So lock up your daughter lock up your wife lock up your back door and run for your life

by anna at 09:40 AM on September 19, 2005

Last nite was the network premiere of Pearl Harbor. I'd never seen it for it met several of my no-watch criteria: 1 It's a big-budget blockbuster, usually long on contrived action and short on character development and plot. 2) It is about something historical so you know how it turns out. (The DVD version of Titanic promised an alternate ending. Like what?) 3 It's about war stuff.

So since it was opposite the self-congragulatory gabfest that is the Emmies and some other crap I grudgingly watched. It was pretty good. Kate Beckinsale was enchanting as a young nurse caught in a love triangle with two best friends. Like most 40s and 50s young women she strove to look older and more sophisticated. They'd use red lipstick and fancy hairdos to achieve this. Nowadays older women strive to look like teenagers with lip gloss, wrinkle creams and limp straight hair. This isn't progress.

But what struck me most about the flick was the sudden and poignant loss of innocence. All of a sudden everything changed. They went from micro-living to macro-living one sunny morn. Earlier in the day I heard Canned Heat's Going Up to the Country, a wistful ditty about the end of the idealistic 60s. "Gotta leave today. Cuz it's a brand new game and I don't want to play... We might even leave the USA." The singer clearly sensed that the peace/love gig was up. It was released in 1969 just before the Woodstock love-in. And not long before the Hell's Angels stabbed a boy at Altamont. The deaths of icons Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and the Who's madman drummer Keith Moon soon followed, in a seemingly inevitable fashion.

My brother, who distributed free and legal acid on the streets of Haight-Ashbury in 1965, sensed the end sooner. By the so-called summer of love in 1967, the scene had already started to desinegrate. Once everyone gets wind of something, it's over.

I suppose for our generations the defining end-of-an-era moment had to be 9/11. Everything had changed one sunny morn, once again. And now Hollywood is poised to churn out some shlocky drivel about heroism or something. I'd much rather see a story of the subhuman hijackers and the events leading up to the attack, as seen on 24 last season.

Now that would be compelling.