You know what killed vaudeville? The moving picture, that's what.
I just watched a fantastic movie, Stranger Than Fiction. I loved it so much, I felt compelled to come straight away and post about it on Live Journal. The desire has no real logic to it, but I needed an outlet. So here I am, clad in my PJ's, yammering away on my keyboard listening to the closing credits. It feels very surreal for a reason I cannot describe. It just does.
I'm reminded of every other movie/book/song that did the same thing to me. Lost in Translation. Foxfire. Space Camp. The Empire Strikes Back. Superbad. Dark City. The Crow. Brick. Dead Poet’s Socieity. A Catcher in the Rye. Weezer’s Blue album. Rudyard Kipling’s poems. Any David Eddings novel. Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.” Any World of Darkness novel.
When I was 12, I read a book called The Summer of the Green Star. It was a story about a young man who lived in a small town, living a ho-hum life. One day some strange neighbors move next door into a summer home. They're polite and affable to our protagonist, but something is different about them and he can't place it. He falls in love with the neighbor's daughter, and they spend the summer together, blissfully. As summer wanes, she sadly tells him she has to go, never to return. The father pulls our young paramour aside and tells him that their aliens. He tells him that they were just visiting, and they live incredibly long lives. The father explains to him that his blossoming love was a doomed venture from the beginning - he would be old and frail, and she would eventually view him as nothing more than a pet as the years progressed on. The last page of the book has him staring mournfully at the empty summer house where he fell in love with the alien girl, never to see her again.
The plot was ludicrous, the writing was uninspired - everything about that book was campy and predictable and I just couldn't stop reading it. Looking back it was probably meant for a girl to read and sigh dreamily about, not a pre-pubescent boy, and certainly not a boy who had until that point only read comic books.
The day I finished the book, I was incredibly depressed that the protagonist had known love for a fleeting moment, and lost it never to return. My mother took me too a Hardees’s, and as we ate, I told her about the book. She nodded absently, picking at her food, not really listening to me. I tried to explain to her as best I knew how, that her son had just Awakened. That he could know tragedy, or comedy, and be moved to tears by art. It was a profound realization on my young mind, and her disinterest became irrelevant to me as I carried on excitedly, not even touching my food.
When I watch a good movie, or listen to a great song, or read a great book, I’m rushed back to a run-down old Hardees’s on Highway 98 by the Waffle House in Daphne Alabama. Inside is a 12 year old boy talking to his disinterested mother about the greatest book he’d ever read.
Stranger Than Fiction is a good movie. I’m glad I got to watch it.
I'm reminded of every other movie/book/song that did the same thing to me. Lost in Translation. Foxfire. Space Camp. The Empire Strikes Back. Superbad. Dark City. The Crow. Brick. Dead Poet’s Socieity. A Catcher in the Rye. Weezer’s Blue album. Rudyard Kipling’s poems. Any David Eddings novel. Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.” Any World of Darkness novel.
When I was 12, I read a book called The Summer of the Green Star. It was a story about a young man who lived in a small town, living a ho-hum life. One day some strange neighbors move next door into a summer home. They're polite and affable to our protagonist, but something is different about them and he can't place it. He falls in love with the neighbor's daughter, and they spend the summer together, blissfully. As summer wanes, she sadly tells him she has to go, never to return. The father pulls our young paramour aside and tells him that their aliens. He tells him that they were just visiting, and they live incredibly long lives. The father explains to him that his blossoming love was a doomed venture from the beginning - he would be old and frail, and she would eventually view him as nothing more than a pet as the years progressed on. The last page of the book has him staring mournfully at the empty summer house where he fell in love with the alien girl, never to see her again.
The plot was ludicrous, the writing was uninspired - everything about that book was campy and predictable and I just couldn't stop reading it. Looking back it was probably meant for a girl to read and sigh dreamily about, not a pre-pubescent boy, and certainly not a boy who had until that point only read comic books.
The day I finished the book, I was incredibly depressed that the protagonist had known love for a fleeting moment, and lost it never to return. My mother took me too a Hardees’s, and as we ate, I told her about the book. She nodded absently, picking at her food, not really listening to me. I tried to explain to her as best I knew how, that her son had just Awakened. That he could know tragedy, or comedy, and be moved to tears by art. It was a profound realization on my young mind, and her disinterest became irrelevant to me as I carried on excitedly, not even touching my food.
When I watch a good movie, or listen to a great song, or read a great book, I’m rushed back to a run-down old Hardees’s on Highway 98 by the Waffle House in Daphne Alabama. Inside is a 12 year old boy talking to his disinterested mother about the greatest book he’d ever read.
Stranger Than Fiction is a good movie. I’m glad I got to watch it.