Thursday, June 28, 2012
Still Tugging at our heartstrings
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| FOR THE LOVE OF DOG: Tug asleep on his bed. He shared our home and lives from June 28, 2002 to Oct. 20, 2011.
He would have turned 14 years old today.
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He passed away this past October at the ripe old age – for a Labrador retriever – of 13 ¼ years old. It’s been eight months now and I still find myself missing him. The pain is no longer as acute as it was during the fall and winter and the house doesn’t feel quite as empty as it did in the immediate aftermath of his death. In fact there are some days now that go by without me missing him at all.
In a way, it’s been nice to be dog-free and not have to worry about someone having to run home to let him out or feed him and I know my wife appreciates not being woken up well before her alarm goes off by the wet nose or bark of a hungry dog trying to mooch an early breakfast out of her. (Tug learned early that I wasn’t a morning person and that trying to wake me was nigh impossible.)
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| FIRST AND LAST PHOTOS At left is the first picture we ever saw of Tug. It was his "pet of the week" photo in my newspaper's pet adoption column. At right is the final picture of him taken on Oct. 20, 2011, the morning of the day we had him put to sleep. | |
Always lots of food.
In his last six-to-eight months of life, when even getting up off the floor seemed almost as difficult as climbing the stairs he used to bound up in a leap or two, his only goal in life seemed to be to make us happy. I am convinced now that he solidered on as long as he did because he thought he somehow owed us for rescuing him from the dog pound after the people who had no idea how to care for one dog, let alone two, and couldn’t see how wonderful and smart he was turned him over to the Bucks County SPCA because he was “too difficult.” In the end it was my wife and I who owed him for making us better people. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like over the past decade without my “pal” by my side.
Psychologists have expounded plenty about the nature of the bond between dogs and humans and why we miss them so much when they are gone.
“It appears that dogs have evolved specialized skills for reading human social and communicative behavior,” says Brian Hare, a Harvard shrink explaining the current thinking. He adds that they use this ability to figure out our moods knowing that if they do something that makes us happy they’ll be rewarded with food or attention. We see this behavior as signs our dogs love us while psychologists, like John Archer, from the University of Central Lancashire, sees it as dogs “manipulating human responses,” and becoming “the equivalent of social parasites.”
I think that’s a bit harsh.
Because if Mr. Archer ever had a dog like Tug, he would know dog’s aren’t “social parasites.”
Dogs are social creatures and crave companionship, much the way we do. Yes they learn how to manipulate their people, but then again, so do human children. And after seeing the way some children act these days, I’ve been glad I was just a dog-dad.
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| CLEAN AND HAPPY: Tug sporting a new tie he got after his last bath. |
I also realized that he didn’t have the higher reasoning powers of humans but I firmly believe that dogs understand the concept of love and loyalty. I mean how else do you explain the dog who wouldn’t leave the casket of his fallen Navy SEAL master or the black Lab who refused to leave the side of a canine friend who had been struck and killed by a passing car.
Psychologists would probably just attribute that to “pack instinct,” a vestige of a behavior left over from their wolf ancestors. Call me sentimental, but I think it is more than that just a “trick of evolution.” After all, when you come right down to it, a pack isn’t much different from a family. The same group dynamics apply.
I think that perhaps dogs were made man’s best friend as some sort of divine plan; a way of teaching us to be better people. How to be unselfish, how to be a good friend, a good listener and good confidant. Over the past nine and a quarter years that he graced our home, Tug taught us all those things and more. He taught us that no matter how bad your past was, it is now that really matters. He didn’t let his awful first few years stop from enjoying the time he spent with us. He was simply content to live in the moment taking pleasure in everyday things that we’d probably overlook. I used say his philosophy was “Every so often you need to stop and pee on the roses.”
I am sure that sometime in the future my wife and I will adopt another dog who needs a good home and fall in love with him. We’ll probably learn new things about ourselves from that dog too. But until that day comes, I will continue to remember all Tug’s loveable antics and take to heart the lessons he taught us.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Remakes and reboots and sequels! Oh sigh!
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| DARK SHADOWS REDUX: Hollywood's idea of summer camp. |
It’s a trend I’ve been noticing for a while, but it seems to have come to a head summer, especially with genre films. A month into the summer movie season we’ve already been “treated” to two different versions of Snow White (“Mirror Mirror” and “Snow White and the Huntsman”), a campy remake of the ’60s-era gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows,” a totally unneeded sequel, “Men in Black III” and a movie based on an old board game, “Battleship.”
None of these movies did terrifically well at the box office, and after only seeing just two of these flicks myself, I’m not surprised. Both “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Dark Shadows” were OK films. They were at best, a pleasantly diverting way to spend a late spring/early summer night, but they were ultimately forgettable. My wife and I only went to see them out of mild curiosity. She was a fan of the “Dark Shadows” TV show and was intrigued by the idea of the quirky Johnny Depp playing the original self-loathing vampire, Barnabas Collins; and we both went to “Snow White” just to see if Kristen Stewart (“Twilight”) could really act. (The jury is still out on that one.) In retrospect we probably should have waited to rent them on DVD.
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| BATTLESHIP: Sank at the box office. |
The reason I won’t even rent “Battleship” is because of its lame concept. I’m not wasting two hours of my life nor any of my hard-earned cash just to hear Liam Nelson yell “You’ve sank my battleship!” at some CGI alien. For the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea to make a movie based on a board game. What’s next?
“Operation: The Movie?”
“Candy Land: The Motion Picture?”
“Chutes and Ladders?”
Sigh!
