Mopping up a few odds and ends from my recent time off : I finally saw "American Grafitti" after all these years. Yep, it was another of the all-time classics, like "Casablanca", that I'd inexplicably missed. I won't go into a long review, but I do think it's a perfect movie in every respect, something I'd say about very few films. For me, the nostalgia aspect was high, and I think that what I loved so much about it now was what caused me to avoid it in 1973. As a thirteen year old, I had no longing to look back at the early 1960s, an era I barely remembered. But childhood memories return as you get older, and now it seems like a magical time, a feeling that was captured in the movie. "Grafitti" also jump-started the 1950s retro craze in the mid-70s that culminated in "Happy Days". Another thing you notice about the movie is that George Lucas was a very talented writer/director of nuanced, character driven stories. In fact "AG" is the kind of coming of age comedy John Hughes or John Landis would later excel at, and here's Lucas doing it before either of them and creating a classic. Interesting to consider what he might've done careerwise, had "Star Wars" not become such a monolith. If, like me, you've somehow never seen "American Grafitti", watch it right away, even tonight. It gets my highest rating, Two Gigantic Thumbs Up, and could not be more highly recommended. ////
I also saw a British crime drama called "Moment of Indiscretion"(1958). Ronald Howard of the Sherlock Holmes TV series stars as "John Miller", a prosecutor who's never lost a case. He's been itching for some time off with his wife "Janet" (Lana Morris), whom he's rarely seen in the two years they've been married. But duty forever calls. When it does this time - in the form of another important case - she meets up with her ex-fiancee, who's phoned her just as Miller was leaving. Her ex is an oil driller who'll soon be moving to South America. He just wants to say goodbye to Janet, who was the love of his life before she married. She agrees to meet him - at his friend's apartment - and there's no hanky panky. He respects her marriage (though he was once a rival of her husband) and he leaves her after saying goodbye for the last time. They depart separately to avoid being seen together. "We don't want anyone getting the wrong idea", says the ex.
After he leaves, she waits a few minutes then exits the apartment herself. When she does, she witnesses the murdelization of a woman on the floor below. A man has stabbed her to death. Janet runs out of the building and goes home, shaken, but she can't tell the police or her husband what she's seen, because it will reveal her meeting with her ex. So she keeps it to herself in the hope that no one saw her leave the scene. However, she dropped a monogrammed handkerchief on her way out of the building. "Inspector Marsh" (our pal Denis Shaw) from Scotland Yard gets hold of the hankie, and by checking it with every last boutique in London, he's able to confirm her as the buyer.
Shaw then visits Janet to question her about the 'kerchief, and after her poker face fails, she confesses everything to the Inspector and her husband.
"Yes, I was in the building. I was meeting my ex-fiancee. There was nothing untoward, I just wanted to bid him farewell before he left for South America. I did witness the murder and that's my handkerchief. I must've dropped it when I ran away. But I saw the man who killed that woman! I could identify him if he's ever caught".
Now the plot gets interesting as Inspector Marsh takes her along to meet with the apartment's tenant, a "Mr. Corby" (John Van Eyssen). Upon being introduced to Janet, he smirks. She's shocked, frozen in place and stammering : "It's him! He's the man who killed her"! Then she faints.
Once she's led away, Corby - calm cool and collected - turns the tables and says that he saw Janet arguing with the dead woman a month earlier. Apparently they knew each other? Only if you believe Mr. Corby. The problem for Janet is that the Inspector does! So he arrests Janet Miller. She's in jail awaiting trial, and it looks like she might be going to prison for murder if her husband the prosecutor can't find evidence to refute Corby's "eyewitness" testimony. "Moment of Indiscretion" is more drama than thriller, and centers on Prosecutor Miller's loyalty to his wife Janet. It's a little slow in places and may have worked better at 60 minutes instead of 71, but it still merits Two Solid Thumbs Up and is definitely recommended. ///
Finally, we have "Stillwater", the new Matt Damon movie that I actually saw in a theater (Laemmle Encino) with my sister. It's based on the Amanda Knox story, but the film is more ambitious than that. It's almost like two movies in one, which accounts for it's 140 minute running time. Besides the Knox take, it's also about a father's emotional re-connection with his daughter, who he more or less abandoned by abdicating his responsibilities as a parent. Damon plays an oil field roughneck who got into drugs and alcohol. It's the nature of his job, always away from home, working with other tough men, partying hard at the end of the day. We never see this; when we meet Damon he's clean and sober and has been through hell. His wife committed suicide and his daughter's in prison in France, for a murder she swears she had nothing to do with. That's the Amanda Knox angle.
