Breakfast with Pandora

12 days of Netflix, Part I

  It's Christmas, folks.

I know there are those of you who have already slung your tree into the gutter, tinsel waifs blowing in the chill breeze. For me and others, Christmas starts Christmas Eve and ends Epiphany Eve, the night before January 6.

Etwart says, Happy Christmas, everybody!

When my kids were young, they had so many relatives giving them gifts that, along with ours, they could open one gift a day, partridge-in-a-pear-tree style, on all 12 days.

Nowadays I think of the 12 days as days of relaxation and feast, before going back into a new semester with 6 AM wakeups five days a week.

Mostly by accident, I have spent a lot of time with Netflix this Christmas-- the Watch Instantly feature. I rejoined in November because I got the movie-watching bug, ordered one movie from my queue, and promptly forgot all about it. I still have the same movie, From Russia With Love, the best Bond movie of them all.

The Watch Instantly feature is great for the lazy procrastinators among us who have fast Internet connections. You look up what movies are available, click a button, and the movie starts playing on your computer.

Below are capsules of the first movies I watched for the first four days of Christmas. If I keep it up, more will follow. Did you like these? Did you see these? Leave a comment.

Foul Play (1978): I am a nostalgia hound, and I figured this one was going to float my boat. A romantic comedy starring Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn involving a plot to assassinate the pope, it was filmed in my hometown, San Francisco, and we all went out to see it when it first came out. I remember it as totally fun and funny, but the second time around it was kind of flat. I remember in particular the first scene at the party where Chase bumbles with the cocktail stirrers as longer and funnier. There were a lot of good parts-- especially Dudley Moore's-- but it didn't add up to a whole this time.

Frank Caliendo: All Over the Place (2007): This guy sort of shot up and flew down like a flare. Caliendo is an impressions comedian who did the best George W. around and a John Madden (the football announcer) that was uncanny. He also did a great Charles Barkley (the basketball player), and had a stint on sports shows as a result. He must have known his days as the latest thing were numbered, however, because about halfway through this show, he started to tell the audience that he was going off on tangents and bombing. And there was a heckler that he didn't deal with very well. A rough set, despite the audience that was 99% ready to laugh at whatever he said.

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008): I didn't see this in first run because I had a kind of dread that it wasn't going to be that great. I was mostly right. I think I'm getting too old for these ting, ting, ting, ehhh! sword-fight movies where the ultimate result has to be that the good guys win. One thing that did get me, though, was the Aslan scene at the end, where he restores Reepicheep's tail. That was faithfully from the book, and they got it right. Much of the rest was kind of a mess. And the mushy stuff with Susan and Caspian was over the top. Bleah, kissing!

The Big Lebowski (1998): Another one I never saw on first or second run, because in those days I never went to movies but stayed home at night with tiny kids. This is a Coen brothers film, and an amazing one, a time capsule of Los Angeles and the Clinton era, when we thought, mistakenly, that the only thing we'd ever have to worry about again was whether to buy the Jaguar or the Rolls.

The Big Lebowski is a hard-boiled detective movie, starring Jeff Daniels as a hard-boiled detective who doesn't know he's a detective. He's an aging hippie who stumbles on a complicated kidnapping plot that everyone wants to hire him to resolve. Along the way he pieces together details until it all comes together in the most bizarre fashion.

The delicious Sam Elliott narrates and participates as The Stranger, a cowboy storyteller, which makes this film deliciously meta and postmodern. It's very LA, very conscious of the roots of American cinema. I loved it, though with the nudity and raging f-bombs it's not for the kids. John Goodman, in support, knocked it out of the park. The best performance I've ever seen him give.

What's next? Once I do a few Christmas chores around the house, I'll be back to the computer and the 17,000 titles Netflix has in the vault for me to watch instantly. Oh, the technology!

Word of the day: quirkmuffin

 By way of the blog "Dealbreakers," which is a grown-up and very funny take on what makes  people "undateable," this post on a word I'd never heard before and which-- today, at least-- came up with only  646 hits on Google.

Pancakes with Pandora.

A quirkmuffin, apparently, is that "adorable female lead from your favorite quirky movie" (such as Natalie Portman or Zooey Deschanel) who would be an obnoxious maniac in real life.

Also an ENFP.

