Category Archives: Art

Whatever You Do, Please Don’t Watch This Movie

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It was Friday night and I was open to some mindless cinematic entertainment. That’s my excuse. But having wasted almost two hours of my life watching Olympus Has Fallen, the only thing I can do to partly redeem myself is to warn anyone who might be open to some mindless entertainment not to make the same mistake I did.

If only my curiosity about how they would end this thing hadn’t gotten the best of me.

The premise is that a bunch of well-armed, oddly-motivated Koreans take over the White House with the help of an ex-Secret Service agent who has “lost his way” (that’s an understatement). Their goal is to somehow reunite North and South Korea while destroying the United States. Lots of people are killed in the attack. Furthermore, the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the three people who know the passwords that will blow up all of America’s nuclear missiles – happen to be at the White House and end up as hostages in the presidential bunker. There’s only one intrepid Secret Service agent left standing. Not only does he kill every bad guy he meets, he rescues the President and the President’s son, after which he stops the countdown to nuclear catastrophe with only seconds to spare.

It’s stupid, exceedingly violent, poorly-written and cliche-ridden, but it’s only a big-budget action movie. What bothered me was the idea that some people’s lives and suffering are much more important than everyone else’s. The President gives up secret codes, jeopardizing the whole country, in order to protect two people. The Speaker of the House (the Vice President is a hostage too) orders the Army and Navy to withdraw from South Korea, accepting the idea that he’s probably starting a war, in order to save the President’s life. Bodies are strewn all around the White House and the District of Columbia, but the President and his Secret Service pal crack jokes as they walk outside. The brain trust in the Pentagon’s command center is so happy when the President is rescued that they all stand and applaud, despite the fact that they’ve presided over the worst breach of security in the nation’s history, during which scores of innocent people were maimed and killed and the lives of millions of others were unnecessarily put at risk.

Really, if you’re a senior official who’s taken hostage, consider yourself expendable. You can be replaced.

By the way, Netflix claims that 900,000 people have given this epic an average rating of 4.2 out of 5, meaning the average viewer really liked it. Some people loved it. From the comments, some people even took it seriously. I’d tell you to judge for yourself, but that would be wrong. 

One Way Literature Can Help

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When I was in college, many years ago, there was this girl. I can’t remember exactly what the circumstances were, but one night I was trying to get or stay on intimate terms with her and said something that was really dumb (foolish, pathetic, etc.). The gist of it was that no one else would ever be as important to me, but what I said was even more melodramatic than that. Her appropriate response was something like “are you kidding?”. As you can tell, I’m still embarrassed more than 40 years later. 

Well, I’ve been reading Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, first published in 1874. The heroine, Bathsheba Everdene (quite a handle, as people used to say), has given the local gentleman farmer, Mr. Boldwood, the mistaken impression that she might marry him. It all started when, on a whim, she sent him a valentine. Then she encouraged him some more. He’s never had any experience with women and has fallen in love with her. Meanwhile, she’s fallen in love with a dashing but unreliable young soldier. Miss Everdene tries to let Mr. Boldwood down easy, but he doesn’t take the news very well. Some excerpts:

Oh, Bathsheba, have pity on me! … I am come to that low, lowest stage – to ask a woman for pity! … I am beyond myself about this and am mad… I wish you knew what is in me of devotion to you; but it is impossible … In bare human mercy to a lonely man, don’t throw me off now! There was a time when you turned to me, before I thought of you! … I took for earnest what you insist was jest [that damned valentine!], and now this that I pray to be jest you say is awful, wretched earnest… I wish your feeling was more like mine, or my feeling more like yours! Oh, could I have foreseen the torture that trifling trick was going to lead me into, how I should have cursed you; but only having been able to see it since, I cannot do that, for I love you too well! … Bathsheba, you are the first woman of any shade or nature that I have ever looked at to love, and it is the having been so near claiming you for my own that makes this denial so hard to bear. How nearly you promised me! … Where are your pleasant words all gone – your earnest hope to be able to love me? Where is your firm conviction that you would get to care for me very much? Really forgotten? Really? … Would to God you had never taken me up, since it was only to throw me down! … I tell you all this, but what do you care! You don’t care….Dearest, dearest, I am wavering even now between the two opposites of recklessly renouncing you and labouring humbly for you again. Forget that you have said No, and let it be as it was!

I know it’s only fiction, but what I said to that young woman a long time ago doesn’t embarrass me as much now.

One Benefit of Having Children (Recommending Songza)

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One of mine told me about a website called Songza. They let you listen to commercial-free music after an initial advertisement, but what’s especially interesting is that they have many, many categories, all the way from “Doing Housework” and “Today’s Pop Hits” to “Pastoral Symphonies”, “Blues Instrumentals”, “Sun Records Road Trip”, “Surf Music After the 60s” and “Robert Christgau’s Record Collection”.

It’s similar to how Netflix suggests stuff like “Dark Movies About Road Trips in South America” or “Comedies with Singing Animals”.

I browsed the “Record Store Clerk” category, found “New Music for Baby Boomers”, and then “Retro Indie Rock”. I’ve been listening for an hour or so and it’s been great. They’re playing music by groups I’ve never heard of (Department of Eagles, Leagues, Morning Benders) that will probably appeal to anybody who’s a Brian Wilson fan (like your humble blogger).

There may be a catch somewhere (you have trouble leaving your computer?), but I don’t know what it is.

http://www.songza.com

Revisiting the Overlook Hotel, Again and Again

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Stanley Kubrick is my favorite director. Like Roberto Clemente, John Lennon, Andy Kaufman and many others, Kubrick died too young – even though he was 70 when he finished his last movie.

If you’re a Kubrick fan, or if you love what he did with The Shining, or if you enjoy a good cultural mystery, or if you are a student of human psychology, you should consider watching a documentary called Room 237. 

Did you know that people have spent a whole lot of time looking for hidden meanings in The Shining? Did you realize that there are 42 cars and trucks in the parking lot of the fictional Overlook Hotel? Have you ever thought about watching The Shining backwards and forwards at the same time? Have you pondered the possibility that the astronauts bounding around on the moon were actors in a government-sponsored, made-for-TV movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, who later used The Shining to spill the beans? 

Room 237 covers all this and more. Even if you don’t find any of the theories convincing, the clips from Kubrick’s movies and many others are fun to watch. It’s a documentary that will make you laugh and also make you think.

And remember, whatever you do, stay out of room 237.

Now That That’s (Almost) Over

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(until the next time…)