directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
screenplay by Chad Hayes and Carey W. Hayes
after a story/play by Charles Belden (1933?)*

A bunch of us were in a hotel room and chose this off the pay-per-view service because something really trashy seemed to be in order. We got what we paid for. I don’t know the original but I’m sure that as a remake this is a horrible embarrassment. Obviously, the filmmakers couldn’t have cared less. Movies like this are dumb on arrival, so they tend to get away with being dumb even within their own dumbness, and I guess I’m going to let this one off the hook too – what would be the point of complaining that the twist at the end was only superficially a twist, or that we got to know way too much about the bad guys too early on for them to remain satisfyingly scary, or that all the “hey it’s Paris Hilton, get it?” attention to Paris Hilton was a drag on the script…? I’m ignoring the “none of them are looking at the road while they’re driving” and “you can’t touch melting wax like that, it’s burning hot” type of problems – I’m just talking about the storytelling problems, the stuff that actually hurts the movie. Does anyone care? I guess not, and I don’t want to be the loser who misses the point. But: just because the target audience is only here for the cheap shocks doesn’t mean they wouldn’t still have more fun if the movie were better thought-out. Even those of us who came in search of trash would have been more satisfied if we’d found, to our surprise, a clever thrill-ride. But we didn’t! We did, however, find some over-the-top gore that we weren’t entirely expecting. A bunch of it was supposed to be goofily horrid, in an Itchy & Scratchy vein, but two slashed Achilles tendons in one movie is just in bad taste. Not to mention the completely gratuitous finger-severing. John Ottman’s score was fun in a junky, unmemorable way. That’s what the whole movie wanted to be, but only parts of it were. But I guess when junk is your stated goal and your audience already expects trash, it’s hard to know what counts as success. For our “hey let’s watch something really dumb” purposes, this was a grand slam.

* I swore I’d review this in one paragraph, so I have to put this stuff down here in a footnote: This movie is based on the 1953 movie House of Wax, which was based on the 1933 movie Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was “based on a play by Charles Belden.” I can find no record (online at least) of this “play” ever having been produced or published in an original form. I’m betting it was never performed as a play and Belden sold it directly to the movies. But that’d be quite a play!

directed by Robert Wise
screenplay by Nelson Gidding
after the novel by Shirley Jackson (1959)

The book was better, but was the movie any good? I think it was, but in a weaker way. The biggest problem with the book was that it wasn’t perfect, so to speak – it was trying for an effect of carefully controlled atmosphere, but there were little gaps and irregularities in the cloth. Maybe the more eccentric choices were all intentional, but they still tended to dilute the spell, and the spell would seem to be the whole point. The movie suffered from the same problem, but moreso. We’re there for the atmosphere, so every time we have to think “that came off a little odd; oh well, I’m going to be a good sport and go along with it…” the experience falls a notch.

Was it that the movie had aged poorly? Not particularly, though it’s definitely full of dated mannerisms in the writing and staging. In the movie, dialogue that in the book had seemed atmospherically peculiar just seemed clumsy and unlikely. Maybe there’s just something more self-assured about text on a page that helps it age better. Or maybe, as I suspect, this movie was always clunkier than the book.

The score was by Humphrey Searle – whom you may know as the “S” in Franz Liszt’s “19 Hungarian Rhapsodies, S. 244” et al. – and while a good deal of the music was interesting on its own terms, it was a bad score that, I think, hurt the movie considerably. This movie could make an excellent case study in the difference between incidental music and independent music – rather than adding to the effect of the visual, Searle consistently describes it, as though he’s writing for radio. As we’re being shown several “forbidding” shots of the house, meant to convey the immediate aversion of our heroine upon her arrival, we hear a little discordant fanfare figure in each shot. The music here emphasizes the artifice of the editing, and comments on the significance of the shots, rather than contributing to the feeling of the scene – good way to bring a viewer out of the moment. Furthermore, when Searle does try for scary effects, he doesn’t have a good sense of which avant-gardisms “sound” and which just come off like an orchestra doing something weird. All too often this music registers to the viewer as “some kind of weird music,” because of the distracting trombone-iness and harp-iness of what’s going on, if you know what I mean. Stravinsky talked about wanting to write for violin in a way that captured its inherent “violin-iness” (okay, so he didn’t use that word – I’m just saying that real composers care about this concept) – and that’s exactly the sort of writing that shouldn’t be employed in incidental music. The effect is everything; the means should be invisible, or at least ignorable.

That said, I like his main theme* – it very successfully captures what the book is going for, I think – and wish he had known better how to deploy it.

