It’s Just a Movie

Cover of Inherit the Wind

I have heard about Hulu, the free moving channel on the Internet, but I never paid too much attention to the news. Lately I have been receiving a lot of advertising in my mailbox about the “free TV channels on the Internet”, which of course are free once you pay a one time fee for a software that does the miracle.

I am annoyed, as annoyed as the next guy by those commercials, and they are marked as junk. As soon as they come in are transferred by the mail to the “deleted bin”. Once in a while I go through the deletes though to see if there is nothing legit that slipped through.

Of course there is nothing, the systems works fine, but I started to look for some of those commercials to see the pattern. Somebody must have gotten my email address, and even if it is an automatic mailer, somehow they must realize that they don’t get anywhere and they will stop.

Yeah right, fat chance…

I started to Google some of those free things and this is how Hulu came up. I remember about it and I gave it a try. I actually was pleased to discover that they have some good movies that they are running. I saw Paper Chase, Time Limit, some basement made sex stuff, which was not porno enough to offend the taste and not bad enough to offend the intelligence, but one can see only so many before one gets bored…

They had the remake of “Inherit the wind”. I watched about two minutes of it, and I decided that some movies should not be remade. When different actors play the same character, usually they play it for different people, different generations, different geographical location etc. It might be grainy, black and white the sound is not perfect quality, but I could not see anybody else in Hamlet but Lawrence Olivier…I felt the same way about “Inherit the wind”.

It is not my intention to talk about Stanley Kramer right now. I don’t have the time. However I am totally mesmerized by the way he moves the camera. I don’t think that anyone up to him and from him on knew how to pane the camera around the main character. He had the option to use color. And he used it quite a lot. However “Inherit the wind” would not have had the same dramatic effect if it were made using color film.

It is amazing how actual the theme is. And I am not talking about the Evolution vs. Creation, I am talking about extremism against rationalism… It helped me a lot in understanding what is going on right now.

The first time I saw “Inherit the wind”, I was a teenager in the Old Country and the title was translated as “The Monkey Trial”. It scared the daylight out of me. My only consolation was that the action took place long ago. When you are a teenager time is relative. Anything before you were born was happening very long ago, and anyone over twenty five is already old… I was telling myself that it was just a movie, and that America could not have been that way at that time… Well, I am not a teenager, I am in America, in the middle of it, and still don’t believe that it is happening… That makes me a retard? An optimist? A denier of reality?

I have seen the movie many times here in the States. Maybe a lot of my screwed up unAmerican thinking is greatly owed to Henry Drumman.

Somebody in one of my posting commented that those are just movies, can’t be taken seriously. I think that the remark was not right. The movie industry was not created in the States as it is commonly believed. Italy made films before Hollywood and sold them abroad. However, Hollywood legitimized the art of film making… In spite of the amount of garbage which came out of Hollywood, there is a fair amount of films which should be kept in libraries next to the classic of literature, and one of them is Stanley Kramer’s…

“Inherit the wind” should be a curriculum requirement in any high school in this country. Sure some of the characters have been stereotyped in the American literature before, however “Inherit the Wind” makes a visual portrait of what is bad in America and what is good and hopeful. I don’t think that too many things will change in the foreseeable future, and if we consider ourselves Americans, we should all watch this movie once in a while, like we would watch ourselves in a mirror…

And speaking about classics, I think that every one who has to serve in the jury should be asked to watch first “12 angry man”, every single time before jury duty… I would not mind to pay for the jurors’ time watching that movie. I think that this would be one of the best made expenditure in our legal system…

At the time I wrote this piece, Hulu was just another player in a crowded market, these days though, it turned into the star of the day by Google and Yahoo racing to buy it out… They still have the free version, however for a few dollars a month, one can get the premium edition with high quality movies delivered every day.

Cover of Inherit the Wind