Breaking the Vaccuum Tube

Holy crap, dear readers, I apologize for the substantial delay between posts.  That's my bad.  I choose to write now because:
a) I have time;
b) I have things to say; and
c) An old wrestling buddy I ran into outside a bar asked if I was still running the blog.

When someone you haven't seen in seven years asks if you are still writing, maybe it's time to do an article.  Interestingly, my highest readership recently has come from Germany.  So - Guten tag, Deutschland!  Wilkommen!

For the first time, I'm going to write today about television shows.  There will probably be some meandering, as well, as I don't plan on editing myself.  Enjoy.

Sherlock (BBC)

Do these two ever not make a movie together?

Sherlock.  Cheers.  I assume that if you are reading this blog, you're not an uneducated buffoon, and therefore have read at least some of the original Sherlock Holmes mysteries.  And if that's the case, then you have some idea of what to expect with this show.  Guy solves crimes, he's kind of a dick, incompetent police, British accents, yadda yadda yadda.  And you're right.  BUT: I wouldn't write about this show if it wasn't something awfully special.  So here goes.

A friend of mine introduced me to this show in March of this year, fully two seasons into its run.  I was staying at another friend's house in LA, and, having just gone to the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I felt too upper-crusty to allow myself to enjoy a mere television show.  Nevertheless, Jules put the first episode on, and I dismissively watched.

Have you ever been fishing?  And cast a line out there and felt a trout kind of grope around dumbly for the bait before biting, and then you yank on the pole to set the hook?  And that fish struggles for a half second before resigning itself to its fate - that it will be the guest of honor at that night's barbecue?  Yeah, that fish was me.  And Sherlock was the whole goddamn tackle box.  And the BBC was the fisherman.  And that's where I'm ending this metaphor.  The point is, about ten minutes into the show, my host returned (yes, we were just hanging out in his house, though neither of us lived there) and I immediately told him to shut the fuck up because I was watching Sherlock.

There is so much good about this show.  I think the first thing I really liked was the simple casting of, well, everybody.  There's really not anyone who turns in a sub-par performance [side note 1: That's more than I can say for literally any of my other favorite TV shows with the exception of Firefly.  The West Wing - Zoey Bartlet (Elizabeth Moss) and Mandy Hampton (Moira Kelly); DragonBallZ - Kirillin (because duh); and Mad Men - Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss... again)] [side note 2: No, this blog program does not allow for footnotes.  I've tried.]  Now, patently, you need a good Sherlock Holmes to pull this show off, and you certainly get that with Benedict Cumberbatch.  He's endearing, but I would want to punch him in the face if I met him.  A good quality for the role.  Same goes for Martin Freeman as Watson; he needs to be great (and is), but that's too easy.  Each villain, especially Moriarty, is rounded and three-dimensional.  How many TV series do that?  Sherlock gives us ten to twelve really high-quality characters for any type of film entertainment (yes, including film) in its short run, and for $7.99 on Netflix, you can watch all of them.  Remarkable.

I also really like the series for its (very) loose adaptation of the original stories.  Remember all the hoopla over that godawful Lucy Liu show, Elementary?  Well, if not, don't worry - you haven't missed much - but the hullabaloo there was that the show was "modern" and "edgy."

Americans don't do "edgy."  We like things sanitized, watered down for the least common denominator.  We eat that shit up, and before you crucify me for indicting American TV culture (that's the wrong word.  The culture we expect within the world of the shows we watch?  Read DFW's "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" if you need clarification.  The point is: Americans like to say we like uniquity, but we don't.), remember that The King of Queens was on the air three times as long as Arrested Development.

Sherlock is actually edgy.  By that I mean that it strips away our expectations of the established Sherlock Holmes mythos and allows the characters to inhabit the world created by the show - often with very unexpected results.  The first episode is called "A Study in Pink" - a direct play on the Doyle story "A Study in Scarlet" - but instead of being predictable, the show grabbed me by the balls and didn't let go for the full 90 minute episode.

Oh yeah - each episode is an hour and a half long.  Did I mention that?  Ergo, the plot doesn't feel rushed, and the characters (well, the director, really) are able to use moments to create real human elements (homoerotic subplot between Holmes and Watson; lab tech's infatuation w/Holmes and its sometimes disastrous consequences, etc.).  Scrubs cannot do this; its 21-minute plotlines just can't handle any largess, despite the fact that it is the shows tangents that give it character and relatability.  In this way, Sherlock's ceiling is (at least) three times higher than any half hour show, and few hour long shows (actual run time in US = 46 min.) even come that close.  Simply put, each episode roughly equates to a short movie... but since the exposition partly carries over, it becomes something more than that.  Escapist, yes, but isn't this what we want from television?  Isn't this the apex, or close to it, of what good television can be - a line blur between longer cinema and shorter vignettes?

Sherlock gets full marks from me - 10/10.  No question.  If you haven't watched it yet, you should, and if it's not your cup of tea (no Brit pun intended), then that's just your loss.

Postscript to this - after I got back from LA and finished the show (only six episodes right now, but again, that's nine hours), I got a coworker hooked on it and she showed her daughter... who happened to be in one of my classes.  Anytime Sherlock Holmes and Medieval History can be discussed in one lecture, I figure my class is successful.

I'm back, bitches!  As usual, I exhort you [like Ras?] to shoot me a message with a blog idea, or leave a comment below.

Um das deutsche Volk: Es tut mir leid, aber ich weiß nicht, keine deutschen Fernsehshows. Können Sie mir ein paar Titel? Außerdem liebe ich den Film "Das Leben der Anderen." Keep it up! Und vielen Dank für das liest!

Maintenant, je dois le français me découvrir, aussi!

