More Than One Lesson

“Never meet your heroes.” It’s a phrase and a sentiment that we are all familiar with because there are some unfortunate souls who have met a celebrity or an inspirational figure and ended up gravely disappointed. Not many of us however have had that disappointment echo through history the way young Robert Ford’s did.

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“We want the finest wines available to humanity! We want them here and we want them now!” I had that put on a t-shirt at a specialty store once. It’s a quote that only a relatively small number of people will recognize (certainly in the United States). But I had to get it because it’s the definitive quote from one of the most quotable movies of all-time, Bruce Robinson’s cult comedy classic Withnail & I. It now comes in at number 7 on my list but at that time Robinson’s essentially autobiographical look back at 1969 Britain was my favorite movie. So why would a film about two out of work actors living in squalor and living to get drunk and high in late ‘60s London resonate with me so much? I don’t drink much- and not at all when I first saw it at age 20- I don’t take drugs, I’ve never been an out of work actor, and I’ve never been British in the ‘60s. Or in any other decade now that I think of it. But from the first time I saw it, Withnail & I spoke to me in a way few films ever have. I came for the quotes but I came away with so much more.

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In 2012, Ridley Scott returned to the world of Alien 33 years after directing the original film. Prometheus was a fairly entertaining but decidedly incoherent movie most notable for an outstanding supporting performance by Michael Fassbender as an android named David. Wisely, Scott and the rest of the creative team behind Alien: Covenant decided to bring Fassbender back but in terms of storytelling, we’re given a largely derivative mess. What’s maddening is not that the audience won’t be able to figure out what’s happening in the film. It’s that this is a movie that presents things in a needlessly complicated way in an attempt to make it appear deeper and more complex than it really is. After taking a slight step back and piecing it together, it’s very simple. There is nothing wrong with simplicity. But don’t try to trick us into thinking there’s more to it when there isn’t.

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I’ve usually found that, when it comes to the kind of comedies I enjoy, most fall into one of two categories. Some are well-constructed with strong characters and give me some solid chuckles throughout. Others make laughs their biggest priority and are only concerned with things like characters and story to a minimal extent. Just enough to have something to hang those laughs on. A Fish Called Wanda is that rare and wonderful movie that is the best of both worlds. It is brilliantly constructed, filled with richly drawn characters, and it is also laugh out loud funny the whole way through.

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Wes Anderson’s films are often most memorable for the little moments. He can find the humor and the sadness in the smallest gestures and inflections. His detractors feel that his films tend to be too crafted and controlled. That he gets too caught up in set and costume design and loses focus on characters. While I feel that some of his films (this one, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel) are more effective than others (The Darjeeling Limited, Moonrise Kingdom), all eight of his features have ranged from pretty good to exceptional. A lot of little things add up in all of them. Still, 17 years after I first saw it (just weeks after I graduated high school), Rushmore stands as my favorite.

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As anyone who watches a lot of movies can attest, many of them feel like variations on movies we’ve seen several times before. I doubt anyone could say that about Colossal. It’s no wonder that the marketing for the movie sold it as more of a comedy than it really is. When the premise involves a woman realizing that her actions when standing in a certain place at a certain time of day (thank you, Dr. Jones) conjure up an enormous Godzilla-like creature in Seoul, South Korea, it’s hard to know how to sell that as a drama about the destructive nature of alcoholism.

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There has long been a debate about whether Trekkie or Trekker is the proper name to describe Star Trek fanatics. Whichever one it is, I can’t claim to be one. I’ve always been a casual Star Trek fan. I have seen every movie but only a handful of episodes from the original series and The Next Generation. So it may come as a surprise that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies of all-time.

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“Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. One is the quick jolt. The other the deliberate, slow-paced game of skill, but never was a sport more ideally suited to television than baseball. It’s all there in front of you. It’s theatre, really. The star is the spotlight on the mound, the supporting cast fanned out around him, the mathematical precision of the game moving with the kind of inevitability of Greek tragedy. With the Greek chorus in the bleachers!” – Vin Scully

In recent years, baseball organizations have become heavily dependent on the contributions of brilliant mathematical minds. Sabermetrics, the highly sophisticated statistical analysis detailed in 2011’s Moneyball, has, let’s be honest, strong nerd appeal. While I am unashamedly a nerd, my love of baseball has nothing to do with acronyms such as WHIP, FIP, VORP, BABIP, or WAR (that last one stands for Wins Against Replacement, which I still don’t understand how anyone can quantify). While I respect the role those statistics have to play in building baseball organizations, I sincerely have no interest in learning how they actually work. I don’t love math and I certainly can’t imagine ever writing about it. I love stories which is why I almost everything I write is about film or television. While baseball is a game steeped in numbers, what it is, really, is a story. Every at bat is a scene, every inning an act, and every game one episode out of 162 of a full season.

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In 1996, Danny Boyle’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s wildly popular novel chronicling the lives of Scottish heroin addicts quickly became one of the highest grossing British films of all-time and an international hit. Trainspotting was accused by many who did not see it of glamorizing drug use. While it was incredibly entertaining and often very funny, its style unflinchingly showed the horrors of heroin addiction without taking a heavy-handed stance about it. If you can watch a character dig into the “worst toilet in Scotland” on his hands and knees, another wake up in a pile of his own excrement, and another dying in squalor of AIDS and come away from that film believing that being a heroin addict is an exciting and glamorous lifestyle then your critical thinking skills are almost certainly broken. While Boyle didn’t back away from the horrors he also didn’t back away from what it is about heroin that creates addicts in the first place. Still, I would imagine that for a teenager, watching Trainspotting would make a far more effective anti-drug teaching tool than anything he or she could learn from D.A.R.E.

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As film lovers we watch different movies for different reasons. Sometimes we need to laugh, sometimes we want to be challenged intellectually; sometimes we’re looking for something with strong emotional resonance. And sometimes we want to see a gigantic gorilla smash things. If you like movies where gigantic gorillas smash things (and why on earth wouldn’t you?) then Kong: Skull Island delivers what you’re looking for in spades.

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