“What? I read a book that isn’t a comic book? Has the world gone mad?
Well, sometimes I like to get away from my regular, capital-L literature featuring metallic men and men who fly around in jet suits and metallic men who have the metal in their skeletons instead of using it as skin.
The Film Club. Recommended to me by a friend a really long time ago, I got around to it on a trip and read most of it in two plane rides.
Welllllllll that’s not entirely true. There was also a 3-hour airport delay where I proceeded to get a little thrashed on airport beers. Can you all read after drinking? Because I really can’t. I wish I could because those are two activities that almost seem made for each other. A whiskey in one hand, some book about an eastern european gulag in the other. What could be better?
And I must say, when you’re loaded the pages FLY by. I mean, it’s almost TOO fast.
Scratch that. It IS too fast, which is probably why I didn’t retain all that much.
But what’s really weird, flipping backwards in this book, I did remember most of what had happened. Just not off the top of my head.
“Oh yeah…that’s the part where he sets up his son with beers on the porch to discourage neighbors from moving in.”
“Oh yeah…that’s the part where he and his son talk about cocaine.”
Okay, the book.
The author definitely has a gift for talking about movies. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to go back and watch some of those old terrible movies that everyone says you should watch. I usually respond to those people with a polite “BITCH do I LOOK LIKE someone who does fucking homework?” However, I sometimes carry a backpack and I have adult braces, so the answer to that one is Yes more often than I’d prefer.
The movie parts are great, but the father/son stuff fell a little flat for me. I thought it was going to be great. A son who hates school gets the chance to drop out provided he and his father watch three movies a week together? Sounds like fertile ground, no?
Well, it turns out, no.
I mean, I hated school. HATED it. I even tried that BITCH/homework line there a few times, and it was only slightly less effective than it is now. I would have dropped out to watch three movies a week, absolutely, no doubt. Hell, I would have dropped out if I had to commit three murders a week with a parent. That would have been a decent trade in my eyes.
Sadly, however, I never got the offer. And though the son in the book learns a lot about film, I would say that the remarkable thing about the whole adventure is the fact that, clearly, education beyond the 8th grade might be kinda bullshit. I don’t know for sure, I don’t know if the son is in a gutter somewhere, but I doubt it. And he seemed to be going through the same shit that we all went through at that age, namely a series of extremely painful relationships that ended in ways that were hurtful to all involved. THANK GOODNESS WE ALL STOPPED DOING THAT STUFF, HUH? HAHAHAHA! HUH!?
-ahem-
At any rate, for doing something like this, the true outcome is that it’s no big deal. It’s no big deal in that the kid seems about average.
In fact, I know a lot of people would question the wisdom of doing something like this, myself included. But on the other hand, I don’t think fathers and sons spend a ton of time together. Especially after those sons are over the age of 15. Really, the experiment here seemed to be about whether it was worth it to have a potentially drastic negative impact on your son’s life with this plan, but the benefit would be that you would have spent a good long time doing something together when he was of an age that the two of you could actually have an intelligent discussion. I feel like a lot of dads check out during this part of life. Shrug and figure there’s not much use talking to kids during those teen years.
Ultimately, the reason it all works out is because the parents obviously care about their son. They may not make all the right choices, but they think a lot about the choices they do make, and the entire book reads like a letter of love and admiration from a father to a son.
So the reading of the book didn’t do a lot for me. That said, I’m glad that someone out there did something like this. And I can’t imagine a lot of people (those with shithead dads excluded) who would prefer a high school diploma over some quality time spent with dad.”