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| TOTAL RECALL: I seem to recall seeing this movie before . . . . |
Do Hollywood executives really think that audiences have such short-term memories that they need to be re-introduced to the Marvel Comics web slinger after only five years? Yes 2007’s “Spiderman III” sucked and Tobey Maguire is getting a bit long-in-the-tooth to play the teenaged/twentysomething Peter Parker. So just recast the part and move on to a brand new story. If nothing else, the success of “The Avengers” shows us that you don’t have to do an “origin story” to make a successful comic book-based movie.
Later in the summer will come yet another remake, this time of the “classic” Arnold Schwarzenegger action flick “Total Recall.” Supposedly this version will stick closer to the reality-bending elements of Philip K. Dick’s original story, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.” If so, why not just call it that and forgo the all the big budget action sequences and the iconic three-breasted woman of the 1990 original and avoid the inevitable comparisons to its predecessor?
I don’t know if I’ll necessarily skip this one, but I won’t be seeing it opening weekend. I’ll wait to see what kind of word-of-mouth it gets before plunking down another $10 for a movie I’ve essentially seen a dozen times before.
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| THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: Those other Spiderman films were just a fly in the ointment |
What is most worrying about this trend is the lesson Hollywood execs might take away from it. Sure most of these remakes and reboots weren’t/won’t be hits, but most look like they will at least make their money back. Meanwhile, their one, big-budget all new film, “John Carter” crashed and burned at the box office.
Disney reportedly spent $250 million on the film which was based on the first book of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series of novels, “A Princess of Mars.” In its opening weekend it only made $30 million domestically while doing slightly better overseas with a $70 million haul. It quickly disappeared from theaters shortly afterward, pretty much guaranteeing it wouldn’t make its money back.
That’s a shame too, because Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, written in the early 1900s, are science fiction classics, and in many ways inspired all the space opera epics that came after it, from the “Flash Gordon” and “Buck Rodgers” serials in the ’30s and ’40s, to the “Star Wars” movies at the both the end of the 20th century and beginning of this century. Given time to catch on, “John Carter” could have found a bigger audience. (It’s due out on DVD soon, so perhaps those sales will help unsully the film’s bad reputation.)
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| MEN IN BLACK III: Can we user their Neuralyzer to forget this film was ever made? |
This would be a huge mistake. Hollywood is already loosing movie attendance to other media – video games and Internet streaming video services such as NetFlicks and Youtube – where there is a ton of original content available. Some of it even approaches Hollywood quality. (More on that too in another future blog post).
As more and better quality HD video cameras find their way into consumers’ hands and film editing – once the domain of only highly skilled professionals – becomes easier and easier to do on even the most inexpensive of home computers, then Hollywood may find itself becoming more and more irrelevant as people choose to bypass them, and get their entertainment straight from these amateur filmmakers themselves.
If Hollywood wants to avoid this fate, then they are going to have to get pretty creative.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
R was for Ray…
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Photo courtesy of the Associated Press
Ray Bradbury poses for a photo at a Waukegan, Ill. park named in his honor in this 1990 AP file photo. He wrote about playing in the park as a child in "Dandelion Wine." Bradbury, who wrote everything from science-fiction and mystery to humor, died Tuesday, June 5, 2012 in Southern California. He was 91. |
Yesterday, science fiction and fantasy fans learned they had lost one of their long-time heroes, Ray Bradbury, who died in Los Angeles after a lengthy illness. He was 91.
The multiple award-winning author of such classics as “The Martian Chronicles,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “R is for Rocket” and “I Sing the Body Electric” inspired generations of people including filmmaker Steve Spielberg and author Steven King.
“He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career,” Spielberg said in an interview with CNN. “He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination he is immortal.”
“Ray Bradbury wrote three great novels and 300 great stories,” King says in the same CNN article.
“One of the latter was called ‘A Sound of Thunder.’ The sound I hear today is the thunder of a giant’s footsteps fading away. But the novels and stories remain, in all their resonance and strange beauty.”But perhaps his greatest impact was on the millions of everyday people who read his work.
“I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 in high school and suddenly ‘getting’ sci-fi,” wrote wolfpack75, commenting on the author’s obit on the sci-fi website IO9.com. “In that, I had the realization that unlike the books I had read before, science fiction can be fiction you relate to and understand and, in some ways, can understand you. I was reading pure escapist fiction beforehand: superhero comic books, Dumas’ Musketeers series, Fantasy novels (D&D related mostly). It is an amazing story and lead (sic) me to such authors as Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, etc. His books opened doors in my mind that I never knew were shut. For that I am eternally grateful and will miss Ray Bradbury.”
Like wolfpack75, I trace my real introduction to science fiction to Bradbury’s short stories. Before I discovered them, I didn’t tend to read much. I am dyslexic and a slow reader and as a child I hated reading because it took me such a long time to finish a book. As a result the only things I tended read were “Star Trek” books because I didn’t have to work so hard to understand them. Then one day, in school I believe, I was introduced to Bradbury and suddenly discovered a whole new universe.I don’t remember which story it was, but I do remember being wowed by the creepy, twisty ending. It eventually led me to reading some of his other works like “The Illustrated Man” and “The Martian Chronicles” and from there other full length novels by such authors as Robert Heinlein (“Starship Troopers,” “Glory Road,” “Friday”), Kurt Vonnegut (“Cat’s Cradle”) and Piers Anthony (The Incarnation of Immortality series).
For opening my eyes up to whole new universes of wonder I, like so many others, owe Ray Bradbury a debt that can never be repaid. And as an aspiring sci-fi writer myself, I can only hope to be half as eloquent as he was.That said, I will leave the last word about his death to the great author himself who wrote in “Fahrenheit 451”:
“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
“It doesn't matter what you do, he 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.”
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