Damon goes to France, initially to visit his daughter, who he hasn't seen in years. At first, their reunion is tentative, but after she presents him with her version of events, he starts to believe there's a possibility of reversing the verdict. Even when the French defense attorney tells him to forget it, Damon forges ahead, conducting an investigation of his own. I won't tell you too much about what happens during his explorations in Marseilles, but it's not a part of France you'd want to visit.
Damon's a tough Oklahoman, though, and he wants his daughter out of prison, so he does what he has to do to get her freed. Along the way, he meets and becomes friends with a French theater actress, who lives next door to the apartment he's renting. More than that, he becomes a surrogate father to her tomboy little daughter, who loves all things American and takes to Damon like her hero. They become inseparable, like soulmates almost, and the movie diverts for about 45 minutes to examine how this new second family bears on Damon's effort to free his daughter. So you could almost say it's three movies in one.
I thought it was excellent. I'd never heard of it's director, Tom McCarthy, but then I saw he also directed "Spotlight", which won Best Picture in 2015. I also think that Matt Damon did a great job as "Bill Baker", the father who's trying to redeem himself by finally being present for his daughter, when she needs him the most. Damon should get an Oscar nod for Best Actor, I believe, and while he might not win (because there is always heavyweight talent up for the award), I think he's deserving of a nomination because he shines in a low key, restrained performance, much in the way Ethan Hawke did in his role as "Reverend Toller" in "First Reformed". The characters are vastly different, but it's not an easy thing to do, to bring depth to a non-showy role. So yeah, Damon deserves an Oscar nom, and besides that, he's just plain Always Good, in every movie he's in. He's one of those actors where, if you go see his movie, you know it's gonna be a good one, and so is the case with "Stillwater", which gets Two Big Thumbs Up from me.
As for Amanda Knox, I think she's a cuckoo bird. When her case was in the news, I - like everybody else - fell for the news media propaganda that she was 100% innocent, and a victim of the big, bad Italian prosecutor. But then I - like everybody else - saw how she acted during her trial, doing cartwheels at the courthouse and smooching with her Italian boyfriend (a co-defendant), when she was supposed to be brokenhearted over the dead girl. She looked and sounded like a nut job to me, and a spoiled one at that. Now, I think the truth is somewhere in between, in her case. She may not have committed the murder herself, but...........well, see the movie. Kudos to the filmmakers for not flinching. /////
Other odds 'n ends : I have some full season dvd collections of The Loretta Young Show, which I bought a while back because I thought it'd be a nice, old-fashioned show to watch with Pearl once in a while. One night last week we were watching an episode called "My Favorite Monster" about a little girl who can't tell the difference between TV and real life. It was very clever, almost like an episode of Twilight Zone, and when the credits appeared at the end, it said "written by William Raynor". "Wow"!, I said to Pearl. "Bill Raynor again"!
Those who follow the blog will know that Bill Raynor lived right across the street from us (and just around the corner from Pearl and her family) when we lived in Reseda from 1953-1967. He was also a talented amateur photographer who took my baby pictures. He was a screenwriter by trade, and in addition to writing for television he also wrote several movie scripts, including some classic sci-fis that we watched last year. "Wow", I said again to Pearl. "He probably wrote that show about a hundred yards from here". If that. You could throw a rock from Pearl's yard to the old Raynor house. Our little corner of Reseda wasn't exactly Hollywood Central, but we did have a cool little grouping on our street, with actor Richard Reeves and Bill Raynor living next door to one another, and Dad (and us) across the street. Dad of course worked for ABC Television, then Deluxe Laboratories and 20th Century Fox.
