August 4, 1995
Dear Everyone:
Back again.
Two weeks of vacation flew by like a supersonic jet.
The trip to
Canby went fine, particularly since I managed to escape helping to
repaint the folks’ house (our 50th wedding anniversary present to them,
I’m told). “Byron” brought
his friends “Hermione” and “Riley” over, which means I finally got to
meet the lady who read “Byron’s” copy of the weekly Letter all those
months after he’d moved out.
Got to meet our
newest member of the family, “Alice’s” daughter, “Park” who, in turn,
got to see The Park in
Ashland, her
namesake. Ashland was fun,
if a little too warm, as usual.
“Park” learned to say “ice cube” and “uh-oh!”, which she heard
quite often over the past couple of weeks.
After a week back at
work, it’s as if I’d never left.
Everything was right where I’d left it.
Movie reviews...
Saw
Pocahontas
while I was on vacation, since I figured “Jeannie” would never go.
She didn’t miss much.
Politically correct.
Historically very incorrect, beginning with an English ship flying the
Union Jack 194
years before it was adopted by Great Britain.
David
Ogden Stiers plays
Governor Raleigh.
Mel Gibson plays a
blond.
And Linda Hunt
plays a tree. The animals
don’t talk, but the vegetation does.
No good songs.
Species.
Evidently,
Ben Kingsley decided it was time for him to do an action film.
After all, look what it did for
Keanu Reeves.
Of course, Kingsley doesn’t actually
do any action; he has a
younger co-star to jump through hoops for him.
Kingsley has grown himself a cross between a human and an alien
species, then gets upset when she escapes.
The female seems to spend an awful lot of her time taking her
clothes off and changing shapes.
Definitely not for the squeamish and not for the kiddies.
Wait for two-for-one night at the video store.
Waterworld.
There’s been a lot of press about this one, mostly about how much
trouble it’s been to produce and how expensive it was ($200,000,000.00)
to make. Well, of course it
was expensive. The whole
idea is about a future when the polar ice packs have melted and the
world is covered with water (nicely done at the beginning, when the
Universal
logo, a globe in space, begins to turn and the continents disappear
before your eyes). So all
the sets had to be built on water, in
Hawaii, where, if you
want steel, you buy it at their prices or you pay to ship it out from
the mainland and wait for it.
Granted, the project
had problems. Like when a
hurricane sort of ate the main set and it had to be rebuilt, putting
everything behind schedule.
And everyone getting seasick.
And, of course, there was the star,
Kevin Costner,
who, with a
Best
Director Oscar sitting on the shelf, felt qualified to offer some
cogent suggestions to the
director. And there was
the director, who evidently told the star just where to stick his cogent
suggestions. Rumor had it
that sparks were flying and the set was more volatile than the big
action finale, and that people were either walking off the set or
leaving in a big huff.
This last must, of
course, have been the invention of the media people.
In the first place, no one was walking off the set for the simple
reason that it was completely surrounded by water and, with the
exception of some directors, very few people truly believe that they can
walk on water. As for
leaving in a huff, this too, is ridiculous:
Everyone knows that a huff doesn’t float worth a damn.
But what about the
movie?
It’s sort of an action movie (it was originally supposed to be a
quick rip-off of
Mad Max);
but then again, it’s sort of not.
Action movies generally involve a lot of reacting and Costner
wanted more acting. So there
are kind of soul-searching scenes mixed in with wild murder and mayhem
on jet skis. As for the
basic premise, it has more holes in it than Kevin’s trimaran.
Premise number one:
The glaciers have melted and covered the continents.
Problem is, the glaciers have melted before and the continents
did just fine. In fact, in
northwest Ethiopia,
there’s a mountain that, during the
Miocene, became an
island over and over again as the sea level rose and fell.
This island may have been the home of the ultimate origin of the
species homo sapien.
According to geologists, if all the glaciers melted, the current
sea level would rise somewhere between 80 and 200 feet.
Far from drowning all the continents, you’d still be able to see
the tops of the
World Trade
Center in New
York, although I’d advise against taking the elevators.
Premise number two:
Our hero has gills.
He has mutated to adapt to the new environment.
Now, let’s look at whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals.
All air-breathing mammals who’ve lived in the water for millions
of years. Do any of them
have gills? Of course not.
Webbed toes, yes; ask any sea otter.
But not gills.
Instead, they’ve either developed nostrils that can close against the
water, usually by means of small flaps, or their nasal passage has
migrated to the top of their heads.
Of course, if I were
Kevin Costner, I probably would have drawn the line at nose flaps or
holes in my head, too.
Despite these little
inaccuracies, the movie is certainly worth seeing.
Dennis
Hopper looks like he’s having a blast playing the villain.
And there’s even a nasty little dig at those bad old oil
companies.
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |