Knightriders - The Full Life & Semi Death of Billy the King

Knightriders

Director: George A. Romero

Come on. It's a fake; it's all a fake. They try to make it look tough. They try to make it look dangerous. – Hoagie Man

See magic ain't got nothing to do with organs and glands and busted necks. Magic got to do with the soul, man. Only the soul's got destiny. –Merlin

Don't forget to pick up a helmet. It's the thing that looks like your head, only it's got a chinstrap. –Tuck

You gotta have guts to do what we do baby. That's basic number one. –Rocky

There can only be one king, Morgan. –Alan

What the Netflix envelope told me about this one:

Billy (Ed Harris) leads a group of traveling performers who portray knights on motorcycles – an act that's quickly falling apart due to personal problems with members of the group, including Billy himself, who is beginning to confuse his shows with reality. As Billy loses control, cast members fall away from the troupe one by one, leading Billy on a quest to redeem himself and reunite the group – a mission that might lead to his own demise.

As I watch these 30@30 movies, I keep my computer open to a blank Word doc to capture the quotes I like and to record a few notes as things catch my eye or make me think. For this particular movie, I ended up with a lot of one-sentence observations that did me more or less no good as I tried to come up with a viewpoint for this post. Let me share a few:

• Stephen King made a cameo as "Hoagie Man" (according to the credits), a spectator at the first battle! Oh, "Hoagie Man's Wife" was played by Stephen King's own wife, Tabitha.
• Brother Blue (Merlin) is apparently best known as a storyteller. I could see that.
• Showing the camaraderie among the actors and crew after the show is over is a nice touch.
• I didn't expect this movie to cover the issue of being gay, but it just did!
• Billy went to jail with Bagman. And holy shit they beat up Bagman!
• Domestic violence, too? This movie covers a lot more than I thought it would!
• In the end… is Billy left without a crown AND without a queen? Linet belongs to Alan? And then Billy leaves altogether? And with the Black Bird apparently…
• Billy got hit by a truck! What the…

So I could talk about Stephen King or Brother Blue, homosexuality or domestic violence, police brutality, camaraderie, black birds or death by truck. But, really, none of those topics would really suit the movie.

The movie had an odd premise: a group of traveling motorcyclists dressing and acting as King Arthur and his court experience their own sort of familial drama. It's a movie about the dynamics of a group – there is always a leader and there is typically someone else who wants to become the leader – and about loyalty. It's about choosing sides and choosing friends. I guess maybe it's even about forgiving a friend who wrongs you.

Morgan – a character, by the way, that I despised from the first moment he popped up onscreen – breaks away from the troupe in pursuit of personal fame and riches. He also abandons his on-again/off-again girlfriend mechanic in pursuit of a chicer, more sophisticated snake of a woman. And yet, when he returns to the troupe, both Billy and Angie accept him back. I assume they think he's a changed man; but if you ask me, he'll take off again as soon as something shinier comes along! That part of the movie – lesson in forgiveness that it may have been intended – annoyed me.

I didn't feel Morgan deserved forgiveness or earned their trust. He was still slimy and dirty and it always seemed he had one scheme or another going on. I suppose if I read what I wrote above – the part about this being a family-like group – it makes sense. Your brother, sister, mother, father, etc. often gets the benefit of the doubt, over and over again. With family members, you tend to accept their faults and overlook their wrongdoings in your unconditional love for them. And if Morgan were my brother, perhaps I'd have forgiven him too… even though he doesn't deserve it! Maybe it was a flaw on the writer or director's part for not making me as the viewer connect enough with the good qualities living inside Morgan's character. Or maybe it's my fault for overlooking them.

And then there's the ending. Billy leaves the troupe – after crowning Morgan as his successor – with the Indian who represents the black bird in his dreams, and he seeks out the cop who beat up Bagman. After giving him a thrashing, Billy begins his contemplative ride off into the sunset… or so I'd thought. He seems quite out of it (presumably because of his injury) and is killed by a truck crashing into him. Just like that… cut to the funeral scene. I understand it and yet I don't particularly like it. I get that, after he has moved on from his art, his passion, his life, there's really nowhere else for him to go, and nothing else for him to do other than ride off into that ETERNAL sunset. Still, I couldn't help but feel he deserved a better end.

My takeaway: Sometimes forgiveness among friends is something you can only understand from the inside. And never ride a motorcycle while injured down the middle of the road, even if you THINK there are no trucks nearby!

Fahrenheit 451 - The Fireman's Women

Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing. –Guy Montag

We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop. There is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
–as read by Guy Montag (from James Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson)

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives. –Captain Beatty

It doesn't matter what you do, [my grandfather] said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

–Granger

Barnes & Noble.com's book description:

Guy Montag was a fireman whose job it was to start fires. The system was simple. Everyone understood it. Books were for burning, along with the houses in which they were hidden.

