Napoleon Dynamite

~~Originally posted on August 18, 2017~~

It was sometime in the middle of 2005 when the name ‘Napoleon Dynamite’ began registering in my brain enough for me to actually devote energy into finding out what it meant. Released the previous summer, the film had already become an independent cult classic, and as more and more people were talking about it, I became curious. Everyone else I knew had already seen it. Good grief, even my own parents had seen it by that time. And then, one night, I found myself sitting in the home of my old pal Christopher Jones, being forced to watch it. I’ll admit, I didn’t entirely get the humor during that first viewing. There were parts that I found really hilarious, but just as many that made me cringe with awkwardness, or feel genuinely sad for the characters. Watching the movie is almost like experiencing a symphony that hits these three notes over and over again. Hilarious, Awkward, Sad… Hilarious, Awkward, Sad… Hilarious, Awkward, Sad… But something has happened to me in the years since I first watched Napoleon Dynamite – something that has made me unable to watch it now without a huge, unquenchable grin on my face the entire time.

Napoleon Dynamite takes place in the rural town of Preston, Idaho – a place that feels like it dropped anchor in about 1987 and was then dragged kicking and screaming through the 90s before washing up in 2004. The story centers around the lives of three high school misfits who find friendship in each other. Napoleon, Pedro, and Deb have a variety of mild antagonists to deal with. These include the ‘popular’ crowd in their school, Kip – Napoleon’s older brother who spends most of his time chatting online with his internet girlfriend, and Uncle Rico – that sleazy relative who shows up unannounced and wreaks havoc in the lives of his family because he peaked in high school and is miserable that life has been nothing but a downhill slide ever since. Together, the unlikely trio of heroes form a bond that allows them to overthrow the established social order of high school politics. When we first meet Napoleon he’s the archetypal teenage loner, constantly over-exaggerating in order to impress those around him into liking him. He’s the guy that (if we’re honest about it) we all would have made fun of, laughed at, and generally avoided if he was a real person that we knew in high school, regardless of whatever social pond we were swimming in at the time. But Napoleon has a pure heart, and in his innocence he attracts the affection of Deb who accepts him for who he is. As his confidence gathers momentum he’s able to let his guard down, shrug off discouragement from his family members, stop bragging about his imaginary ninja skills, and clinch Pedro’s run for class president by channeling Jamiroquai in a public display of dance moves that brings the entire school roaring to their feet in applause.

And I’ll be completely honest with you. Even though I’ve just done my darnedest to give a brief, satisfactory summary of this movie – nothing I’ve said or could say about it will truly do it justice. It’s in a genre of its own. It completely defies all attempts at standard categorization. It laughs at professional critical analysis, and it scoffs at conventional comedic movies. If you’ve never seen it before, gather the whole family (it’s safe for all ages), make some popcorn, and let Napoleon Dynamite transport you to the most familiar-feeling parallel dimension that you’ve never been to.

I give Napoleon Dynamite 4 Coffstars , 2 Coff-steaks 🥩🥩, 3 Coff-jams , 1 pocket full of Coff-tater tots , and 1 (tamed) wild honeymoon stallion

Sneakers

For those of you who don’t know me, I was born at the tail end of 1978. I guess 39 years really isn’t that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but from a technological point of view, it was prehistoric times. The first video games I played were on the Atari 2600, my family didn’t own a phone that wasn’t attached to the wall until I was in middle school, and we didn’t have a cell phone until I was 18. The first computer we had (a top of the line custom desktop) could have held about 50 songs on its entire hard drive, if mp3 files existed at the time—and they didn’t. Our second PC was able to connect to the internet after a few minutes of the modem making screeching and scrunching sounds, and no one else could use the phone while someone else was online. And then things started changing. They changed really fast. And now, 20 years later, it takes only a few seconds to see what people are doing on the other side of the planet. The barriers of global communication—which at one time included things like oceans, and mountains, and long-distance fees, no longer exist. Information availability is nearly without limit.

