The Screengrab : the quiet american

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Nine)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 GMT

And now, the worst...

THE BAD SEED (1956)

So, a few years back, my lovely Polish bride was in a production of the theatrical version of The Bad Seed, where bratty little hellspawn Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack) gets away with a whole lot of evil behavior, including (gasp!) matricide, simply because the gullible adults in the story (much like the gullible adults of today) are unwilling to see children -- especially cute little white children -- as anything but perfect little angels. But in the Hays Code ‘50s, villains simply HAD to be punished, at least in the movies, leading to one of the most ludicrous finales in cinematic history, whereby the bad seed gets her comeuppance Old Testament style with a good ol’ bolt from the blue courtesy of God (or possibly Zeus) Himself...followed by a dorky curtain call (complete with a comical “spanking” for McCormack) to reassure skittish audiences that, hey, folks! It’s just a movie! See? Everybody’s alive and well and no evil will ever befall you if you stay on the right side of the tracks with all the decent, well-dressed, respectable Christian people...honest! (AO)

THE QUIET AMERICAN (1958)

We could keep you up all night babbling about all the movies that softened and betrayed the endings of their source material (and even original screenplays, in some cases), denting otherwise excellent movies: Stella seeming to reject Stanley's blandishments in A Streetcar Names Desire, Mel Cooley squawking "Get me the FBI!" at the end of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and on and on. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel about the dangers of well-intentioned American efforts in Indochina may take the prize, though -- partly because it has so much to recommend it (particularly Michael Redgrave's performance as the aging British reporter whose disapproval of the title character -- Audie Murphy -- is gummed up with the knowledge that the younger man is his romantic rival, and the sensuous, flowing atmosphere and camera work), which makes it all the more frustrating when Mankiewicz betrays Greene in the last scenes. The revelation that the American was the moral angel he believed himself to be, and the decision to have the woman the two men shared turn away from the surviving member of their triangle in disgust, was a significant enough alteration to lay waste to everything that had come before it. (The 2002 version, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, is in many ways a clunkier piece of filmmaking, but it holds up better just by being true to Greene.) (PN)

NO WAY OUT (1987)

This slick update of The Big Clock relocates the action from the world of magazine publishing to Washngton, D.C., where the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman) kills his mistress (Sean Young, so it's not as if a jury in the world would view him unsympathetically) and launches a search for the woman's other lover (Kevin Costner) while working the angle that she may have been the victim of a possibly apocryphal Soviet mole called "Yuri." Naturally, he puts Costner in charge of the investigation. In what appears to be the ending, Costner manages to slip away after exposing the bad guys; then, in the concluding scene, it is revealed that Costner, an actor who has trouble passing for anything but a lifelong resident of California, turns out to in fact be Yuri, the Russian mole. It's a twist ending, and to steal a line from David Edelstein, it's twisted, all right. (PN)

MINORITY REPORT (2002)

For the most part, Steven Spielberg's take on Philip K. Dick is one of the director's smartest and most accomplished entertainments in recent years, topped off with one of his most mind-melting bad endings; it's like seeing an Olympic athlete ace the first nine parts of the decathlon before fleeing the course to get fucked up on hillbilly heroin. The drop is so deep and so sudden that some enterprising geeks have an explanation for it: they'll tell you that everything that happens after Tom Cruise is sealed away in his frozen prison tube is actually a dream that his character has of being rescued and redeemed; despite what the movie shows you, as the credits roll, he's actually still locked away in there and the villain is triumphant. If some guys sitting at computer keyboards could come up with a nifty idea like that, how come Spielberg, with access to every writer in Hollywood and the millions to pay them, had to settle for the ending he wound up with? (PN)

HOLLYWOOD ENDING (2002)

