Donald Trump, the Confederacy, and Honor

Over the weekend I watched Gettysburg, the 1993 Civil War epic film about the Battle of Gettysburg.  It's one of my most favorite historical films, although at more than four hours long it's really not one I can afford enough time to watch often.  But for some reason or another I felt led to see it again.

Maybe I sensed that I was needing to watch it anew.  That the time was coming soon to bring it up in conversation.  That opportunity comes tonight, after reading how President Donald Trump is restoring the name of seven military bases back to their original names that honored Confederate officers from the Civil War.  The bases had been re-named by the Biden regime to be more "neutral" or "politically correct".  The venerated Fort Bragg became the vacuous-sounding "Fort Liberty", f'rinstance.

Now, to be accurate about it, the Trump Administration is not directly restoring the original Confederate namesakes.  Fort Bragg was originally named after General Braxton Bragg.  Fort Bragg 2.0 gets its monicker from Army Pfc. Ronald Bragg, who earned a Silver Star for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge.  It's a clever way to re-brand the forts to their first identities.  And I think it's a magnificent end-run around a leftist ideology that cares not for the things that matter, like history and heritage.

And honor.

Something that has struck me every time I've watched Gettysburg, which was based on Michael Shaara's richly-researched 1974 novel The Killer Angels.  It's how the men of the Union and the Confederacy respected each other.  That, despite how they were on opposing sides of a bitter conflict.  The Civil War was ultimately founded in the few errors made by the Constitutional Convention: namely the issue of slavery.  That manifested itself in time into the issue of states versus federal government, but I greatly digress...

The Civil War was going to happen.  It's a wonder it didn't break out thirty years earlier during the Nullification Crisis.  But there is not a doubt in my mind that conflict would break out eventually.

But that isn't what the men, and women, on either sides of the fighting wanted.  They each wanted the right thing to be done.  Unfortunately it took a violent thrashing-out to decide who would determine that.  It was an unenviable situation that truly pitted brother against brother, literally and figuratively.

Back to Gettysburg, the film and what it depicts.  The officers of each side, and on down to the basic soldiers, don't necessarily hate each other.  They didn't in real life either.  As I said, they respected each other.  How could they not? They had too much nobility.  They had too much honor.

If those men could honor each other, I don't see how I can't honor them all, either.

I've heard the screeds: "they were a foreign country fighting America!"  "They were traitors!"  "They were the losers and we don't pay tribute to losers!"  Ad nauseam.

Those things are said by people who have no concept whatsoever of honor.  They couldn't care less what honor means.  They barely ever use the word at all.  "Honor" is a thing almost dying.  It seems more fitted for an earlier time, somewhen that doesn't factor in to a world of thoughtless replies and cruel memes.

The men and women of the Confederacy and Union alike, they didn't ask to be drawn into war against one another.  They were doing the best that they could with the hand that was dealt them.  It was their lot to participate in the very worst of family disagreements.  And the men of the Confederacy loved their countrymen no less than the Union loved theirs.

They were admirable, every one of them (okay, except for those like the ones in charge of the prison at Andersonville).  They played the parts given them.  And after the war, they reconciled.  They embraced again.  Decades later at the reunion at Gettysburg battlefield, the survivors of Pickett's charge went up the ridge to meet the Union defenders, only this time they met and shook hands and hugged one another.

I really can't see that kind of thing possible among people today.  The people of today like bitterness.  They thrive on hate.  They despise all vestige of honor.

The people who tore down the Confederate monuments in recent years are little more than thoughtless animals of base instinct.  They have no notion of respect for those who came before us in generations past.   How could they?  Honor is an alien notion to them.

I have no problem whatsoever with a fort being named for a Confederate officer.  Or having a Confederate statue erected.  Or something like a school named after Robert E. Lee, arguably the most beloved general in America's long and illustrious history.  There can be monuments for North and South alike.  If the United States federal government came to reward pensions to veterans of both sides, we can still abide by that.

Union and Confederate.  Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.  The blue and the gray.  They both fought with honor.  And we can honor them both.

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It's the fortieth anniversary of The Goonies!

The perfect movie about young adventure.  Released on June 7th, 1985.

My family saw it in the theater about a week later, at the long-gone Janus Theater in Greensboro.  Watching it made me wish, not for the first time, that there were other kids living closer by, instead of us being out in the country.  It would have been fun to have others my age nearby to have adventures with.  The best we could do was have friends from school over on weekends, when we could use our imagination and make our family's farm into something more than it really was.

