Bit to Do

We love our rebels. It speaks to the free spirit in us all. Of course, not all of us have the gumption to, say, skip out on our responsibilities, steal a car, and spend the day cruising around the city getting into all sorts of wacky shenanigans, and that's why Ferris Bueller is such an endearing character. Or in the literary world, we have Holden Caulfield. Anyone who met this character in real life would think he was just some foul-mouthed punk teenager who feels overly entitled to himself, but reading about his exploits after deciding to drop out of college is exciting.

The formula is simple: authority = bad, and we admire those who attempt to thwart it, precisely because we have been trained by society to accept and submit to it. We like to think we can get up the cojones to spit in the face of authority and do whatever we want, but in the real life we have something called consequences. Thus, we pick our battles, and in the meantime revel in the safety of fiction.

So, who is the rebel with whom we are concerned today? Well, anyone who took a second to read the title of this article can probably surmise that the answer is one Luke Jackson, primary protagonist of the classic film “Cool Hand Luke,” which screens today at Tinseltown as the newest installment in the Cinemark Classics series. Paul Newman plays Luke, a Korean War veteran sentenced to two years in a Florida prison camp after drunkenly removing the tops of parking meters. There, he refuses to play by the rules, running afoul of the prison captain (Strother Martin), who famously declares that, “what we have here is failure to communicate.”

“Cool Hand Luke” plays at Tinseltown twice today, at 2:00 and 7:00. Tinseltown is located at 4400 Towne Center Drive in the Springhurst Shopping Center. Further theater information can be found at the Cinemark Tinseltown website.

Image: Internet Movie Database