guest post | K Morris – Poet

Many thanks to Alan (http://allyballysblog.wordpress.com/) for agreeing to write a guest post for newauthoronline.com. Please do check out Alan’s blog, it is a great site and I am a particular fan of his 10 sentence fiction.

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Who on earth is Ace Ventura, anyway?

Two decades. Twenty years is a long time. Remembering things as far back as that can sometimes be hard to contemplate or even believe. I often try and remember back as far as I can and think about what life was like then. Where did I live? What did I look like? What were my goals in life? (if I even had any) Thoughts of technology and how far it had advanced is always a winner. Thinking of mobile phones when they first really came into the public’s hands to where they are now.
Taking photos and videos back then was usually always a gamble. After the photos developed, you had to live with the fact that you mum had chopped your head off, or dads finger was in the viewfinder. Personally, I never had experience of videoing anything as a kid. That was usually something left for ‘the rich kids’.

Twenty years ago, I was eleven years old. Obviously, I was still at school and I lived at home with my parents and my younger brother. I owned a Commodore Amiga home computer and my brother had a Sega Mega Drive. Neither of my parents owned a mobile phone or any other kind of mobile data device. Come to think of it, nobody really did, unless you were a government or NASA official.

Actually, the very thought of ever owning such a device, especially something as advanced as the iPhone and iPads of today, certainly seemed like something out of a futuristic SiFi movie and way out of reach.

A big part of growing up for us all, are movies. The motion picture is something of a way of life for a huge portion of the world. Ultimately, it is a career and a lively hood for the Hollywood big wigs at the helm, but, for the average Joe like you and I, movies are a source of entertainment, a reason to go out at night, a reason to invite friends over and for others, an inspiration to go out and make it big.

I think most adults of my generation grew up with videotapes and video rental stores. Because of this, most of us will have grown up watching movies such as, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber and of course, Ace Ventura. This isn’t an article about the amazing success of Jim Carrey, the star of said movies. Nope, it’s about how something like a popular movie can shape your childhood and follow you all the way through your adult life.

I remember seeing a trailer for The Mask, during the commercial breaks of one of my mum’s god-awful soap operas, on TV one night. I was ten years old and utterly mesmerized with the special effects that were being demonstrated on this seemingly mind-blowing movie. Who was the guy with the green mask on? I had no idea. I also had no any idea who Jim Carrey was, either, if you’d had told me that’s who was wearing it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to witness seeing The Mask on the big screen. Money was tight for a working class family of four in the city, and while my mother had taken my brother and I to the cinema several times in the past (Mr. Nanny and Home Alone 2), at ten years old, I was still profoundly shocked at the price of a cinema ticket.
My disappointment didn’t last long, however. You can imagine the smile on a ten year olds face on Christmas morning when he unwrapped a parcel to reveal a VHS tape of The Mask. From that moment on, the film was played to death in the VCR and I could easily rhyme off random parts of the script. In fact, I still can.

Like most kids, I was a fan of movies anyway, but, I had firmly established myself a fan of comedy and indeed, a fan of Jim Carrey. This naturally made me curious as to what other works he had completed, and it wasn’t long before I discovered Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on the shelf of the video rental store one Friday night.

While at school, kids talked about movies, they repeated lines from them, acted out lines from them. It appeared to be a part of most kids, and parents, lives.
The Lion King, D2: The Mighty Ducks, Little giants, Richie Rich and hundreds of others were all talking points.

The next year, when Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls was released, my parents ensured that my brother and I didn’t miss out, and a trip to see it was timed nicely with my eleventh birthday. I was over the moon and buzzing from watching my comedy hero act like a total buffoon on the big screen.

Almost exactly twenty years on, I still own these movies on DVD. I watch them if they happen to be on TV, I’ll laugh at them as I always have. Every so often, my friends and I will chat about our favourite movies, remember them and repeat funny lines from them.

I earn my living as a Manager at a national, blue chip retailer. I’ve done this for many years, after working myself to the bone and climbing the success ladder.
A huge part of my job involves recruiting new members of staff. Full time posts, part time posts, and often, school or college kids are recruited for a weekend position while they beaver away at the their studies.

Over time, when you get to know these kids and you build some rapport with them, you’ll chat to them and find out what they’re into. Maybe even ask what they got up to at the weekend. The ones who didn’t get completely rubbered on cheap, gut melting liquor, talk about visiting the cinema. This generally starts a conversation about movies and actors alike.