By the way, hands down Natalie Portman's best (really rough and grown-up) role was in Cold Mountain.

Thanks to Drew for the Dealbreaker link.

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Also, watch this trailer and, if you are in your thirties or forties, try to resist going to see this movie. Hint: Tina Fey and Steve Carell. Sad that we have to wait till April to resist fully.

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Finally, there must be some of you out there who like The Freshman, the 1990 film with Matthew Broderick and Marlon Brando. On IMDb.com, it only garners a 6.4 rating. How can this be? It's one of my favorites. Let me know your rating.

My stroll down nostalgia lane was courtesy Netflix, where I currently have a two-week trial. I discovered that I can watch some movies instantly on my computer, and this holiday weekend it's been The Freshman and Bottle Shock. What do I have to say about Bottle Shock, the movie about the 1976 blind tasting between California and French wines that California won? They really worked hard to make the female lead look like Jane Fonda, which was fun to see. Otherwise, it was pretty unwatchable.

BTW, it got a 6.8 on IMDb. What is the world coming to?

The appeal of vampires

By way of elegant blogger Rebecca Clay Haynes, this question: "What accounts for the enduring appeal of vampires?"

She asked this question on her Facebook page, and, among several comments, attracted this Iron John-style assessment:

 The more divorced we get from our primal, pagan, animal, dark, shadow side, the more "civilized", the more "in our head", "out of touch with our bodies", "sexually repressed", etc., etc., the more appealing is the mythology of an external, evil, amoral, blood-sucking, primal being drawn to us, to enter us, fang first.

This may have been true from about 1946 to about 1963, but I don't think anyone can argue that we are out of touch with our bodies or sexually repressed today. We are among the most puritanical and yet sexualized societies ever to hit the earth. You can't escape sexual imagery, language, politics, or anything else sexual if you are in any way a consumer of popular culture. I'm pretty sure we are in touch with our primal-- selfish, fearful, pleasure-seeking, survival-oriented-- selves. We have never not been, some folks' mid-twentieth century desire to the contrary notwithstanding.

I am an interpreter of particular stories in particular contexts, and for this phenomenon I very much consider the target audience.

For the Twilight series of books which is currently holding the attention mostly of young girls and women-- and some of their mothers-- the appeal has nothing to do with vampires, and everything to do with the classic (American?) female desire for the bad boy. Here also you get the double whammy of a bad boy, Edward, who is actually chivalrous and honorable, which is a lethal (so to speak) combination for romantically-inclined girls and women.

But there is also the component of blood. For adolescent girls who are just getting familiar with the reality that blood will be in their lives on a monthly basis-- and that there will be a relationship between that and sexuality and childbearing-- I could see an erotic fascination with vampires.

In the trailer for New Moon, for example, the central scene is the one in which the heroine Bella cuts her finger, and a vampire goes crazy over the droplets of blood that come out. I have the impression that many girls would appreciate a story in which men are more attracted than repulsed when women bleed.

In this context, the title "New Moon" makes complete sense. 

As to the more universal appeal of vampires-- I don't know that there is one. Many international stories are mirrors, reflecting back the tensions and ambiguities with which an individual or culture dominantly identifies. I did a quick search of scholarly literature and found, for example, that the original Dracula by Bram Stoker may have addressed the colonial British fear of interracial marriage. 

BTW, I have not seen New Moon yet, though one man at least has. The two young ladies in my life did so on opening weekend, and both pronounced it good. When I asked my thirteen-year old if she liked Taylor Lautner, the werewolf character with the bare chest, she clammed up. Nary a smile. "Your silence speaks volumes," Dad said. Later on she allowed as to how he might have been somewhat attractive. She always did want a dog around the house.

The Aeneid Meme: Casting your favorite Roman epic

(This is a meme, so consider yourself tagged [this means you, Michael Leddy]-- and skip to the bottom if you want to avoid the preliminaries.)

Image: The Roman national epic in Victorian art.

An eon ago, before that Troy thing with Brad Pitt, there was a made-for-TV Hallmark Hall of Fame mini-series that dramatized the Odyssey.

Remember it? The one with Armand Assante as Odysseus, Bernadette Peters as Circe, Vanessa Williams as Calypso, and Greta Scacchi as Penelope? Anyone? Anyone?

