What did you do to mark Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday on Saturday?
Hundreds of people dressed as Lucy gathered in her hometown of Jamestown, New York, in an attempt to set a world record for the most Lucille Ball imitators in one spot. I saw footage of overweight men dressed in polka dot dresses wearing red wigs and lipstick. It wasn’t pretty.
We marked Lucy’s birthday in a more sensible way by watching one of her old movies, made long before Lucy was “ditzy Lucy.” It was the 1937 comedy Stage Door, which was shown as part of Turner Classic Movies fine “Essentials” series every Saturday at 8pm. Lucy was 26-years-old when this movie was made, and she played a wise-cracking woman in a house full of wise-cracking women. Those were the days when Lucy was making movies with both the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Along with a bevy of great women actors like Eve Arden and Ann Miller, she supported Ginger Rogers and Katherine Hepburn in this one. Stage Door is the sort of movie sympathetic to women that just doesn’t get made anymore. It was a comedy with melodramatic overtones about how hard it was for young women to break into the theatre. All the women lived in a boarding house for aspiring actresses called “The Footlights Club.” It was written by two giants – Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. See it if you ever get a chance.
Just to keep our theme of sassy women going, we watched the 1972 screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, last night with our trusty On Demand movie feature. This movie had another unbelievable cast – Barbra Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Madeline Kahn (in her first movie role), and some character actor favorites of mine like Kenneth Mars, Randy Quaid and Emmet Walsh. Barbra Streisand makes one smart quip after another throughout the whole movie. I’m scratching my head to come up with examples of current movies like the ones we saw this weekend with women in strong comic leads.
So I laughed a lot. That beats crying thinking about the possible world-wide economic meltdown we seem to be on the brink of, or lamenting the deaths of all those Navy Seals killed on that helicopter in Afghanistan.
I will restrain myself and only make two political comments. First, the people who are blaming the economic problems on Obama are simply idiots. This is a worldwide crisis. Obama didn’t cause the problems in Greece or Ireland or Spain or Portugal. I saw an editorial from the state-run Chinese newspaper this morning which talked about the solutions to the US economic problems in words that sounded exactly like a Tea Party speech. Think about that for a moment.
Second, I heard the commander of our forces in Afghanistan talking about the Navy Seals that died and calling them true heroes that died in the defense of liberty. There is no question about the courage of these men. But I’m sorry; I fail to see what relationship there is between the hunt for Muslims in Afghanistan and liberty. I really don‘t.
Okay, I can’t help myself – I’m going to say one more thing. Few people are connecting the two stories. They are integrally related. Over the past decade the United States has spent over a trillion dollars on two wars we have had no intention to finance. We haven’t sold war bonds or initiated a special tax to fund the war on terror. We simply borrowed money (from the Chinese) to do it. Again, Obama didn’t start this. He’s slowly stopping it, and while the pace of our exit from the Middle East frustrates me, it is a sign that Obama is more of a pragmatic moderate than the wild liberal his political opponents make him out to be. The whole mess is extremely depressing.
I was about to say I’m so sick of it I’m ready for the world to be run by wise-cracking women, but then you might think I support Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin. No, no, no. Unlike them, Lucy’s ego had limits. She understood she was acting and was content ruling network television for a couple of decades. God help us if either Bachman or Palin become President. There won’t be anything funny about it.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Stanley, Did You Really Say That?
How much should a memoirist tell?
I remember Jennifer Holberg asking that question to Rhoda Janzen and Thomas Lynch at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing last year. Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, spoke sadly about how her portrayals of some family members had caused lots of pain. Lynch, the funeral director-poet-essayist best known for The Undertaking, said he waits for people to die before writing about them (which only seems fitting for a man in his line of work) and has managed to avoid stepping on toes.
I just finished reading Hannah’s Child: A Theologian's Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas. Stanley, who was named “America’s Best Theologian by Time magazine in 2001, has long had a reputation for being provocative. As a result of his philosophical and theological convictions about honesty, he’s written a bracing memoir unlike any I’ve ever read. Consider these lines:
“Mother was a pain in the ass.”
“Dick’s way of going about things made it appear that his true interest was in being the first president of Roman Catholicism in America.”
“Dennis had nothing he wanted to do other than be the dean.”
It is compelling reading as he details his first wife’s mental illness or tells the inside story of faculty battles at Notre Dame and Duke, but at times I felt like I was slowing down to gawk at a traffic accident. What is the difference between transparency and too much information? Or, as Hauerwas himself puts it on the last page of the book, “between a loving but honest description and cruelty?”
One of the things I learned about Hauerwas is that he came from a long line of bricklayers and joined his father “on the job” when he was seven or eight years old. It’s a long way from being a poor bricklayer in Texas to places like Yale and Duke, and the pages of Time magazine. In previous encounters with Hauerwas, I've felt like he had a chip on his shoulder, and now that I know his story I have a better sense of the complex forces that drive him.