Mikey, Mouth, Chunk, Data, Brandon, Andy, Stef, and Sloth... you are just as "Good Enough" today as you were four full decades ago.

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Just hitting the Intertubes: Trailers for Superman and second season of Fallout!

A couple of things went online today that I've watch a few times.  I've got a good feeling about both of these.

First, it's the first trailer for the second season of Amazon's  Fallout series.  As a die-hard fan of the Fallout games I absolutely loved the first season.  They completely nailed the look and feel of the franchise.  It was an astounding surprise that throughly delighted me.  Season two debuts in December, which may be a busy month for streaming if the final volume of Stranger Things comes out then also (as many are speculating).

So here's the trailer for Fallout season two:

And then there's this: the new (and probably final) trailer for Superman.  This is a project that has gotten me increasingly intrigued with each new spot that's been released.  I think David Corenswet is going to do much as the great Christopher Reeve did in the role: making Superman and Clark Kent two entirely separate personas in the eyes of the world.  Reeve's portrayal is the platinum standard of that and Corenswet seems poised to tap into that also.

More than that though, I can't help but believe that this is going to be a movie we need right now.  The idea of Superman being good and upright and moral in a world that has grown cold and jaded and cruel, like ours has become... there is something uplifting about that.  It seems that there are few absolutes on this earth anymore.  A Superman who can inspire us to be our best should be one of them.

I could say a lot more about that, but anyhoo here's the trailer:

Superman flies into theaters on July 11.

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May the Fourth be with you!

The past several years have seen my love for the Star Wars saga take some brutal hits, but my love for the original film will forever endure.

Over the decades I've gotten to meet a lot of people from this movie.  Maybe too many than can be readily counted.  For some reason the ones who most come to mind are Peter Mayhew who played Chewbacca, and Paul Blake who was Greedo.  A week and a half before 9/11 I had a VERY wild barbecue ribs dinner with Blake.  Quite an interesting chap.  I asked him about what he thought regarding the changes that George Lucas had made to A New Hope with the 1997 "Special Edition", particularly making it so that Greedo opened fire first on Han Solo.  Blake's response was awesome: "I think it's absolutely BOLLOCKS what George did to Greedo!  Why did he do that?!?  Han was perfectly right to shoot Greedo first.  I was holding a gun on him after all.  I just can't understand why George did that!" 

Well, however it is that you choose to celebrate the occasion, May the Fourth be with you :-) 

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The first trailer for Tron: Ares just dropped

 Looks like we're  about to get a whole new meaning for  "going off the grid"...

Tron is one of the more delightful films from my childhood and I really liked Tron: Legacy when it came out in 2010.  Tron: Ares looks like it's going hardcore for the next iteration of the franchise's evolution: the digital world entering the real one.  Well, Flynn did tell his son in Legacy that the two realms are more connected than we realized.  And Clu believed he could invade our reality.  So that seed has already been sowed.

Maybe if Disney commits to a solid film without a "woke" agenda - like its Snow White currently bombing bigtime - I might see this.

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In memory of Gene Hackman

The sad news came out this morning that Gene Hackman and his wife were found dead in their home in New Mexico.  An investigation as to what happened is underway.

My first exposure to Hackman was his portrayal of Lex Luthor in 1978's Superman: The Movie.  I've seen most of his films.  My favorite film of his was the 1992 western Unforgiven: he played the evil sheriff "Little Bill" Daggett and it earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

A few years ago I watched The French Connection - the winner of the 1972 Academy Award for Best Picture among many other prizes - for the first time.  All I knew about it going in was that it starred Hackman and that it was about drug smuggling.  If anybody had told me beforehand that I was going to be screaming my lungs out while watching it, I would not have believed it.  But that is indeed what happened.  The scene where Hackman's Popeye Doyle (which snagged him his first Oscar win) commandeers a car and goes off in pursuit of a train is one of the most terrifying spectacles committed to film that I've ever beheld.  It's just CRAZY.  It might be the best chase scene in the history of American cinematography.

So I thought that to honor the memory of Gene Hackman, I would share that scene.  A fine actor at his very finest.

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Movies I've Never Seen finally returns with EVENT HORIZON!

Almost exactly ten years ago I launched a new series on The Knight Shift: Movies I've Never Seen.  It's just what it suggests.  I would watch a movie that until now I've not beheld before and write about it.  It would be an attempt to fill in the many gaps that exist in my personal motion picture database.  It would be contributing to the cultural dialogue.  And it would be a lot of fun.

