1991 for Keanu Reeves

My good friend Ryan hates Keanu Reeves. Similar to Norm's distaste for Johnny Depp and mine for Owen Wilson, Ryan refuses to watch movies starring Keanu, likely never having seen Speed or The Matrix.

That would be a shame, as I hope Norm has seen Ed Wood or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I've learned a few things since watching Midnight in Paris.

Anyway, I bring that up about Keanu Reeves because I was thinking about him after seeing reviews for the third John Wick film and his appearance in the new Netflix movie with Ali Wong and Randall Park. I do not hold the same feelings about Keanu.

Dad brought me to see Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure in the theaters in 1989, and I wrote about it a while back, about how it seemed to me to be a '90s movie despite it's release year, about how the special effects looked and how the absurdity fit a later psyche.

Point Break remained one of Dan and my summer favorites for years after we obtained the VHS, Speed was one of the movies we saw while theater hopping in 1994, and The Matrix helped alter the way I engaged with philosophy.

And while I find this discussion on the blankness of Keanu's face being the reason he's the perfect action star funny and interesting, I tend to think he has at least some acting chops. I mean, he's pretty decent in his few scenes in Parenthood.

And Point Break brings me back to the point I'm getting at today.

"Point Break" was released on July 12th, 1991. Keanu plays Johnny Utah, former Ohio State QB who blew his knee out and eventually joined the FBI, goes undercover and pretends to be a lawyer with adrenaline issues. Okay, that is pretty ridiculous, but still, we loved it:

One week later, on July 19th, 1991, saw thew release of "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," the sequel to the aforementioned 1989 entry:

Keanu again plays clueless Ted Logan, only this time he and his buddy/fellow Wyld Stallions founding band-member Bill Preston, are killed by evil robot copies of themselves, battle with Death itself, enslave Death, and use alien intelligence to best the badguys after reincarnating themselves. The movie is even more absurd than the original, very original in its own right, and has grown quite a cult following.

A few months later, on September 29th, 1991, saw the release of Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho:"

More of a starring vehicle for River Phoenix, Keanu plays a street hustling/gigolo/son of the Mayor of Portland, Oregon. River's character, being gay, falls for Keanu's but is rebuffed, as Keanu reminds him that he only sleeps with men for money. Today it is hailed by the queer community as an early classic. It's also loosely based on parts of three Shakespeare royal plays.

In three months of the summer of 1991, Keanu Reeves played an undercover FBI agent who learns to surf for the work, a clueless teenager killed and resurrected by his own victory over capital-d-Death, and a male prostitute running away from his birthright as the son of a mayor of a large Pacific Northwest town.

How many actors have played such diverse roles in movies that came out essentially within the same season of a year?

The Infinite Rewatchability of Incredibles II

I haven't had a chance to get any reading done, and now that I have an idea of my talking time in Rome in June, I really need to crack some books. I have some books on my list (Milkman and Big Bang among others), but with Netflix combined with Cassius being sick as hell, and my plan for watching Incredibles II in a four hour binge with the first iteration did not happen.

I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to talk about Incredibles II. So, to start:

1. It's good. It's popcorn covered in melted cheese, summer blockbuster action movie packaged as a family adventure.

2. It's unabashedly feminist. The main good-guy is Elasti-Girl, the main bag-guy is a lady, and half of the movie is Mr. Incredible being ground down by domestic life as a house-dad.

3. The action set pieces are all Badass, with the capital B. It's almost like Pixar knows that animation can embrace the limitations of the computer in ways that live-action never can without appearing fully cartoony and fake.

4. One thing they really nail is the realization of the full potential of an elastic character. Holy cow, they get it right, and show how awesome that power could be.

I love the movie Coco, another Pixar entry on Netflix, and for a while it was Cassius's go-to for viewing. It's not so bad to have on in regular rotation, but it will always make me cry.

Incredibles II never really has that element: the emotionally-manipulative heart-string tug.

Plus, they really lean in to Jack-jack's powers.

I've gone back to watch clips of the first movie, and I'd have to say that the animation changes are jarring. Watching them back to back would have been amazing, mostly to see what was cutting edge in 2004, and then again in 2018.

But, was it so cutting edge in 2004? I remember that was the narrative, that Pixar had to do years of work trying to update their animation abilities to properly render believable human characters. But didn't Shrek come out in 1999? Not that Shrek has lots of human characters, but...maybe my memory needs to be updated.

Also, they use phrases like "Lets make supers legal again!" and similar taglines, that are so obviously nods to president cheeto-dust that it's more discomforting than funny. For me, anyway.

