Most non-heinous

Lauren and I finally had a Saturday night with nothing to call either of us away to something work related, so we cozied up on our couch, played a board game and decided to watch the movie Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Honestly, I think the movie popped into my head because I’ve been writing a classroom series for Discovery about Relativity, and so Time and multiple dimensions and whatnot was kind of in my head. Whatever the reason, it was a good choice. I haven’t watched that movie in several years and I forgot what a solid little comedy it was.

For those who didn’t grow up in the eighties and haven’t seen this movie, briefly it’s about two boneheaded high school kids who are trying to form a band, except now they’re failing history. They have one last chance to get an A-plus on their final oral report and pass their class or else Ted will be sent away to military school and the band will never form. From seven hundred years in the future, via a time-traveling phone booth, in literally drops a man named Rufus. He sends the moronic duo on a ‘most excellent adventure’ through history, where they gather ‘personages of historical significance’ – including ‘the most bodacious philosophizer in ancient Greece’, Socrates (pronounced ‘SO-craits’); ‘the very excellent barbarian’, Ghengis Kahn; and of course, ‘the short dead dude’, Napolean. They of course succeed in passing their report, and we realize the full importance of these two kids and the band they are trying to form.

No doubt, this movie requires huge, big, gigantic suspension of disbelief, what with future societies being able to travel through time via a magic phone booth and entire civilizations achieving world peace through one band’s rock-n-roll, plus several dozen other minor plot points that you just kind of have to say, “sure they could have done that.” But if you can do that, it is just ninety minutes of good clean fun. Heck, minus a few dirty words here and there, this movie is even clean enough that I wouldn’t feel weird about my daughter watching it. And if this movie doesn’t fill you with the urge to play air guitar, nothing will. I actually have the Bill & Ted guitar riff as the error sound on my computer. But most of all, and this really is the mark of a truly great movie, this flick has a ton of quotable lines. I mean a ton.

'Sixty-nine, dudes!'

I just wrote another blog about how I don’t like watching new movies anymore and tonight, watching Bill & Ted reminded me why. I honestly don’t think anybody could make a Bill & Ted today. The closest anybody came to trying was that lame ass waste of my life, Dude, Where’s My Car. It’s like Hollywood thinks that in order to make a movie about two idiots, the movie itself has to be idiotic. Yet, Bill & Ted, for as “dumb” and improbable as the movie was, was actually very witty and well thought out. And apart from the titular duo being abnormally stupid with ridiculous surfer accents, you never feel as though you’re watching one-dimensional stock characters. Compare that to Dude, Where’s My Car, which first of all wasn’t so much a movie as a series of idiotic and disconnected vignettes, and whose characters were merely idiots and that’s it. No depth. No arc. Every scene made sure to beat it over your head that these two were idiots and that’s all they were.

'Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.'

But whatever. I’ve already written a blog complaining about movies. Let’s move on. What occurred to me tonight was how this movie really defines my generation. I know that’s a heavy statement, and I don’t mean it exactly the way it sounds. But basically, one’s knowledge of this movie, or lack thereof, can tell you a lot about which generation they are a part of. It all comes down to Keanu Reeves. Everybody from my generation cannot watch a Keanu Reeves movie without thinking, “Dude, that’s Ted jumping on that bus… That’s Ted talking to Dracula… That’s Ted learning kung fu.” If you come from a later generation, you simply replace all those declarations with, “Dude, that’s Neo philosophizing with Socrates.”

'All we are is dust in the wind, dude.'

Something else that’s extra funny about this movie for me personally is George Carlin. Those who know me well know I am a huge George Carlin fan. I don’t own all his albums, but the ones I do own I can quote verbatim from beginning to end. I have the same image of George Carlin fixed in my head as everybody else in this world – that of a crotchety old man obsessed with words and pissed off at the world. But here’s the thing, I first met ole George as Rufus in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A couple years later I saw him hosting a comedy awards show and had no idea that he was this comedic legend. I simply thought, “Wow, that’s weird. Why would they have Rufus hosting a comedy show?” The first time I heard a George Carlin routine (it was one of his best, where he was ranting and raving about Americans’ love affair with euphemisms) I thought, “Hey, that’s that guy from Bill & Ted on that tape all pissed off.” It’s all so ironic because, obviously Carlin’s role as Rufus was the one where was out of character for most people who know and love him. But tonight, watching him in this role made me laugh because for the longest time, I thought that was who George Carlin really was, and that his comedy routines the things that were out of character.

'It seems to me that all you have learned is that Caesar is a salad dressing dude.'

