GRAND CANYON review

From time to time I get reminded of why I love running Ain’t It Cool News. Tonight, I woke up at 3am… I was thinking about writing a review for John McTiernan’s BASIC or of Jon Amiel’s THE CORE. Enthused by neither really, I flirted with writing a review of Lawrence Kasdan’s DREAMCATCHER… Again, haunted by a lack of enthusiasm, a sort of emptiness filled me.

You see, all three films are fun. Empty trivial confections. Sure I had a goofy smile on my face as I watched John Travolta effortlessly act cool, or the absurd smirk I had as Jason Lee longed for a toothpick on a sealed crapper being bumped by a deadly shit weasel… and how could I not giggle at boring to the core to drop of some nuclear warheads. Yeah, I was amused. They made me smile, but I didn’t really have anymore to say about those films than what I’ve just said. So, there really isn’t any point to me intellectually wandering around in circles attempt to write something that would entertain me, perhaps put an equally empty smile on your face.

So as I laid here, now at 3:15am, I wondered… “Harry, what do you want to do?”

As it happened, I had a sealed brand new copy of GRAND CANYON sitting on my desk. No, not some new edition with commentaries and deleted scenes. That fairly bare-bones job that Warner’s put out a few years ago. I had bought it about 7 months ago. Put it in my DVD Library and left it there. Last night, around 7pm, tired of war coverage I was looking through my shelves and noticed the sealed wrapper on GRAND CANYON. The thought happened, “That’s a good movie!” Not that I’ve seen it in years mind you. In fact, I just intuitively remembered thinking at a preview screening back in 1991 that it was a good movie.

I grabbed the DVD, took it into my room, put it on my desk, then went to supper with Dad. The urgency had waned. When I finished supper, again I thought that I wanted to watch a movie, but like a drone, I watched the War. It’s like the ultimate reality miniseries isn’t it? We tune in to the “news” channels… we read updates in the paper… We react as we hear about children firing guns at our marines and our marines defending themselves. We watch “experts” analyze this and that… We hear career politicians tell us it is right and wrong… We like to feel right, so we choose a side and we look for information to affirm our own sense of righteousness. Yup, then we feel that self-righteous indignation build like we’re going to be motivated to do something, when… oh… A sand storm, wow, that looks like a Bruckheimer film.

I fell asleep on the televised morphine drip of reality.

I didn’t sleep well. I can’t remember the dreams really. But when I awoke, I thought… “This sucks.” I sat up, looked at my desk and there in its pristine wrapper was Lawrence Kasdan’s GRAND CANYON. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll watch GRAND CANYON, it’s a good movie.

This is something I can write about. Unlike many reviewers, I can’t just write about anything. I’m sorry I don’t write about all the movies I see. I wish I had something to say about them all. That each movie provoked a response, but sometimes other than a smirk or a giggle or a roll of the eyes… sometimes a film doesn’t leave me with much to say at all. Oh sure, I can dissect a movie for everything that kept it from speaking to me. Point out the flaws, tell you why it was inadequate. What about a movie left me ultimately empty. Then, with the silliest film, something in it gives me an idea, a notion, and I’ll write for pages because through all eye candy and all the artistry, it made me react.

Sometimes when I’m feeling rather empty inside I’ll watch some romantic comedy and turn to mush… Literally just spill pages about love and want and failures and hopes. Other times when I’m in love I’ll see those same films and feel they’re empty and meaningless, not nearly the transcendent experiences I had formerly given them credit as.

Sometimes I’ll let myself go with a movie, just exist in the plotline, no matter how silly, but I’ll method watch… where I allow myself to live in the moment on screen, to make their same decisions and come out the other end feeling wonderful. Admittedly, that isn’t for everyone, but sometimes… Sometimes it is so great to just let go of my own cynicism and my own smug sense of right and wrong, and just make simple decisions as a simple character in a simple story would. Because out here… in the seats in the theater… we’re all much more complicated than a bit of 120 minute fiction.

With the problems in the world being what they are right now, I have really been feeling quite helpless. The other day, I was on CNN.com and I for some reason I clicked on the “CASUALITY PAGE” and suddenly… inexplicably… I began to cry. I didn’t see a name there that I knew, a face of recognition. It was empathy. On ABC I saw Iraqis in a market that had accidentally been targeted during the dust storms and there was this woman there… Running around… this look of panic on her face, not hysterical, but she was missing someone she loved, maybe a whole family. I don’t know. They didn’t interview her. I don’t know her name, but again… I cried.

Here in Austin, Texas, in my relatively easy life… I pulled a muscle in my back a few days ago doing something silly, it hurts like hell. There’s tiny little things in life I wish were better and other parts that feel like huge failures of the utmost importance to me, but most of the time I just think about what Rick Blaine told Ilsa Lund, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that.”

Yeah. A hill of beans. I suppose I’d forgotten ol Rick tonight when I put GRAND CANYON in. I’d forgotten so much about the craziness of happenstances and helping hands. That sense of sacrifice that we all have as individuals and as a nation. I mean look at it like this.

