daily prompt

Be Careful What You Don’t Wish For

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I know nothing about the life of the actor Hugo Weaving, and I even had to look up his name before typing it. He is so famous that he is obscured by his success. He played Agent Smith in the three Matrix films, Elrond in the three Lord of the Rings films, V. in V for Vendetta, and provided the voice for Megatron in the Transformers franchise and Noah in the Happy Feet movies. I trust that the film industry has made him an extraordinarily wealthy man, given that these dozen films have earned approximately $8 billion dollars for that industry. Yet he could walk down my street unnoticed.

He disappears into roles that require makeup, prosthetic devices, masks, but always gives portrayals that are compelling, fully realized, quotable—not only quotable because the lines are memorable, quotable because of his delivery of them. Other actors may take on make-up-heavy parts, but, well, Gary Oldman is always Gary Oldman, the best Gary Oldman that there is, but always recognizable as himself.
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On the Edge

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

I’m a damn sap.

Sometimes it’s the television ads. There are some that get me every time. “Aw, they’re getting a new kitten!” (Never mind what the ad is selling.) Or if a character in a movie—at any point in the movie—says something about wanting to “go home,” and at the end of the movie they walk through their front door and say they’re “home,” and the music swells and the credits start rolling, I’m a goner.
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The Forest and the Trees

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A heavy rain drowns each raindrop; a light rain, like the kind I saw in the woods out behind my house when I was a child, a light rain striking the leaves and branches of trees, further slowing their impact, that rain produces the strongest petrichor of all, the one that renders me into an seven-year-old noticing the world for the first time.
 
The lightest of rain after the driest of spells leads to the most argillaceous petrichor, which is the kind that humans smell as relief, the thought that things will start growing again.—”Petrichor,” Jan. 26, 2015

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and dross beneath them; the lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand the lawn by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental and foreign.
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