I've always enjoyed Westerns, for the most part. I've been trying to think of a Western that I actively disliked, and I've been unsuccessful; the best I can do is find Westerns that aren't my cup of tea, like The Searchers and the 'spaghetti Westerns' of Sergio Leone. But every Western I've ever watched has been, at least, admirable or entertaining on some level.
Most recently I watched 3:10 to Yuma, the 2007 remake of a 1957 film of the same name. What struck me about this film is the way it is not a "deconstruction" kind of Western; it's not a Western that feels the need to make statements either about the genre itself (Unforgiven) or different statements about the West (Dances With Wolves). 3:10 to Yuma is nothing more than an archetypal blood-and-guts Western, with good ranchers who are down on their luck, bad guys who are very good with their six-shooters, towns where the marshals are openly corrupt when they need to be, tense evenings around the campfire, ill-advised ventures into Indian territory, stagecoach robberies, and all the rest.
Russell Crowe is Ben Wade, the leader of a gang of criminals who are extremely brutal in their crimes -but interesting, Wade himself isn't shown to be especially brutal himself. His underlings, though, are very brutal, chief among them his second-in-command, the possibly psychotic Charlie Prince. Just once in the film is the question raised of how bad a man must Wade be to actually lead these guys.
On the other side of the moral ledger, we have Christian Bale as rancher Dan Evans, who is just about as down on his luck as he can be. His ranch is desperately close to foreclosure, the railroad company is itching to take his land, the water to his ranch has been diverted, his older son thinks he's a failure, and he's trying to do the best he can despite the fact that he lost a leg in the Civil War. Evans meets Wade by chance early on, and then again a short while later, when Wade is captured. However, Wade's gang is still at large and will clearly do whatever they need to do to get him back, so a dangerous mission is undertaken to take Wade to the town of Contention, where they will put him on the train that departs at 3:10 pm for Yuma, and the prison there. The 3:10 to Yuma. Dan, our rancher hero, is good with a rifle, and volunteers to go, for $200. They set out, and it's a race against time and a group of violent bandits.
What's interesting about this particular race against time is that it's almost an anti-race against time. Most races against time are of the "Do X before Y happens or else". Here, the goal isn't to do something in an allotted span of time but to get something done at a very specific time, even though that specific time is a little ways off and there are all kinds of obstacles between. It's a combination, really, of a race against time and a dread-filled wait for a moment where we all know all hell will break loose. These two relations to time come into play over the course of the film, creating very different kinds of tension in very different places.
This is, simply, a very good film. Its performances are all first-rate, and the chemistry between Christian Bale and Russell Crowe is outstanding. The supporting cast is superb across the board, most notably Ben Foster as Charlie Prince, a man whose devotion to Wade is never explained, or even speculated upon, but is yet somehow suggested. The conversations in the film, especially those between Evens and Wade, all feel quite real and almost unscripted, as both men feel each other out and stake out their own moral claims on what is going on.
That's what impresses me so much about the film: the fact that it so clearly understands the notion that even villains see themselves as the heroes of their own story. Ben Wade acts, throughout the film, in accordance with a very real moral code, and we, somewhat like others in the film, admire him for that, even as we acknowledge that his moral code is not a good one. But it is a code, and we know that, for all his murder and robbery, Ben Wade is actually more moral than some of the men who capture him.
3:10 to Yuma is a terrific film. Highly recommended.
Last week's episode of The Office was the best this season. I liked the wedding episode, but the "mafia" episode was a real dud. There were a lot of people out there screaming about shark-jumping, which I thought was premature. Besides, you can't even claim a show jumped the shark at a certain point until at least a half-season has gone by: the phrase is about the overall effect, not immediate bitching about something that pissed you off. There's a new phrase for that: "nuking the fridge." That's when you idiotically whine about how a series that features Nazis being melted by the power of God, a man surviving a fall from a plane in a raft, a guy having his heart ripped out of his chest and continuing to live, and a man simply walking off a gunshot wound after drinking from the Holy Grail is suddenly unrealistic because a guy survives a nuclear blast inside of a lead-lined refrigerator.
OK, them's fightin' words! Well, not really, but I do disagree with some of this, so here are my points of contention with My Right Honorable Friend.
