‘Say hello to Grace Kelly’: I’m introducing my teen to the classics
On a lazy morning at the library, we discovered that you can check out an astounding 50 items at once, which pretty much should cover us for the rest of the summer -- an item a day, a novel, a biography, a classic Jimmy Stewart flick.
While picking out DVDs, I talked the little guy into “Rear Window,” the Hitchcock masterpiece. Not only had he never heard of the movie, he’d never heard of Hitchcock. When Grace Kelly first enters Stewart’s cramped apartment -- like gold plate, like plasma jets off the summer sun -- he audibly gasps.
“Say hello to Grace Kelly,” I say.
“Who?” he asks.
“Grace Kelly.”
An evening breeze went right out of him.
He is transitioning, from boyhood to something else – we’re not entirely sure what. The anti-puberty paint we purchased for his bedroom appears not to be working. The other day he was scolded for scratching at his bare stomach too close to a bowl of steaming green beans.
The guy’s got a ways to go is what I’m saying. We all do. The male of this species will always be an unfinished house, minus a few shingles. That accounts for some of our charm and much of the aggravation we sometimes cause. Each day I wake up, I’m relieved my mate of 300 years didn’t smother me in my sleep.
Meanwhile, the boy is a spec house with a lot of unfinished surfaces. His edges need some serious sanding. At 13, he will still sit through a movie where the dogs lip-sync the dialogue or talking chipmunks over-sell the jokes. He has been raised on this, as well as a steady diet of bombs and exploding cities.
Sure, those will always be our very best movies, but lately the little guy has shown a burgeoning interest in movies with more of a soul.
So after visiting the library, we sat on the couch and watched “Rear Window.” In it, a keen-eyed photographer, housebound with a broken leg, determines that a neighbor has killed his nagging wife. Simple, right? You could’ve shot it with your iPhone. You could fit the plot points on the back of your Starbucks cup.
Good scripts are literature. Like books, good movies help to make us interesting adults. And great movies all have great endings.
Sinister and sweaty, it was the perfect movie for a summer night. As it opens, New York City is suffering a heat wave. Neighbors never interact, until something goes terribly wrong, then they wail at one another. In that sense, it was very much like the New York of today.
Now, I don’t know much about movies, or life, or death, or anything for that matter. The Baldwin brothers all look the same to me, and I can’t tell Nancy O’Dell from Deborah Norville. These days, I can barely even tell a Camry from an Accord. The world seems to be suffering – and a little dead -- from sensible sedans, and their human equivalents.
But this much I am sure of: Good scripts are literature. Like books, good movies help to make us interesting adults. And great movies all have great endings.
That’s the big note -- the great endings. You can have a terrific career that ends poorly. You can even have a wonderful romance that fizzles in the end. But you will never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever write, produce or witness a great movie that doesn’t have an amazing ending.
Paul Newman had the best take on this. When told that the first pages of a script were the most critical, he agreed, but insisted that the last minutes of a movie were what mattered most of all. “Chinatown.” “The Wizard of Oz.” “Casablanca.” “E.T.” “Good Will Hunting.” All end with surprise, another element to world-class storytelling.
So, there you have my theory on movies.
Here’s my theory on little boys:
They take a while. They dream, they play, they waste a lot of time. They screw up, and find joy in screwing up, so they screw up some more. In no way are they sensible sedans.
At one time, their lingering little-boy temperaments were perfectly suited to jumping on a sailing ship, or a horse, and hitting horizons that scared the bejesus out of everybody else. After 6 million years of human evolution, little boys have been pre-programmed to take on a world that hardly exists anymore.
Now they sit on beds and couches, destroying kingdoms with their thumbs, in video games that are about as compelling to me as talking dogs.
But boys can still have terrific endings -- at least most of them will.
I know. I used to be one.
Twitter: @erskinetimes
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