Well, I got ruthlessly made fun of last night, and I blame it completely on this class.  But I couldn’t help it!  I went to see Martian Child, the new movie out with John Cusack, last night with some friends, and I had to borrow a pen and write on the back of a receipt to remember some of the stuff I was seeing that had to do with our class.  I’m just going to throw out the big ideas I picked up on.  You should all go see it; it was much better than I thought it was going to be.

 First, the movie is based on a book.  John Cusack, who plays a man named David, is, of course, a science fiction writer whose most recent book is called DRACOban.  His wife died two years before the movie’s start (again, of course the mother figure is absent) so now he wants a kid and has no way to have his own.  He goes to adopt an orphan named Dennis, a little boy who is convinced he is from Mars.  When he goes in front of the adoption board (the law), he explains how he’ll raise Dennis completely in the context of how he goes about writing his novels to which the head board guy (who sure enough turns up again later and questions David’s fathering abilities and tries to take Dennis away) says “very often with our children we don’t get to have a second draft.”  Direct relation of kids to books!

The first connection between father and son occurs in the context of playing baseball.  With Dennis’s magical thinking, he believes he has Martian wishes and uses them to wish for the players in the game to get hits and make homeruns.

 Dennis is also obsessed with taking pictures of everything.  His walls are covered in the images he has captured on his camera.

 And this just made me laugh…When John Cusack went in for a parent-teacher conference, there was a very prominent framed photo of George Bush serving as the background for her head.  I thought it was hysterical…no one else in the theater seemed to take any notice!

The final big thing was that when David adopted this boy, his writing completely stopped.  His agent kept showing up to pester him all throughout the movie to finish Dracoban 2: The Revenge of Dracoban (even though David stressed that every single character had died at the end of the first one so a sequel would be rather pointless…think Hamlet 2).  He eventually did end up writing, and the book was all about his relationship with his son (although Anjelica Huston wanted “Harry Potter in space”).

 That was about everything I saw, but I’m sure there’s more!

Alex