While I haven't opined that The Office has engaged in shark-jumping, I've wondered if it might be getting close to doing so, because for me, the show's best moments -- and there have been so, so many -- have all been grounded in a strong sense of believability. We've all known bosses who are like Michael Scott: amiable, and even good at their original position, but utterly inept at management and who only succeed by virtue of the good people they have under them. We've all known managers who stay employed almost inexplicably: "How can the higher-ups not see this stuff going on?!" Michael is that boss, and The Office has followed the tried-and-true comedy strategy of taking something very familiar and simply dialing up the intensity just enough to allow for absurdity.
The problem, for me, is that the absurdity has usually been still believable on some level. The least successful episodes have all involved incidents in which Michael, or someone else, did something that I'm pretty confident would get them fired in nearly any real-life workplace. I remember a few seasons back when the Scranton office got flooded with the just-relocated members of the now-closed Stanford branch, and Michael outed one of the new people as a felon and humiliated another who was extremely fat. Or the episode where Michael "outed" Oscar as gay. Those episodes left bad tastes in my mouth, because things just wouldn't return to normal after incidents like that, unless we're talking about a very poorly run company indeed.
My problem this year is that so far it feels like the air of plausibility around The Office is feeling strained. Michael and Jim as co-managers? I've never seen any kind of co-manager scenario, except in a couple of cases where one manager was being transferred out but his "effective" date at the new place wasn't for a week or two. Long-term co-managers? I don't see how any workplace would try this.
Likewise, Jim and Pam in the same office. I have never heard of a workplace where this is allowed: a person allowed to work in an office where their spouse is their direct superior. This has already reared its ugly head on the show, in an episode where Michael and Jim had to decide which employees got raises and which didn't. That kind of thing is a giant can of worms, and each week it goes on, I find it hurts the believability of the show.
My biggest problem with the show's direction right now, though, isn't about plausibility but about character. Dwight Schrute is one of the show's signature creations, but so far this year, especially with the promotion of Jim, I fear that the writers are going too far with Dwight. They're perilously close to making him not a very odd and paranoid character, but an outright malevolent one. I found the sadistic glee Dwight showed in bugging Jim's office almost out-of-character.
However, I could still be wrong. It could be that the writers are setting up some storylines here. I hope so.
(On SamuraiFrog's "nuking the fridge" comment, I do object there on the grounds that with the exception of the liferaft-from-the-airplane thing, the Indiana Jones moments he cites are all instances of something literally magical happening in the movies. Sure, I can accept the power of God melting the Nazis, because that's the power of God. Sure, I can accept a sacrificial victim still living after his heart's been plucked out, because that's the power of the evil sorcerer-priest. Ditto the Hole Grail. There is no magic at work in the fridge-nuking, which is why that scene doesn't work. It's the same with the airplane jump: there's nothing magical going on there, so all we have to go on in terms of plausibility is our own experience. Suspension of disbelief is a hard thing to get a handle on, sometimes.)
Several early-morning starts at The Store this week, and a very full "To Do" list, have me feeling a bit irritable, so maybe a mood-lightener is called for. So here's Kermit the Frog singing "Lydia the Tattooed Lady".
I haven't done a quiz-thing in a really long time, so here's one I'm stealing from Roger:
A- Advocate for: Combating global warming; the merits of the Star Wars Prequels; the dismissal of everyone with the Buffalo Bills above the rank of "kid who fills the cups with Gatorade".
B- Best Feature: Either my brain or my hair.
C- Could do without: Joe Lieberman. I'm sure glad they gave him a stern talking-to back in January; it's turning out well.
D- Dreams and desires: To write something that's good.
E- Essential items: Books, music, movies, hand and power tools, my computer(s), cats, bib overalls, pizza, rum, beer, lemonade, ice water, apples, white peaches, blueberries, coconut cream pie.
F- Favorite past time: "Past time"? The Romantic Era, I suppose. Pastime? Reading, blogging, generally partaking of any activity involving the "Essential Items" listed above.
G- Good at: learning; wasting time online.
H- Have never tried: Authentic Indian or Thai cuisine, made by pros in a restaurant. I've had takeout versions and "quick make at home" kinds of dishes, but never the real items.
I- If I had a million dollars: I'd own a nice house on a nice piece of land.
J- Junkie for: coffee and tea.
K- Kindred spirit: All spirits are kindred. Whoa....
L- Little known fact: I've only had stitches once. It was in second grade, when I fell off my bike and hit my chin on the sidewalk.
M- Memorable moment: Playing a work for solo trumpet in college, written by a friend who was majoring in Composition.
