Out of the Past

While going through the family photos to select shots that needed to be incorporated into the home movies, I found this picture of my Grandpa Claude -- and my mother, when she was a toddler.

I'd never seen it before, and I think it's just smashing. It really shows Grandpa's spirit and personality -- and Mom, well she seems never to have changed in some ways. She loved toys and teddy bears to her dying day.

I can't use this shot in the home movies, because it falls well outside the time period that they cover, but you can bet I'll include it in the slideshow that I'm planning as an "extra feature" for the DVD.

I'm guessing that I scanned another hundred and fifty pictures today, and I've only just begun working on their restoration. It's kind of tedious work, and it's getting more emotional, too, because we're getting up to our earliest days at the farm in Albion.

In those days the house was bright and attractive and open. The plaster was clean and solid; it was a house meant for entertaining and my folks did a lot of that. By the End Days, the house had transformed into a deeply eccentric folly, shot through with cracks -- a funhouse, all right, but one with a distinct Gothic side, a shadow behind all the happy faces that stared out of every available space.

That world isn't covered in the Home Movies either, but somehow I feel that I must give it a nod. I'm not sure yet exactly how I'm going to end the new version of the movies, but I've been working hard all through the recut to give it the shape of a story with a beginning, middle and end. It seems to me that I have to at least indicate the shape of things to come, to at least point at the way it ended. I don't want it to be maudlin, but there needs to be some sense of the damage that time and trouble inflicts on us all.

-- Freder.

The Perfect Giant Gorilla Movie

Last night TCM ran the original Mighty Joe Young. I didn't need to watch it; have seen it many times and own the DVD. But with nine thousand channels on tap there was absolutely nothing else worth playing while my dinner defrosted, so I did take in the first few scenes, right up to the introduction of the grown-up Joe.

I think I like this better than King Kong, because it's got heart (if anything, heartless is the word to describe Kong, with its merciless treatment of man and dinosaur and ape alike) -- and a good deal of flat-out schmaltz. I like schmaltz, if it's not forced or artificial, and the thing about Joe is that it's remarkably genuine. I saw it first sometime before I reached my teens, and while it's not exclusively a kid's movie, that's the perfect age to see it for the first time. Its scary bits and melodramatic bits all prey on a child's innate fears, and at the same time the whole wish-fulfillment thing of having a giant ape for a pet is expertly calculated. Although as a boy gets older, that scrumptious Terry Moore becomes the character you'd rather have by your side.

How do I know when something is just perfect? It's embarrassing to admit this, but it makes me cry. That's why I often weep over things in movies and books that aren't at all sad. I know. It annoys me, too.

But the climactic scene where Joe rescues the little kid from the burning orphanage? It's just perfect. And it gets me every time, from the first time I ever watched it right up to now.

Thankfully, I didn't get that far last night. Don't know if I could have taken it! As it was, even the opening scenes with the little girl falling in love with Joe and bartering for him were getting to me. That little girl is just perfect. "Oh, I'm being very naughty!" But does that stop her?

We couldn't move on to the city and Robert Armstrong soon enough to please me, and watching it this time I experienced a real Coin Drop. If there are any comics fans out there, get this: isn't Robert Armstrong as Max O'Hara the obvious model for Spider-Man's J. Jonah Jameson? I mean, it's exact! The haircut, the 'stache, the moodswings, the fabrications -- it's all here! Stan Lee rather famously never created anything original in his life -- what he did was to cleverly re-combine existing things in new and interesting ways, and lend them a contemporary attitude. When he was casting around for a foil to play off of everyone's friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Max O'Hara is surely what must have come to mind!

The other remarkable thing about Joe is that he still holds up remarkably well as a special effect, even in today's CGI-saturated world. We're aware that we're looking at something real, not a digitally generated illustration. By this time, Willis O'Brien had perfected his many tricks and techniques for combining animation with live-action, and he had the added benefit of having the extraordinarily gifted young Ray Harrihausen on his team. O'Brien was a pretty good "actor," too -- he always got great emotion out of his puppets, never more so than here.

My dinner, by the way, was "Frozen Mexican Stuff." It wasn't horrible, but I could have gotten better at Buen Apetito just two minutes drive from my house. Oh, well.

-- Freder.

