movie marathon

It’s a movie marathon—or as we like to say out here in toe-tapping, wide-stance airport men’s room-la-la-land—“The copper made me do it.”

Larry Craig needs to watch more movies. His excuses could use a little Hollywood edge.

Anyway, it was 30 below zero last week so all we could do was to watch the mailman deliver our little Blockbuster movies-by-mail and then sit back and veg out. No, wait. It was 30 above. Oh well. It’s easy to get mixed up here. But we still watched a lot of movies. Peter had his Ipod plugged in and Alan was still recuperating from his waterboarding accident.

First movie: Juno. I know it was still in the theater, but we saw it at matinee prices and at a neighborhood theater. Very funny movie. The boys loved it, too. Peter said the scenes in the high school were just like his school. The screenwriter is a woman who lived in the Twin Cities and wrote the screenplay from a local coffeeshop. It takes place in Minnesota but was shot in Canada, same scenery. Juno is the main character’s name and the name of a street 3 blocks from our house. It also has something to do with classic Greek mythology, too, according to the movie, but I just focused on how Romanesque it really is. And how I finally got to use some wisdom I learn from doing crosswords. She knows the neighborhood, just mixed up on Hera vs Juno. Or maybe that’s the way she meant to write it since she also mixed up Morgan Freeman with Denzel Washington.

Cute movie. Worth an afternoon. Good music.

Then the mailman came with the videos.

Talk To Me with Don Cheadle was a good movie. Based on Petey Greene who was a very influential radio host in Washington, DC, in the 60s through the 80s. Great way to see 1968 from a different perspective. Wonderful performance from Cheadle. Also Martin Sheen always does a good job. If you can, see him in the Dorothy Day Story. Moira Kelly plays Dorothy Day and Sheen is the priest.

Lots of swearing but might have been less than it really was when Petey Greene was on the air in Washington. I don’t remember him (maybe I was little young) but I do remember where I was when Dr. King was killed. Powerful scene in the movie.

An unfortunate result of the movie though is that it gives the impression that Petey Greene died without ever getting clean. In real life he was clean and sober and had a family years before dying of cancer. Also, according to a bio I read, his manager never reconciled with him in real life and the James Brown concert took place in Boston, not Washington. Strange reasons moviemakers have for changing things around.

The movie opens with James Brown’s It’s a Man’s World which I think was the first record I brought home when we lived in Damascus. It was a 45rpm. I played it in the living room to annoy everybody, but Mom and Dad ruined it when they said they liked the music. Parents! Of course, anybody who had Mississippi Fred McDowell records had to have some James Brown inside.

Then we watched Catch a Fire with Tim Robbins and Derek Luke. Powerful apartheid-era movie. I hadn’t read the description very well so I thought it was just another action movie that the boys would like. Robbins’ accent was hard to believe until I read a review later that said it was pretty good. He was powerful in Mystic River.

Derek Luke was also great. You have to see him in Pieces of April. One of my favorite movies especially with a pre-TC Katie Holmes.

For all the controversy that the African National Congress generated in pre and post-South Africa, this quote from the movie sums up my feelings:

“My children, when they speak if their father, they will say he was a man who stood up for what was right, a man who said he must do something now. What will your children say about you?”

The last movie was Paradise with an amazingly good Don Johnson and an always good Melanie Griffith along with Frodo as a ten year-old human. I thought this was a very well-done movie. I was drawn into it even though the main reason I had ordered it was to get movies with a female director. There’s a different perspective between us, unbelievably, and this movie brings out some of the best differences just in the things that get emphasized.

There was an interesting NYT article last December about the difference perspective means in the work of Alan Lomax and his folk music collecting.

“Mr. Work, the most eminent of the black folklorists, was not merely an acolyte of Mr. Lomax but clearly had ideas of his own. Where Mr. Lomax tended to treat black vernacular music as an artifact in need of preservation, Mr. Work sought to document it as it was unfolding. Thus on “Recording Black Culture,” instead of spirituals harking back to the 19th century, we hear febrile gospel shouting set to the cadences of what soon would become rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll.”