21st Favorite Movie - The Shawshank Redemption

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

When this movie came out, no one and I mean NO ONE saw it coming. It wound up earning a paltry $18 million, $7 million less than it cost to make, and it didn't win a single Oscar. I think more than anything, the title kept people away. C'mon... 'Shawshank'? If you haven't seen the movie, you might think the movie is about a lamb bone. And now, it is ranked #2 overall on the imdb.com list of 250, receiving an average rating by users of 9.2. Only The Godfather is ranked higher. And the part that kills me is that most of them still don't give Stephen King any credit for writing the short story that was adapted into the film.

Bethany is taking a mentoring class right now and one of their assignments was to pick a movie from a list that the professor came up with that featured mentoring relationships. One thing though was that you could not pick a movie that you already seen. Astoundingly, one of her classmates had never seen this movie before. How is that possible? Do they not have USA or TNT where it is aired at least weekly? Have they never met one of the thousands of people who have rated this movie so high on imdb.com? Are they Amish?

As you can see this has become one of the most widely loved movies of all time. No one dislikes The Shawshank Redemption. And pretty much no one has never seen it before. Since you have all already seen it and already love it, I don't need to go into detail here. Plus, Bethany and I are going to dinner in the city tonight with a friend of hers from her Japan team, Tim N. So I gotta get ready. I'll leave you with my favorite quote from the movie:

"Get busy living... or get busy dying."

22nd Favorite Movie - Boyz in the Hood

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

This movie came out in the theaters when I was a junior in high school. By the time I was a senior and it had been released on VHS (no DVD back then!) it was already the favorite movie of many of my friends. In fact, I had one friend - Daniel P - who whenever we went to Movie Express in Montclair (no Blockbuster then!) to rent something, he would only beg us to rent Boyz in the Hood or Juice, even though we had already seen both movies 20+ times. For some reason it seems like people didn't own movies that much back then... I don't remember people collecting movies on VHS like people do with DVD's now. Maybe we just didn't have enough money, but I can't remember it ever crossing our minds that maybe we should just buy these two movies instead of paying $3 to rent one of them every 2 weeks.

I was excited to watch this movie with Bethany a few months ago because she had never seen it. I wound up being a little disappointed with how dated it felt... at times it truly seemed like a "made for tv movie". Some of the music is a little sappy... the production a bit cheap-looking... and those clothes!!! I mean, just check out Cuba's yellow-orange shirt on the picture above with the one big polka dot on it. But the movie still has undeniable power.

So you got Cuba Gooding Jr. before Jerry Maguire as the teenaged Tre', Laurence Fishbourne before The Matrix playing his father, and Angela Basset before Akeelah and the Bee playing his mother. But Ice Cube steals the spotlight from all of them playing Tre's friend, Dough Boy. The last scene where Dough Boy says in reference to local newscasters, "Either they don't know or don't show what's going on in the 'hood" always gets me.

Boyz was the directorial debut of John Singleton and at the time it seemed like this was the beginning of a promising career that perhaps would even rival his mentor, Spike Lee. But after being nominated for best director and best screenplay for Boyz, I would have to say that Singleton has not made another film that compares to the power of his inaugral effort.

One of the main themes of the film is fatherhood. When the movie begins, Tre's mother decides that he is getting to the age where he really needs his father's presence in his life, so she sends him to live with his dad until he is in high school. Many of Tre's friends do not have fathers, and the film shows how being raised by his loving and disciplining dad affects the choices that Tre' makes later in life.

I've been reading a book by Donald Miller (he wrote one of my favorite books of all time, Blue Like Jazz) called To Own A Dragon. The subtitle of the book is "Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father". Miller says that not having a father around to teach him how to make wise decisions, to make him feel significant, and to just give him an idea of how a man is supposed to conduct his life made him often feel lost, like he didn't belong, and like he was worthless. The book says that 85% of people in prisons grew up without a father.

Although they may be intended for different audiences, Boyz in the Hood and To Own a Dragon are saying the same thing: as a father, there is nothing you can do that is more important that raising your children to know right from wrong and to have a sense of purpose in their lives. I have been more and more grateful for my dad as I read this book and also I have been more and more eager to learn HOW to be a good father for when that day comes. Heck, I even watched a couple episodes of Run's House for the first time on MTV today, hoping to glean some parenting tips from Reverend Run, formerly of Run-DMC. But I guess all that will come in time. I guess Bethany and I should enjoy this time we have together without kids because someday there will be a lot for us to do.

