Weblog not to be used for the other use.

I was flipping through the AFN channels this morning and I ran across a movie called The Straight Story. It's about this old hick guy, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who decides to drive his lawnmower, towing a big trailer, to Wisconsin because he wants to make the trip on his own and his vision is too bad to drive a car. I didn't catch what state he was from, but it looked like Illinois. If it wasn't Illnois, it might as well have been. I don't know why it caught my attention, but it did. To be honest the movie looked really boring, but I guess maybe I was drawn in by how real it looked. I mean the people seemed genuine.. like they were really from the countryside of the midwest.. not that bullshit you see on TV. I think some people from big cities have no clue what life is really like for the majority of Americans. Don't get me wrong, I like big cities of course. I'm more of a city person myself. That's why I moved from Podunkville, Illinois to Los Angeles, California. Still though, I can feel the isolation from the rest of America when I'm someplace like LA or NYC.

Anyway, it was kind of interesting and kind of cheesy. The story culminates pretty progressively. First this old geezer meets this hitchhiker along the way. He guesses correctly that's she's running away because she's pregnant. He goes into how it's better to get flack from your family and risk rejection from your boyfriend than to not have a home and all of that.. in the way that old wise hick men tend to speak sooth. He talks about when his sons were young how he'd give them sticks and tell them to break them. Then he'd take all the peices and bundle them together and tell them to break that in half. And of course they couldn't. And he would say, "That's what a family is." The whole stronger together than apart thing. Kinda cheesy, but still sweet.

He also gets passed by this bike marathon and catches up to their camp site that night and spends time with them. One of the guys asks him what the worst part about being old is to which he replies, "Remembering when you was young."

He also meets this other old guy along the way and they go out for drinks. He drinks milk instead of booze though as apparently some preacher helped him stop drinking after he returned from WWII. He told the other old man a story he'd never admitted to before about how in WWII he was a sniper. He had a friend in his platoon who reconnoitered for them and was really good at it. One day they were waiting for the enemy and Alvin saw something moving at a distance, sneaking toward them slowly. After a few minutes it moved again and he shot it. Later his platoon found their scout shot in the head. They assumed he was killed by the Nazi's. They all still thought that to that day or until their deaths except him, as he knew what he'd done.

More expriences he has along his journey kind of lead up to how important he has realized family is and it turns out he is going to see his brother, to whom he hasn't spoken in 10 years, who just had a stroke. I use "just had" loosely as this whole trip takes him like 8 weeks or something.


I guess it was interesting to me because you see these looney old men and think you can't relate to them at all. I can understand a hobo on the street in the city much better. But it got me thinking how normal these crazy old hick folk from Illinois were probably once like, and probably still are. I mean I guess I always knew they were.. but you don't think about it very thoroughly. You just don't.

I didn't see the end of the movie so I don't know if he made it. I assume he did. I don't know if his brother was still alive when he got there or not or if they made amends. But I do know that that old guy sure looked happy driving his little john deer lawnmower, eating hotdogs made of braunsweiger (sp?). And that actor sure did a genuine-looking job of looking teary-eyed when he reminisced.