Jesus Don’t Surf . . . Entertainingly, Anyway!

by Thomas M. Pender

I never got the chance to watch the HBO series John From Cincinnati during its original run back in 2007, but I did catch the teaser ads.  I was very intrigued at the curiosity campaign, which showed Bruce Greenwood walking up the beach from the ocean.  Wearing a body suit and carrying a surfboard, he stops walking, looks stunned and confused, then looks down.  He and the viewers notice that his feet are about six inches off the ground!

This intrigued me, and not being an HBO subscriber, I looked forward to the day I could see it on DVD.  Well, that day came this past week.  Luckily, I saw the entire one-season show through Netflix and I didn’t purchase it.

Ugh!

I’m a fan of symbolism, when it’s used wisely.  I loved reading The Grapes of Wrath and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in the 11th grade, because Mr. Farah explained how the characters symbolized well-known characters from the Bible, including Jesus Christ Himself.  As I mentioned in a review some weeks ago, Christian messages distributed to the general public as entertainment should be packaged in digestible wrapping, not force-fed.  John failed miserably here.  Nothing is digestible.  I sort of understand some of the biblical symbolism, but not thoroughly, and I certainly didn’t enjoy doing it.

One of the reasons I was originally anxious to see the show was because the cast was literally filled with actors I perceive as capable: Greenwood, who I thoroughly enjoyed in the UPN’s Nowhere Man, Rebecca (Risky Business) De Mornay, Ed (Modern Family) O’Neill and Howard Hesseman, who can’t seem to leave Cincinnati behind!  This is his third television romp in that town, after starring in WKRP In Cincinnati and The New WKRP In Cincinnati.  However, when I finally got to see it, I discovered that these fine folks’ performances, while fascinating, were mired in confusing and convoluted dialogue.  In a way, it was like watching Shakespeare: you can sort of follow the basic plot, but you have no idea what individual monologues and back-and-forths are all about.  It was constantly and increasingly frustrating.

One major exception to the great casting was Greyson Fletcher, who played young surfer Shaun.  I read that he was quickly cast based on his skateboard skills alone, which would transfer well into surfing skills.  I believe it!  Fletcher is about as good an actor as Laurence Olivier is today!  It was like witnessing Day One of a mannequin learn to walk and talk.  I’m not sure I ever saw the kid blink once . . . or smile . . . or emote in any real human fashion.

I can’t really tell you if Austin Nichols, who portrayed the title character, is a good actor.  He spent the entire show grimacing as if forced to suck a lemon, and talking like he was the love child of Rain Man and E.T.!  It was incredibly irritating, particularly in the beginning of the show, when he only speaks words he hears other characters say, and only knows a few lines.

JFC was not a bad idea for a show, but it was created and delivered with no clarity whatsoever, leaving us with one confusing mess.  I seriously defy anyone to watch a single scene of this ten-episode series, and explain to me what the characters are talking about.  It’s that bad!  A shame, really.  If they had simplified the dialogue in order to tell an entertaining and digestible story, I might actually feel bad it got cancelled.

The Stubs of My Lifetime

by Thomas M. Pender

Some – like You’ve Got Mail and Antz – may never come to mean much, but others – like the 50th Anniversary showing of Citizen Kane at Detroit’s legendary Fox Theatre – may just be a piece of history.  Still others – like Holes, the very first film my son Garrett saw in a movie theater at the age of 3 – are personally historical.

At some point in my 45-year love affair with movies, I decided to start saving the ticket stubs of each film I saw in the theater.  I knew most would never amount to anything, but my thinking was: Who knew back in 1982 that E.T. would become such a historical phenomenon?  And how exciting would it be to have an original ticket stub to that iconic film?  So, never knowing which movie would turn into a classic in the future, I saved stubs from every blockbuster and every turkey I paid to see.

Some don’t so much cause me to reminisce about the film itself, but rather the time or place.  I saw A Bug’s Life, The Siege and about a dozen other films at The Odeon Theatre (just around the corner from my flat in Kenosha, Wisconsin) from the fall of 1998 to the summer of 1999.  The films themselves don’t stand out as masterpieces to me, but they remind me of a short time in my life when I was in love with the place in which I lived, and the events that happened there.  I was renting the second storey of a turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century family home that had been converted into four flats.  Mine was the largest, being the entire second floor, and included two fireplaces and a small chandelier in the dining room.  The house was situated in the Library Park section of Kenosha, and not only was it a few short blocks from Orson Welles’ birthplace home and from Lake Michigan, but the home itself was listed as a historical structure.

None of this would likely matter to many other people, but to me, it was a wonderful place to live, and I’m reminded of that whenever I see the ticket stub for Affliction, and all the other shows I saw at the amazing little Odeon Theatre.  Affliction itself, lauded as it was, was probably one of the most achingly boring films I’ve ever seen, yet the time and place remain with me in the stub.  It happened to be the film that was showing at the Odeon when I left Kenosha.  I took a picture of the theater itself, and the marquee blares the boredom proudly.

I’m not really one to run out and see the “artsier” films, or the “Oscar buzz” shows.  I see what interests me.  Will Sotheby’s someday auction off my antique ticket stub to the showing of Green Lantern?  Doubtful.  Still, by keeping all of the stubs, however dubious their place in history may be, there is a chance that I’ll end up with a piece of cinematic history.  Even if I don’t, I’ll still have the stub to the film where my son fell asleep holding onto my arm, and woke up to climb in my lap and say, “I love you, Daddy.”  I’ll still have the stub to the film I went to see with my fiancée on her first trip to see me in America.

In the end, these are the historic events I wished to chronicle.