Well, that new series until now has had one... and only one... entry: my viewing of The Big Lebowski.  And then like with so many other things at the time the wind was just lacking in my sails.  It was a few months after Dad passed and I was still reeling from that.  I was also trying to maintain some income as a freelance technical writer.  And failing miserably at writing my book (which was only completed in the past two and a half months).  Writing about movies that until now had escaped notice enough to finally view them was something I very much wanted to make a regular feature out of.

Maybe things have gotten better enough that I can commit some time toward that.  It's rare that I find myself enjoying a new movie anymore.  Perhaps doing this will be a good thing for me in other ways.

So in rededication of Movies I've Never Seen, here is the the second film in the series.  A motion picture that I have heard various things about over the past few decades...

Event Horizon (1997)

Fifty years into the future, the rescue ship Lewis and Clark is dispatched from Earth to investigate the sudden reappearance of the Event Horizon.  The massive starship vanished seven years earlier after embarking on humanity's first attempt to venture out beyond the confines of the solar system.  Now it has been discovered, in orbit around the planet Neptune.

Captain Miller (Laurence Fishburne) and his crew have escorted Dr. William Weir (Sam Neill) - the engineer who created the Event Horizon - to the wayward vessel.  They are tasked with finding out what happened to the ship and its personnel.  Weir explains to his colleagues that the Event Horizon was an experimental ship designed around a gravity drive that would fold spacetime between two distant points: where a normal spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to reach neighboring Proxima Centauri, the same voyage with such an engine would be able to be accomplished in a matter of days.

But things went wrong on the Event Horizon.  The people who made it envisioned the starting point and the end point but unfortunately they didn't seem to consider what was between the two.  Where the craft was going to be traveling through.  And that's where the ship went to and is now back from and as the crew of the Lewis and Clark come to discover, the Event Horizon didn't return alone.

This movie is all over the place.  I can understand why it has become a cult classic, for the most part.  But it's too disjointed for me to really say that I love it.  I like the general premise of Event Horizon the film: that a spacecraft has gone to nowhere less than Hell itself.  But there was a lot missing in the execution that keeps it from being a true horror classic on par with The Thing and Alien.  I did like the performances by Fishburne (before his iconic role in The Matrix and there is a little bit of Morpheus peaking out from his portrayal of Captain Miller) and Neill, still on a crest following Jurassic Park.  The film also stars Sean Pertwee, who has become an actor I appreciate.

The real star of Event Horizon however is the titular spaceship.  It evokes some reminiscing about the U.S.S. Cygnus, the gigantic vessel from 1979's The Black Hole. Each of these ships is in a subgenre all its own: the "haunted house in outer space".  When done right it could be amazing.  Unfortunately I can't think of any examples where any film has stuck the landing on that particular milieu.  But design-wise the Event Horizon is certainly imposing enough of a superstructure to darken the thoughts of any who would dare trespass aboard her deck plates.

Now a few hours after having watched it, I find myself thinking that Event Horizon is a high-concept film that misses the mark.  I won't say that I can't recommend it however.  It's worth catching at least once, and who knows: it may interest others enough that they would want it in their own personal library of movies (please Lord let physical media last a long loooong time still, I am not ready to have everything streamed from a remote server).  Director Paul S.W. Anderson swung for the fences with this movie, and it shows.  And that's also admirable.  This plot and execution needs a bit more finesse though.  Maybe in another few years the time will be ripe for a remake, because it's certainly a notion worth visiting anew.

I believe that every film should be judged by the standards of the time it was released in, as much as anything else.  As it is, 1997's Event Horizon is a model example of Nineties sci-fi filmmaking, and there is some respect to be had in that.  So for anyone who considers himself or herself a scholar of that era, I will heartily suggest Event Horizon as something to complement your broader knowledge of that decade's culture.

One last thing: I had heard, several times in fact, that Event Horizon could serve as a distant-era prequel to the Warhammer 40,000 franchise.  Having finally seen this movie, I can say that I absolutely understand why!  Maybe Anderson needs to be extended an invitation to direct something from the upcoming Warhammer 40K projects in production at Amazon.  If that happens, I definitely believe he could nail it.

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Last night I finally watched A Christmas Story Christmas

My family and I saw A Christmas Story on its opening day in 1983, and I saw it again a few weeks later with my Cub Scout pack.  Every holiday season I wind up watching it at least once or twice.  And I'll forever treasure the Red Ryder air rifle that Dad gave me for my tenth birthday.  This movie is as near and dear to me as this sort of thing is likely to be.

