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Is "Ghost Rider" really Texan?
February 27, 2007A scrubby pasture with a dusty rut of a path running through it. Bluebonnets poking out of the ground. And cattle lowing somewhere or other.
Ahhh, what a sight for sore, Texas-deprived eyes.
Wait a minute.
Those bluebonnets don't look like the right color.
And hold on.
What's that big ol' tree doing growing in a pasture? Shouldn't it be a twisted mesquite?
The tears in my eyes dried up as I began to wonder, just how genuinely Texan is the movie "Ghost Rider," y'all?
The flick made some pretty darn good stabs at it.
For one thing, the accents of the Texan characters weren't too bad. Nicolas Cage got it right most of the time as Johnny Blaze, except when he seeped into hokiness, telling Eva Mendez's character, Roxanne, something like "run along home now."
First of all, people in Texas -- in the 42 years I was there -- don't say stuff like that much.
Second of all, men in Texas know better than to give their woman marching orders. They don't like sleeping on couches or eating TV dinners eight days a week.
And those bluebonnets were too light blue. The bluebonnet is so dark as to be almost purple. Maybe them flars weren't supposed to be bluebonnets but another bluebonnet-like blossom.
That big tree growing up out of a hill (a hill!) on the prarie where Roxanne and Johnny pitch woo and plan their futures didn't seem right either.
However, I must take into account that I'm from the part of Texas where hills are a rarity and big trees were planted by somebody. To be true to my part of the world, the tree would be a mesquite, and the hill wouldn't be a hill.
It was a bar scene that cemented the authenticity of the movie's Texasicity.
The wooden shack-like structure rises up out of the night and is surrounded by wicked-looking motorcycles. Inside the bar, it looks like neither broom, mop nor Pledge have had free reign.
Rickety tables and sufficiently scruffy characters populate the place.
The drinking establishment quickly brought to mind two such enterprises back in Wichita Falls, the old Bar-L and the P-2 -- a.k.a. the Duece.
I could just about taste a red draw.
That, my friends, is pure Texas.
Every director with a movie supposedly set in Texas needs to drink a red draw at a beat-up table outside in Wichita Falls, surrounded by motorcycle riders, cowboys, suit-and-tie renegades and other lovers of that Lone Star beverage, the red draw.
Run along now, and get you a sip.
Posted by Trish Choate at 12:38 PM | Permalink
Above, Below, a Northern thing?
Wind slapped and grabbed at my too-short coat as I stood there, considering the question a stranger on Q Street had just posed.
"Is P Street above or below this street?" the young man said.
My first impulse was to say, neither. The sky is above, and the ground is below. In between is a lot of cold wind.
I realized that answer probably wouldn't be welcome. So I shifted my entire view of the universe from North Texas to Georgetown in D.C. to try to understand what he meant. I usually get along in D.C. the same way I did in North Texas, which is to ask directions from the first person I saw.
So I probably had a lot in common with my questioner, but I hadn't heard this above and below stuff before.
I realized we were actually standing on a hill, so maybe that had something to do with his alternate view of the universe.
"P Street is right down there," I said, pointing while I tacked a southernism into the sentence --"right."
"OK, thanks," he said.
He then walked "below" Q Street to P Street, about one-fourth of a block away.
I, too, walked down the hill, trudging "below" Q Street to a side entrance to my apartment building.
I had my own question: Was this "above" and "below" view of the world a northern thing?
Posted by Trish Choate at 12:22 PM | Permalink
"Perfume" or Something Stinks
February 07, 2007The movie was ruined for me before I even sat down to watch it, but I didn't know it.
"Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" looked pretty juicy in the previews. It seemed like it would be worth going to just because Dustin Hoffman was in it with his suitably big nose.
Plus, I'd just finished reading the book of the same name by Patrick Suskind. The novel was enthralling, repellant and fascinating at the same time.
"Perfume" the book was translated from the German, so I'm not sure if it was Suskind's intention, but the style was old-fashioned without being unreadable.
In other words, it wasn't like grabbing good ol' Dickens and then realizing that you were going to have to invest some time and serious brainpower to follow the story. Well, worth it, of course.
Instead, the style of "Perfume" was part of the ambiance that sweeps the reader along.
The anti-hero is a wierd character who at first evokes pity and then fear.
His sniffer is an ubernose, and what he lacks in basic human skills, he has in aroma savvy.
But it's that lack of basic skills -- or basic humanity, really -- that ends up defining Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the French dude with the amazing schnoz.
The story is set in all the filth and insanity of 18th Century France, giving readers a quick lesson in the ickiness and lack of sanitary conditions in that period.
It seems perfume was one of the things that made life bearable in all that stink.
Having devoured the book over a weekend, I set out the next weekend to go to the discount show at the E Street Cinema in D.C.'s Chinatown.
What a waste.
The movie pretty slavishly followed the book, leaving out a lot, of course.
That turned the experience into a stinkin' bore.
So what's the lesson learned from this and from the aforementioned "The Painted Veil" experience?
Go see the movie, and then read the book.
The book will always be more detailed, for one thing, and you'll have the experience of getting inside an author's head. For another, the movie might be radically different as in "The Painted Veil."
If so, then you've hit gold.
Posted by Trish Choate at 02:35 PM | Permalink
