Extraordinary Measures

Seen at: Reel Mountain Theater, Estes Park, Colorado, about six weeks ago

There are two movies theaters up in Estes Park, but only one (the Reel Mountain) that is open all year round. I'd been meaning to get up there for some time, but mustering up the gumption to drive all the way up the Big Thompson Canyon just for a movie had been elusive.

To be honest, I wasn't even planning on seeing Extraordinary Measures. That's right---I was going to skip it. In January I decided I was tired from seeing movies constantly in the way I've doing for a year and a half. I privately decided to take a break. My plan at the time was to let some of the minor winter/spring Hollywood releases leave the theaters, then to catch them later on DVD by the end of the calendar year.

Like I said, that was my plan. Along those lines, I noticed that Extraordinary Measures (a movie that was not high on my to-see list) was leaving all the theaters in northern Colorado, even the ones in Denver. "It's time," I decided. The next Friday came around and Extraordinary Measures was officially gone. I'd crossed the Rubicon of my movie project.

But it was not to be. My plan was thwarted when the very next day, on a whim, I looked up the Estes Park listings on. I saw that Extraordinary Measures was now showing up the canyon!! It seemed like fate: at last I had a definite reason to go up there.

It turned out to be a nice result. In the morning, I used the opportunity to do some winter hiking on the trails on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. That afternoon, I drove into town to the theater, which I found to be a charming and quaint independent showplace on the edge of town---very well run and tidy. Five buck matinees and cheap popcorn too.

The movie itself more than surpassed my expectations, which were very low, actually. First off, I had developed an aversion to Brendan Fraser. He's really not a bad actor. He just seems to choose really awful screen projects. But in my contrarian way, at the start of the film, I decided, "Heck, I'm going to try to like Brendan in this one." I guess it worked because I became entranced by the fleshy protuberances of his one-of-kind profile as he was leaning into confort his sick child.

Yes, the sick kid thing, with the corresponding race against time to find the cure. That's certainly a barrier to my embracing a movie---one knows that the story's going to pull heartstrings, so one almost must take a defensive stand against the onslaught of emotion, to force the movie to be genuine. But the simple straightforward story in this case won me over, just as I was won over last summer (in a big way) by My Sister's Keeper. I came out of the theater a tad less cynical than when I walked in. Most people I know would not like this movie, but for the kind of movie that this is, it works.

Harrison Ford was certainly a surprise here. In Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he looked like a tired old man doing a geriatric Saturday Night Live parody of his Indiana Jones character. Here he plays a (very) cantankerous University of Nebraska professor, and he seems to relish every minute of it, hopping and bouncing around the screen as if he were twenty years younger than in Skull (coincidentally Estes Park has multiple businesses that sell only University of Nebraska paraphernalia to the tourists---I guess I really did come to the right place to see this one).

This day-trip adventure to the mountains was so successful that I reconsidered my entire decision to take a break, and have forged onward (for now) without missing a beat. Soon after I discovered that forgoing the trailers really helped me with emotional stamina as well, so I got a second wind with movies in general.