N- Never again will I: read Ayn Rand. Once was enough.
O- Occasional indulgence: I try to take a four-day weekend three or four times a year.
P- Profession: Maintenance/Handyman
Q- Quote: “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” (James Cameron said that. I just heard it last week, in an article I still need to link one of these days.)
R- Reason to smile: The Daughter continues to grow. Good movies continue to come out. I continue to learn new things.
S- Sorry about: Telling my parents some unimaginably unbelievable whoppers as a kid.
T- Things you are worrying about right now: The vomitous mass that is the United States Senate.
U- Uninterested in: John McCain's opinion on anything. Sarah Palin's opinion on anything. Rush Limbaugh's opinion on anything. Glenn Beck's opinion on anything. Lather, rinse, repeat.
V- Very scared of: The onward march of ignorance, the increasing disrespect toward science, the disregarding of certain problems until they will be unsolvable, the rigid adherence to the worship of the "free market".
W- Worst habits: swearing too much, eating too much, surfing the Web too much.
X- X marks my ideal vacation spot: I think I could have fun anywhere at all. Even right here. I've been enjoying "staycations" for years.
Frank Gehry: awe-inspiring creator of amazing buildings, or guy who gets lots of press for designing buildings that look like wads of crumpled tin foil?
:: Wow, the Saints are apparently now officially awesome. They were behind 24-3 at one point in the second quarter, pulled to being down 34-24 as they headed to the fourth -- and then they blew out the Dolphins, scoring 22 points to win 46-34.
:: The quarterbacks in that game, Drew Brees and Chad Henne, were a combined 40 of 74 for 509 yards, 1 touchdown, and 5 interceptions. I'll bet that was a fun game to watch.
:: Speaking of watching stuff, I finally reached my annual frustration point with the Buffalo Bills two weeks ago and decided to stop watching them and watch movies instead. So The Daughter and I spent the time we'd have otherwise had the Bills game on watching the first two Spiderman movies. So of course the Bills are 2-0 in those games.
:: Bills QB Trent Edwards, who showed promise his first two years but has regressed horribly this year, was out yesterday with a concussion. So, in the wake of the victory, I'm already seeing calls for his backup, Ryan Fitzpatrick, to be the new starter, especially after two wins. Fitzpatrick's numbers? 11 of 22 for 123 yards and one touchdown. Color me unexcited. The Bills' revolving door at quarterback the last nine years has seen a slew of guys come through who put up numbers like that. (Drew Bledsoe excepted; he actually put up some numbers in his brief time here.)
:: I still love the Spiderman movies, despite their maddening habit of killing off the villains each time out (with one exception) so they can never appear again (in the comics, you never know when Spidey's gonna have to face Doc Ock again), the complete bungling of the Gwen Stacy character (if she's not gonna be Peter Parker's first love and if she's not gonna die, she just shouldn't be there at all), and the less-than-enthralling music by Danny Elfman and Christopher Young.
:: I still think that the Vikings are unlikely to get anything other than a playoff berth out of Brett Favre's presence. The schedule has been completely in their favor the first six games: they've been home for each of their three games against good teams, and their first three road games were each against one of the worst teams in the NFL.
:: I know that pass rushers take a while to develop, yada yada yada, but really, color me unimpressed with Bills first-round pick Aaron Maybin. It seems to me that a defensive player taken 11th overall in the entire draft should, after seven games, have more than four tackles. And we're not even talking about his lack of any sacks, even though he was billed as a top pass-rushing prospect.
:: What's wrong with Peyton Manning? His yardage was down considerably in Sunday's game against the Rams, as he failed to break 300 yards for the first time this year. Sure, his numbers (23 of 34, 235 yards, 3 TDs, O INTs) may look good in the afterglow of a 42-6 win, but they may have an issue there.
:: That last was facetious.
That's all. Next week, the Bills host Houston. I'll be watching Spiderman 3.
:: The fine folks at Guinness have weighed in on ten "unbreakable" world records. Interesting reading...when I was a kid, the annual release of the newest edition of the Book of World Records was always an event.
:: Here's a news item that thrills the "I can't wait for the future!" part of me. Apparently the airport in San Diego is one of the country's busier airports, and it has the country's busiest runway, because that runway is the airport's only runway. For various reasons, building a second runway on the airport grounds is unfeasible -- so one person has suggested building a runway at sea, around ten miles offshore. Wow!!!
