This morning, I saw Elizabethtown. I've been looking forward to this movie for about two years, I guess. See, I love Almost Famous. I loved the original version that Cameron Crowe put out. It was a great film to me. Then I watched Untitled, the director's cut of AF. Most director's cuts add about 10-15 minutes to the film. Untitled was 40 minutes longer than Almost Famous. It was ten times better for me. Almost all of the extra footage added to the plot, the pacing was excellent, the film was a masterpiece. Crowe said that the studio wouldn't let him put out the nearly three-hour version in theaters, but DVD gave him a lot of extra freedom to do what he wanted with the film. The DVD set of Untitled (which was what Crowe originally wanted Almost Famous called, but the studio wouldn't let him do that either) includes both the AF original cut and the director's cut. I tried watching the theatrical version one day and couldn't. The film is so much richer because of those extra 40 minutes.
Anyway, so, I was looking forward to Elizabethtown. I didn't watch Vanilla Sky because the film looked a bit odd, I'm not a huge Tom Cruise fan, and it was based off of a Hispanic film, which meant that the majority of the film really wouldn't be from Crowe's heart and past, which is where AF and Say Anything were from. So, I skipped it. I watched the first trailer and was okay with it. Nothing great, but trailers are often formulaic and don't really get to the heart of the movie. I watched the internet trailer on apple.com and was really moved. I don't know if it was Elton John's song "My Father's Gun" that played over the majority of the trailer (which featured very little dialogue, as the dialogue was mostly muted while the song played, which was kind of odd) or just what I could derive from the scenes from expressions and not dialogue, but it was simply great.
I watched everything that came out about the movie. Trailers, the internet trailer, even the music selection trailer on Apple's site. I devoured it all. I was expecting a really good movie.
So, I went to the first screening today. I went a little late because last time I'd gone to a movie at that time of day on a Friday, the theater had been practically empty (of course, that's when I went to see Serenity, so there you go). The place was packed. I went into the theater and it was almost full. See, I live near Elizabethtown, so a lot of people wanted to see the movie because it's based in a city near where they live (not why I was there). Then I remembered that it's Fall Break time for the kids around here, so a lot of youth groups were there (heh, they said "fuck" twice in the movie and I heard a lot of gasps. I loved that). I found a seat that was a single, next to the handicapped area at the back. That was nice.
Until a manager came in and said that there was a woman there with her handicapped daughter and they wanted to sit together. I was having a nice day and said I'd move. I got up and looked around. I don't like to sit next to strangers in a theater. I'm not wild about sitting next to anyone in the theater unless I'm close to them in some way (really good friend, hot girl, etc.). So, the only seats that worked into that criteria were in the front row. Alright, fine, how bad could it be to sit in the front row?
I basically had to scootch down as far as possible to see the entire screen. Shit. This movie had better be fucking good. Fucking youth groups and fucking old people taking up all the fucking seats. It'd better be fucking good.
It was.
It was so damn good.
It was the best movie I've seen this year. I love Star Wars and really liked Episode 3. This was better. Critics fell all over themselves for Batman Begins and Serenity. I thought they were both mediocre. I liked Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. A History of Violence was good. War of the Worlds and Mr. & Mrs. Smith were okay, but forgettable. Sin City was gritty and harsh, but good. Saraha wasn't as bad as I expected, but wasn't all that good.
But Elizabethtown was abso-fucking-lutely great. It easily was better than all of those movies from the past 10 months. I can't even recall a movie from 2004 that was that good.
I hate Orlando Bloom. He was really good in this, even great at times.
I used to dislike Kirsten Dunst. Something changed that about 6 months ago and I can't put my finger on it why. In this, she was really good (the Southern accent that they tried to work in for her was the only nitpick I had, and I'm not sure if it grated on me for a specific reason or if it was just that I'm used to her normal accent that she uses in every other movie I've seen her in).
The soundtrack was great and I'm thinking about heading to Wal-Mart to buy it right now. In fact, I think I will. Meh, probably not. I don't know.
I was worried it would be Garden State all over again. It's not. It's better than Garden State, and I really liked Garden State.
It made me realize things about myself that scare the hell out of me. I'm not ready for my father to die. I fear that I really don't know him that well. I worry about what my mother might be like after my father dies. I fear that I might fail at my chosen profession and have lost five years of my life when I could have done something else. I then wonder what I'd do after I failed. I saw myself in Bloom's shoes and I wonder if my dark appointment with destiny is coming, too.
I'll admit, there wasn't a lot of hilarious dialogue that I could endlessly quote. There little bits of the score were very reminiscent of the AF score. There's set-up for a sub-plot or two that you see scenes of in the trailer but are missing from the film. To me, it doesn't matter.