This Woody Allen comedy stars our hero as a washed-up movie director who, given the chance to make his comeback film, suffers an attack of hysterical blindness and has to blunder through the entire production without being able to see what he's directing. Of all Allen's recent misfires, this one feels especially revealing because of the way that he fails to leap at the chance to score some sure laughs with the obvious joke that's waiting to be made: at no point do we get to see any of the footage that's been okayed by this poor bastard working in the dark. This, it turns out, is only the fair warning for the well-worn groaner awaiting us at the end, when the disgraced director receives the happy news that his blind man's movie has been declared a masterpiece by...the French! For a guy who's spent more and more time in the late stages of his career accepting plaudits from those same French critics and audiences, this counts as perhaps the laziest instance of biting the hand that feeds on record. (PN)

GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002)

Martin Scorsese's period epic was inspired by a 1928 book that was a garish collection of tall tales recounting the "real" hidden history of New York City. By the time Scorsese and his screenwriters got through embellishing it further and welding a plot to it, the result was practically a steampunk fantasy of barbaric city dwellers with a few Mad Max extras sprinkled in having knife fights all over the Five Points district. Which is fine; it definitely counts as something to see. However, the movie crashes as it strains to build to a proper climax. The main plot, involving a conflict between the local dictator Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his arch-nemesis (Leonardo DiCaprio) happens to climax just in time to collide with the 1863 Draft Riots, an actual historic event that, as Scorsese stages it, smashes into the storyline like a runaway truck tearing through the back of the theater and steamrollers the main characters. The most charitable interpretation is that Scorsese was trying to show how petty and, in historical terms, forgotten the people whose struggles he'd been involving us in for the preceding two and a half hours really were. But it feels as if The Lord of the Rings had ended with the news that the year was actually 1945 and Mordor was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, and that just as Frodo and Gollum were battling for the ring, they were all wiped out by the dropping of the atomic bomb. (PN)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Set Your DVR! December 22 - 29, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I don't know if your Christmas week is anything like mine (if you even have a Christmas week, that is), but every year, I spend an inordinate amount of time on the couch. It's a good way to be with family without having to, y'know, talk with anyone. I usually lay there, using my mind only to ponder how full my belly is and wondering how long it will take me to digest enough to make room for another slice of pecan pie. But this year, instead of mindless entertainment, I intend to engage with some movies! Maybe that will take my mind off of food. For a little while, at least. Here's what's good this week, in the central/eastern format. I'm also moving overnight movies to the prior day write-up, which is my policy from here forward.

Monday, December 22:

Monday offers two flicks about evil and naivety! What could be better than considering evil during the final weeks of the year? Au Revoir, Les Enfants is Louis Malle's examination of life in a French boarding school during the Vichy occupation. Our young protagonist seems to be going through normal kid issues, but his innocence is threatened by the War and his growing suspicion that a schoolmate might be a hidden Jew. The Quiet American is based on Graham Greene's novel about a not-so-well meaning journalist encountering a CIA agent in 1950s Vietnam. Strangely enough, the CIA agent may be the more naive of the two.

12:30/1:30 pm: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm The Quiet American on IFC.
2:30/3:30 am: Enemy Mine on AMC.
5:05/6:05 am: Au Revoir, Les Enfants on IFC.

Tuesday, December 23:

Tuesday's full of anti-war sci-fi in the AM! Maybe it's not great sci-fi, but it's (probably) worth a viewing, especially with impressionable young minds around you. Enemy Mine, one of my favorite movies when I was 13, is about setting asides differences in the face of a hostile universe. I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I recall that it had a strong anti-war and pro-cooperation message. A far better movie (with far less latex and, well, mostly the same message) is the original The Day The Earth Stood Still, an untouchable classic that only a fool would attempt to remake. Finally, The Day After is a good way to wrap up the morning with some schlock that originally aired on TV when I was exactly the right age for a nascent political awakening (that would be 1983, when I was 11). In light of the dramatic depiction of the harshness of life after a nuclear attack on the US, I remember my shock and disbelief when I overheard President Granddaddy Ronald Reagan on TV pushing for more nuclear weapons. He lost my vote that day.

