Classic Film: E.T.

I could write a book about what the movie E.T. means to my life, and how impressive and amazing I think it is. I actually have written a lengthy research paper on it, so I know this film backwards and forwards. I hate being asked what my favorite movie is, because it seems silly for me to even compare some movies together. I love different movies for different reasons, they bring out different emotions and for different moods. But if I have to pick one, it's always E.T. because that was the movie that taught me how much I could love movies. I made my mom take me to the theater to see it a dozen times when I was little. So I have a lot of memories of this movie, and they're built around how I saw the film as much as the movie itself.

As a two-year-old, I was sitting in my hometown in the Pulaski Theater staring up at the screen entranced. It was so much bigger than me, and I was engulfed by the movie and by the magic. As a college senior, I was sitting in a theater with my mom, sharing a huge bag of Reese's Pieces and celebrating together. I was graduating in a few short weeks with a film degree, I had just finished a feature length documentary and a short comedy. I was having this crisis like a lot of seniors probably do, wondering what I was doing, where I was going. So sitting in that theater reminded me of who I was and what I wanted.

So then last weekend, we find me in my thirties, with a second film degree under my belt. I'm working on post-production in the largest film project I've ever made. And there I was, sitting at the amazing AFI Silver in Maryland. Like I said, I've seen this movie a lot of times. Too many to count, I've pulled apart the cinematography and I've studied the color scheme. But this was the first time since I was two that I was in a theater full of children who were probably seeing the film for the first time.

What a revelation it was, it was so wonderful to hear them laughing and enjoying the movie. I saw suddenly why the movie got a ten minute standing ovation at it's premiere at Cannes. As I've gotten older I've had a lot of people do the "ugh, that movie is so schmaltzy and cheesy, it's really not that good of a movie."

The people who say that have forgotten what the movie is about, which is being a child. The movie wasn't made for adults, at least not the ones who can't remember being kids. It's designed down to it's most basic elements to be a movie about and for children. I worried a bit that it was a movie that would be a little dated, but the kids in the theater didn't care. It's actually brilliantly directed, but I can see how it would take a close study to really get how impressive it can be.

All in all, it was a brilliant experience, and I'm so glad I had it. I think that E.T. is a movie that people need to show their kids, because it's a smart, well crafted film and there aren't too many of those available for that age group these days.

Supernatural "Rewatch"

So this project is not actually a traditional rewatch like most people blog about because I've actually not watched Supernatural before. I got about six episodes in and then forgot to watch one week and just never remembered to catch back up. But tumblr, once again, convinced me to give it another shot. That and we needed something to take the place of Revenge. So I'm going to try an experiment and actually write this up like a rewatch blog. We'll see how this goes and how long it lasts, right now I'm only committing to the first season for now. I'll try to do two episodes per post.

Pilot

It's pretty weird to see these guys so young, but that wears off pretty quick and you end up along for the ride. The pilot is a little weird for me to watch because I have such patchy information about what happens later. So I ended up annoying my best friend by asking her a ton of weird questions.

It's great to see a pilot that really works. We meet the characters, we establish their personalities quickly, we reveal their history (at least as much as we need). We give them a long standing goal (find their father/figure out what killed their mom).

We even establish Sam perfectly as our reluctant hero, and give him motivation to go on the quest. I mean, you know even without knowing anything about the show that Sam isn't going back to law school. But you have to give him the reason WHY. Also, whoever came up with that visual of the woman on the ceiling catching on fire? Two gold stars for you.

One thing I loved was that right off the bat the show was willing to use more obscure mythology and dig into other supernatural phenomena for the stories. This more than almost anything sold me on it, we didn't jump straight to standard ghosts and demons (though it still didn't take long).

Wendigo

One thing that struck me about this episode was that Supernatural is a show that actually does a pretty good job with the set up and pay off. It's nice that it gets that from mystery shows or procedurals instead of just following along the paths of most sci-fi or paranormal shows where they just suddenly hit you with a "Oh, he had it all along" excuse when it helps move the plot along. "How are we going to get out of this one?" "Oh, just give him a screwdriver." "Where would he have gotten a screwdriver?" "Who cares?"

Anyway, Wendigo actually reminds me a bit of The X-Files, basically because that was another show that starts off strong with the pilot and then just had a relatively tame monster of the week second episode. Of course, most shows would be lucky to be as good as X-Files, so that's not a bad thing.

To be honest, there's little about this episode that sticks out. I get the sense that we're going to have a revolving parade of random girls that show up for one episode and we never see again. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It feels a bit patronizing "oh, girls, I know you don't have a female lead on this show so every episode we'll give you a random chick so that you'll keep tuning in, 'kay?"