Guy Montag enjoyed his job. He had been a fireman for ten years, and he had never questioned the pleasure of the midnight runs nor the joy of watching pages consumed by flames... never questioned anything until he met a seventeen-year-old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid.

Then he met a professor who told him of a future in which people could think... and Guy Montag suddenly realized what he had to do!

One of my favorite things about this book is Bradbury's clever spin on the word 'fireman.' In today's world, of course, a fireman is someone who rushes to a burning building, saves those inside and works tirelessly to extinguish the fire. In Bradbury’s futuristic world, however, a fireman is the starter of fires, and his job is to destroy whatever is inside, including – at least in one instance in this novel – the people who wish not to leave. His twist on the word is such a simple one, but how it changes things entirely!

In this world where fires are created by the fireman, there is but one reason to burn down a building: the occupants possess and read books, an act which is against the law. The thought of reading being an illegal act floors me. I just can't comprehend in my sheltered little anti-censorship world that books could ever possibly be forbidden, that reading them could be prohibited.

Shaking that incomprehensible thought aside, I want to focus this post the women in this book. There are not many women mentioned: Mildred Montag, Clarisse McClellan, Mrs. Bowles & Mrs. Phelps and a nameless woman whose house Montag's unit is sent to burn. While their space in the book's pages is limited, their impact is huge.

Clarisse is the first one we meet, on Montag's journey home after a day's work. She only exists a few days in the story before reportedly being hit by a speeding car. It is Clarisse who sets to motion the change in Montag. She, unlike most people in their world, is happy, optimistic, reflective. With her incessant questions, she leads Montag to begin analyzing his life, his happiness and his job. Her sudden disappearance only serves to deepen his introspective scrutiny.

The day after meeting Clarisse, Montag's fire squad is called out to a house ripe for destruction. The woman Montag encounters inside – a woman whose book-hoarding has brought them in the first place – chooses to set fire to herself rather than live a life without books. This leads Montag to wonder why books hold such power (see the first quote above).

The woman with the most page space devoted to her is Mildred Montag, our hero's wife. The relationship these two share is very strange, in that they seem quite detached from each other with little to nothing in common, yet Montag assures us he did at one point love her very truly. But Mildred is everything Clarisse is not: she blindly believes what she's told to believe, she has stopped thinking on her own, she questions nothing. Mildred accepts life as it is, no more, no less. She spends most of her free time with "her family" on the parlor walls. There is little need for human interaction when you can be constantly surrounded by walls of, essentially, television screens that have the ability to virtually converse with you.

The final two women – Mrs. Bowles & Mrs. Phelps – are more or less clones of Mildred Montag. They are the only human contact Mildred requires (as her husband's presence doesn't seem to mean much to her one way or the other).

Why are all these women important? Because their very presence propels this story forward. With Clarisse, we see Montag begin to question his whole world when she asks him if he's happy; with the book-hoarding woman, we see him start to question the worth of books and therefore the validity of the laws against them; with Mildred, we see him explore the boundaries by asking her if she remembers how they met and seeing her reaction to his hidden books; with mindless Mesdames Bowles & Phelps, we see him reach the conclusion that things have gone too far when he explodes at them and recites poetry, to their horror. Each of these women make an impact on his journey to enlightenment.

That is the only reason I can accept Clarisse's disappearance, the book-hoarding woman's death by fire, Mildred's maddening complacency with her life, and the Mesdames' brainwashed devotion to the world as it is given to them and the laws set forth by those in authority. If they were merely unnecessary dressing to the story, I don’t think I'd much have been able to stomach these things.

My takeaway: You cannot live without questioning the world around you; nothing should be taken as truth until you've made it a truth within yourself. And a character's literary importance cannot necessarily be judged by the number of pages on which he or she appears.

The English Patient - Tragic Optimism

The English Patient

Director: Anthony Minghella

Have you noticed there are chickens? In Italy you get chickens, but no eggs. In Africa there're always eggs, but never chickens. Who's separating them?
–David Caravaggio

My mother always told me I would summon my husband by playing the piano. –Hana

I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes with too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all. –Madox

So yes, she died because of me… because I loved her… because I had the wrong name. –Count Laszlo de Almásy

The Netflix DVD jacket:

Adapted from Michael Ondaatje's acclaimed novel set against the backdrop of World War II, Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning drama stars Ralph Fiennes as a horribly burned pilot who recounts a tale of doomed romance to the nurse tending him (Juliette Binoche). As his story is revealed via flashback, so too are secrets about his identity and the depth of his passion for the woman he loved (Kristin Scott Thomas).