I have been astounded at how many young people of today have never seen or even heard of The Mask, Ace Ventura or Forest Gump for that matter. Their argument is usually, ‘that’s old and before my time’. Very true. But, people of my generation are familiar and fans of movies that were out before our time aren’t we?
Predator, Die Hard, Rambo, Rocky, Midnight Run, See no evil, hear no evil? These films have lived on and remained popular due to us ‘kids’ growing up with them and starting a new fan base.

I often worry those films like The Mask and Ace Ventura will fade away. Some may say, yeah, but isn’t there a sequel to Dumb and Dumber due out at Christmas? Yes, there is, but, I wonder how many kids or young adults of today, have actually seen the first one and are there fore bothered about the second one.

I for one will ensure that my kids grow up enjoying and appreciating what made me laugh and fall in love with movies, such a long time ago.

Twenty years ago, to be precise.

Many thanks to Cupitonians (http://cupitonians.wordpress.com/) for the below post. Anju has a wonderful blog which I would encourage you to visit.

My love for literature began when I was a toddler and my dad would enact Tom Sawyer or Oliver Twist before bedtime. I would squeal and jump about with glee, trying to imitate him every night. This was often accompanied by my English Teacher mom correcting my dad’s horrendous pronunciation of names (“It’s Shar-Lut not Char-lut-eh!”) and shaking her head in disbelief. Mum would tell different tales, lores from the various places she had lived as a travelling family, folk tales she’d heard from her friends from around the world, stories she ripped off from Chinua Achebe books. We grew up as a family with a lust for things that captured our imaginations.

It came as quite a surprise to my teachers that I was so passionate about my English Literature classes. Everyone else hated it and for good reason. I studied in an all-girls convent school that was formerly a British hospital turned to a school for British-only students. Later, they opened the doors to Indians as well (I have since found out that my grandmother was among the first Indian students to set foot in that school). This brought in a lot of changes but the one thing that didn’t change was the syllabus. A huge part of our curriculum included all the famous British authors, including our beloved friend, William “Bard of Avon” Shakespeare.

While my classmates moaned and whined about how they wished “these damn writers would die” (“Erm, but, they are dead. That is sort of their claim to fame”) or the examination board would burn down and we would be free from these wretched exams, I would make jokes about opium eaters and how England is my soul country and how if you pricked us, would we not bleed? One particular teacher really resented me for correcting what I thought was her half-baked knowledge on my artists. And they were all MY writers, spinning stories just for me. To prove that my theories on her ignorance was right, for my final project where we were meant to write a story on based on a proverb, I copied word for a word a story from Nicholas Nickleby. She gave me a 100 on 100. Hence proved!

By the age of 15 (when I passed out from Indian high school) I had devoured every “masterpiece” that was on the top “to read” lists. I was reading Tolstoy & Nietzsche, James Joyce & Virginia Woolf, The Bronte Sisters & Jane Austen, Mark Twain & Ernest Hemingway. I came across a list of books that the school had banned, and being the rebel that I claimed I was, I read the Harry Potter books. When I went to University, I was studying (purely for the pleasure of it) American Literature, Indian Writing in English, Commonwealth Literature and well, I could go on. There also comes a certain arrogance from reading books such as the ones I was hooked on to – only a select group of “intellectual” people could read and discuss them. After a while, conversation with them would seem contrived because I wasn’t reading for form and the grammar. I was reading it for the story, for all the things unsaid and shining through in between the lines, for the places that only a great book could transport you to. I do have a wanderlust to quench after all.

I still try to tick off book lists, that’s just me. I’m 21 down on the top 50 banned books and steadily making my way through the 100 greatest books of all time. But picking books isn’t as deliberate anymore. Sometimes I go to my favourite used book store and pick up a book whose title has caught my attention. Sometimes I open the front of these books and then buy them for the unique message someone had written to someone. If I have one flaw, it would be that I don’t like going by popular opinions, I need to form them myself. This has led me to losing 5 days of my life reading the Twilight series (which I have to say is a masterpiece compared to 50 shades, which I also read) and gaining so much more from reading the Hunger Games Trilogy. Like everything in life, there is a chance of a hit and miss but one thing’s for certain, there will always be the thrill of learning something, anything and the chance that you will come upon magic.