A Blooming Tragedy

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post with the saddest news. Terry Pratchett, British author of the Discworld novels, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's and says he will consider assisted suicide when the time comes. Presumably, when he can no longer write or work for legalizing assisted suicide in England.

Here's a link to the NPR story.

I can't say that I've read all, or even most, of his novels. The man is prolific. The one bitter little gripe that I have about him is that nobody who is that prolific has the right to be so good.

Lots of writers have attempted the comedy-fantasy, but none, to my knowledge, have brought such humanity to their work. Pratchett isn't just a genre writer -- the stories are character-driven and the humor is a full-blooded mix of satire and verbal slapstick that masks an underlying seriousness and concerns some of  the big questions of life. It's not for nothing that Death is a recurring character in Pratchett's novels; in Reaper Man (one of his best) The Powers that Be actually sack Death because he's developing a personality. Can't have that happen!

The bumbling witches and warlocks that populate his early novels aren't shallow characters. They bumble not in the form of pratfalls but because they are human.

A friend of mine is a huge fan of P. G. Wodehouse. I don't know why I was surprised to learn that she is also a big fan of Pratchett's, but it's easy to see the connection once you think about it. They share the same lightness of touch and a distinct British-ness that colors their work. Like Wodehouse, you can pick up any one of Pratchett's books, start anywhere, there's no one beginning point, all avenues into their worlds are good. But there the similarities end: where Wodehouse draws eccentricity out of the natural world, Pratchett draws humanity out of the most eccentric of fantasy worlds. More so than Wodehouse, Pratchett has something to say. If you haven't read him, you should.

I don't feel sorry or sad for Pratchett. My sense is that he is as emotionally well-equipped to face the challenges ahead of him as well as anyone. And although the prospect of Alzheimer's must be worse for a writer, who makes his living and defines himself out of his own head and personality, all the evidence indicates that Alzheimer's is harder on the family than it is on the sufferer.

I'm sad -- and angry -- for us. It's not fair. More damn tears to hold back. Pratchett might have had more than twenty years of activity and as many more books ahead of him. It's a crime. We're being robbed. Why couldn't this have happened to Nicholas Sparks or Danielle Steele, instead of Pratchett? Why does this sort of thing have to happen to people who bring good into the world?

Thank you, Mr. Pratchett. You will be missed.

-- Freder.

Robert Wise and Me

When I was in, I think, the eighth or ninth grade, I made a (very) short film. It was supposed to be a comedy, but it was really just a bad joke in more ways than one. It told the story of a Wacky Spy who steals a Top Secret document only to have it blow up in his face.

I was terribly disappointed in the end result. With no means of editing, we shot it in sequence and in one take for each shot. All the fluffs ended up in the "finished" piece. To make matters worse, I was shooting indoors with outdoor film under low lighting conditions, in the hope that this would give the finished film a yellow, faded "silent movie" look, the way it had done with one of the reels of home movies my dad had shot years earlier. Imagine my dismay when the film was developed and gaudy, bright seventies colors flooded the screen.

I didn't even get the title cards framed properly. They were dumb and unfunny enough to start with, but in the "finished" film you couldn't even read them. My venture into comedy film-making was an embarrassment.

I can only suppose that Robert Wise felt a bit that way about his venture into Star Trek movie-making. Star Trek: The Motion Picture was made under appalling conditions, with a script that was never finished and a schedule so tight that the movie went out essentially uncompleted. It never had a proper post production, no time for a sound mix or foley work, so the bridge of the Enterprise was dead silent. Effects shots were still arriving the day before the premiere and they were not what Wise wanted, but he just had to cut them in as-is. The next day he hand-delivered the "finished" film to the premiere. The print was still wet!

So in 2001 he jumped at the chance to do a "Director's Cut" that was far more elaborate than these things usually are. With a rule in place that his crew not do anything that wasn't possible in 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was completely rebuilt from the ground up. A new edit restored scenes that got lost in the rush of the original release, and removed dead weight; new effects shots were created, the picture was finally given a proper sound mix. Wise got the chance to complete his unfinished movie.

With the result that it is no longer the worst movie in the series. In fact, it's jumped both The Final Frontier and The Search for Spock to land in the number three position (I'm only counting the films that feature the original cast). Granted, that's not saying much, as both of those other movies are dismal. But Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with all of its story flaws still intact, now at least possesses a professionalism and polish that makes it worth sitting through.

