Now I understand...

my family's movie rating system... It's like this: I have an aunt who once lived in California and is an expert on all things Hollywood. She is definitely the one to have on your team when playing the silver screen edition of Trivial Pursuit. A serious movie buff, she can tell you the stars, major plot points and even the director of most movies from about 1939 on. For one reason or another, however, she judges every movie she has seen since 1969 by what she considers the pinnacle of Hollywood cinematic perfection: Midnight Cowboy. I had never seen it, although I once read a humorous essay by Southern writer Bailey White in which her own mother, oddly enough, compared every movie she saw with, you guessed it, Midnight Cowboy. Figuring there had to be something redeeming about that movie, I decided to finally watch it, albeit thirty years late. Apparently in 1969, it was rated X! Yikes! Well, let me tell you, right now it would barely get a PG-13. I could have done without the psychedelic drug references, but I guess that sort of thing was de rigueur in that era. (Hey, did I use that right?) Anyhow, hayseed Jon Voight leaves the sticks for the big city hoping to strike it rich as a man-whore (thank you for that word, Adam Sandler), which he believes to be his one true calling. He meets Dustin Hoffman (who surprisingly did not win an Oscar for his incredible performance), loses all his money, fails to succeed in his chosen profession and ends up taking care of his new-found friend who sadly dies on the bus to Florida. If you could cut out all the gratuitous sex and drug scenes, it is actually an excellent movie about the unlikely friendship between two hapless guys, broke and trying to survive on the streets of New York.

So while I was on my old movie binge, I also decided to watch Easy Rider (which I had never watched in its entirety) - mainly because everyone said how great Jack Nicholson was in the film. Well, it's true, Jack was great. But then, Jack is great in every movie he does. His young self looks like a cross between Dennis Quaid and Tom Cruise - and he is, to my astonishment, quite good-looking. I first discovered Jack as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where he had perfected that lobotomized wandering-eye look, which detracted considerably from his overall appearance. At any rate, Peter Fonda was his usual beautiful, laid-back man-of-few-words self and Dennis Hooper was a colossal asshat. And, as far as movies go, to quote my aunt and Bailey White's mother, "It was okay, but it was no Midnight Cowboy."