5 Grossly Overrated Films (Plus Some Post-Election Musings)

Whew, it's been a while!  Good to be back on the blog.  It's been an exciting few months off (not that I've ever posted with any great regularity).  I'm back living in Colorado Springs, teaching middle school, and my writing has had to take a backseat to things like lesson planning.  Whatever.

As I write this, it is November 10th, and the presidential election has been over for four days that already seem like an eternity.  I think it's infuriating and hilarious by turns that the overwhelming reaction by my Republican friends and coworkers has been one of indignation, disbelief, and moral outrage.  Conversely, I have managed not to gloat, mostly because if you believe in facts and numbers (like me), Obama's reelection really came as no surprise.  The wizards at FiveThirtyEight straight-up called this election exactly, and the head pollmaster there, Nate Silver, has now correctly predicted 101 of 102 states in the last two elections (including D.C., which is sort of a gimme).  Does no one read that blog?  If not... why?  It gives much better coverage and information than any of the "news" networks, so why not read it?

Anyway, I haven't actually seen a new movie in a while, so today's blog is actually just something I've wanted to write for a while.  I've noticed that frequently, my overall enjoyment of a film either increases or decreases on repeat watches, and that sometimes I notice things on the second or third watch that make it hard to enjoy the film.  Conversely, some movies (I'm looking at you, Shawshank) seem immune to this effect, and remain in the pantheon of movies I would describe as "great."  Today I want to look at five of the former: films that betrayed my initial enjoyment of them by revealing themselves as being hopelessly overrated.  My one qualifier here is that just because a movie is on this list, I'm not calling it bad; it's just not as good as it's made out to be.  I would like to point out that there is a comments section at the bottom and you are encouraged to respond - your feedback helps me write better articles.


5. The Dark Knight (2008)

Now I have your attention.

Quick - think of your favorite scene in The Dark Knight.  Got it?  Good.  The vast majority of you just thought of a scene featuring Heath Ledger as The Joker (as you should have).  The rest of you are lying.  This preference for Mr. J is fine as far as it goes, but the unfortunate reality of the second Christopher Nolan Batman is precisely that the relative performances of the actors are simply too disparate.  Don't get me wrong; I think the ensemble of TDK does a great job, and it makes for a really good film, but Ledger's performance is simply too other-worldly to exist in the universe created by the film.  The Joker is an esoteric, spectral, malevolent force of nature, but the rest of the characters are forced to play by the laws of physics.  Ledger simply upstages them.

It's really too bad.  I own this film, and I enjoy watching it, but I find myself now skipping to the Joker's scenes, because they are quite frankly just better than anything else the movie has to offer.

Interestingly, Javier Bardem's performance in No Country for Old Men could have fallen into this same trap for me, but that movie does a much better job of balancing out the performances.  I would give Nolan some slack for directing a comic book movie, but I've read enough Batman to know that that's really no excuse in this case.

4. The Boondock Saints (1999)

This is about as subtle as it gets.

Can we just take a moment to reflect on how little fucking sense this movie makes?  Two Irish brothers who say they're Catholic but seem to have missed the whole point of it discover that they're really good at killing people and decide to do it professionally, except they never get to collect any money because first they feel it necessary to off more or less anyone who has ever called them names.  Oh, and as far as we can tell, they live in an apartment with no furniture because they're poor because the only job they can get is at a meat packing plant, which is weird, because they both speak about twelve languages fluently and you'd think they could get a job translating, if nothing else, although I admit they may be too mentally unbalanced for that.

Other oddities include:

• A bartender who has Tourette Syndrome for no reason, and whom the main characters just refer to as "Fuckass";
• Literally the worst detective of all time, played by Willem Dafoe, who is a good enough actor to know better than to be in this film (well, maybe - he was in Daybreakers, after all);
• Ron Jeremy not having sex, and therefore not using the one skill he has been honing for decades;
• Gunfights that escalate in ridiculousness to the point that I'm not sure why there's no video game of this movie;
•  The most persuasive cinematic argument of why it's okay to kill people since A Time to Kill, only with worse acting and less circumspection.

Seriously, this movie sucks.  The best part is the opening credit music.

3. Fight Club (1999)

In the context of the movie, I'm not sure if what follows this moment is fighting or really violent masturbation.

If I had to take a guess, this is probably the one film on this list that I'll get the most push-back on, because this movie has so much potential to be great, and then ends up sucking something terrible.  But a lot of people don't think that.  So let me explain why I'm right and you're wrong.

The first half hour or so of Fight Club is incredibly promising.  I totally get that the Narrator feels caged in his mundane life, and that his masculine aggression - his manliness, as it were - is near boiling over, and he and Tyler find an outlet in the fight club, and the cinematic twists and turns (I'll try not to spoil anything there) are cutesy film-school stuff, but also both true to the book and well-done, so I'm okay with it.

Then, about a third of the way through the movie, the movie falls off the tracks a bit.  Suddenly, the Narrator is part of a vast, secret anarchic conspiracy, with grand designs to overthrow the world's banking system, destroy civilization as we know it, and start from scratch.  Um... first off, that's a lot of pent-up testosterone, apparently; and second, fucking why?  Tyler never really gives a good reason for a lot of things that happen in this film.  Why make the soap with human fat?  Because it's more effective, apparently, but that's not really a good reason, Tyler.

Like Boondock, my takeaway from this film is that death and wanton destruction are permissible, with one small difference: Fight Club clearly does not give two shits about the well-being of civilization, whereas the characters in TBS do struggle morally with what they are doing (and then do it anyway).  Tyler and the Narrator are making decisions that will impact literally billions of lives, and they rationalize it by... I dunno, assuming that they are smarter than everyone else on the goddamn planet, I suppose?  In the words of critic Roger Ebert, "Fight Club is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish."  He gave it two stars out of four.  High praise indeed.

