lornamatic

I had the privilege of attending a screening of “Raiders: Adaptation” tonight at the Silent Movie Theater.

If you haven’t heard about this movie already, you will shortly start hearing about it everywhere. The back story goes like this: In the 1980’s, three kids in Mississippi decided to film their own take on Raiders of the Lost Ark, scene by scene, on home video (betamax!). That’s not the unusual part.

The unusual part is that they actually did it. The entire film. Including the car fight / chase scene, the bar on fire scene, the boulder scene, and even the melting Nazis. They didn’t have desktop computers. It took them seven years to complete.

The sound is horrible. The picture quality is horrible. In a few scenes, the kids age years right before your eyes. But the movie - the movie is fantastic. The creativity and the resourcefulness of these kids was really inspiring.

See, we grow up and we get old and we get told NO a lot. Eventually we just stop trying, learn to lower our expectations, stop trying so hard to reach a dream. We believe in No. After all, it’s a lot of work, and failure sucks, and hey, that desk job drains my soul but it pays the bills… and this is how the world works, anyway, people don’t follow their dreams- that’s why they’re called dreams, stupid.

Chasing your dreams costs money. It will cause you to lose sleep. It might wreck your credit, break your heart. You might fail. People might laugh at you. And along the way, there’s temptation: give in, give up - there are a thousand easier choices to make. Chasing a dream is hard work. But when you’re 10 years old, you don’t really know about that part, so you dive right in with all the optimism and innocence in the world. The thing is, sometimes, you succeed.

Go download the trailer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 3:32 am and is filed under Joy, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.