Turns out that was back in 1997. Goodness, how time flies.

Back then, mythology geek that I was, and much younger and more idealistic, I decided to have an ancient Greek mythology neighborhood experience with it.

I invited everyone on our cul-de-sac to come see it on our TV, but with a twist: I determined to take the TV outdoors, sit it on a box on the street, and spread out blankets on the grassy slope of our lawn. My scheme was to recreate the ancient Greek practice of outdoor entertainment, making a kind of electronic Theater of Dionysus.

Idea guy that I was, I didn't care how I was going to acquire and spool 50 feet of extension cord and cable out to where the TV was to be perched. But we finally managed it, with much long-suffering from then-spouse, and some neighbors consented to indulge my fantasy.

It was a great scheme, but the experience was a bust. The movie was long, full of commercials, and stupid. Assante was a stiff, and they messed up a great story that was already a screenplay almost as it had been originally written. Plus, at the end of the 3 hours or whatever, we were only halfway through the two-day Event.

My neighbors politely declined my invitation to come back the next night. They were already mosquito-bitten enough, and had earned several cups of sugar and other favors in plenty.

Several years later, with Troy, big Hollywood messed up the Iliad. Now there is only one great ancient epic to go: the Aeneid.

The Aeneid is a downer, so they will have to do a lot of fixing of it if they want to make it palatable to American audiences. But it is also the national epic of Rome, which gives it a great hook.

Aeneas, the national hero of Rome, is your basic Trojan hero minding his own business during the Trojan War, when the Greeks use the Trojan Horse to penetrate his city and destroy it.

Conflict. Violence. Screaming. Fire. Think Troy, but without that confusing ankle thing.

Aeneas has to flee, though he'd rather die fighting. Much to his chagrin, the gods have designated him as the father of the Roman people.

Aeneas and his ragtag band of followers-- an idea stolen from Battlestar Galactica-- go on a long mission to find their new home. Along the way, Queen Dido pops up as a love interest for Aeneas. Another tragedy ensues, as it is impossible for her and Aeneas to be together. Dido ends up with a white flag upon her door.

Finally Aeneas and company come to Italy, where more conflict awaits Aeneas, and a villain-- the Italian superstar warrior Turnus. In the poem, this ends tragically as well, since Turnus ends up not being such a bad guy after all. But Hollywood can get him a Black Stetson and everything will be fine.

Now, with all this going on, there's got to be about 12 optioned screenplays going around So Cal waiting for the right investors.

So let's get a jump on the competition. Who do you want to see in the prime roles of this blockbuster epic? 

Aeneas... the reluctant hero... a family man, a single father, good with a sword when he has to be, but much more interested in peace.

Dido... exotic Carthaginian queen... a widow forced into the executive position by the death of her husband... a great leader, noble city-builder who falls tragically for a man she can never have.

Turnus... young Italian hothead... angry at this newcomer who has stolen his bride-to-be, Lavinia, because of some cockeyed prophecy...  monstrously talented at the art of war, but young-- so young...

Supporting characters:

Anchises... Aeneas' father... an inspiration to Aeneas, and a source of great sorrow... he dies before the proto-Romans come to Italy, but Aeneas meets him in the underworld, where he tells his son about the coming greatness of Rome...

Ascanius/Iulus... Aeneas' son... a cute little kid who grows up throughout the years of the story... by the end, he is a young man himself...

Lavinia... the daughter of King Latinus, the intended of Turnus, who is given to Aeneas after a prophecy tells Latinus that she should be wed to a stranger who comes from overseas... She should be pretty and young, but keep in mind she has no lines...

The Olympians... How do we handle them... yes, they are characters in the epic, especially the jealous Juno, who holds a vicious grudge against the Trojans...

Have at it! Tell the world who you'd like in these roles. And add other roles from the story (e.g., Anna, the lady standing in the painting above) as you see fit.

In a world...

Labor Day weekend movie notes, II: The Natural

There are a few movies I watch over and over again: Defending Your Life, when I need a boost of encouragement; Vertigo, when I'm nostalgic for the old San Francisco; When Harry Met Sally, when I need to be guaranteed a laugh; The Princess Bride, when I need to quote along some funny lines; Sideways, when I need to be reminded I am not as bad off as some people.

