“Big Fish” is one of my favorite movies. If you haven’t seen it, you should go watch it now cuz I’m gonna spoil the hell out of it here.

It stars Albert Finney and Obi Wan Kenobi. They both play the same character at different points in his life.

The character, Edward Bloom, is dying and his adult son has returned home to make one final attempt at getting to know his father.

The son, William, is played by actor Billy Crudup. This is distracting because for the first 10 minutes of the movie, one finds himself having the internal conversation in which he keeps asking, “In Hollywood, where name change is so common, how do you land on ‘Crudup’? It’s like you are given a task and you just, you know, crud the whole thing up.”

Then eventually you settle down and get into the movie.

The boy, like most, has anger toward his old man. He feels that his father has never been genuine because all he does is tell tall tales.

His outrageous lies involve a giant, a witch, Siamese twin spies, a small town called “Spectre” that is paradise itself, one really big ass fish that may or may not be living in the family swimming pool, the extreme lengths he (Edward) has gone to to win and keep the love of his life (including shoveling elephant dung at the circus for a month for the payment of a tidbit of personal info about her, e.g. she likes music) and other forms of ridicularium (I just made that word up).

The movie takes place in Alabama. I am in Alabama. Spectre, if it exists at all, is rumored to be as difficult to find as Shambala. Today I found it. It cost me $3 (pics related)

When Tim Burton made this film, he came to a private island near Montgomery, Alabama and built the small town (more pics related).

The film came out in 2003, I think. And, though serene and pastoral then, it is merely a goats town now…

HAHA!

Though so much of the sets were constructed out of plywood and styrofoam, they are still standing today.

The town’s idyllic simplicity was represented by the practice of the townsfolk taking the shoes of visitors and slinging them high out of reach onto a cord strung between poles (pic related).

Just like they do in the’hood

Of course, that angry son eventually learns the truth – that truth is subjective and…”A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him and in that way he becomes immortal”

But, you see, Edward Bloom wasn’t lying – not really. Maybe he was doing some exaggerating or maybe, just MAYBE he was telling the honest truth about events the way he saw them with his own personal flair and panache.  And, perhaps that is why I identified so strongly with him.

The greatest poet who ever lived, Norther Winslow, put it best when he wrote:

The grass is so green,

The sky is so blue…

…Spectre is really great.