One thing I do appreciate them getting away from is the dynamic of the "one skeptic among believers" thing that so many shows *coughOnceUponATimecough* have been playing lately. Sam and Dean both believe. They've seen it. Sometimes there's a side character that doubts them, but in general (at least in this episode) people are like "actually, this doesn't make sense and these guys seem pretty confident so let's do what they're asking for now at least." Which is pretty refreshing.

Perspective, let's have some

So I live on the East Coast, and I have lived in Virginia my entire life.

While the weather is kind of different now than it was when I was a kid, the basics are still the same. We have four seasons (though Spring and Fall are fading fast) and the summer is very hot and very humid and prone to thunderstorms. The winter is very cold, and we're prone to snowstorms.

None of these weather events are extremes of their type. So when I say we get snowstorms, I mean "we get a few inches of snow." So people in Maine and Canada can laugh wholeheartedly at our snowstorms, that's cool.

The thing with weather is that it's impact on your life is all about what you're prepared for. When I was a kid, we were always pretty ready for the various things that came through, including thunderstorms, hurricanes, snowstorms, and ice storms and even a couple blizzards. My parents weren't crazy survivalists or anything, they just knew what needed doing so that you could bunker down for a couple days and then just go about your life when you were done.

Which is why the last year or so here in Northern Virginia has been driving me so crazy. Yes, the weather has been a bit abnormal, and it's been a lot of extremes one after the other. But for the most part, there's been an overwhelming sense that the people in the Northern Virginia/DC/Maryland area have forgotten everything about preparedness. And I'm not entirely talking about individuals, there's been a failure of governments and corporations too.

Why is it that whenever there's a strong windstorm, the power is out for at least two or three days in DC? If it was just this one time, I would say that people are probably working as hard as they can, etc. etc.

But the people I know who live in DC are constantly complaining about their power company, and every time I hear about a major outage I also hear a report that it will be two or three days to get it back. So they apparently can't handle a small outage, when millions of people's power failed because of the storm last weekend they were in over their heads and that's SHAMEFUL. Power companies have monopolies, and since they don't have direct competition I thought they were held to standards of service. I read a quote where someone said that this was like a repairing after a hurricane only with no warning.

I'm sorry, but I think that the power company should be prepared for a hurricane at all times. There should be policies in place, and they should know exactly how to implement them in order to restore power because lack of electricity can KILL PEOPLE. Especially in the heat we've got right now. Besides the fact that if you're prepared for a hurricane (the time to prepare is not when the weather channel is waving graphics in your face it's when there's nothing going on) then you're prepared for smaller storms or most things that might be thrown your way.

The government isn't doing much better, but at least I can give them the excuse that everybody wants tax cuts so their budgets are slashed repeatedly until they're mostly ineffective. But the departments of transportation around here did not come out of this looking very good, and the fact that the entire 911 system for my county went down in the storm is a big, big problem.

Yes, this was a "derecho." This was a "land hurricane." This was unexpected and there was a lot of powerful wind.

But you know what? We get hurricanes here. We get thunderstorms. We get windstorms. We should have been more prepared for this. We should have been ready and this should NOT have paralyzed everything the way it did. When we got hit with tornadoes last year, I completely understood that people didn't know what to do because Virginia doesn't get tornadoes. But my hometown, which was hit with an F3 and an F2 within an hour of each other, still rallied and got everything together and did an amazing job recovering. Meanwhile, we have a windstorm and can't even get the traffic lights working four days later.

Part of the problem is that people here on the East Coast LOVE to exaggerate their weather, probably because it is relatively mild. Like I said, when I say we get snow I mean a few inches. The two worst storms I can remember were the Blizzard of '93 and Snowmageddon (which refers to a specific set of storms, no matter what the stupid people are walking around saying about every tiny little snowfall). Both of those were the kind of thing Michigan just calls "Tuesday."

My town had a 500 year flood last year and the biggest damage was that a commuter parking lot got flooded and trashed a bunch of cars. Meanwhile in the Midwest, houses are floating down rivers. We had an earthquake last year, and while it was an interesting geological event it was a 5.something. The same week, California had a 5.something and I don't think people even looked up from their iPads. And all of these things I mentioned became HUGE news stories, people talked about them for weeks and months. The "derecho" has brought out all of the "where were you" type posts and videos and photos of the damage.

In some cases, the damage is severe. I'm not going to lie, this storm was bad. But in a few cases the "damage" is a few branches torn out of trees that landed on a sidewalk or a yard. And people expect sympathy? Over a dozen people DIED and you want me to feel sad because a little bit of siding blew off?

The weather is getting worse than it was five or ten years ago. But it's not worse than it was twenty or thirty years ago, as far as I can tell. We still have some of the mildest weather in the country, we just get each type and other places have more extremes of one thing or another. So there's no real reason for our government and service companies not to be prepared for this, and people shouldn't be surprised that we get a bad storm now and again. This shouldn't be news because we had a storm, it should be news that we were so ill equipped to handle it.

And your trampoline getting blown over isn't worth any sympathy points.