Remembering The Last Unicorn

I don’t remember how I stumbled across this piece of information, but somehow the internet saw fit to reveal to me that The Last Unicorn is touring the country in a digitally remastered print, and that the tour was kicking off in San Francisco.

The Last Unicorn was a fixture of my childhood. I remember watching it over and over, but like so many movies we adore as children, I remember the experience of it, rather than the film itself. I know that the Red Bull was one of the most terrifying things I’d ever encountered, and I remember the beauty of unicorns living in the ocean surf, but I would’ve been hard pressed to explain how the unicorns had ended up in the waves or why, exactly, the Red Bull persecuted the film’s protagonists.

Going to the Movies in LA

The only times on this journey I’ve forgotten where I am is at the movies. I thought maybe, since I’m bouncing around so much, I’d finally experience that sensation I’d read about so many times: waking up disoriented and not knowing where you are for a moment. This hasn’t happened to me though. But when I go to a movie, if it’s a good one, if I get lost in it, halfway through it’ll take me a minute to remember what’s just outside the neutral space of the theater, which skyline I’ll see when I walk back out into the real world.

Why Texas Looks Like Italy

My brain did some interesting gymnastics when I climbed Mt. Bonnel–aided, I think, by the fact that I’d been listening to an NPR story about Southern Italy before I arrived there. The thought that kept crossing my mind as I climbed up through brush was, ‘The West really does look like Italy.’

Edit: It was pointed out to me, that what I really meant here, is that West Texas looks like Italy. I should’ve remembered the lesson I learned from Bernie: that Texas is really five states. (Even though the narrator of that particular clip grants Austin a separate status from West Texas.)

I’ve never been to Italy, but, to me, the landscape I was climbing through felt like it belonged there more than it belonged in Texas. I think Spaghetti Westerns are to blame.

I’ve seen my fair share of Spaghetti Westerns, and I’m always very aware that they were shot in Italy when I’m watching them. So much so that I start to think of them as being set there, rather than in the West. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a perfect example. I’ve been told so many times that it was shot in Italy that I think of it as an Italian movie. The action doesn’t really take place in the West. Rather it occurs in a slightly fantastical realm. That’s the only place a character could get away with being called, the Man with No Name. And since this fantastical realm is created by an Italian, in Italy, it feels more of Italy than of the American West.

So, wandering through the landscape that movie, and other Spaghetti Westerns, try to imitate, all I could think was how much it looked like Italy, even if I knew that was a sort of backwards way to think about. The line between what was imitating what was and what just was didn’t seem to be there.

And if you’ve stuck around through this rambling I’ll also point out that Arthur Dent has trouble with that line as well.

The more he backed away, the more scared he became. After a while, he realized that the reason for this was that in all the films he had seen in which the hero backs farther and farther from some imagined terror in front of him, he then manages to bump into it coming up from behind.

Stalking Streetcar 922

I went to do one of the cheap, touristy things New Orleans has to offer the other day, which is ride the St. Charles streetcar and look at all the big, opulent houses surrounded by majestic and tangled oaks that line that street. (I think I could live in New Orleans just for the trees.) I had an ulterior motive in this sightseeing venture, and that was to find Perley Thomas #922, the streetcar from A Streetcar Named Desire. (You can see it right at the beginning of that preview.) I knew it was still running somewhere in the city thanks to the interwebs, and I had a hunch it ran on the St. Charles line because my host said that the older streetcars traveled that route. You can spot them because their grates are made of cast iron, according to her.

Durham’s Spirit Animal

I asked about Durham’s connection to bulls the first day I was here, about the third time I saw the ‘Sustain a Bull: Shop Independent Durham’ (the pun of which I only realized now, while googling it to make sure I had the wording right) sticker in the window of a retailer. It’s like the whole city has a spirit animal.

Movies I Should’ve Seen Already: Boogie Nights

These days the Movies I Should’ve Seen Already™ are being selected by the people I’m staying with. Without access to the Netflix queue I’ve filled up with questionable classics like Plan 9 From Outer Space my at home movie-viewing is restricted to the library of the person I’m staying with. Which is fine with me. You can learn a lot about people from their taste in cinema. That’s why in Cincinnati I watched Reality Bites, because it was important to the person I was staying with there. When tasked with finding a movie for us to watch she felt it vital to my education that I took in that one. And that’s why here, in Pittsburgh, I watched Boogie Nights.

Theater Hopping in Foreign Locales

I saw Wreck-It Ralph, Lincoln, and Skyfall (in that order) the day after Thanksgiving and while I could write a post about how all three dealt with old guard vs. new guard and the inevitable change that comes with the passing of time (while in Lincoln those resisting change were depicted as antagonists, in Skyfall it was admirable to cling to tradition. Wreck-It Ralph walked a line between the two where old and new could exist together, as long as no one tried to grab power that didn’t belong to them) what I actually found most interesting about the experience was how it was changed by my total unfamiliarity with the place I was having it.

Quests of Nerdery

I’m in Pittsburgh on my own for a week. I’m essentially house sitting while the person I’m staying with is on the West Coast for Thanksgiving. This is a new experience on this journey. So far everywhere I’ve stayed there has almost always been someone around, someone to give my exploration of a place a nudge in one direction or another and someone to report back to at the end of the day. “Today I did this, and saw that thing, and visited this establishment, and learned this little factoid.”

Here, in Pittsburgh, there’s no one to tell stories to about what I saw and did (at least, not until next Tuesday) and I’m enjoying that freedom, that lack of accountability. I’m also trying to resist the urge to just stay in with the two softest and cuddliest cats and watch Buffy and whatever “classic” movie I can find that’s streaming on Netflix.

Pittsburgh is one of those places, like Portland, ME, that takes up more of my mental geography than it has an actual, physical presence in the real world. This is mainly due to Michael Chabon. The only thing in Pittsburgh I knew I wanted to see when I arrived was the Cloud Factory. Upon discovering that Dogma was filmed here as well enough of my interest was piqued to drive me away from the continuing angst of the Scooby Gang and out into the streets of Pittsburgh yesterday.

Movies I Should’ve Seen Already: Reality Bites

This is one of those movies that defined young adulthood for an era, this particular era being the nineties, and as such I should probably be a little more lenient in some of my complaints. At least this movie was trying. It’s good that this movie feels dated twenty years later. It means we’re making progress. But then, half the fun of these posts is taking a movie out of its context. I should’ve seen these films already, but since I haven’t I get to analyze them from a different frame work then they were created in and intended for.

Theater Hopping: It’s All Fantasy

Last Saturday I broke my personal record for theater hopping and managed to see all of (or so close to all of that it’s not really worth mentioning): Prometheus, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Ted, Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, Brave, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I’m a little more proud of this than I should be probably. There are more productive, legal, and moral ways to spend your day than watching six movies in a row, but when you’re as obsessed with being on top of pop culture and having a valid opinion on everything as I am, this almost feels like an efficient use of your time.