I've learned how to laugh and I've learned how to pray
Let’s have some movie fun, we haven’t done that in a while.
Go watch the video on this page. I know, it’s a year old, but I’m just now getting to it.
Watch it all the way through, full-speed, i.e. don’t pause it. As best you can, mentally keep track of what you recognize and what you don’t.
Go, don’t read any further until you’ve done that. No cheating!
Let’s do a little experiment. Go read this column. It’ll only take a few minutes, I’ll wait…
What did you think — might that guy be a pretty good writer? Did you notice who wrote it? Dave Barry, the funniest man in America, the guy who put the booger in booger journalism, the man of a thousand names for a rock band (“Fugitive Squirrel and the Clearly Disturbed Beavers”), the man who wrote columns about setting pop-tarts on fire and setting Barbie’s on fire and North Dakota wanting to change its name (he got a sewage lift named after him for that one).
This is not a full-fledged review, just a slightly extended endorsement, for people who don’t need either.
Last year’s Force Awakens had anticipation levels higher than any in modern memory, including the ghost movie. That Movie That Shall Not Be Named didn’t have to not only extend the universe but overcome an abysmal trilogy that most Star Wars fans pretend don’t even exist; Force Awakens did. It mostly succeeded, but only by slavishly copying A New Hope to the point that I christened it A Newer Hope. (To all of those who’ve made a long list of excuses for why Abrams did it and how brilliant he is, I refer you to Alias seasons 3-5 or the last episode of Lost.)
Rogue One, on the other hand, is the movie Force Awakens should have been.
1979 was a pretty good year for the Yale University School of Drama. One of their graduates starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the year’s top-grossing film, a family drama about the breakup of a family. Meryl Streep, class of ’75, would eventually win an Oscar for her performance in Kramer vs Kramer, one of several that now grace her home (although she almost lost that first one, leaving it in the bathroom at the Oscar ceremonies).
The other graduate was in another top-10 box office hit, a science fiction movie not named Star Trek that was still one of the most hotly anticipated movies of the year.
I ran across this statement recently:
“The greatest danger of television and movies is helping (us) to grow accustomed to the enjoyment of the absence of God.”
I’ve pondered that for a couple of weeks. I generally agree with the sentiment: we need to be careful about what we intake, and a lot of our intake these days is television and movies. (Note the absence of books, probably for a couple of reasons: one, it’s possible to find books that aren’t absent God, and two, who reads books anymore?) But there are couple of implications that I’d like to tackle.