It also has fish tanks, a grocery-market sized supply of canned goods, it is enormous. He hustles his pregnant wife into an industrial-sized elevator, and they descend, until they emerge in the fallout shelter which is an exact replica of their home aboveground, only it’s way down in the earth. Now.” Sissy Spacek (she plays absolutely the most proper little woman you could ever want to meet … although she also enjoys a little nip from the flask on occasion) is horrified at how rude he is, but there is no stopping Calvin at this point. “Please, just go – now – you must go – go home, go into your basements, lock yourselves in … but go. It is the moment he has been waiting for all his life. All of the guests listen to the news, and yes, they are concerned, maybe worried … but Calvin goes into Defcon One mode. We hear President Kennedy talking about the missiles discovered in Cuba. He bails out, and the plane begins to descend on its own, zooming towards the suburbs below. But then things become more urgent, and he has no choice. He decides that he’s going to try to make it to the ocean before bailing out … he doesn’t want the plane to crash in the residential area below. He radios back to the base wiht a Mayday. Then: the screen cuts to a pilot flying over Los Angeles.
#Blast from the past tv
The guests, one by one, all turn to look at the TV screen, sensing that something important is happening. Calvin is way too paranoid.Īnd then … someone flips on the television … and you see President Kennedy addressing the nation, very somberly. You hear, as the camera pans through the party, certain guests gossiping quietly about Calvin’s eccentricities – and that he had built a highly secret bomb shelter beneath his house, in the event of a nuclear war, and he had been working on it for years. Calvin Webber is obsessed with the Communist threat (you get this immediately) and obsessed with the fact that at any moment they could all be incinerated in a fiery nuclear maelstrom. I’ll stop saying that, but one last time: I love his performance). Calvin Webber holds court at the bar, making martinis for his guests, telling awful jokes, and whispering in a conspiratorial way about the commies. (The soundtrack to this film is phenomenal.) Helen Webber, in her cute little cocktail dress, wearing oven mits, and largely pregnant, fusses over the hors d’ouevres.
#Blast from the past movie
They live in a split-level home in the suburbs of Los Angeles, and the movie opens with the two of them throwing a cocktail party. Christopher Walken and Sissy Spacek (two very very funny performances – I love it – Sissy Spacek so rarely gets to be funny) play a married couple – Helen and Calvin Webber. It’s a wonderful little movie, and I highly recommend it, if you haven’t seen it. I loved it the moment I saw it, and it never fails to delight me, make me laugh. I can see both sides (mainly because both sides express themselves very well – with humor, tenderness, and a great eye for detail.) A balance between the two “sides” of nostalgia would be ideal.Īnd a few words about Blast from the Past: Neither movie is “right” about nostalgia, I don’t think. I’ve watched them back to back, and it is a fascinating exercise. I think that these two movies should be shown together on a double-bill. To me, it seems like there’s some kind of correspondence between them, although they are very different movies. I have always thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast these two theories of nostalgia, these two responses to “oh, those were the good old days, weren’t they?” Pleasantville came out in 1998, and Blast from the Past came out in 1999. This post will be about the movie Blast from the Past, which takes quite another view of nostalgia – almost completely opposite from Pleasantville (and yet equally valid). Here is part 1 – the discussion of what the movie Pleasantville seems to be saying about nostalgia.
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