Category: Film

We have come so far, America, yet we have so far to go

Posted on 16 January, 2017 By Wil

Last night, while looking for a movie to watch, I said to Anne, “How about Selma? It’s timely.”

It’s one of those movies that we’d both been intending to see since it came out, but never got around to. I tracked it down and we settled in. It is a powerful, moving, beautiful film that at least one Fascist who is about to become an illegitimate president should watch.

When the film was over, I sat on the couch, and wept for several minutes. This isn’t ancient history. This isn’t fiction. This is something that happened less than a decade before I was born, and the kind of systemic racism it reveals is still happening today from Ferguson to Baltimore to towns all across America that never make the news. And now we are about to have an illegitimate president who would look at George Wallace and think he was the hero of this story.

It’s appalling to me that our SCOTUS threw out the voting rights act that Dr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and so many other civil rights leaders fought so hard to bring into law. It’s even more appalling that, half a century later, our country still needs it. It’s disgusting and sickening that the idiot who is about to become the least popular president in history doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, about the people who fought so hard (some giving up their lives) to ensure that their fellow Americans were allowed to exercise the rights given to them in our country’s Constitution.

I went to a hockey game today. At one point in the second period, a picture of Dr. King was put on the jumbotron with an excerpt from his famous “I have a dream” speech printed next to him. There was no announcement, there was no attention drawn to it, to him, to his sacrifices and to the entire reason today is a federal holiday. I think I was one of maybe half a dozen people in the Staples Center who applauded. I’m pretty sure I was the only one (at least in my section) who stood up. That made me feel ashamed for my country, and so disappointed in my fellow citizens. More attention was paid to the kiss cam, than to the memory of the man who we are meant to honor and remember today.

We have come so far, America, yet we have so far to go.

Film

only i didn’t say fudge

Posted on 24 December, 2016 By Wil

Sometime in the next 18 or so hours, I’m going to do the annual quoting of A Christmas Story on my Twitter. You should unfollow me now.

I came across this delightful interview that Peter Billingsley did with Buzzfeed News that made me really happy to read.

[After he auditioned for the film and] didn’t hear back from [Director Bob]Clark for weeks, Billingsley just thought, oh well, he’d lost the role. “Bob Clark said for whatever reason that I was the first kid that he saw,” says Billingsley. “But [he] thought, Well, jeez, you can’t just hire the first person you see. So my assumption was, ‘Well, that didn’t go well.’ But whatever. You were quickly onto the next thing.”

Thousands of kids later, and after an eventual callback, Billingsley did indeed land the film’s lead role, and shot the film in Toronto and Cleveland over roughly a month in the dead of winter. “This was a real little grinder kind of indie [film],” he says with affection. “It took [Bob] 12 years to get the movie made. Nobody wanted to fund it, this period movie about a BB gun. Nobody cared about it.”

I think about stories like this a lot. I think about how it’s almost always the little indie movies that nobody wanted to give a chance that end up becoming the films that define a generation. There’s a similar, likely made up by my mom and a publicist story, about Rob Reiner seeing me before anyone else for the role of Gordie in Stand By Me. There is also a similar story about how nobody wanted to release the film, no studio wanted to fund the film, everyone in the industry at the time had passed on it, and when we landed at Embassy (before it was bought by Sony), it still wasn’t a sure thing (HA A SURE THING THAT’S VERY CLEVER WHEATON) and the production was nearly cancelled just a few days before we were supposed to begin filming. We were already on location, and Rob Reiner called Norman Lear, who wrote a personal check to get the movie made.

So. For the five of you who don’t know, Peter Billingsley played Ralphie in A Christmas Story. We both auditioned for the role, and even went to final callbacks together. I wrote about it way back in 2001:

I think that A Christmas Story is the greatest Christmas movie ever made. Each year, I watch it, over and over, on TNN or TNT or TBS, or whatever T-channel does that marathon, and I never, ever, get tired of it. Every year, when I watch it, I am reminded of the time, when I was about 10 or so, that I auditioned for it. The auditions were held on a cold, rainy day in late spring, down in some casting office in Venice, I think. I saw the same kids that I always saw on auditions: Sean Astin, Keith Coogan, this kid named “Scooter” who had a weird mom, and Peter Billingsley, who was very well known at the time, because he was “Messy Marvin” in those Hershey’s commercials. I sort of knew Peter, because we’d been on so many auditions together, but I was always a little star struck when I saw him. (One time, I saw Gary Coleman on an audition…now, this was HUGE for all of us kids who were there, because we’re talking 1982 or 83…and he was Arnold freakin’ Jackson, man…wow). [tangent] Whenever I see Sean Astin, I sob at him that he got to be in Goonies, and I didn’t, and he always says, “Hey, man, you got Stand By Me. I’d trade all my movies for that.” I haven’t seen him since he did Lord of the Rings…but something is telling me that he wouldn’t be so keen to trade that. 😉 [end of tangent]

So I remember that audition, for A Christmas Story. The scenes we had to read were the one where Ralphie is telling Santa what he wants, and panics, telling Santa that a football is okay, the one where Ralphie is decoding the Little Orphan Annie message, and the one where he thinks he shot his eye out.