This might be the poli sci in me, but fascism sounds like a serious mistake.  I'm not sure how much of that is the fault of the filmmakers and how much of that is author Chuck Palahniuk being a horrible person, but either way, it turns into a movie that somehow confuses me and makes me uncomfortable, all at the same time.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Go ahead.  Have a staring contest with the HAL 9000.

Let me start off this way: 2001 is an incredible movie.  But I do have some major problems with it.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I concede that I watched the 160-minute version of it, not the usual 141-minute version, so take what I am about to say with a grain of salt.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a boring movie.  There, I said it.

Not all of it is, I suppose.  But the first two segments (there are four) are among the most insipid pieces of film I have ever watched.  I admire Kubrick's filmmaking, I admire the cinematography, but when a film starts with half an hour of monkeys (actually midgets in costumes) smacking each other with bones, even I get a little antsy.  Then we go from that to a segment about which I can tell you nothing except that I fell asleep the first time and had to skip back to the monkeys and start the section over.  By the time we got to HAL and Dave duking it out, I was unable to fully enjoy the last two sections, which is too bad because they really are quite breathtaking.

Again, I know Kubrick could make films to make your heart race - I've seen The Shining.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

Joseph Cotten looks like a confused penguin.

Often called "The Greatest Film of All Time" by three types of people: morons, people who haven't seen it, and pretentious critics (more pretentious than me, anyway).

I agree that Kane is an absurdly genius film, that the technical ability needed to make it is remarkable, that it is innovative, and that Orson Welles was an amazing actor and filmmaker.  However, after watching this film a few times (four or five, over a period of years), I am still at a loss to explain why it receives such enthusiastic praise.  The story is good-but-not-great, and the cultural sensation that it caused with regards to William Randolph Hearst is largely if not wholly a thing of the past.

Simply put, I do not enjoy watching this movie; it is a chore for me to do so, even though in it Welles created a wide range of innovations and experimented with a huge array of film technique.  I can appreciate it, but there are other, later films that can teach me the same things that also frankly grab my attention better.

Monkey's out of the bottle, man.  It's the goddamn sled. 

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

I tried to post a pic of a busty, blue-eyed blonde here, but due to some casting issues, we'll have to settle for two out of three.

I have really conflicting opinions regarding classics of any genre or field.  Specifically, I wonder sometimes if we as moderns are capable of appreciating knowledge, ideas, and art with the same perspective as those who have gone before.  In some ways, of course, we can never put ourselves in the "here and now" that was the "there and then," but shouldn't we at least try?  In doing so, do we forfeit our right to objectively comment upon the merits of the subject?  Or, worse still, would we lose our ability to admire unencumbered of our historically ignorant bias?

Recently, I had to (quite unexpectedly) confront this issue when I called my brother, who is a composer, and we started talking about whether my preference for Classical- and Romantic-era symphonies is illegitimate because it is rooted in an imperfect understanding of the social environment from which they emanated.  He's probably right, of course, at least as far as the music goes - he usually is - but I did get to thinking, "Oh my God, this is almost a perfect analogy for literary criticism!"  And this thought excited me, because I know a hell of a lot more about lit crit than music theory and it gave me an opportunity to change the subject.

One of the primary ongoing debates in literary theory over the last hundred years or so has been the extent to which (or whether) external, societal knowledge should color our analysis.  Alternately, some critics insist that the only material we should consider when analyzing a text is the text itself.  Film being a type of literature, it really makes sense that we should think of it in the same way, but I suspect that many of us (not without reason, I grant) are more or less unwilling to look at a film, especially a great one, and try to analyze it independent of any outside knowledge while remaining self-aware of the process.  We watch it and say, "I like it," but we don't know why and can't articulate our justification.  I want to change that.  This could be a catastrophic failure, so bear with me.  But hopefully Lawrence of Arabia will hold up.  I think it will.

Because the truth of the matter is, I think no matter how you slice it, this is a great film.  Let's start with the most straightforward approach and just consider the film in and of itself for a moment.  This is a very, very well-made movie, which usually gets credit for having two stars but probably deserves recognition for three: Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, and Director of Photography Freddie Young.  Not only were O'Toole and Sharif both appearing in their first English-language film (a designation I must throw in there for Sharif), but there is not a single scene in which the two young actors do not fully embody the men they are portraying.  And this goes on for hours.  Nearly four hours, in fact.  So that's remarkable enough on its own.  O'Toole is especially striking, especially as his Lawrence walks the fine line of sanity, cobalt eyes at once expressionless and haunting (see photo above; ignore caption this time - more on that in a moment).  Not only were these actors fine choices for their parts, but the film happened to come into being at a moment in time when the genre (and film in general) was, to an extent, being redefined.  T.E. Lawrence and Sherif Ali (Sharif) feel real because actors were finally allowed to make them real; consider that just seven years earlier, James Dean shocked the film world with the gritty realism and vulnerability of his performance in Rebel Without A Cause.  By 1962, every character could have that depth.  Compare the performances in Lawrence with those in 1959's Ben-Hur, which seems as though it could be made quite easily into a stage production (it was, in 1899) and even the previously-discussed A Streetcar Named Desire (which was, of course, a play first and a movie second).  Even one of my favorite noirs - Kiss Me Deadly (1955) - is episodic and broken into scenes, by and large.  Lawrence, on the other hand, does not take place in a scene; it takes place in a world.