:: First, there was the Discovery Channel doing boom de yada. Then, the always-wonderful xkcd did its own version of boom de yada. Finally, someone animated the xkcd version and sang the words. Boom de yada!
There's no doubting it, folks: Captains are cool. Captain is probably the coolest rank, right ahead of General. Lieutenants are OK, and Commanders are fine. Colonels seem to be mostly desk-jockeys and out of touch; Privates and Corporals are just getting started, while Admirals mostly seem to wistfully recall the days when they were Captains. Yup, Captain is where it's at, folks.
At least, in the world of fiction, Captain is where it's at. So here is a tribute to fictional Captains of all sorts: ten Captains from fiction that I like a lot.
But first, a couple of special mentions to two real-world Captains. I'm a huge fan of Captain Morgan, of course.
And then, of course, there's The Captain:
OK, on to the fictional Captains, listed in no particular order:
1. Faramir, Captain of Gondor.
Ah, Faramir -- a man who devoted his life to service to Gondor, only to be continually snubbed by a father who doted on his elder son to begin with, and later became a lunatic driven mad both by grief and by his unwise consultations with one of the Palantiri. Into his hands, completely unwittingly, fall two Hobbits and the Ring of Power, but proving his quality, the young Captain of Gondor releases the Hobbits on their mission -- and is rewarded by his father with the impossible task of charging the now-overrun city of Osgiliath. But all ends well for Faramir in the end as he weds the beautiful Eowyn of Rohan.
I wasn't the biggest fan of M*A*S*H when I was growing up, mostly because I now know that by the time I was really aware of the show, it was past its point of highest brilliance; later on, in my late high school and college years, I would see quite a few of the earlier season episodes and realized how good the show had been at first. Not to imply that M*A*S*H was crap in its latter years; far from it, actually, but the show's high mark was when Trapper John, Frank Burns, and Colonel Blake were still around. But anyway, Captain Pierce was the show's anchor through every season, combining irreverent suspicion of authority with an unflagging sense of what was right.
3. Captain Honor Harrington.
Honor Harrington is the Captain of a series of space ships in David Weber's long-running series of novels that tell her adventures. In truth, I've only read two of them, but I do plan to read more of them, as Honor Harrington is a fantastic character. She's clearly meant to be an analogue of that other, more famous, nautical captain of literature, Captain Horatio Hornblower, right down to the initials. Weber's series of books tells the tale of her adventures and her rise through the ranks of the Royal Manticoran Navy.
4. Captain Geoffrey Thorpe.
Of course, we can't have a list of favorite Captains without including a couple of pirate captains, and Captain Thorpe is one of the best. Played by Errol Flynn in the movie The Sea Hawk -- which happens to be one of my favorite films of all time -- Captain Thorpe is the finest of pirates. He is gallant, daring, swashbuckling, and he commands the loyalty of everyone around him. His piracy is motivated by patriotism, as he preys upon Spanish ships and interests in the unacknowledged service of Queen Elizabeth I. Oh, and Captain Thorpe also has a way with the ladies as well.
5. Captain Jack Sparrow.
Captain Sparrow is, for my money, one of the great screen characters of the last ten years. I love him for his complexity: he's a scheming scoundrel, but he is also gallant when the need is called for and is motivated by a strong moral code that is all his own. That, and he's often utterly hilarious. I think that the first time we see him, in Pirates of the Carribean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, is one of the best movie entrances of all time:
What I also find funny about Captain Sparrow is that he's so insistent on being acknowledged as a Captain, and yet, in the three movies, he doesn't really spend much time being a Captain -- he's constantly losing his ship and trying to get it back. At one point he even tries convincing Davy Jones that he's not actually a Captain, since he lost his ship to mutiny, but Jones snaps back, "Then you were a poor Captain but a Captain nonetheless. Have you not spent these last years introducing yourself as Captain Jack Sparrow?"
INTERLUDE
Before continuing my list with the last five of my Ten Favorite Captains, there's another category of Captain that bears a bit of discussion. There are lots of notable fictional captains who, for various reasons, weren't very good captains, or perhaps they were good captains but in the stories in which we meet them, they are undone by circumstances beyond their control, or perhaps they're captains in situations where their captaining skills aren't really much tested.
