"What'd You Think?"

Movies were one thing my dad and I could agree on. We both thought that an evening at the movies was one well spent. This was significant because, for as much as my mom loved the arts (plays, music, art galleries), she really didn't like going to the movies. I can only think of two or three times in my life that she ever went to the theater or drive-in with us. I'd ask her about it and her only reason was just that she didn't enjoy the experience of going to the movies. So my dad and I were movie buddies. He had someone to go with and I had someone to pay for everything.

The first movie I remember that was a kind of a father/son thing was Rambo: First Blood II. Crazy, right? I was eleven, my brother Jason with thirteen, and ol' Dennis took the two of us to see Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo shoot, stab, incinerate, and explode a wide variety of Vietnamese people. Dad had been in the military and liked books, movies, and tv shows about soldiers and war. He wanted to see it, but even if Mom did go to movies, she sure as heck wouldn't pay to see an evil Vietnamese officer slicing a bloody leech off Rambo's body with a knife. Leech-slicing and Stallone's naked, tortured body just weren't her cup of tea. Anyway, the three of us saw it together, and Jason and I thought it was the coolest thing ever that Dad took us to a movie that we were clearly too young to see. (For the record, as a military man, Dad laughed through a lot of First Blood II. I particularly remember him laughing when Rambo fires a bazooka from inside a helicopter filled with P.O.W.s and no one inside the chopper dies.)

Anyway, Dad and I would go to the movies together now and then. Sometimes one or some of my brothers would be there, and sometimes it would just be Dennis and me. Generally, we'd see manly sorts of movies - action flicks, bio pics, and stuff like that. Whatever we'd go see, it always ended the same. The credits would roll, we'd walk out the back door of the theater, we'd make it halfway to the car, and Dad would say, "So what'd you think?" We'd spend the drive home discussing the relative merits of Schwarzenegger in The Running Man or Tommy Lee Jones in U.S. Marshals.

The last movie I remember seeing in the theater with Dad was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, a stark portrait of ambition, greed, and the acidic effects of loving power more than people. It's about a man who makes a fortune and amasses power as he builds an oil drilling empire in California, and Dad was fascinated by the depictions of early oil drilling technology. I still find it funny that, of everything in this dark,  emotionally complex movie, Dad was most interested in how they drilled for oil at the turn of the century. It's not a warm, happy film by any stretch of the imagination. It ends with the main character alone and friendless in his giant mansion after he clubs his adversary to death with a bowling pin. Cheerful? I think not. Nevertheless, I have a lot of affection for the film because it was the last time that, halfway across the parking lot, Dad looked over and said, "So what'd you think?"

My dad passed away a couple of years ago, and I miss him a lot. One reason why I love movies is because they are opportunities to get together with people you love. Even when I was a teenager and didn't have much to say to say to my parents, Dad and I could always agree on a movie.