And now I'm getting the same chance that Robert Wise got! Thanks to Apple's iMovie software, my stupid little one-joke "comedy" is getting the post-production that it so desperately needed.

The first thing I did was strip the color out. What an improvement! There's a reason why the great comedies (and even some bad ones like mine) are all in black & white: color distracts and overwhelms. In this case, the black and white also highlights the scratches and age of the film, which I like. And it's now (slightly) less obvious that I shot this in my bedroom and the upstairs hall of our house!

Next the flubs came out. At one point I walk into a wall, and then spoil the take by grinning. At another point I freeze in my tracks and tell the cameraman (my dad) to "Cut." You get the idea. A few frames of film shaved, a cross-dissolve added here, a fade to black there -- goodbye flubs!

Thanks to some stock photography I was able to add establishing shots, exteriors, that will help set the stage and clarify things: a "top secret government facility" (actually the Googleplex) and an "international spy organization headquarters." I'm creating new title cards and insert shots in Photoshop that are at least legible and, I hope, slightly more humorous. Finally, I'll score some silent-movie music from one source or another, and Voila! My stupid old one-joke "comedy" will no longer be quite the embarrassment that it once was.

It's still going to be a stupid little one-joke "comedy," nothing can change that. As with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the raw material is what it is. But I'm having a ball and learning new things and who knows? I've always wanted to write a script. With the tech that's out there now, all things seem possible. . .

-- Freder.

Hearts and Flowers

. . . and now with our pow-wow of the weekend behind us, my typing fingers are freed and I can safely reveal that my friend of approximately 32 years, one of my best friends in the world -- BC, I've referred to him numerous times on the blog -- is getting married.

And my reaction, my feelings, as you already know, are exceedingly mixed.

There is the part of me that is genuinely happy for him. This is something he's worked on for a long time.

And on the other hand, there's the part of me that's going: What the fuck??!! Where in fuck's name did that come from??

But even the shock is secondary to the feeling I can't shake, that I am losing one of my best friends ever, that my life is being diminished yet again.

And don't give me that line about "Oh, you're not losing a friend, you're gaining another friend!" That line is such a load of cod's bollocks that even the people who spout it don't believe it. Fact is, this changes everything from here on. There's a reason why the tarot card named "Le Morte" always features a scythe-swinging skeleton. Death and Change are the same devil.

And I guess that's where a lot of the anger that flashed through me when I heard the news came from. Still mourning one loss. Didn't need another.

Well, that and the fact that I thought I'd reached the stage in my life when I would never have to attend another fucking wedding, ever again. To steal from my friend EWR's vast catalog of colorful sayings, I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon.

But there's more. Those of you who have been reading here for a while must know by now that I am quite the perverse and capricious bastard.

I'm jealous. What's he got that I ain't got? I'm at least as good a catch as he is, warts and all. How come he can make this happen and I can't?

Fact is, I have never walked out of any relationship. I'm always the one who gets dumped. I've tried to learn from the mistakes of the past, but it always ends the same way.

The one I lasted with longest was Lorna. We lasted barely over a year. She had a bad case of "Guess What I'm Thinking" and "Guess Why I'm Angry at You." Had I known then that I had Asperger's I might have been able to make a better case for myself. As it was, I used to beg her, "TELL me what you're thinking. TELL me what you're feeling. DON'T make me try to guess. I can't read your mind." Truth was, I couldn't read her face or her body language, either, and now I know why.

She told me early on that she never wanted to get married again, because her first marriage had been such a terrible experience. Her first husband did things like throw bricks at her, or strangle her until she went unconscious and then anally rape her while she was out. I listened to all this and took her at her word.

As time went on, I kept getting a vibe from her that I couldn't understand. Because I took her at her word, I didn't even want to mention the M word. One day when she was particularly cranky at me I said, "I would marry you. . ."

And she said, "That's not what I want."

I wanted to shake her. I wanted to say, "What do you want? Just tell me!"

One afternoon I called her and she said, "We have to talk."

I was so stupid in those days that I said, "About what?"

So that was it. She broke up with me over the phone. I wish I could say that I never saw her again, but we worked for the same newspaper, and with all the daily stress of banging out advertising on the tightest of schedules mixed with my sadness over losing Lorna, I eventually had a nervous breakdown and walked out of that job.