And 26 years ago, a quaint little film called Sneakers predicted this would happen. Three years before, Phil Alden Robinson had directed Field of Dreams, which is essentially a parable about Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones building a sacred temple in the form of a baseball field. Sneakers was Robinson’s follow-up, and even though it’s basically a heist film veiled in several other genres, it’s also a parable—a parable about the power of information in the digital age. It definitely has some fantastical plot elements, but in the two and a half decades since its release, it’s proven to be remarkably prophetic in regards to some of its ideological warnings concerning information technology. As the villain of the story, played by Sir Ben Kingsley states so eloquently to his protagonist Robert Redford: “The world isn’t run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It’s run by little 1s and 0s, little bits of data… there’s a war out there; a world war. And it’s not about who’s got the most bullets, it’s about who controls the information—what we see and hear, how we work, what we think—it’s all about the information.”

Side Note: James Earl Jones makes a cameo appearance in this movie, and he has the best lines…

But all heaviness and ideological gravitas aside, Sneakers is just a really fun movie. It reminds me a lot of Ocean’s Eleven—it has a similar feel to it. And like Ocean’s Eleven, what really makes it a great film are the characters, their uniqueness, and how well their personalities ping-pong off each other. I don’t want to give too much away, but let me break down the team dynamic for you: There’s Sydney Poitier, the ex-CIA operative who functions as the co-leader of the team along with Robert Redford. He’s often roped into verbal sparring matches with Dan Aykroyd, who plays a technical genius obsessed with conspiracy theories. The heart of the team is David Strathairn who plays a blind computer hacker named Whistler. I’m not going to tell you why he’s the heart of the team—you just have to watch it. Then there’s Carl, played by the late River Phoenix in one of his last roles—he plays… well, he plays a kid named Carl. And finally, last but not least, is Mary McDonnell (Stands With A Fist), playing the intelligent, quick-thinking, quick-witted, token female who’s obviously just had enough with all these dudes running around getting into trouble.

Movies about teams of people saving the world are pretty common these days, but if you want to watch something different, look no further than Sneakers—a film about a group of small business entrepreneurs (without superhuman abilities, without guns, and without Denzel Washington), that end up saving the world all the same. If you’ve never had the chance to behold this forgotten treasure from 1992, it’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Green Mile

~~Originally posted on July 9, 2017~~

I’m of the opinion that you can’t go wrong with a movie that has Tom Hanks on the cover – whether it’s Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, or The ‘Burbs – and that’s definitely true of the one Seth Dickey brought to our Thursday Night Movie Time this past week. The Green Mile (1999) was a collaboration between Director Frank Darabont and Stephen King. Five years earlier, the pair had brought The Shawshank Redemption to the screen, and this was their follow-up. Both films have a very similar tone. The main difference between the two is that Shawshank has a very subtle, biblical undertone, loosely based around the Old Testament story of Joseph, whereas The Green Mile has a plot that is overtly and undeniably based on the New Testament story of Jesus Christ. The Green Mile takes place down in Louisiana during the time of the Great Depression, and revolves primarily around the interaction between Tom Hanks’ character Paul Edgecomb – a death row prison guard, and his prisoner John Coffey – an extremely large black man (portrayed by the late Michael Clarke Duncan, may he rest in peace) who has been wrongly convicted of raping and murdering two young white girls. Throughout the course of the film we see that Coffey has a variety of supernatural abilities which include healing disease, prophecy, sensing the good and evil in other people, and even resurrecting a dead mouse. He also has a genuine concern for other people, including strangers, as well as a childlike sense of wonder. His conviction as a child rapist and murderer is based entirely on outward appearances and racism. We don’t even see the trial, because whatever trial he had was irrelevant – he’s an eight foot tall black man and a stranger – his guilt was assumed the moment they found him holding the dead bodies of these two little white girls. The reality is that he found them after they had already been killed, and was trying to heal them. This film doesn’t just touch lightly on an important issue – it presses firmly on a deep and open wound that our country is still grappling with today. And it does so by reminding us that the qualities which make someone a genuine child of God cannot be seen with the eyes. This is what Hanks’ character learns in the film. It’s what we, as a society, still have not learned. I give The Green Mile 4 Coffstars 🌠🌠🌠🌠, 3 Coff-tears, 2 Coff-cones, and 1 Mr. Jingles .

