Season's Greetings 2023

 

365 Films in 365 Days – November 21: Trains, Planes and Automobiles

This series is dedicated to matching memorable movies with the signature day each year upon which I could watch them forever. Given that this post will be published 2 days before Thanksgiving this year, I give you…

Trains, Planes and Automobiles (1987, Paramount Pictures, John Hughes)

The film starts quietly enough, in a quiet board room, no music, and all painful stares. It's a bold way to start a comedy, which is intended to evoke laughter and noise. The scene is amusing, the way it's shot, but it mostly serves to set up the stakes: Martin's Neal aims to fly home for a family Thanksgiving in 2 days.

Thanksgiving is not as glamorous as Halloween or Christmas, between which it is sandwiched on the calendar. Other movies toy with the look and tropes of Thanksgiving, and while this one isn't specifically about the day or the tradition, it probably has the best message to share on the subject. And, I like to think, it manages to achieve a certain wistful charm related to the idea of Thanksgiving and being with family, even if one's family isn't the kind that would best be there to spend time with. It's a deft hand at play, and the film works better than you remember it does.

The "bad trip home" model the film follows is ruthless from the beginning. Neal pays $75 to lose a taxi cab, only to arrive at the airport and learn his flight is delayed. He has already struck out before the real plot begins, though he'll be up to the plate again many times before it's over. It's unironic how Neal's troubles begin with Candy's Del (i.e., tripping over his trunk while in a foot race with Kevin Bacon to a cab), and almost as if Del is some kind of "bad luck angel" sent to mildly torment his target (rather than gently support like Clarence does in It's a Wonderful Life) into becoming a better person.

On the first plane, Neal is confronted by being bumped from first class to coach in a middle seat, endless chatter and stinky feet (both Del's), and a wheezing cough from the passenger on his other side. Three strikes again!

By the way: How dare the movie have the title that it does and not offer up the vehicles displayed in the same order!

If the differences between Del and Neal weren't apparent, Del's choice in rides and dives drives the point home near to finality. It's classic blue collar vs white collar. But the movie never preaches one over the other, or seems to take sides. Neal is traveling through Del's worlds. Or is Del a satellite who can't help but orbit Neal's planet. Both moving through and past each other on mutually exclusive collision courses with life.

Both their reactions when they arrive at the shared motel room to find a single bed is ripe silver. And the shower bit when Neal finishes to find that only a single tiny towel remains for him to dry with is pure gold.

There's almost nothing funny about Neal's "have a point" tirade that he levels against Del after he goes through his sinus clearing routine in bed. And there's nothing funny about Del's quiet but devastated reaction to Neal, showing Candy's real depth as an actor. Comedy can cut to the quick. Sometimes it cuts too deep, too. We need to be reminded of that. Not everything is a joke, even if it might seem funny to pile on the "fat guy" (or gal). Thank you for that reminder, movie.

Del stands up for himself without malice, which is great. We are both Neal and Del at times, simultaneously overly critical and all too vulnerable to what the world throws at us.

"Those aren't pillows!" and the context behind those words is one of the best laughs in the film. It's ridiculous, but it works. And the way they shake it off after by jawing about "da Bears" is a nice chuckle to follow. (Funny, too, how men slamming into each other on a field is the cureall to the gay.)

"People train runs out of Stubbville." The Owen character is a full-on caricature, and I'm here for it.

Neal's gift of a train ticket to Del is sweet and mostly redeems their relationship to that point. Del's want is still written on Candy's face as the scene ends.

Del struggles as if his whole life is in that trunk as he drags it from the broken down train. Neal rebounds from his disappointment quickly and helps to take up Del's yoke.

The bus scene is probably the most over-the-top bit in the entire piece. Probably any or all of it has happened in real life, though.

One of the all-tie greats curse word scenes occurs when Neal reaches the Marathon rental car counter. I honestly cannot stand the way the woman is chatting and carrying on on the phone before this happens. It's a perfect send-up of those type situations.

"You play with your balls a lot." It's almost a throw-away line, and it's a cheap but decent laugh, but most of all it tells us how closely Del has been watching Neal. (Of course, it's been good, and he doesn't have gloves, so you can hardly blame Neal.) Even Neal's response to this might suggest he does play with his balls a lot. 

Poor Del's goofiness and nicety finally catch up with him in the car at night. The best physical bit of comedy is found here as Del straight-jackets himself to the driver seat.

The movie hits cartoon-levels of hijinks when Del skirts the car between two big rigs going the wrong way down the interstate. Skeleton heads and all. It's pretty awesome.

And then the car catches fire. The whole thing has such a naturally satisfying progression of bad to worse.

The drunk scene after when Neal calls Del into their second shared motel room together is so honest and well played by both.