Which was a mistake, really. I'd have been so much better off staying there. I could have managed it without the complications. Never date anyone you work with.

Strangely enough, that lesson still hadn't sunk in when I started seeing a lovely lady that I worked with at the first bookstore that I worked in. We lasted about three months. I had it in my head that I had lost Lorna and a couple of others because I was too withdrawn, too reserved, and so I dropped the "L" bomb early on.

Now, mind you, I don't understand to this day why the "L" word should be so toxic. I've loved a lot of people in my day -- doesn't mean that I wanted to jump into a Marriage Ceremony with them. But, oh dear, suddenly I was a threat to her freedom. I went over to her house one evening bearing pizza and a movie, expecting a nice, normal casual evening, and instead she broke up with me.

I went out into the dark and sat alone on the front steps of her house. I could physically feel something breaking inside of me. It wasn't my heart. I know this because my heart still troubles me with feelings of wistfulness on a daily basis, feelings that can't be pursued because That Way Lies Madness and, perhaps, an appointment with the tallest building in town. What was breaking might have been my last connection with the world that Most Everyone Else lives in.

That was a decade ago. I haven't had a relationship since. I'll probably be alone the rest of my life. In the words of The Great Man, W.C. Fields, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it."

So Anyway.

Although they have little reason to know it, as we see each other seldom enough and when we do get together I am usually withdrawn and distant in the manner of those who share my disease, I value my friends highly. It's a blow to lose this one.

-- Freder.

Second Bond Syndrome

When Pierce Brosnan took over as James Bond, his debut vehicle, GoldenEye (directed by Martin Campbell), was absolutely smashing. But the follow-up, Tomorrow Never Dies, was just exactly half as good, and they kept getting worse after that.

Yeesh, I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Daniel Craig. I'm on record as thinking Casino Royale (also directed by Martin Campbell -- do you sense a pattern here?) is one of the best of the entire series, right up there with From Russia With Love, so I was scared away from the theatrical release of Quantum of Solace when its reviews skewed so very negative. A friend of mine assured me this weekend that Solace was "even better" than Casino Royale. So when I found it in the five dollar bin at Wallyworld (at  least I didn't overpay for it) I took a risk.

Alas, my friend was wrong and the reviewers were right. Roger Ebert hit it on the nose: Bond is not an action hero!

Following the worst theme song and opening credits sequence ever, the first hour of Quantum is a complete write-off, with one annoying action chase (usually poorly shot, all quick cuts and herky-jerky camera moves) after another. In cars, on foot, in boats, lord knows what all else, for nearly fifty-five minutes things hurtle about and poor Daniel Craig barely gets the chance to speak.

This is not what makes James Bond James Bond. Of course you want a big action set-piece to begin the movie (I would have cut the opening car chase -- a waste of screen time if ever there was one -- entirely and begun with the questioning of Mr. White and the subsequent on-foot chase between Bond and Quantum's mole. There, you see? The movie's better already!), but Bond's main weapon is his personality, and the screenwriters and directors seem to have forgotten that here.

When, finally, things calm down for half a tick and Craig is actually allowed to speak and play the character, Quantum of Solace at last begins to feel like a James Bond movie -- but by then it's more than half over. This isn't so much a James Bond movie as an episode of James Bond tacked on to the first hour of one of those Fast and Furious waste-of-timers.

Daniel Craig may be the best actor to ever take on the role. He brings a genuine gravity and even some heart to Bond that Bond never had before, and most of this movie squanders it.

My advice to the Broccoli family is pretty simple: Don't stint on the director's fees. You have a guy who gets it, who knows how to do it -- Martin Campbell, Use him, please. I'd rather see his name on a Bond picture than on Green Lantern any day.

-- Freder.

A Little Angina in the Night

It is reported that my sister has had a heart attack. It was apparently bad enough that they flew her to Portland (why didn't they do that for my mother?), but the latest news is that there was "no serious damage" and that she will pull through.

I'm not entirely without human feeling and I wouldn't wish this sort of thing on anyone, but I've divorced myself emotionally from my sister so far that the feelings I do have are more or less abstract.

There's certainly a part of myself that can't help but recall my sister's well-developed sense of Drama.

