No movie to report tonight, because I was of course watching the season premier of "The X-Files". It was a great episode, picking up right where the cliffhanger ending left off in 2016. There are so many plot threads, and subplots and conflicting loyalties and deceptions that it's hard to keep track of them all, but it's clear that The Cigarette Smoking Man is still alive and running things, and even though he got burned to a crisp in 2016, he still looks pretty doggone good all things considered.
I am a hard core "X-Files" fan. I remember watching the first few episodes in 1993 at Mr. Davey's house on Burton Street, the same house I wound up living at two years later. But in Fall 1993, I was still living in my long time residence on Rathburn Street. The Northridge Earthquake was still a few months away and we were blissfully unaware of the changes to come. But "The X-Files" served as a sort of precursor or omen, a sign of Weird Things To Come, and boy did things ever get weird in the ensuing years. But I remember watching those first two or three episodes of the show at Burton Street, just up the road a bit from Pearl's (another house I did not know was in my future), and I remember thinking, "Man, this show is really going for the throat", i.e. going for hard core truth.
Keep in mind that this was 25 years ago. Pre-Internet, pre-information overload. Pre- everybody and his brother has an abduction story. To quote the famous Jimmy Durante line, "Everybody wants to get into the act"! And that is so true nowdays. Everybody has had every experience possible.
Or not.
"The X-Files" premiered in a time when the Millennium was approaching, when television programming was changing and beginning to dumb down big time. Yet here was this new show, which took up where "The Invaders" left off in the 1960s, only now it was going into areas (like Area 51, lol) that most of the public had never heard of before. And it was talking about Aliens! Yippee!
That was the central theme, and you had Mulder the Believer and Scully the Skeptic. Mulder and Scully, the great Sci-Fi couple who have lasted now for eleven seasons and a quarter century, with a fourteen year break in between.
There were always two major factors to the lasting appeal of the show. One was the unrelenting drive for The Truth, which was "Out There" according to the show's motto. But the other factor, the main appeal I think, was always Mulder and Scully. Whoever cast these two in their roles was a genius of public perception. Needless to say there are dozens if not hundreds of actors applying for lead roles in any new series. The role of the casting director is to choose not only the most talented cast, but to choose the actors who personify each character.
And for Mulder and Scully, there could only have ever been two actors to play them; David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.
Fate and psyche play huge parts in such decisions, where an actor or actress becomes a character to the extent that he or she is identified with it. And the casting director, if he or she is a good one, is like the Psychic Medium of the operation, the one who says - for instance to David Duchovny - you "are" Mulder.
Or Bob Denver as "Gilligan". For me, that is the #1 casting decision in all of television, and that character entertained me and formed a lasting dialogue in my life that exists to this day.
Now I am off the subject as always, but there is a reason that great characters stay with us throughout out lives, and that is because Real People - people who we love - stay with us throughout our lives, and in television, with it's format of continuing episodic series, where the characters visit us weekly, it feels like the same thing. In the best television series, the characters and the actors that portray them become like family. Just like our favorite bands do.
So that's the deal with "The X-Files". For me, my life is an "X-File", so no other explanation is needed for my appreciation of the show, haha.
Elizabeth, if you are reading, I saw your post about looking for a professional quality photo lab. I am not the one to suggest such a facility in the digital age, though I could have in the film age, but even then it would have been far away here in Los Angeles. But still, I see you have received some good recommendations, and even better than that, I see that you are planning for a gallery show.
That would be - and will be - a great thing. And it will happen. I wish I could be there to see it!
But when it does happen, I will be there in spirit. That's how these things generate in the first place, beginning with connections in the spirit.
But still, one day I will hope to see one of your shows in person. :):)
See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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