OK, let's get away from reality for a bit. Sheesh. Time for a little escapism. It's a perfect month for that, as July marks sorta the middle of summer and it's a big movie-launch month.
I noted with interest, and a feeling of old-timerism, that this month marked the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future. This month is also the 25th anniversary of the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore movie Ghost, which put the Righteous Brothers song "Unchained Melody" back on the map.
These movies and their staying power make me think of the movies my husband, Dre, can't do without, at least once they pop up on our onscreen cable-TV guide. When were their release dates? Heck, who cares? They have been, or will be, regarded just as highly on the 18th, 29th or 31st anniversaries as on their zero-year or other landmark anniversaries because they're going to be watched whenever Dre knows they're on. And I do mean whenever.
A small sample of his must-see-until-the-film-falls-apart movie list, memorized dialogue and all:
• The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. (He turned his nose up at the fourth installment, Terminator Salvation, and apparently he wasn't the only one.) He now eagerly awaits Terminator: Genisys, which will someday be shown ad nauseam on our TV, which should give me time to figure out what looks to be a doozy of a time-traveling ball of confusion.
• Independence Day, one of those movies that long begged for a sequel (and which will finally get it next year, with apparently everybody returning except Will Smith). This movie is on my gotta-see-it-every-time list too. It had the biggest examples of what I call the if-the-characters-weren't-incredibly-stupid-there-would-be-no-movie-plot moment: You really want to send a "welcome wagon" helicopter to fly out and meet a space ship about the size of Rhode Island? And have a rooftop party while one of its sister ships squats above you ... and starts to open?
• The Punisher, the 2004 version with Thomas Jane as Frank Castle and John Travolta as the bad guy, ironically named Saint. Dre loves to see Saint get his just desserts. I tune in long enough to see the guy who has to be the most fascinatingly hokey of Frank Castle's would-be assassins ... Harry Heck, a sort of satanic Johnny Cash complete with guitar, dark fingernail polish and an apparent penchant for serenading his would-be victims first.
• The Alamo. Yeah, the one with John Wayne. I have a feeling that one's on a lot of old-guy-favorite lists. The most memorable part of this movie for me: Looking at Col. Travis' outfit and thinking what a shame it was that he was a little over a century too early for military fatigues.
• Lean on Me, in which Morgan Freeman plays the no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners school principal Joe Clark ... who probably wouldn't have gotten so much as his pinky finger in a public-school door today, let alone his foot. (Last fall marked the 25th anniversary of that movie.)
• The Color Purple, whose snubbing at the Oscars still has me harboring hard feelings toward Out of Africa and which spawned a memorable musical rather than just people doing bad parodies of Oprah Winfrey's "All my life I had to fight" line in the play.
• War of the Worlds, the Tom Cruise variety. Dakota Fanning's piercing screams in this movie are nothing short of maddening. But who cares, when one can capture the beauty of aliens that are too dumb to check the living conditions on the planet they'd planned to take over for millennia?
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When I was a child, the most memorable part of this movie was the theme music. I'm now 50-something, and the most memorable part of this movie is ... the theme music.
• The Day After Tomorrow. That one's a hum-along, since the theme music in the "climate fiction-disaster film" almost eclipses its plot.
• 2012 and, once it hits cable, its 2015 little sis: earthquake disaster film San Andreas.
And my list? Groundhog Day. Not the actual 1993 movie, in which Bill Murray's character lived the same day over and over, just my fantasy version: Wife relives hubby's movies ... over and over.
It's email all over again:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 07/19/2015