“I believe there is nobody for anyone.” — Frank in ‘Destination Wedding’
Being a man of few possessions, especially clothes, I struggled to find T-shirts that were not in the opposing team’s colors during my frequent visits to the sidelines for my grandson Oliver’s baseball games this summer.
I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was rooting for the other side.
But Wednesday I found the perfect option — a white T-shirt that proclaimed the wearer to be “The World’s GREATEST Grandpa.”
Modest soul that I am, I’ve rarely ever worn this particular shirt and certainly not out in public. But I thought this might just be the right time to do that.
Oliver’s all-star team was down to their last chance to win the sectional title and move on to the state championship tournament. Their opponent was worthy; in two previous meetings the teams had traded wins by a one-run margin each time.
If you’d asked, say, the world’s greatest Grandpa, what he thought, he would have said that that made all the kids on both teams champions. In the end, Oliver’s team came up short this third time around so now the other team moves on and his season is over. Somebody had to win and somebody else had to lose — that’s how the game is played.
In our culture, we have cliches to cover these types of situations. The most pertinent one is “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.”
It was a game well-played. And that’s the end of the story.
Until next year.
***
Netflix occasionally delivers a romantic/comedic option to me and that happened recently with “Destination Wedding,” a 2018 film starring Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves as two miserable and unpleasant wedding guests who develop a mutual affection despite themselves.
The script is remarkable in that Lindsay and Frank are the only characters who speak during the entire film. There are some off-screen sounds from a TV, but otherwise it’s just the two of them, alone and miserable in this cold, cold world. Make that, this hot, hot world.
One particularly sweet exchange:
Lindsay: I’m not wearing anything under my pajamas.
Frank: Why would you? … Superman couldn’t see through those pajamas.
Lindsay: So you tried.
There are a lot of good lines and what’s supposed to be funny actually is funny in this film.
When it comes to real love in the real world, we have many, many cliches in our culture to help people cope. “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” — for some reason, that one comes to mind.
Same with fiction. Better to have seen this film than to not have — I said that.
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