When it was announced that there was a sequel coming and that most of the original cast was returning, my curiosity was aroused.  What would it be like to see grown-up Ralphie with a family of his own?  I was looking forward to finding out.  A Christmas Story Christmas was released two years ago and for various reasons I haven't been able to watch it during the holiday season, when it's meant to be seen.  But last night some stars aligned and I decided it was time to see the Parker family is up now.

I'm glad that I did, because A Christmas Story Christmas turned out to be something that I needed right at this moment.  I saw a lot of myself in the now 43-year old Ralphie (once again inimitable portrayed by Peter Billingsley).  The situation he is in at the start of the movie is much my own at the moment.  And then, it is now just over ten years since Dad - my own "Old Man" - passed away, and Christmas hasn't been the same without him.  It's been said that you don't know how much you appreciate someone until they're gone.  There have now been eleven Christmases without my father and there hasn't been one that I didn't feel his absence.

So seeing this movie last night very much resonated with me.  It made me thankful, for the happy times which I have had in my life, however much fewer those seem to have been in recent years.  It gave me a little bit of hope, that maybe my pursuit of my dreams hasn't been a vain thing after all.  It made me grateful for the loved ones I still have in my extended family: people who are as dear to me as anyone could possibly be.

I could say more, but I guess what I'm trying to convey if nothing else, is check out A Christmas Story Christmas if you haven't already.  It may delight you as unexpectedly as it did me.  A very worthy follow-up to a beloved holiday classic.

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Just saw Wicked aaaaaand...

I LOVED IT!!

Okay, it's the new movie adaptation that came out just before Thanksgiving.  I still haven't seen the original musical yet but now I want to remedy that.

Today is Christmas Day.  Two of my dearest friends live the next town over and they didn't want me to spend the holiday alone without us doing something fun together.  They picked me up and after a bit of lunch at Waffle House (maybe the only restaurant open on the holiday) we proceeded on to the theater nearby for the 2:45 show.

I knew nothing about Wicked other than it's based on The Wizard of Oz and the musical is composed by Stephen Schwartz (who also created my all time favorite musical Children of Eden).  I figured out early on though that it's about the Wicked Witch of the West, the main antagonist of the books.  But that's pretty much it.

Well, talk about subverting expectations!

Wicked was unlike anything I've seen in a film.  I genuinely was not prepared for either the sheer cinematic spectacle or the twists and turns that the story took.  And after the movie one of my friends told me that almost everything in the movie, the effects and the sets and whatnot, are practical: not computer-generated at all.  Which absolutely astounded me to be told that.

I could say so much else about this movie.  But if you haven't seen it yet, my advice is to go in and see it cold.  So I'm not going to say much more than what I've already told you.  I must note though: the casting of the Wizard is perfect.  So looking forward to seeing Part Two!

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It's the first trailer for Superman!

And, ummm... little on the fence about this.  I think David Corenswet is definitely tapping into the Superman mystique.  When I see him as Superman and then as Clark Kent it really is like looking at two different people, which is what Christopher Reeve - the gold standard for the character - pulled off magnificently.

I'm wondering if this trailer packs in too much for a teaser.  This is our first time looking at James Gunn's Superman, due out this coming July 11.  It doesn't give us as much sense of wonder about Superman himself as I was anticipating.  But, Krypto is awesome!  Who doesn't love dogs? :-)

Anyhoo, here is the teaser, which dropped a little while ago.  See for yourself and feel free to leave a comment.

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A Christmas Story: The movie about who we were, and could still be again

I have a lot of fond recollections stemming from A Christmas Story, that 1983 film about nine-year-old Ralphie Parker (delightfully played by Peter Billingsley) and his ever-hapless quest to obtain a Red Ryder air rifle.  I was in fourth grade when this movie came out and we - Mom and Dad, my sister, and my best friend Chad and I - saw it on its opening day, at the movie theater at the old Carolina Circle Mall in Greensboro.  A few weeks later our Cub Scout troop made an outing one Saturday and saw it, so A Christmas Story is the first movie that I saw more than once during its theatrical run.