He owes a great deal to Ernest Hemingway, both stylistically, for his staccato sentences (“Paula is a great reader. Much of the time we share is spent reading. We both love murder mysteries.”) and his macho manner. Stanley is without a doubt combative, which seems like an odd thing to say about a pacifist. He is also funny, brilliant, complex, engaging, overbearing (after all, the preface is called “On Being Stanley Hauerwas”) and someone who has been right on just about every major issue of our time. For example, in Time in 2003 he wrote this about the Iraq War, “Bush’s religious rhetoric … tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.”
I recommend the book, if you are interested in theology and what makes an uncompromising theologian tick. But every time you cringe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I remember Jennifer Holberg asking that question to Rhoda Janzen and Thomas Lynch at the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing last year. Janzen, author of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, spoke sadly about how her portrayals of some family members had caused lots of pain. Lynch, the funeral director-poet-essayist best known for The Undertaking, said he waits for people to die before writing about them (which only seems fitting for a man in his line of work) and has managed to avoid stepping on toes.
I just finished reading Hannah’s Child: A Theologian's Memoir by Stanley Hauerwas. Stanley, who was named “America’s Best Theologian by Time magazine in 2001, has long had a reputation for being provocative. As a result of his philosophical and theological convictions about honesty, he’s written a bracing memoir unlike any I’ve ever read. Consider these lines:
“Mother was a pain in the ass.”
“Dick’s way of going about things made it appear that his true interest was in being the first president of Roman Catholicism in America.”
“Dennis had nothing he wanted to do other than be the dean.”
It is compelling reading as he details his first wife’s mental illness or tells the inside story of faculty battles at Notre Dame and Duke, but at times I felt like I was slowing down to gawk at a traffic accident. What is the difference between transparency and too much information? Or, as Hauerwas himself puts it on the last page of the book, “between a loving but honest description and cruelty?”
One of the things I learned about Hauerwas is that he came from a long line of bricklayers and joined his father “on the job” when he was seven or eight years old. It’s a long way from being a poor bricklayer in Texas to places like Yale and Duke, and the pages of Time magazine. In previous encounters with Hauerwas, I've felt like he had a chip on his shoulder, and now that I know his story I have a better sense of the complex forces that drive him.
He owes a great deal to Ernest Hemingway, both stylistically, for his staccato sentences (“Paula is a great reader. Much of the time we share is spent reading. We both love murder mysteries.”) and his macho manner. Stanley is without a doubt combative, which seems like an odd thing to say about a pacifist. He is also funny, brilliant, complex, engaging, overbearing (after all, the preface is called “On Being Stanley Hauerwas”) and someone who has been right on just about every major issue of our time. For example, in Time in 2003 he wrote this about the Iraq War, “Bush’s religious rhetoric … tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.”
I recommend the book, if you are interested in theology and what makes an uncompromising theologian tick. But every time you cringe, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Missing Mary
When you are an unknown blogger like me, the loss of a faithful follower is devastating. I’m mourning the passing of Mary DeYoung, a friend for at least 25 years, who died last Monday following a brief battle with cancer. Mary followed the blog I did when we lived overseas and was overjoyed when I started this new blog. She was a frequent commenter who would also unabashedly correct my grammar via personal notes. I’m not sure if she ever fully believed my explanations that they were “just typos.” She sent me about three paragraphs in May on the difference between “its” and “it’s,” which I kept pleading I already knew. Our last correspondence was on June 21st. Unbeknownst to me, she also had a biopsy that day.
Her funeral last Saturday was the epitome of the oxymoron “good funeral.” It was attended by hundreds of people, which gave an indication of how beloved Mary was. The messages and remembrances were touching, the music was great, and I felt honored to be there.
Here’s one of my favorite stories about Mary. I’d known her for years and Gretchen and I had even spent a week in Minnesota together with Mary and her husband Steve when this happened. I used to teach a class in the religion department at Hope College. It was usually in the same room in the same building – which I always thought of as the “humanities” building since it housed the religion, English and history departments. Then one year I was given a new classroom in a building that housed the math department. On the first day of class I was wandering through the building trying to find the right room when I saw Mary sitting in an office.
“What are you doing here, Mary?” I asked.
“This is my office,” she said. And indeed, it did look like her office. Not only was she in it, but there were pictures of her husband and kids on the wall.
But I was puzzled. “Why is this your office?” I asked stupidly. Now I knew in the back of my head that Mary did something with math but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“This is where the math department has their offices,” she said.
Oh. At that point I’d known her for six or seven years. She’d been a professor of math at Hope College all that time. (All told she spent 29 years on the Hope math faculty.) Apparently, that had never come up between us.
