From the Vault, Apparently

Mom sent me and Dan, I'm to assume, a thumb drive with 552 photos she'd discovered in boxes in a closet. She sent them to her favorite digitizer, and back comes the pictures and a disc. You can imagine the rest.

This isn't the first time she's done this, and I always find it fascinating, since the digitizing people don't ever seem to try to place the pictures in any kind of order. One minute there's a picture of me and Dan in the living room at Basswood circa 1994, then Christmas at Grandpa Tom's and Lizzie is 15 months old, then Bobbi holding an infant Heather with Scott toddlering around her feet.

The first few pictures, I was stunned to see, were photos I took during our 1990 trip.

I wanted to come here to share some of them, especially the cool ones.

Like this one, from Christmas some year at Grandpa Tom's, probably 1989:

Having a kid makes me feel differently about this kind of picture.

How about us boys, dad:

There were some tender pictures of dad and Lizzie, which were neat.

Remember posing on the couch for timer-induced family photo time? And then mom trying to snap one of just us boys?

That was when my hair was just starting to curl and I didn't know what the hell to do with it. Too bad Dan's hand is positioned like that.

Some were pretty cool compositions, pics I'm sure mom took. I especially like those momentary snapshot into the life of a guy, the SHERWOOD from the title of this blog, as he lives his life. One, as a father of two on a trip to Yosemite:

And another, as if this were penned by Joseph Heller, chilling on a couch, no kids, I'd even guess no wife:

This Sherwood-son has filled one of those roles, and is about to fill another.

There are more coming...Dan, feel free to put some up (you and me at Johnny and Janelle's wedding?).

These ones made me smile. They all did, though, really.

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.

Wouldn't Fit in Comments

I have to confess to being only partially qualified to address your post. Of the twenty Pixar films you list, I have seen sixteen. The four I missed are: The Good Dinosaur (almost never heard of it), Coco (no time, really), Cars 3 (Cars 2 soured me on the series), and The Incredibles 2 (too recent). Also I never focused before on two parallel processes producing animated films from one basic source. Your post stretched me out a little and I appreciate it.

Of course I won’t express an opinion on material I haven’t seen, but I do have to say that The Incredibles offers so much: it’s a little mushrooming of popular culture, with stunning visuals, appealing characters (especially E, the costume designer), and some deeper issues thrown in, like our rampant disgust with our current over-litigious culture, and the psychology of obsessive envy.

The Incredibles places itself so specifically in time and place - clearly the early 1960s, complete with James Bond-type infrastructure and gadgetry, automobile styles, and media coverage techniques. And a world separated into “Supers” and the rest of us is all too familiar to anyone who has read even one Superman comic. It’s the kind of opus made specifically for this kind of outlandish storytelling. I watch it a couple of times a year.

Toy Story 3 remains maybe the best thing Pixar ever did. Winks and nudges in the direction of pop culture - “No, Buzz. I AM your father!” Seriously? - and of course all the toys are pop culture references in themselves. The main thrust for this picture is the hair’s breadth escape by our intrepid heroes from the embittered and possibly schizophrenic stuffed bear, Lots-o’. The emotional themes are as weighty and fraught as in any live action drama, and we forget we’re actually dealing with toys’ lives. How deep can you go? It broadens the definition of animation, and the sophistication and effectiveness with which it deals with adult issues of family, rejection, and betrayal stake out new ground for the genre.

Finding Nemo didn’t have the luxury of too many pop culture references, but the jokes abound anyway. Mount Wannahockaloogie? The Shining-inspired “Heeeeere’s Brucey!” as the shark chases Marlon and Dory; fart jokes between seagulls. But for me the epic quest of the movie, while having its thrills and memorable moments, especially surfer-dude sea turtles riding an ocean current, is too static and borders on the frustrating, Dory’s shtick notwithstanding. It’s excellent work, but I think a little short of Toy Story 3. 

I know movies in general depend on us viewers suspending our disbelief, and especially  animation. And I love the Paris that’s portrayed in Ratatouille, but try as I might, I couldn’t quite buy in to the rat-sous chef interface that supports the whole film. The movie’s lovely, and slyly pokes fun at French cuisine snobbery with a rat-infested restaurant winning over the jaded critic, but while I liked it, for me it rests on a flimsy foundation.  

The preceding paragraph probably makes me a Philistine.

Wall-E is a very interesting entry. Its issues are both current and timeless: the progress of artificial intelligence combines with humanity’s inability to deal with itself or its planet. Its visuals are excellent, its dramatic pace unflagging, and the changes wrought in the principals are profound. It does belong high on any list. 

If I were, say, to compare Wall-E with Zootopia, I would say that Wall-E is superior because of its ambition and how well it executes its concept. But Zootopia is a gratifying product in my opinion. It combines cartoon cuteness with a noir hard-boiled mystery - ever notice how all the action with the hench-wolves and trapping the crooked bureaucrat happen at nighttime? There is the friendship forming, then falling-out, and then reforming-stronger-than-ever, a whole series of delightful visuals (love the commuter train), and of course, a rotten-to-the-core public servant as the bad guy. That theme never gets old.