Lost: Simply The Best

It has been forever since I blogged about something other than one of my favorite movies! But today will not be much different. Today I would like to talk about my favorite tv show of all time. That's right, Lost is better than Seinfeld (my favorite show 5 years ago), better than The Simpsons (my favorite show 10 years ago) , better than The Brady Bunch (my favorite show 25 years ago).

Not only is Lost my favorite show of all time, this current season is its best season yet. So many fans have jumped ship, complaining that they want this question answered or they want see more of that character. But I believe it just keeps getting better and better. Right now the series keeps building off of little hints that were dropped in previous episodes (Jacob's list? VW buses on the island? The Purge?) which makes it feel more like you are reading a book than watching a one-hour, stand alone, tv show. Is it any surprise that Stephen King is a big fan and has been referenced twice now in this season? (a rabbit with an 8 on its back is mentioned in his book On Writing, and in the first episode the characters were discussing the book, Carrie) Lost is taking on the feel of a saga, a masterpiece, much like Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which I have a feeling the producers are very familiar with. JJ Abrams, in fact, has expressed interest in making those 7 books for the screen --http://www.writerswrite.com/wblog.php?wblog=214071

Within this - the best season of the best show of all time - I believe last week's episode was the best episode ever. Maybe I am getting a little carried away, but after watching it I spent about four hours online researching stuff. And the image I posted here is the lightning-quick glimpse we got of the person who was in that chair in the shack in the middle of the jungle. Some say it looks like Locke. Others say Ben. Still others suggest Kelvin or Alvar/Magnus Hanso or Dennis Hopper (you have to admit it does sort of look like him!). All I know is that I am a little bit frightened to see what happens in these next two episodes. The producers say, "only an extremely deranged individual would think of doing what we're doing". Me scared!!!

Also in case you missed it, the producers of the show announced that there will be 3 more seasons after this one, each one containing 16 episodes. These are significantly shorter seasons than they had been doing... they averaged 23 episodes per year the first 3 seasons. But the good news is that each season will be 16 straight episodes, no breaks or re-runs, which is pretty much what we are in the middle of right now since the show came back from its (Day)break. So that means that by May of 2010, all of our questions will have been answered.

And in case you have never seen an episode but have grown interested... whatever you do, DO NOT tune in this week thinking that you will just "jump on board." This would be like deciding that you are going to read Les Miserables this summer, and then opening the book to somewhere in the middle and starting from there. It would be like deciding you are going to watch the movie Psycho and then starting from just after the shower scene. Completely and totally unacceptable. Get Season 1 on DVD. You will not be disappointed.

23rd Favorite Movie - Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Make sure you have read the first post in this series ("My 50 Favorite Movies") before you read on...

I know some of you will think I am cheating by counting this entire series as one movie. But I have a couple reasons for it:

1. The movies are all so close to one another in terms of quality that to rank them against other movies would be difficult. I CAN say that I liked the third one the best, then the first one, and then Two Towers. But rating each one against other movies like Saving Private Ryan and Jaws feels like splitting hairs to me.

2. To the non-hobbit/elf loving reader out there... three posts on LOTR would have been quite the bore. Plus, it's my list and you're not paying me anything to read this so I can do whatever I want! Ahhhhh... the beauty of blogging.

A great deal of my childhood was comprised of three things: baseball, Boy Scouts, and monsters. My older brother could probably say the same thing about his childhood. I don't know what it is like now, but we lived in a neighborhood without any other kids my age and I didn't have any other siblings, so I was always tagging along with him. One of the infamous family videos is of me as a kid smashing the clay Godzilla figures that my brother had left sitting on the table to dry. Yup, my big bro introduced me to monsters, Dungeons and Dragons, and Lord of the Rings (although my mom, a librarian, may have been partially responsible for that last one).

In the first grade, I submitted a story of epic proportions to the school newspaper entitled "Samwise and the Bats". It was a sequel to LOTR in which Samwise and his dog, Woof-Woof, find a new ring and whenever he places it on his finger, bats and other monsters appear that he has to fight. The story ends with the bats capturing Samwise and taking him to their lair and Woof-Woof triumphantly saving the day. I still have a copy lying around somewhere if you want to check it out sometime. Tolkien's estate tried to buy the copyright from me but I turned them down.

All this to say... if these three movies had been released when I was seven, I would have wet my pants.

My friend Chris C (who was Dungeonmaster when we used to get together and play D&D during recess) described them as a "masterpiece". I can't think of a better word. Peter Jackson made all the perfect choices: the perfect actors, perfect music, perfect location, perfect special effects... I know hardcore fans of the books dispute his decision to leave things out like Tom Bombadill or the final confrontation with Sauron at the shire, but with each movie at 3 hours+ already, he had to cut some parts.