When my mother was in the hospital recovering from the amputation of her right leg, and the spotlight was off of my sister for sixty seconds, instead of being there to support Mom, my sister chose That Moment in History to flamboyantly walk out on her husband, take up residence in a shelter, and come in to the hospital late at night after visiting hours to hit up Mom for money.

She ended up moving back in with him anyway, soon after my mother was released. It was all just a stunt.

Over the years, my sister has done herself harm or threatened to do herself harm in flagrant bids for attention.

So forgive me if at some level. . . well, it doesn't smell rotten exactly, but mainly what I'm feeling right now is a bit weary of this.

She works two very stressful jobs, is under a lot of pressure to support her family, and, last I knew, had pretty horrific eating habits, not to mention the long family history of heart attacks on my mother's side of the family. She's also abused her body with a wide variety of chemicals over the years -- much worse than I ever thought of being, because she mixed alcohol with drugs. One time she put herself in the hospital because she'd been driving under the influence of LSD.

Neither my father nor I know whether or not my sister has health insurance. Dad is concerned that he's going to have to take on some of her family's expenses, and asked me if I knew whether or not a payout from the estate is possible. My answer was that I didn't know, but that until recently she had taken much more money out of the estate than I, and that she may be close to the end of what she's entitled to. What she's done with all the money she's taken out so far remains a mystery. Her husband and family haven't seen any benefit from it. I should remind my father that she claims to have $30,000 in a retirement account, and say that if worse comes to worse, she may have to dip into it. Otherwise, her husband and her son will just have to knuckle down and get a job.

I wish her well, but will not visit her in hospital. For me, she exists only in these occasional calamitous dispatches, and in the reports from my lawyer of her constant demands for money. The person in the family home movies that I work on every night is already a ghost.

-- Freder.

The Things Normal People Do

 I hate it when people give me food. I know that it's meant to be a gesture of something or other, but to me it's just one of the ways that normal people are trying to rob me of control over my own life. The stuff is usually fresh and needs to be eaten right away -- but what if I don't want to eat cucumbers or peas this week?

Not being at the mercy of someone else's good intentions is  a big deal to me at this stage of my life.

I rarely go out and do things on my own hook because normal people are always coming up with ways to steal my days off, and after that's happened I always need time to decompress. There goes the weekend! The first and only recreational-type thing that I've done for myself, on my own hook, in more than two years was to go to the movies last week to see Captain America.

Otherwise, the only time I leave the house its to go to work, go to the store, or because someone is scheming up plans that they think will improve my life.

Yesterday I had to go out to my father's house again for lunch. About the only reason I didn't mind this is because it gave me an excuse to drive my new car for longer than three minutes.

I expected to be made uncomfortable and I was, although forewarned is forearmed and like that. My father's wife gave me a tour of her garden and forced me to eat raw peas. The only thing I eat raw is carrots. I chewed manfully, but really wanted to spit the damn things out.

Food is as personal a thing as clothing and sex: we should always be allowed to make our own choices in these things. We have so little control over almost everything else.

I heard some of the same stories that I've heard before, was pressured once again to come to the theater with them (for deeply personal reasons, I don't want to attend live theater anymore, but especially not under these circumstances.. I've tried to explain this to them, but I always stop short because I can see that. for them, it's not about my feelings). I was aware that my father was studying me to see if my hands were shaking. This awareness usually makes me nervous and causes the shaking, but yesterday I was steady.

I had a space heater forced on me. My father has been trying to give me one of these damn space heaters for at least two years now. While Mom was alive I at least had a valid excuse not to accept it: there was no room in the house to put it anywhere! Yesterday he was not taking "no" for an answer.

Too much time was spent with my father and his wife giving me a hard time because I told them that I'm unwilling to attend -- that thing I can't write about because my friend won't just tell everyone his secret like a normal person, no, he has to sit on it so that he can make it into a Big Presentation, turn a get-together into another episode of The Fucking *their name here* Show.

Normal people do things, I guess, in an attempt to be friendly. Instead, I just always feel like I'm being Railroaded.

I had very little freedom -- of movement or anything else -- for some considerable time. Now that I have choices, I want to be the one who calls the shots in my life -- and incursions from the outside world like the thing I'm not allowed to talk about really make me cranky! I'm feeling more protective than ever of my free time. . . not to mention my larder.

-- Freder.