There is one thing that makes me sad when I watch Bill & Ted. Alex Winter. He played Bill, and for the entire world who knows him he truly will always be Bill. And it’s not like Keanu who simply played Ted in various different roles. For Alex Winter, Bill was really where he topped out. After making the sequel, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, he really didn’t do much. I checked out IMDB and the few post-Bill roles he did have were in movies or TV shows that I’ve never even heard of. It’s really too bad. Why did Keanu have life after Bill & Ted and not Alex? They both certainly seemed evenly pitched in their roles as idiots. But somehow Keanu is the one who achieved longevity. Though, actually, I just did a Google search on Alex, and it looks as though he’s developed a new career behind the camera as a writer and director of films and appears to be doing very well for himself. So… good for you Alex.

'Eat the pig! Eat the pig! Ziggy ziggy ziggy zig!'

But anyway, long story short, Bill & Ted, great movie. If you haven’t seen it, rent it. If you already own it, watch it again, because I’m sure it’s been awhile for you too. Watch it and remember that idiocy can be done smartly. And of course, above all…

'Be excellent to each other… Party on, dudes!'

The screen's not so silver anymore

I don’t watch movies anymore. I really don’t. Well, not much anyway. And I never actually go to the movies. The last time I was in a movie theater, in all honesty, was when I went to see The Passion of the Christ back in the spring of 2004. Since then, there have been very few movies that could get me excited enough to think about leaving the comfort of my own home to head out to the multiplex. And with the rare few that could elicit that excitement, I still never made the time. Even after those movies came out on DVD, even then I rarely had the get-up-and-go to rent the stupid things and watch them at my leisure. Friends keep trying to sign me up for free trials of Netflix, unaware of how useless it would be to me. In the past two years, I think I have maybe watched a dozen new movies from beginning to end, maybe… and two of those movies were Smokey and the Bandit 1 and 2, which were merely new to me.

In the overall storyline of my life, this is really a heavy statement. Movies used to be my life. In high school, in college and in my two years in L.A. there wasn’t a month that went by when I didn’t see at least one new movie in the theater and several others on tape. I mean, I guess that’s just part of the package when you think you want to spend your life making movies – watching new movies is just something you do, and do a lot of. But no more.

There are several reasons for my downward turn in screen time. Most notably, of course, was the birth of my daughter, which also happened in the spring of 2004. Since then, free time isn’t something I come by easily. But that’s not the entire story, because absence hasn’t made my heart grow fonder for the stuff Hollywood puts out every year. On those occasions when I do find myself with a couple hours of uninterrupted time, I rarely feel the urge to run out to Blockbuster and catch up on all the entertainment I’ve missed. I certainly have no desire head to the movie theater with my precious hours. These days, I honestly have trouble working up the desire to devote two straight hours of my life to sitting in one place. When I do watch a DVD, it’s usually of a TV show, which only requires a half-hour or less, and even then I’m usually antsy to do something else by about minute fifteen. In most every situation on most any evening after my daughter has gone to sleep, I find I’d rather be doing pretty much anything other than watching a movie: working out, checking e-mail, blogging, working on my back-burner writing projects, paying bills, balancing the checkbook, playing board games with my wife, having an actual uninterrupted conversation with my wife, reading (gasp) a book. If a movie is on in my house, nine times out of ten it’s one that’s already in our collection, that Lauren and I have both seen a million times, and is merely providing background noise to something else we’re doing.

Now, I’m not saying all this to sound all high and mighty, like I’m somehow a better person who has better things to do than all the couch potatoes and film geeks who revolve their lives around movies. To be perfectly honest, when I really sit down and think about it, I do miss it. I miss getting excited about movies. Whenever I read the blog of a friend from L.A., where they’re talking about how pumped up they are over the opening night screening of the latest blockbuster, I feel pangs of longing, because I remember how pumped up I used to get over the same thing. When you’re a movie person, and all your friends are movie people, going to the movies was an event. It was an experience. Especially when it was the opening night of a particularly well-anticipated movie. We’d all meet up at the theater, wait in line sometimes for an hour or more, sit in a packed auditorium before a gigantic screen (we always went to theaters with gigantic screens), with several hundred other people who were just as excited as we were to see what we were seeing. For two hours, you and these other strangers acted as one giant unit. You all laughed at the same time. You all screamed at the same time. You were all dead silent at the same time. And with a really good crowd at a really good movie, you actually all applauded at the same time, just as though you were acknowledging a live performance with actors who could hear your adulations. [I can still remember one of the most awesome movie-going experiences of my life, the midnight opening of the Bruce Willis flick, Armageddon on the gi-normous main screen of the Cheri in Boston (may it rest in peace), and some minor character, in a throwaway line, mentioned M.I.T. Apparently a decent fraction of the audience had made the trip over from Cambridge to see the movie, because all of a sudden the entire theater erupted in applause.] When the movie was over, you sat through the entire credit sequence hoping to see the name of somebody you knew. A lot of times the group of us, or at least some of us, would go out for drinks or dinner or some other form of post-movie entertainment before dispersing for the night. The next weekend, you’d do it all over again.