I was going to mention Captain Smith of Titanic here, but then I remembered that he's not fictional. Still, ordering his ship to full speed after learning that there are icebergs about isn't the kind of thing that puts one into the Captain Hall of Fame. On an actual fictional tangent is Captain Harrison of the SS Poseidon, who, after telling his corporate boss that he's an "irresponsible bastard" for ordering the ship to full speed despite bad weather, goes ahead and orders the ship to full speed despite bad weather. (His ship ends up capsized, and he ends up drowned, for his troubles.)
Star Trek fans will remember that a generally accepted bit of canon, although it didn't appear in the films, is that Hikaru Sulu was supposed to be the first captain of the USS Excelsior, but his involvement in the Khan-Genesis incident resulted in him being bumped from that assignment and the ship given to an overbearing, arrogant, pompous ass named Captain Styles. Styles also committed the unforgivable Trek character sin of downplaying the legendary exploits of the Enterprise ("I can't wait to start breaking some of the Enterprise's speed records tomorrow!"), so his comeuppance -- having to sit on the bridge helplessly as his ship ground to a halt after he'd ordered warp speed -- was quite welcome. Captain Sulu would later, indeed, get command of the Excelsior.
And then there's Captain Will Decker, who was Captain of the Enterprise right up until the moment when it became necessary for the Enterprise to actually go somewhere. Once that happened, Decker was supplanted as Captain as another guy (who will be discussed later in this post) took over. Decker got a consolation prize, though, when he physically melded with an enormous machine-intelligence to become...well, I don't know what. But it sure looked cool!
I suppose that we'll never know how good Captain Clarence Oveur was at his job, but if he hadn't eaten the fish for dinner, we'd never have witnessed Ted Stryker's redemption for the death of George Zip.
Proving that apology to one's superiors may be a good policy but it's still not any guarantee of future success is Captain Lorth Needa. But being in the right place at the right time -- i.e., the execution due to incompetence of your direct superior -- sure worked out well for Captain Firmus Piett, didn't it? It's the age-old method of career advancement: just hang out, do your job well, don't screw up, and sooner or later you'll have to move up when the person ahead of you blunders badly.
6. Captain Jean DeWolff.
Jean DeWolff was a recurring supporting character in the Marvel Comics universe, mainly in the Spiderman titles. She was very tough and unrelenting, often wearing a beret on the job; she was also supportive, if not downright friendly, toward Spiderman. Unfortunately, Captain DeWolff met an untimely end in a storyline that was one of the best Spiderman tales of the 1980s, although she has apparently turned up anew in the "Ultimate" line of Marvel comics.
7. Captain Barney Miller.
Now if there's a most-underrated classic sitcom ever, Barney Miller has to at least be in the running. That show was hilarious and full of great and memorable characters, and yet I never see it mentioned in lists of great old teevee shows. What gives!
The show was one of the great formulae for comedy: the workplace of eccentric weirdos, seen through the relatively sane eyes of a single character. In this case, our island of sanity is Captain Miller himself, who has to deal with detectives with who are all neurotic about different things and the endless stream of red tape and paperwork that get in the way of police work. I loved this show and would love to see it again.
(I love that, according to the show's Wikipedia page, many police professionals viewed the show fondly, some to the point of addressing Hal Linden, who played Barney Miller, as "Captain".)
8. Captain Han Solo.
Oh come on, you knew he'd be on here. Come to that, those of you still reading who have been around a while no doubt know which two captains are going to round out this list, but let's plug on, anyway.
So. Han Solo, captain of the Millennium Falcon, the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy, which made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. He's a captain of his own ship and he's got the undying loyalty of his copilot, Chewbacca. His ship isn't that big, so he makes his living not by hauling freight but by smuggling contraband. He's in hawk to a gangster, and he doesn't much believe in anything...yet. He's the archtypal scoundrel with a heart of gold, the money-loving mercenary who can't tear himself away from his new friends when they need him, even if it means ending up inside a block of carbonite. When we meet him he's the amoral rogue, following the bag of coin, but at the end, he's found a cause and has fought and sacrificed for it. All the while, being a pretty good Captain.
