the movie rather than playing to an empty house after the audience has stormed out of the theatre.

Much of the storyline concerning the life of Moses in Cecil B. de Mille’s Ten Commandments is conjecture and the events in Jewish History portrayed are literal transcriptions of mythic texts. I will never forgive ‘Moses’ for abandoning the fifth commandment and becoming president of the NRA. In the day actors did not have personal trainers or spend months in the gym before a shoot.

When he got to the Reed Sea DeMille realized his epic had reached marathon proportions and jumped immediately to the volcano at Sinai. The gang had great fun staging the bacchanal under the mountain, then jumped 40 years to Mount Nebo in sight of the Jordan. In the scheme of things the commandments are an afterthought. Rather prophetic that the people were busy breaking them while God was inscribing them.

Given the vast amount of material with which the Israelites left Egypt carried on makeshift carts the desert must have become littered with the items abandoned along the way.

The Middle Class tradition of a summer spent at the cottage is a ritual fast becoming beyond the means of the average family. Couples who both work full-time, teenagers with summer jobs, and the costs of affording a second home have made this only a fond memory for most. Long retired the Thayers have spent their summers on Golden Pond all their married life. The couple of old loons are as much a fixture on the lake as the pair of Loons who sail out to greet them upon their arrival. At the end of long and illustrious acting careers both Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda are note perfect as this aging couple raging against the coming of the night. Casting Henry’s own daughter as the confused and rebellious offspring was a stroke of genius. As the grandson dropped off for the summer Doug McKeon merely had to play his own smart aleck, inexperienced, young self amid these two old pros. He was never to give a performance its equal and probably didn’t realize until many years later the generosity the two afforded him. The young punk at the dock showing off his pecs was the son of the director. As Ethel tells her daughter, “If I’d know I’d have rented a 13-year-old for Norman.” Or something close. Life On Golden Pond unfolds at a sedate pace. There is parchesi, fishing, berry picking, picture puzzles, and reading in front of the fire place. If you ever get a chance to see a performance of the stage play upon which this is based, go.

As season 8 begins we meet the impossibly cute Kevin who showed up near the end of Season 7, a lad with dimples so adorable it is felt necessary to have him declare, “I’m not gay.” As the story progresses the brothers are aging in real life and on screen. Flashbacks of the past year Sam spent with a young lady during Dean’s year in purgatory show Sam appearing a giant beside the diminutive lass and her father. Care is no longer being taken to disguise the fact that he towers over his supposed older brother Dean. Calling him little Sammy is almost laughable. The plot lines, if it be possible, seem even darker than before. Sam goes to Hell and back. We see flashbacks of Dean’s year in purgatory.

With the angels in heaven at war with one another the lines between the good guys and the bad guys are definitely blurred. The brothers are good ole boys who continue to roar around the countryside in that Chevy Impala listening to Rock. How they maintain their sleek physiques on their diet of beer, liquor, and junk food remains a mystery. The arsenal they carry in the compartment under their trunk? The show continues to be ultra-violent but save for a sequence at the beginning of an episode in Season 7 showing off Jared Padalecki’s impressive upper body these hunks keep their clothes on.

As we wait for the release of Season 9 on DVD Season 10 is ongoing on broadcast TV. How much longer can the writers and producers drag out this scenario and keep it interesting?