In the summer of my 14th year (I’ve always wanted
to use that style opening but have never had the chance)…anyway, as I was
saying, it was sometime early in June when I was 14. I was out of school for the summer (cue Alice Cooper), having somehow
survived my freshman year of high school.
One day, Dad said he’d like to go to see a movie over the weekend. Mom and I said that sounded like a good idea
and we suggested we should go to the earliest showing on Sunday, knowing
already which movie we were going to take in: A
Bridge Too Far.
A Bridge Too Far
had been getting a lot of good reviews and the previews I had seen before other
movies looked like it was fairly realistic.
The movie was based on the book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan, who
had another great WWII book-movie combo in The
Longest Day. Indeed, A Bridge Too Far was probably one of the
most realistic depictions of combat until 1998 when Tom Hanks saved Private
Ryan and set a new standard in realism.
But when we arrived at the now-defunct Showcase Cinemas on Secor Ave.
Dad said, no, he didn’t want to see A
Bridge Too Far. He wanted to see
another one, one that neither Mom nor I had heard of and didn’t even sound
interesting. I got insistent – whiny,
really – that I wanted to see A Bridge
Too Far. The previews were cool and
it wasn’t going to be in the theaters much longer… this was when home VCRs were
still a few years in the future and if you missed it in the theaters, too bad. Dad said no, and he used his definitive,
end-of-discussion tone.
For those of you who never had the opportunity to meet James
Thomas Erskine, he was a bit larger than life, or at least, as large as
life. He had a certain presence about
him. It wasn’t commanding, but you
always knew when he was in the room. You
also have to understand something about his decisiveness. It was…well…decisive, and pretty much
final. He was a professional firefighter
and a Lieutenant on the Toledo Fire Department.
When you’re in that position, you have to be able to rapidly assess and
take control of a chaotic situation and start calling the shots. When you do, you have to give clear,
unambiguous orders. Moreover, you damn
well better be right because you are sending or leading your people into harms
way, in a way that few people outside public safety services can truly
fathom. Sadly, even when you are clear,
unambiguous and right, things
sometimes go very, very wrong. Dad’s
decisiveness, while not intransigent, was rarely compromised, and that held
true at home, as well.
I was heartbroken that I wasn’t going to see the movie I
wanted to see and was going to have to spend 2 hours watching some stoopid
movie Dad wanted to see. As Dad bought
the tickets, Mom and I had a quiet sidebar conversation. She wanted to see A Bridge Too Far, too, and she had also not heard of this movie to
which we were about to be subjected. We
both thought it odd that this WWII combat veteran who was fascinated by all
things WWII combat was seemingly uninterested in a really good WWII combat
flick.
When the movie was over, we emerged from the theater into
the familiar warmth of the bright summer sunshine. Chronologically, it was only about two and a
half hours after we entered the cinemas.
Physically, we were still on Secor Ave. in Toledo, Ohio; we were still
driving a 1974
AMC Matador to our home at 568 Colima Drive; they were still my parents and
I was still their son. But the universe
as I knew it had changed. An astonishing
magnitude of change. Completely and
irrevocably.
In those 121 minutes in the theater I witnessed things that
only a few people up to that point had.
Forces of good and evil, battling for supremacy using both swords and
spaceships. Creatures of impossible form
– dozens of them – intermingling with humans and each other. Sentient computers, some able to create
holographic messages. My 14-year old
brain was wracked by how real it all was and how much I admired my new heroes
and reviled a new set of villains (and let’s not forget one young lady’s really
nice figure and jiggly breasts, giving me, or at least lending to, my penchant
for brown-eyed brunettes).
The year of my 14th summer was 1977 and the movie that Dad wanted to see and that Mom and I had
never heard of was, of course, Star Wars.
There are bigger Star
Wars fans than me. But there are few
who were born after 1970 who will understand how profoundly that movie changed
things for those of us who went in to see it with no knowledge of what we were
about to see. Those born later will have
had some exposure to light sabers, R2-D2, C3PO, the Millennium Falcon, etc.,
through extensive merchandising. Kind of
like people born after 1990 are considered ‘digital natives’ and have no idea
what life was like before the internet.
These musings of astonishing changes to the universe were
brought about by seeing Episode 8: The
Force Awakens. I’m glad that the acting was
solid, even if the story was a bit derivative.
After seeing Episode 1: The
Phantom Menace, I left the theater thinking that the acting was so utterly
horrid that I wouldn’t being shelling out any more cash to subject myself to
it. And I didn’t. I never went to see the 2nd and 3rd
episodes, and only caught parts of the 3rd at home when Brian was
watching.
To illustrate my disgust and disdain for the abysmal
directing of some very good actors, I had the following conversation on
Facebook with one of my friends:
Me: I knew that it wasn't worth a
second look when I left the theater thinking that the best actor in the whole
movie was Yoda.
KD: R2-D2 carried every scene that
he was in.
Me: What?! No way. He was sleep
walking through his lines! I have it on good authority that he was hitting the
oil bath between every take and his reflexes were almost a microsecond slow
through the whole shoot.
KD: He was the only professional on
the set! (I heard Liam Neeson asked him for some pointers.) Those ugly rumors
about him hitting the oil bath were spread to cover up the fact that he was
calling his agent, trying to get out of his contract.
So anyway, the series seems to be back on track and all is
well in the post-1977 universe.
May the Force be with you.
No comments:
Post a Comment