9. Captain Malcolm Reynolds.
Oh yeah, you'd better believe it. Back when I wrote about Firefly, I noted that Malcolm Reynolds -- "Mal" to his friends, even though River Tam points out that "Mal" is French for "bad" -- undergoes a character arc that is pretty much the reverse of Han Solo's. (Solo is the rogue who becomes an idealist fighting for a cause; Reynolds starts off fighting for a cause but becomes a rogue when he's defeated.) What occurred to me in writing this post is that Reynolds also somewhat parallels another of my captains above: Captain Jack Sparrow. Both men are motivated by two beliefs: their belief in freedom, and their belief that a ship -- for Sparrow, the Black Pearl, and for Reynolds, the Serenity -- is the key for a man to have true freedom. Both men are, also, scoundrels with hearts of gold who can be extremely dangerous when crossed. And both have their own unique ways of speaking.
He's also fiercely loyal to those he has chosen to surround himself with. In the course of the show, he ends up with a doctor and the doc's sister on board, both of whom are fugitives who make life more difficult for an already-shoestring operation. But in one episode, when the doctor and his sister fall into trouble, Mal Reynolds comes back for them. Later, the doctor asks him why he's done this, since just leaving them would have made things much easier; Captain Reynolds replies, "You're on my crew." The doc presses the point, asking again, and Reynolds says again, "You're on my crew. Why are we still talking about this?"
Here's a good Malcolm Reynolds moment:
10. Captain James Tiberius Kirk.
Yup. The best Captain ever. This is a Captain who will romance the woman, punch out the bad guy, lock phasers on target, reprogram vital tests to his advantage, destroy his own ship to take out some Klingons, steal his own ship back to go get his friend's body, go back in time to find some whales because the Vulcan whose brain isn't quite all there yet says he should, fight a Gorn to the death and then refuse to kill him, mouth off to a Federation envoy when he's ordered to babysit some storage bins filled with "quadrotriticale", talk any out-of-control robot into a logical conundrum so extreme that it burns out its own circuits, and...well, Jim Kirk does it all. That's why he's awesome.
And there we have it. Thanks to Captains everywhere!
(Lest there be any misunderstanding whatsoever, let me iterate that not one word of this post is to be interpreted as a statement of any kind of opinion on the real world military, and not one word of the first graf of this post, specifically my statements about ranks other than Captain, is meant to be taken seriously in any way. If I have any real-world Colonels among my readership, no, I do not really think you're a desk jockey.)
I've been mostly away from computers today, so I'm late in commenting on the passing of Soupy Sales, so I'll just leave it at this: I hope there's at least a small piece of Heaven given over to pie fights.
My alma mater, Wartburg College, was noted for the very high quality of its vocal music groups -- still is, I suppose. Chief among these was the Wartburg Choir. I had the privilege of going on tour with the Choir in my freshman year, as they did a piece that actually included a small brass ensemble. It was a setting of my least favorite hymn of all time, "A Mighty Fortress", but that was a small price to pay to get to hear these people on a nightly basis.
The choir closed out each concert in the same way, offering this unimaginably gorgeous setting of a spiritual as their encore. I couldn't find a video of the actual Wartburg Choir doing it, but I did find this amazing high school chorus doing the piece. Here's "Give Me Jesus".
I don't often associate pieces of music with things -- even the Star Wars score has become an abstract entity for me over the years -- but this is one of the rare works that transports me back to another time and another place.
A blogger who is even more fascinated with overalls than I has decreed November 20 as "International Overalls Day". As befits the content of this blog, I may be participating. Further announcements as events warrant!
(Of course, November 20 is a Friday, so I won't be wearing overalls until after work. I find mildly ironic that my job is one for which overalls would be an ideal uniform, but I doubt I'll convince the Powers That Be at The Store of this.)
From time to time, when reading a negative review of a movie I'll see the film described as a "mess", and often times I'm unsure of what a "mess" is, in terms of a movie. The instance that stands out in my memory is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. When I was looking for reactions to that movie, I think nearly every article or blog post I read about it called it a "mess", which I found odd because I didn't find the movie messy at all.
But now, having re-watched the Cameron Crowe flick Elizabethtown, I understand better what it is to call a movie a mess, because, well, Elizabethtown is one. It's an amiable mess, to be sure. It's not the kind of mess a dog makes on the new carpet; it's the kind of mess that covers the desk of the dotty teacher we all had in school, the one we liked anyway despite his dottiness. (It was a guy teacher for me; yours might have been a woman. Doesn't matter.) Elizabethtown is a mess. But I really liked it anyway.