The black and white looks great and the sets, costumes and location are nicely done, especially considering that the book relies so heavily on the reader’s imagination to make this stuff more unnerving than any actual image could ever be. The book is about feeling upset and scared while looking at very mild things – so the movie has a very hard task, since the viewer is much more likely to feel the way any normal person would feel, looking at, say, a wall. I think Robert Wise did a fine job in his struggle against that problem; I admire the scene that’s just a shot of the wall. In fact there are a lot of striking, well-shot, pleasantly eerie visuals throughout. But turning insinuations into actual imagery is still an uphill battle and the movie doesn’t exactly make it to the top.

I should however mention that this movie has an excellent scare in it that made me shout out loud in shock, which I never ever do. I don’t want to give it away – I’ll just say that it conformed exactly to a theory of mine about how to make the worst possible scare in a movie: first give the audience about one second of not being sure what’s happening and then hit them with the scare image. It’s the unknown that’s scary, not the surprise itself – surprise is just a means of making something unfamiliar. A jump scare that comes in a tense context, where the audience is already braced for a scare, isn’t nearly as terrible as a jump scare that comes when everyone’s guard is down – as long as you prime your audience with that one second of “oh, what’s this?” so that when it shows up, they know without a doubt what’s happening – they’re getting caught with their guard down. Terrifying. Robert Wise and his editor pulled it off exactly.

Julie Harris makes the main character suitably pathetic, but doesn’t quite bring the sympathetic quality that comes for free in the book just from the fact that she’s narrating. Claire Bloom does the cruelly unpredictable stuff that’s written for her, but like I said, behavior that’s jarring in the book is ridiculous on the screen unless we’re convinced of it, and I wasn’t at all convinced. Russ Tamblyn seems to be present. The best thing in the movie is Richard Johnson as Dr. Markway**. I haven’t seen him in anything else – given his filmography I guess that’s not surprising – and I thought he was a really entertaining presence, a well-bred British fellow with absolutely no shame about raising an eyebrow and saying things as though they’re really interesting. He goes about his business with a sort of constant, non-sequitur dignity; it’s a pleasure to watch. The DVD commentary track has all the major cast members plus the director and screenwriter showing up for at least a few words, but the majority of it is a 75-year-old Johnson waxing on about his career in general. He comes off more or less exactly like Dr. Markway. I enjoyed it.

One thing he mentions is that he was offered the role of James Bond before Sean Connery, but turned it down. He says something like, “at first glance, I do seem like a more obvious choice for the role,” which at first sounds absurd but on second consideration makes sense – he’s an actual debonair fellow, rather than a smirking rogue. He goes on to say that the rougher quality “Sean” brought to the role was a big part of the success of the James Bond series, which is also certainly true. However, IMDB tells me that Richard Johnson went on to star in two “Bulldog Drummond” movies. Drummond, whose name rings the tiniest of bells for me, was a longstanding detective character who was retooled in Bond’s image in the late 60s. I think I’d enjoy seeing Deadlier Than the Male (1966) and Some Girls Do (1969), both as period James Bond ripoffs and for the chance to imagine what the Richard Johnson Bond movies might have been like. But apparently they’re not easy to come by.

I leave you with this promotional still from Deadlier Than the Male. If you set out intentionally to take a photo for the caption “The poor man’s James Bond,” I don’t think you could do better than this.

* Listen to the excerpt of track 2 here.

** For no good reason, the movie changes “Dr. Montague” to “Dr. Markway” and “Eleanor Vance” to the significantly inferior “Eleanor Lance.” This is corroborated on the DVD commentary by the screenwriter, who says he can’t remember why he did it.

directed by Andrew Adamson
screenplay by Andrew Adamson, Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely
after the novel by C.S. Lewis (1950)

My self-assignment here has been to talk about every book and movie in the order that I experience them, but I’m going to make an exception and talk about this one right away, even though I have still to talk about The Haunting (old), House of Wax (new), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (book), The Squid and the Whale, and Rosemary’s Baby (movie). But this one’s jumping the queue because I have the opportunity, here, to be one of the first people anywhere to write up a review/response to this thing. Not counting those aint-it-cool-news.com types. Yeah, one of them already saw it, of course.

But let me emphasize that this was an extremely advance screening! The aint-it-cool dude reported that his screening, last Saturday, was announced as the first public screening, and I know that the child actors from the movie didn’t see it until Monday. I saw it on Thursday, in a really enormous theater with only a few people in it, many of them holding scripts. It won’t be released for another three weeks. Pretty exclusive stuff, right??? I want to thank all those who made this possible. Thanks, Jon.*

That said, I found the movie intensely unpleasant. Really, really bad. That’s my review. You heard it here first!

