Movie Review: I Know My First Name is Steven, Flight of Dragons, Howard Zinn, and Growing Pains
March 6th, 2010First of all, let me say I wish I had something to write other than reviews in this blog for awhile, but otherwise it would just be what I had for dinner and looking for jobs, and that gets a little boring to write about. So here we go:
I got my Warner Brothers Archive DVD’s March 1st. They’re very good…though the ads are right that there’s no extras and no cleaning up of films for the DVDs. They’re manufactured on demand, but I’m happy to report that case artwork exists, and also on the DVD. It’s plain, but it works. The thing that was not advertised is that these disks only work if you have a DVD “play only” player — something that had me cursing until I realized I could use them in the back room. It just doesn’t work on DVD recorders or on PCs. This is stated on the box, but I didn’t hear about it in any of the reviews I read beforehand.
The films themselves look great. I got I Know My First is Steven (1989) and The Flight of Dragons (1983). The first has very good picture, with occasional dust or scratches on the film visible. Sometimes there appears to be a slight jump motion from one charactor or another, but this doesn’t happen when I run the film back and play again. The Flight of Dragons is a cartoon — one of the animes I remember enjoying before anime was a popular word. I never owned this one or saw it on television…my friends owned a copy. Now of course I understand that Rankin Bass did the cartoon, as they did The Last Unicorn, and the two films are very similar — drawing styles, music, credits, backgrounds, still pictures, etc. Rankin Bass is better known for their stop-motion work on Christmas specials like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
Like the Last Unicorn, they have an excellent script, great characters, animation that’s detailed etc. I haven’t finished the film yet, but it’s good. Some years I found one of the books the film was based on, The Dragon and the Geiorge by , which I recognized only by the character names. I read it and then got rid of it — the basic plot of the movie was there, but the storyline with the main character’s wife, Angie, was thankfully left out of the film entirely. The film was also based on the book The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson, an attempt to explain how dragons might have flown scientifically. I think I have seen this book but I haven’t bothered with it. The film combines the two ideas of the books and does very well. Actually, that’s a very interesting idea, combining two books with similar themes. In the film, Peter is transported a magical land, where he must help the wizard Carolinus defeat his evil brother — something the scientific Peter must do while trapped inside the body of a dragon. (Actually, a plot very similar to The Last Unicorn in a way). This is a good film, and I’m enjoying it.
I know My First Name is Steven shows the true Steven Stayner kidnapping case. I’ve been wanting this film, and convinently saw it mentioned on the WB website the day it was released, which intrigued me into looking through the rest of their inventory. I can say having watched a lot of contemporary movies and TV series for this time period lately (Growing Pains, A Son’s Promise) that this film has aged very well. Considering that at the time this film was made, the writers could have beat you over the head with the plot alone, with a Very Special Miniseries about strangers, complete with foreshadowing music and much wailing going on, it’s a relief to say that whoever put this together did any extremely good job.
Because it’s a miniseries, a lot of standard camera shots are used — a few closeups, a few establishing shots. Not fancy camera work, no special effects — and not that that’s a criticism. They have good locations in this movie, and it’s more of a character study — of Steven’s family, but particularly of Steven and how he changed.
There’s also some chilling throwaway lines in this script, that the scriptwriters had no way of knowing about when they wrote this. Funny. One of them is pointed out by the actor who plays the older Steven Stayner, in The Yosemite Murders by Dennis McDougal: the screenplay has Steven’s older brother make him a list of available girls at school — something I guess that was done in real life, and seems perfectly normal. The other is something I noticed. The grandfather in the story comments to Del, Steven’s dad, that if he didn’t have so many kids, he could afford a car that runs, and that if the kids were animals, they could pick the best and drown the rest.
The statement is obviously meant to show the grandfather’s relationship with the family — and one of the reasons he’s suspect later on — but wow, what a statement, considering more recent events.
The film comes on two discs, no extras, and it is quite good all by itself — in fact, it looks better visually than the last time I saw it on TV — but this is one film that really needs extras. A few documentaries, a TV promo trailer, other things, would really be wonderful.
The actors all do a good job in this film — and you get to know the characters pretty well. Steven’s brother Cary isn’t given much to say in the script — rightly so, considering when it was written — but as Steven’s big brother, the script does show him than the younger sisters. “Mom and Dad never come in here,” says Cary in the movie, when Steven compliments him on his drawing ability.
Huh.
But the focus of the movie is about Steven, of course, and the film actually has an arch to it that works — things get worse for Steven after he tries to go back home. This was in the book, too, but it’s great the movie explored it (as it could very well have ended happily like A Son’s Promise, regardless of the outcome). The little title card epilogue at the end of the film has been updated to 2004 — something I haven’t seen before– with one notable, but perhaps appropriate omission.
Great movie. Highly recommended. The people who made it took the time to allow it to be a miniseries and didn’t squash it down to a hour.
Howard Zinn: You can’t be Neutral on a Moving Train:
Maybe it was just not my morning for Howard Zinn. It wasn’t, either, the last time I tried to watch this documentary on television. Don’t get me wrong, I like Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States — the fact that he uses enough block quotations to give a good picture of events and focusing on people history usually neglects. And I’d be interested in how he came to develop these ideas.
Maybe this film tries to show it — Zinn as an activist here, there, and everywhere else — but I quickly lost interest. By the time the film showed Zinn at a book signing with students being interviewed as to why they enjoyed his books, I’d lost interest all together.
the film has some good music and the credits, with little side videos, are well worth watching for some comments.
Growing Pains Season One:
Well, this is another disk of Growing Pains the series, and I have to conclude after watching several that they haven’t aged well. I remember when the show went off the air. I watched it then. I like watching many things that I enjoyed at the same thing as this show — even those shows which stress morals — like some episodes of After School Specials.
And there are times lately where I want to watch unambigious shows — now it’s getting harder to tell who at any given moment is the bad person or good guy in a series. Something to do with filming. And it’s not just this show — others like the Andy Griffith Show and The Waltons are preachy by today’s viewpoint.
But every episode in the series so far seems to be about a Very Special Episode — sex, drugs, AIDS, stealing — and here, I’m not only speaking of this show but of Mr. Belevedere too, which I watched reasonably recently. If today’s shows could be said to cater to a common person, these shows spoon fed the masses their daily moral lesson. This is something I don’t remember continuing into the 1980’s-early 1990’s, but apparently it did.
That’s all right, so long as there are enough episodes without that to stand on their own. And there don’t seem to be. And that’s too bad. It’s not that this is a bad show, it’s easy to see that the characters in it are a happy family, but still…just in this one disk, the father threatens to hit his son twice…and there’s a moral right there, for the audience. In a show like Home Improvement some years later, a Very Special Episode came alone once a year, not once a night.
I’m sad to say that maybe I’ve outgrown these. It’s nice to see shows where people are nice to one another, but the morals on top are sometimes a bit much.