Now if I were a math professor everyone I met would be informed of that fact within the first three minutes of knowing me. I like to establish my intellectual superiority. Not so Mary. Teaching was one of the things she did, but not the only one. It was possible to know her and experience the richness of her life without having that fact straight. We went to church together, had a lot of the same friends, went to parties together, served on boards together, and many, many other things. She had a great spirit and zest for life. And she knew more math than I ever, ever imagined.
Mary DeYoung was 58 years old when she died. I, and countless others, miss her.
Her funeral last Saturday was the epitome of the oxymoron “good funeral.” It was attended by hundreds of people, which gave an indication of how beloved Mary was. The messages and remembrances were touching, the music was great, and I felt honored to be there.
Here’s one of my favorite stories about Mary. I’d known her for years and Gretchen and I had even spent a week in Minnesota together with Mary and her husband Steve when this happened. I used to teach a class in the religion department at Hope College. It was usually in the same room in the same building – which I always thought of as the “humanities” building since it housed the religion, English and history departments. Then one year I was given a new classroom in a building that housed the math department. On the first day of class I was wandering through the building trying to find the right room when I saw Mary sitting in an office.
“What are you doing here, Mary?” I asked.
“This is my office,” she said. And indeed, it did look like her office. Not only was she in it, but there were pictures of her husband and kids on the wall.
But I was puzzled. “Why is this your office?” I asked stupidly. Now I knew in the back of my head that Mary did something with math but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“This is where the math department has their offices,” she said.
Oh. At that point I’d known her for six or seven years. She’d been a professor of math at Hope College all that time. (All told she spent 29 years on the Hope math faculty.) Apparently, that had never come up between us.
Now if I were a math professor everyone I met would be informed of that fact within the first three minutes of knowing me. I like to establish my intellectual superiority. Not so Mary. Teaching was one of the things she did, but not the only one. It was possible to know her and experience the richness of her life without having that fact straight. We went to church together, had a lot of the same friends, went to parties together, served on boards together, and many, many other things. She had a great spirit and zest for life. And she knew more math than I ever, ever imagined.
Mary DeYoung was 58 years old when she died. I, and countless others, miss her.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
A Stick of Dynamite
Two big questions today: 1) What are you doing about the holes in your education? and …
2 ) Are you on the right side of the defining issues of our times?
I heard an interview a little over a month ago on the Diane Rehm show with David Reynolds, a scholar who has written a new book about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reynolds called Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential and important American novel ever written. After all, upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”
I felt a pang of uneasiness listening to the interview because I’d managed to make it into my 5th decade without ever reading the book.
Not anymore. I finished it a few hours ago. There were a couple of surprises. First, I had always imagined Uncle Tom’s character would be like an “Uncle Tom,” a black person who kisses up to white people for favor. That is not true. Instead, Uncle Tom is a Christ-figure, someone who selflessly suffers for the good of others, both black and white. He is a model of non-violent resistance and every good thing about Christianity. The second surprise is the Christian message of the book. I was prepared for what Stowe would say about slavery. I was not prepared for what a mighty evangelical preachment the book would be. I imagine this frustrates as many readers as it inspires, but in the 1850’s I believe it was truly inspirational. She veers into overwrought sentimentality at times, especially in the account of the death of a child in the middle of the book. Apparently, she borrowed heavily from the melodramatic constructions of her British contemporary Charles Dickens, who has a child named Little Nell die in a similar manner in a serialized novel of his called The Old Curiosity Shop. Oscar Wilde, in referring to the Dickens work, said, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell,” and one tends to believe that applies to Beecher’s book, too.
But for all that – the sentimentality and evangelical fury, and even her misguided portrayals of black people as super-sensitive spiritual beings – Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a powerful book, a veritable stick of dynamite. What Stowe got right was her indictment of the system of slavery and how that system befouled both the North and the South. She correctly saw that it made no difference that there were nice and gentle slave owners – the morality of the individual people involved was inconsequential next to the evils of the system. Stowe felt she was divinely-inspired to write the book, and, while one might argue with the fervor of her theology, I’m led to think God did move her to write this book to help put an end to America’s original sin.
So back to my questions. The first is from my own awareness of the holes in my education. Oh, I’m sure you wonder how anyone who is a product of the Flint, Michigan Public Schools could say this. Be that as it may, what I’ve decided is to do something about it, rather than lament it. There’s nothing wrong with being self-educated. All you have to do is turn off whatever reality show is on and pick up something you know is a classic. The next hole in my education I plan to fill in is Middlemarch by George Eliot. How about you?
My second question comes from thinking a bit more about Harriet Beecher Stowe. She took a stand against slavery when it was controversial. She didn’t wait to figure out which way public opinion was going to go on the issue. And she got it right. I wonder what you think today’s issues are, and what you are doing about them?
