With "Mystery, Alaska," Cinematic Underdogs is officially a year old. Happy anniversary to us! It felt very apropos to celebrate our first anniversary with a perfectly mediocre sports film. That's what we are here for! Not to bring you the greatest movies ever made. Not to bring you the coolest horror flicks or underrated indie gems. None of that! We are here for nostalgic sports movies that kind of suck, but also make you feel cozy and warm and like a child again. "Mystery, Alaska" isn't very good, but it isn't very bad either. It is benign, inoffensive, utterly anodyne. It is a 90s flick about a small town who gets to play an NHL team for very tenuous reasons. But who cares about believability when you have Russel Crowe, Burt Reynolds, and Hank Azaria leading your cast?
At least, that was the logic of the late 90s. And it was kind of a fun time to watch movies during that time. Your average Saturday matinee could be lightweight and melodramatic, frivolous and filled with feel good charm and you'd have a blast and yet file it into the cognitive trash by the time you got home. Run-of-the-mill 90s sports dramas were more often than not extremely enjoyable and yet completely forgettable, which brings us back to this film. Neither of us could remember if we'd even seen it. We merely remembered one scene: something pertaining to a jock strap, and a lot of ice. And as that scene emerged from the depths of our memories and replicated onscreen, it was a most uncanny experience: both familiar and unfamiliar, a sort of cinematic dejavu.
There is a bittersweetness to this liminal, dissociative feeling. It reminds one that memories fade, cells decay, time flies, and we all die. But it also reminds us to cherish every moment, and all the small things we give our time to, including so-so films like these. That is the real power of "Mystery, Alaska": in being forgettable, it had the power to evoke long lost and latent recollections of time live, and time passed. It worked a similar kind of magic on us like a madeleine once stimulated Marcel. Who would have guessed a sports movie podcast would have such a Proustian slant?
Anyways, I guess the bottom line is that "Mystery, Alaska" is a pretty blah film. But it was fun as hell to discuss. And so, on that note, it was a victory as usual! That is the best part of Cinematic Underdogs: we always win because the process is what we're in it for! So, ya, thanks for listening even if you don't! It is very possible we blather, bloviate, equivocate, and slander to mere ghosts! Either way, we'll keep making content! It's a nice little ritual, and fills life with meaning and fun. And we plan to do this until our stupid little podcast becomes so embedded in the archives of our past that we dust episodes off and enjoy them, like this film, as middling relics of a strange segment of time where we dedicated our minds and energy to documenting opinions and sentiments for reasons that will ultimately seem alien, enigmatic, and inscrutably bizarre.