Then a few months later, in the weeks leading up to my tenth birthday, Dad started hinting that he had a special present for me.  He wouldn't tell me anything about it.  Mom did tell me that he had told her and that she had thought it was going to be a real treat.  Well, we had my birthday party at Roll-a-Bout skating rink in Eden, and almost my entire class came.  The last present to unwrap was from Dad, and my anticipation by then had intensified dramatically.  I took the wrapping off at one end and saw the word "Daisy" and knew instantly what it was.

It was indeed an official A Christmas Story edition Red Ryder air rifle.  With a compass in the stock and that thing that tells time.  And when my classmates saw it they all started singing "You'll shoot your eye out!  You'll shoot your eye out!"

What a beautiful time that was, for all of us.

I still have that Red Ryder rifle, too.  More than forty years after Dad gave it to me.  It's in excellent physical condition and a few years ago I got off a few shots from it.  It works perfectly.  It, along with the telescope that I got for Christmas in 1982, are very precious artifacts from my childhood, and I've kept them in great working order all this time.

I don't yet own a "major award" but it's safe to say that my life, especially at this time of year, has been touched by this movie.  In some profound ways and others, more subtle.  And with growing older has come ever-fresh appreciation for A Christmas Story.  And maybe it's because I'm a life-long student of history...

This is truly a special film and that it is set in 1940 makes it even poignant.  1940 was the last Christmas that America got to have before the attack on Pearl Harbor.  That event marked the United States' final and irrevocable entry into world affairs.  After that attack, nothing was the same anymore.  We became a very different people.  We had to.  There was no choice but to "grow up" and accept that we had a role to play in the matters of mankind.

A Christmas Story is not just a tale about one family.  It's about who we all were as the greater American family.  A Christmas Story depicts one boy's playful plight in the final days of American innocence.  There would be no Christmas like that again, ever.  That was the last Christmas that a kid like Randy could get a toy such as a metal zeppelin, symbol of German industry that it had become.

I've wondered sometimes what happened to the characters of A Christmas Story the next Christmas, as people from sea to shining sea prepared to go to war full-bore.  What a completely different holiday it would have been for each of them.  The Parkers and their neighbors emerged from the Great Depression seemingly none the worse for wear.  How would their holiday be with the gloom of global conflict hanging over their house on Cleveland Street?

That last shot of Ralphie holding his beloved Red Ryder air rifle, when he says that it was the best Christmas present he ever got... he's not kidding.  When he tells us that, he's really saying to us that this was the final time he got to have Christmas with childlike wonder and that his BB gun is a precious relic of that time in his life.  I haven't seen the recent sequel but it wouldn't surprise me if Ralphie kept his Red Ryder after all these years, as a sacred trophy of his childhood.

A Christmas Story is a movie about who we were at our very best, before the larger world intruded upon our relative peace and calm.  It is a memorial to a bygone era of American society that there has been no going back to.  But I like to think that there is still a bit of that spirit at work amongst us.  Movies like A Christmas Story play a part in keeping the flame going.  And it is for that reason which I believe makes A Christmas Story a true classic film.

In the end, A Christmas Story is about something wonderful we once had, and have lost along the way.  But I like to think that somehow, we might still have it again.

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Back from seeing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever movie

"HEY!  UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!!!"

I needed to see this movie right now. 

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a story near and dear to my heart.  I played the head firefighter in two productions of the stage play for Theatre Guild of Rockingham County.  That was years ago and I still  have very fond memories of  those shows.  So I was curious about how this new adaptation, directed by Dallas Jenkins, would be.

This new film (there was a television movie back in the early Eighties, so this is the second time that The Best Christmas Pageant Ever has been formatted for the screen) pretty much follows the plot of the original novel.  The Herdmans, AKA "The worst kids in the history of the world" are the juvenile blight upon the whole town.  But a series of events leads to them not only coming to church one Sunday morning, but also demanding to be in the annual Christmas pageant.  The uppity church folks want nothing to do with the Herdmans.  But as the story progresses we find that the Herdmans maybe "get" the Christmas story better than some ever do.  This is a story that is both heartfelt and hilarious.  A perfect holiday tale out of the Seventies.

I thought the movie was great, although maybe a bit slow-going at first.  I was expecting more "nasty" from the Herdman kids, but what is shown in the movie is pretty much in keeping with their depiction in Barbara Robinson's book.  This is a story more than fifty years old and what seems tame today was no doubt quite shocking then.  So my expectations were biased, through the lens of modern sensibilities (if only we could go back to that more innocent America).  It's a well-cast film, especially the child actors.