There’s a similar, possibly apocryphal story about Stand Be Me that claims I was the first kid Rob Reiner saw for Gordie. I’m not sure if it’s true, but I do know that we were also a tiny indie movie nobody wanted to fund, no studio wanted to release, and was nearly cancelled literally the day before filming was to begin.

I sometimes look at movies that didn’t cast me, and wonder what I could have done with the role, if given the chance. Sometimes I feel sad when that happens. But I don’t feel that way about A Christmas Story. Peter is perfect in that role, and though I’d known he made a career for himself working behind the camera, I didn’t know what, precisely, he’d done. It makes me happy to know that he’s another survivor of the Child Actor’s Club.

Film

ICYMI: a tiny bit of trolling

Posted on 17 December, 201616 December, 2016 By Wil

I went to see Rogue One Thursday night with a bunch of my friends, because OBVIOUSLY I went to see it again. I will see it all the times, because I like it that much.

It was raining and what passes for cold, here in Los Angeles, so I went to my closet to grab a scarf, and I realized that I could do a tiny bit of silly trolling, inspired by the Big Bang Theory version of myself:

One guy walked up to me and said, “that’s the wrong franchise, buddy,” to which I replied, “Oh … is it?”

Film

The Guardians of the Galaxy 2 Trailer is Fantastic

Posted on 16 December, 201616 December, 2016 By Wil

I feel like trailers show us way more than they need to, but maybe that’s just because I’m old and set in my ways. I do my best to avoid them, but I was super excited to see this one before Rogue One last night. I love Guardians of the Galaxy so much (It’s my favorite of all the Marvel movies, and maybe my favorite movie in its genre of all time), that I was bouncing in my seat and clapping my hands the whole time for this one.

Nothing about the plot is given away in this. It’s just the characters we love doing the things that make us love them, so if you’re a trailer avoidance aficionado like me, you’re probably safe. Here’s the trailer at YouTube. It’s also embedded below:

So if you watched it, what do you think?

Current Affairs

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

Posted on 13 December, 201613 December, 2016 By Wil

We, the Rebel Alliance, do therefore in the name—and by the authority—of the free beings of the Galaxy, solemnly publish and declare our intentions:

To fight and oppose you and your forces, by any and all means at our disposal;

To refuse any Imperial law contrary to the rights of free beings;

To bring about your destruction and the destruction of the Galactic Empire;

To make forever free all beings in the galaxy.

To these ends, we pledge our property, our honor, and our lives.

Until about two months ago, I was really into the Empire in the Star Wars universe. Darth Vader was cool and the bounty hunters were awesome, and the Death Star was bad ass, and Star Destroyers were amazing.

And then America elected (barely and with interference from a hostile foreign power) a Fascist know-nothing who has so much contempt for our country and the people who live in it, he has chosen men and women who have no experience in government and/or aggressively hate the agencies they will be charged with overseeing to lead them. He’s instigated dangerous international diplomatic incidents that threaten the safety of all of us, and he doesn’t seem to care.Though he lost the popular vote by the largest margin in history, though he will take office (unless the Electoral College acts to preserve the Republic — I’m still in Bargaining, it turns out) with the lowest approval rating in this century, though he has never held a public office or cared about anyone other than himself in his life, he and his toadies are acting like he has a mandate to destroy the popular, progressive achievements of the last century, and enact policies that will greatly harm the very people who voted for him.

Neonazis have been welcomed into the mainstream of America, and their leaders have been normalized by our media. An unabashed authoritarian is set to take control of the most powerful office in the world, with the most invasive and unaccountable spying apparatus in history at his tiny orange fingertips.

All of that was going through my mind as I watched Rogue One last weekend, especially during scenes that take place in cities that are under occupation. I realized that I’d sort of known on some level that Star Wars was, at its core, an anti-Fascist story, and I’d understood that the bad guys were, like, bad … but it was all in the fiction for me. Until this weekend, it wasn’t something I’d ever really felt as a commentary on reality. After a lifetime of being entertained by Star Wars, it landed on me in a way that it never had, before. I didn’t want to like the Empire, or admire how cool it was when Vader uses the Force to choke someone. I wanted the Empire to lose, and to lose badly. I wanted the Empire, and the Emperor, and the Sith to be destroyed. Retroactively, Darth Vader’s redemption in Jedi was more powerful than it had ever been, and I haven’t watched Jedi in years.

Suddenly, Stormtroopers weren’t just cool action figures I played when when I was a kid; they were literal stormtroopers. They were the forces of evil and terror. The fun of cheering for Darth Vader when he’s being a badass villain, believing that bounty hunters are awesome, or getting excited when the Death Star is cleared to fire and a Star Destroyer blasts ships into oblivion … it was all gone. The Empire is terrible. The Empire is evil. I realized that Yoda is right about the Dark Side of the Force and those who are seduced by it. I realized that the Republic — our Republic — is worth fighting for, and even though it feels like nothing matters at all right now, everything is terrible, and the forces of evil are going to get away with it because the so-called “leaders” in Congress put their party and their ambitions ahead of their patriotism — maybe because of that — it may soon be time to get off of Tatooine, and join the Rebel Alliance.

May the Force be with us.