I feel like Dumb and Dumber really took a page from this movie when it came to their respective state trooper scenes. I like both, but this came first.

I feel like that bluesy, down note, harmonica-based musical motif in the film went on to influence practically every comedy and buddy drama TV program that aired in the late 80s and 90s as a marquee "scene-transitioner."

The realization of Del's homelessness is so well handled. There were clues throughout. Neal's choice to go back and include Del is the film's Thanksgiving blessing. Leave no one alone who can you can afford to include. It's comedy with a heart, and those are often the best kind.

November 21 — 6 of 365 logged

Go to next! Go to last!

The Good Word: "What Binds Us Together"

Disneyland 2023

 

And we're off…!

Pit stop at Pea Soup!

This much farther to go on Day 1.

We found Waldo!

Toeing the waters in Ventura.

What we left behind: (left to right) Paige, Ewan, Mommy, Daddy.

Goofy!

Toolin' along Main St.

Cruella!

The man, the myth!

Belle!

Mid-ride Alice

Mid-ride Canal

Under the sea (under the sea)!

Minnie!

Mickey!

Queen of Hearts!

Inside Minnie's house

Outside the Falcon

After a long fun day…!

The Good Word: "Joshua 1:9"

The Little Girl's Promotion

And all in time for her 5th trip around the sun!

The Good Word: "Increasing your capacity."

A Glimpse of Paige's Fifth Jubilee

 

365 Films Across 365 Days — June 11: Jurassic Park

This series is dedicated to matching memorable movies with the signature day each year upon which I could watch them forever. Bowing to the day it original came out, I now take a look at what is arguably the most famous creature-driven thriller of all time:

Jurassic Park (1993, Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielberg)

This and The Rocketeer (1991) are the only two films I have a distinct memory of going to see with my family at the theaters in the early 90s. To this day, I always like to watch Jurassic Park in a dark room because of this.

The bass sound drop at the beginning of the film is immediately attention grabbing. Chances are always high that if you're dealing with a great Spielberg film, you're also dealing with a great John Williams soundtrack.

The opening scene is kind of strange really. Great, but strange. It almost has a big budget, made-for-TV feel. Upon this, what is undoubtedly my umpteenth viewing of the film, I have to acknowledge that the faces you first see aren't memorable or important to the plot. The danger they're all safe-guarding against isn't abundantly evident. And the scene ends in a terrifying but mostly unsatisfying way. This is all good stuff, and is a setup that demands you keep watching out of morbid curiosity. And it's really the best place to start the film, given that the opening depicts the incident that kicks off the tragedy to follow. (Oops, spoiler alert!)

"Because Grant's like me. He's a digger." Such a solid scene ending on the piece of amber. Again, another scene with characters who we don't much see or care about again (Gerrano dies and is hardly mourned, after all), but is perfect for foreshadowing more of the world we're in and gives us the perfect segue into Montana. Grant and Sattler are a truly fun duo to watch. They are both kind of dorky and lost in their scientific expertise, but they have a lovable charm and cuteness about them (not at all hurt by their good looks) that stays with them all the way through the end of the movie. Neill and Dern deserve a lot of credit for this.

Goldblum's Ian Malcolm has such a strong showing in the first movie that his character ended up headlining the sequel over Grant or any of the others. Malcolm comes off as the perfect foil for Grant without ever being unlikable or unimportant to the plot. He is the first to truly question the wisdom of the park's planners and his cognizance here would seem to make him the villain, but he is more the cool, sunglasses-and-leather-jacket-wearing soothsayer.

The scene about DNA and dinosaur blood and gene sequences would have utterly slowed down and killed the momentum of a lesser film, but in Jurassic Park it plays like a captivating bit of education that pulls together everything since the "He's a digger" scene till now in all its pseudo-science animated glory. It's easily the "weakest scene" in the film because it's purely exposition, but for all the thinking viewers who ever enjoyed this movie it's essential.

I had a crush on Ariana Richards's Lex character when I watched JP in the early days. Coupled with the fact that she had a crush on Grant who is a paleontologist, a career for which at that early age I was already keen on exploring when I got older, I found myself identifying most with Grant, which always heightened the thrill of the viewing experience for me given that Grant is the main hero.

Malcolm poetically remarks, "God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs." To which Sattler then adds, "Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth." Poignant and funny.

It's such great writing, pacing, and acting/character development to have Grant and Malcolm discussing Ian's tawdry family/love life when the weather starts to pour and they draw closer and closer to danger. This is probably the lowest relational point between Grant and Malcolm, but they still manage to have brief little moments of realness and brotherhood. Like the shared words on being scared, Grant offering him his canteen of rain water, and their collective efforts to save Lex and Tim from the Rex. It's super hard not to love both characters at that point.