In the afternoon, there's John Ford's 3 Godfathers, which is like a Western version of Three Men And A Baby, only with death and despair. Awesome! Then Roman Polanski's The Pianist offers a little more death and despair. And finally, as a salve to all of this suffering, Lubitsch's The Shop Around The Corner is the sweetest and bestest romantic comedy that ever graced celluloid. (Note: the overnight movie discussed here rather than on the prior day for thematic purposes.)

2:30/3:30 am: Enemy Mine on AMC.
7/8 am: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
9/10 am: The Day After on SCIFI.
3/4 pm: 3 Godfathers on TCM.
4:30/5:30 pm: The Pianist on IFC.
5/6 pm: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM.
2/3 am: The Shop Around The Corner on TCM.

Wednesday, December 24:

Christmas Eve brings more despair! I recommend that you choose wisely and then go volunteer in a soup kitchen. Nobody Knows is a 2004 Japanese film based on a true story about children who were horribly neglected by an unfit mother and then abandoned to survive on their wits alone. Guaranteed to make the hardest heart break down and openly weep. Brother's Keeper is the uplifting documentary about a rural community that rallies around a near-feral farming family when one brother is accused of murdering another. The Delicate Art of the Rifle is a microbudget indie about a sniper on a college campus. Death and the Maiden is Roman Polanski's film (of the Ariel Dorfman play) in which a woman (Sigourney Weaver, who has never been better) is convinced that the man who gave her husband a ride home was the man who tortured and raped her while she was a prisoner of the previous brutal regime. It is stunningly good and sadly underappreciated. Finally, Bad Santa is the salve for all that ails us.

6/7 am: Nobody Knows on IFC.
8:30/9:30 am: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
10:30/11:30 am: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Nobody Knows on IFC.
2:45/3:45 pm: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
4:35/5:35 pm: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
6:15/7:15 pm: Death and the Maiden on IFC.
10/11 pm: Bad Santa on Comedy Central.

Thursday, December 25:

Tidings of comfort and joy for all: TCM has a film fest of Bogie's most iconic movies on Christmas Day. That'll deck your halls with boughs of something. Note that it runs all night.

7/8 am: 3 Godfathers on TCM.
2/3 pm: Bad Santa on Comedy Central.
7/8 pm: Casablanca on TCM.
9/10 pm: The Big Sleep on TCM.
11 pm/12 am: The Maltese Falcon on TCM.
1/2 am: The African Queen on TCM.
3/4 am: High Sierra on TCM.

Friday, December 26:

Back to our regularly scheduled holiday sadness! George Washington is a must-see film about youths who can't see a future for themselves in their quiet North Carolina town. Elephant is about youths whose future is brutally taken away for reasons unknown. And The Honeymoon Killers is about hideous sociopaths who love each other and brutalize the world. Happy fucking Boxing Day!

9/10 am: George Washington on IFC.
10:35/11:35 am: Elephant on IFC.
2:05/3:05 pm: George Washington on IFC.
3:35/4:35 pm: Elephant on IFC.
5/6 pm: The Honeymoon Killers on IFC.
3:35/4:35 am The Honeymoon Killers on IFC.
5:25/6:25 am: George Washington on IFC.

Saturday, December 27:

Saturday is about Japan. First up is The Greatest Story Ever Told, aka The Seven Samurai. I believe I recently wrote here that The Wild Bunch was the best film ever. That's only half-true, because The Seven Samurai is its equal. Damn, this movie is good. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon isn't even close to the same league, but it's pretty great on its own. Finally, Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle is not the best Miyazaki movie, but it's wonderful and highly, highly recommended.

7/8 am: The Seven Samurai on IFC.
10:30/11:30 am: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm: Howl’s Moving Castle on IFC.
4:30/5:30 pm: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on IFC.