Much of that world can be attributed to Young, who figured out how to trick a hot, sandy desert into giving up some of the most memorable cinematography in film history.  Here's just one example:

Whew, really glad I figured out how to embed video.  Now, go back and take a look at that clip.  From 1:41 until 3:14 (only a minute and a half, but kind of an eternity in film), it's just two guys looking at a third ride a camel toward them.  With no soundtrack.  So why is it so damn mesmerizing?  Well, for starters, he's literally coming out of a goddamn mirage.  How do you set up that shot (and what's the aperture setting on that camera)?  What happens if you need a second take?  How in the world do you cue your actor - flare gun?  And if that's not enough to keep you wondering, keep watching the clip past 4:00 and pay attention to the blood stain.  Simple-ish special effect, yes, but goodness, is it ever effective, and Young calls no attention to it whatsoever.  Amazing stuff.

I promised I would stay objective, but I also promised that I would explain the picture caption from up top.  I can't have both, so here goes: Lawrence, especially in its first half, has a rather strong homoerotic undercurrent.  At one point, Lawrence loosely adopts two Arabic boys and treats them as he would some kind of cross between sons and lovers, and the is feminized in his treatment of them (at one point, he demands a hotel room with a bed that has sheets for his ward).  Also notable: this movie has no women.  None.  IMDb tells me that, at 227 minutes, this is the longest movie ever made to feature no women with speaking parts, but if there are any women with non-speaking parts, then I missed that.  So the objects of Lawrence's gaze must be male.  The classic film audience has been conditioned over the decades (and had been, even by 1962) to associate the male gaze with heterosexuality.  So Lawrence is unique filmically and, the film itself suggests, unusual personally (especially for the early 1960s!).

Lawrence falls into that rarest sliver of films that can be considered even more an experience than a movie.  Upon finishing the all-evening viewing (I had to stop for a Chipotle break), I'm not sure I have much to say about the story.  Honestly, a good chunk of the film concerns itself with shots of camels traversing the desert.  But go back and look at that clip again.  If I end up making a film in my lifetime, I would sell both my kidneys for a scene like that one.  Lawrence of Arabia has a half-dozen or more.  So the next time you have a free evening to burn, give it a watch.  It's a classic for a reason.

The Benefits of Bad Movies - Part 2

The Sandlot: another not-so-great movie that is nonetheless one of my favorites.  I'm sentimental that way.

A few weeks ago I opined on a viewer's ability to derive the general quality of a film based on the reviews (and meta-reviews) from a variety of websites. Today, I want to focus on the somewhat more ethereal world of evaluating a film based on its trailer. This is, other than general hype and perhaps some early reviews, the only real exposure you can have to a film before you see it. It's amazing to me that no one seems to write about this much! Think about it - how many times have you left a theater after seeing some new trailers and said, "That movie looks awesome!" or "That's gonna be a piece of shit!" I've said it many times. Both versions. And think about how trailers work: they're several million dollars of advertising under any circumstance, so what is the production company using them for? TO MAKE BACK THE MONEY THEY SPENT ON THE FILM. It's a vicious cycle. So the way I see it, you can evaluate the advertising of a movie in four ways, listed below.

But first, an unnecessarily detailed explanation of the single most prevalent failing of trailers. I apologize in advance for this. In many ways, I think trailers are inversely and paradoxically related to the narrative arc of a story, in that the most effective trailers reveal very little. Now, film narratives rely on two interconnected concepts: the fabula and the sjuzhet.  Those are scary-looking words for pretty simple concepts. A film's fabula simply means the film's events, in sequential order (A B C D...), whereas the sjuzhet refers to those same events in the order they are presented in the film (potentially A C D B...). For most stories, these two plot setups mean roughly the same thing, with some key exceptions (such as Pulp Fiction, Memento, and others). But by and large the fabula dominates perception of a film, and we can think about its narrative arc in the same way we do that of a novel. To throw more jargon at you, that means that we are looking at five main aspects of narrative: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. I have a theory about this. My theory states that the more overtly a trailer presents the first two parts of this narrative, the more desperately the producers and distributors want you to connect to the trailer. That desperation shows. And it sucks. No one wants to feel like they're being conned into seeing a movie. I wish I had more bad examples of this, but it's just easier to point to trailers that get it right. Take a look at the teaser trailers (the 30-second ones) for The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises. Yes, these are comic book movies, but damn, do they make you want to see the film! And guess what - they tell you absolutely freaking nothing about the movies. They don't even tell you who the villain is!  And yet, the idea of a "trailer narrator" who has to introduce the whole premise of the film in a 30-second TV spot has become so ingrained in our collective psyches that I bet everyone reading this blog could imitate his voice.  This trailer narration is like expository dialogue - it's just bad storytelling!

So now, without further ado, the four types of film advertising, and what the trailers tell you about them (note: these are not hard and fast rules, but they do tend to be true):

FILM TYPE 1 - Big budget, big advertising.  I usually think of this in terms of "blockbusters" - if your movie costs $230 million to make, you're probably going to be willing drop another $20 million to earn your money back, plus some.  This category is a real mixed bag in terms of quality, however.  For every Lord of the Rings, you just might get Transformers, or worse, Ghost Rider.  People will still see crappy movies, sure.  And you know what?  I saw Transformers in theaters.  IMAX, actually.  I expected robots and explosions, and I got 'em.  Terrible film, but decent entertainment.  So why do distribution companies spend the money?  Because they know that schmucks like me will pay to see it.  These are, without a doubt, the safest films that get made.
By the way, there will be a forthcoming diatribe on the MPAA rating system, but as a teaser, take a look at the "blockbuster" films coming out this year, and then count how many of them are rated PG-13.  Just a guess: I bet it's roughly all of them.  Think that's an accident?