Movie poster from here.

Another one of these movies is The Natural, the self-consciously mythological baseball movie by one of my favorite directors, Barry Levinson, with one of the best performances Robert Redford has ever given. It tells the story of the ultimate underdog, Roy Hobbs, a 35-year old rookie who once had the chance to be "the best there ever was" but now just wants to get a piece of his dream 16 years after a near-fatal moral error.

Back when I had ambitions of publishing a scholarly book on Greek mythology and American cinema, I wrote a 6000-word chapter comparing the movie with Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode, which is an extended telling of the myth of Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece.

I liked the idea of Roy Hobbs as Jason, his teammates as the Argonauts, and the Golden Fleece as the championship of the league, which is symbolized by a "bit of cloth," the pennant.

Over the weekend I popped this one into my VCR because there were no decent sports on television, and did a little pleasure research with it. Apparently Barry Levinson used Arthurian legend as a template for the story, which he adapted from the much darker-- and brilliant-- Bernard Malamud novel. But now I read that on a DVD extra feature someone is comparing the movie to the Odyssey.

The movie is Arthurian because the team Roy Hobbs plays for is the New York "Knights." And it is Odyssean because of the character of Iris Gaines (Glenn Close, a smashing cast), Roy's long-lost faithful Penelope who hasn't seen him for 16 years.

But I shouldn't go on with these pedestrian insights. My 6000-word chapter is absolutely the last word.

<grin>

Well. It's been nine years since I wrote that chapter. Let me excerpt something from it, the poor thing:

There is nothing more entertaining than a good sports story. An exciting finish, unlikely turns of momentum, all of these get our blood racing. But to be good, that kind of story must also have a moral dimension. We must be able to root honestly for an individual or a team. It seems that we consider victory satisfying only when the worthy person or team achieves it. And in the stories we've just considered, it seems that the worthy person must be someone tied intimately to the family, to the things of civilization. If all these ingredients are present, it almost obligates the storyteller to cast his tale in a positive light.

It was a first draft.

Nine years later, I think of The Natural in a more postmodern light, as a story told by a certain author in a certain time. The mythological elements-- which include lightning bolts, special bats (swords, to bring back Arthur for a sec), the death of the father, the unknown son who comes to light, the good woman and the bad woman, good and evil generally, the quest, the moral error, the death and three-day wait for the resurrection moment, the fireworks, the redemption (just to name a few things)-- are put in there on purpose, partly as a way of telling a good story, but mostly as an affectionate tribute to those elements and to the sweetness of American mythology overall.

American cinematic mythology is what I really mean, and that post-Depression, I think. We got addicted to stories with happy endings during that prolonged economic tragedy, and we never got off of them. Barry Levinson is acknowledging that in The Natural.

I finally realized that The Natural wasn't going to be mythology for others as it is for me when one recent academic year I showed the clip of the climactic scene to a bunch of teenage heroes. It is, for me, a baseball and mythology fan, one of the greatest moments in cinematic history. To them, it was a random bit of celluloid without context or interest.

No one in the class had seen the movie, and not very many were interested in baseball. I think if they were to see the entire movie, it might move some of them. But there is something antique about it now that I don't think would translate.

It has been, after all, 25 years since the movie was made. Few things last that long in today's Internet daze.

I wonder if you saw it, and what you thought of it. If you weren't alive in 1984, did you see it on VHS or DVD? Did you know it even existed before this blog post? These are the questions that old scholars need to answer.

Labor Day weekend movie notes: The original Parent Trap

I love Labor Day weekend at home. It's quiet, the weather's just as nice as at the beach, and you spend so much less money.

Photo here.

Also, you have a little time for things that have eluded you in the first hectic weeks of teaching teenage heroes again: watching a movie here and there.

On Friday night, it was the original Parent Trap with Hayley Mills in her dual role as young adolescent twin sisters Susan Evers and Sharon McKendrick. In 1961, when The Parent Trap was released, audiences marveled at the special effect of splicing Mills onto opposite sides of the movie frame to give the illusion that she was actually two people.

In 2009, my viewing companions and I marveled at a different thing: spousal domestic abuse by the wife.

