I love living in the future, part n
One of the great things about living in the future is that you can treat movies like books. Since I have a future-phone, I can just load it up with movies and watch them whenever.
Right now I’m watching The Straight Story. When I get tired, I’ll pause it, go to bed, and pick it up tomorrow. It’s fantastic. But, so far, it’s given me the best opening panels of a movie I’ve ever seen:
WALT DISNEY PICTURES PRESENTS
A FILM BY DAVID LYNCH
Just the juxtaposition is fantastic. Apparently David Lynch made a G-rated movie almost entirely by accident, because he was captivated by the story of Alvin Straight and the journey he made across America on his lawnmower, and there just wasn’t anything David-Lynchishly-shocking in the story. It’s a story that’s so excellent that it really had no choice but to be made into a movie-if David Lynch hadn’t done it, someone else would have.
I’m very impressed by Sissy Spacek’s performance as Alvin Straight’s mentally-handicapped daughter, Rose. It’s very hard to act handicaps that you don’t suffer from, especially convincingly-but she did a fantastic job.
It’s a great story, but it’s also a delightfully-American story. And I think that its, well, locality just makes it that much more enjoyable.