> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://tombeaverbooks.ghost.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# The Big Year
- URL: https://tombeaverbooks.ghost.io/the-big-year/
- Published: 2026-10-05T20:21:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T01:22:26.000Z
- Author: Tom Beaver
- Tags: Book: Movies And TV, #Import 2026-10-09 17:51

> GUESTREADABLE: xxx  
> RSTATUS: xxx  
> ESTATUS: xxx  
> CHAPSECTIONNAME: xxx  
> CHAPORDER: xxx  
> ITEMCHAPNAME: *Year 2021*  
> ITEMORDER: *xxx*  
> ITEMTYPE: xxx  
> ITEMSOURCE: MoviesAndTV\_v3f.vellum  
> ITEMNOTE: xxx  
> ITEMINTRO: *x*xx

STORYSUBTITLE: Dec. 20, 2021 

STORYCONTEXT: **The Big Year** (Jack Black, Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Dir. David Frankel, 2011) 

Just watched *The Big Year* (for the second time). It’s a nice change of pace from…I want to say from most other recent movies. There were no guns, no criminals, no explosions. It wasn’t set in the future. There might have been stunt doubles, because yes, there were a couple of pratfalls, and some running over rough ground—but no one flew through the air from a hard sock on the chin. No one even made a fist.

It did have plot. And dramatic tension. And exotic locations. And excitement. But not over-excitement. The world was never in danger. It’s about bird watchers. You see the conflicts this expensive, time-consuming passion creates for the people who have it. You see them wrestling with choices, competing, racing against time—and because it’s a story set on the real Earth, in the present time, that’s drama and excitement enough.

My pulse quickened at times—maybe as much as it quickens during the other kind of movies I referred to, where the stakes are a hundred times higher and the stunts a hundred times harder to make believable.

More and more I find myself liking stories where the biggest thing that happens is something small (though not small for the characters)—that is, where the troubles and escapes are more life-sized. And even in the stories about fantastic situations and future technologies and superhuman powers, what I’m liking more and more are the filler scenes. The interludes where characters are spending time together between one challenge and the next. People conversing, cooking, eating, everyday things like that. Things we all do. I like the in-between scenes that are happy endings in themselves, examples of life well-lived.

Like a scene in this movie where two rival birders discover they like one another. They have a good meal together in a nice restaurant. They’re two individuals with complex lives, and they’re not perfect, but they both know how to conduct a conversation, how to give and receive hospitality, how to begin a friendship.

I learn from scenes like this. Just as big, in the real-world scale of things, I get joy from scenes like this. For a few minutes I’m living a different possible life—a life where existing on the earth with other people, in some place with some particular set of appealing earthly, cultural detail, doing nothing out of the ordinary, feels extraordinary. Quentin Tarantino talks about “hang out movies”—and makes them. Where you spend a good part of the experience not watching a plot unfold but watching interesting characters have an interesting time together.

This movie has many scenes of that kind. They aren’t the stuff of blockbusters, but they are the stuff that makes for good, memorable weekends, days, evenings, moments, when it happens in our actual lives.

If I go to the movies to have experiences I don’t get to have for real, why not also go to the movies for experiences I do get to have, but want more of? I’m realizing that usually when I want to watch a movie I’ve seen before, it’s not to see an explosion again, or some other spectacular thing, but to see again some scenes of this kind, sometimes just for a few seconds of this kind.

A year or two from now I’ll re-watch *The Big Year* so I can have that uneventful dinner again with Stu and Brad. *\~ Dec. 20, 2021*