The 39 Steps

Many years ago, when I was just a young lad with a high-pitched voice that still sounded like my sisters’ … mom and dad read me the ancient story of one of the most mightiest of manliest of men to have ever existed – King David. Of course, due to my age, they were reading from an extremely abridged and docile version of the Bible with lots of pictures… that obviously contained none of the sex and violence that’s in the real Bible. If you’ve never read the sacred tomes of the Old Testament, and in particular the books of First and Second Samuel, they are more graphic and explicit than any episode of Game of Thrones. And that is not an exaggeration, but that is another review for another time. At any rate, what those fluffy 80s picture Bibles did not leave out, was the amount of running, chasing, and hiding that dominates so much of King David’s story. David was, quite literally, in regards to Judeo-Christian literature and culture – the original ‘man on the run.’ In his early years, before he became king, David was a hunted man. He was always on the move, unjustly accused, pursued by his enemies, pursued by the reigning authorities, hiding in caves, scrounging for food, ‘making his way… the only way he knew how…’  David’s early story is about how God protects him, guides him, and empowers him during this time in his life. It’s the story of how he remained faithful under constant duress, and how he waited patiently for the day when justice would be done, and he would finally become the king. This is one of the stories I found fascinating as a kid. And it’s one of the oldest stories in existence that is still being re-told to this day, and has been re-told, re-imagined, and re-worked over and over again so many times, in so many different ways. David’s journey from shepherd to king has been extrapolated, carefully pulled up by its deepest roots, stripped down to the core of its DNA, and transplanted into so many different stories that it’s probably impossible to list them all – I’m not even going to try. It’s the original seed from which so many other orchards have been cultivated.

As an example of what I’m talking about – I first encountered this re-grafting of David’s story when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time. The character of Aragorn has a story arc, throughout Tolkien’s sprawling epic, that is taken completely from David’s early life. Aragorn’s story is an example of what I would call a pure distillation of the source material. It’s essentially the same general premise, with fantasy elements, names, and places substituting for counterparts in the original story. And of course, because it’s a fairy tale – not real life – it leaves out all the uncomfortable parts that the Biblical narrative isn’t afraid to show us.

Now, as I’m sure most of us are aware, The Lord of the Rings was eventually made into a landmark cinematic trilogy that was released between 2001 and 2003. But way back in 1935, at around the same time that Tolkien was crafting The Hobbit novel into its final form, another Englishman by the name of Alfred J. Hitchcock was releasing a film called The 39 Steps. And just to give credit where it is due, this film was an adaptation of a book written in 1915 by John Buchan, not an original work by Hitchcock. We can, however, give credit to Hitchcock for making (as far as I can tell) the very first masterpiece that translated the ancient literary example of the hero who is hunted down, on the run for his life, trying to find justice – The King David Motif, if you will – into a cinematic formula that has since been copied, tweaked, adjusted, and re-adapted many times over. Here’s a brief list of movies that I’ve seen, which employ some variation of this formula:

Running Man, The Fugitive, Enemy of the State, Waterworld, Mission Impossible, The Jason Bourne movies, Shooter, The Island, Minority Report, and Mad Max: Fury Road… just to name a few. There are many more of course, and the whole “Spy” genre itself, as we know it in movies today, is mostly an overgrowth from that indigenous sapling planted by Hitchcock so many years ago.

Side Note: Hitchcock himself used the same formula again in his later film, North by Northwest in 1959 – one of his most successful films.

In The 39 Steps, the hero is Richard Hannay, a Canadian traveling in Britain who is unwittingly caught up in an espionage conspiracy, accused of murder, and chased up into the Scottish countryside by both the criminals and the police. Along the way (just to make things interesting) he jumps off a train, meets some odd characters up in the moors, is almost fatally shot, accidentally propelled to the front of a political rally, forced to give a public speech, and gets handcuffed to a woman named Pamela who hates him, and then eventually falls in love with him… at least, I think she falls in love with him… I mean they’re holding hands at the end, and this was 1935, so… you know. I guess, in Hitchcock’s mind, if you’re handcuffed to the same person long enough, you just eventually go with it. Actually, the relationship between Hannay and Pamela reminded me a great deal of the relationship that forms between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in Capra’s It Happened One Night. But that’s another review.