Sunday, December 28:

Wait, Sunday is about Japan. Rashomon, another film by Akira Kurosawa, is iconic and a must-see for fans of cinema, although it isn't quite as great as his best movies. The Bad Sleep Well is Kurosawa's corporate office take on Hamlet. Of his three Shakespeare adaptations (the other two are Throne of Blood/MacBeth and Ran/King Lear), it is the least, but it's full of his distinct sensibilities and very enjoyable. Finally, Malick's The Thin Red Line is half-war movie and half-nature documentary and all about the human soul. Overnight, there's Tati's utterly delightful Mr. Hulot's Holiday, which is full of wit and pratfalls.

7/8 am: Rashomon on IFC.
8:30/9:30 am: The Bad Sleep Well on IFC.
8/9 pm: The Thin Red Line on IFC.
2/3 am: Mr. Hulot’s Holiday on TCM.
2:30/3:30 am: The Thin Red Line on IFC

Monday, December 29:

Dreary Monday! Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a film based on a play that delights in its own postmodernity. If you watched The Bad Sleep Well, definitely follow it up with this. And then put off whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing. Kiss of Death is one of the great film noirs. The Sweet Hereafter, Atom Egoyan's film based on Russell Banks's devastating novel, will ruin you in a good way. And The Player is Robert Altman's great tribute/kiss-off to Hollywood.

6:50/7:50 am: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 am: Kiss of Death on FMC.
1:30/2:30 pm: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead on IFC.
9/10 pm: The Sweet Hereafter on IFC.
11 pm/12 am: The Player on IFC.

Set Your DVR!: December 8 - 15, 2008

Hayden Childs — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

First off, many apologies for my absence last week. With houseguests (I call them “Mom and Dad”) around for a few days past the weekend, I didn’t have any time to do the research or write the column, and I figured that very few of you want to read me repeating variations on “I got nothin’ but I sure like booze.” Because I’m all about keeping the high standards around here.
So to change things up a wee bit, I’m going to list a schedule and then write about sentence or two about the movies at the end. Or a few of them, at least. Here’s what’s worth watching in the upcoming week!

Monday, 12/8:
Well, I got nothin’. But I sure like the booze.

Tuesday, 12/9:
5/6 am: Out of the Past on TCM.
5:25/6:25 am: Les Enfants du Paradis on IFC
8:40/9:40 am: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.
12:05/1:05 pm: Les Enfants du Paradis on IFC.
3:35/4:35 pm: The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC.

Wednesday, 12/10:
5/6 am: Cat People on TCM.
6:30/7:30 am: Curse of the Cat People on TCM.
6:35/7:35 am: The Quiet American on IFC.
1/2 pm: The Quiet American on IFC.
2:30/3:30 pm: 2001: A Space Odyssey on TCM.
3/4 pm: Vanishing Point on FMC.
5/6 pm: 2010 on TCM.

Thursday, 12/11:
7/8 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
11:30 pm CST/12:30 am EST: CQ on IFC.

Friday, 12/12:
3/4 am: Cop Land on TNT.
2:30/3:30 pm: The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC.
8:45/9:45 pm: Death and the Maiden on IFC.
10:30/11:30 pm: Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster on VH1CL.

Saturday, 12/13:
8:45/9:45 am: Brother’s Keeper on IFC
2/3 pm: Brother’s Keeper on IFC.
7/8 pm: Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster on VH1CL.
11:30 pm CST/12:30 am EST: Elephant on IFC.

Sunday, 12/14:
5:30/6:30 am: Elephant on IFC.
7/8 am: Jules et Jim on IFC.
4/5 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
8/9 pm: Dead Calm on CHILLER.
9:30/10:30 pm: The Wild Bunch on AMC.
11 pm CST/12 am EST: Dead Calm on CHILLER.
11 pm CST/12 am EST: The Godless Girl on TCM.

