How Daddy is Doing...

I just wrapped up another semester of the "Music and Movies" course at JP Catholic. These kids are some of the best students a professor could ask for: smart, insightful, polite, gracious, and really thorough in their work. As a reward, rather than give them a traditional final exam, we decided to watch a movie together. I chose something I'm sure they'd never seen before, and something I hadn't watched in years. A classic by Steve Martin called "LA Story."

If you haven't seen it, I recommend it highly. The breadth of work Steve Martin produced post SNL is really astonishing. Yes, there are silly things like "The Jerk," or " The Man with Two Brains," but from the '90s on he's done some real thought provoking work that wanders repeatedly from absurd to sublime. This is the first of a long line that includes his work in Pure Drivel, The Pleasure of My Company, Shopgirl, and his plays, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," being the most noteworthy.

I won't spoil it for you, but the story of Harris Telemacher, an LA weatherman who goes on an existential journey after meeting and falling in love with a British journalist is filled with moments of abandon, reflection, and a few symbols that are a little too "on the nose" for my taste. But the idea that a man named after Telemachus gets a prophetic sign (literally) that asks him "How Daddy is Doing" is something that holds up, even after all these years. I'm really glad I chose it.

Let me know what old, dusty movie you'd dust off to share with me... Lord knows I've got the time...