2 ) Are you on the right side of the defining issues of our times?
I heard an interview a little over a month ago on the Diane Rehm show with David Reynolds, a scholar who has written a new book about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reynolds called Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential and important American novel ever written. After all, upon meeting Stowe, Abraham Lincoln supposedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”
I felt a pang of uneasiness listening to the interview because I’d managed to make it into my 5th decade without ever reading the book.
Not anymore. I finished it a few hours ago. There were a couple of surprises. First, I had always imagined Uncle Tom’s character would be like an “Uncle Tom,” a black person who kisses up to white people for favor. That is not true. Instead, Uncle Tom is a Christ-figure, someone who selflessly suffers for the good of others, both black and white. He is a model of non-violent resistance and every good thing about Christianity. The second surprise is the Christian message of the book. I was prepared for what Stowe would say about slavery. I was not prepared for what a mighty evangelical preachment the book would be. I imagine this frustrates as many readers as it inspires, but in the 1850’s I believe it was truly inspirational. She veers into overwrought sentimentality at times, especially in the account of the death of a child in the middle of the book. Apparently, she borrowed heavily from the melodramatic constructions of her British contemporary Charles Dickens, who has a child named Little Nell die in a similar manner in a serialized novel of his called The Old Curiosity Shop. Oscar Wilde, in referring to the Dickens work, said, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell,” and one tends to believe that applies to Beecher’s book, too.
But for all that – the sentimentality and evangelical fury, and even her misguided portrayals of black people as super-sensitive spiritual beings – Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a powerful book, a veritable stick of dynamite. What Stowe got right was her indictment of the system of slavery and how that system befouled both the North and the South. She correctly saw that it made no difference that there were nice and gentle slave owners – the morality of the individual people involved was inconsequential next to the evils of the system. Stowe felt she was divinely-inspired to write the book, and, while one might argue with the fervor of her theology, I’m led to think God did move her to write this book to help put an end to America’s original sin.
So back to my questions. The first is from my own awareness of the holes in my education. Oh, I’m sure you wonder how anyone who is a product of the Flint, Michigan Public Schools could say this. Be that as it may, what I’ve decided is to do something about it, rather than lament it. There’s nothing wrong with being self-educated. All you have to do is turn off whatever reality show is on and pick up something you know is a classic. The next hole in my education I plan to fill in is Middlemarch by George Eliot. How about you?
My second question comes from thinking a bit more about Harriet Beecher Stowe. She took a stand against slavery when it was controversial. She didn’t wait to figure out which way public opinion was going to go on the issue. And she got it right. I wonder what you think today’s issues are, and what you are doing about them?
Monday, July 25, 2011
The Keeper of the Flame
The answer became clear during the encores.
I hung out last night with my wife and son and Paul McCartney, along with 60,000 or so of our closest friends at a sold-out Comerica Park in Detroit. Sir Paul shredded my eardrums as he took us on a tour of Beatlemania (All My Loving) to Wings (Band on the Run) to all-time sing alongs (Hey Jude) to emotional ballads (Eleanor Rigby) to stirring tributes to fallen bandmates (Something, begun on a ukulele that once belonged to George; A Day in the Life which morphed into Give Peace a Chance in honor of John) to awesome pyrotechnical displays (you can check out my son’s video of Live and Let Die on You Tube and hear me say, “It’s a little smoky here) to a Detroit concert-only Motown tribute (a cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1962 song Hitchhike). After two and a quarter hours (during which he never left the stage), 69-year-old Paul McCartney did two encore sets.
The first featured Lady Madonna, Day Tripper and Get Back. The second was Yesterday, Helter Skelter and Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End. By the end of The End he’d been on stage for almost three hours.
Are you kidding me? 69 years old and he’s doing that? And he still has those songs in his hip pocket to pull out for encores?
Somewhere along the line the answer became clear.
The question, of course, is why. Why does a 69-year-old do this? Why isn’t he at his Scottish estate, sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, counting his billions?
Because he is doing what he alone in the world can do. And he’s perhaps the best ever in the history of the world at doing it. There is something timeless, life-giving and transcendent about Sir Paul keeping alive the legacy of The Beatles, along with the rest of his music. He is obviously filled with joy on stage as he moves around like a kid and is able to still perform his songs in the keys they were originally written in. He has found the Holy Grail, the fountain of youth, the magic elixir. It is doing what you were made to do.
I saw him the last time he played in Detroit – at Olympia Stadium in May of 1976. I am telling you he was better last night than he was 35 years ago, and he was pretty darn good 35 years ago. And never, ever, could I have imagined then that I would be taking my son with me to see him blow our minds decades in the future. It was fitting to be in a baseball stadium, because it’s baseball that is supposed to sentimentally fuse generations together in our culture. That job was done by good old fashioned rock and roll last night – and not only did I see plenty of parents and kids together but grandparents and grandkids together as well. Amazing. (Also fitting to be in a baseball stadium because in my memory when rock and roll was starting, we all thought rock musicians would have careers that lasted even shorter than those of baseball players – we figured by 30 it was over. How wrong was that?)
