as featured in Desert Exposure Magazine
RaisingDad
by Jim and Henry Duchene
Beautiful Nonsense
There are some classic movies I'll watch because I just don't like them.
Why do I torture myself this way? Because I'm trying to understand what it is I don’t get. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example. Whenever it comes on TCM, I'll watch it.
"What are those monkeys doing?" my five-year-old granddaughter asked the last time I saw it, referring to the first part of the film which takes place at the dawn of man. My father, who was watching with me, looked to see what I was going to say.
"I... don't know," I admitted.
"They're ugly," she noted. A little later into the movie, she asked, “What’s that black thing?” Again, I… didn’t know.
I looked over to my father.
He was asleep.
Yeah, the movie does that to me, too.
I understand on a technical level what an amazing achievement it is, especially for its time, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is such a slooow movie to slog through, even by old movie standards. Maybe my mistake is that I read the novel by Arthur C. Clark first.
Loved the book.
The movie?
Not so much.
When the psychedelic finale came on, it caught my granddaughter’s eye, and she crawled into my lap to watch it with me. When it ended, she said, “Wow! I’ve never seen that before.”
My father?
Still asleep.
A movie he did stay awake for was Citizen Kane, another classic I don’t care for. My granddaughter either.
“Why’s the movie gray?” she wanted to know. She didn’t bother hanging around to see if there would be a psychedelic conclusion.
“You know,” my father told me, “William Randolf Hearst always thought this movie was about him. Orson Welles denied it, but Hearst ruined his career anyway.”
“Really, pop?”
“Yeah. And he once killed a man.”
“Who?”
“Hearst. He was trying to shoot Charlie Chaplin because he thought Chaplin was having an affair with his girlfriend, but he ended up shooting someone else because they were on a yacht and drunk. Mainly drunk. If Orson Welles had put that in his movie, Hearst would have gone out of his way to deny the movie was about him.”
Who knew my father was such a film scholar?
“Did he get away with it?” I asked, not knowing much about Hearst, other than my brother and I had once hiked up the California coast from his house in San Clemente to Hearst’s castle.
“He was rich,” my father sniffed. “What do you think?”
Again, Citizen Kane is a visionary film of technical brilliance.
So why don’t I like it?
On the other hand, I love Casablanca. A film that, judging by the number of writers it had, should have been terrible. Heck, I even like Elmo Lincoln, the original Tarzan of the silent era. I think it comes down to this: Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick are amazing filmmakers, but boring storytellers. Stanley Kubrick took the only novel that ever scared me, Stephen King’s The Shining, and turned it into beautiful nonsense.
Doctor Strangelove?
I just don’t get it.
Peter Sellers was a comic genius and hilarious in Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther movies--The Pink Panther Strikes Again in particular--but I find him trying too hard under Kubrick’s heavy hand.
Now that I think about it, I can’t think of one Stanley Kubrick movie I’ve liked. R. Lee Ermy was great in Full Metal Jacket, but that’s about all. Reading A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess was a challenge, but watching it was impossible. Even the nudie parts. And don’t get me started on Alfred Hitchcock. Some critics consider him our greatest film director. I consider him a safer alternative to Sominex.
But don’t take my criticisms seriously, because if I were a movie executive I’d go broke. When James Cameron’s Titanic came out, I was certain it would be a flop, and not just because Kate Winslet couldn’t be bothered to make room for Leonardo DiPopsicle on that board she was floating on after the ship sank. No, my problem was at the end, when she was an old lady and died in her sleep. Heaven, as it turned out, was the Titanic with her one-night stand there waiting for her. Everybody thought that was sooo romantic, but I could only think about her poor, dead husband–the one she had children, grandchildren, and lived her life with. I couldn’t help but think of that dumb sap waiting in another part of Heaven for all eternity for a dead wife who will never show up. Anyway…
A billion dollars later, I’m eating my words.
My granddaughter’s favorite movie is Trolls World Tour, which will be almost two-years old by the time you read this.
“Watch it with me, grandpa,” she pleaded when we first bought it for her on Pay Per View or whatever it’s called. This was during the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, when all the movie theaters were closed. It cost us TWENTY dollars for her to see it as many times as she wanted in a 48-hour period. Over a hundred dollars later, we were still watching it. I couldn’t believe how happy it made her. She sang along with it. Got up and danced. Told me to be quiet when I tried to get her to clarify a particular plot point, and you know what?
It became my favorite movie.
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What do Titanic and The Sixth Sense have in common?
Icy dead people.
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@JimDuchene