Critics are trying to rip this a new one. I haven't agreed with critics much this year (look up the review for Batman or Serenity and see how close they are to mine). I love this movie. I was seriously considering sneaking out at the end and then back in before the next showing to see it again, but the next showing had people lined up waiting once we got out of our showing. It was a little ridiculous.
I want this movie. If there'd been a stand outside the theater offering a DVD of the movie (as some studios have considered doing), I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Money is tight now, and I'd still do it.
Don't let my opinion buff up your expectations of the film, though. This film meant a lot to me because of how it related to my life and how I saw the film (figuratively, not literally, but I was pleasantly surprised that I didn't have a crick in my neck at the end). Nearly every part of this film worked for me, and at the end I was satisfied. I walked out of the theater without a real complaint. I just wish I could see more movies like this.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Lookin' into their eyes, I see they're runnin' too
Wow, it's actually been a week since I last wrote one of these. Look, it's just the second sentence and I know this is going to be a long one. It's been brewing in my mind for the last couple of days, and it's a mighty strong brew, so I'll try to put in a couple of stopping points for those without the time or the inclination to read extremely long posts.
Friday night, I was out at a friend's house just to hang out. About a half hour after getting there, my dad calls and says that a guy was at their house asking for me. It turned out that is was Calvin, who was my best friend through junior high and high school. We were pretty inseparable, taking a lot of the same classes, hating the same teachers, and we were totally devoted to the Yearbook program. Sometime near the middle of our junior year, Calvin got a girlfriend, it became serious, and she ended up getting pregnant. Calvin tried to "do the right thing" by asking her to marry him, but her parents wouldn't let it happen. The kid was born the July between our junior and senior years. Calvin stuck with school pretty regularly until the spring of our senior year, and then he started missing school. A lot. When Spring Break rolled around, he dropped out, although the girl stuck with it until she graduated. Calvin took care of the kid, she went to school. I didn't talk to him much that summer, but the next summer, we got together and hung out for the day. He'd gotten married to the girl in a small courthouse ceremony the previous September, which I wasn't told about and was honestly a little hurt that he hadn't invited me or informed me in some manner (After all, my e-mail address hasn't changed in seven years, and he could obviously find where I lived today, so it seems he could at least drop me a line). For some reason, we went car shopping for him that day, and he bought new car (Calvin was really, really into cars in high school. When I say that, I mean that he had maybe five cars he was working on at one point in time. Some people collect stamps, Calvin collected crappy "classic" cars that really needed work). He bought that car three years ago. We hadn't talked since. He worked for Grandy's pretty steadily after the girl became pregnant and he was some kind of manager when I last saw him, so two years ago, I went to Grandy's to try and find him, but he had left by that point. I think I tried calling the phone number that he gave me, but I didn't get in touch with him. Even the e-mail address bounced back. He was essentially gone.
So, three years after I last saw him, I get that call from my dad. As it turns out, I was home that weekend, so it was amazingly lucky that Calvin caught me when he did. We talked for a few minutes on the phone, during which time I gently probed for information. He and the wife had separated sometime last year after she'd had a second kid with him, she'd joined the National Guard and shipped off in January and came back in April, at which time she asked him for a divorce. So, the wife is now the ex-wife. He was now driving a truck for a junkyard, going on a big, circular path through several neighboring states five days a week. He was renting a house from an old English teacher of ours. There was this tone in his voice that made him sound hollow, that joy really didn't exist for him except where his kids were concerned. I told him where I was and told him to swing by, I was going to ditch my friends for the night to hang out with him. (Potty break if you need it)
So, Calvin picked me up and we just went. Our hometown is now essentially a suburb of a big town across the river, so we naturally headed in that direction, since our town is dying a very slow death (the local theater went out of business, so now we have to travel about 30 miles to a theater in neighboring towns. It sucks). Anyway, so we talked about where I was, where old friends were, and he talked about regrets. He was so pissed at himself for not having stuck with high school and then gone to college. He was one of the smartest kids in the school. He scored a distinguished on his portfolio, and he was one of only 15 kids in my senior class to do that (unfortunately, they couldn't count his scores toward the final tally because he dropped out). Now, when he drives his truck, five times a week, he passes the university where he had planned to go. We ended up going to a pizza place/bar and then back to his place to continue to catch up. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to catch up on. It ended up being a lot like Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days," where people who knew each other in high school end up talking about high school. Calvin and I weren't really trying to get back to our "glory days," we just really didn't have anything else to talk about. That was kind of fun, but it was also sad. At the end of the night, I gave him my e-mail address and phone number, and told him that if he ever gets a chance to visit, I've got a couch with his name on it. I really want to build a friendship with him again, but I'm wondering how to.
