fine whine

Tuesday's trip to NYC caught me by surprise, as I had mentioned, and I ended up needing to return a couple DVDs to the library unwatched as a result. I realized about five minutes after leaving the house that day that I should have grabbed my portable DVD player and a couple of those movies for my two two-hour flights, but alas, we cannot change the past.

We can, however, make it more dramatic or interesting by adding wide angle shots and a score by Angelo Badalamenti. At least that's what David Lynch did with The Straight story, the "true story" of an old guy who drove a John Deere riding mower from Iowa to Wisconsin in 1994 to see his estranged brother Lyle. The discrepancies between the film and the reality begin with the previous sentence, as Alan's brother's name was in fact Henry, not Lyle.

I've done a little bit of research, you see. I'd planned on writing a brief recap of several movies I'd watched lately today, but I instead will publish that material tomorrow and today will focus on Mr. Straight and his story.

Alvin Straight was born October 17, 1920, in Minnesota and died November 9, 1996 in Iowa. In between those dates he led a full life, as a soldier, farmer, laborer and more. He married twice and had seven children, though it is unclear whether any of them had the sort of developmental problems that Sissy Spacek portrayed in the film. I suspect not, but have nothing on which to base my doubts other than Hollywood's common desire to augment reality to attract more sympathy and heartwarmth. But I might just be jaded, taking out my lack of admiration for Sissy Spacek out on her character and its place in the film (I never got on the Carrie bandwagon, but haven't yet seen Badlands to really make a judgment on her abilities). His second wife Betty remained at home in Laurens, Iowa, not some mentally-addled daughter. It was she who sent him his Social Security check when he ran out of money in Charles City.

They divorced not long after his return from spending several weeks visiting Henry in Blue River, Wisconsin. Though he intended to return home on a replacement John Deere riding mower (donated by a Texas dealer whom I will mention more later) his nephew Dayne took him home in a pickup on a day off from his job at the cheese factory, reducing what would've been a six week drive into about a six hour one.

This was not to be the last time he was driven back to Iowa in a pickup. In July of 1995 he set out west to visit some other relatives in Idaho, but made it only as far as Pine Ridge, South Dakota before a breakdown. A local minister drove him and his ailing lawnmower, heart and circulatory system back, a 250-mile return trip. He'd likely been driving a brand-new John Deere mower given to him by Paul J. Condit, chairman, president and head honcho of Seminole, Texas farm supply company Texas Equipment Corporation. Paul swapped him the new mower for Straight's 1966 model and supposedly displays it at his dealership (1305 Hobbs Highway, Seminole TX 79360. Give 'em a call at 915-758-3643 to make sure it's still there before making the trek).

I figured it would take me about two days to drive there in my Galant if I drove the 22-hour trip stopping only somewhere in Missouri for the night. If the mower's still there it would take me at least thirty days if I kept up Alvin's 8-10 hours of 5 mph "top speed", or over thirty weeks if I matched his 240-miles-in-six-weeks average (though he did stop for a while to get his Social Security check) on his first Deere. That said, I don't know if Paul and company would part with it. They did have some financial difficulties in 2001 and likely then lost their official John Deere status during those Chapter 11 proceedings, which might be why they don't appear in the johndeere.com dealer locator. They'd probably want to keep the mower anyway. I'm guessing the $5000 retail value of the mower they gave Alvin wasn't what pushed them over the edge into bankruptcy.

A couple other details different from the movie: Straight's mower did break down not far from Iowa, but the repairs in West Bend did cost him $250. There was no word whether twins worked on the mower. He camped out (to wait out his check) in Charles City, ninety miles further. The movie combined these two events, possibly in an effort to keep it around two hours. Nothing anywhere indicated whether he did, in fact, pick up a hitchhiker and have a touching conversation about family, nor did anywhere indicate his campfire food preferences. His journey began July 5th and ended August 15th of 1994.

One preliminary film contract had his payment as $10,000 plus 10% of the profits. He turned down all television appearance offers (and didn't really like Jay Leno's show, he said).

His brother Henry was seven years older, and both of them had lost their licenses due to deteriorating eyesight.

Richard Farnsworth, who portrayed him in the film, had health problems of his own. In cancerous pain, he shot himself in October of 2000. There is no indication that his Best Actor Oscar loss to Kevin Spacey for American beauty had anything to do with his suicide.

On another film related note, I felt that Angelo Badalamenti's fiddle-driven score was somewhat off-putting. ANGelo BAdalamenti. BaDAlamenti. BadaLAmenti. BadalaMENti. BadalamenTI. What a fun name to say! I suspect it will be bouncing around in my head. Oddly enough, I can assign musical notes to it, say E-D-C E-D-E-F-E in the key of C major. Of course considering his track record (Christmas vacation) perhaps a minor key would be more appropriate.

Please realize that that previous paragraph was just a mental meandering and had absolutely no point. This whole endeavor is my brain dump, after all. If something I write happens to amuse or interest you, it's just a side effect.

As for my sources, I'm not listing them. If you really want to check my work, search Google and Lexis Nexis. That's what I did.

Well, it took some eight or ten M*A*S*H episodes of heightened vigilance, but I finally caught a glimpse of Gary Burghoff's missing fingers (well, just the ends of them). I'm up to the fourth season, thanks to cheap DVD stores and my local library, and I've come to respect it as decent television, though I can no longer recall which doctor other than Alan Alda's Hawkeye that I had previously thought was on the show--Trapper John (the actor's name eludes me) had thrown me for a loop the first three seasons but now the cast looks funny without him.