Monday, 12/15:
1:15/2:15 am: Das Boot on TCM.
9:35/10:35 am: Mystery Train on IFC.
2:45/3:45 pm: Mystery Train on IFC.
6:25/7:25 pm: George Washington on IFC.

The Movies:
2001: A Space Odyssey on TCM: 12/10 at 2:30 pm CST. Do you need a blurb about this movie? I doubt it.

2010 on TCM: 12/10 at 5 pm CST. I don’t think this is a great movie, but my god, it’s full of stars.

Brother’s Keeper on IFC: 12/13 at 8:45 am and 2 pm CST. Fantastic documentary on sibling murder and rural family values.

Cat People on TCM: 12/10 at 5 am CST. Val Lewton & Jacques Tourneur’s no-budget horror/suspense flick.

Cop Land on TNT: 12/12 at 3 am CST. I hate recommending movies that have almost definitely been cut for cable broadcast, but Cop Land is fairly surprising, being a Sylvester Stallone movie that’s actually pretty decent. I could be grading on a curve here.

CQ on IFC: 12/11 at 11:30 pm CST. Roman Coppola’s love-letter to the films of the 60s is not as bad as some argue, although it’s nowhere near as good as it could have been. Jeremy Davies may be the reason for both. I like the scene that copies a scene from La Dolce Vita from another angle.

Curse of the Cat People on TCM: 12/10 at 6:30 am CST. What’s that? Can’t get enough Cat People? Well, here’s a second helping.

Das Boot on TCM: 12/15 at 1:15 am CST. Shockingly, it's not actually about shoewear.

The Day The Earth Stood Still on AMC: 12/11 at 7 pm CST and 12/12 at 2:30 pm CST. Fuck a bunch of Keanu Reeves and his entirely unnecessary remake.

Dead Calm on CHILLER: 12/14 at 8 pm and 11 pm CST. Claustrophobic little suspense movie that takes place on one little boat out in the middle of the ocean.

Death and the Maiden on IFC: 12/12 at 8:45 pm CST. People may ask: why are Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley considered such great actors? Well, they made this movie, an underappreciated Roman Polanski film about torture and its consequences.

The Delicate Art of the Rifle on IFC: 12/9 at 8:40 am and 3:35 pm CST. I saw an early showing of this when I lived in North Carolina, some ten years ago. It’s a micro-budget indie based on the Charles Whitman shooting at UT, and I seem to remember thinking that it was pretty good, although it went off the rails towards the end.

Elephant on IFC: 12/13 at 11:30 pm and 12/14 at 5:30 am. See Leonard’s write-up.

George Washington on IFC: 12/15 at 6:25 pm. Somewhere between Days of Heaven and Killer of Sheep.

The Godless Girl on TCM: 12/14 at 11 pm. Cecil B. DeMille’s last silent film from 1929. That’s all I know.

Jules et Jim on IFC: 12/14 at 7 am. Confession: I can’t stand this movie. Truffaut directed a number of the finest films of the French New Wave, but this one drives me nuts. This shouldn't keep you from seeing it. There's a reason so many people like it; I'm willing to accept that it's my blind spot that's the problem. But GOD I hate this movie.

Les Enfants du Paradis on IFC: 12/9 at 5:25 am and 12:05 pm. One of the great films of French cinema.

Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster on VH1CL: 12/12 at 10:30 pm and 12/13 at 7 pm. Entertaining even for non-fans of Metallica. Maybe even more so. This is what happens when multi-gazillionaires have trouble coming up with something to bitch about for their fans’ pleasure.

Mystery Train on IFC: 12/15 at 9:35 am and 2:45 pm. Mostly great Jarmusch flick about the creepy goings-on in a Memphis hotel overseen by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Out of the Past on TCM: 12/9 at 5 am. One of the blackest and bleakest film noirs, starring Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Directed by the great Jacques Tourneur.

The Quiet American on IFC: 12/10 at 6:35 am and 1 pm. Decent film about Vietnam and betrayal starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser and based on a book by Graham Greene.