Paul’s last words (after singing “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make”) were “See you next time” and I believe him. Maybe next time I’ll be with my grandkids. And hopefully, by then, the ringing in my ears will have cleared up.
I hung out last night with my wife and son and Paul McCartney, along with 60,000 or so of our closest friends at a sold-out Comerica Park in Detroit. Sir Paul shredded my eardrums as he took us on a tour of Beatlemania (All My Loving) to Wings (Band on the Run) to all-time sing alongs (Hey Jude) to emotional ballads (Eleanor Rigby) to stirring tributes to fallen bandmates (Something, begun on a ukulele that once belonged to George; A Day in the Life which morphed into Give Peace a Chance in honor of John) to awesome pyrotechnical displays (you can check out my son’s video of Live and Let Die on You Tube and hear me say, “It’s a little smoky here) to a Detroit concert-only Motown tribute (a cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1962 song Hitchhike). After two and a quarter hours (during which he never left the stage), 69-year-old Paul McCartney did two encore sets.
The first featured Lady Madonna, Day Tripper and Get Back. The second was Yesterday, Helter Skelter and Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End. By the end of The End he’d been on stage for almost three hours.
Are you kidding me? 69 years old and he’s doing that? And he still has those songs in his hip pocket to pull out for encores?
Somewhere along the line the answer became clear.
The question, of course, is why. Why does a 69-year-old do this? Why isn’t he at his Scottish estate, sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, counting his billions?
Because he is doing what he alone in the world can do. And he’s perhaps the best ever in the history of the world at doing it. There is something timeless, life-giving and transcendent about Sir Paul keeping alive the legacy of The Beatles, along with the rest of his music. He is obviously filled with joy on stage as he moves around like a kid and is able to still perform his songs in the keys they were originally written in. He has found the Holy Grail, the fountain of youth, the magic elixir. It is doing what you were made to do.
I saw him the last time he played in Detroit – at Olympia Stadium in May of 1976. I am telling you he was better last night than he was 35 years ago, and he was pretty darn good 35 years ago. And never, ever, could I have imagined then that I would be taking my son with me to see him blow our minds decades in the future. It was fitting to be in a baseball stadium, because it’s baseball that is supposed to sentimentally fuse generations together in our culture. That job was done by good old fashioned rock and roll last night – and not only did I see plenty of parents and kids together but grandparents and grandkids together as well. Amazing. (Also fitting to be in a baseball stadium because in my memory when rock and roll was starting, we all thought rock musicians would have careers that lasted even shorter than those of baseball players – we figured by 30 it was over. How wrong was that?)
Paul’s last words (after singing “And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make”) were “See you next time” and I believe him. Maybe next time I’ll be with my grandkids. And hopefully, by then, the ringing in my ears will have cleared up.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Javier, John, Julia and Jeff
News item: Javier Bardem appeared before the United Nations in Geneva yesterday supporting an international treaty to protect actor’s rights. “Bardem wants movie tickets to drop in price to dissuade potential movie pirates.”
I am with you, Javier! Not that I really care about actor’s rights (sorry, but it’s hard to muster much sympathy for anyone who goes home at night to two amazing trophies – an Oscar and Penelope Cruz), but it is now possible for a cheapskate like myself to do the dinner part of “dinner and a movie” for less than the movie part. As ridiculous as this sounds, coming on the heels of the new Harry Potter movie breaking all sorts of box office records last weekend, I wonder, “Who goes to the movie theater anymore?” There must be someone going, but it sure isn’t me. I think we’ve been to the movie theater twice since Christmas.
And it’s not just the cost that stops me. It’s what’s showing. I realize my demographic (middle-aged grumpy white guy) comes in a just above “deceased” on the list of demographics film studios are trying to capture. Be that as it may, there still are movies being made that I want to see. It’s just that most of them hardly show up at my theater. What does show up seems to be something like “Fast, Furious Vampire Transformer Apes Battle the X-Men, Captain America, Thor and the Green Lantern.” If you want to see a really good movie – like last year’s wonderful film Get Low, you have to be creative. And good luck seeing Biutiful, the movie Javier Bardem was nominated for Best Actor for last year at a theater.
