July Grab-Bag

An overview of what I’ve been filling my head with lately.

This week was fairly busy with wrapping up the summer semester, helping complete an expedited new faculty hiring process for two open positions, and finalizing a rough overall outline and sample chapter for the textbook I’m co-writing, so this may be something of a smattering but I do have some thoughts on things that I’ve been reading/watching of late.

Films

After months of not having the time (or honestly, the interest) to view much of anything¹, I jumped back in and watched more movies in the last two weeks than I had in the past two months. This was partly because we all got sick with a daycare cold earlier this month and so, once everyone was asleep, all I had the energy to do was lay in bed and put something on the TV that I only had to half pay attention to - usually something I scoured from PlutoTV, which I’m more and more convinced is the only streaming service anyone needs these days. The only movie I watched in its entirety during this stretch was The Mask of Zorro, which I hadn’t seen in over a decade but which I always loved and, having rewatched it, can attest to it kind of putting all modern blockbusters to shame. It’s full of real people in real sets and physical spaces fighting each other with real swords, elaborate stunt work, attractive movie stars dripping with sexual chemistry. It’s of crazy that no one seemed to know what to do with Antonio Banderas after this, and that aside from the Shrek movies he kind of floundered until going back to Almodovar and entering his elder statesman era. Anthony Hopkins is ludicrously miscast (for a number of reasons) as Don Diego de la Vega, aka the original Zorro, but he’s such a giant, beautiful ham in it (complimentary) that I imagine he got paid entirely in cored apples. 

I saw the sequel once and remember it being terrible. I won’t be revisiting it to confirm.

Speaking of sequels, I also re-watched the entire Beverly Hills Cop trilogy last week in order to gear up for my viewing of the new Netflix installment. I’m not a big “rewatch everything else before the new one” guy - I loathe franchise continuity more and more these days, and I prefer to go in to new entries reinforced only by inconsistent and likely inaccurate memories and impressions whenever possible. But it had been a while since I had seen any of these and it was a fun revisit. The first remains pretty untouchable - a true lighting-in-a-bottle moment as Sylvester Stallone dropped out at the last minute and they had to fill the Sly-shaped hole in the wall with Eddie Murphy, an incongruence that is perfectly reflective of the central tension of the film itself. This is also Eddie Murphy in 1984, and there’s rarely been anyone so electric on screen.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the second one. There is an amping of style combined with a total abandonment of recognizable humanity and an embracing of vulgar extremism, and I imagine Cop 2 is closer to what someone unfamiliar with the series imagines when they learn of its existence than the more human-scale first entry. It was certainly heavily-rewatched by me and my brothers in our action-obsessed formative years, skewing as it does more in the direction of the male American adolescent. The less said about the third one, which tried to eschew comedy for action while nonetheless feeling more cartoonish than the previous entry, the better. Though it does feature a George Lucas cameo and a line reading from Hector Elizondo that is a piece of Sailor Family legend.

The new one is kind of mediocre, which means it’s better than most other legacy sequels. Murphy seems to care, but he’s also not throwing his fastball anymore. They must have felt like they owed John Ashton after his absence from Part 3 because there’s a lot of prime Taggart material while Judge Reinhold is nowhere to be seen for the middle ninety minutes. Axel gets a daughter because all of these things have to be about strained relationships with the protagonist’s kids, and I guarantee you they walked right up to the ledge of making Joseph Gordon Levitt the grandson of Ronny Cox’s Bogomil before thankfully walking that back, though not back enough to write him out of the script (he’s fine but extraneous). Kevin Bacon is a fun villain but gets too little to do, which is frustrating as they give his character some things that would have been interesting to play if the script was interested in any of them.

I know these have been happening for a while, but it seems like Top Gun Maverick has cursed us with the inevitability that every single pre-millenium action character will get one before we’re done. The problem is that most of them are nothing more than vanity projects for their stars. Not that Maverick wasn’t (the text of the film is basically that Tom Cruise is still better than anyone else at what he does), but none of the others have a star at the center surrounding themselves with talented filmmakers and forcing the movie to a level of greatness through sheer force of lunatic will. It did get me wondering which ones could possibly be left. Die Hard is out for rather sad and tragic reasons. Stallone’s already done it with Rambo and Rocky - twice each! - though it’s not like that would stop him from trying again, unless he wants to give Demolition Man: John Spartan a shot (would watch). I don’t know - maybe after long-delayed, vaguely sad attempts like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the misshapen and ungainly Star Wars sequel trilogy, or the last two Ghostbusters movies we’re finally at a point where we can put this all behind us.

Books

I started what I thought was going to be a re-read of Aristotle’s Poetics as textbook research, only to realize that I had never actually read the whole thing before.

I read The Epic of Gilgamesh for the first time and was struck by how sensitive and tender it is, being ultimately the story of a king who travels to the afterlife after the death of his friend in order to learn the secret to immortality, only to find out that death cannot be conquered. I was struck by the ending, in which Gilgamesh returns to the city of Uruk to marvel once again at its splendor, knowing that life must inevitably end. I have always lumped this and Beowulf together, being that they’re the oldest extant works of written literature, even though they were composed on different continents and written hundreds if not thousands of years apart. It’s also more of a fascinating contrast to Beowulf - in particular the way that Gilgamesh portrays the tenderness and sensitivity of masculinity and male friendship in addition to lamenting and marveling at the ultimate fragility of life.

I also read Knife, Salman Rushdie’s autobiographical account of his physical and emotional recovery from the brutal stabbing that almost took is life in 2022. The chronicle of the days immediately preceding, and the months after, the attack is straightforward and unsentimental, and as Rushdie describes the ways in which the assailant’s knife ruptured not only his flesh but his sense of happiness, tearing through the reality of the life he was building with his wife, I couldn’t help but think of our own struggles last year through Tiff’s illness. I recognized too the ambivalence that can sometimes come in the immediate aftermath of survival - I got through this, and now what? It’s something we don’t often address because we paint survival in purely victorious terms. And it is a victory, and with the right mindset and support system it becomes a chance at renewal, but part of the struggle afterwards is that once the immediate danger has passed, no one gives you a treatment plan for how to figure out continuing within a life that has often in many way been completely decontextualized and redefined. It was nice to see this addressed if only briefly.

Music

Oh, and there’s also a new Phish record out. I’m not going to talk about it too much because I don’t want to be that guy (just mentioning it has caused a hemp necklace with a glass mushroom tied to it to coil around my neck as I type). But I really like it.

-cs

1. For reasons I see no need to question, summers have become when I pack in as much reading as I can rather than catch up on any viewing. It could be that, as reading is my primary mode of de-stressing, I do it as a way of decompressing from the entire academic year.