I only have one complaint, and it isn't even Peter Jackson's fault.

***BIG TIME MAJOR SPOILER ALERT***

I kind of wish that Frodo would have died.

It's funny, even though as kids my brother and I were really into LOTR stuff, we never actually read the books. We had audio tapes that would tell part of the story, and children's picture books, and the 197o's movie that was part live action and part animation, but we didn't have the full story. So watching these movies together when he was back for Christmas (remember a new one came out every December from 2001-2003), we kept expecting that Frodo was going to die in the end. My brother's wife, Betsy, had read the books when she was little and even she thought Frodo died in the end. In the movies they did such a good job of making it seem like there was no hope for him and Samwise - that this really was a suicide mission - it just seemed impossible for them to get out alive.

Here's the real problem I have with the ending... I just think that to go that far... to be 9 hours invested in this thing... to have the ring destroyed because Gollum got too close to the edge while holding it and fell in, well, that was a little disappointing to me. I think it would have been better if Frodo died a heroic, sacrificial death by plunging into the fire while wearing the ring. That would have been way better than Gollum slipping and falling in. But this is what I REALLY wish would have happened: Frodo, Samwise and Gollum all make it to the fiery pit of Mount Doom, and Frodo pulls his "no, it's mine, my precious" thing which is cool because it shows the power of the ring over anyone and makes Smeagle into more of a helpless victim. And then what should have happened is Gollum grabs Frodo, bites off his finger, and you think he is about to put the ring back on his scaly finger but then you see him become Smeagle in his eyes and he plunges himself into the fire carrying the ring, not wanting to live as Gollum anymore and never wanting the ring to do that to another person again. That would have been boss!

Anyways, I haven't had the taste for LOTR since we did a marathon with the high schoolers a couple years ago one day. We watched all three movies - extended editions - back-to-back-to-back. It was excruciating. I was so sick of battles by the end of that. It was over 12 hours with the extrage footage added. Just brutal. But one of these days, after I have fully recovered from that nightmare, it will be fun to revisit a true masterpiece and feel like I am seven again.

The Happiest Place on Earth

If you read our last update you know that Danny and I spent the weekend at Disneyland. It was the perfect weekend getaway! Everything was great and it felt so good to be away with no responsibility. I got to leave work early on Friday so we stopped at Harris Ranch for dinner on the way to LA. I had the chicken. Haha, just kidding. We had fabulous steak! We got to our hotel at about 9:30 so we had plenty of time to enjoy the nice room and relax. We highly recommend The Annabella Hotel in Anaheim - we paid motel prices for a gorgeous room with a super comfy bed.

Saturday morning we hit Disneyland. My biggest fear was that the free tickets we got from a friend at church wouldn't be valid. I read them a hundred times but I just knew it couldn't be that easy and they would say the tickets are only good for certain days or certain people - but we waltzed right in without paying a cent! By lunch we had done all our favorite rides and not waited in any nasty lines. We ran into Jerry and Christine, friends from the Campbell Church, and then had lunch at the Blue Bayou, the restaurant inside the Pirates of the Carribean. I've always wanted to eat there because of the atmosphere but now I want to eat there again because of the food! Man, that was an amazing meal. That meal was so good that it actually inspired a new blog countdown for when Danny finishes his movie countdown: Top 10 meals he's ever eaten.

After lunch we hit California Adventure, a first for both of us. We enjoyed all the rides (and the Bug's Life and Muppets 3-D shows!). Tower of Terror was our favorite ride - at one point I didn't know if we were going up or down, I just knew we were going fast! We ran from the Muppets 3-D show (it really was great!) to have dinner with Mandy and Danny, college students from the Campbell Church at the ESPN Zone. More great food, but the best part (besides Mandy and Danny's company) was the private TV screen in our booth! We swapped back and forth between baseball, hockey, and Pepperdine volleyball!

We headed back to Disneyland to hit Tomorrowland and call it a day. We did have to stand in line for almost two hours to ride Space Mountain - and then were scared out of our minds since we were in the front row and couldn't see anything! Fun stuff. We passed out in the soft hotel bed at about 1 am after a great day. The weekend ended with lunch with Jessica and Alex, college students from First Covenant and a relaxing drive home. I'm so grateful for time away just the two of us, and it couldn't have been more perfect! I highly recommend a romantic getaway at the happiest place on earth.