I watch movies all the time in the comfort of our home. Most recently I saw Nowhere Boy, a biopic about John Lennon’s adolescence. The story goes a long way towards explaining the forces that propelled Lennon to write some of the world’s greatest pop tunes and become such an iconic figure. In a nutshell, he was raised by a loving (but undemonstrative) aunt who stepped in because his father had deserted his mother, who wasn’t fit to care for him. Unbeknownst to John, his mother was living around the corner with a man she wasn’t married to and their two daughters. Eventually the family secrets come out (as they always do) and John begins to have a relationship with his mother – who is the sort of life-of-the-party type of gal whose constant kissing and affection is a little much for a teenage boy with sexual urges to puzzle out. (Which helps you understand why Julia, the song he wrote about her ten years or so after the time in his life this movie covers, sounds like a love song.) Just as the triangle between John, Julia and Aunt Mimi is getting sorted out, Julia is tragically hit and killed by a car as she crosses the street in front of Mimi’s house. (John meanwhile is a few blocks away playing guitar with his new friend Paul.) John was simultaneously loved and rejected, taken in and abandoned, and that tension is all over his music.
To the best of my knowledge, Nowhere Boy never played in a theater here. We were looking for it. It was released in the UK in 2009 and in the US in October, 2010, to coincide with what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. It is a compelling movie about a compelling figure. I sit scratching my head wondering why this movie never played here, while Zookeeper, which I would need to be paid at least four figures to sit through (okay, I lied, I’d watch it if someone paid me three hundred bucks, but that’s my limit!) gets promoted like crazy and is playing at every theater in town. Somebody help me understand this.
Let me ask you – what percentage of movies do you see in the theater versus the percentage you see at home? Would those numbers change if the prices were lower? Of course, I’m not optimistic that movie theaters are going to lower their prices anytime soon for the sake of Javier Bardem or his American lookalike Jeff Munroe. Guys like Javier and me will just muddle along, staying home with our trophy wives, watching what we want to see.
I am with you, Javier! Not that I really care about actor’s rights (sorry, but it’s hard to muster much sympathy for anyone who goes home at night to two amazing trophies – an Oscar and Penelope Cruz), but it is now possible for a cheapskate like myself to do the dinner part of “dinner and a movie” for less than the movie part. As ridiculous as this sounds, coming on the heels of the new Harry Potter movie breaking all sorts of box office records last weekend, I wonder, “Who goes to the movie theater anymore?” There must be someone going, but it sure isn’t me. I think we’ve been to the movie theater twice since Christmas.
And it’s not just the cost that stops me. It’s what’s showing. I realize my demographic (middle-aged grumpy white guy) comes in a just above “deceased” on the list of demographics film studios are trying to capture. Be that as it may, there still are movies being made that I want to see. It’s just that most of them hardly show up at my theater. What does show up seems to be something like “Fast, Furious Vampire Transformer Apes Battle the X-Men, Captain America, Thor and the Green Lantern.” If you want to see a really good movie – like last year’s wonderful film Get Low, you have to be creative. And good luck seeing Biutiful, the movie Javier Bardem was nominated for Best Actor for last year at a theater.
I watch movies all the time in the comfort of our home. Most recently I saw Nowhere Boy, a biopic about John Lennon’s adolescence. The story goes a long way towards explaining the forces that propelled Lennon to write some of the world’s greatest pop tunes and become such an iconic figure. In a nutshell, he was raised by a loving (but undemonstrative) aunt who stepped in because his father had deserted his mother, who wasn’t fit to care for him. Unbeknownst to John, his mother was living around the corner with a man she wasn’t married to and their two daughters. Eventually the family secrets come out (as they always do) and John begins to have a relationship with his mother – who is the sort of life-of-the-party type of gal whose constant kissing and affection is a little much for a teenage boy with sexual urges to puzzle out. (Which helps you understand why Julia, the song he wrote about her ten years or so after the time in his life this movie covers, sounds like a love song.) Just as the triangle between John, Julia and Aunt Mimi is getting sorted out, Julia is tragically hit and killed by a car as she crosses the street in front of Mimi’s house. (John meanwhile is a few blocks away playing guitar with his new friend Paul.) John was simultaneously loved and rejected, taken in and abandoned, and that tension is all over his music.
To the best of my knowledge, Nowhere Boy never played in a theater here. We were looking for it. It was released in the UK in 2009 and in the US in October, 2010, to coincide with what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. It is a compelling movie about a compelling figure. I sit scratching my head wondering why this movie never played here, while Zookeeper, which I would need to be paid at least four figures to sit through (okay, I lied, I’d watch it if someone paid me three hundred bucks, but that’s my limit!) gets promoted like crazy and is playing at every theater in town. Somebody help me understand this.
Let me ask you – what percentage of movies do you see in the theater versus the percentage you see at home? Would those numbers change if the prices were lower? Of course, I’m not optimistic that movie theaters are going to lower their prices anytime soon for the sake of Javier Bardem or his American lookalike Jeff Munroe. Guys like Javier and me will just muddle along, staying home with our trophy wives, watching what we want to see.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Moral Ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films
Is the universe moral?
