Monday, August 31, 2009

I'm old in my mind and QUICK NOTES ON SAVING PRIVATE RYAN

I was looking over my recent blogs, specifically the more rant-related ones , and realized that to a certain degree I’ve become an octogenarian in this blogworld. My blog, aside from all that wacky movie stuff, has basically become a series of “letters” penned to a variety of companies that have, in one way or another, spited me. In return these companies, strangely enough, have responded to me in some way or another with offers of help, or in terms of the zealots over at Greenpeace, stern reprimands.


Seriously, I could be caning my way in to a McDonalds and complaining that the coffee’s too hot, and the hashbrown wedge is too damn expensive. I could be lifting my pleated, sky-blue pants to my belly-button and typing out a letter to a cereal company ‘cause there wasn’t enough raisins in my bran flakes.

I’m sure this is something I learned from my mother, as I can vividly remember an altercation at The Embassy Suites in Lynnwood, Washington, and my fireplug of a madre responding in kind with a berating letter … a berating letter that netted her two free nights at said trashily-fancy establishment.

In my early days of blogging, I was once to referred to by a cynical co-worked as a “poor man’s Mickey Rooney” which seemed nice at the time as Mickey Rooney is connected in my brain as “vaguely famous”. Later I looked up Mickey Rooney and just found a washed up old man ranting on and on about street signs and diapers. Not exactly what I dreamed of being compared to when growing up, but hell, I could probably do worse.

I don’t really know where this scree of ranting is going. I was just thinking the other morning, over a bowl of pureed figs and Ovaltine, that I’ve always been a complainer, and that this blog could probably be seen as just a laundry list of my complaints, and as I’m getting older, it’s probably marking me as a crotchety old man of sorts. I thought this and then sort of shrugged and thought, “not bad.”

That’s what I was thinking..

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I watched Saving Private Ryan this weekend on my day off and had a few quick thoughts:

1. If you were a male actor and you had even the slightest bit of clout in the industry in 1997, you were in this movie. Sure you might’ve been Ted Danson or Paul Giamatti and played faceless XO that somehow interacted with Tom Hanks, but if you weren’t a part of this film, you probably should’ve been hunting for a new agent.

2. This has to be the most overblown film made during the 1990s. Steven Spielberg just can’t help himself, every shot is huge, every moment epic, every scene filled with exactly one million extras. I want someone to take away his big budget, put him on a soundstage with a closet full of props ten actors and tell him to make a fucking movie. I think it’d be good for him.

3. Tom Hanks is great. Yup, say what you will about some of his film choices, but the man is one of the great actors of his time. His character in this film is a man broken by way, stretched so thin that he’s literally shaking his way to the grave. And you can see it in every wrinkle of Hank’s everyman face. He’s just like us, a teacher in a small town forced in to the war, and he’s given everything he has and they just keep asking for more. I often as I found myself drawn away from this movie by all the crosses and American flags, I kept finding myself drawn back by Mr. Hanks.

4. Good grief, if I ever hear another batch of swelling strings indicating a dramatic moment, I might just snap. Spielberg absolutely loves himself a leit-motif (thank you Alex Healy for the correction of my butchered phrase-work) and they pop up just about every moment someone’s going to catch hot lead or when a story about home is about to pop up. I found myself dreading the violin’s twang.

5. Nonetheless, I like myself a war movie. This is the second time I’ve sat through this film, the first with my sophomore girlfriend Rachel Leibold (all I remember is her flat iron bangs and a lot of sleepy explosions). If I can sit through this ball ‘o’ corn twice, I must like something about sweaty, dirty men killing Nazis.

Tuesday: Similar thoughts on Inglourious Basterds

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