There are two principal problems: first, with the material, and second, with the production itself. Or really, there was one problem, which was that the problems with the material and with the production amplified each other. The mismatch between style and content was, to me, near-nauseating.

There are gonna be three types of audience for this movie – 1. People who love the book and know it backward and forward. 2. People who read the book when they were in fourth grade and don’t remember it too well – that’s me! – and 3. People who have never read the book. Then for each of those there are the subcategories, a and b: people who are pleased by the “Christian content” and people who are not. Mark me down as “put off.”

When I was a kid, I only read the first two books in the series, I believe, or maybe the first three. Whatever I read, it was with rapidly diminishing interest. I remember liking the setup of the first book: when you pushed past the fur coats in the magical wardrobe, you found yourself in a snowy, mysterious forest where a lamppost was lit. But the fun of that, you’d think, would be the contrast between fantasy-land and life, or the excitement of this portal between them. Or, in the Alice in Wonderland vein, just the sheer craziness of what could happen in that fantasy-land. Well, after a few chapters of playing the fun correctly, the book veers off in an epic direction that was a complete disappointment to me in fourth grade. The kids start loving – I mean, really loving – this heavenly magical lion, and they get all excited about being kings and queens and fighting in an army of mythical creatures… By the end, they have forgotten all about the wardrobe and even about their real lives. I only had room in my heart for one exposition per book, at that age; it was unthinkable to me that I should care about what happened within Narnia in and of itself. And I didn’t understand why the kids in the story did, either. And how dare they forget their parents and love a lion instead – a fairly aloof one, at that. It was almost nightmarish.

Well, now, having found out a bit more about C.S. Lewis and these books, now I know why the kids loved a lion instead of their parents, and I also know why I didn’t understand it at the time – because that lion is an example of a type that did not figure in any of my other childhood reading, though it certainly does for many other children. He is a Savior, with a capital C, and their love for him is religious love. Perhaps some will think that I am only revealing my own degraded secularity here… but I for one find depictions of this emotion, religious love, upsetting. It’s especially upsetting in this Narnian form, when it’s not depicted in the context of religion, but just as a way of relating to, say, a lion. It’s very hard for me to see it as a heartwarming or stirring thing. It’s creepy. Because religious love is never reciprocal; it is not like love for a person who might well love you back in the same way. Neither is it a rational, justified love for something inherently admirable. It’s the love of cult members for their cult leader, it’s an affiliation masquerading as an emotion. It’s obligation so overwhelming that it can’t help but feel like it must be related to love.

I’m not about to go into whether or not this sort of thing is “good” in the context of religion, but certainly I’ve been brought up to think that it has its place there; in any other context, it sets off alarm bells. Who is this creep asking for pledges of undying devotion? How dare he conscript these gullible kids to fight in his army?

When a bedraggled, wild-eyed Father Christmas showed up and HO HO HO gave the kids marvelous, wondrous weapons so that they could go to war, I couldn’t help but feel that I was watching some kind of sick, shameless recruiting film. Similar feelings when the evil wolves, taunting the eldest boy, tell him that they aren’t afraid of his sword because they know he doesn’t have it in him, that it’s smarter to listen to them rather than just kill them… and then, when he does the right thing and kills one (woo-hoo!), the holy lion tells him solemnly to clean his bloody sword in the earth, which he does while the music swells.** Yes! Feel the power of Aslan, dude! All the kids eventually get to kill fairyland creatures – that, says Mr. Lewis, is a real coming of age, of real moral importance.

This is all made much much worse by the fact that it walks and quacks like all the most excessive Hollywood schlock, maxed-out on CGI. The lion to whom these poor kids pledge their eternal souls (more or less) isn’t a real lion, or a puppet, or a man in a suit – it’s just another projection of that slick, shimmering ectoplasm that wolfs down entire movies these days. It’s not just that CGI looks fake and flat – it’s that it all clearly emanates from the same dead, digital no-man’s-land. Yoda wasn’t actually in the Star Wars prequels – instead, the CGI blob that ate the movies just formed one of its many tendrils into a puppet that looked like him. In the same way, part of me didn’t feel like there was any real Aslan in Narnia – there was just a lot of cartoon stuff. All the worse, then, that these kids wept over it and put their lives on the line for it.

All in all, the movie looked, sounded and felt exactly like one of those commercials for the Marines, wherein young men battle monsters and work their way through ridiculous CG landscapes in order to get a military uniform zapped on to them by wicked-awesome lightning. Videogame trash aesthetics in the service of dead-serious propaganda. It’s easy to say that Lewis is selling Christ’s salvation here; but from the movie, at least, it seems like he’s selling more than that – a moral mishmash of everything that to him seemed good, human, British, and necessary. Including going into battle with shiny swords. Seems like a classic case of confusing/conflating nostalgia with ethics. A dangerous fallacy and a common one – is there a name for it?

