I watch old, DVD movies on my computer. In the new normal, one finds them self exploring unfamiliar options. With only an antenna for local stations, television offerings are thin and weak with reruns. The schedule worsens every week. So I’ve gone to my DVD library. At present I have around 150 movies but that’s not enough. So I have begun replenishing my cache. In the old days, before new normal, you could find decent films for $4 or $5. I must not be alone in the search for cheap, DVD movies. Supply & demand: prices have gone up. This week the cheapest, desirable films are running $10. Most of them are movies I already have in my collection. But do what you must. I have three on order, due to be delivered soon and my Amazon cart has six more, waiting for me to place the order. The virus isn’t going away like the man said it would. My takeaway; don’t trust a narcissist hack when you need medical advice. My simple minded solution is, I’m not spending money on gasoline now so I can afford more DVDs.
Last night I watched ‘Gladiator’ with Russell Crowe, released in 2000. Last week I watched ‘Road To Perdition’ with Tom Hanks, released just two years later. What I couldn’t ignore last night was, if you reduce them both to bare bones they are the same story. One was set in Rome, the 2nd Century AD. The other, 1931 in the upper midwest. In both cases, wise, old rulers who carved out empires, they grew old and were forced to choose a successor. Both had wretched, evil sons. They also had beloved, loyal, generals. Both rulers die. Their beloved,(should have been sons) die valiantly and their worthless progeny, they die of their own treachery, pathetically. In both stories, a young boy of high birth survives, hope for the future.
From the Storytelling tradition you learn that there are only so many story formats, like fifteen or so. Beginning with bare bones, they get fleshed out through different time periods, locations, cultures, characters and plot twists but the skeletons, you can copy the list on a scrap of paper. But they unravel into millions of different versions. I ordered three different films that revolve around Richard Nixon’s undoing, all with different characters, different twists and personal narratives but the same historical benchmark, the same bones. I’ve seen them all and the bones they share is Nixon’s doomed effort to avoid the inevitable downfall.
On a grand scale, I love the ‘Geology’ story, how tectonic plates shifted and slid around the planet for a few billion years with violent upheaval and slow motion uplifting, subduction and voilá, there it is, a land bridge for people to cross between Siberia and North America. You have to get your mind around very long periods of time and that is more difficult for some than others; it takes practice and repetition, maybe even a little leap of faith. But the story is irresistible. Those paleolithic folks who came across that land bridge, they peopled a hemisphere with cultures and history. They precluded the age of European exploration by 12,000 years. Add people to the story and anything can happen. With that in mind, it is truly difficult for me to glorify mankind’s righteous, pure side without balancing the equation.
In that long climb down from the trees, civilization has advanced by leaps and bounds but the planet's only self righteous animal can’t shake his case of arrested development. Moral failures of lust and violence are ageless. They are only one side of the coin but reliable as the rise and set of the sun. But I don’t want to go there today. If I have to fall back on a DVD movie tonight it need be a feel-good tale like ‘Groundhog Day’ or ‘Sleepless In Seattle.’
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