It never got old.

And yet somehow, for me, it has. And it isn’t because I have a family now and feel I’ve got better things to do with my time than go see every movie that comes out. It isn’t because I’ve turned snobbish over steady stream of crap that Hollywood has put out lately. I’m sure the ratio of gold to crap is the same now as it was back then – though it doesn’t help that all the films people keep raving about to me, that I actually do take the time to see, end up sucking. (Sideways, people? Really? Wedding Crashers was the funniest movie you ever saw? Anchorman? Are you shitting me? You get the idea.) And it certainly has nothing to do with the fact that ticket prices are out of control. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what a movie ticket even goes for these days, but I’m sure the amount it costs compared to my annual income is about the same or better than it was during my entry-level-assistant days back in L.A.

I think I’ve traced my lukewarm feelings toward the cinema to two specific factors. The first is the fact that I haven’t been able to watch a legitimate blockbuster in a long time. I love my wife dearly, but I somehow married a woman who cannot handle any kind of violence, suspense or scariness – all the things that make for the best kinds of movies in my opinion. Finding a movie that we can both agree on is never an easy task and I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of movies that I really wanted to see in order to spend an extra couple of hours with her. Spiderman 2, X-Men 3, The Return of the King, the final Star Wars installment, just to name a few. I partially blame my wife for this, but with the crazy schedules we’ve been working coupled with a daughter who just does not sleep ever, I’ve considered it a pretty mild sacrifice to forgo these flicks in favor of spending more time just drinking coffee, talking with and making love to the woman I love (who is always much more happy and willing when she hasn’t just had the bejeezus scared out of her). In the last two years, there are only four new movies I’ve seen that I have actually liked enough to watch more than once and would recommend to a friend. They are decidedly non-Blockbuster, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit liking them, but I will stand by and defend these movies to anyone who speaks badly of them: School of Rock, 13 Going On 30, What the Bleep Do We Know, and Mean Girls.

So yes, I think the fact that I haven’t seen the type of movie that is created for the express purpose of getting people excited about movies is part of the reason for my general Hollywood malaise. But I think the other reason is the real clincher. I no longer have a group of people to get excited about movies with. While going to the movies alone or with just one other person is great and wonderful and something I did a lot of back in the day, it was always the big group outings that really generated excitement for whole movie-going experience. Experiencing a movie with a band of friends who were just as passionate about it as you were, and who could talk intelligently about what was great and what sucked, was such a big part of what made going to the movies great. But beyond that, the thing that will always make going out to the movies far superior to watching one in your own house (no matter how sweet your home theater system is) was good movie crowds. Like I described before, there’s something inexplicably wonderful about sharing a simultaneous laugh, gasp or moment of silence with several hundred other people. And when that many strangers break into spontaneous applause for no logical reason… as freakishly overdramatic as this sounds, it does makes you feel like you’re a part of something. And unfortunately, since moving out of L.A., I have yet to experience another good movie crowd.

Not once. I know that no other city on earth has as many “movie people” in one place as Los Angeles. But out here in the sucking creative void that is New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it’s like people go to the movies simply because it’s something to do – not because it’s the thing to do. I can’t tell you how many times between 2000 (when I moved out of L.A.) and 2004 (when I stopped going to the movies altogether) that I was the only person in a semi-full theater laughing at a really funny scene. Teenagers and grownups alike showed little remorse in carrying on conversations during key dramatic scenes. On the few opening nights I went to, the theaters were never packed, and you certainly didn’t have to show up two hours early with a pack of friends to secure your tickets. And not once did the crowd I was a part of ever break into spontaneous applause. Not once. Is it any wonder I have felt no compulsion to go back?