I was complaining about certain unsavory aspects of the story (Aslan is killed in a pagan blood-altar ceremony?? How did I miss that as a kid?) to a friend who responded by sending me a quote from a recent article; the writer pointed out that kids are generally oblivious to moral lessons in their literature and gave the example that C.S. obviously wanted kids to recognize Edmund’s wickedness in themselves – but kids never do. It’s a good point; that kind of presumptuous moralizing is so offensive that a kid can’t even conceive of it. So what do kids get out of these books? Atmosphere, mystery, that sort of thing. The warm British-y stuff that’s left over underneath the epic. I might have been annoyed with the weird misuse of those elements, when I was a kid, but I did recognize that atmosphere as worthwhile and fun.

Which is why this movie is so particularly inexcusably bad – because it absolutely gets the atmosphere wrong. Its technique is all schlock and smarm, studio-slick in the worst possible way. I had my first twinge of concern when the prologue (in a bomb shelter during the London Blitz) ended with a snap-bang power edit blackout on a door-slam – what was the point of that? I thought – and then a general sense of doom as the main title music kicked in with some synth drum loops and a bunch of “new age Hollywood poignant” chords rising one after another. What was the point of that? No point, it’s just all part of the standard playbook these days. That, the CGI, the whole deal – it’s just what movies are like! Didn’t you see Lord of the Rings? Just hire those guys and film it in New Zealand and it’ll be perfect. I cannot forgive their insensitive, second-hand approach to tone and atmosphere.

Andrew Adamson was the director of Shrek, which was also built out of borrowed, junky new-Hollywood gestures (slow-mo running from a giant explosion, etc.). At the time, I (and most other people, I think) thought they were making fun of that stuff – they certainly got away with it because they framed it that way. But at the time, one of my friends complained that Shrek seemed to him truly secondhand, nerdy and ingrown, and in retrospect, I think he may have been right. In Narnia, which has no claim to being a “parody” of anything, the bullshit is still slathered on suffocatingly thick in every scene. The final battle begins with a near-silent shot of the two armies racing at each other, whooshing into violent sound when they hit. You know what I’m talking about because you’ve seen it before. Like, on Xbox. The whole movie seemed to have been directed that way: “Yeah, then the wolves will, like, run at the camera and we’ll do one of those things where the middle one, like, jumps over it, you know what I mean?” “I totally know what you mean.” “Yeah, and then when he’s fighting this guy, he’ll like whip the sword around before he gets him with it, like, whop whop whop BOOM, you know?” “Totally.”

Production design was pretty good. Some CGI animals were better than others; talking animal effects were done well. The goat-leg effect was very nicely handled. Tilda Swinton did a good bad guy, I thought, actually playing the personality traits of selfishness and cruelty rather than just “being evil.” The kids were okay – the little girl had the heaviest screen-time-to-age ratio to carry and did a very good job. The other girl was very conscientious but didn’t seem to know how best to maneuever the big lips that got her cast in the first place. The “bad” kid, Edmund, had the right young Brit look and used it serviceably. The eldest brother, Peter, looked like Prince William and that was about it for him.

After the screening, the director, the producer, the four kids, the ice queen, and the goat man were all present. The ice queen and the goat man both made a point of referring to their own “bad acting” and sliding sideways out of questions about their thoughts on the film. Even the kids – who at this early stage of their long publicity tour were, we imagined, practicing their faux-interview skills on us – even the kids seemed reluctant to say outright that they liked the movie, though they eventually found their way into saying stuff like “it actually surpassed my expectations.” The youngest girl, Georgie Henley, was extremely composed and well-spoken for a 10-year-old, which of course got chuckles from the audience. I thought she was charming too, and also felt guilty that I was participating in this “isn’t that precocious!” response that was probably fairly demeaning to her. When asked whether she wanted to stick with acting as a career, she answered, seriously, “Well, I’m still very young. I’m interested in many different things – right now I just think of acting kind of as an option.” Everyone chuckled, even though this was a perfectly reasonable, intelligent answer. Georgie, I’m sorry. I’m also sorry that the movie is so junky, but you seemed like you’ll rise above it.

Tilda Swinton, by the way, had her hair dyed a violent, flourescent yellow and, in this context, came off as an alien visitor from celebrity-fashion land, possibly dangerous. Adamson, by contrast, seemed like a total long-haired tech geek. But that’s superficial of me.