I'm going to be honest: I'd been dreading watching this movie (sorry, Michele) because not only is it a war movie (which is a genre I'm don't particularly seek out or enjoy), it also happens to be 2 hours and 42 minutes long. And while it's probably not a movie I'll revisit, I will admit that it was more enjoyable than I'd expected. The music is beautiful, and any time Colin Firth can grace my television with his face and voice is a time well spent.

This is a love story, wrought with tragedy, focusing on Count Laszlo de Almásy and Katharine Clifton. However, the real tragedy in this movie, if you ask me, is Hana. We first meet her as a woman cursed, having her "sweetie" die in the war, and watching her friend get blown up by a landmine. She then stays behind as her company moves on and chooses to care for a dying burn victim. He leaves her, too, and goes so far as to ask her to help him die. She falls in love with Kip and he leaves her. Alone, she seems to have no choice but to move on. Perhaps she is optimistic that she will find a new life, a new love, a new purpose in Florence. And perhaps it is this optimism which I find so tragic.

I suppose you could look at it as quite the opposite though. Each person who leaves Hana makes her stronger. Her happy idealistic view of the war is shattered when she loses her Love. And the death of her friend leaves her open and free, with no real ties, to leave her company and care for the badly burned Count Almásy. Her dependence on him for purpose, as well as for company, lasts as long as it needs to. He asks her for release from life only after he has finished his story, which restores Hana's faith in love. Having been scarred by the deaths and then healed by the story, her skin is thicker and her outlook optimistically guarded. I'd like to think that by the end, she has learned that optimism is okay, as long as you know how fragile life is. But I still think she's a tragic character.

The love story between Almásy and Katharine Clifton annoyed me. I don't appreciate that they are having an affair and betraying Geoffrey Clifton. Not to go all Moral Police on them, but it does bother me that they feel their love is above the law. This, of course, leads to Geoffrey's murder/suicide attempt. That's not to say that he wouldn't have attempted something similar even if they'd told him, but it would have made them aware of the possibility of such actions, at the very least. And at most, Geoffrey could have accepted the affair with decorum and appreciation of their honesty. Who really knows?

My takeaway: Some people possess in innate sense of optimism that cannot be crushed even by the deaths of loved ones; though I may find these people tragic, I can appreciate their sunny outlook on life, as it takes a lot of faith and conviction not to be dampened. And Ralph Fiennes's future role of Lord Voldemort was secured the moment his burnt face was unveiled in this movie.

Cutting Loose - Confusing Passion & Drama

Cutting Loose

Author: Susan Andersen

I am not a passionate person. I refuse to be a passionate person. Please tell me I am nothing like my parents. –Jane's journal entry

All this time she had imagined herself immune to passion. Or if perhaps not entirely impervious, at least smart enough to prevent what little she had experienced from ruling her. She'd felt a bit smug about it, actually often reflecting that the world would be a far more manageable place if everyone would exercise their willpower a bit more often. –Narrator

Dev realized that neither Mike nor Dorrie had hugged or kissed [their daughter Jane] – not in greeting, not in goodbye. In his family no one got in or out of a relative's house without one or the other […] Up until tonight he'd taken that for granted […] Suddenly, however, he had a new appreciation for his family that he hadn't possessed half an hour ago. –Narrator

Thank God for girlfriends. What a screwed-up world this would be without them.

–Jane's journal entry

Book jacket:

Jane thinks nothing can make her lose her cool. But the princess of propriety blows a gasket the night she meets the contractor restoring the Wolcott mansion. Devlin Kavangh's rugged sex appeal may buckle her knees, but the man is out of control! Jane had to deal with theatrics growing up – she won't tolerate them in someone hired to work on the house she and her two best friends have just inherited.

Dev could renovate the mansion in his sleep. But ever since the prissy owner spotted him jet-lagged, exhausted and hit hard by a couple of welcome-home drinks, she's been on his case. Yet there's something about her. Jane hides behind conservative clothes and a frosty manner, but her seductive blue eyes and leopard-print heels hint at a woman just dying to cut loose!

This book was a much-needed easy read, after getting through such monsters as The Autobiography of Malcolm X (tough content) and The Stand (tough length). I could have probably finished this book in one solid weekend if life hadn't been happening at the same time. I've read several fluffy romance novels in my day – and I’m perfectly happy admitting that. Of those I've read, I have to say that this one, though fairly predictable – yes, the guy gets the girl in the end – was well-written with a few unexpected moments. I don’t recall if I've mentioned it before, but I’m keeping a list of books I want to read when this project is complete. The list contains books other people suggested too late to make the 30@30 list and sequels to books I've read or books by an author of a 30@30 book. Susan Andersen’s two companion books to this one have been added to that list.

