Revolutions and Change.

I've had to delete my opening sentence like 5 times already, which is a bad sign. I've been away from this damn thing too long. Sorry folks, I suck. I know all three of you are pretty stoked to see me back and are probably wondering what the hell have I been up to. Well, not much, really. Actually to be honest, I just got tired of forcing myself to watch a documentary or a western just for the sake of the blog. I love watching them, but it started to feel like a job (like any responsibility should feel, which is why they suck) so I kind of wandered off and didn't come around here to often. But I never stop watching movies in general, so it kinda bothered me that I couldn't write about them because of the stupid corner I painted myself into by limiting this blog to only Docs & Cowboys. But forget it! Just as I predicted on my first post, I am veering away from my stupid blueprint (all in less than 6 months!) and am now going to write about any damn movie I wanna yell about. It's a fuckin' revolution and Shepard Fairey is making me some posters!! Not really. But it would be sweet if he did.

Now let's get to the movie that got me out of my rut and made me rethink my ways (okay, I'm being dramatic now, I'll stop) about my bullshit blog; Revolutionary Road. I was upset about missing this in the theater. I could've seen it a lot earlier, but I refused to watch the bootleg that someone lent to Mari (which means she saw it without me, I hate when she does that). So finally, I got to watch it on the proper dvd and now I'm even more pissed off about not catching it in the theater. I try to make it a point to catch films by good directors on the big screen, and man is Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Jarhead) a great one. If someone were to tell me that I had to choose only one guy to go on making movies about suburban decay and the ugly underbelly of the American family for the rest of my life, it would be Sam Mendes. For someone that is not American, he really dangles the facade of what is suposed to be a perfect family unit in front of our eyes and then just peels away, and away, and away. He did it with American Beauty and he's done it again with this adaptation of the classic Richard Yates novel.



On the surface, Revolutionary Road is about Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple (Leonardo DiCaprio & Kate Winslet) that begins to question the structure of the ideal 1950s' American married life and takes a magnifying glass the American Dream, so to speak. The weight of this story is carried by this theme throughout, but it's about so much more: the rejection of the idea that as Americans, we have to accept that complacency is king, that there is not much for you once you jump through hoops a, b and c. April realizes this and in some ways voices what most of us (at least I do) repeat to ourselves everyday; Are we really living our lives to the fullest? Is life really about working 40 hours a week at a job that you hate? Why are we not exploring our happiness? We all want to break out of the monotony, we all want an exciting life, but in order to do that, risks need to be taken and shit needs to get rattled. The film beautifully presents how these ideals, which have cemented themselves into our way of life, can ultimately be our unraveling.


It's a tough movie, the situations that Frank and April go through really sink into your mind and make you wonder where did we take that turn and who sucked the life out of life itself. Films like these are what I love about movies. It said something, it looked beautiful (any movie that Roger Deakins is the DP on will always make me happy), it motivated me (shit, it got me to get up off my ass to write another blog! Well, I'm technically still on my ass, but you get the idea.) and it made me think. Brilliantly acted by Dicaprio (does anyone else think that the older he gets, the more he looks like a young Jack Nicholson? Weird.) and completely stolen by Kate Winslet, you have to see it.