Seems to me Moana and Brave are both products of the current zeitgeist of female heroes, and extremely young female heroes. I enjoyed both of them; their difference is that Moana is a civic-centered story, and Brave centers on family. Moana can be predicted pretty easily, but Brave has multiple show-focusing suspenseful moments where Moana spends more time enlightening us about Pacific Island culture and history.

Let me finish on Frozen. It’s exceptional graphically, and its comic relief portions are super top-notch. It’s one of the few animated features that’s actually a musical, in that its chief characters sing songs that carry the plot forward and establish the mood of the scene and act. The family drama at its center is deep and real enough to carry the movie. However: they made SO much off it, and the marketing of merchandise and the production of a live action stage show (fun, epically staged, a little gimmicky and needing one musical number excised - I saw the Broadway preview in Denver), that it has become a kind of instant institution. Little sister princesses were seen everywhere on their long gowns and gloves, you couldn’t escape the logo if you left the house - enough! I understand being torn about Frozen, completely. It seems churlish to denigrate something so successful, but it was just too ubiquitous. It’s not possible for them to forgo a sequel, is it?

Pixar Post, Part 1

After watching The Third Man and having my movie ziggurat altered, I began thinking about rankings, and remembered that I had wanted to do something similar here about the twenty Pixar movies that have been made, seeing as how earlier this summer saw the release of that 20th film, The Incredibles 2, a movie I have yet to see.

Quickly, the list:

1. Toy Story
2. A Bug's Life
3. Toy Story 2
4. Monsters, Inc.
5. Finding Nemo
6. The Incredibles
7. Cars
8. Ratatouille
9. Wall-E
10. Up
11. Toy Story 3
12. Cars 2
13. Brave
14. Monsters University
15. Inside Out
16. The Good Dinosaur
17. Finding Dory
18. Cars 3
19. Coco
20. Incredibles 2

It has long been my contention that in 2010 with the release of Toy Story 3 Pixar began a long slide off of the top of the mountain of being the greatest animation film maker in the world, a title reclaimed by Disney. Tangled was also released that year, and while Tangled isn't as good as Toy Story 3, it is far closer to the original Golden Age of the '30s for Disney in terms of look and design, and it marked a reversal of their earlier efforts. 

Meet the Robinson's (2007) and Bolt (2008) aren't bad, really, but it's obvious that Disney is playing catch-up in terms of digital animation and storytelling. I mean, dang, compare those two with Pixar's two from the same years: Ratatouille and Wall-E.

Wreck-It Ralph came out the same year as Brave, in 2012, and it appeared the gap between Disney's in-house digital animation group and Pixar had finally disappeared. Frozen's 2013 smash-hit brought more shine to Disney than the prequel Monsters University brought to Pixar in that same year, and by now the eclipse has complete.

Pixar's best two films between 2013 and 2018, Inside Out (I didn't like it as much as many other people) and Coco (I may love it more than many other people) compare favorably, if not being better than, Disney's two best films during that same timeframe: Zootopia and Moana. 

If I were to rank those four, it would look like:

• Distant 4th: Inside Out
• Tie for Second: Moana
• Tie: Coco
• First: Zootopia

I may be torn in my feelings about Frozen, but between Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, and Moana, Disney has fully reclaimed the mantle, despite the excellence of Coco.

And here we're only talking about two animation producers and a single distributor! What a time to be alive!

Anyway, back to my desire to talk more about Pixar...

A Brief Note about the Cars Trilogy

I've always felt that the worst Pixar movie between Toy Story and Toy Story 3, a fifteen year era that saw 11 movie releases and the absolute height of Pixar's dominance, was Cars. And over the summer when I was inspired to do this listy-shenanigans post by other writers similarly minded listy-shenanigans, nearly all of them had the Cars sequels near the bottom of the list, as in the worst of the worst.

I have yet to see Cars 2. Cassius loved Cars so much that he eventually broke the DVD and now I haven't seen that installment for a few months. BUT, Cars 3 is on Netflix and has replaced the original as the Boy's go-to talking Car movie. I can say that I've seen the first and third movies recently.

I, too, would rank them near the bottom of any Pixar ranking, but in a vacuum, both movies fit on a continuum, bookending the main car, Lightning McQueen's, lifecycle from star rookie to flailing elder, and are pretty good as a pair. 

Hearing that Cars 2 is a spy spoof starring mostly 'Mater, the tow-truck voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, with maybe some racing on the Euro circuit, I could see this movie filling the 20th spot on a list, with the first and third, taken together, represent a salvage of the talking-car theme to possibly higher up the list.

Other Brief Notes

I'd like to mention later some thoughts on Brave, Inside Out, and The Good Dinosaur. Also I'd like to voice my disappointment with Finding Dory's setting at the Morro Bay Aquarium (a fictional place) while not actually showing Morro Rock at anytime during the film's running time.

So...how would you rank the movies? Would your ranking be in terms of best or in terms of favorite? Are those the same for you guys? My list may look something like this, but it could change with the weather...(I'm only going with five)

1. Finding Nemo
2. Ratatouille
3. Toy Story 3
4. Coco
5. Wall-E

What about Monsters, Inc and Up? And the OG Toy Story?