Monday
5/23/05
Full Circle
It was a hot, rainy summer, and the humidity in the northeast was, more days than not, oppressive. It was a summer that not only saw the space shuttle Enterprise make its first test flight from the back of a 747, but saw the White House occupied by an overly smiley peanut farmer from Georgia. This was also a summer that saw the deaths of Elvis Presley and Groucho Marx which were followed in short order by the births of Ludacris and Dustin Diamond in what I can only assume was some sort of twisted cosmic joke.
In any case, through a series of no coincidences at all, this was also the same summer that saw a certain fair-haired boy of twelve become increasingly disillusioned by the steady stream of feculence that oozed from Hollywood. (Oh, all right, feculence is probably too strong a word, but jeez, how often do you get to use the word 'feculence?' On the other hand though, feculence is truly the only word that accurately describes the cinematic, well, feculence that is Mitchell. )
Anyway, while it's true that 1977 was a year that brought us Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl and Black Sunday, the 1970's as a whole wasn't a very family friendly decade for movie going. There was, of course, the perennial stream of Disney fare aimed at the kiddies, but even that wore thin for the fair-haired boy of twelve. There are, after all, only so many times you can sit through cookie-cutter exercises in cinematic tedium like The Shaggy D.A. and Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo before a glassy-eyed ennui takes hold.
But then, just as it looked as if America had no choice but to sit through years of interminable cinematic road trips with Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed, everything changed. The fair-haired twelve year old, who was, oddly enough, remarkable only for his striking resemblance to me, went with his folks to a freshly minted space opera otherwise known as Star Wars. And the rest, as they have been known to say, is history.
And so it was that twenty-eight years and four movies later I found myself entering our local Lowe's googolplex with my own two fair-haired lads in tow, hoping for a big, satisfying whiz-bang climax to the whole thing. As we found our seats and settled in for a round of ads and trailers I pondered the fact that my first born, who is almost ten now, is surprisingly close to my own age when all of this started. The only real difference between us, I mused, is that he's by far a bigger fan of the series and even more exited about seeing Revenge of the Sith than I was. Of course the fact that he was sitting there wearing a Darth Vader helmet was sort of a giveaway.
Anyway, almost as satisfying as musing about my boys and the whole circle of life thing was that Revenge of the Sith really did turn out to be, in my humble opinion, a great movie. No spoilers here, but as the saga finally came to a close in a perfectly imagined and dialog-free denouement I was left with that all too rare sense of wonder that seems to come so easily to twelve-year-olds.
Oh yeah, and go get a copy of the Mst3k episode of Mitchell. Trust me.
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Full Circle
(I've found lately that devising new and ever more clever gambits with which to start blog entries is becoming, well, ever more difficult. I suppose I could simply jump right in with a clear and simple exposition on whatever themes I'm exploring on a given day; but heck, that seems just plain lazy. Yes, its inexplicable, but I find that the stealthy literary vivisection of a theme is not only far more entertaining; but entertaining in a ratio directly proportional to just how intricately Byzantine I can manage to make the whole thing.
That said, for the sake of preserving the opacity of my usually inscrutable posts, I think I'll be trotting out a well-worn conceit to begin today's rumination. -E)
That said, for the sake of preserving the opacity of my usually inscrutable posts, I think I'll be trotting out a well-worn conceit to begin today's rumination. -E)
It was a hot, rainy summer, and the humidity in the northeast was, more days than not, oppressive. It was a summer that not only saw the space shuttle Enterprise make its first test flight from the back of a 747, but saw the White House occupied by an overly smiley peanut farmer from Georgia. This was also a summer that saw the deaths of Elvis Presley and Groucho Marx which were followed in short order by the births of Ludacris and Dustin Diamond in what I can only assume was some sort of twisted cosmic joke.
In any case, through a series of no coincidences at all, this was also the same summer that saw a certain fair-haired boy of twelve become increasingly disillusioned by the steady stream of feculence that oozed from Hollywood. (Oh, all right, feculence is probably too strong a word, but jeez, how often do you get to use the word 'feculence?' On the other hand though, feculence is truly the only word that accurately describes the cinematic, well, feculence that is Mitchell. )
Anyway, while it's true that 1977 was a year that brought us Annie Hall, The Goodbye Girl and Black Sunday, the 1970's as a whole wasn't a very family friendly decade for movie going. There was, of course, the perennial stream of Disney fare aimed at the kiddies, but even that wore thin for the fair-haired boy of twelve. There are, after all, only so many times you can sit through cookie-cutter exercises in cinematic tedium like The Shaggy D.A. and Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo before a glassy-eyed ennui takes hold.
But then, just as it looked as if America had no choice but to sit through years of interminable cinematic road trips with Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed, everything changed. The fair-haired twelve year old, who was, oddly enough, remarkable only for his striking resemblance to me, went with his folks to a freshly minted space opera otherwise known as Star Wars. And the rest, as they have been known to say, is history.
And so it was that twenty-eight years and four movies later I found myself entering our local Lowe's googolplex with my own two fair-haired lads in tow, hoping for a big, satisfying whiz-bang climax to the whole thing. As we found our seats and settled in for a round of ads and trailers I pondered the fact that my first born, who is almost ten now, is surprisingly close to my own age when all of this started. The only real difference between us, I mused, is that he's by far a bigger fan of the series and even more exited about seeing Revenge of the Sith than I was. Of course the fact that he was sitting there wearing a Darth Vader helmet was sort of a giveaway.
Anyway, almost as satisfying as musing about my boys and the whole circle of life thing was that Revenge of the Sith really did turn out to be, in my humble opinion, a great movie. No spoilers here, but as the saga finally came to a close in a perfectly imagined and dialog-free denouement I was left with that all too rare sense of wonder that seems to come so easily to twelve-year-olds.
Oh yeah, and go get a copy of the Mst3k episode of Mitchell. Trust me.