It's easy to watch, over and over. Mainly because of how cool Elasti-Girl is...

Nice watch

Nice watch, dude. I don’t wear one, although they have come roaring back into style. I have two that stay in a drawer. My wrists have grown fat as the rest of me has, and I don’t fit into them any more. Well, I suppose I could wear the one with the leather band, but I don’t.

It was somebody from early in the last century, like Nietzsche or maybe Thomas Mann, or Sartre - somebody - who said that Humanity’s only real superpower is reading. That struck me as maybe a bit of self-serving aggrandizement, but also true. We chiefly - or maybe exclusively - encounter our ancestors through books. And our minds can be thoroughly transformed - not only our minds, but our outlooks, our attitudes, and certainly our perceptions - when encountering a genius from a previous time. I know I’m preaching to the choir here. 

So it was with dismay and disappointment that I found out that Workman Press did not publish a 2019 Page-a-Day calendar with a new book every day. It sucks. I did start to realize, though, in true insert-the-rationalization-that-fits fashion, that in the last couple of years, fewer and fewer books appealed to me, and that I hadn’t got that much use out of them. 

So for 2019, I got a calendar with a new Zen thought each day, and I have really been enjoying it. An early-year sampling of favorites: from E.M. Forster: “Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.” From someone named Joanna Macy: “To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe - to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it - is a wonder beyond words.” From the Upanishads: “The spirit down here in man and the spirit up there in the sun, in reality are only one spirit, and there is no other one.” And I’ll finish up with my all-time fave, John Keats: “I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.” 

In August of 2017, much of the U.S. witnessed a total solar eclipse. I was working at a construction and engineering firm in Boulder (Colorado had about a 91% totality) and we went out into our small parking lot to take a gander at it. Some thoughtful person had brought in eyewear, like 3D glasses for the theater, only they were certified to protect your eyes as you looked up at the phenomenon. Scattered in the lot next door to ours were some young people - undergrads at the U. of Colorado most likely - because there was a pot dispensary there. 

We’re watching and remarking and gawking, and I took off my lenses and walked them over to a shy-looking young guy, who may or may not have been high. If he was, then he was very low-key about it. I handed him the protective gear and said, You probably want to see this. He appreciated it big time and I told him to be careful. He almost didn’t do it, but I gently encouraged him and when he brought the eyegear to his eyes and looked up, he looked up for a long time. It was almost like having a contact high.

A few days ago I watched the Avengers Infinity War, because I like the franchise … well, it just seemed like so much filler to me. It’s so obviously set up for a sequel - it boils down to the latest in the exploitative, we’re-just-going-to-make-noisy-frenetic-shit-you’ll-buy-it-anyway genre. That’s what they should call the superhero genre. Religion used to be the opiate of the masses. Now it’s cinema. A religion of its own.

My reading progresses glacially. Beside me here is “Everything Under” by Daisy Johnson. It’s debut fiction that was nominated for the Booker last year! I love an amazing bit of debut fiction. I’m only on page 38, and so far the tension builds between a neglectful mother who is hated by her grown daughter as the mother slides into dementia. 

My other book at the moment is a reader of Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian linguist and philosopher who published from the 1920s to 1950s. He talks about what he calls Heteroglossia, the multitude of languages and meanings in fiction, but also in everyday speech. Won’t get soporific about it, but he says that authoritarian regimes (which figure prominently in stuff written in Soviet Russia) try to suppress the multiplicity of languages, and attempt to keep all utterance in standard, normative language. He calls this a centripetal force. The countervailing centrifugal force is the more natural and stronger force, pushing meaning and language outward to encounter more and more meaning. It dovetails nicely with a book I recently finished, called “Sweet Lamb of Heaven,” by Lydia Millet (2016). In that book, a woman’s estranged husband severely limits what she can say, and even think, as he runs for election to a seat in the Alaska state legislature. It’s uncanny, actually.

Well, right there, I’m going to peter out and go to bed. Been a long day.

Gift Haul and Words on Pixar

Dad, I loved what you wrote.

I realized a few things about my own musings on the topic, and have been trying to get them down. Like, originally I was going to write down two separate Top Five lists but could never manage to take out either Toy Story 3, Finding Nemo, or Ratatouille, and it turned out my "best of" was really a "favorites" list.

I admit that it's been at least a decade since I've watched The Incredibles, and I'd wanted to watch it before going to see the sequel this past summer. Neither of those things have happened, but it remains the general plan: binging them.