FILM TYPE 2 - Big budget, low advertising.  Not too many in this category.  If they're not worth marketing, they're not worth making, especially for a huge budget.  Why would a production company pull the plug on marketing costs?  Well, if a film is absolutely destroying its budget... it might be time to cut your losses.  If another seven-digit marketing expenditure still only puts a handful of asses in seats, why bother?
The only good scenario I can understand is a medium-budget movie that gets low pub and does well regardless, or at least relatively well.  I'm thinking here of films like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and things of that nature.  This is probably the first category where you might see Oscar-bait, but it's kind of tough for me to swallow that too many production companies will under-pub their best films.  Those are more likely going to come from...

FILM TYPE 3 - Low budget, big advertising.  So many great films here, and a lot of them are award winners.  I guess even more if you say "low- to medium-budget."  The point is that if a film only costs $8 million, and the production and distribution companies overspend the production cost of the film on marketing... they probably have a great deal of faith in the commercial success of the film.  People will see these movies, not because they're filled with amazing special effects and big-name actors, but because they're flat-out good movies.  If you see trailers for a film that looks like it cost nothing to make and it's nonetheless getting huge pub, it's probably a cue that you should see it.

FILM TYPE 4 - Low budget, low advertising.  Here's where things get a little weird, because so many of these films are indie flicks and pet projects.  Steven Soderbergh is kind of the de facto master of this genre.  Twenty-five years ago he pioneered the modern indie film with sex, lies, and videotape and hasn't really let up since; his The Girlfriend Experience (2009) shows that the low-budget end of production still has some enthusiasts.  Along with Soderbergh, some directors have, for one reason or another, moved away from lower budgets, only to return some years later.  Kevin Smith made Clerks. on the money he made selling his comic book collection, and we all know how well that turned out.  After Jersey Girl (a high-budget flop), Smith returned to his roots, so to speak, with Clerks II, for which he had a bigger budget but still directed like an indie film.  Films in this category really run the gamut of "awesome" to "shitty," so there's no good way to generalize, but again, check out the MPAA ratings here: types 3 and 4 are where you see the R ratings.  Coincidence?  I think not.

I won't prattle on too much here (like I did yesterday).  Obviously, I can't predict what you like, and there is no scientific way to separate the good from the bad.  There will always be exceptions.  But I do believe that if you take to heart the advice and guidelines I put forth in the two parts of this entry, you will save yourself from paying $10 to see a movie in theaters that just doesn't deserve your time.  Sure, you could guess.  But how often can you afford to guess wrong?

Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling, showing about as much emotion as he ever will in this film.

Those of you who know me fairly well may not be startled to learn that I have something of an affinity for dark, depressing movies.  I don't think that this is a function of my personality or outlook so much as the fact that I really appreciate the grittiness of some films.  To me, these sorts of films come off with an honesty, a reality that we are sometimes afraid to confront in our daily lives.  We all want to live in a romantic comedy, but most of us face an uphill fight each time we swing our legs out of bed.  In some ways, tough movies remind us that the bad times could always be worse; no one's come after me a la Anton Chigurh recently.  But in other ways, I wonder if these movies are freed of some of the narrative constraints that so afflict even the great comedies.  More on that presently, but lest we forget, also, it is worth noting the words of my film studies professor, "Comedies are simply tragedies that haven't ended yet."  Cheery stuff.

I suppose the first question worth posing is, what limits do comedies have?  Well, for starters, we need to think of what comedy is.  Like with most things, I like to start on a theoretical level first and work towards the literal, so put Drive on hold for a moment.  Consider for a moment what many people consider to be the world's first comedy, The Odyssey by Homer (by the same token, we can think of The Iliad as the first tragedy).  This is a book replete with death, violence, sex, death, shipwrecks, trips to Hades, and more death.  I mean, holy crap, this book is bloody.  So how can it be a comedy?  Well, the fact of the matter is that the classical comedy (loosely) means simply that the ending is happy for the protagonist (even if that protagonist is kind of a dick, as is the case with Odysseus).  I'm not totally sure when this changed, but we can trace this type of classical comedy through literature into the post-modern era.  How many of you have read Kafka?  If you were reading The Metamorphosis, well, then, you know what I mean.  So this idea is certainly not dead.  But somewhere in the tradition of American cinema (and yes, I think this is largely an American phenomenon, although certainly we do not hold exclusive rights).  I don't want to go through the whole history of comedy (maybe I'll write up The Philadelphia Story one of these days, and I can tackle it then), but suffice it to say that I think the most notable adaptation comedies have made in the past century is perceptive: we think of comedies in an entirely self-contained manner.  Contrast this with Odysseus's plight; as those familiar with the story are well aware, the hero's journey does not end with his nostos to Ithaka - he must set out on foot with an oar, until he finds someone who does not recognize it.  (This is fast becoming a ridiculous tangent.  I promise this is going somewhere.)  You remember what my film professor said?  Yeah, keep that in mind.

So why is this a problem for comedy film?  Well... time limits are an issue.  Film has traditionally coalesced near the two-hour guideline, slightly less for most new comedy.  I'm not 100% sure why this is, but I doubt very much that it is incidental - consider that the films of the 1910s and 1920s tended to be either rather short, as with Battleship Potemkin and Chaplin's films, or insufferably long, as with Intolerance (look it up, people, I'm not summarizing that shit).  Essentially, that means that we have developed a cultural expectation that a comedy will wrap up neat and tidy, all things will be happy for the main character(s) now and forever, and we don't have to consider the long-term effects of the film's sjuzhet.  This isn't a bad thing, necessarily - consider The Hangover, a film which was sadly overlooked for Oscar contention.  How many of you honestly left the theater thinking, "Man!  They sure did a lot of damage to that hotel room!  And Ed Helms totally paid with a credit card!  They're going to get arrested again!"  No.  You're a liar.  You didn't think that.  And yet, it's a totally logical reaction, given the movie.  But the truth is, we just don't think about things like that.  It's just not the expectation we have, especially when a movie is goofy.  We expect the story to be over in two hours.  This is what I will call a "modern comedy."