I'd put even money that nobody else has ever pointed out Gary Burghoff's sinister secret. Now that I know it, though, it's rather obvious that he's always concealing his hand. Some times it looks natural, but often enough it looks like he's up to something, especially in light of the fact that everybody else makes no effort to hide their hands. But did I ever notice before? No. Does it matter now? Still no. It's just another useless bit of information that I can use to frighten and bewilder people.

Sinister, ha ha ha. Get it?

Want to know an easy way to get thrown out of a bowling alley?

Skip the shoe rental and shot-put your bowling balls from the regular floor. They really love that sort of thing.

Here's an interesting tidbit for you: Ehren Kruger, screenwriter for the American remake of Japan's Ringu, better known as The ring, also wrote screenplays for three other movies: Scream 3, Reindeer games and Arlington road. Talk about inconsistent. Scream 3 was the necessary-but-not finish to a series that lost steam almost before ever getting any, but it was workmanlike and adequate—suitable, maybe, but nothing exceptional. Reindeer games was an overly twisty action flick that was anything but adequate, though not in a good way. Despite a prominent Ben Affleck I still wanted to like that movie, but as I saw it that just wasn't possible. I just now placed a reserve for the DVD of the director's cut, though, and I haven't completely given up hope yet. That said, I'm not exactly keeping my fingers crossed. And giving up on crossings and double-crossings all together brings us to Arlington road, by far the superior film of the three. Can three have a superior? Is it just superior or most superior? For some reason I'm thinking that superior is one of a digital relationship, but as I type this that sounds silly. Going back, far past silly and ludicrous and into serious, Arlington road is a good thriller, though the final ending drags on a bit. The action is well paced and nothing is revealed unnecessarily or too soon. It is, I will admit, a little unconventional but that wouldn't stop me from recommending it to anybody with more than a shred of intellect. So Kruger's batting .333 in my book, one hit and two misses. And then comes The ring which likely won't knock a film out of a future AFI 100 best horror films but probably should. For what I had expected to be a through-the-motions (don't-go-in-the-basement, ooh-a-scary-monster) flick, it turned out hauntingly beautiful and even pretty good (By "pretty good" I mean "I rather liked it"). Now, three weeks after watching that I have watched its Japanese predecessor (and lived to tell the tale).

Though the (film snob) buzz would lead me to believe otherwise, it wasn't really better than its progeny across the Pacific. The effects were, well, worse, though the understated faces of death was not to its detriment but actually a good thing—Verbinki and company may have taken that one further than necessary to get just a little more jump out of the audience. Understatement was the watchword for the visuals, though a lot of plot was spoken and verbally worked through, whereas Verbinski and pals left more to be seen and absorbed by the audience rather than beating them across the ears with it like a trout. Score one for the Americans. Another point for the Americans is the deeper story and reengineering of who does what—the reporter's considerably less independent (though more vulnerable) in Japanese. There are more character changes, too, with a more fleshed out son back in America. Hell, the video is only four scenes long in Ringu, none of them particularly disturbing.

On the whole it is almost as though the Japanese version is the more conventional of the two, though by conventional I am referring to the conventions of the Hollywood horror flick. Perhaps it is something of a modern-day Seven samurai (Akira Kurosawa's love letter to the American—and to some degree Italian—Western, which was remade as an American Western). To be an American with very little exposure to the Japanese language of film, I know I missed subtleties and framings that any Tamagotchi and Pokemon graduate in Osaka would immediately recognize. I think I noticed where some would be, but again I could not understand them. I have every intent to learn the written and spoken language, but to learn its cinematic equivalent could well be a tougher proposition. But if it takes watching every Godzilla film ever made (over there) I'll do it, gosh darn it.

To sum it all up, (and I know that this will get me drummed out of armchair film school) if you're going to see only one Ring, watch Verbinski's. I can't really come up with an ideal way to watch both, having done so myself. Watching Ringu first would take much of the bite out of Ring's "ending" and give away too much of the plot, but to do it in reverse, as I have done, takes too much away from the not so horrible Japanese version. To have seen Naomi Watts play the reporter first sets a standard that just can't be met by the earlier, lower budget film. Seeing the American film's video first makes the Japanese one cheesy, almost laughable in comparison. The imagery's altogether better given that they had something of a first draft to expand and extend. Yeah, the AllMovieGuide calls the shorter video "obscurely menacing" but the images that haunt me after a movie ends are the ones that I see, not the ones that menace me obscurely (see also the creepy stick figures in The Blair witch project twisting in the wind in haunting black and white). I also disagree with AMG's praise of the Kabuki stylings of Sadako, being too unnatural as to call attention to it and not just to make it frightening. Verbinski's trick photography is no better, I will concede, but it has the edge of being a little girl on screen and not whoever was used in Ringu, with the gawkishly long and skinny arms and rubber glove fingers. Maybe it's my preference for the stylized, but I still give the edge to the USA on this one and let AMG and its highfaluting opinions be damned. But this is a decision everybody needs to make for oneself, not one to be decided by some site or beret wearing film geek and then set in stone. So watch one, or both. Just not neither.

About the best thing to do, short of inducing amnesia (a la Zaphod Beeblebrox), would be to watch the two of them at the exact same time. Unfortunately that too wouldn't work well as the movies have different runtimes, and who has two TVs beside each other? Moreover the watching of a subtitled movie demands somewhat more attention than is devoted to one with understandably spoken dialogue, so one would definitely be shortchanged whether it be to a viewer transfixed by the visuals or merely a slow reader. This whole paragraph is utter nonsense, so skip it and instead rent The ring and watch it, though you might want to do it early on in the day and with other people around you. Just trust me on that.