Ya know.... I’ve seen so many teenage comedies and teenage jock films that... to a degree I’m a bit numb with them. And ya know... Here in the first month or two of the year I’ve seen a lot of movies that just didn’t make me feel like writing, because... well I didn’t want to spend any extra moments discussing them here... alone at my keyboard. I hate raging and being frustrated. Throwing my hands in the air and feeling the tension in my scalp. But I don’t have that right now. Instead I feel an absolute compulsion to discuss what I strongly feel is Joe Johnston’s best film by far.
For me, Johnston’s films have always been two separate films a piece. An effects sequence and a live action sequence. Taken separately one would always be superior to the other, but seldomly in his films have the two merged convincingly. This has always been a problem with effects films, and it’s something that has plagued many of the best ‘genre’ filmmakers because... Well so much more planning goes into the effects scenes. But the key is to make it seem as spontaneous as the regular scenes. You are supposed to make both scenes blend into one another. This is what is so amazing about George Pal’s WAR OF THE WORLDS and TIME MACHINE as well as Harryhausen’s SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS.... in those films... it all fit.
Well, in OCTOBER SKY, we are dealing with what would appear to be a non-effects film. And that’s the way it should be. This was a wonderful film. I’m gonna give you folks a warning, I’m probably going to go out in left field here, so if you want off the ship, just click away cause this film got to me.... and you know how I get when a film get’s to me.
As I said in the first paragraph, I’m sick and tired of the high school jock movie and the high school comedy movie, from time to time there’s a film in those genres which really does separate itself from it’s fellow redundancies (such as the upcoming AMERICAN PIE from Universal), but by and large... I get rundown on it. Why? Cause I wasn’t a jock in High School. I was on the football team for a while, but because of how big I was, the coach wouldn’t let me practice against my own teammates, and instead used me as a hitting dummy to ‘toughen me up and make me mean’, but that wasn’t who I was and I dropped out.
It was no big loss for me, group showering and trying to kill another teenager were never my favorite pastimes, but living in a small town... being nearly six foot tall and 250 pounds.... well you were kinda expected to play football. My mother said that if I played, she’d buy me a new car, my biology teacher said he’d cut me some slack if I’d play.... It could have been an easier, more accommodating route... but my dreams were not of gridiron. Instead I was in Band, I loved playing film soundtracks, hearing the sounds of John Williams or Danny Elfman escape my trombone’s bell.... I joined the debate team, the theater groups, the science team, math team, typing team, Spanish team.... everything I could. I would give oral presentations of poetry and prose, I studied how to do movie make up, and just about everyday me and my fellow group of weirdoes/geeks/corner people traveled the 55 some odd miles to watch movies on the postage stamp sized movie screens of Wichita Falls. And I was happy.
We were the strange group, but I seemed to always make people laugh... I was never very shy, but the older folks in town never really seemed to understand what I was up to.... Especially my mom. I was supposed to want to ride horses, round up cattle, brand em, build fence, shear sheep, drive a tractor, negotiate oil contracts... I was supposed to be a rancher. Do “God’s Work” as she put it. But making terraces and studying fertilizer.... it just wasn’t my life’s calling. Hell... I hadn’t a clue what was, but damn if I didn’t love movies. I bought every magazine I could, read them all. I’d buy Chicago Newspapers to read what Gene and Roger thought, I’d buy every STARLOG, CINEFEX, CINEMAFANTASTIQUE, US, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, PEOPLE, VARIETY, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, etc that I could get my hands on.
My mom never lived to see what came of all of that, but I have to say... everytime I get a letter from an old high school acquaintance, teacher, etc... I smile. I was voted BIGGEST BOOKWORM in High School, I was also voted most likely to succeed. People have always seemed to sense that I was not someone to settle for a regular job, I guess I give off that vibe a lot.
OCTOBER SKY is a similar story. It’s filled with the typical clichés about a father figure wanting the kid to be one thing, when in reality he’s a completely different animal. It’s about geeks with non-traditional dreams that dared to attempt to realize them. This isn’t about Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawkings... This is a movie about that kid in high school that always stared out the window dreaming of getting out of the town he was in, dreaming of something grand for their life. And their ‘grand’ was really quite a small thing in the way of the world, but to him, and to the town he lived in.... It was something huge and unimaginable.