So what is the obverse?  I tend to place non-"modern comedy" flicks in three categories: dramas, documentaries, and art films.  Original, I know, but give me a break, here; I'm trying to classify 110 years of movies into three categories.  Obviously, it's not going to be perfect.  Most dramatic films are clearly one or the another (Warhol really didn't do "drama" all that well, and James Cameron really hasn't exploited his artsy side so much as his money-grubbing side), although I do think many great films straddle that line fairly effectively.  Think of Citizen Kane - an ironic tragedy, sure, but also an artistic statement (especially for its era).  2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the zenith of this blending.  And I think that most cinephiles would agree there - the great movies tend to incorporate a strong measure of art (advice: pay attention to Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction at the Oscars, then watch all of the films that are nominated).

So I'm going to do something really revolutionary here: I'm going to split dramas into two categories.  Tragedies and Comedies.  "But what?" I hear you say.  "We already have comedies as its own category!"  To you I say: some men just want to watch the world burn.  Also, do you remember that whole diatribe about The Odyssey?  Yeah, that wasn't an accident.  I think what we've started to do as a culture is to confuse the classical comedy with the traditional tragedy, because what we now think of as a comedy didn't exist in 1500 B.C.E. (times were tougher then) and what we usually call "Drama" they would call "Hilarious," at least in comparison to their terrible, non-indoor-plumbing-filled lives.  (Years later, the Romans would invent indoor plumbing... with lead.  Making it possibly a step backwards.  Then they scrapped theater and just threw people to the lions.  So... yikes.)  Wowza, so if that's their comedy (and yes, I have read Aristophanes, and that's like Hellenic slapstic, but I'm generalizing here), what was their tragedy like?  Spoiler alert: EVERYONE DIED.  But no, seriously.

Whew, almost there.  Almost to the actual discussion of the film.  But first let's look back over the Best Picture winners since 1990 (totally arbitrary cutoff line) and classify them, just so we have a bit clearer image of what I mean by comedy and tragedy, and explanations when I had some questions (or if I haven't seen them - don't judge me, I watch a crapload of movies, but I haven't seen everything):
1990 - Dances With Wolves - Haven't seen it, Costner is a terrible actor, but not as bad as Nicolas Cage.
1991 - The Silence of the Lambs - Comedy; no real winner but the principles are alive and well at the end.
1992 - Unforgiven - I could make a good case either way.
1993 - Schindler's List - I'm saying comedy, with reservations.  Obviously, the setting is tragic.
1994 - Forrest Gump - Still one of the biggest mistakes the Academy has ever made.  Travesty, but no tragedy.
1995 - Braveheart - Haven't seen it.
1996 - The English Patient - Haven't seen it.
1997 - Titanic - I'll call it a tragedy, but it's mostly a tragedy that this won best picture.
1998 - Shakespeare In Love - Another huge mistake.  Comedy.  Fifth-best movie that was nominated that year.
1999 - American Beauty - The first real tragedy on this list.
2000 - Gladiator - Tragedy-ish, but God, do I hate Russell Crowe's acting.  Weak year for film (truth; check the nominees).
2001 - A Beautiful Mind - Comedy.  About schizophrenia!  Ha!  Ha!  (Shut up, Ben!)  YOU SHALL PERISH.
2002 - Chicago - Comedy, and just not a good movie.  Certainly not "Best."
2003 - The Return of the King - Comedy.
2004 - Million Dollar Baby - Tragedy.
2005 - Crash - Comedy (sort of) and the third-best movie nominated that year.
2006 - The Departed - Hmm... I'm going tragedy.
2007 - No Country For Old Men - The purest tragedy on this list.
2008 - Slumdog Millionaire - Comedy, third-best film nominated that year.
2009 - The Hurt Locker - Haven't seen it.
2010 - The King's Speech - Haven't seen it.
2011 - The Artist - Uh, comedy.

That was a lengthy definition, but you get my point here: the genre of movies we tend to embrace is not actually what we think it is.  We like to laugh and we like our movies to have a happy ending (modern comedies and dramatic comedies).  It turns out that not that many people seem to like irredeemable tragedy, so we redefine it: dramatic comedies usurp the title of "drama," and tragedies are increasingly relegated to the realm of "art films," where, with a few exceptions, they simply don't belong.  You doubt me?  Find someone who dislikes No Country for Old Men or A History of Violence and ask them why they feel that way.  Notice how their argument might be couched in the rhetoric of bad art criticism: "I just didn't get it" or "It was too 'out there'" or "What was the point of that movie?"

But once in a while we come across a film that really does blur the line between a drama and art for art's sake.  It's a rarity in American cinema, I concede.  But it is with this in mind that I (finally) come to Drive, as I believe it is in that rarest of categories, the true hybrid of tragedy and art.  This really is a difficult film to wrap my head around, and I confess that it's taken me almost a month to write this review because I didn't even know if I liked it or didn't like it.

And with that, if you don't want spoilers, stop reading, immediately.