One of his comments, I think, sheds some light on the movie’s horribleness. He said that unlike The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, this book posed problems for an adaptation not because it required cutting back but because it required fleshing-out: C.S. Lewis leaves important things unsaid and sketches his characters lightly. As examples of things that were added, Adamson mentioned various creature designs and the cracking-ice action sequence in the middle of the movie. But he missed the broader problem: Lewis didn’t create real characters or give us real reasons to care about them. The movie needed to show us something to get us involved; instead it dumps the same old garbage on us.

Ugh – I could just keep going on about this but I guess I should move on with my life.

Here is the only picture I could find of the first edition cover. Now, I’m not saying the movie should have looked like this illustration… but still, something to think about.

* It’s taken more than another whole week for me to actually write this and post it. Oops.

** Beth is telling me that, in fact, Aslan just told him to “clean his sword” (in the river, we must assume), and the next shot, of the sword entering the ground, was a cut-ahead to later, as he prepared to be knighted. Yeah, maybe. Whatever.

directed by Michael Winterbottom
screenplay by Martin Hardy
after the novel by Laurence Sterne (1759-1767)

After finishing the book just recently, obviously I had to see this.

With adaptations the question is always “is it a good adaptation?” This means: does the movie fulfill whatever fantasies are called to mind by the phrase “movie version of Tristram Shandy?” In this case I think that the answer is almost entirely yes. The main things I would want from a movie version of Tristram Shandy: visualizations of the characters and locations, and reenactments of some of the funny dialogue. Definitely there. My one reservation would be that the overall 18th-century “look” was just the same natural-light on-location-at-a-manor-house stuff that I’ve seen on PBS so many times, and the various actors never exactly disappeared into the parts, so I didn’t quite get that full feeling that I was getting to see it really happen. I just got the feeling that I was seeing a very charming performance of it. But that was good enough. Given the film-within-a-film construction (about which more in just a second), that kind of remove was probably appropriate (and/or inevitable).

Let me be clear: you get to see all kinds of stuff from the book that you’d want to see: the siege of Namur, Uncle Toby whistling Lillabullero, a slideshow of famous men with long noses, etc. etc. A good part of the long scene with Toby, Walter Shandy, and Dr. Slop preparing for Tristram’s birth is included, but what takes 100 pages in the book is here only a few seconds – as you might imagine – and I ended up worrying that as a result, a lot of the fairly absurd dialogue, quickly delivered, was probably flying over the heads of the audience members who hadn’t read the book. And I think that might have been the case. This movie is certainly going to be more satisfying to those who read the book first. But my moviegoing companion, who had not read the book, thoroughly enjoyed the movie, even though she said that she did indeed feel a little removed from it at the beginning.

So far, I have only been talking about the beginning. If you’ve read anything about this movie, you already know that it’s an adaptation in the Adaptation sense – after a little while, the movie veers off into meta-movie land and thereafter only returns to Tristram Shandy for brief interludes. The movie is, in fact, mostly about Steve Coogan (played by Steve Coogan), the lead actor in a movie version of Tristram Shandy. Yup, it’s one of those. But the lovely thing is that, just as in Adaptation, the movie-about-a-movie still has claim to being an adaptation of the source material, which itself is more concerned with “the making of” than it is with telling a story. Just as in the book, the meta- play is partly meant to get at philosophical issues of the interactions between life and its own representation, and partly just for fun.

In fact, as far as layering goes, the movie complicates things well beyond the book. The PBS-ish movie-within-the-movie is itself a playful affair, wherein adult Tristram walks into a scene of his childhood and complains that the child representing him is not playing the part correctly, etc. If carried out throughout, THAT movie could well have stood alone as a complete representation of the complexities of the book. But then the “real” actors are added on top of that, and then finally at the end we see the “real” real actors coming out of a screening room where they seem to have watched the meta-movie itself. I was reminded of, yes, The Muppet Movie, which is a movie about a bunch of characters in a screening room watching a movie about themselves wherein they come to Hollywood and make a movie about themselves. A similar kind of playfulness here, though it obviously creates a different emotional effect. It’s also worth saying that it creates a different emotional effect from the comparatively claustrophobic Adaptation.

