My sister had printed out a web page containing a list of the commemorative festivities with intention of taking her son to one or more of them, as part of his homeschooling curriculum.
Looking over the list, I developed some vague plans, which eventually centered on attending the Sunday ceremony of the Oath Keepers, a cause I fully support.
But I wound up just tagging along my sis and her son to the re-enactment of Paul Revere's ride on Sunday night. It was actually very fun. We had to walk about a half mile to the Clarke-Hancock house. An actor portraying a Minuteman answered questions from the crowd beforehand. I could tell he had done his homework because he talked about the abuses by Parliament, not King George.
It was hard to hear some of the actors during the short outdoor play, but the ones playing John Hancock and Sam Adams really chewed up the scenery and spoke decently loud. I would have cast them in the same roles as well.
The high point was when the Sam Adams character boomed out how this was the hour to defend liberty. A cheer arose from the crowd, and for that moment, you could tell that everyone, including the actor, were talking as much about the present day than about 1775.
My sister said she got goose bumps when she heard the clop of horse hooves coming down the road as Revere rode up, yelling "the regulars are coming!" (as the narrator explained, everybody was British back then). It occurred to me that although the accents have changed in 200 years, the sound of horse hooves hasn't.
I made up for my abbreviated visit to Lexington by returning on Tuesday evening to go to the quaint little Lexington Flick theater on Main Street (photo) to see Sunshine Cleaning. Because of the fiasco last time, when I saw JCVD in November, I was fully prepared for the parking meter situation in Lexington, having brought sufficient quarters, as well as cash to buy the ticket. Still I fretted that the meters limited one's stay to two hours. How do they expect anybody to see a movie?
Since the Flick is an old indie theater, I made sure to buy a bag of popcorn to support its operation. Like last time, the movie was showing in the upstairs of the two theaters, which has a very low ceiling and a ramp between the seats and the screen, much like the Village East Cinema in Manhattan---the ramp is the roof of the first floor auditorium. Seeing a movie in a place like this is a nice change of pace from multiplexes.
Like last time, the movie started right on time, without any previews. It occurred to me that maybe this was because of the parking situation---to keep everything under two hours.
Sunshine Cleaning is by the same producers as Little Miss Sunshine, and it has some of the same themes, specifically involving death and corpses. The story is about a pair of down-and-out young sisters in New Mexico who lose their jobs and wind up starting a service to clean up crime scenes after murders and suicides (given the theme, the opening sequence didn't catch me off guard at all).
In this case, however following the Law of Variation, Alan Arkin plays a character who doesn't die. We don't need any of the main characters to die in this movie, because there are plenty of dead bodies to go around. The Law of Sacrifice is nevertheless upheld in that an important character is killed prior to the start of the narrative. We learn about it in flashback.
I'm a huge Amy Adams fan, so this was a treat to watch all around. Emily Blunt plays her sister, and two function well together---Adams as the responsible single mother, and Blunt as the screw-up younger sister who chafes at her older sister's advice and authority. Following the theme of Little Miss Sunshine, Adams' character's son (instead of daughter---variation at work again) is a "special" child who doesn't fit into the system very well.
The sisters' clean-up operation turns out to be wildly successful, and allows them to climb up out of desperate poverty. Since this is comedy, we know there must be complications, one that will put a monkey-wrench in their plans.
What will the complications be? It occurred to me at the mid-point of the movie that I had no idea what was coming. This was a nice feeling. Often in these kind of "rags to not-rags" stories, the comic downfall is all too easy to see.
As I've said before, I tend to judge this kind of story on the freshness of the plot complications. In this case, the movie almost let me down, in that the complication that screws up the cleaning business arises as self-sabotage.
But it was nicely set up, and Adams' character was actually given multiple "warnings" by fate that should have allowed her to avoid it, if she had been tuned into the signs the universe was giving her. That's the proper way to handle a self-sabotage element in a narrative, a way that augments the story, and flows out of the characters' natures directly, rather than just plummeting in from the gods above.
The comic downfall leaves the two sisters is a "black moment" that is very, well, black. They are far worse off than at the beginning of the story. It's a sign of good story when it can pull off this level of reversal.
How will they climb back out? Their resurrection must come in a way that is established by the story previous to the downfall, drawing on assets that were previously unseen by the characters, which will now shine forth. If you've seen Little Miss Sunshine, the character who steps forth to save the day should be rather obvious by the time you get to that point in the story.
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