Movie time

July 16, 2021 by Amy Welborn

Regular readers – as opposed to the rest of you toffers – know that with a 20-year old and a 16-year old at home, I seize this precious time as an irreplaceable ~~brainwashing~~ teachable moment in our lives, so we do a lot of movie watching. This week wasn’t as educational as others, but get ready. The twenty year old only has a couple more weeks here before he moves on (again), so I’ll be in high Let-me-educate-you-about-film-noir mode for that time, I’ve no doubt. Especially since he’s having his wisdom teeth removed during that time and will be totally at my mercy.

It will be unbearable, I’m sure.

There were movies watched this week, though. Here they are, with quick thoughts:

Black Widow: Saw this Sunday night in the theater. I have zero interest, but I love going to the movies and have only been, what, three times in the past fifteen months? So okay, I’ll go see your stupid Marvel movie. Especially if it’s in that theater. You had me at “wine.”

I mean – it was fine, I guess? I can’t critique it in terms of the canon or the multiverses or whatever, but it didn’t put me to sleep or render me restless. I liked the beginning quite a bit, especially since it seemed tailor-made for my current obsessive quest to get you to understand how stupid the gender identity movement is, since the Black Widow looks like this as a girl:

Thank goodness for blue-haired tomboys. No, you stupid jackass, she’s not really a boy.

Aliens – following up on last week’s Alien. One of them had seen almost all of the franchise, the other none of them. I’ve only seen the first two, and those many moons ago, so this was fun. A great movie, really – and oh, please don’t hate me because here I go again – a really powerful response to the notion that “mother” is nothing more than “birthing parent” and it’s fine, all fine.

You know, there is great pleasure in watching movies with an audience. One of my great movie going experiences was in Knoxville when I was in college and the Tennessee Theater showed classic films all the time – including a double bill, as I recall, of Casablanca and Gaslight. The theater was packed because, of course, everyone had come for Casablanca. What they didn’t expect was Gaslight – and I will never forget the communal gasps throughout that film. What great fun.

All to say, I would love to watch Aliens with an audience. Even just for that moment.

Get away from her you bitch!

All right, we’ll get more high class for you guys now. Next movie? The Big Sleep which everyone found entertaining but also confusing, including me. But, as I told them, I’m sure half the confusion was due to elements that were in the book but couldn’t, because of “standards” – be in the film at the time. And yes, I was right. So for example, the “racket” that was in the back of the bookstore was undefined and puzzling in the movie but was a pornography distributer in the book. Makes much more sense.

Entertaining, nonetheless. Although I prefer The Maltese Falcon for its stronger secondary character actors like Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre.

The 39 Steps – delightful, of course. We’d all seen it before, but many years ago – and we also saw a production on Broadway at some point – and, as, I pointed out in my inevitably boring way – the beginning of the meet-cute-hate-each-other-fall-in-love-trope.

There are, what do they say, only six or seven stories to be told and retold?

Then last night, 1917. I’d seen it before, but one of us hadn’t. So while the other was out gallivanting, we took it in. Here’s what I wrote about it the first time I saw it:

What interested me, though, was the timing of the events. The date of the action is April 6, 1917 – which stretches into the next day.
That can’t be an accident, and there are two aspects to the date that are interesting. First, that’s the date on which the United States entered the Great War.
Secondly, it was Good Friday that year.
I have no idea if Mendes was aware of the second point, but it seems to be vaguely reflected in some of the imagery of the film. There’s a striking sequence in a devastated town in which a cross-topped altar is in the foreground as flames smolder about. Church bells ring at one point (although I kept wondering…who’s ringing them?) And the film ends in the bright light of the next day – Holy Saturday. Our protagonist has, in a sense, gone through a great Passion for a greater good – both to fulfill a personal promise and to save the lives of others. It doesn’t hit you over the head, but it’s there.

Can I tell you that the 20-year old admitted that he was very sad to see that Pig wasn’t playing anywhere near here, because he wanted to surprise me with tickets for it for my birthday?

As I said when he first showed me the trailer, as absurd as it seemed, “Well it worked. How can you watch this trailer and not want to see this movie? You have to, right?” And as the reviews have come in, it seems…yeah. You have to, but not for the reasons I originally thought – as in “This is a crazy John Wick wants his truffle pig back but with Nicholas Cage movie” reason, but because…it actually has a point and is brilliantly acted.

Well, it will come here soon, I’m sure.

Oh, and one more.

I thought I had written about this, but a quick search doesn’t turn anything up. Maybe I did something on FB or the Gram, so who cares. Anyway. We do have our fair share of movies filmed here in Birmingham. Nothing huge, but it’s steady. Three years ago, we watched chunks of a movie with Aaron Eckhart being filmed. Straight to video, I assume. Bruce Willis was here a few weeks ago. He didn’t call! Can’t believe it. Anyway, a couple of years ago, an independent film called Sword of Trust was filmed here. Marc Maron was the star, and it has a few other familiar faces – the repulsive Senator from Veep and yes, the guy who played Artie in The Adventures of Pete and Pete.

I knew it was filming, but didn’t make any effort to stake out the locations, but one day we were driving on our usual route, not half a mile from our house, and could see action at the big local pawn shop – as it turns out, the main location for the film. We stopped, parked, and walked to a viewing place and saw what was, if not the last scene of the movie, the last scene being filmed – as in, they shot the scene and then someone yelled “That’s a wrap!” and everyone cheered and hugged each other.

As I said, that movie was Sword of Trust , and I’d never watched it because up to this point, it was only on Amazon Prime for an extra cost, and it didn’t seem like a move I wanted to spend money on. But a couple of nights ago I noticed it was on Netflix! For which I still pay! Stupidly! So I decided to watch it….

Well….I watched the first twenty minutes steadily, and then got bored, and ended up just scanning the rest of it for familiar sites…which I saw!

So, the pawn shop which is the central location of the film is, as I said, not far from my house. A few years back, it was owned by a fellow who had the best collection of mid-century furniture in town. He told me he bought it by the shipping container from a dealer in England. I used to go there all the time just to look, but never bought anything.

So that’s this spot!

But what I want to brag on (sadly) is this: There’s a series of shots near the end in which Marc Maron parks and is going to his former lover’s (wife’s?) little house – she’s an unsuccessfully recovered addict – to drop off some food (Piggly Wiggly bag and everything!) . So he parks and I say to myself, “That’s where the skate park is.”

Not that there’s a skate park in the shot, but there’s one there now. My son isn’t a skater, but he’s a biker, and it’s one of the spots they like to go to, in an industrial area a couple miles from our present house. He took me there once to show me. ONCE. And I recognized it! Without the skate paraphernalia, even.

When he got home, I ran him the scene and he said, “Oh, yeah, that’s the skate park. That’s it.”