And finally, something I've been blowing my mind on. During my most recent break, I went for my usual hikes, at Aliso Canyon, O'Melveny Park and Santa Susana State Park. One day, out at Santa Su, I went off trail a little ways to check out an old metal frame that's bolted into the rock. It looks like it once held a sign, maybe for the shooting range that was located on the land back in the 1950s. I've seen it dozens of times before as I walk down the trail, but for some reason this time I diverted to inspect it, probably cause I'm interested in the history of the place and I wanted to see if it had any markings. It's elevated from the main trail, about 30 feet above it, so you go up a little hillside to get closer. After checking out the frame and finding nothing special (though I'd still love to know it's history), I continued around the side of the small hill, being careful to stick to patches of bare earth because there's no trail up there and you don't wanna chance a rattlesnake.
In that regard, it's a good idea to look down, to keep your eyes on the ground, and when I'm in exploratory mode I usually do that anyway, because ever since I read a book called "Forbidden Archaeology" by Michael Cremo, I've been interested in Indian artifacts. Dad used to talk about finding arrowheads in the woods of northern Indiana when he was a boy, and in recent years, after reading that book, I've been hoping I might find something too, so every now and then on a hike, I'll look down and scan the trail, and just off to the sides, for the heck of it. This time, I was off trail, and in an area I hadn't walked before (or if I did, it was when I was new to the park back in 2014). And as I walked slowly, past the metal frame and around the back of the small hillside, I saw a chipped black rock. Now, of course there are rocks strewn all over the landscape at Santa Su, from pebbles to boulders the size of houses. But this black rock caught my eye because of it's shape. It had sharp edges, and while that's not unusual, it also had a low-angled pyramid shape on top. "OMG", I thought, as I bent down to pick it up. I wanted a closer look because it resembled some of the rocks in my "Forbidden Archeology" book. When I held it in my hand, it fit, like a tool. There was a space for my thumb, and my index finger folded comfortably around the side.
But what blew my mind was a closer examination of the edge. One edge had been "worked", as the archaeologists call it, meaning that the rock has been chiseled down to a sharp edge on one side, for the purpose of cutting or scraping. On this rock you can see the chisel marks, four of them (about 1/3 inch in size), indicative that the rock was indeed "worked" for a stone cutting tool. The marks, when combined with the rough pyramidal shape of the top and the space for a thumb grip, leave no doubt that what I found is a stone cutting tool. The only question is.....how old is it?
The Santa Susana Mountains and the Chatsworth Hills were inhabited by the Tataviam Indians prior to white settlement in the Valley. I don't know their timeline, or when they left, but certainly by the 1880's, when the railroads began to come in, they were sophisticated enough to be using modern tools (at least I would imagine). What I'm saying is that I doubt a Tataviam would still be chipping with stone tools in the 1800s. Or even the 1700s for that matter.
The ancestors of the Tataviam and also the Fernandino and Gabrielino Indians say that their people inhabited the area for 8000 years (freakin' amazing), and indeed there is an ancient cave painting on the property of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, where rocket engines were once tested. That painting is estimated at 3000 years old. There are other pictographs that are newer, just a few hundred years old, but it demonstrates the duration of the tribes in that area.
In "Forbidden Archaeology", stone tools of the type I'm describing originated in the Neolithic Age, which (depending on your Google link) began anywhere from 3000 to 14,000 years ago. The Indians in Santa Su were there for 8000 years. So what I'm wondering is when was this rock made? Who "worked" it, who chiseled it into a cutter, when did they do it, and most of all........how long was it sitting there on the ground before I found it?
Remember, it was off trail, in a park few people visit anyway, and the park itself was not open to the public until the 1990s. So was the cutter made a couple hundred years ago........or several thousand? And had it been sitting in one position all that time, or at least in the same area (accounting for rains, earthquakes, etc)?
The sandstone at Santa Susana has been there for 80 million years and was once at the bottom of an ocean. That blows my mind every time I'm out there. But now.....this cutter.......someone actually made it, and used it. Probably a few thousand years ago.
That blows me off the freakin' map. /////
That's all I know for today. I send you tons of love, as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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