Thanksgiving Weekend Consumption

The wife and I went out to the Oregon Coast for a couple of days, sans child, which meant long uninterrupted hours. We spent a lot of time reading and watching movies on television, some bad, some good. Most memorably, we watched Cocoon, Ron Howard's 1985 film about aliens and senior citizens. The movie holds up after 22 years, though time has proven Steve Guttenberg to be a sincerely awful actor and Wilford Brimley to be a grandfatherly good actor.

I found myself obsessing about Cocoon, and luckily I live in the age of the Internet. We had no Internet access on the coast, but when we got back I looked up the IMdB entry for the movie and discovered several things: first, Wilford Brimley was only 50 years old during the shoot. He wasn't even a senior citizen. Also, the woman who played the beautiful woman alien, Tahnee Welch, is Raquel Welch's daughter.

All the usual elements of a Ron Howard movie are here, especially a willingness to yank at our emotions. I'm usually annoyed by this tendency of Ron Howard's because he does it so well and so blatantly. But I was not as annoyed this time, perhaps because the acting is so good (except Guttenberg, who is here for so-called comic relief). Also, this movie is about a bunch of people actually cheating death, which I think appeals to people at such a primal level that it's hard to lose.

We also watched 13 Going on 30, Elf, the Battlestar Galactica movie Razor, and several other diversions. I kept some high/low tension by continuing to read Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which dovetailed nicely with Cocoon.