I had never watched this movie all the way through. For some reason I had never gotten beyond the peekaboo-dress-cutting scene (I can't explain it-- watch it yourself if you haven't already). This time I was there for the entire 129 minutes, and I mostly stayed awake.

The story of The Parent Trap revolves around the relationship of twins Susan and Sharon, who have been separated at the age of one and divided between their divorcing parents. Susan goes with father Mitch (Brian Keith) and Sharon goes with mother Maggie (Maureen O'Hara).

S&S are reunited at a summer camp, where after a few opening spitfire-works, come to realize they are sisters, and switch places in order to go to the other's home and see their other parent. Soon their scheme matures into a plan to get their parents back together, and as this is a Disney movie, you know the end without it being a spoiler.

Most of this is fun Disney stuff, but there is always a dark side to Mouse House picture-- witness, for example, the disturbing demises of moms in Bambi, Dumbo, and Finding Nemo.

About three-quarters of the way through Trap, divorcees Keith and O'Hara are having an argument in order to establish that they don't get along and that the separation was justified. Then, out of the blue, O'Hara drops Keith with a straight right to the eye, causing him to lose his taciturn rancher persona and transform himself into a whimpering puddle. Purple makeup assures that Keith's shiner is prominent for all to see.

Then, when the couple makes up, Keith says, "You can slug me in the face anytime you want."

Where is the 1950's All-American Macho Man made famous by all those westerns and detective films eaten up by post World War II audiences? Is this the first shot off the bow from the nascent feminist movement? Or is it another instance of well-documented Disney misogyny?

Whatever the answer, The Parent Trap is full of female manipulation, cat-fighting, and nice-nasty hissing and dissing, from Mills' twins themselves and their summer camp buddies (e.g. peekaboo dress-cutting) to O'Hara to Keith's gold-digging girlfriend (Joanna Barnes) and her mother (Linda Watkins), and even Keith's longtime maid (Una Merkel, of the famous "I don't say nothing" line).

It is as if the specter of divorce is so threatening that all femalekind must rise up either to end it or exploit it.

Especially since Brian Keith is loaded with money and looking to get swatted. You don't want to waste that type of horseflesh.

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Ye Old Extra Notes

For a more contemporary view of divorce and parent-trap style remarriage, see Mrs. Doubtfire, a Touchstone (Disney) picture. I love Sally Field, I really do.

Here is a gathering of Internet opinions on Disney and dead moms.

District 9, AKA great myth (spoilers)

District 9 is great myth, better seen than read about. So go see it if you haven't. In the meantime, I'll do my mythology-scholar thing, and you can read about it if you want when you come back.

Image here.

I went in to District 9 thinking it was going to be a major triumph for me in the iron stomach department. I'd read a review of the movie warning that it had graphic violence, and lots of it. I believe the phrase "multiple dismemberments" was mentioned, along with more f-bombs than exploding ones. Usually that's a deal breaker for me, but the film has been getting such positive buzz I figured I'd take one for my readers and post about it.

I saw the film with impressionable young sprout dear son, who is a newly-minted junior in high school and driving now. He was seriously bent by seeing the director's cut of Blade Runner on DVD, so I told him that if he wanted, we could leave early. Son brushed off my suggestion like a wildebeest slapping his tail at a fly.

The simile is apt. District 9 is shot in South Africa, a place that would seem to be fertile for good stories. I posted on the Iliad-like Tsotsi (made in Botswana) a couple of years ago. Both these films are gritty and grace-filled with the kind of all-or-nothing urgency of grace pushed to the edge.

But unlike Tsotsi, District 9 is at its core a "summer movie," (as someone who'd seen it said afterwards), one that's intended to be an exciting, fun-filled romp.

Gritty, grace-filled, and fun. Like I said, great myth.

District 9 is science fiction, which is to say it has aliens and an Independence Day-like flying saucer hovering over a city (here, Johannesburg). But unlike the 1996 blockbuster, which trades on earthlings' dread of extraterrestrials as incomprehensibly hostile to all things earthly, the aliens in this movie are pitiable refugees, their mothership disabled. 

As the movie explains via its documentary-style storytelling, the aliens are given a section of the city called District 9, which becomes a slum set apart from human society by a wall. The movie revolves around what should be done for and to the aliens, who in addition to being pitiable, are also disgustingly inhumane.