Like I said though, I don’t really miss it – save for nights like this when I really sit down and think about it. Other things have come into my life that have not only filled that void, but overflowed it, so much that I rarely think about how great going to the movies used to be. To be honest, the only times that it really sucks is when some movie of the political nature comes out: Fahrenheit 9/11, Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth. Devoted followers of these films’ auteurs assume that I’m refusing to see them because I’m simply a close-minded Bush supporter, when the real inconvenient truth is more along the lines of: “Hey, I didn’t even go see the last Star Wars in the theater, so why would I spend money on this piece of shit?”

But please, dear friends, don’t let this blog stop you from recommending these films to me. Even though on most occasions over the last two years your recommendations have sucked quite largely, you do sometimes get a rare gem through. And if I ever eventually find more free time at my disposal, I do intend on seeing them all… though it will most likely be on a small screen, forty-five minutes at a time in between diapers, novels and my wife constantly asking, “Is he going to die? Is he going to die?”

And to my L.A. friends, if I ever find myself out your way for a few days, please take me to the movies. Somewhere big for something loud. Help me to remember how it used to be.

Inexplicable optimism

As of yesterday I am now officially, and gainfully, unemployed. By choice mind you. After four years of working as an on-site Avid support tech, which was stable and paid well, I have finally made the leap into the uncertain world of freelance writing. The beginning of this new phase in my life comes on the heels of a whirlwind month and a half, which has included a move into a new apartment, a mind-trip high school reunion, and two back-to-back away jobs that paid a boatload of money but kept me away from my family for nearly three weeks straight. I’m still in the process of decompressing from this marathon run and am just really starting to ponder the implications and future of this leap.

I honestly have no idea what or who I’m going to write for, where my paychecks will be coming from or what I’m even going to write about. Fiction? Non-fiction? I’ve got several ideas, which will keep me busy for awhile, but I really haven’t thought too deeply on the subject up until now. In fact I’m still not thinking about it very much, except in the abstract. And the thoughts I am having, amazingly, involve not even a modicum of fear or apprehension. Right now all I feel is excitement. In fact, I haven’t felt this excited about my future in a very long time.

It all washed over me this evening. I was standing in the kitchen of our new apartment just washing dishes. First of all, side note here, our new apartment is awesome. This place is actually an old renovated hay barn and is much more “us”, with a thousand times more character, than our old generic apartment in our old generic development ever was. Just being in this new place is exciting and invigorating. As I stood at the sink this evening, the windows over the sink were open and I could hear the rain falling on our yard and the wind chimes chiming on our porch. I had the Sirius coffeehouse station on playing artsy acoustic music and a pot of freshly ground Kona beans percolating next to me. Lauren was putting Allison to bed in the next room and for one perfect moment I was completely at peace. But it wasn’t just the peace that comes from easing down after a long hectic month. It was an even better kind of peace; the kind that is laced with unencumbered optimism about the future.

The last time I can remember feeling this way was the summer of 1999. I had returned to Los Angeles after a month shooting a movie with a group of friends, and was just beginning the process of sending out resume after resume to any company that was hiring. Talent agencies, TV shows, production companies – I applied to pretty much every nook and cranny of the entertainment industry. And with every resume I faxed, my excitement grew and grew as realized that I could end up working for any one of these companies. My whole future was ahead of me and the possibilities truly seemed endless. But that feeling quickly passed as soon as I actually started going out on interviews and realized that I would eventually have to pick one of these positions. All of a sudden the waves of possibilities collapsed to a single decision. And ever since then, for the past seven years, even as my path through life has meandered this way and that, my future has still been a veritable connect-the-dots of single decisions. Not that that’s a bad thing. With very few exceptions, those decisions have been wonderful and exciting in their own rite: leaving L.A., asking Lauren to marry me, moving to Philadelphia, becoming an Avid tech, having our first child…

But now, for the first time since that first summer in Los Angeles, the immediate future ahead of me is wide open. At that time, I had just come out of the four-year comfort zone of college and leapt into the unknown territory of “the real world”. This time I am coming out of the four-year comfort zone of a steady job into the unknown territory of… something. I don’t even know what this territory is – “making things happen for myself” perhaps? But just like the summer of ’99, I’m not scared. Not even a little. I know I probably should be, just like I probably should have been then. And I know that as the abstractness of my future gradually solidifies into the concreteness of reality it will start to sink in. But for now all I can feel is excitement and optimism at the seemingly limitless possibilities ahead of me.

And it didn’t occur to me until just now, but this time it’s actually different than it was seven years ago. The possibilities truly are endless because this time I’m going into it a freelancer. The last time I was in this place, one decision collapsed my possibilities to a single reality. But now taking one job or trying one path won’t close off all those other possibilities. This time, the future truly is limitless.