The thing that makes me sad the most is that despite how close we were, there's not the much there now. I told him things about my life that very few people know, but it has no real impact on him like it does on my current circle of friends. Where I currently am, I have friends who are like siblings to me, that I share just about everything with and enjoy hanging out with for hours on end. Yet, in a few years, when we move away for jobs or just to wander the Earth, when I get together with them, will we have anything in common, or will we just talk about our "glory days?" I seriously don't want that to happen. I'm sad to find out it happened to Calvin and me, but it scares me that it might happen to me and some of my current friends. I hope it doesn't happen, I really do. I have a hard time imagining what my life would be like without talking to these people once a week; I can't fathom not doing so for months or years at a time.
Catching up with Calvin also taught me a lesson about, well, me. The past few years, I've felt like I've done nothing with my life. Yeah, I've got a degree, but I really didn't do anything to get it. I took classes that seemed like they'd be fun, some of which were. I took classes that were "required" and did the least amount of work possible, passing them all with relative ease. I've paid a lot of money to get a degree that was really just a way to get into a grad program, which I'm actually learning from and doing stuff in. Except for social growth, I feel like I've lost four years. I'm unmotivated. I'm tired of the bureaucratic bullshit that I've been going through. I've questioned how the hell I got to where I am, and tried to find exactly what figurative roads brought me here. I think I have friends here who are the same way, but I've been with most of them for the past four years, so we ended up questioning it all together. Calvin taught me that he's done the same thing. He was on a very different path, yet we're all starting to feel the same way. There's a line from Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty" which I took a chunk of as the title of this post:
From what Calvin told me about where several people from high school currently are, we're all runnin' on empty. That's sad, but comforting, too.
He also brings another Jackson Browne lyric to mind which would make an awesome SotP, but this seems more appropriate. Calvin's graduated with his GED last year (valedictorian, actually, scoring extremely high without having studied any of it since high school), doesn't have the financial structure to go to school, has two kids that are weighing heavily on him since their mother really doesn't want them because they interrupt her new partying lifestyle, a job he doesn't like and with no real chances to move up the ladder, a friend's wife who is falling in love with him and he feels wrong about it, and no real friends around, only asshole cousins who grab his ex-wife's ass in front of him to tick him off and who take and deal drugs but say that "it's okay, we're working undercover for the cops." Essentially, Calvin is surrounded by shit, and he knows that he's to blame for a good chunk of it. That's why "These Days" comes to mind, and the lines
It was oddly prophetic that I put that on a CD to drive home to Thursday morning. It saddens me to know that Calvin is in that situation, and it saddens me even more that I can't really do anything about it other than drop him a line every now and then so he has someone to talk to it about.
Well, that's about it. It was a long, sweeping narrative epic that I'm sure had you enthralled. Hope you took advantage of the pee break and, if you didn't, I hope your bladder didn't explode. However, if that was the case, your dedication is appreciated.
Friday night, I was out at a friend's house just to hang out. About a half hour after getting there, my dad calls and says that a guy was at their house asking for me. It turned out that is was Calvin, who was my best friend through junior high and high school. We were pretty inseparable, taking a lot of the same classes, hating the same teachers, and we were totally devoted to the Yearbook program. Sometime near the middle of our junior year, Calvin got a girlfriend, it became serious, and she ended up getting pregnant. Calvin tried to "do the right thing" by asking her to marry him, but her parents wouldn't let it happen. The kid was born the July between our junior and senior years. Calvin stuck with school pretty regularly until the spring of our senior year, and then he started missing school. A lot. When Spring Break rolled around, he dropped out, although the girl stuck with it until she graduated. Calvin took care of the kid, she went to school. I didn't talk to him much that summer, but the next summer, we got together and hung out for the day. He'd gotten married to the girl in a small courthouse ceremony the previous September, which I wasn't told about and was honestly a little hurt that he hadn't invited me or informed me in some manner (After all, my e-mail address hasn't changed in seven years, and he could obviously find where I lived today, so it seems he could at least drop me a line). For some reason, we went car shopping for him that day, and he bought new car (Calvin was really, really into cars in high school. When I say that, I mean that he had maybe five cars he was working on at one point in time. Some people collect stamps, Calvin collected crappy "classic" cars that really needed work). He bought that car three years ago. We hadn't talked since. He worked for Grandy's pretty steadily after the girl became pregnant and he was some kind of manager when I last saw him, so two years ago, I went to Grandy's to try and find him, but he had left by that point. I think I tried calling the phone number that he gave me, but I didn't get in touch with him. Even the e-mail address bounced back. He was essentially gone.