I saw it with a pretty large audience for a holiday movie that's not necessarily a "tent-pole" spectacle.  Obviously most of the people at the theater today were there to see Wicked (a film I'm hearing only crazy good about) but in the showing I caught there was still a substantial crowd.  I did notice that I was the only single person, unaccompanied by anyone else, at the showing.  But that's okay.  This story is a part of my life and I was going to be there for that sake.

Is The Best Christmas Pageant Ever on the level of a true holiday classic film?  I'll say it has potential for that.  This is the kind of Christmas movie that there isn't made much of anymore.  You know, films like A Christmas Story, and even National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.  I can see this movie becoming something families enjoy together every year about this time.  Hey, it took a long time for A Christmas Story to come around to the level of holiday tradition, too.  I think this movie can make that list, too.

Anyhoo, after all the craziness my life has had lately, my brain very much needed something sweet and endearing and comical to distract itself with.  And that is just what The Best Christmas Pageant Ever delivered.  I'll give it three stars out of five.

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Public domain is destroying my childhood (Look at what they've done to Popeye!)

In the past couple of years some beloved characters have begun entering public domain.  And that's led to them being abused by people with less than noble intent.  The worst example probably being the recent film Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, in which Pooh becomes a feral bear hellbent on revenge for Christopher Robin abandoning him.  It's a horrible thing to do to such a revered children's character and of course it found an audience, probably of people who never cared to even watch the Disney movie much less read the original book.

But what "they" have done to Popeye has got to be worse than that.

Here is the trailer for Popeye the Slayer Man:

This is actually one of two movies coming up featuring a murderous Popeye.  The other is Shiver Me Timbers and it looks more horrible than this one.

I'm sure the people who do this think they're being "cute" but they're really not.  It's almost pitiful: They could be using their talents and their tools to make something much more original and endearing to a larger audience.  And instead they are giving us this... crap.

This isn't something being done in tribute to a beloved franchise.  It's not like this is a "fan film".  A true fan film is done out of care and devotion and appreciation.  Star Wars has had tons of fan-produced movies, some of them even full-length features.  Nobody who has made a serious fan film ever expected to actually make money for their effort.  It's something you do because you have a neat idea that you want to express your love of that particular setting and its characters with.  And because making movies can be a fun experience for everyone involved.  There is a kind of child-like innocence that happens when making a sincere fan film.  We certainly had that vibe when my friends and I made Forcery years ago.

Popeye the Slayer Man is not any of that at all.  It's a cheap cash grab making a mockery of the source material.  There is nothing whatsoever "funny" or "horror"-filled about its premise.  Just like the other movies being derived from characters now lapsing into public domain.

I certainly won't be seeing this.  Any more than I saw the Pooh "film".  And I sincerely hope that nobody involved in this dreck ever gets taken seriously by the entertainment industry.

Betty Boop enters public domain next year.  God only knows what some sick minds out there plan to do to her.

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"One, two, Freddy's coming for you..."

 Happy fortieth anniversary to Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street.

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Fortieth anniversary of The Terminator

It was forty years ago today, October 26th 1984, that James Cameron's science-fiction thriller (I'd also consider it horror) The Terminator was released.

Cameron was sick with food poisoning in Rome.  While convulsing in agony he had a fevered dream of a robot assassin with glowing red eyes hunting him down.  And that was the genesis of the Terminator.

This is a movie that has aged very well.  Including the design of the Terminator and the then-relatively distant future of the SkyNet-dominated 2029.  Ask a conceptual artist on a modern film to create an endoskeleton for a cyborg killing machine and it would be difficult not to envision something along the lines of the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Hunter-Killer.

I first saw The Terminator in 1986.  My best friend Chad had seen it on cable TV and was really raving about how good it was.  So I was able to rent it not long after.  I thought it was amazing.  It was definitely nightmare fuel for a twelve-year-old.  Especially that shot of the metal skeleton rising out of the wreckage to continue chasing down Sarah Connor.  I was like "Can't ANYTHING stop this guy?!?"

I've got this movie on DVD.  It's been awhile since I've seen it though.  Think I'll pop it in tonight.

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Well, it is a fantasy movie after all...

This is one of my favorite scenes in motion picture history.  From the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian.  Conan (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has just freed Subotai (Gerry Lopez) from certain death.  Here we see them having dinner together.

I'll let the scene speak for itself.

It's two fast friends, enjoying a meal in each other's company.  And the conversation turns to religion.

There is no bitterness or anger.  Not an iota of hatred between the two men.  They are simply discussing their respective faiths: Subotai's in the Four Winds, and Conan's belief in Crom.

