I had a night in to myself last night. Well, not totally to myself. Lil' S1 was here, but he's a teenager with a bevy of devices and his own room, so I didn't see him much. To be fair, he did agree to watch a movie with me, but he didn't like the one I selected—The Town—so he bailed after about 15 minutes. I was okay with it. It's a much gritty movie than I expected, and the subject matter is right on the edge of age appropriateness for a 14-year-old. I mean, if he really wanted to keep watching it, I definitely would have let him, but he didn't, so I was fine with him peacing out before dudes get shot in the head at point blank range.
In retrospect, it was a bad choice by me for father-son movie night, but Lil' S1 suggested we watch a heist movie (he just watched and liked Ocean's Eleven), and The Town was the first one that came to mind. I didn't know anything about it, other than Ben Affleck is in it; it's set in Boston; and Joe Muzzulla used to watch it four times a week.* I thought it might be a kinda light and fun caper film—the type where you still feel good rooting for the criminals (like Ocean's Eleven)—but it's not. It's not that at all.
*Muzzulla from the linked article: "When I was an assistant, and I had to turn in my postgame edits, I would go home and just work from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. I needed something to kind of keep me up or keep me going. There was a three-movie shuffle (the other two were Whiplash and The Dark Knight) that I would turn on in order to get me through the game so that I could get to bed." Could you live a normal and happy life watching these three movies every night? I feel like I'd be simultaneously keyed up and bummed out the entire day.
It's a pretty good movie, though. I thought about also bagging it when Lil' S1 opted out, but I decided to stick with it, and I'm glad I did, if only to see Jeremy Renner's performance. He's tremendous (deservedly earning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nom). I don't think The Town would crack my personal list of top 100 films of all time, but it was well worth a watch, especially since I had already started it. I find it really difficult to start a movie for some reason (unless I'm on a plane), but once I'm into it, I really don't want to stop, and I almost always find the experience satisfying, even if the movie is not that good. I watch movies the same way many people go to the gym. It's fine once you get there and rewarding when it's over, but it's not always easy to motivate yourself to get there in the first place.
After I watch a movie, there are two things I like to do: 1) look up if there is a Rewatchables episode on it; 2) search up the cast on Wikipedia. With The Town, for 1), there is—I already listened to it. For 2), I was surprised to see Blake Lively was in this movie, and that made me realize I didn't know who Blake Lively actually was. I knew the name because TMZ is one of S's guilty pleasures, and she told me all about the legal fights with that Baldoni guy, but I obviously didn't know what she looked like, being that I didn't recognize her in the movie. I also didn't know what she was first famous for. I've since learned she was the lead in Gossip Girl, a TV teen drama I had heard of but never watched because I was a man in his 30s when it came out (I say having consumed and thoroughly enjoyed the entire series Never Have I Ever). Now I know all this, and there is a decent chance I will promptly forget it and then randomly think What was that show Blake Lively was on? while I'm trying to focus on something else, and I'll have to Google it, annoyed that I had to stop whatever it was I was doing to slake my curiosity. Of course, in this hypothetical, I could just not look it up, but that's unrealistic. That's like waking up in the middle of night and trying to not go to the bathroom. You'll just think about it and think about it until you get up and go anyway, so you might as well just do it immediately and get it over with.
That, unfortunately, is how my brain works a lot these days. I just don't retain trivia the way I used to, and I get irritated by it. For example, Rebecca Hall is another actor in The Town (she's the female lead), so I read her filmography on Wikipedia last night also, and I remember thinking to myself Oh, yeah, she's in THAT, and now I can't remember what THAT is. I just looked it up for the second time a few hours ago, and I still can't remember. The weird thing—or maybe this isn't weird; maybe this is how it is for everybody—is that I still have a very good memory for things I used to know. Like, if it imprinted in my mind before, I dunno, age 35 or so, it's pretty firmly in there and would be difficult to dislodge even if I wanted that. But if I learned it after that, it's very tenuously in my memory, and I need to do flashcards or something like that every now and then to keep it in there. For example, I just looked up the Rebecca Hall movie for the third time. It's Vicky, Christina, Barcelona. So, I've now forgotten that twice in the past 18 hours, but I could tell you that I watched that movie in Fall of 2009 in San Diego with my cousins. I was there for a convention, and it was the same week the Seahawks beat the Jaguars 44-0.*
*Let the record show it was actually 41-0. So, not perfect recall, but pretty good.
S and I play this game Movie Grid every night in bed, and we are a pretty good team, because she watches—or considers watching—just about everything,* so she can probably come up with three movies starring, say, Florence Pugh, while I literally couldn't name one, despite listening to S rattle them off many times. (Wait, I think she's in Little Women. Boom! OK, got one at least.) But then older actors will come up like Jack Nicholson, and she only knows As Good as It Gets. When this happens I like to mess with her and feign amazement that she doesn't know the deep cuts from an actor's oeuvre: "What?! Come on, that's your only one for Jack Frickin' Nicholson?! You've never hear of Wolf? What about The King of Marvin Gardens, The Witches of Eastwick, Hoffa..." It's funny because she doesn't know I'm doing that.
*If you wonder how she does this, the answer is twofold: 1) she travels a lot; 2) she's willing to watch things in 15-minute increments whenever she's able to take a quick break from work or chores. That last one is key. That's the how busy people watch a lot of movies and TV shows.
Alright, it's about time for me to wrap this up. But before I do, I have to share one more thing about a film that I learned today. Turns out pretty much everything about Frank Dux, the inspiration for the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport, is untrue. The dude apparently is a huge liar. This is not very surprising. Even as a 13-year-old, I found the claims in the end credits about the real-life Dux's feats in a real-life Kumite dubious. What is surprising is that, well, for one thing, he's still alive—I always just assumed he was dead for some reason—but more so that I hadn't heard about this before today when a series of movie-related Wikipedia jumps took me to his page. He got exposed as a tall tale teller decades ago. This is a perfect illustration of what makes misinformation so pernicious. People hear the original false story, but they don't always hear the corrective followup. It's like Mark Twain once said: “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Until next time...
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