So what qualifies District 9 as great myth?

First of all, great myth entertains. It holds us for the entire time the story is being told. There wasn't a moment during the movie when I wasn't enthralled. This happens very seldom to me, since I am so analytical about stories. There is a moment where the ordinary guy hero, Wikus van de Werwe (played by Sharlto Copley, a walking amphetamine overdose), is shooting his way into an underground bunker. It had been a while since the movie started, so I thought, "This is the end. He won't get out of this, and this will be the end of the movie."

In fact, we were only something like halfway through.

A couple more times I thought the same thing. What can happen now? Obviously this is the moment where the hero dies. And yet the plot continued to unfold.

Second, great myth hits us where we live. The South African writer and director, Neill Blomkamp, takes pains at first to build up the aliens as ugly, disgusting, subhuman, and unworthy of our esteem. But gradually, gradually, with the introduction of two alien characters (importantly, a father and son), we come to see the aliens as the good guys and the multinational exploiting corporate mercenaries as the villains (Blackwater International, anyone?).

There's nothing like finding an underdog where there was no underdog before, and finding a villain where there was no villain before. This is a summer movie in that there are men (and aliens) in white hats and men in black hats, and it's not tough to figure out which is wearing which.

That's why towards the end people were cheering whenever an evil mercenary was splooshed by the super-powerful alien weaponry. What a turnaround: the aliens are killing the guys with the helmets and the guns, and we're cheering.

Third, we welcome the humanity, grace, and tenderness within the destruction. A great story has depth, and levels. Within the serendipity of cheering for the aliens, there is the honest surprise of a relationship that develops in the triangle of the human, Wikus, and the alien father and son. Americans, as a nation, do value community within diversity, we do want to give people second chances, we do want to think the best of others, despite our racial past.

District 9 carves out for its viewers a tender awakening to the "humanity" in the aliens, with not even a smidgen of sentimentality or emotional cheating. The film is shot with a brutal filter that washes out color, and most of the movie is set in shantytowns that are among the ugliest places I have ever seen in the world. Yet, you can't help feeling optimistic about the ability of the human (and alien) spirit to transcend its circumstances.

I like about South Africa that despite its painful history, it continues to try to be honest as a country about the ability to heal and not to deny. That corresponds with my ethos for sure. So I'm going to love a movie that shows what South Africa is about.

That's the tip of the iceberg. There's plenty more here, but for now we'll call a halt. As I've written before, I don't consider myth to be exclusively ethereal stories about the gods that were told thousands of years ago. Myth is here, today, with us, allowing us to cope with our everyday anxieties and the tough paradoxes of life. It may be that District 9 will be forgotten in a few weeks, years, or months. But stories just like it will continue to be told, as long as we are human.

Julie, Julia, Meryl, Amy-- and Meg

Premiere night at the local cinema was crowded, only single seats available in the main body of the auditorium, so we sat in the fifth row, the better to see Meryl Streep having a grand old time impersonating cookbook author and proto-celebrity chef Julia Child in Julie and Julia.

Photo: Meg in Sleepless.

Streep was her normal, incredible self, almost making herself invisible under that floppy wig. Definitely worth an Oscar nomination.

But to me, the best performance of the night was not Streep's, and it was not Stanley Tucci's as Julia Child's husband Paul, though they  had terrific chemistry and great lines. Tucci also did a fantastic job in Big Night, another movie about food.

Photo: Amy in Julie and Julia.

No, sir.

Amy Adams, whom I first loved in Enchanted lo these many moons ago (2007!), did the best job. Not the best job playing Julie Powell, the blogger who in one year made all 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Adams did a great job impersonating Meg Ryan, who, if she were still young like Adams is, would've been the best choice for playing herself in the role of Powell.

Nothing much happens in Julie and Julia-- it's just plain fun, with a lot of great lines. The best one is probably the one that earned the flick its PG-13 rating. Look for the remark about the pasta.

What tension there is comes in the depiction of blogger Powell as a neurotic writer with confidence problems. Doing this, she looks and sounds exactly like Meg in When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle: the short hair, the skinny figure, the turned-up nose, the big, expressive eyes, the lying down in frustration and exasperation, the spunkiness, the adorability.