One issue I have with this book – and it's not alone in this atrocity, by any means – is a character's fanatical adherence to an idea or compulsion. In the case of Cutting Loose, that idea is, "I must not be passionate, for passion always equals drama, and I refuse to be dramatic like my parents." This thought belongs to the story’s female lead character, Jane, who not only links passion and drama but also assumes that those are intrinsically entwined with alcohol. While her childhood reveals the reason these arbitrary linkages were made – her mother and father, a stage actor and playwright, respectively, were nearly always engaged in overblown arguments followed by passionate reunions, drinks in hand – it does not convince me that the adult Jane is not capable of separating passion from drama from alcohol.

She seems like an intelligent character in every manner except this one. This is what annoys me. It is out of character for her to be so close-minded and set in her ways on that one particular aspect of life. She doesn't let herself get emotionally involved, fearing that will lead to passion which will lead to drama and ultimately to an unhappy home. She doesn't allow herself to drink more than one glass of wine – and even then, rarely one! – for fear it will lead to drama and passion and fighting and an unhappy home and now we've come full circle. She sees this as black-and-white with no possible way to have passion free of drama, a drink free of fighting and love free of an unhappy home.

Of course, without this stalwart view of hers, much of the tension between Jane and Dev wouldn't exist, making this story pretty much pointless. I simply wish the conflict between the two could have been better played than an "I can’t have passion because my parents are dramatic!" attitude. It just annoyed me.

My takeaway: Love is often found in the most unsuspecting places when you let down your guard and free yourself to it. And passion, my friend, is not the same thing as drama or fighting – consult your thesaurus!

Her Fearful Symmetry - A Moral Matter of Death & Life

Her Fearful Symmetry

Author: Audrey Niffenegger

The thing that made the twins peculiar was hard to define. People were uneasy when they saw them together without knowing exactly why. –Narrator

One may do many things in a long life. I also played a great deal of tennis and brought up three children. There's time for all sorts of adventures. –Jessica Bates

Elspeth? […] I won't forgive you.
–Robert Fanshaw

Julia had never thought of death as something that would happen to her, or to people she knew. All those people in the cemetery were just stones, names, dates. –Narrator

She would sacrifice everything. All this sadness for nothing. –Narrator

Book description from Amazon.com:

Julia and Valentina Poole are twenty-year-old sisters with an intense attachment to each other. One morning the mailman delivers a thick envelope to their house in the suburbs of Chicago. Their English aunt Elspeth Noblin has died of cancer and left them her London apartment. There are two conditions for this inheritance: that they live in the flat for a year before they sell it and that their parents not enter it. Julia and Valentina are twins. So were the girls' aunt Elspeth and their mother, Edie.

The girls move to Elspeth's flat, which borders the vast Highgate Cemetery, where Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Stella Gibbons, and other luminaries are buried. Julia and Valentina become involved with their living neighbors: Martin, a composer of crossword puzzles who suffers from crippling OCD, and Robert, Elspeth's elusive lover, a scholar of the cemetery. They also discover that much is still alive in Highgate, including—perhaps—their aunt. 

While this book started out fairly plausible, it didn't really surprise me when it took a turn for the supernatural. Audrey Niffenegger's previous book is, after all, The Time Traveler's Wife, which focuses on a man who jumps time and space. The turn that Her Fearful Symmetry makes is one toward ghost stories and resurrections.

But more than just a supernatural leap, the storyline veers into the moral grey area within the ghostly realm. There's no way to approach the discussion of the moral dilemma without revealing one of the story's major conflicts. So, if you have the desire to read this book and don't want to learn of the ending beforehand, you should probably stop reading now.

The deceased Elspeth assists in the premature death of her "niece" Valentina and then attaches her own soul to the body. This is in opposition to the original plan agreed upon by the women, wherein the soul of Valentina was to be returned to her body following her funeral. It is Elspeth's argument that the soul, freshly removed from the body, would not have been strong enough to return only a few days later; and she took over the body herself so that it would not go to waste.

Elspeth's participation in the plot that Valentina hatches is questionable from the start. Being a ghost herself, and having experienced the first few months where she was barely more than a ball of mist and jumbled emotions, unable to do much of anything at all, she would have known from the start that the goal of reuniting body and soul would not be possible in the short time they had before the body began to decay. Yet she kept her knowledge and experience to herself and agreed to assist. In the end, all Elspeth's greed got her was an unfamiliar body, alienation from her lover and a load of guilt.

I'm not reserving all my judgment for Elspeth, however, as Valentina was the one who felt it would be better to appear dead to her family than to confront Julia about no longer wanting to mirror her twin sister's whims and life choices. And in the end all that Valentina's cowardice rewarded her with was a bodiless soul unable to live the life she so desperately wanted to be her own and not her twin's. Fools, all of them.

My takeaway: Confrontation, though rarely my first choice in any situation, is pretty much always preferable to a death-to-life scheme hatched with a greedy and resentful ghost. And being a twin is as much creepy hotel hallway as it is Doublemint commercial.