Orlando Bloom plays a guy named Drew who works, as the film opens, for an athletic wear company in Portland, Oregon. (It's not Nike, but as Nike is located in a Portland suburb, it's pretty clear that we're talking about Nike here.) Drew is being whisked to the corporate HQ by company helicopter so he can meet with the billionaire CEO (played by Alec Baldwin) so he can be fired. Why is this shoe designer for a hugely successful company getting fired personally by the CEO? Because his latest shoe design is a failure of epic proportions. He's designed a shoe that has been touted as the Biggest Thing EVER, only to see it universally loathed. The opening scenes show entire semis full of these shoes being returned to the HQ's warehouse. Drew has just committed Epic FAIL which will cost his company nearly a billion dollars. Oops. (The film doesn't dwell on the shoe itself much, but we do get to see it a few times, and yes, it looks ridiculous, like the shoe Prince Namor of Atlantis would put on if he was going to go for a jog.)
After this staggering and extremely public failure, Drew is feeling a tad suicidal – but just a tad – until he gets the call, later that night, that his father has passed away, back in the family hometown of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Off Drew goes to return to the home he hasn't seen in years. On the plane, he meets a flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who comes off as just this side of being a crazy stalker. She talks to him, gives him directions to his hometown, follows him into the terminal so she can shout the directions to him through a crowd ("Remember: Route 60-B!"). Drew gets home, and then we have the usual kind of thing in one of those stories where the city-kid returns to his small-town roots. There are folks who aren't aware that California and Oregon aren't the same place, there's the cousin in his 30s who is still at heart a teenager who wants to get the band back together, there's the doting older woman who takes one look at Our Hero and concludes that he hasn't eaten anything since 2003.
One night Drew is feeling lonely and calls everyone he knows, only to get through to no one; and then he dials the number given him by Claire, the almost-crazy flight attendant, who just happens to be off duty and can drive up to hang out with him.
Elizabethtown is a movie that just can't seem to decide what movie it wants to be, and that's how it's a mess. It feels not so much made a cobbled together out of various ideas. It's as if Cameron Crowe literally couldn't decide what story he wanted to tell, so he just said the hell with it and told all of them. Hence the result: a film that is so amiable and clearly heartfelt that I can't dislike it, but still just doesn't get into my heart the way Crowe's better films -- Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous -- do. Elizabethtown has the crashing of a wedding, long conversations by phone, stand-up comedy at a wake, "Freebird" at the same wake, a fire alarm at that same wake, and in the end, a road-trip across the country in which Drew drives places as prescribed for him by Claire, cueing up specific songs on specific CDs as he passes specific points on the trip.
I remember a review by Jeff Simon (of The Buffalo News) of this film, in which he wrote that the film is basically a mix tape. That's a very good metaphor for the movie, in the way its individual parts all seem disconnected and unrelated except for the larger connecting theme of how it all relates to Drew and his various troubles. Elizabethtown is an unfocused film that lurches from one thing to another, and yet it does so in incredibly likable fashion. Maybe that's the way that the movie is a metaphor for life itself? I dunno...but the movie is a mess, and still, I liked it a lot.
I'm sure that prison food probably ranks below high school food in quality. I don't remember ever finding any maggots in my high school meals; but then, even if I had, there was no James Whitmore sitting nearby waiting to take my maggot and feed it to the bird he was nursing back to health. But I obviously have no real basis on which to make this judgment, except for the existence of an item called "Nutriloaf" (or "Nutraloaf").
Nutraloaf is a special prison food, intended for inmates who have apparently demonstrated behavioral issues. I suppose Nutraloaf is what they feed to the guys who are spending "a month in the hole". And apparently it is disgusting -- so disgusting, in fact, that there have been lawsuits over the serving of Nutraloaf on the basis that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
Well, some fine soul out there actually decided to do a Nutraloaf taste test, making it according to a recipe cited in one of those court cases and then giving it a whirl. My favorite comment was this one: "Even though it doesn't have a taste, it feels like something is lingering in my mouth. It's like a Nutri-ghost."
It certainly can't be worse than Rachel Greene's "English trifle", though:
At some point yesterday, this blog received its 500,000th hit, at least as far as SiteMeter is concerned. Thanks to the regular readers, the sporadic readers, the readers who were regulars until I offended them, and the people searching for pictures of Sophie Marceau. (For some reason she gets the most hits.) Since the heyday of blogging seems to be over, I don't expect this blog's traffic to ever grow much beyond what it is right now, for the remaining duration of this blog's existence, however long that ends up being. But it's still fun.