I like to think that Conan and Subotai each give the other something to think about.  Conan certainly seems impressed by the point Subotai is making about "the everlasting sky".

Conan the Barbarian is a fantasy movie.  It is very tragic that people in real life can not speak to one another about their differing beliefs without descending into scorn and hatred.  We don't think anymore.  We only react.

I don't believe that either this candidate or that one is bringing about division among the people.  The people seem to enjoy the division.  It gives them hatred of others.  It justifies their desire to destroy people who don't believe as they do.  They like to hate.  They enjoy it when someone else is hurting.

"The other candidate" is merely the rationale that they use to justify their bitterness.  Hate is a personal choice on the part of the individual.  I believe that of the candidates for President there is only one who has expressed the desire and ability to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, especially in regard to the Bill of Rights.  The other candidate does not and indeed has long expressed contempt and disdain for the Constitution.  But I am not going to "hate" that candidate for it.  I choose to not cast a vote for that candidate, and to support the candidate who I have many reasons to trust will honor the Constitution (especially in matters such as the border issue).

But I'm not going to get sucked into unwise wrath toward anyone about it.

Conan and Subotai.  Sitting together eating Lord knows what, talking about their theologies.  And appreciating each other.

Like I said, one of my favorite scenes in a movie.  So much that can be taken from watching it.

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LEGO Jaws set is officially the coolest thing I've seen all summer

Just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the movie Jaws comes the Official Jaws LEGO Set!

Click on the pics to enlargen (you're gonna need a bigger browser):

 

At a hundred and fifty bucks this is actually a pretty good deal for a LEGO set this large.

Click on over to GeekTyrant for more photos of this amazing set!

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Happy 80th Birthday George Lucas!

 

It was on May 14th, 1944 that a little boy was born in Modesto, California.  Growing up he was a restless young man, with no clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life.  He finally settled on being a race car driver.  But a near-fatal car crash a few days before graduating high school put a damper on that idea.

Our hero eventually decided he wanted to go to college.  He enrolled in a junior college and studied everything from anthropology to sociology to literature.  While there he began experimenting with filmmaking.  He then ended up at University of Southern California, choosing to continue his studies in cinematography.  And he discovered that he enjoyed it, a lot.  A series of student films followed, and many of them gained notice for their groundbreaking and breathtaking visuals.

The young lad graduated from college and tried to enlist in the Air Force.  Unfortunately his many speeding tickets, of all things, disqualified him.  He was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War but was again disqualified from service, for medical reasons.

He then returned to University of Southern California as a graduate student.  After producing the short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB he came under the wing of Francis Ford Coppola.  It wasn't long after that when the young man was given the opportunity to make a full-length adaptation of his film, and in 1971 came the release of THX 1138.

It was not a box office success.

Undaunted, our hero decided he wanted to make a different film.  One drawing from his experiences coming of age in Modesto.  That became the genesis of 1973's American Graffiti: a film that has become as classic as any.

Then, around 1974, our young hero sat down with a pad of paper and began writing the first draft of what he roughly titled "The Star Wars".

And the rest, is history.

On this very special day, The Knight Shift and its eclectic proprietor wishes a Very Happy 80th Birthday to George Walton Lucas Jr.  A man who perhaps more than most in our lifetime has impacted the world in so many positive ways than can ever be counted.

And I like to think that he still isn't finished with his craft.

Someday, I hope George Lucas once again shows us something we haven't seen before.

Before I close out this post, I want to share one of my favorite photos of Lucas.  It's from the filming of American Graffiti.  Here is Lucas, sitting on the floor beneath the countertop at Mel's Drive-In, directing Ron Howard:

I just love the pose Lucas is in.  That, my friends, is directing with dedication.

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We entered The Matrix a quarter century ago this week

I had seen the commercial that ran during the Super Bowl.  While browsing the magazines at Barnes & Noble I flipped through the pages of Starlog and ogled the photos, which had to be the most abrupt juxtaposition of images from a single movie I had ever beheld (martial arts, Giger-ish metal, what?).  But none of it made any sense.

Then about a month after The Matrix came out, I was having our weekly discipleship meeting with a friend.  And he was raving about seeing it the night before.  Brent tried his darndest to explain what he had seen, but it all went way over my head.  Something about Nebuchadnezzar and agents and red pills and... he went on.  I tried to reconcile it with everything else I had overheard others saying about The Matrix.  And there were quite a few who were talking about it.

