Reflections on Watching The Postman a Good Decade Or So After Everyone Else Forgot It Existed
(Hey, I had laundry to take care of. Don’t judge me.)
1) Joe Santos needs to fire his agent. And if he’s smart, he’ll sign up with whoever represented that mule, because — and I’m not exaggerating — the mule had more and better lines. And it was a mule. A regular, run-of-the-mill mule, too, not even a talking mule.
2) When WW3 comes, stick as close to Tom Petty as you can get.
3) Any “general” who doesn’t recognize you — despite long, repeated, face-to-face conversations — just because you shaved off a week-old beard is probably not fit for command.
4) Joe Santos should probably also consider Ringo Starr’s publicists, if the mule’s people are not available. And Kevin Costner has the weirdest product-placement department ever.
5) Horses stand to lose a lot more comfort than people do in post-apocalyptic America. Tailors, fashion designers, and editorial cartoonists, on the other hand, are gonna love it.
6) Seriously — Tom Petty? Why, in all of the myriad of negative criticism of this movie (the justified and the over-the-top), had nobody ever stopped to harp on the fact that TOM PETTY is PLAYING HIMSELF in the movie. ? That’s right; HIMSELF: TOM PETTY. The _actual_ Tom Petty. I can’t see how you would be able to come up with any concern that trumps that. Tom Petty: post-apocalyptic celebrity mayor, on merit alone, should be the first and last issue raised in every paid movie reviewer’s comments.
7) If you’re playing “Dueling Shakespeare Quotes,” to the death, best stay out of the Comedies.
8) Movies that involve panoramic horse-riding montages while James Newton Howard music plays should be automatically edited for time when released for home viewing.
9) It’s easier to film post-calamity futures set in the Rocky Mountains, but the temptation to turn them into Westerns must be fiercely resisted. Seriously; I get that there was a nuclear war, but somehow it destroyed all automobiles … and not horses. It apparently also destroyed every form of transportation in between, plus wiped out all computers and electronics, yet it left wooden wagons okay and machine guns & ammo cheap and plentiful. Reality, though, is that even in the present, the Rocky Mountain states do have things like paved roads, so removing the electric grid will not instantaneously crank the clock backward to 1881. Besides, the Internet itself was designed from the ground up with the specific goal of surviving a nuclear war and remaining operational. I know it screws with storyboarding, but writers really need to take that into account.
10) It’s hard not to, but try not to consider together the fact that Tom Petty is not addressed directly by name as Tom Petty in dialogue, and the fact that Kevin Costner’s character (the titular “The Postman” himself) is never given a name either. Because that would suggest that Kevin Costner was, in fact, playing himself all along, which is a dystopian scenario indeed.
11) No one, past, present, or future, has ever looked intimidating while wearing a scarf.