Vanishing Point on FMC: 12/10 at 3 pm. Must-see little existential car chase movie.

The Wild Bunch on AMC: 12/14 at 4 pm and 9:30 pm. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the best American movie, period. It's possibly the best movie made by anyone. On one level, it’s about bad men in bad times with a bad end coming at them fast. But that’s only one level.

Sydney Pollack, 1934--2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:00:00 GMT

Sydney Pollack has died at the age of 73, ending a recent struggle with cancer. As a young theater buff, Pollack, who grew up in South Bend, Indiana, went to New York after graduating high school and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where he first studied under and later served as assistant to the legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner. Early in his career, Pollack appeared on Broadway in A Stone for Danny Fisher and The Dark Is Light Enough as well as on TV, incluyding episodes of Plyahouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and Have Gun, Will Travel. After Burt Lancaster, who he would later direct in the late sixties in The Scalphunters and Castle Keep, suggested that Pollack consider directing, he stepped behind the camera for work on several TV series and eventually broke into movies with the 1965 The Slender Thread. He brought a skilled rapport with actors and a taste for old-Hollywood glamour to his feature film work, and he became associated with certain high-caliber performers who placed a lot of trust in him--particularly Robert Redford, who he directed in seven starring roles, beginning with the 1966 Tennessee Williams adaptation This Property Is Condemned and including the winner of the 1985 Academy Award for Best Picture, Out of Africa. They also worked together on The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand, probably the most successful of Redford's old-style romances, Jeremiah Johnson, Three Days of the Condor, Havana, and The Electric Horseman, which paired Redford with Jane Fonda. Pollack was also an important figure in Fonda's career, having directed her in the 1969 They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which marked her transformation from sex-kitten comedienne to hard-edged dramatic actress. That picture went a long way towards establishing Pollack as a new-style Hollywood pro; it won Academy Award nominations for Fonda, Pollack, and Susannah York, and earned Gig Young a Best Supporting Oscar for his brilliant performance as a dance-marathon emcee.

It was the 1982 Tootsie, though, that really took Pollack's career to a couple of different levels. A massive hit and instant classic, it elevated his profile as a director. And because Pollack earned many of the film's biggest laughs in his on-screen performance as Dustin Hoffman's agent, it unexpectedly revived his acting career. (Pollack took on the role at Hoffman's insistence; the actor apparently thought that the movie could benefit from the brio that Pollack brought to the many legendary screaming fights that the two of them were having off-camera.) After Tootsie and Out of Africa, he directed such big pictures as The Firm, Random Hearts, and The Interpretor; he also contributed memorable performances to Robert Zemeckis's Death Becomes Her, Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives, and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, where he was brought in an emergency replacement for Harvey Keitel. In the last several years of his career, he also branched out as a producer of others' films, including The Fabulous Baker Boys, Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Quiet American, 40 Shades of Blue, and Michael Clayton, where he also played George Clooney's boss. He also served as executive producer on his own last film as a director, the 2005 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry.

Trailer Review: Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D

Paul Clark — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Every so often, Brendan Fraser will step outside his acting comfort zone and do some serious acting, as in Gods and Monsters and The Quiet American. This isn't one of those times. Returning once again to the warm bosom of family adventure/comedy, Fraser headlines Hollywood's latest attempt to update Jules Verne for a new generation. Because, y'know, Around the World in 80 Days turned out so well. But Journey has something that 80 Days, with all its silly cameos, didn't... the magic of 3D! What a wondrous age we live in when we can go to a movie theatre, put on some uncomfortable glasses, and behold while stuff that gets hurtled directly toward the camera looks like it's going to land on us. Whatever will they think of next? Dare I dream that one day television might be broadcast in color? Or that I'll be able to type something on a keyboard and transmit it over my phone lines? I can't wait to see what the future has in store for us!