Suddenly I felt like there was some arcane secret that I hadn't been let in on.  And I realized that here was something that I just had to understand.  To see for myself.

That came on Sunday night, two days after our discipleship time.  Brent wanted to meet up at the now-closed West End Cinema in Burlington.  We got there for the 9 o'clock show.  And for the next two hours my senses were assaulted by the most jarring spectacle that I could recall seeing on the big screen in quite a long time.  Without warning any of the buildup I'd had for Star Wars Episode I was a fast receding dot on the horizon.

I had seen The Matrix.  And nothing from the realm of filmmaking would be the same again.  I drove home that night, trying to digest it all.  But it was too much to take in.  I think it was for a lot of people.  My best friend from college saw The Matrix five or six times during its first run and made it the basis of a paper he turned in for a class.

Maybe I should have watched it a bit more too, instead of going to the theater to see The Phantom Menace nine times that summer.

The Matrix is arguably, and quite much so, the most influential movie of the past quarter century (geez, just sayin' it like that makes it seem like a lifetime ago... which I guess it is).  Did the word "unplugged" carry as much potency as it did before March 31st, 1999?  To say nothing of how the term "blue pill" has entered into the modern vernacular as derogatory slang.  And of course there were the action sequences: imitated but never duplicated.

I wound up buying a VHS copy of the movie.  The summer of 2000 found me working as a reporter in Asheville, North Carolina.  And then I was the one trying to explain The Matrix, this time to my editor.  I let him borrow my copy over the weekend.  He came into the office on Monday morning raving about how The Matrix was so much like what the mission of our weekly magazine was all about.  He had a light in his eyes, that I hadn't noticed before.  The Matrix became the topic of many a discussion we had in the weeks and months after that.  And come to think of it, I can't think of any other movie that has ever precipitated nearly as much conversation and reflection and argument as that film did.

I hadn't planned on getting a DVD player just yet, but my sister received one for Christmas and she won me over with its image clarity.  So the day after the holiday I splurged on a player too.  The very first DVDs that I bought were Blazing Saddles and The Matrix.  I've still got them, and the other night I put in The Matrix.  The quality of that standard DVD is still so sharp that the movie looks almost as good as would the Blu-ray or 4K editions.

I won't say that I became a fan of the Matrix saga as much as I did Star Wars (though I'm nowhere near as much into that as I used to be, no thanks to Disney's bungling).  And I'm kind of past the point where any franchise will probably grab me anymore.  But the world of the Matrix grasped hold hard and fast that spring night in 1999, and it hasn't let go.  I'll even vicariously defend the sequels except for The Matrix Resurrections because I haven't seen that one yet.  I think the biggest reason that The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions got panned is because they didn't end the trilogy as many if not most people wanted it to.  They wanted to see the machines completely destroyed, and that would have been wrong.  Neo came to understand that humans and machines shared too much in common than to see one side or the other obliterated.  The trilogy ended as well as is it could have: with the humans wanting out of the Matrix free to leave, and hopefully humanity and machines in a place where they can cooperate with each other.  It wasn't a perfect conclusion for all involved but it was the start of something hopefully better for the two factions. To me, that was a great ending to the saga.

So much else I could say about this movie.  But I would be remiss if I did not touch on a final thought:

Have we truly taken the Red Pill?  Or are we still plugged in, afraid to leave comfort and security?

As Neo said at the end of the film, "Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

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Happy 50th Birthday to Blazing Saddles!

It was on this date in 1974 that filmmaker Mel Brooks released his western spoof upon an unsuspecting world.  And comedy was never the same again...

It's probably the number-one movie that has been said "it could never be made today."  Which makes it all the more special.  Blazing Saddles is unadulterated political incorrectness as only Brooks and his crew could have made it.

How much does this movie mean to me?  I have owned a copy of it on every home media format going back to VHS.  It was the very first DVD that I bought.  Later on I bought it on Blu-ray and today I keep it loaded on my iPad Pro (along with the complete Star Wars saga, The Thing, and Airplane! among others).

There are two movies that I distinctly remember from early childhood and each of them was run on CBS (the network our family's television was almost always tuned to) every year: The Wizard of Oz and Blazing Saddles.  Try finding a broadcast network that would show it today though!  Even HBO Max is now carrying a "trigger warning" when you watch Blazing Saddles on it.

Well, so much that could be said about this film.  I think I'll celebrate today by watching it again for the hunnerd zillionth time.

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