The Rex attack on the lead car all the way through the car drop that just narrowly misses Grant and Lex who are literally hanging by a rope is one of the all-time greatest thrill sequences in film history. The movie pretty much doesn't let go of you at this point until the end. It's not all absurd, pompous action and obnoxious developments that aren't justified. It lets quieter moments back in every few scenes, but they always serve some emotional purpose beyond simply resetting your decibel levels lower before blasting you with the next thrill chase.

Dennis Nedry's death at the jaws of dilophosaurs at 1 hour and 14 minutes into the film is truly the point at which doom starts to set in. You now know that potentially no one is safe and all hope at getting the park's computer systems back online is in jeopardy. The movie officially turns a page into disaster film territory, the mission becoming only to survive and escape, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I love how not all of the challenges and dangers the characters face are dinosaur related. Escaping the falling car out of the tree. Climbing an electrified fence. Navigating a UNIX system database to initiate computer programs. The story never fails to deliver on basic action-adventure elements that allow all the characters moments to shine or be vulnerable.

Grant completes his character turn and growth when he promises to stay up all night to ensure the kids stay safe, and then he tosses his lucky velociraptor claw to the ground. His love affair with dinosaurs is over.

Another one of those quieter scenes: Hammond and Sattler's conversation about the flea circus. This scene redeems Hammond from being a simple dinopark tycoon villain to something more sympathetic.

And right after that, Grant and the kids discover the dinosaur eggs. This scene, too, redeems the dinosaurs from being simple eating/killing machines. "Life found a way." After all, the dinosaurs are only adapting and reacting to survive in the environment they've suddenly been thrust into.

Ever since the first time I watched this movie, I thought it was a little more than convenient that a trapeze-swing-like pair of vines with a stick between them happened to be just in the path that Sattler ran to get to the shed. The only bit of hokum in an otherwise perfect movie.

"Clever girl." This line may be one of the most quotable in the entire film. And with Muldoon's quiet admission and violent death at the teeth and claws of that clever girl, one of the most thrilling sequences begins as the humans square off in a hide and seek match of wits and nips. It's fairly clever on the part of the storytellers to have the kids escape the clutches of the deadly velociraptors thanks due to two things that would have only been found since the age of man: mirror-like reflections and ice cubes.

The shot of the velociraptor's profile covered in computer screen reflections of lines of DNA code is full of symbolism!

In true Spielbergian fashion, the Tyrannosaurus comes out of seeming nowhere to rescue the heroes from the velociraptors—a final bit of redemption. There is a pattern to Spielberg's films where a lot of work is done earning the audiences trust in the first 2/3 of the film, only to burn through all of that capital in the final act in over-the-top turns of event. Go big or go home. It's solid Storytelling 101.

And the movie ends without any witty dialogue or pontificating about the future or lessons learned. The characters that survived are just glad the nightmare's over. We as the audience obviously want more, and that's a great way to leave your audience. Don't overstay your welcome in storytelling. And while there have been many sequels to follow in the Jurassic franchise, the first movie is and always will be the best. It's because of that want for more that more were made, and I completely understand from a business perspective. But as the credits roll their last, John Williams's score subtly treads into cautionary territory with those low swaying horn sounds. Return to Jurassic Park, only if you dare!

June 11 — 5 of 365 logged

Go to next! Go to last!

Visiting the "Old Country"

Welcome to Marlow, Oklahoma!

The church I first came to know the Lord in.

The Ag Dept at the school where Dad taught.

Still an Outlaw!

Don't believe me? Take a close, hard look at the fellow in the upper middle!

The house I first lived in as a baby.

Right down the road from the high school football field.

And here is the home that I remember most from that time. 3.5 acres on a gravel road outside town.

The road west from the house above. My friend "GT" lived down this way. Our horse Jake saved me from a bobcat attack, I think, on the rim of the creek on the right.

The road east where Shane and Shawn (other neighbors) lived, which heads back to town.

Before we left for the airport, Blackie and Cricket, horses that belonged to the family whose house we stayed at, wished us farewell from the fence line.

BONUS! A view of a small part of the Grand Canyon on the flight home.

1st Grader Going On 3rd Grader!

"Excellent job!!" - Mrs. Sherry's note on his animal report on giraffes

In the News: "Gun control IS the ONLY thing we can control!"

Reunited with my drum kit

 

It's been a while, old girl.

Mid-Winter Happenings at Casa de Wright

Hmong Culture Day at YPSA in The Pocket!

Ewan in his Japanese yukata.

Ewan with a constrictor during an animals study visit at school.

Mrs. Sherry's 1st grade class prepares for a walking field trip to the local library.

In other news, we bought a house!

Busy, happy days here in the Wright Fam! God has blessed us richly, and we thank Him!