Films ape life in one notable aspect -- the same scenes keep playing out over and over in our lives, just as they do in the movies. When you watch enough of them, you hear the same knocks at the door, the same wave sounds of the ocean, the same train whistles, the same echoes out in space, as director after director repeats the techniques that have proved effective in earlier films.
These redundant special effects apparently bother me so much that last night I had a dream revealing that there has only been one knock on one door throughout all of film history -- sort of a Garden of Eden moment, you know. It may have been Adam 'knock-knock-knockin' on heaven's door' or wherever Eve was staying at the time.
During my long writing career, nobody ever asked or assigned me to write a review of a movie, and now you can see why. I'm way too likely to give away the family jewels, which is, of course, a veiled reference to Indiana Jones, without the veil.
Yesterday I rewatched "Titanic" for the umpteenth time. It's around three hours and fifteen minutes start to finish, much longer than most Hollywood films. One brilliant wag came up with my favorite line about that movie soon after it was released: "It was a relief when the iceberg finally showed up."
The dialogue in that flick that always sticks with me is when the Rose Calvert character is hanging off the ship's stern, poised to jump to her death, only to admonish the guy hovering nearby, Jack Dawson:
"Don't presume to tell me what I will or will not do. You don't know me."
Luckily for the plot's sake, he did in fact know her very well.
Rose and Jack were imaginary characters, but the iceberg was real.
***
Yesterday marked my return to Millbrae, smack in the mid-peninsula, for the first time in three months to see my doctor and get a checkup.
As I told my daughter as we were driving there, for many years I motored back and forth through that part of the Bay Area, either on the ancient route, El Camino Real, or on the bayside highway 101, or the western route 280. They all have their individual charms, trifurcating the peninsula north-south into three almost evenly split pieces.
All roads lead to San Jose, of course, which is the answer to Dionne Warwick's melodically rhetorical question, which might better have been termed "Do you know the ways to San Jose?"
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Ever since the Covid-19 crisis hit, traffic in the Bay Area has been lighter than I've seen it since the 1970s, but that's starting to change now. We actually hit an old-fashioned slowdown as we headed back toward San Francisco and the Bay Bridge yesterday. That made us nostalgic for the good old early days of the pandemic, when the highways felt more like you were in Montana than one of the country's most congested metropolitan areas.
The main thing we learned at my doctor visit is that new research suggests Vitamin D is an effective anti-viral agent, perhaps even against Covid-19, though I gather than remains unproven. In any event, I'm to take 2,000 mg a day from now on.
Anyway, against the odds, my doctor pronounced me of sound health, although she didn't get into the mental health side of the ledger. Best to leave well enough alone.
***
I'm truly relishing the process of creating these daily essays: Unstructured, spontaneous missives that seem to have broken free of the stylistic constraints that confined my writings during my long pre-retirement phase.
"Your problem as a writer is you use more than one voice in the same piece," a frustrated editor once told me early in my career. What she considered a defect was in my view a success, because it meant I'd beaten down the numerous voices in my head to just two or three.
These days, when critics send me similar feedback, I have a ready response:
"Did you hear I had a stroke?"
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