Author: photog

Guest Contributor – TomD – 10JUL2024 – Photo – Just Stumbled Across This

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TomD

 

I don’t have a clue what the parentage was for this unbelievably well done and beautiful car. It was one of the cars for a local 4th of July car show. I could have spent a good portion of the day there but the unrelenting Florida sun, mid-90’s and near 100% humidity had me thinking heat stroke after about an hour.

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 1

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When reality collapses under a landslide of madness:

  • POTUS exposed as a human vegetable
  • Cost of living now requires selling kidneys for gas money
  • Illegal aliens and homeless drug addicts now the two largest voting blocks in some blue states
  • Kamala Harris imagining herself as president unencumbered by anyone wanting to vote for her.
  • Morning Joe both extols Joe Biden as the sharpest he’s ever been and begs him to step aside to avoid defeat.

Well then, it’s time to take off the pundit cap and try to enjoy life a little.

I’ve always been partial to watching movies.  My tastes probably fall somewhere in the middle.  I’m definitely not part of the avant-garde by any means.  I’ve never enjoyed Cinéma verité and the various other European schools that abounded in the 1950s and 1960s.  They always just looked like low budget crap that someone made with a home movie camera and no money.  But by the same token I think that at least 80% of the output of Hollywood in its heyday was pretty poor stuff.

I totally believe that cinema is not a single subject.  There are several distinct things that get lumped together as movies.  Hopefully they all contain the characteristic that they entertain.  But beyond that I think one kind of movie makes you feel and another makes you think.  Now that is not to say that a movie that makes you think doesn’t also engage your emotions.  That would be odd in a movie created by humans.  But what I’m indicating is that many, even most movies don’t really make you think.  And that is not to say that only high-brow art-house movies can delve into the human condition.  Far from it.  Even someone as populist and popular as Frank Capra can capture a character or a moment that makes you think about the big questions.

So, I think I’ll divide my discussions about movies into two main categories; entertainment and enlightenment.  And let’s start with entertainment.  Because it is the summer and that is the season when we want to enjoy the beautiful weather and make believe that the world is a happy place where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just cartoon characters who dress in primary colors and get chased around by the Tasmanian Devil and eventually eaten.  So, let’s see.

Well, first things first, we’ll divide and conquer.  Let’s divide things into genres:

  • Science fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Action/Adventure
  • Comedy
  • Drama

Science Fiction

I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting sci-fi movies in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed almost all of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion you can do a search on the site.

  1. Destination: Moon
  2. The Thing from Another World
  3. Them!
  4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  5. The Time Machine
  6. The Day the Earth Stood Still
  7. War of the Worlds
  8. Forbidden Planet
  9. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  10. Blade Runner
  11. Alien
  12. Terminator
  13. Starship Troopers
  14. Independence Day
  15. 12 Monkeys
  16. Jurassic Park
  17. The Matrix
  18. Contact
  19. Firefly
  20. Serenity
  21. The Martian
  22. Dune

 

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  I left out Star Trek and Star Wars.  I consider Star Wars fantasy and I consider Star Trek mostly awful.  But the same could be said for several of the movies I put on my list.  I hope my list will inspire a million spirited comments.  Everyone has their favorites and their turkeys.  Unlike politics we can all have our opinions on sci-fi movies without fear of doing any damage.  Have at it.

What Makes a Good Story?

photog Current Events, Literature, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner

An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.  A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.  A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.  A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.  A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.  A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn’t have any oranges on it.  A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.

What do all of these stories have in common?  Well, almost nothing.  Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.  But otherwise, they’re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.  But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.  It’s as simple as that.

We recognize Frodo’s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.  We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.  We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.  We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.

So, what is the most important aspect?  Plot or character?  I used to think plot.  After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.  But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.  And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.  Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don’t believe the hero is real?

So that’s the trick for the author.  Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.  Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.  Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.  But when it’s done right it’s the rewarding part of writing.  Self-satisfaction.