All I have left to do now is make it happen. All I can hope is that I ride this wave of excitement into an actual lucrative career. I hold no illusions that this is going to be easy, or that it will happen quickly, but right now none of that matters. Right now all there is is possibility.

10 Years

This is a little late in coming and I intend on doing a more in-depth write up on this eventually, but for now this will have to do...

I went to my 10 year high school reunion last weekend. I was honestly pumped up about this event. Not because I'm some huge success and wanted to go rub it in people's faces... not because there was the prospect of hooking up with the ex prom queen... not because I wanted to see how miserable the lives of my enemies had turned out... None of those things were the reason. I was simply, purely and genuninely interested in what my old friends were up to.

My highschool, I have realized, was different from most. Although there were definite cliques and there were definitiely people who were more popular than others, by and large, we all kind of hung out together. I wrote a whole essay about this about six years ago. Basically, it wasn't just that the jocks hung out with the nerds and the kids in the band... the jocks WERE the nerds and the kids in the band, as well as the arty granola hippies and the vocational school rednecks. Pretty much, we were all friends. At the very least we all knew each other's names, which doesn't happen in a lot of schools.

So I really and truly was just excited to see people again and find out what they were up to. The thought of being nervous never crossed my mind... Right up until the point, and I mean the INSTANT, we pulled into the banquet hall's parking lot. Just as we turned in off the road, I saw somebody getting out of their car. It was a guy I graduated with whose name was Glen, but who everybody called G.W. I hadn't seen G.W. since the summer after graduation but I recognized him instantly. He looked exactly the same... yet remarkably different. I mean, it was just G.W.... only ten years later. He'd grown about 4 inches and put on about fifty pounds of solid muscle. That's when the wave hit me. Suddenly I felt dizzy. For whatever reason, at that moment the realization hit me that I was going to be seeing all these people I once knew... only ten years later. In effect, all these people who I only remember as kids would now be grownups. I know this is an obvious observation, and I honestly didn't expect it to hit me as hard or as ludicrise-ly as it did. But suddenly I seriously felt as though I didn't know where I was.

We got out of the car and there was a bearded man standing next to his car dressed in ripped jeans and an old baseball hat. I didn't recognize him until my friend Jesse said his name, Colin. Oh my god, it WAS Colin. I remembered him as a young kid without a trace of facial hair and now he was a man. He spoke with a deep Maine drawl that I never remember him having and when he talked it was slow and quiet and deliberate. Sixty seconds into our conversation I had to sit down. Literally, i just sat right down in the dirt parking lot, knowing I was on the verge of passing out.

I'll hopefully get into the rest of this evening later on. But suffice it to say much of it felt a lot like these first two encounters. In fact I still feel like i'm tripping out right now. Dozens of faces of people I once knew. People I instantly recognized as the kids I'd hung out with, but who had, as far as my mind and memory were concerned, aged ten years in an instant.

There was no pretension shown by anybody there that night. Everybody greeted everyone else with genuine hugs, and for those first few minutes the conversations and tones of voice were those of the 17-year-olds we once were. And even as we discussed jobs, families, mortgages, land value and other typically grownup topics, these were still just my high school friends. I honestly can't figure out if it felt "weird" or "right."

All I know is that it was a truly awesome evening. When I left this place I always envisioned breezing back into town from L.A. speaking of whatever fabulous movie or TV show I was working on at the time and regaling everybody from this small hick county with stories from the big city, from show biz, from all the cool things I was doing and the people I was meeting. Instead, I came into town as just another Mt. View graduate, no better or worse than anybody else I knew. I actually found myself most amazed and intrigued by the stories of people who had stuck around the old homestead. Some actually were homesteading (one girl had built a house that had no electrcity or running water), other's were farmers, like real down home Maine farmers, and loving it. The aforementioned G.W. spent his days working his land up on Hogback Mountain (yes, it's actually called that) and putting out a local alternative newspaper. An independent movie crew just recently finished shooting a film up on his land and he helped them out with everything from cooking to standing in as an extra to all the miscellaneous tasks that go along with a film shoot.

What blows me away most is how much people still looked inherently the same. Nobody had gone bald. Nobody who was once skinny became fat. Nobody who was once plain became a super model. We're all doing so well, and what's even better is we're all doing well in our own unique ways. Hopefully as I spend more time thinking on it I'll be able to articulate all this better. Right now I still feel tripped right the hell out and my head is just buzzing with strong feelings that I can't even identify much less figure out why I'm having them.