movie ping list
And Happy New Year.
Thanks — Happy New Year too!
I just watched the enjoyable, but somewhat complex “Train Dreams.” It is the exact opposite of flash and glitz. It’s a very slow story of the life of “everyman,” n this case, Robert Grainier, a logger and railroad worker who “leads a life of unexpected depth and beauty in the rapidly-changing America of the early 20th Century.” It’s a movie of quiet reflection on life. I’m surprised it got made in this short-attention span clickbait era.
There are several brutal scenes that deal with the extreme racial prejudice that existed around 1900 as well as another tough scene of frontier justice for a man whose brother had been murdered.
The “Great Fire of 1910” is an important element in the movie. That was a huge wildfire in the Inland Northwest region of the United States which burned three million acres in Northern Idaho and Western Montana in the summer of 1910.
It connected with me because it takes place up the road from us in Bonners Ferry, Idaho and a number of familiar inland northwest places are described. My mom’s family was into logging and making lumber. Just today I hired a local “urban forestry” small business to remove two red fir trees severely damaged in our big wind storm ten days ago. So there’s a regional connection in the Idaho panhandle, a family connection to logging and a personal connection to the local forests and wilderness.
I watched “A Call To Spy” on Amazon Prime. It is about women who volunteered to go to France to spy on the NAZIs. Later I looked the women up, found it was a true story. Those were amazing women. Only a few made it out alive.
Not 2025 film, but I watched Chuck Heston in his first movie “Peer Gynt” last night. Filmed in 1941 by rank amateurs, but the 17 year old Heston was already making interesting acting choices. Highly recommend for film history purposes.