Happy Independence Day! Last night was kind of surreal, because I could see all the fireworks displays at the horizon, in the suburbs, which makes for a trippy kind of vista, fireworks in the distance, literally at the horizon, rising over the city. Chicago itself didn't have any fireworks this year, owing to budget woes, although I think they did the usual launching of them at Navy Pier, the weekly summer firework fest that happens there (which kind of drives me bananas -- fireworks every weekend? It's like celebrating Christmas year 'round. It takes the fun out of it! You need some downtime, or else it becomes a slog.)
Have to go on a grocery run today, but the boys should enjoy that.
I watched "The Way Back," a Peter Weir movie, and although it was highly rated, and Weir had done a few good shots with memorable images, I found the movie to be not what I had hoped it would be. The movie was supposedly inspired by real-life happenings, but there wasn't enough going on in the movie plotwise, nor characterwise, to make the trip worthwhile. Guys escape a gulag in Siberia and cross Siberia by foot to freedom. Seemingly inspiring tale of survival, but it ended up just a picturesque slog, with people dying along the way. Grand vistas, tough terrain, but mostly just people walking, and not even talking, and the ending strove for some poignancy, but was robbed of depth and meaning by the lack of characterization. I mean, the characters were all wretches of various stripes, victims of Soviet repression, one way or another, but the story just dipped its toes in the lives of these characters, so you never got a real sense of who they were, what they were doing, how they got put in the gulag, and so on. They needed to rewrite the story and delve deeper into the characters. And even the trip itself got glossed over in parts -- I mean, the guys cross Siberia, Mongolia, lurch into Tibet, confront the Himalayas, and then the camera skips over that and they're in India, at the end. They skip the Himalayas?? WTF? We see them slogging over desert and dying of hunger and thirst in the desert but we don't see them managing to walk their way over the fucking Himalayas? Cinematic robbery! The problem the director faced was that so much time had been wasted on the front end of the story, that by the time they reached the Himalayas, it was like "Oh, and they made it over. The end." Bahah! Have you ever read "Going After Cacciato" by Tim O'Brien? That is a great, picaresque war novel about guys literally walking away from the Vietnam War. It's a very cool novel, and that epic sense of travel is wonderfully conveyed. I had hoped that "The Way Back" was going to be like "...Cacciato," but it wasn't. It was just drawn-out and boring and dismal, without enough characterization for the trip to matter to the viewer, and without enough plot for the trip to be particularly exciting. We hear about things (like dangerous peasants who get bounties for capturing prisoners) but we never see them, there are no encounters with them. Anyway, the movie got great reviews, but I wasn't impressed by it, and I wanted to be. The raw material of the movie could've made for something truly grand and epic (I mean, even the concept of it inspired: "Crossing Siberia in Stalinist Russia. On foot!"!) but it so wasn't. Fail.
Oh, and Mark Strong was in this one, too, amusingly enough, although his role is small and largely inconsequential. But I was like "Holy shit, there's Mark Strong again!"
