I Am Thankful for Movies. And Shia LeBeouf.

I love movies almost as much as I love books. My tolerance for bad movies is greater than my tolerance for bad books as long as there is a character to love in there somewhere. For instance, at this moment we're watching Transformers. The exposition is handled rather sloppily--it's thrown into the movie all at once, slowing down the action--but Shia LeBeouf's character (Sam Witwicky) is so accessible and so funny that I don't mind watching the movie over and over again. The fights between the Transformers, the car chases and so forth, are also a lot of fun.

And there are the good movies, the movies I get lost in, the movies that I turn up loud so that people will QUIT TALKING OVER THE DIALOGUE. Don't talk to me unless the house is on fire. This is why I don't watch movies until the kids are in bed and Mat's off doing something else. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is in that lineup, but A&E's Pride and Prejudice tops the list. As does the new Andrew Davies' adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, though I will always have a soft spot for the Emma Thompson version. X-Men is up there too. I have a pretty eclectic taste in movies, surprisingly.

Tonight we've watched three movies. We've watched a little bit of Holes (also starring Shia LeBeouf), Zorro the Gay Blade (with George Hamilton), and now Transformers. It's a decent way to spend an evening, comfortably ensconced on a couch. I respect our ancestors that could sit and listen to a story, letting their own images fill their mind as the storyteller spoke, ignoring the sensation of their rears going to sleep or having a warm front from the fire, but a cold back. Personally, I need something I can see--words I can build my own images from, or movies, that create through some magic of medium and imagination more than I could on my own. The spoken word wouldn't distract me enough from my numb backside.

Music can transport me too--Loreena McKennitt's work especially. She tells stories not only with her lyrics, but with the style she chooses, the harmonies that work against the melodies to evoke a sense of wonder. When you put a good movie with good music together, it is nirvana for me. The Pirates of the Caribbean series is nirvana. I love Hans Zimmer's music, Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush's Captain Barbossa, and the transportation to a world of oceans, adventurers, and wonder. Bring me that horizon indeed.

A word here. Yes, pirates are inherently bad. They are, after all, pirates--careless of human lives, property rights, abiding by the law. However, my pirates, the pirates the Disney studio created, may steal, may lie, but there is an inherent innocence in the decent ones (I'm thinking specifically of Jack Sparrow and the pirate with the wooden eye), and an innate goodness despite what they do. They are adventurers first, pirates second. I admire the adventurers, the ones who brave endless stretches of water to seek out mythical treasures, surrounding themselves with people they trust and with whom they work well, free from the constraints of societal expectations. I don't hold with the lying, the stealing, the self-centeredness, and I like to think I can separate the two sides and admire only the good. I like to think that most fans of the movies can. We admire the spirit of adventure, not the need to "raid, pillage, plunder, and otherwise pilfer [our] weaselly black guts out."


So. I am thankful for movies and music and not having to sit by a fire to hear either.