In Lawrence Kasdan’s GRAND CANYON, we’re looking at the face of the early Nineties. The first Gulf War was on the boob tube. That war was the first 24 hour Media War. Around the clock coverage by CNN. The real moment of “glory” for the station. “This is Wolf Blitzer live from Baghdad.” It was stunning to see the green hue of night vision Baghdad as Anti-Aircraft fire lit up the sky. In a strange way, there was awe to be had. My day to day life back then felt quite insignificant too. That was before AICN. I was in College at the time.

When I saw GRAND CANYON in 1991, I saw the world simply. There was right and there was wrong. GRAND CANYON was a bit over my head at the time I feel. Like I said, I thought it was a good movie, but I don’t feel I fully appreciated the film till this moment… this morning.

I happened to put it in this morning. Happened to choose it out of a huge selection. Happened to be bored and listless enough by my own feeling of insignificance to put the movie in, because… well, because it was a ‘good movie’.

GRAND CANYON is not a “good movie.”

GRAND CANYON is a great film.

Great because it’s about bigger things than just the problems and triumphs of the characters on the screen. Bigger, because of the ideas of the film. The realizations of the film. The sense of orchestration. The self-awareness the characters have and as a result the self-awareness that they are communicating and trying to pass on to us.

In the movie, MACK, the Kevin Kline character, is at a crossroads in his life. His kid is getting to the age of self-determination. His wife CLAIRE, Mary McDonnell, can feel the impending emptiness of their son’s eventual departure. For MACK, he has an experience that scares him, a feeling of how fragile his existence is and a stranger drops in from out of the night, from a completely different social strata of Los Angeles and picks him up by the collar and places him back into his safe little life again, and he wonders Why?

Why did this man do this for me? What can I do for him? MACK begins to interject himself into SIMON’s life and ends up finding some meaning for himself.

Each character in the film has hair-thin threads of connectivity to somebody else that they are touching. And when Mary McDonnell’s character wants to adopt this baby she found while jogging, how is that any different from MACK’s helpful friendship with SIMON? They will argue from their individual sides, but ultimately… they are all RIGHT in their own ways, from their own perspectives.

Look at this War we’re in and look at us here at home. We’re all so smug in our feelings of RIGHT and WRONG. We each know how wrong the other sides are, but we rarely if ever fully consider the other side. It’s easier to call them names. Scream at them. Label them. Marginalize them. This film asks us to look at why we’re choosing the paths we choose. To understand the paths THEY choose. And to realize that in the end we are all relatively insignificant, that we all share the same ground, which will be here long after all of our rhetoric, our worries and our actions.

We’re all meddling in each other’s affairs. Some on grander levels, but it all comes down to ourselves. Are we doing the right thing for us? Here’s a conversation between MACK & SIMON from early on in the film…

Right now, we’re each small people. The ones of us that have “larger voices” well obviously their meddling will be seen as driven by unseen reasons. Reasons that we all instantly begin speculating about.

I mean, it nearly goes without saying that George W. Bush is Adolph Hitler and that Michael Moore is a Communist Pig Fucker, but that’s detachment. That’s allowing ourselves to paint each other as monsters.

When I look out at this crazy world we’re in, a world that I’ve known such greatness, I can’t help but want to find the good in it. But when I look at the screaming and the hatred and the death and fear that we are living with in society, there’s a feeling like it’s all too much. Too much for any of us to survive, and we won’t. It’ll all take each of us and things will move past and these times will end and we’ll each be judged by higher powers or future generations… if we’re lucky enough to be considered by either.

Beyond all the cynicism that we have in this society, in this world we live in. Where we can instantly hate a country for not supporting a war. Where we can instantly hate someone for declaring that war. When we all jump to judge and hate, and cease to consider that perhaps… Perhaps we’re each doing what we feel must be done.

The President has his interests, the troops have their beliefs, France has their interests and the Peace Advocates have their beliefs.

The decisions we make affect those around us. Be it a decision about hooking the only two black people that you know up as a couple, adopting that baby you just found, teaching your son to drive, deciding to make significant art over popcorn ultra-violence or realizing that you’re good at popcorn ultra-violence. Those are the types of decisions that characters in movies have.

Tonight I had a decision about what I was going to do. I watched GRAND CANYON and enjoyed the hell out of it. I decided to write a self-awareness piece about where I am, how I see things and how GRAND CANYON affected that. Yeah… It’s a pretty worthless exercise of self-indulgence. Ultimately it’ll be discarded, forgotten as Roy Batty said like Tears in the Rain.

But I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel great to write. If I don’t feel better right now, as I get ready to post this. That’s what is important to remember in times like these. We each handle crisis differently, we each choose our own paths. If hating someone or something is your way of feeling good about yourself, then, well, that’s your path. Doing something worthwhile though, that’s what feels best. These peace protesters… at the end of a march, a speech, they feel great, proud that they took a stand. Our troops in Iraq, at this moment as they fight, no matter the reasons behind the decision to send them, they’re doing it under the pretense of liberating these people. For them, that’s a fight worth fighting. For each of us, we each make the decisions that we choose to make because of our own beliefs, but in the end, the GRAND CANYON… the real GRAND CANYON… it is what will be left. And that is a beautiful and humbling thing to think about. Thank you Mr Kasdan.