The whole movie is played very mildly, emotionally low-key (just like actual on-set documentaries and, indeed, most real social life), and yet in a few key places flirts tastefully with having sentimental content. I thought this was exactly in keeping with Sterne’s worldview. That’s the other thing I would want from an adaptation of Tristram Shandy – something that captured that particular feeling of how the world is both delightfully and distressingly frivolous. A good deal of the screen time is taken up by chatty British humor and some Christopher Guest-ish deadpan character comedy, but the construction, and the grounding of Tristram Shandy, make it all add up to more than that as a whole. It’s really a sort of portrait of an everyman type, this Steve Coogan/Tristram Shandy/Laurence Sterne guy, a self-centered guy not entirely sure what is worth wanting, trying to figure out what kind of order can possibly be imposed on life. The closest thing to a dramatic plot involves him flirting with a production runner named Jennie while his girlfriend Jenny is visiting the set with their baby, and even that is played as low to the ground as possible.

It’s actually quite remarkable to me, thinking back on it, that a balance was struck that made all these elements seem to cohere and serve a worthy thematic purpose. I can see a thousand ways that a movie like this could have fallen apart at the seams. But somehow it all just felt right – so natural almost as to seem slight, while I was watching it. My appreciation for it has, I think, grown in retrospect.

Music was all borrowed from other movies, including several cues by Michael Nyman, whose smart/stupid classical/minimal style, which often rubs me the wrong way, was here exactly right.

I do however think that the title is ungainly, though I understand how they ended up with it (the movie being neither Tristram Shandy nor NOT Tristram Shandy).

I saw this at the New York Film Festival screening (which, at time of writing, is pretty much the only thing mentioned on the movie’s official website) and so Michael Winterbottom, the two leads, and some downplayed dude (I believe it was producer Andrew Eaton) came up on stage for a little Q & A thingy afterward. Actually, they first showed themselves when they stood up from box seats to receive applause, and I thought “Whoa, did they just watch their own movie so that they could listen to our response?” I think I would have found myself laughing louder had I known. My understanding was that after the first couple showings, filmmakers didn’t do that. Though I suppose that this was probably only the 20th showing, or something, so perhaps they weren’t quite completely fed up with it yet.

The Q’s were, as always, fairly embarrassing. It must be some kind of principle of self-selection at work – Q & A session questions seem always to be either 1) eccentric and/or ornery, 2) not questions, or 3) questions that have already been answered. In 2000 I saw Woody Allen give what was being promoted as a “rare” Q & A session to promote Small Time Crooks, during which he was 1) asked where he got the glasses that appeared in one character’s apartment (A: I don’t know) and 2) badly told one of his own jokes from his stand-up act of 35 years ago (A: Yeah). I wish there was a 3) so that I could round this out, but I don’t recall any more; I just remember cringing through the whole thing.

For Tristram, the ornery question came from a guy who asked “This obviously wasn’t the book, why didn’t you just film the book?” and then when given the expected answer, pressed the question again with obvious irritation, and then grumbled audibly when the director wrapped up his second version of the answer. The 2) non-question came from a woman who told everyone what she thought the “womb” sequence meant. The moderator did her the favor of turning this around in his on-mike rephrase, as “basically, what was the meaning of the womb sequence?”

At this point, it occurred to me that I had a question to ask, so I raised my hand, and got called on, but as I started to speak I was cut off by some guy shouting out 3) a question that had already been answered. Namely, were any scenes actually improvised? The moderator had started things off by asking that very question. The answer, by the way, is pretty much, “just the obviously-improvised silly conversations that bookend the movie.”

Then I finally got my chance. I’m leading up to this like my asking a question was a big event, but, well, for me it was. For those three seconds, I ran the risk of annoying everyone in Alice Tully Hall, not to mention some minor celebrities whose movie I had just seen. For a non-famous, non-performing-in-Alice-Tully-Hall guy like me, having that many ears on you at once is a rare occasion, and primitive social-structure instincts come to the foreground. It’s hard to fight that inner law of conformity that says: When there are 700 people present, you will not call undue attention to yourself. So, sad to say, that sort of moment feels significant both before and after, even though it adds up to nothing.

Well, it does add up to my getting an answer from Michael Winterbottom, so, in order to turn my moment of glory into a public service, and also to hopefully exorcise the moment from my brain, where I keep running over it (apparently just to be really really sure that I did not make a 700-person faux pas, which I obviously did not) – I offer you the exchange in its entirety, as best I can remember it:

Me: How do you see the Jenny character as relating to the original book?

Moderator: The question is how the character of Jenny as she appears in the movie compares to the character from the book. I guess that’s a question for Michael.

Beth: (to me, quietly, during the pause) There are two. [i.e. there are two characters named Jenny in the movie, so my question is perhaps ambiguous]

Me: (full voice) Either one, really.

