Why We Love the Movies
Apr. 25th, 2009 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewdayIt was a pleasant evening, after an unseasonably warm day. My son got home from work early and asked me to marinade some chicken breasts for him to barbeque on the grill, which I did. Also picked up some salt potatoes to go with the meal and a quart of strawberries and an angelfood cake for dessert.
Little Jay is at his mom's for the weekend, so I got to watch what I wanted on the TV while I ate dinner. I started to watch something called "Love and War" which purported to being the backstory to Hemingway's early novel, A Farewell to Arms, which was set in Italy during WW I. However, having read three authoritative biographies, a couple of the novels including Farewell, and all of Hemingway's short fiction, I simply couldn't countenance Chris O'Donnell as the young Ernest Hemingway or Sandra Bullock as Agnes von Kurowsky, Hem's first love.
But even with a dozen or more premium channels, the pickings were disappointingly thin for a Saturday night. Out of desperation, I finally surfed over to Nick and watched a few minutes of "I-Carly," which is what I would've been watching if Little Jay had been here. Somehow, though, "I-Carly" just isn't as much fun as when you're watching it with a little kid who's seen it so many times that he's memorized the dialogue.
So I went back to "Love and War" which, for shear romance, had edged out "Lou Dobbs Tonight" by the thinnest of margins. As an added bonus, it also turned out to be only slightly less accurate than Lou Dobbs because, at the end, Agnes visits Hemingway at Walloon Lake, an event which never happened.
Apparently, this departure from fact was deemed necessary in order for Agnes to deliver her final assessment of hemingway's romantic "coming of age." (I don't know what Lou Dobbs' excuse is.) It seemed, in so many words, to be the movie's way of explaining how Hemingway managed to survive all of his war wounds except the one delivered by the heartless Ms. Kurowsky and his resulting metamorphosis from idealistic and hopeful young man into the mature but embittered adult that he'd supposedly become overnight.
Following von Kurowsky's pessimistic speech, a sort of rolling postscript noted that she had continued to serve as a Red Cross nurse through the end of WW II, married once, and died at the age of 93. Presumably in that very order. By contrast it was noted that Hemingway eventually married four times before committing suicide in 1961. Which seemed to imply mitigation of Ms. von K's responsibility for our hero's untimely, not to mention unhappy, end.
Still, it did seem like a bit of piling-on, even in the case of an ego-maniacal - and ultimately self-destructive - pr*ck like Ernest Hemingway. I guess that's why we love the movies...
Little Jay is at his mom's for the weekend, so I got to watch what I wanted on the TV while I ate dinner. I started to watch something called "Love and War" which purported to being the backstory to Hemingway's early novel, A Farewell to Arms, which was set in Italy during WW I. However, having read three authoritative biographies, a couple of the novels including Farewell, and all of Hemingway's short fiction, I simply couldn't countenance Chris O'Donnell as the young Ernest Hemingway or Sandra Bullock as Agnes von Kurowsky, Hem's first love.
But even with a dozen or more premium channels, the pickings were disappointingly thin for a Saturday night. Out of desperation, I finally surfed over to Nick and watched a few minutes of "I-Carly," which is what I would've been watching if Little Jay had been here. Somehow, though, "I-Carly" just isn't as much fun as when you're watching it with a little kid who's seen it so many times that he's memorized the dialogue.
So I went back to "Love and War" which, for shear romance, had edged out "Lou Dobbs Tonight" by the thinnest of margins. As an added bonus, it also turned out to be only slightly less accurate than Lou Dobbs because, at the end, Agnes visits Hemingway at Walloon Lake, an event which never happened.
Apparently, this departure from fact was deemed necessary in order for Agnes to deliver her final assessment of hemingway's romantic "coming of age." (I don't know what Lou Dobbs' excuse is.) It seemed, in so many words, to be the movie's way of explaining how Hemingway managed to survive all of his war wounds except the one delivered by the heartless Ms. Kurowsky and his resulting metamorphosis from idealistic and hopeful young man into the mature but embittered adult that he'd supposedly become overnight.
Following von Kurowsky's pessimistic speech, a sort of rolling postscript noted that she had continued to serve as a Red Cross nurse through the end of WW II, married once, and died at the age of 93. Presumably in that very order. By contrast it was noted that Hemingway eventually married four times before committing suicide in 1961. Which seemed to imply mitigation of Ms. von K's responsibility for our hero's untimely, not to mention unhappy, end.
Still, it did seem like a bit of piling-on, even in the case of an ego-maniacal - and ultimately self-destructive - pr*ck like Ernest Hemingway. I guess that's why we love the movies...