So, three years after I last saw him, I get that call from my dad. As it turns out, I was home that weekend, so it was amazingly lucky that Calvin caught me when he did. We talked for a few minutes on the phone, during which time I gently probed for information. He and the wife had separated sometime last year after she'd had a second kid with him, she'd joined the National Guard and shipped off in January and came back in April, at which time she asked him for a divorce. So, the wife is now the ex-wife. He was now driving a truck for a junkyard, going on a big, circular path through several neighboring states five days a week. He was renting a house from an old English teacher of ours. There was this tone in his voice that made him sound hollow, that joy really didn't exist for him except where his kids were concerned. I told him where I was and told him to swing by, I was going to ditch my friends for the night to hang out with him. (Potty break if you need it)
So, Calvin picked me up and we just went. Our hometown is now essentially a suburb of a big town across the river, so we naturally headed in that direction, since our town is dying a very slow death (the local theater went out of business, so now we have to travel about 30 miles to a theater in neighboring towns. It sucks). Anyway, so we talked about where I was, where old friends were, and he talked about regrets. He was so pissed at himself for not having stuck with high school and then gone to college. He was one of the smartest kids in the school. He scored a distinguished on his portfolio, and he was one of only 15 kids in my senior class to do that (unfortunately, they couldn't count his scores toward the final tally because he dropped out). Now, when he drives his truck, five times a week, he passes the university where he had planned to go. We ended up going to a pizza place/bar and then back to his place to continue to catch up. Unfortunately, there wasn't much to catch up on. It ended up being a lot like Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days," where people who knew each other in high school end up talking about high school. Calvin and I weren't really trying to get back to our "glory days," we just really didn't have anything else to talk about. That was kind of fun, but it was also sad. At the end of the night, I gave him my e-mail address and phone number, and told him that if he ever gets a chance to visit, I've got a couch with his name on it. I really want to build a friendship with him again, but I'm wondering how to.
The thing that makes me sad the most is that despite how close we were, there's not the much there now. I told him things about my life that very few people know, but it has no real impact on him like it does on my current circle of friends. Where I currently am, I have friends who are like siblings to me, that I share just about everything with and enjoy hanging out with for hours on end. Yet, in a few years, when we move away for jobs or just to wander the Earth, when I get together with them, will we have anything in common, or will we just talk about our "glory days?" I seriously don't want that to happen. I'm sad to find out it happened to Calvin and me, but it scares me that it might happen to me and some of my current friends. I hope it doesn't happen, I really do. I have a hard time imagining what my life would be like without talking to these people once a week; I can't fathom not doing so for months or years at a time.
Catching up with Calvin also taught me a lesson about, well, me. The past few years, I've felt like I've done nothing with my life. Yeah, I've got a degree, but I really didn't do anything to get it. I took classes that seemed like they'd be fun, some of which were. I took classes that were "required" and did the least amount of work possible, passing them all with relative ease. I've paid a lot of money to get a degree that was really just a way to get into a grad program, which I'm actually learning from and doing stuff in. Except for social growth, I feel like I've lost four years. I'm unmotivated. I'm tired of the bureaucratic bullshit that I've been going through. I've questioned how the hell I got to where I am, and tried to find exactly what figurative roads brought me here. I think I have friends here who are the same way, but I've been with most of them for the past four years, so we ended up questioning it all together. Calvin taught me that he's done the same thing. He was on a very different path, yet we're all starting to feel the same way. There's a line from Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty" which I took a chunk of as the title of this post:
"Lookin' out at the road rushin' under my wheels,
I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels.
I look around at the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through.
Lookin' into their eyes, I see they're runnin' too."
From what Calvin told me about where several people from high school currently are, we're all runnin' on empty. That's sad, but comforting, too.
He also brings another Jackson Browne lyric to mind which would make an awesome SotP, but this seems more appropriate. Calvin's graduated with his GED last year (valedictorian, actually, scoring extremely high without having studied any of it since high school), doesn't have the financial structure to go to school, has two kids that are weighing heavily on him since their mother really doesn't want them because they interrupt her new partying lifestyle, a job he doesn't like and with no real chances to move up the ladder, a friend's wife who is falling in love with him and he feels wrong about it, and no real friends around, only asshole cousins who grab his ex-wife's ass in front of him to tick him off and who take and deal drugs but say that "it's okay, we're working undercover for the cops." Essentially, Calvin is surrounded by shit, and he knows that he's to blame for a good chunk of it. That's why "These Days" comes to mind, and the lines
"These days I sit on cornerstones,
And pass the time in quarter-tones to ten, my friend.
Don't confront me with my failures;
I have not forgotten them."
It was oddly prophetic that I put that on a CD to drive home to Thursday morning. It saddens me to know that Calvin is in that situation, and it saddens me even more that I can't really do anything about it other than drop him a line every now and then so he has someone to talk to it about.
Well, that's about it. It was a long, sweeping narrative epic that I'm sure had you enthralled. Hope you took advantage of the pee break and, if you didn't, I hope your bladder didn't explode. However, if that was the case, your dedication is appreciated.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
