joshwriting | Entries tagged with movies

I was re-watching National Treasure 2, and noticed, in the credits that it was written by "The Wibberleys."

I know of an author whose last name was Wibberley, though I'd been pretty sure he had died more than a decade before this movie was made. Still, I went alooking.

Leon (Leonard) Wibberly was the author of one of my all time favorite books, The Mouse that Roared - also a wonderful movie.

Cormac Wibberly (the husband half of the team of screenplay writers) is his son, and did the two National Treasure movies along with several other works.

Color me amused.

Current Mood: amused
Current Location: Hollywood
Current Music: Pink Floyd

As part of my research for my Improbable Histories class, I watched a couple movies I have not seen previously, Time Quest and Time Changer.

Time Quest asks and answers the question "What if JFK had not been assassinated?" A time traveler comes back to November 22, 1963 and prevents the shooting of President Kennedy, in the process changing many features of the years to come. The cold war, the space race, Viet Nam, music, future presidencies, and his own family are among the areas on which we get to see some of the influence.

Time Changer works in the opposite direction. It starts in 1890 and one of the characters is sent into the future where what he sees may influence his actions in 1890 - in the hopes of causing that future world to never be what comes to pass.

Time Changer is a tad heavy-handed with its morality, but then again it is quite upfront about its status as a Christian movie. The conceit is that a few carefully written words in a minor religious treatise are (will be) enough to bend society a hundred years (and a bit) later one way or another - that saying the wrong thing in this book will lead to a largely godless society: ours.

Time Quest is, perhaps, no less heavy-handed, but in treatment of the Kennedy clan and its legends. It takes potshots at others along the way, but focuses on a) why did this intervention happen, and b) what are the results of it. Personalities are painted with a jaundiced eye, with nobody put on a pedestal.

I can't honestly recommend Time Changer. It is a bit too shrill even given its pre-stated biases.

Time Quest is poorly acted and its pacing and scripting are odd and uneven, but the story is interesting to me, at least. I love the little twists and the idealist in me loves the world that is created.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Algebra Of Darkness by Harold Budd

I just rewatched the movie Pump Up the Volume. It was a product of the early 90's that I brought my students at my school to see. In many ways, the messages it gives from then still or again resonate now.

The movie addresses, among other things, the tyrrany of standardized testing in terms o school performance and evaluation. The practice of pushing students out of a school to inrease the appearance o perormance results isold, not new. Compounmd that with keeping those self-same students on the rolls until you get the money for them, and you have the basis of an incredibly corrupt system.

Reading news excerpts over the last few years shows Superintendents, Principals, Guidance Counselors, and Teachers all caught cheating/lying to increase their students' scores on these high stakes tests. What lessons are we, are you taught by this behavior?

I wrote the linked essay not too long after I saw the movie for the first time: http://www.geocities.com/josh_shaine/everybody_knows.html (I apologize to those who are offended by Yahoo/Geocities sites.)

(I like the Leonard Cohen version better than the Conrete Blonde version, but for some reason the CB version is the only one that made it onto the sound track! Grr...)

Current Mood: upbeat
Current Music: Everybody Knows, performed by Concrete Blonde

Movies for Josh to Watch: Ghost World (at Vainglory's recommendation); Amelie (having just watched the star in another flick, "He loves me... He loves me not")

Movies for others to watch:
Topsy-Turvy (Gilbert and Sullivan)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (A brilliant adaptation of Ray Bradbury's work)

Chocky (book by John Wyndham) seems to have aired as a British TV mini-series in the mid-80's, with two sequels. I have to see it.

What else do I have to see?

...that I would love everybody I know to see or have seen.

Amazing Grace and Chuck (Gregory Peck, Alex English, Jamie Lee Curtis - 1987)
Buckaroo Banzai (Christopher Lloyd, Ellen Barkin, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jeff Goldblum, John Lithgow, Peter Weller - 1984)
Flap (Anthony Quinn, Claude Akins - 1970)
Harold and Maude (Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon, Vivian Pickles - 1971)
If... (Malcolm McDowell - 1968) (O Lucky Man and Britannia Hospital are sort of continuations, though not necessary to the first flick - and if you saw the second or third, you would not know the first existed)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Valerie Hobson - 1949)
The King of Hearts (Alan Bates, Genevieve Bujold - 1966)
The Man from Snowy River (Kirk Douglas , Jack Thompson , Tom Burlinson , Sigrid Thornton , Lorraine Bayly , Chris Haywood - 1982)
The Man in the White Suit (Alec Guiness - 1951)
Slither (James Caan , Peter Boyle , Sally Kellerman , Louise Lasser - 1973)

I am sure there are more.

Descriptions are available at MSN Entertainment as well as other places. I do not agree with all of their judgments, but the plots are pretty on target. Trailers for some of the films are out on the net somewhere - post 1980's have the best shot.

Mentoring the unwilling or unsure is dangerous. Mentoring them in dangerous areas is even more dangerous.

I was listening to "Wrapped Around My Finger" earlier today and then wandered into the living room, where Susan is watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

This is a pair of depressing tales about the training of folks in one's art. CTHD, in particular, takes what could have been a set of promising, love-filled lives, and sets them turn to mist and despair.

She cannot bow to her true teacher/master, cannot accept that for all she has done, he is still beyond her.

He is seduced by her youth and potential - not seduced sexually, though it might as well have been so. He relaxes just enough, just too much.

*shakes head*

Too close? Not close enough? And, when her life has been redeemed, by external measure, perhaps, she determines that it has not.

A part of me wants to treat it in the same way that I wanted to treat the end of Brazil. Our hero escapes. He goes beyond the bounds of where harm can befall him.

Here, I want to believe in Zoltan: "Wish comes true." Matter of factly, it is so.

But we know it is not, that that legend is false. All our hopes for the future dissolve into mist.

All from putting too much trust in one who cannot yet be trsuted, who may never be able to be trusted, but certainly not yet.

Yet, without that trust, would there have been a chance of her reclamation? Would another have been able to do what the Wudan master could not?

Yet, he had to do it that way, for to do otherwise would have been untrue to his self, his chi.

*sigh*

Alas, Obi-wan. It is ever the way.

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Josh's Crosstime Salute

Entries tagged with movies

Posting Frenzy, Part 2: An Amusing Connection

Time Quest vs. Time Changer

Pump Up the Volume

More Movies

Movies every Josh should see...

A List of Obscure and Cult Movies...

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

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April 2025

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