The Perfect Storm

Two years ago, I decided to partake in my first Black Friday shopping experience. I got two hours of sleep, then woke up to drive to Best Buy in spite of freezing temperatures and enormous lines of crabby people. I was exhausted, and the whole thing was surreal. I'd never seen the area Best Buy so crowded in all my life, let alone at 4:30 in the morning on a frigid day. Simply terrible. Anyway, once I got inside, all hell broke lose. I was delirious and tired, and must have told myself, "Fuck this, I'm getting like ten DVDs to make sure this was worth it," because I ended up purchasing some movies that I never could even remember wanting to own, at all. Anyway, I got home hours later and immediately collapsed into a sleeping stupor. I think this even happened on my living room floor. By five in the evening or so, I woke up and it was completely dark out. I had no idea what was happening, or what time it was. But the thing that confused me the most was emptying out my shopping bags and finding this DVD among my purchases. I mean, what? Why? Really? Don't get me wrong; this isn't a movie anyone should be embarrassed to own or anything. But it's also far from a must-own; who wants to see a bunch of blue collar guys work on a fishing boat and then drown? And who wants to see it happen more than once? (I had already seen this movie years prior - again, one of my most baffling DVD purchases to date, and I paid ten dollars for Bio-Dome.) Anyway, I was kind of planning on watching this DVD exactly nine days from now. (Or, eight days, I guess. Always tough to decide when to call it a "new day" if midnight has passed but you're still not asleep.) Why? Because that would allow me to watch it on Black Friday, of course. Symbolism, yeah? But my half-hearted plans changed earlier tonight when I began a homework assignment - due tomorrow (today? today!) - at 2:00 in the morning. Fortunately, like all self-respecting engineers, I never do my homework out; I just copy it from the solutions PDF. So with at least an hour's worth of copying to do, I decided to doubletask and knock a movie off of my backlog. Fortunately, my backlog has dwindled so much that I was (unfortunately) limited to a very small selection to choose from. I wanted to put on something I'd seen before, as otherwise I'd have been 90% distracted instead of, say, 50% distracted. In fact, to minimize distractions, I put on what I thought would be the most boring already-seen movie of them all: The Perfect Storm. After all, don't I have better things to do next Friday than make time to watch this movie? I do. So I popped it in, gave it a watch, and can honestly say that I'm glad I made that purchasing gaffe two years ago. This movie was good. Certainly not feel-good - although, in a way, it was bittersweet enough to have a similar effect as a feel-good movie; think Titanic, which is actually kind of a good comparison for this movie in general. Let's compare the two. Both are historically semi-accurate stories about boats that sank in the North Atlantic. You enter both movies knowing and expecting that everybody is going to drown, but during the final act you are teased into believing - mostly because you want to - that they'll survive the ordeal. Both were love stories, albeit to different extents. You get the picture. There's really not much to say (or spoil), plot-wise, so instead let's focus on the cast. Now, I remembered this movie primarily as one that starred George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg and no one else. You can imagine my pleasant surprise when John C. Reilly, Agent Mahone from Prison Break, and Diane Lane showed up. Alright, I know this post has been long-winded enough, but let's discuss Diane Lane for a minute. She was pretty hot in the late '80s when she was in her early twenties, and she's arguably even hotter now in her mid-forties. But, having just seen mid-thirties Diane Lane (this movie came out in 2000), I can say I wasn't blown away. If anything, I was a tad disappointed. In fact, at first, I didn't even recognize her. So what's the deal? How could someone who was bangin' at the ages of both 20 and 45, but not at 35? That's almost inconceivable, right? (Barring weight fluctuations, that is.) I have two theories. The first theory is that "young" hot and "middle-aged" hot are different kinds of hot, and that women in their thirties are unfortunate victims of temporary identity crises. Perhaps there's an adjustment period between when a woman loses her youthful attractiveness and when she has finally figured out how to make her age and experience work for her in a physically appealing way. Think of it like a second puberty. Kids are usually really cute, and young adults are usually some level of attractive, but middle schoolers and young high school kids are downright goofy-looking. My second (and probably more reasonable) theory is that Diane Lane was just made to look her part in this movie: a fisherman's gal in a blue-collar town. Maybe we can't find fault with her for not being a knock-out when she spent the whole movie all covered up in flannel shirts. Maybe my second theory holds more validity than my first one - people say Diane Lane was amazing in 2002's Unfaithful - but it's not nearly as fun. Oh well. At any rate, the movie was a good one, even if it was also a tear-jerker. I'm sure the families of the fishermen who perished at sea during the storm had mixed reactions. I did too. On the one hand, these men were foolish (well, at least the captain was) for ignoring the many storm warnings and pushing way out into the sea just to catch some fish. On the other hand, they really needed to make some money - it can't be easy making a living as a fisherman - and perhaps you can't blame them for doing their best to scrape by and provide for their kids and girlfriends. And their ultimate end, drowning, has to be one of the worst ways to go. I for one would put it way down near the bottom of my list of "preferable ways to die," and off the top of my head the only rival I can think of for the bottom spot would be being burned alive. And yet, there's something poetic and timeless about men losing their lives at sea. The film ends with a dedication that I at first could hardly believe: "to the 10,000 Gloucester men who have been lost at sea since 1623." That's twenty-six men a year! And make no mistake; Gloucester is no big sprawling city. It's a little coastal fishing town of about 30,000 people. Imagine twenty-five able-bodied men from your hometown dying every year, all with the exact same profession. Just crazy. Alright. It's bed time. And the worst part about all of this is that I still haven't even finished copying my homework. This sucks. I can't get more than three hours of sleep at this point. I hope no one lets me go shopping for DVDs tomorrow; there's no telling what I'd end up buying.