Favourite Movie Scenes #5: Naked Gun 3, The Opening Dream Sequence

I'm stretching the term "favourite" more and more with each one of these posts, but here goes anyway...

Recently, I've been watching the original Naked Gun trilogy, since they're all on Amazon Prime at at the moment. I started with the third, since it's actually my favourite, despite getting the worst reviews. (But in all honesty I think they're all much of a muchness.)

There are so many brilliant scenes in the trilogy that there's something a bit arbitrary about choosing one, but it's hard to beat this one. I've always seen it described as a spoof of two different scenes, from The Untouchables and Battleship Potemkin. I've never actually seen The Untouchables. I did watch Battleship Potemkin many years ago, and found it so boring I was literally falling asleep.

The scene is funny even if you don't know what it's spoofing, though.

My favourite moments in the scene:

1) When Frank Drebbin runs out of bullets in his gun, but in the next shot suddenly has a machine gun instead. (Since it's a dream sequence, this is quite realistic.)

2) "Look! It's disgruntled postal workers!" (You may not get this if you didn't live through the nineties. If so, do an internet search for "going postal".)

3) Norberg catching the falling babies and doing a victory dance.

4) The sudden appearance of the President and the Pope, along with their entourages, who both just happen to be walking down the steps of the train station at the same time.

The fact that the scene is beautifully shot (quite a set-piece, in fact) is in character for the trilogy. The brilliance of the Naked Gun films is that they combined the silliest, most throwaway humour with such high production values. The viewer's brain is engaged on two tracks: the humour, and the underlying story which you can't help taking seriously on some semi-conscious level.

These films seemed to constantly be on television when I was a kid, and into my teens. I laughed at them but I never thought of them as classics. I do now. They all get the maximum of five stars in my "movie seen" spreadsheet, an honour restricted to only twenty-eight films out of 1380.

I went to see the recent remake in the cinema. It was surprisingly excellent, refreshingly non-woke, and fully in the spirit of the original trilogy. But not quite up to their standard.

One final thing: I've always loved the phrase "dream sequence", and hearing film critics talk about "the dream sequence". It seems so portentous. 

Are you a Nationalist?

Very often, I hear people talk and write about nationalism as if it's some rather extreme doctrine, like anarchism or communism or complete pacifism.

Personally, I don't think this is true of nationalism at all. I think most people have been nationalists throughout history, even if they didn't use the word.

In my view, if you can answer "Yes" to the following two questions, you're a nationalist:

1) Do you think the nation-state should be the basic unit of international politics, rather than a World Government, or supranational organizations, or empires, or some other system? Do you think nations should have fundamental sovereignty?

(People sometimes quibble about sovereignty, pointing out its inevitable limitations. Everything has limitations. I don't think this is a serious objection.)

2) Would you prefer that national cultures should persist? That the French should continue to speak French and make celebrities of bad philosophers, that the Irish should continue to play hurling and apologize every six seconds, and so on?

(Tiresome objections that "you can't preserve a culture in aspic" are often advanced here. The question is not: "Would you prefer that national cultures should never change or evolve?". The question is whether you would prefer them to substantially persist through those changes.)

I think most people would answer in the affirmative to these two questions, and that most people are therefore nationalists. 

Unseasonal

I tried to change the blog's colours to purple for Lent, but for some reason I've lost the ability to do it. At least, I can only do it partially.

Which reminds me. Here's a word that never ceases to delight me-- season. I think there's immense poetry in the word. I would write a meditation on it, similar to my meditation on the word "midnight"-- but I don't have time right now.

Poem for Shrove Tuesday

Our Blessed Lord, the Man of Sorrows,
Went to the Cross for every man's sake.
So let us start our fast tomorrow
But for today let's have some pancakes.

The Pedant's Gambit

I propose that this term should be used for that tiresome challenge one often meets in debate: "Define what you mean by x..."

(I can only find one "hit" of the term on the internet, and not in that context. So I hereby claim its invention.)

I'm very suspicious of the whole business of definition. My standard response to this is: "Define what you mean by define."

Every definition rests on terms which themselves require definition. It's a silly game.

Of course, there's a place for definition in law and other specialist contexts. But even here, things get fuzzy.

I was a member of a jury once. I remember the barrister giving us the following (apparently celebrated) example of what "reasonable doubt" entails. If a person walks into a building all wet, you can know it's raining beyond a reasonable doubt. They might be filming a movie outside and have some kind of rain machine, but that's highly unlikely.

I consider that fuzzy.

People only play the definitions game to score points and throw their opponent, anyway. We all use words every day without demanding definitions and we generally understand each other.

I suppose an exception is words and phrases that do have several different usages, such as "sanction". (I've been married to an American for thirteen years and we still occasionally hit the Shavian obstacle of "two countries divided by a common language." As in; "Why was there a buoy in the water? Why didn't someone pull him out?" But rarely.)

Yes, I've been arguing with someone on the internet. (I try not to.)

St. John Paul II speaks about Ireland, in English!

Here's an intriguing and delightful little clip that popped up on my YouTube feed. St. John Paul II, on board a plane about to land in Ireland, says that he prays for Ireland every day, and that it's been near to his heart since he was a boy. He also teases the journalist a little. His personal charm and warmth is very evident. We also learn what he had for breakfast that day. The answer will STUN you! (Well, not really, but it's interesting all the same.)