I touched on this topic briefly in yesterday’s post and am going to expand on it today. In March, I wrote one of my favorite blog entries called “Oh the Humanity,” where I managed to tie together Jesus, Gandhi, Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen. Today it’s moral ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films. (I write these blog entries, by the way, to get these weird connections out of my head and into yours – like how when you have a song stuck in your brain and someone else hears you humming it and picks it up, somehow, magically, you are suddenly free of it.)
Earlier today I read this quote from the Florida prosecutor who put Casey Anthony on trial: “We are disappointed with the verdict today. (But) we did our job. The jury did their job. This is justice in America.” How does that strike you? Does it sound like he’s blaming the failure to convict in this case on both the jury and the justice system? What if he’d said, “Hey, we had to prove that she murdered her daughter beyond a reasonable doubt, and according to the decision of the jury we failed to do that”? My opinion is the majority of Americans believe two things about the Casey Anthony case – first, that she is guilty, and second, that the prosecution did not prove its case and the jury had no choice but to let her walk.
Actually, I think the majority of Americans believe three things about this case. The two I just listed and this – that somewhere along the line Casey Anthony will get hers. We believe that somehow God, the universe, fate, circumstance or whatever you want to call it will take care of her.
Which makes the news I heard this morning that Casey Anthony has already been approached about having her own reality show hard to stomach. That doesn’t exactly sound like divine retribution.
It’s interesting to me that we believe eventually things will sort themselves out in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary. We don’t want to think about this but thousands and thousands of crimes go unsolved every year. People, quite literally, get away with murder all the time. And as for our justice system that the prosecutor in Florida commented on, well, it does have its flaws. One of the more delightful conversations I once had was with an African-American judge who told me that when he was an attorney he was known as “the black Perry Mason” in Benton Harbor because he never lost a case there. On the other hand, he said, “I never won a case in Grand Rapids, either.” There is a very interesting relationship between the median income level of a community and the percentage of court cases that end in a conviction. In a nutshell, the higher the median income level, the more likely it is you are going to jail when on trial for anything in a community. I'm telling you that if Casey Anthony were tried in Grand Rapids we'd be having a different conversation today.
All of which brings me back to the challenges story-tellers like novelists and filmmakers face. They have to create their own universes and decide how moral that universe is going to be. Readers and watchers demand, however, that things make moral sense in books and movies. Suppose you were watching a Brad Pitt movie where right in the middle of it Brad was going for a walk and a piano fell from the sky and killed him. And that was the end of the story! The film just ended with Brad Pitt crushed by a piano and he didn’t resurrect and become a superhero with strange musical powers or have his death avenged by an angry group of music critics. We’d tell our friends, “Hey, I went to that new Brad Pitt - Piano Guy movie and it sucked. Don’t go see it. It’s terrible.” No, we want stories that make us feel good. We want heroes that learn something (like don’t walk under falling pianos) and become better people (starting support groups to help grieving families cope with IFPDS – Instant Falling Piano Death Syndrome.)
We were playing with our new On-Demand movie toy a few nights ago and found the German movie Das Boot. I knew this movie won a bunch of awards but had never seen it. So we watched it. I’m going to tell you what happens and I don’t care about a spoiler alert because it’s 30 years old. You’ve had your chance to see it. The movie is about a German U-Boat in World War II. It is agonizing and excruciating as they deal with the amazingly difficult life in their submarine and then are shelled mercilessly during some naval action. The climax comes as they try to slip past the British through the Straits of Gibraltar. They don’t make it. They have the stuffing pounded out of them and the submarine sinks to the bottom of the sea. Through heroic, superhuman effort the crew works together to patch up the sub and miraculously are able to get it to lift itself off the sea floor and head for home. They make it back to Germany, and are just enjoying a hero’s welcome when some enemy airplanes come out of nowhere and bomb the submarine station and the sub and the entire crew is blown up. And the movie ends! Talk about a piano falling out of the sky. They went through all this anguish to get home and when they do they get blown up. But foreign films don’t labor under the same sort of requirements that American films labor under. Foreign filmmakers don’t answer to Hollywood studios that demand a happy ending – they get to explore irony instead.
And irony is often a more accurate snapshot of reality. Stuff happens. In the Richard Rohr book I referred to in a recent post he calls this the “necessary sadness” of life. The rain falls of the just and unjust. Heroic people are blown up just while they make it back to safety, while a woman who most probably murdered her infant daughter is rewarded for the instant fame accompanying her deed with offers of money and more fame. And here’s the thing I want you to contemplate – when the inevitable books and movies about Casey Anthony do come out, we will tolerate them because they are non-fiction. Sadly, we know the world works this way. But as a work of fiction – I’m telling you an author wouldn’t be able to sell that script anywhere.