[I then proceed to be distracted from the answer because I worry that it sounded like I was saying that the question could be directed to “either one” of the men on stage – though there are four – and that maybe saying “either” about four men made me sound crazy and people are annoyed with me, just as I have been annoyed with pretty much everyone to ask a question thus far]

Winterbottom: Well, Jenny in the book is his wife* and Tristram is really writing it all to her. She doesn’t actually appear, but there are these sort of apostrophes to her scattered through the book. When Sterne wrote the book he was just a parish priest, he wasn’t famous at all, and then the book was a huge success [he said some other stuff here, while my mind was racing distractedly] and he would leave his wife at his house in Sutton-in-the-Forest**, and he took a place in London and began to spend all his time in high society. And he dealt with a lot of the same issues that would come up for a celebrity today. So there are connections there, just not necessarily to the book.

I had asked because I felt like the sad/creepy possibility of romantic unfaithfulness that hung over the character in the movie was not really something that showed up in the world of the novel, and I wondered whether they had intended it as extrapolation from or contrast to the book. But it makes some sense that it both seemed foreign to the book and yet was intended as relevant to Sterne’s own life – his unfaithfulness to his own wife was apparently a blind spot for him. Here’s a related dumb anecdote that has been reprinted in several places. For all I know it’s completely apocryphal:

Sterne, who used his wife very ill, was one day talking to Garrick in a fine sentimental manner, in praise of conjugal love and fidelity. “The husband,” said Sterne, “who behaves unkindly to his wife, deserves to have his house burnt over his head.” “If you think so,” said Garrick, “I hope your house is insured.”

Garrick = David Garrick (1717-1779), actor, playwright, theater producer.

* Apparently, though not necessarily. In fact, Shandy ends one chapter by pointing out that we are jumping to conclusions if we simply make the obvious assumption that she is his wife.

** Of course, I don’t actually remember him saying that, but that’s where Sterne lived, and I trust that Winterbottom got it right.

directed by Alfred Hitchcock
written by Ernest Lehman

On the big screen! I strained to find details that I had never seen before; I wanted to believe that projected from real live film, the movie would seem newly rich and luxurious, that I would be seeing it “for real” for the first time. But of course I’ve seen it for real before. If anything, the image on the old print we saw was duller and muddier than the one on the DVD.

Furthermore, I’m not sure how much this movie benefits from the big-screen treatment, at this point in history. We all know that it’s a rollicking tale of adventure full of crazy spectacles – like a man being run down by an airplane! – but when it comes down to it, those few famous spectacles weren’t exactly characteristic of Hitchcock or of this movie as a whole. For me, the big screen accentuated not the excitement but the 1959-ness of a movie that, for pure sensory impact, can’t actually compete with any of the much, much more flamboyant movies made in the past 45 years. Somehow, on the small screen, I can still watch this movie and think it’s exciting without having to make any serious historical acommodations. On the big screen, I felt like the compact and almost stage-y quality of a lot of the movie had been stretched too thin. I was forced, to my dismay, to see some of it as exciting in an old-fashioned way, rather than simply as exciting.

Of course, my willingness to see North By Northwest as evergreen is only something I acquired at some point in my teenage years. I recall that when I first saw it, at a young age, I found some aspects so dated as to be inaccessible. The opening scenes, in particular, irritated me. “Why is he being such a jerk?” I asked my mother, as Cary Grant snapped and chattered smarmily at his secretary, lied to get a cab, and generally acted like a jerk. “He’s supposed to be funny and charming,” she told me. Well, now, of course, I see it that way. But there’s a fine line between insufferable and charming, and I guess I had to learn a few things about 1959 before I could know where to place that line.

Oddly, when I first saw it, I think the thing in the movie that most thoroughly impressed me was the moment when Cary rubs a pencil on a pad of paper to see the indentations left by a message written on the previous page. Nowadays, that moment strikes me as one of the goofier examples of Ernest Lehman’s penchant for treating cornball stuff like it’s incredibly clever. (“What possessed you to come blundering in here like this? Could it be an overpowering interest in art?” “Yes, the art of survival!”) But at the age of 10, or whatever I was, I thought that pad-and-pencil thing was great – just like Encyclopedia Brown! Nothing is cornball the first time around.*

Another reason I like seeing familiar movies with audiences is because it allows me to see the otherwise-hidden “laugh points” that define a movie’s rhythms. On the other hand, it can be isolating to see an audience laughing at something that has long since ceased, for you, to be laugh-related. I remember a filmmaker/teacher of mine once saying that she was always a little taken aback when she heard laughing in response to her film, because she had lived with it for so long that she had to think to remember why people were laughing. This is, interestingly, not at all the case with live theater, where the actors have to engage with the jokes every time they tell them. At least up to a point. Maybe in truly long-running shows, the performers start to feel like they’re performing some inscrutable ceremony, with responsory laughing as part of the text.

