Prompt #
55 – Movies
The
first movie I remember seeing was a western. My parents left my
brother and me near the front of the theatre and they went to sit
farther back. A horse and rider came full on the screen and the horse
reared, seeming to fill the room and coming right for us. The noise I
made, not sure whether it was screams or sobs, brought my parents
running. I'm still afraid of any horses without a fence between me
and them. This theatre burned down when I was six but I think this
event was a couple of years before that.
The
worst experience I remember was when as a young teen, my mother took
me to a show called Mom and Dad. Parents were rooked by advertising
to take their teen-age children. The show was sold as the answer to
“the talk” on sex education which neither parents nor schools
ever really had with young people. I think the movie was an old military health education film from the previous war that stressed avoiding
sexually transmitted diseases by instilling fear in everyone. People
were puking in the aisles. Although my memory appears to differ from what IMDB says.
I've
never been a big fan of science fiction but because John Wyndham was
a famous writer and his novel The Midwich Cuckoos, which is often
taught in schools, had been made into a movie called The Village of
the Damned starring Hayley Mills' father, I went to see it. Several
small villages around the world are “visited” by an alien force.
Nine months later every female in every village gives birth to a
blond child. The children all have ESP. They can communicate with
each other telepathically and they can read other peoples' minds. In
order to save the world, John Mills, a teacher, has to rig a
briefcase with a bomb, build a brick wall across his mind so the
special children cannot read him, and enter the classroom on a
kamikaze mission. A suicide bomber hero. The first day of my teaching
career, in a Manitoba community where the majority of families were
of Icelandic heritage, I walked into a classroom of white-blond
children. I freaked. I had no briefcase, and no brick wall.
Once,
after my marriage ended and I was living alone in the city, I decided
I had to force myself to do things I wanted to do without waiting to
meet someone to escort me. I picked an afternoon matinee and, because
I was an English major, decided to check out the new version of D.H.
Lawrence's classic Lady Chatterley's Lover. What I learned is that a
lot of single men go to matinees and sit there watching with
overcoats or felt hats covering their laps.
One
recent movie that really made me angry was The Notebook. The young
couple, Rachel McAdam and Ryan Gosling, were beautiful, and I've always
loved James Garner. But the plot, the romanticization, the emotional
manipulation, was really upsetting. Haven't we matured beyond fairy
tales for adult children?
I was a
relatively young adult during the Vietnam War. Three of my favourites
are set in this era. I love Apocalypse Now, starring Martin Sheen and
Marlon Brando, the updated revisioning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of
Darkness. I love Coming Home. I've always loved Jane Fonda's work.
And I like Rambo First Blood which was one of the first stories about
post traumatic stress. Because it was filmed in the town where I now
live, Hope, BC, I have written about it on my Earthabridge blog,
pieces called "Cult Fiction," when we celebrated the 25th
anniversary around 2007.
My
favourite fluff film is Dirty Dancing. Love Jerry Orbach and Patrick
Swayze. I recently really enjoyed re-watching Shakespeare In Love,
although I usually refuse to watch any movies interrupted by
advertisements on television. And I still don't watch scary movies. I
don't watch many movies at all, because of where I live and lack of
disposable income. And because I learned that lesson the hard way, not to go
alone.
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