Digital Analogue

Gone with the Wind

Tonight at the Orpheum they showed Gone with the Wind on the big screen. (Badly projected, so that the top part of the frame hit the curtain, but what can you do?) Boy, that's a lot of movie. With a 20 minute intermission, it came in over four hours.

You can certainly see why it's a classic, though. "Epic" doesn't even begin to describe it. I can't even imagine what their budget must have been. The costumes, the sets, even the props showed incredible attention to detail. The roles were big and the actors filled them. Vivian Leigh? That character could easily have been so one-dimensional, but her Scarlett O'Hara was complicated. Olivia deHavilland played a model of goodness and compassion, and even at the end I wasn't totally sure whether she knew or not.

The supporting cast was pretty awesome too. Mrs. O'Hara had all of, what, four lines, and came across as matronly and likable. Mammy---if she can even be considered "supporting"---was spot-on fantastic (didn't she get nominated for an Oscar for this?). Belle Wilder was maybe my favourite character; she's just trying to get by, same as you and me, but she really drives home the fact that the Antebellum and Reconstruction South (not to mention the Confederacy itself) was a rigidly stratified society, and race was hardly the only discriminant.

This is a great movie; so much misfortune befalls everyone, but nearly every single character manages to draw your sympathy. (Ok, maybe not Mr. Wilkinson.) And at the end, somehow, after all the misery and death, it still manages not to leave you feeling down.

"SQL is the Fortran of data bases---nobody likes it much, the language is ugly and ad hoc, every data base supports it, and we all use it." --ORA Lex & Yacc (1992)