Drive is an incredibly violent film.  Let's just get that out there to begin with.  It very well might be the most violent movie I have ever seen.  Now, what distinguishes Drive from other violent films, I believe, is that the violence truly is not gratuitous.  By that I do not mean that the director, Nicolas Refn, could not have chosen to mitigate the on-screen impact of the violence; he certainly could have.  But when I say that Drive is as much performance art as it is film, I grant it the authority to manipulate my emotions.  What impressed me about the violence in Drive is that my reactions to it universally mirrored what one or more of the characters felt about it.  For instance, take the scene where the Driver (Ryan Gosling) and Irene (Carey Mulligan) share an elevator with a hitman.  This turns into one of the most violent scenes in the film, punctuated by the Driver killing the would-be assassin by, quite graphically, stomping his face in.  I was horrified, watching it.  And so was Irene, and I think at that moment (a little more than halfway through the film) both principal characters understood that their story, at least together, could have no happy ending.  That's the plot of it.  The art of it is that both have incredibly powerful emotional reactions, and that we empathize with both, although they are wildly different.  Irene feels repulsion and a shattering of her (relative) innocence; the Driver (although he is harder to read) seems to feel a horrifyingly alone.  His is a life of desperate isolation, and as he symbolically loses Irene by saving her life, that is brutally, poignantly apparent.

I like to draw comparisons between films in this blog, because I hope that it might help my readers find great films that are similar to things they may enjoy.  I think the best I can do in this case is to reference The French Connection.  Both are films that are completely dominated by plot, but I think where Drive is a tragedy, The French Connection is probably a comedy.  And really the biggest difference is that with The French Connection, I feel like there's no "there" there.  It's a gripping plot, but nothing more; as critic Roger Ebert points out, none of the characters really have much depth at all.  Drive, however, has nothing but strong, well-rounded characters, and so we can connect with it at a much more visceral level, and our interaction with it provides, I think, a much more difficult yet rewarding experience.

No matter what else I say about Drive, it won't do it justice.  I don't know if I liked it, I don't know if I enjoyed it, but I will say this: Drive is an incredibly beautiful, terrible film.  It is gripping and powerful film.  And yes, it is violent.  If you can handle it, and if you're willing to sit and stew over it as hard as I have for the past month, I guarantee it will be worth it.  What a haunting experience.  Some of you will hate it, and that's fine.  But then I just ask you to try to figure out why.  And think about your culture, as well.  I think we like our movies happy-go-lucky, and this is the antithesis.

A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

A short post today, as I am tired and would like to go to bed. But I just watched Elia Kazan's 1951 classic "A Streetcar Named Desire," and I feel that it merits some journalistic attention before I retire.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to contextualize classic films, for the very reason that we have seen newer films that borrow, sometimes quite liberally, from the innovations of its predecessors. Consider, for instance, The Magnificent Seven; ignoring that it is a derivative of Kurosawa, the modern audience is tempted to think of the film as cliché from top to bottom, simply because we are familiar with the Western conventions. However, historically, I would perhaps group The Magnificent Seven in with High Noon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers as four films that ushered in the era of Westerns as "High Art" - films to be taken seriously. The film does not exist in a vacuum, in other words; and while we recognize some elements of Unforgiven in Steve McQueen's speech, it is important to remember which movie came first.

Unfortunately, neither can our analysis exist in a vacuum, and we are foolish to try to push our cinematic experiences out of mind when we experience a new (to us) movie. Often, when we are reminded of another film, it allows us to create comparisons for the sake of evaluation. With this in mind, I perceived three films to be particularly valuable in comparison to Streetcar: Gone With the Wind, The Shining, and The Grand Illusion. I will look at each of these comparisons briefly.

Gone With the Wind is perhaps the most obvious comparison. Both films star Vivien Leigh as an economically struggling Southern belle whose identity is defined by confines of property, propriety, and Southern aristocracy. In one, she is blonde; in the other, a redhead. Neither character is particularly likeable, to be frank. The primary distinction is that GWTW ends with Scarlett O'Hara returning to the hope that is embodied in Tara - her inherited, unearned property that, despite everything, assures her a sense of security and purpose in a world that is turned upside-down by the Civil War. This ending is, at best, rather entrenched in the Southern antebellum class system - hardly a victory for feminists everywhere (ironically, Rhett, although he's kind of a dick, seems more understanding of the world and how it is changing. Historically speaking, his actions are probably the more enlightened and progressive. There is a lot of criticism of Scarlett out there which you can read if you'd like; I won't go into it too much here). By contrast, Blanche DuBois has lost the family estate, and the loss of it has probably contributed to what we realize throughout Streetcar is her mental illness. She has delusions, anxiety, an inappropriate fixation on the past, distrust of men, etc. It is what it is, I suppose. However, before you castigate my analysis for being dismissive of Blanche's plight, and claim that it is the unfairness of the patriarchal system in which she lives that is to blame, consider that Blanche wants nothing more than to return to that very same system, and even as she is losing her mind, she creates delusions of absconding with a Houston millionaire. Yes, the system is unfair. I won't debate that. But Blanche's situation is compounded by her unwillingness to seek an alternative, as did her sister Stella. Of course, it's not that simple, but it can't be claimed that no options are given. GWTW and Streetcar make much the same philosophical point, and neither present much of a victory for opponents of the oppressive Southern aristocratic system.

The Shining may be a stretch, I concede, so I'll be brief here. But it struck me while watching Blanche slowly lose her grip that the director, Elia Kazan, was essentially blurring the film's diegesis for dramatic effect, and that Kubrick does much the same thing, also to depict mental illness. However, perhaps as a function of the advancements in filmmaking, The Shining certainly provides more bang for my metaphorical buck; Blanche DuBois makes us feel as though we are watching a crazy person, but Jack Torrence makes us feel like we are a crazy person. There's a difference. And the net effect for Streetcar is that our sympathies for Blanche are somewhat diminished, I think, and her character remains not quite "one-dimensional," yet not quite not, either. Perhaps that's neither here nor there, but that was my thought as I watched.