This all makes sense. The writer and director of the film is Nora Ephron, who also wrote the three movies above, and directed the latter two.

Although I like Meg Ryan a lot, and Amy Adams too, I sure wish Ephron had used more imagination in the depiction of Julie, because I think Adams is a brilliant actress and doesn't deserve to be Ryan.

And what about the movie? We laughed and laughed with the premiere crowd. Everyone was in a terrific mood afterwards. There's something to be said for a film that celebrates the can-do spirit in a perfectly straightforward way. Witty, charming, refreshing.

Go see it, even if you don't like Meg Ryan.

Harry Potter 6: whole lot of snogging going on

When the film version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince released, someone on a local radio station hereabouts reported that at least there were only two more left to go after this one.

Ginny and Harry consider sixteen going on seventeen. Photo here.

They got their math wrong by one. Only one Harry Potter book remains to be made into celluloid, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I can't say I blame a casual observer for losing track.

All in all, I'm not sorry to see the end coming. Not because I don't like the movies-- I've enjoyed the technical aspects of every one of them, and I have a special fondness for the characters both main and supporting (Luna, played by Evanna Lynch, was especially good in this one). I just think it's time for the young stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint to move on. They are too old for their roles now, and I'm anxious for them as I see them onscreen.

We have come a long way since Miss Watson, who plays Hermione Granger, made her debut as a frizz-bomb eleven-year old. The three friends have lived their teenage herodom with us, maturing both in ability to take on great challenges and adventures, and in attracting the opposite sex. Much of this movie is taken up with teen soap opera drama, as Ron, previously lukewarm in the hottie department, suddenly heats it up with the batting-eyed Lavender Brown, and Hermione waits in the wings, impatient for him to notice her.

The "snogging" quotient is pretty high, appropriate for sixteen going on seventeen, apparently. I missed all that in high school, even though I was a pretty good quidditch soccer player.

The quidditch part of this movie is humorous and fun, as is wide swaths of this movie. It runs at a leisurely 153 minutes, and if you're waiting for a plot synopsis, stop waiting. There really is no plot here, just a set-up for the last movie, with a lot of cameos of beloved characters, and one very large event.

That was all there was room for in a feature film. If the reviews on IMDB.com are any indication, huge amounts of the book were left out.

Those who have bought into the J.K. Rowling universe enjoy living in it, the way I enjoyed all the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. I do prefer Narnia, if only because each book is a story on its own, rather than a 200,000 word chapter of a larger saga. When I first read Narnia books, I was disappointed that by Book 3 the original characters Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy were replaced, but I came to love all the other ones, and I admire Lewis for doing it.

Lewis was classically trained and must have agreed with Aristotle's contention that a good story must have proportion-- that is, it must have a discernible beginning, middle and end, and that its events should be, as far as possible, determined by cause and effect. All of the Narnia books, even the ones with the original characters, have separate, distinct and causative plots. What they lose in coziness and nostalgia they gain in narrative force.

Rowling decided to go for coziness and nostalgia, I believe, because it was what her fans wanted. I don't believe that she would have left Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Book 5, at its first-edition length of 896 pages unless millions of people were wanting her to let them marinate in her universe for as long as possible. The Narnia Chronicles never weigh in at more than 200 pages, and with fewer words per page, as well.

It's a strange phenomenon. In our brave new world of ultra-tiny stories, short attention spans, and next-big-thing expectations, Harry has managed to slow us down and sit for a while.

And hopefully Rowling has created something of a book-chic culture for at least some of our young people. The next big thing in young male heroes facing supernatural circumstances is now Percy Jackson. He was in the coming attractions for 2010, and his universe is-- I'm not surprised-- that of Greek Mythology. In fact, his story is a loose retelling of the Perseus saga (hence the name Percy). Stay tuned, everyone, and be ready to read The Lightning Thief if you haven't already. This is going to be the next big thing.

Facebook and the Greek heroization of America

I have not completely abandoned this blog. I wrote most of two posts recently and discarded both. I figured if I was bored of the topic, then my readers would be, too.

Plus, I've been seriously jonesing on fantasy baseball lately, and writing book reviews. I have four assignments in the next two months, which counts as busy for me.

Etwart says: "Cursive is still important in the digital age!"

But maybe you'd like to hear about Facebook and the Greek heroization of America.