Perhaps most interestingly, as is often the case with these kinds of tales, there is usually either some small flourish, sweeping gesture, or over-arching plot element that indicates the presence of the divine in the midst of the hero’s struggle. These act as clues; small trails of crumbs that lead back to the original loaf of bread that started it all. If the early story of King David really is the ancient progenitor of this literary genre, and Hitchcock’s film a true echo of that, then we could expect to find the same kind of evidence in The 39 Steps. And Hitchcock, who was trained by Jesuits in Catholic school to analyze art at an early age, does not disappoint. In this case, we see the divine presence most clearly on display in the form of a church hymnal; it’s conspicuously situated snuggly in the left breast pocket of Hannay’s coat where it stops the aforementioned bullit that would have otherwise killed him. Bullseye.

Believe it or not, this was the first Hitchcock film that I’ve ever watched, and aside from the plot, which is interesting enough on its own, the thing that really makes this old movie shine is how much anxiety it’s able to convey through the screen. This is where Hitchcock’s talent as a filmmaker becomes apparent. He really makes you feel like you’re the one handcuffed to Richard Hannay as he frantically trots from one place to the next. Moreover, it’s extremely frustrating to witness how no one believes Hannay when he tries to tell them what’s happening to him, leaving him with no choice but to lie in order to get help from people! Hitchcock is indeed the legendary master of suspense that he’s been made out to be.

I’ve known about Alfred Hitchcock, and been aware of his impact on the history of filmmaking for most of my life – even having never seen one of his films. But after watching The 39 Steps, I now know why he’s considered one of the greatest directors of all time. In this movie at least, he took an ancient, timeless story that had been distilled into something that fit the time in which he was living, and crafted it into a cinematic formula that we can still appreciate 83 years later.

Stand By Me

~~Originally Posted on July 16, 2017~~

The movie that EB Dickey brought to our Thursday Night Movie Time this past week is a timeless classic in every way that a film can be – set in the 50s, made in the 80s, and just as relevant today – Stand By Me (1986) is one of Rob Reiner’s best. Of course he has several other classics in his filmography, including A Few Good Men, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and my personal favorite of his – The Princess Bride. Richard Dreyfuss plays Gordy Lachance, a middle-aged writer reminiscing about his last weekend of Summer Break in 1959, just as he and his three friends are about to enter Junior High. His narration unfolds the quest they embark upon to find a young man from their town who has gone missing and is presumed dead. On the surface, Stand By Me is about the playful, honest, and pure bond of friendship shared among four 12 year olds growing up together in the same small town. But underneath it’s about the looming cloud of adulthood that is slowly settling over them as they’re forced to grow up. The magic of this film (based on a Stephen King story) is in its ability to capture that moment in time when a kid takes a genuine look into the distance, and perceives, for the first time, that their life is inevitably leading to the same place as everyone else – the grave. The spirit of death hovers over the entire story from beginning to end in a way that doesn’t leave us feeling hopeless and gloomy, but nostalgic for those last days we all experienced just before having the curtain of innocence rolled back on us. I think most of us, like Gordy, have some point in our past that we wish we could return to – and if we could only just get back there – we would hold on to it for dear life. Likewise, we all have friends and loved ones that we’ve lost along the way – either because death took them away from us, or because life took us away from them. This film cuts deep into the core of our hearts with such tact and precision that it’s almost unnoticeable, but there it is – in plain sight, in the very title of the movie, soulfully woven into the narrative with Ben E. King’s beautiful song – nudging gently at one of the deepest longings that any human being can yearn for: that when our time comes, we will have someone to stand by us too.

I give Stand By Me 4 Coffstars 🌠🌠🌠🌠, 3 Coffclouds ⛅️⛅️⛅️, 3 loaves of Coffbread , and 1 choo-choo train 🚂.