For me, the combination of Finding Nemo's graphics, the constant propulsion, the varying settings in both the ocean and in a tank, combined with the juxtaposition of the two kinds of "bad-daddy-ing"---over-protection and assuming control versus over-confidence and pushing---made up for the predictable machinations of the plot. Also, I could see how Dory's thing could be annoying as hell, but, ever since her days as a stand-up on A&E back in the early 90s, Ellen has always cracked me up, and the Dory shtick still cracks me up.

Well, more so there than in Finding Dory, anyway.

The motivations and specific scenarios of the characters in Toy Story 3 definitely make it one of the most emotionally complex and original story-lines Pixar's ever made. I saw it in the theater in Austin, in IMAX 3D. (That almost deserves its own exclamation point.)

Disclaimer: IMAX 3D is not a good way to see any movie. The screen is too huge to see it all at once anyway. Normally with IMAX, a viewer is immersed in the word of the movie. With 3D on top of a screen that big, only the center of your field of vision is in 3D. Everything else is blurry. The whole experience turns into a three dimensional tunnel surrounded by clouds of scenic blur.

The incinerator scene, engulfing me in 270 degrees of three-dimensional garbage flakes, was one of the most powerful and mature scenes I'd ever seen.

Ratatouille came out when we were living in New York, and I was out of work at that time. It hit really close to home for me, and complicated an already complicated situation. I was never Remy, and I never really wanted to be, but I understood him, and the world he saw. It's like the piece of art that shines a light on something you know very closely, or hold dear to you, but is off limits to others. (Check out the movie "Waiting..." for the same kind of thing.)

I'd wanted to say more about those movies in a more polished and less after-dinner-beer form, but I was motivated to show off my Christmas Present from Corrie and the Boy.

Before that, two more quick Pixar bullet points to remind myself for later:

• You make me want to go back and watch Brave again, which is good. I'd love to compare it to Moana.
• How about the graphics of The Good Dinosaur? Like the backgrounds and the Nature, with the capital N? They stood out to me in a movie that pissed me off more than I wanted it to. 

Watches!

A watch. That was the gift.

I liked my watch. It was sleek and readable, the leather band made it low-profile and comfortable, and the blue face worked for my eyes, both reading and reflecting. Cass also likes the watch, and was prone to wearing it, having me tighten it to the tightest hole on the strap (and still it would swivel on his arm).

I'd been thinking about getting a new watch for some time, but I never seriously pursued it. Corrie had noticed me "not-seriously" pursuing it and did her thing.

Christmas tree light bonus!

I'd been researching the wooden watch fad, if that's a thing I'm currently a part of, and found some timepieces that I thought looked pretty cool and cost a reasonable amount. I'm not typically the kind of guy who accessorizes for myself. In fact, I've been mistaken for homeless on multiple occasions. (Wait, what?)

Corrie got in there and found something she thought was cool, and got it. She said that she was going to get a watch that she could have inscribed, but then she found this one, with the cool, clear glass on the back, and decided it was cool enough.

She was telling me all of this as I looked at it in its box. Glass on the back?

Real tree; that's how we do...

Of course that's an automatic watch. Back in the late 90s I had a boner for them when they were called kinetic and I was ignorant to the true provenance of the technology.

For the record, I'm fairly certain I saw this watch on the sites I was perusing. I thought it was very cool, but it was never something I would get on my own. It's way too cool for me to ever consider getting myself. Which is weird...maybe?

While many of my colleagues and friends and smart watches, technological marvels that are one-part Dick Tracy and one-part Star Trek, I've gone the other direction.

My watch is made of wood and metal. It has no plastic, takes no batteries, and uses no electricity. Springs and a tungsten fly-wheel compel the nearly sweeping second hand...and both of the other hands, too.

This is the first kind of invisible clasp watch I've ever had as well:

Bonus Cass sighting

I've thought back to the most memorable watches I've ever worn. The vast majority were the belt clasp. One time mom got me a "rugged" watch for Christmas, because I'd said I'd been looking for a band that could hold up to my lifestyle. Whatever that was. This rugged watch had a canvas and Velcro strap. I can report that it did, indeed, hold up. Another time I bought a watch at a pawn shop in Portland, Oregon (I was in need for the classroom), and it had a fully metallic wrist band that worked like an eighties-era elastic bracelet. That meant it didn't have any clasping to mess with.

Every other watch, I'm fairly certain, has been the belt clasp style.

So far so good on this new clasping system.

Lost steam there at the end.

To sum up: Love my new watch.