Independence Day (Movies from my childhood)

Getting home from work today, I just wanted to take a nice long shower and watch whatever action movie happened to be on TV. For some reason, TNT wasn’t showing Air Force One, so I had to settle for Independence Day.

It’s weird to think that I saw this movie when I was five. My brother and I were eating cherries, making jokey kid-comments about the special effects and being sooo happy that the dog survives. I’m kind of surprised that my parents let us watch this, but they’ve always been fairly liberal with movies. Didn’t really care as long what we watched as long as there wasn’t Tarantino-levels of blood or language.

It’s weird to watch it now. I can’t take it seriously on one level, but there’s still this interest in it. It is what it is, nothing more or less: A melodramatic alien action-adventure flick, but it’s a strong movie-memory for me, so I end up watching it whenever… well, whenever there’s nothing better on.  It’s a bit of my childhood, wrapped up in a neat little package.

It helps that I own Movies in 15 Minutes that contains the Independence Day parody. Keeps me on my toes and interested in the plot after I’ve seen it a million and a half times.  Hell, if you have an inkling to buy Miss Cleo’s book, the Independence Day parody is worth the price by itself.

The movie, itt’s not bad, really, it’s just not great. Not a lot of people will be talking about it in a generation or two. Perhaps 90s “vintage” t-shirts will take advantage of it and its quotes in five or ten years, much as the movies of the 80s have been mined for dusty pop culture references.  But it’s a handful of melodrama, an action  movie that hints at the possibility of apocalypse.  We’ve got a lot of these movies now that are about life, post-apocalypse.  Is there still a need for an action movie that just hints at it?

Distopic America: Soylent Green and Fight Club

I’m saying this right now: Watching these movies is not a good way for ending a year. But watch them I did. Soylent Green was on Turner Classic Movies December 28th, and I fell asleep afterwards. I woke up just in time to catch Fight Club on G4.

And then I was in A Mood.

To Start, Soylent Green frightens me, because I can easily see it occuring. “Make Room, Make Room” on an already overpopulated planet. Or we’re getting to overpopulation or we are already sweltering underneath the strain. In my film class last year, we talked about this film, but never watched it. The majority of my class decided that it wasn’t immoral to eat dead bodies in such a situation, and I stand by that. When life is a battle to survive, we end up doing anything that is within our power to go on.

It would have been better to know, though. The ignorance of the future scared me, such as with the Furniture when they are dehumanized or this grabbing for Soylent Green, a product with no past, but a strong future in the arms of many. How we died, too, is a frightening experience, with its strong regimentation, although I get the feeling that if I ever approach death I would much rather die in a room like that than in some cold hospital bed.

Ah me… it frightened me, because the ghosts of the present haunted the shadows of this film.

FIGHT CLUB

Hello Edward Norton. What can I do for you today?

I think his character needs a hug, and a really well made dinner. Then sent to a great psychiatrist. I’m glad that the ending wasn’t predictable, with a fantastic shot of these two silhouettes against the destruction of office buildings.

There’s also, and I love it, the house where most of the action takes place. It’s such an old and grimy house, but inside it’s still a mansion. A dirty, disgusting mansion, but there are charms.  It reflects the entire movie well, anyway.  What creeped me out was this break away from the average that turned into a complete, faceless organiztion.  There’s that cyclic event that we face in life, especially with the new Outliers of society, when they finally become the norm.  It’s scary, to wake up and have no face.

(Ho hum, ignore that if it doesn’t make sense.  I think I’ve just rambled my way, trying to explain what the theme is of Fight Club, when I can’t.  Not right now, anyway). 

Basically, I love and hate this movie on an even keel. It moves me to the emotions and thoughts that the film draws out, but then I have to live with them. These views on the waste of modern life and hateful office jobs.

Two really fabulous, well done movies, that tell and keep secrets and have the wonderful ability of motion.