I loved this film. Sure it’s got more than its fill of clichés... but ya know.... real life success stories are filled with those. Folks, everytime I do an interview and I get asked the question about when I started this site, and I have to go into the story of being hit by a runaway dolly loaded with about 1200 pounds of movie memorabilia, laying in my bed unable to go take a shit and ignoring it all to type about movies.... Well, I wince cause it feels so damn cliché-y. But that’s the way it happened. Sometimes the last second desperation pass is caught. Sometimes after a fight you do kiss up and make up in a whiny blubbery mess. The reason they are clichés is because reality is filled with them. And thank God, because if everything in life were unique, I don’t think we would have a frame of reference to understand the things we live and experience.
This isn’t a big film. But it has some wonderful themes. It’s strange... at one point in the film I began thinking about GODS AND MONSTERS. In one of Ian McKellen’s stories he looks away distance and says something along the lines of “it wasn’t their fault, it was as if a family of farmers were given a giraffe... and not knowing what to do with the beast they bridled him up with the plows.” Now I just butchered that line, but it was the general gist of it. You see... the character of Homer’s father, played by Chris Cooper just doesn’t understand his son. When he looks at him he sees a scrawny weak little boy that doesn’t appreciate anything that he (the father) has given him. The father sees his interest in something strange and new as being a knife in his back, as a betrayal of everything he understands. But it goes further than that, this is a town where everyone expects you to work in the coal mines. Schooling is just a delay of the inevitable. It’s a 12 year furlough from breathing the black dust that will one day kill you. But hey.... It’s honest necessary work to build a stronger nation... under god, for liberty and justice for all.
Sputnik was a wake up call for dreamers to look overhead and think about.... Space. Where was George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron when that speck of light darted across the sky? It’s really amazing what a milestone can do. That speck in the evening sky gave birth to a scientific dream that so far has accumulated with you reading this from my bedroom. Because without the space race and the cold war and the dreams of thousands upon thousands of those geeks ya might have looked down upon in school... well... these personal computers, the satellites in space, then entire DVD and VCR thing, the 300 cable stations, your cellular phones, the map you printed from Yahoo, the ticker you check your stock quotes with.... All of this might have been delayed for who knows how long. And for me.... watching that little speck of light race across that sky... It was a symbol of what started all of this.
Well, shucks... I guess I might ought to talk about the actors in this film a bit. Like I’ve said, this isn’t a terribly big film. It’s not a huge film about gigantic accomplishments, but it is about dreams, hard work and accomplishments. And to realize that, Johnston has assembled two kids in his group of four that I think are something special.
The lead character of Homer, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake is right on in this film. Go ahead and mark him on the list of kids like Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood that can act and that are good. One of my favorite things in this film are the tiny details like Homer’s rotten canine on the upper left side of his mouth. I love how the dirt and grime sticks to these kids. And that’s something I really wasn’t expecting from a Joe Johnston movie because usually his films are so clean and free of dirt and grime. For me, it was the singular flaw in ROCKETEER... Their world was too clean and too new. But that wasn’t the case in this film. Instead.... In this film we had a real world. And Jake was the perfect kid to play this character. He had the right gleam in his eyes, and when that gleam leaves for a bit.... you feel a soul being lost. I loved it.
Then there is the character of Quentin. I really really feel that Chris Owen may very well be something very very special. He is very very good. I would love to see him be cast completely against type for a film. In this he plays the atypical geek, but in the later AMERICAN PIE he plays a geek stud. Personally I’d like to see him in a major role because I feel he has the charisma to carry a film. He has a wonderful character filled face, and for me, he stole every scene he was in. When he began to get excited.... You could just feel the vibe of energy flow from him. It was wonderful.
This was the film that I think Joe Johnston grew up as a director. It’s a film about characters and a simple story. I always believe you should start off telling simple stories and move on to the more difficult ones. If you try to climb K2 your first time out... you’ll die.... But if you start by climbing that hill in your backyard and moving to bigger and better things.... Well it’s a natural progression.
This probably won’t be a terribly successful film, though I hope I’m wrong. Everyone in my group really loved it and were surprised by their reaction. This is one of those films that can surprise you. I’m taking more people to see it this Sunday, it’s a good film that they ought to see.
Well... I’ll letcha go, I have to wrap this up.... I’ll try to write up my PAYBACK review today that compares the final print to the earlier print. Later...