I was in that million-strong crowd for the Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park. I was still a little bit short of my second birthday so I don't remember it at all. But apparently I was a Pope fan, and had a white Lego vehicle that I dubbed the Popemobile.

I can best describe my upbringing as solidly Catholic but rather casually so. My parents were firm Catholics and loyal to all the social teachings, but my father very rarely went to Mass. He did, however, always bring me into the Pro-Cathedral, as it was then, to light a candle whenever we were in the city centre. My mother brought me to Sunday Mass, which I hated, but we didn't go every week by any means-- it was more intermittent. 

My father was very much from a left-wing republican and trade-unionist background. As he grew older, he became more outspokenly Catholic on social issues. But I think that was more a result of the increasing secularisation of Irish society, and the increasing anti-religiosity of the Irish left, than any change in him. (The Irish Labour Party were once famously described as the political wing of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. But that's a long time ago.)

I had long stopped going to Mass by my teens and I can't remember anyone ever saying a word about this. (I actually felt more awkward when I started going to Mass as an adult, though nobody said anything about that, either.) Nobody ever taught me to pray and the rosary was never said in our home. There were no holy pictures or holy statues. I wasn't baptised until I was three yeas old, when I was batch-baptised with my brother and cousins.

I went to an Irish language school which was one of the relatively few non-Catholic schools at that time. My parents had helped to get it set up, which was a considerable battle. (Be it understood, their battle was to have an Irish-language school in the area, not a secular school.) The fact that it was non-denominational was rather academic, however. All the religious instruction was Catholic, and we were prepared for sacraments there.

I'm actually rather grateful my parents were not very insistent about practicing the faith. Being something of a contrarian, it might have made me rebel against it. 

I didn't intend that digression. Anyway, here's the clip, which I'd never seen before. Apologies if it's old hat to anyone else.

Favourite Movie Scenes #4: Gandalf and Saruman at Isengard, from The Two Towers

For this post, I'm almost at a loss what to say. 

I have a strange feeling that any commentary I can make on this scene will almost be an insult to my readers. The camera angles, the set, the blue filter, the acting performances, the dialogue, the moment where Gandalf sees the Eye of Sauron...every moment is pure movie magnificence, concentrated and compressed and triple-filtered.

As with everything else, one can make objections. To be honest, I never particularly liked the choice of Ian McKellen for Gandalf. My reason for this, I'll freely agree, is rather stupid: I don't want an outspoken progressive atheist playing a character who is more or less God's emissary. But acting is acting. That probably shouldn't matter.

I've also always felt that McKellan had the wrong face for Gandalf, but that's even sillier.

Christopher Lee, of course, might havea been born to play Saruman.

The Lord of the Rings occupies a strange place in my life. I "read" the books when I was about seven, but I barely took most of the story in. After finishing them, for all the rest of my juvenile years, I only had continuing access to an incomplete copy of The Fellowship of the Ring. Still, Middle Earth made such an impression on my mind that it would be difficult to quantify it. (I can remember being told, at the time, that it would be impossible to make a film of the book.)

I'll try to explain the significance of Lord of the Rings in my childhood with a metaphor. Imagine some early Christian missionary had found himself on some island that was cut off from the rest of fhe world. The missionary himself only has the basic knowledge of Christianity, and perhaps a few pages from one of the Gospels. Then he dies of a fever. The islanders embrace the faith with great gusto, it pervades all their lives, and they weave all sorts of devotions and folklore around it. But they still only have a shaky knowledge of it. That was me and Lord of the Rings.

Funnily enough, this scene-- Gandalf and Saruman's concentration at Isengard-- wildly excited me as a child, more so than almost any other literary scene I can remember. (Sherlock Holmes's description of Moriarty in "The Final Problem", which has obvious similarities, excited me in the same way.)

This passage especially:

'For I am Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colors!'

I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colors, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

'I liked white better,' I said.

'White!' he sneered. 'It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.'

'In which case it is no longer white,' said I. 'And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.'

But even now, after I've read the trilogy all the way through three times or so (as an adult), I'm still not equipped to enter a conversation with Tolkien afficionados who can name every character's horse, sword, and grandmother. (I did push myself to read The Silmarillion when I was seventeen but remember next to nothing about it.)

Then the films came out just as I'd started my career in UCD. Everything seemed new and exciting. I loved all the coffee-break conversations about the movies-- not just among movie buffs, but among everybody. It was one of those films, like The Exorcist or Star Wars, that became a pop cultural landmark, and indeed a cultural landmark. I had never lived through such a moment in cinema history myself, so I relished it. (The release of the Director's Cut DVDs, a year after each film, were also a part of this cultural moment.)

Of course, a lot of people who loved the books hated the movies. There were things I hated about them myself. I hated all the laboured hobbit humour, which actually made me cringe-- even though you could say, fairly enough, that these scenes were in the spirit of Tolkien's book. I hated Cate Blanchett's ham-acting, as I saw it. There were other things I didn't like.

On the whole, though, I think the trilogy is a triumph that deserves all the plaudits heaped upon it. There are a few other scenes that I expect will feature in this series.