WARMING UP

Today's one of those days where I have to do a lot of writing--on the job, I mean. I'm working on a script for a 10-12 minute program, and need to get it hammered into some kind of shape by day's end. I already have the skeletal framework in place, but need to put some meat into it. So now I'm warming up, getting the brain used to making phrases and stringing them together.

I like the Super Bowl matchup. Since John Gruden left Oakland last year, I'd hoped the Raiders would get the chance for a little revenge. Now they have it. They won't be playing for that of course--as the oldest team in the league, the urgency of the situation isn't lost on them. But Gruden's Chuckie scowl will be prowling the sidelines opposite the Raiders, and they'll be aware of it.

Watched The Two Towers on Saturday. Wow. It's an amazing, astounding epic that after its three hours left me wanting more. If you haven't seen it yet, you owe it to yourself to do it. No finer film has been made since, well, the first installment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy treatment. It's tough to put into words just how good this film is--like the first one, every shot is masterfully framed, ever scene masterfully rendered, and the tale marvelously told. It's grander than anything else out there, and deeper too. Seeing it made me ask myself over and over, like a man going slightly mad, "Why can't Lucas do this? Why can't Lucas do this?" Jackson's LOTR series is what the Star Wars tales should've been--epic without cheesiness, and including things like believable dialogue, nuanced acting and a real feeling that the good guys are fighting actual evil. I think George Lucas simply took a different path, turned his great yarn into a kids' bedtime story, and thereby robbed it of the depth it should have. He made that choice while making Return of the Jedi, and has stayed the course ever since. He probably thought that that was where the money is, and to an extent it's true that kids see more movies and buy more movie-related junk, but the price has been the credibility of the series and its author. Peter Jackson could've taken that route too, but he didn't, and has made a landmark series of films. Lucas stopped making landmarks in 1979. Empire will probably go down as the last truly good Star Wars film.

I've been worried quite a bit lately. Sure, about the war, and about North Korea (on which even a Bush supporter like myself must acknowledge that the administration has of late bungled the whole thing), and about our resolve to defend our civilization. One of the strangest critiques I've heard of The Two Towers is this bit about its racism--that because all the major good characters are white in one form or another, it's an inherently racist film. Leave aside for the moment that most of the characters aren't even human--the real heroes turn out to be Hobbits, elves and walking trees, for goodness' sake--what should Peter Jackson have done? Several years ago, Kevin Costner starred as an English accent-mangling Robin Hood, and his opposite was Morgan Freeman. The original Robin Hood tales didn't have any identifiably black characters, so the director or writer or whoever (probably some suit at the studio) decided to create one, and thus the Muslim Abu became Robin of Locksley's best mate. If you'll recall, that film was lambasted for lots of good reasons, but mostly because the Morgan Freeman character, though played well, seemed so out of place. He was obviously there as part of some quota. Should Peter Jackson have followed that route, maybe made Gandalf Hispanic, or the Hobbits all Japanese? Other critiques mention that because all the major characters are played by beautiful white people, then somehow the rest of us can't identify with them. That critique truly worries me. If you can't see the humanity, the basic level humanness, of the characters--even the walking trees--because they have Nordic features and long blond hair or are otherwise different in appearance from you, I pity you. You have trouble seeing humanity beyond your own nose. That being the case, we'll have a hard time seeing the humanity in each other that we'll need to rise to our common defense. For all our supposed progress, we are in many ways still a tribal species.

Another thing that worries me is the state of parenting these days. Everybody Loves Raymond captured it well in last night's episode. Ray and Deborah had made some new friends, the Williamsons, who were nice but were raising a monster of a son. He was terrible, always invading the parents' conversation, smarting off to Ray, leading the other kids into mischief, and his parents never called him down. Ray sees it immediately, Deborah thinks he's overreacting, but eventually sees the kid's evil ways and they break off the friendship. Unfortunately, life isn't a sitcom and breaking off the friendship over an obnoxious kid isn't usually even an option. Of all the parents I know well, I can probably count on one hand (okay, maybe one and a half) the number of kids I see being raised with any kind of respect for their parents or for basic societal norms. It seems that our generation of parents isn't bothering to teach our kids "Please" and "Thank you," and sirs and ma'ams must be as dead as Latin. It's kind of simple as a concept, but apparently beyond most parents, that kids aren't born with an institutional memory of how to behave. We parents have to teach them how to be decent. I sometimes worry that in teaching our son to be polite, to share his toys with his friends, and to mind what we say, that we're actually setting him up for other kids to take advantage of him later. These other kids will have been given "choices" and "suggestions" instead of instruction, and will have been firmly in control of their own parents for years by the time my boy meets them at school. They'll have already developed the skills of manipulation, having honed them on their parents and likely their parents' friends. Supposing my kid actually retains the manners we're trying to teach him, he may be easy pickings for these brats. I've actually lost sleep over this.

Well, I think I'm warmed up. Thanks for indulging me if you've read this far. Off to tame a script.

UPDATE: This may help explain why Raymond gets it right.