Longtime readers of the blog recognize that I have an unconventional definition of a hero in stories, and a simple one: anyone outstanding. Anyone, that is, who stands out from the crowd and gets talked about.

Heroes in Greek Mythology have many different qualities, but all heroes have in common that they are talked about, and in ancient Greek society, a hero's hallmark is his or her doxa, or reputation. A big part of being a hero is having immortality through retelling of the hero's story.

I'm seeing a similar phenomenon in 21st century America, but with a 21st century twist.

Time was, pretty much all of us where anonymous to the larger world, and it was a big deal to get your picture in the paper.

Then came the Internet and blogs, and many of us-- though not nearly all*-- figured we could get famous publishing our wit and wisdom online.

But now, with the reality show culture, video blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, potentially all of us are now in a global competition for eyeballs, as we consider the most ordinary details of our everyday lives worthy of being published to at least our larger set of friends and acquaintances.

We are becoming the poets of our own myths, in 140 character plus segments.

We are becoming micromythologists.

In the world of micromythology, there is not 15 minutes or 15 seconds of fame, but rotating bursts of 2 to 3 second fame continually.

And when I say fame, I don't mean like John and Kate Gosselin of "John and Kate Plus Eight" fame. They announced their divorce on prime time TV Monday night after the paparazzi and the tabloids exposed their Jason and Medea behavior to the nation. That's approaching megamyth territory. They are reinforcers of this glut of microburst micromythology.

Here's the bottom line: in America's Facebook/Twitter/reality show culture, where everything, every situation, every tiny activity, now becomes fodder for storytellling, every time more than one person reads about a chapter in someone else's life, a popular and exciting piece of entertainment has happened.

A micromyth.

Don't get me wrong. Part of this is an age-old phenomenon. We have always told each other our stories over the back fence or on the telephone or-- yes, Virginia-- through letters. 

The difference now is publication, which is a crucial part of myth. The Internet can change our back-fence conversations into glossy, good-looking copy on a screen, and can beam it to billions. A handwritten letter, most of the time, had an audience of one.

Mass consumption of massive levels of individual, raw details creates a kind of global doxa where everyone is continually getting little bursts of Greek hero-like immortality, and, once in a while, 15 seconds or 15 minutes of it.

What does this all mean? I am a big-picture junkie. I will speculate.

First, it means that my high school crush, Gretchen, is now on Facebook. Should I friend her? Do I want to hear her story? Do I want to fill my heart with the adrenaline and catharsis of a satisfying tale, along with a big, endorphin-filled dose of nostalgia? That would be much better than the latest episode of "Desperate Housewives."

Second, it means trouble for those of us who craft careful, fictional stories, especially of the written variety. I just finished reading a novel by an up-and-coming writer who won a prize for his short story collection and was given carte blanche for his first novel. In many ways, it was dreadful. 300 pages of his romp through his fertile imagination. And I used a lot of time reading it.

What's more, I just finished teaching a short course on telling one's story through the five senses (one of my deleted blog posts; boy was it boring!) and I was astonished at the difference in beauty, skill, and authenticity of the writers' voices when they spoke from their experience rather than trying to fictionalize it.

Video's in trouble, too. I have not watched a conventional dramatic one-hour television show such as "CSI" in years and years. Admittedly I do not have HBO. Apparently "The Wire" was amazing. And I did love "The Sopranos" when I saw it on DVD.

Movies? Upping the ante on loud, fast, and strange. I can hardly go now. It's sensory overload for me.

Maybe we will get tired of hearing each other's stories, and loading up on those microbursts of pleasure and satisfaction from hearing about someone's trip to the DMV with Junior ("They grow up so fast!") or that someone else had papaya for breakfast (I read it, Beth. Brava!).

But as long as really mass media continues to expose and destroy lives via reality shows (hello, Susan Boyle), we'll also have an irresistible urge to follow suit, in our small, micro-adventurous fashion.

Like Greek heroes, we all want immortality and are afraid of death. Maybe if we just continue to post, the echo of our voice will go on forever.

Footnotes

*This Sunday I remarked to one of my Facebook friends that her status updates were getting long. "You'll have to start a blog," I said. "I don't think so," she said. "I don't want the responsibility of regular posting." I hear that, sister.