However, I was most struck by a comparison to another 1939 classic (the first being GWTW), Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion. If you haven't seen this movie, you should. But essentially, both it and Streetcar deal in large part with the failing and entropic demise of the aristocracy, the latter in the American South and the former in Europe during World War One. This is a complicated comparison, since the films are so different, and certainly we could try to genderize some of the arguments about each, but the important point here is that the characters in Grand Illusion are self-aware about their situation, and honest enough to acknowledge it in discourse with one another. By contrast, only Marlon Brando, as Stanley Kowalski, opines with such awareness in Streetcar. Perhaps it's not comforting that the most truthful and insightful character in Streetcar is an alcoholic, abusive, chain-smoking mumbler with an anger management problem, but then Tennessee Williams is never really all that cheerful. My point is that if you would like a more intellectual approach to this complicated issue, then Renoir may provide a more subtle and nuanced avenue.

A final note on the acting: I mentioned that Blanche is rather one-dimensional, as is Stella, more or less. This may not be totally fair. In the early 1950s, Marlon Brando gave perhaps four of his greatest performances in Streetcar, Julius Caesar, The Wild One, and On The Waterfront. Probably not until Al Pacino in the 1970s would an actor put together four performances of that quality in that short a period of time. However, The Wild One is not a very good film overall, and On The Waterfront and Caesar both have terrific supporting casts. Looking solely at the quality of acting, Marlon Brando simply dominates Streetcar. No one else really comes that close.

It's a good film, but except for Brando's performance, it's not a great one. I would, however, like to see it on stage, where I think expressive acting (Brando's forte) would be less important than the delivery of dialogue.

The Benefits of Bad Movies - Part 1

Over the course of my nearly twenty-three years now, I have been characterized on several occasions as a "film snob." Shocking, I know. I suppose that's what I get for unintentionally offering some, um, patronizing opinions on the cinematic habits of my friends.

Well, here's the thing: I've decided that I don't care about being a snob. In fact, I kind of relish it. I have a film degree; shouldn't that afford me a certain degree of snobbery? But in an effort to ameliorate some of the frustration in my general direction, the first post of the new year will be an homage to the bad - bad directing, bad acting, and most of all, bad movies. Be forewarned: this post is entirely my opinion, and does not necessarily reflect the view of anyone else. If you disagree, by all means, comment, as profanely as possible, so that I can mock you for being offended at something you read on the internet.

Contrary to popular belief, and due to a failing of the English language, being a bad movie is not always such a bad thing. Let's take a look, for example, at the two highest-grossing movies of the young year: the entirely predictable success of the emo-romance twaddle that is The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 and the completely unexpected, but still ridiculous The Devil Inside. Let's not sugarcoat this here: these movies are both pieces of metaphorical crap. I haven't even seen them, and I know this. How do I know this? Well, I have a highly sophisticated system: I read reviews and I watch trailers. And I have a few other tricks, which I'll get to.

First off, I read reviews. Like in every other part of news, it is important to identify the credibility of a reviewer. Credibility is established through education, experience, and reputation, in unequal measure. I would love to say that I have enough of all of these to call myself credible, but of course I really only have part of one - a B.A. that includes a film emphasis. So who to read? Well, think about the source's purpose. What does People magazine, for instance, try to do? Sell magazines. Who do they sell to? Generally, from my research, dentist's offices, where they lie abandoned on lobby end-tables. So for someone like myself, who wants to read film criticism for the sake of film criticism (rather than for profit), where should I turn? Well, there are a couple of critics that I have grown to really like and respect: A. O. Scott, of The New York Times, and Roger Ebert, of the Chicago Sun-Times. Remember, these are people who have seen many, many more films than you and I, and can therefore offer a great deal of perspective. And believe it or not, neither are really that pretentious. If you have doubts, please read Ebert's review of Freddy Got Fingered. It's totally worth it: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010420/REVIEWS/104200304/1023

The other useful source of criticism that I use is meta-evaluation of films. In this, I use three websites: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and MetaCritic. Again, however, it is important to use the evaluative tools correctly. MetaCritic, for instance, allows viewers quite simply to compare the scores given to films by professional critics against the reviews given by, for lack of a better word, amateur moviegoers like you and me. Rotten Tomatoes allows for the same comparison, with one additional mouse click. IMDb's rating system actually allows for a great deal of differentiation, but makes no distinction between professional critics and amateurs. LISTEN TO ME BECAUSE THIS IS IMPORTANT: None of these rating tools will tell you if a movie is bad or good! But it will help you understand a little bit more about whether it will appeal to your tastes. Think about it: if the critics love it and the Proletariat hates it, it's probably not Twilight. Let's take a look:

Breaking Dawn, Part 1:
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-twilight-saga-breaking-dawn---part-1
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1324999/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/twilight_saga_breaking_dawn/

In all of those review sites, the film received between a 4.4 and a 4.9 aggregate score out of 10. So this is a quality check: will you like this movie? Maybe, but not if you're looking for a technically sound movie. As for myself, I have no interest in sparkly vampires, or really, more or less any kind of vampires (with a couple exceptions), so I have not, and will not, pay money to see the movie in theaters. Boom. Done. Decision made.

So why do I bring all this up? It's because I do, in fact, believe that there is a lot we can learn from so-called "bad movies." Take a look at the photo I chose to preface this post with: Randal Graves, debating the existence of an, um, mythical being called "Pillowpants." This scene, from Clerks II (originally titled The Passion of the Clerks), can hardly be called great cinema. But for those of us who know what the scene is designed to imitate - the kitchen from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining - this conversation develops a great and ironic three-dimensionality. Does that make it a classic movie moment? Hell no. But it does help us understand how we define "good" and "bad" in a relatively objective manner. This evaluation has two parts; the quality of film depends on our ability to both objectively compare films to each other, and also to accurately assess the efficacy of the intellectual and emotional responses that a film evokes.


...to be continued...