Musings from Brian J. Noggle

The night’s second Gary Cooper film, 1931’s Fighting Caravans, depicted a young (and by young, I mean a year younger than my present age) Gary Cooper as a young ne’er-do-well scout on the trail from Independence, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, as part of a large wagon train beset by Indians.

Not too many comments, but:

• Lili Damita is way hotter than Helen Hayes, and I can even forgive the French accent since she wisened up and moved to America. Also, at 5′ 3″, she seems to have a couple of inches on Ms. Hayes, using the relative Cooper scale for comparison.
• Like the cantankerous scout Bill Jackson, I too have grown quite fond of a Kickapoo girl.

Still, as I delve more into these older films, I have to admit I prefer color films to black and white, unless they’ve been lovingly restored by gentle, adulating acolyte hands. But that’s a matter of taste.

Also, I hope that I am like Gary Cooper. Although I am a stunning example of manhood in my thirties, I hope to get sexier as I near the midcentury mark and beyond. I’m still hoping to dodge the whole lung cancer thing, though.

So tonight’s first movie is the 1932 rendition of A Farewell to Arms starring Gary Cooper and Helen Hayes. Here are my thoughts:

• Man, Helen Hayes was kinda cute, but she’s like, what, 4 foot tall?
• Good to see Gary Cooper was as cross-eyed as I am.
• You want to know a secret about the quality of DVDs you get when you buy a classic double feature for $10? Man, it’s authentic. I got every pop and his in the soundtrack in surround sound, baby. If only I had HDTV, undoubtedly it would be as pixelated as playing Doom on an Atari 2600. Which I think was called Gunfight, by the way, but that’s neither here nor there.
• Some people, particularly academics (especially those attending Colorado universities) would say that one could not truncate or chop up a Hemingway novel, but this movie indicates that you can. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s just a shell of what the book was.

  Of course, some would continue to cast aspersions on Hemingway’s novels, instead preferring the continental confuance of James Joyce. When I encounter these people, I prefer to engage them in a rigorous drunken brawl. I know that’s what Papa would have wanted.

So I pardon me if I get a little, how do you say it, upset. As some of you know, when my beautiful wife leaves town for business or biking, I take refuge in DVDs to kill the long, lonely hours without the fuego de mi corazon, la luz de vida, and the woman who represents even more foreign language sayings with more italics.

So this evening, when my beautiful wife has gone to a tropical location without me, I watch An Affair to Remember, not because I like chick flicks recommended by the Meg Ryan character in Sleepless in Seattle, but because I am researching the requisites for being a sensitive guy (please don’t beat me up, Tap City codrinkers).

Little did I know that the whole point was that the musically-minded, auburn-haired babe was travelling in a tropical location when she encountered a sharpie like Cary Grant, whom she decided that, as a non-practicing painter who could do the cha-cha and who had a grandmother in France with a good spread, was worth more than her faithful man at home. Pardon me if I take some offense.

Mr. Grant (and his sharpie ilk), I have a pen right here with which I have practiced the particular angle that I can use to drive its blue ball point through your Xyphoid Process right into the lower quadrant of your left lung, so if you even dare start circling my wife in a stairwell, prepare for your lower tracheotomy, do you know what I am saying?

Sure, the movie tried to make me forget my point by detouring into some musical sort of bits through the first part of the third act, with all those damn urchins singing, but I remained undeterred. No matter how many times they ran that damn “Affair to Remember” song through its various interpretations, I could hear nothing but “The Long Goodbye” playing on the car radio, do you get my drift?

Criminey, this brings to mind several things:

• I miss my wife.
• I should lower my caffeine intake.
• As shidoshi said, practice the upward strike by dropping rear leg and pivoting 45 degrees, blocking with left hand and jamming pen into craw with right hand.

I got an opportunity this weekend to see I, Robot, the 2004 film starring Will Smith and “suggested by” Isaac Asimov. In between shots designed to remind us that Will Smith has been working out, it wasn’t a bad film. Not even a bad story. I don’t remember if I’ve read the book–I remember mistaking it in my memory for Caves of Steel, which means I’m ultimately as reliable of a narrator as anything you’d find in a Philip K. Dick novel, but that’s neither here nor there.

Regardless, I thought I might comment upon those people who often unfavorably compare a movie to its source novel or an Alan Dean Foster novel compared to the original movie. Crikey, people, understand that the two are different media, with different ways of presenting a sometimes common story, which might differ in incidents and characters.

I mean, let’s face it, when you’re arguing about which presentation is best, you’re arguing about whose translation of The Iliad is best. Lattimore? Lombardo? Presented with the choice, undoubtedly an ancient Greek would shake his fist at both books and say that either one ruins the story because the dry text removes the storyteller’s inflections and ability to alter the content for the audience.

So yeah, although I think the original Battlestar Galactica was a triumph of storytelling and mythmaking, I won’t automatically discard the new rendition because Starbuck’s a hot chick, and I wasn’t prejudiced against I, Robot the movie simply because it wasn’t faithful to the Isaac Asimov original.

And I don’t want to ruin it for you, but don’t remember early, as I did, that Deckard was a replicant.