I touched on this topic briefly in yesterday’s post and am going to expand on it today. In March, I wrote one of my favorite blog entries called “Oh the Humanity,” where I managed to tie together Jesus, Gandhi, Tiger Woods and Charlie Sheen. Today it’s moral ambiguity, Casey Anthony and Foreign Films. (I write these blog entries, by the way, to get these weird connections out of my head and into yours – like how when you have a song stuck in your brain and someone else hears you humming it and picks it up, somehow, magically, you are suddenly free of it.)
Earlier today I read this quote from the Florida prosecutor who put Casey Anthony on trial: “We are disappointed with the verdict today. (But) we did our job. The jury did their job. This is justice in America.” How does that strike you? Does it sound like he’s blaming the failure to convict in this case on both the jury and the justice system? What if he’d said, “Hey, we had to prove that she murdered her daughter beyond a reasonable doubt, and according to the decision of the jury we failed to do that”? My opinion is the majority of Americans believe two things about the Casey Anthony case – first, that she is guilty, and second, that the prosecution did not prove its case and the jury had no choice but to let her walk.
Actually, I think the majority of Americans believe three things about this case. The two I just listed and this – that somewhere along the line Casey Anthony will get hers. We believe that somehow God, the universe, fate, circumstance or whatever you want to call it will take care of her.
Which makes the news I heard this morning that Casey Anthony has already been approached about having her own reality show hard to stomach. That doesn’t exactly sound like divine retribution.
It’s interesting to me that we believe eventually things will sort themselves out in the face of all sorts of evidence to the contrary. We don’t want to think about this but thousands and thousands of crimes go unsolved every year. People, quite literally, get away with murder all the time. And as for our justice system that the prosecutor in Florida commented on, well, it does have its flaws. One of the more delightful conversations I once had was with an African-American judge who told me that when he was an attorney he was known as “the black Perry Mason” in Benton Harbor because he never lost a case there. On the other hand, he said, “I never won a case in Grand Rapids, either.” There is a very interesting relationship between the median income level of a community and the percentage of court cases that end in a conviction. In a nutshell, the higher the median income level, the more likely it is you are going to jail when on trial for anything in a community. I'm telling you that if Casey Anthony were tried in Grand Rapids we'd be having a different conversation today.
All of which brings me back to the challenges story-tellers like novelists and filmmakers face. They have to create their own universes and decide how moral that universe is going to be. Readers and watchers demand, however, that things make moral sense in books and movies. Suppose you were watching a Brad Pitt movie where right in the middle of it Brad was going for a walk and a piano fell from the sky and killed him. And that was the end of the story! The film just ended with Brad Pitt crushed by a piano and he didn’t resurrect and become a superhero with strange musical powers or have his death avenged by an angry group of music critics. We’d tell our friends, “Hey, I went to that new Brad Pitt - Piano Guy movie and it sucked. Don’t go see it. It’s terrible.” No, we want stories that make us feel good. We want heroes that learn something (like don’t walk under falling pianos) and become better people (starting support groups to help grieving families cope with IFPDS – Instant Falling Piano Death Syndrome.)
We were playing with our new On-Demand movie toy a few nights ago and found the German movie Das Boot. I knew this movie won a bunch of awards but had never seen it. So we watched it. I’m going to tell you what happens and I don’t care about a spoiler alert because it’s 30 years old. You’ve had your chance to see it. The movie is about a German U-Boat in World War II. It is agonizing and excruciating as they deal with the amazingly difficult life in their submarine and then are shelled mercilessly during some naval action. The climax comes as they try to slip past the British through the Straits of Gibraltar. They don’t make it. They have the stuffing pounded out of them and the submarine sinks to the bottom of the sea. Through heroic, superhuman effort the crew works together to patch up the sub and miraculously are able to get it to lift itself off the sea floor and head for home. They make it back to Germany, and are just enjoying a hero’s welcome when some enemy airplanes come out of nowhere and bomb the submarine station and the sub and the entire crew is blown up. And the movie ends! Talk about a piano falling out of the sky. They went through all this anguish to get home and when they do they get blown up. But foreign films don’t labor under the same sort of requirements that American films labor under. Foreign filmmakers don’t answer to Hollywood studios that demand a happy ending – they get to explore irony instead.
And irony is often a more accurate snapshot of reality. Stuff happens. In the Richard Rohr book I referred to in a recent post he calls this the “necessary sadness” of life. The rain falls of the just and unjust. Heroic people are blown up just while they make it back to safety, while a woman who most probably murdered her infant daughter is rewarded for the instant fame accompanying her deed with offers of money and more fame. And here’s the thing I want you to contemplate – when the inevitable books and movies about Casey Anthony do come out, we will tolerate them because they are non-fiction. Sadly, we know the world works this way. But as a work of fiction – I’m telling you an author wouldn’t be able to sell that script anywhere.
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