DC Spinster

Each year on my profile I list six different all-time fave movies, one from each decade I have lived in. Choosing only one from each decade is both challenging and fun.

The first year I blogged I chose Shane, 2001, Alien, Platoon, Fargo and Chicago. The next year I chose Forbidden Planet, Dr. Strangelove, The Conversation, Blade Runner, Saving Private Ryan and Sideways. Last year I chose It!, Bullitt, The French Connection, The Terminator, Unforgiven and Gladiator. I think you could take those eighteen movies and a DVD player to a desert isle and be happy for a long while. Well, at least half a month.

This year the first movie I am choosing, Objective Burma!, was made in the forties but I remember watching it as a boy in the fifties on a tiny black and white TV and being entranced by Errol Flynn and his indigenous band of warriors parachuting into the jungle and making an arduous trek to an enemy radio station and destroying it after a terrific battle. I was inspired by it to draw a comic book that pretty much tracked the movie. I still have that book.

Morgan! is my choice of a movie from the sixties. It's a great psychological study, and who could forget the scene of David Warner flying on a motorcycle into the drink in his burning gorilla suit? From the seventies it's The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich's black-and-white adaption of the Larry McMurtry book of coming of age in a small town in Texas. Jeff Bridges as the high-school jock who goes off to fight in the Korean war is excellent, as always.

Aliens and Schindler's List were my choices for the eighties and nineties. Aliens is the rare sequel that is every bit as good as the original film (Alien) in the series. James Cameron scores again. Schindler's List is Steven Spielberg's great study of courage, barbarity and pathos.

For the oughts, I choose Avatar. Go see it! Afterwards, read Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman.

Next year I'll have yet another decade to choose movies from.

Rest in peace, brother.

When I was a state trooper trainee in Colorado in 1980, the instructors had me pegged for a closet liberal. In the class on Response, the teacher asked me what I would do if I was walking up on a 7-11 and a man burst forth out the door with an automatic rifle.

I said, I'd shoot him immediately with my pistol, if I could. Before he leveled his rapid-fire weapon at me and blew me away.

Then I equivocated when the instructor gave me a shocked (Shocked!) stare and said, I'd yell, Drop it! and give him a nano-second to comply. Then I'd shoot him dead.

Ah come on, the teacher said, you wouldn't order him to drop his weapon, draw down on him and wait for him to comply?

No, I said, I'd shoot him. I'd kill him.

This would be a mismatch, rifle versus pistol. If he killed me first, an armed, uniformed authority figure, there'd be no protection for anyone around. I'd kill him quickly if I could.

We had a saying in the state patrol, Better to be judged by 12 (the jury) than carried by 6 (the pall bearers).

The teacher acted disappointed in me, because of my reputation for upholding individual rights. But it was the right answer from the wrong person. He said, Yeah, you waste this guy.

Today where I live, at a place where I sometimes run (down the footpath alongside the Halocaust Museum), a lunatic, a racist Holocaust denier, walked into the museum with a rifle and opened fire. From what I have heard, the security officers inside immediately shot him down.

He killed a guard before he was shot down, a young man named Stephen Johns. God bless you officer Johns. And thank you, fellow officers for immediately acting to subdue this 88 year old American nut job.

Anne Frank would have been 80 if the Nazis hadn't killed her when she was a teenager.