I remember being stunned when a friend, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark with me for what was, for her, the first time, laughed at the end of the opening sequence when it was revealed that Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes. I couldn’t believe I knew anyone who was still able to sniff out the truffle of that particular laugh, buried so deep under the pile of general cultural exposure. I felt something similar, on a smaller scale, when I watched North By Northwest with an audience.

Does it make me an anti-social creep that when the audience laughed heartily at “I feel heavyish. Put a note on my desk in the morning: ‘Think thin’,” I felt like something was going terribly wrong?

Another case of feeling anti-social: right after Mrs. Thornhill said “Roger, pay the two dollars!” the awful guy behind me leaned over to the girl he was with and said, in a little nerdy voice that you’ll have to imagine, “That later became a very famous line that people would say.”

To the degree that this guy was saying anything at all and not just grandstanding for his date, he got it wrong: “Pay the two dollars” is the refrain from an old vaudeville skit wherein a lawyer fights and fights a two-dollar fine for spitting until he gets his hapless client sentenced to death. This skit was apparently well-known (and appeared in the 1946 movie of the Ziegfeld Follies), and so we can assume that Roger’s fine is not, in fact, only two dollars – which would be beyond absurd, considering that he is being accused of stealing a car, driving drunk, and causing damage to a police car – but rather that Mrs. Thornhill is making reference to the line as a way of saying, simply, “just pay the fine instead of fighting and making it worse.” The punchline-y music, however, suggests that Bernard Herrmann, for one, didn’t understand the reference. Perhaps neither did Hitchcock. I just read online that Ernest Lehman talks about all this on his DVD commentary track, which comes as news to me. I thought I’d watched it all the way through but none of this sounds familiar. Guess I’d better watch it now.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I recently lucked into some unpublished movie score materials, including this beloved score. My reaction to seeing these notes on the page was just the opposite of my reaction to seeing John Williams’ scores; whereas there I was impressed by by how much thought and effort went into effects that are just barely noticed, here I thought, “wow, this music, which is so impressive in the movie, amounts to so little.” I’d known it before – in this movie in particular it’s really in your face – but it was really driven home: Bernard Herrmann just takes simple sequences and extends them to fill however much time is needed. You’d think that upon seeing the score, you’d find out that, sure, it’s based on a simple sequence but it’s been subtly adjusted to sync up with the movie. But nope. Most of the time, he just does his thing without making any accomodations to the screen action. Check out this cue (wherein Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau secretly confer right under Cary Grant’s nose by calling each other from opposite ends of a row of phone booths):

It’s truly, in every sense, musical wallpaper. And yet the effect is so strong, despite the utter indifference of this music to the specific action onscreen. Sometimes continuity, the mere impression of coherence and intentionality, can be the most important thing for music to impart to a movie. I already understood this principle and I was still taken aback by how incredibly bare this music is. Because the effect isn’t one of bareness at all; just as, in a room with patterned wallpaper, one almost never thinks, “this pattern is so spare!” Almost any pattern at all seems rich and enveloping.

Another thought about Bernard Herrmann: his style is the intersection of Richard Wagner and Aaron Copland. When you think about it, it’s amazing that those two composers even have an intersection, and Herrmann hits it consistently. I haven’t heard very much of Herrmann’s non-film output (in particular, he wrote an opera on Wuthering Heights), but it seems like his works didn’t come close to exhausting the potential of this particular stylistic niche, which is such a intriguing synthesis of the romantic and the anti-romantic. I’m not sure that’s a style that I personally would want to write in, but I’m be very curious to hear someone take a shot at it. I generally am attracted to styles that try to achieve a synthesis of sentiment and, simultaneously, disdain for sentiment. As are many people my age, I think. It’s in the air these days. And isn’t the score to Vertigo exactly that, in its way?

I think Stephen Sondheim said that in writing Sweeney Todd he took Bernard Herrmann’s style as a model…and that work has gone on to be seen as a uniquely successful high/low synthesis. Of course, Sondheim clearly thought of it as a kind of special trick, a pastiche, because he’s never really turned back to that style.** But it still seems ripe to me, as are most of the many rashly abandoned branches on the musical family tree. The question, as always, is not whether a style has inherent potential but whether you can talk people into listening to it. Sticking something in the background a movie is, of course, a good way to talk people into anything. As the Coca-Cola people will tell you.

* Nothing I can think of, at least. I’m only talking about cornball, here, not to be confused with kitsch, schlock, or trash.

** Well, maybe in Passion, sort of.