In one post because I watched these back-to-back while in Germany. Wrote this there, too.

If you can find a thematic link, please submit it.

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979, rev. 2000)
directed by Francis Ford Coppola
screenplay by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola
narration written by Michael Herr

I’m annoyed with Francis Ford Coppola for making me refer to his movie as Apocalypse Now Redux, instead of letting me just call it Apocalypse Now (1979) and specify that I watched the restored and extended version he made in 2000. No, this movie’s credits clearly state that it has the idiotic title Apocalypse Now Redux, that it is copyright 2000, and that “Portions of this motion picture were originally released in 1979 in the United States and Canada by United Artists as ‘Apocalypse Now’.” Portions constituting the whole movie. It would be less absurd if this new movie were in some substantive way different (rather than just longer), such that it could not be construed as supplanting the original. But it can and it does and it isn’t, so it should just have the same title and say “extended edition” or something on the DVD package and leave imdb alone! Actually, it looks like imdb has handled this correctly in spite of Mr. Coppola’s nonsense.

So I don’t know about Apocalypse Now because I’ve never seen it, but Apocalypse Now Redux is kind of a mess. Looks beautiful, full of interesting things, but sort of a mess and it really falls apart at the end. I know he had trouble with Marlon Brando and had to make do, but it shows and I’m calling it like it is. The best sequence is the part with Robert Duvall near the beginning. Martin Sheen does a good job holding things together in a movie that doesn’t know how realistic it wants to be. If your movie is going to pass between realism and dream-cinema, the pacing and sequencing of those changes need to be carefully planned; here they seemed to happen willy-nilly, when it was convenient.

Scenes with women quickly become dreamy and lead to nudity; this happens at a key moment in The Conversation too and seemed unmotivated in both places. Sex is a magical dream-state and women are the key? Is that really the point? I understand that here, as with Gene Hackman, the thematic idea is that safety and intimacy have become tragically unattainable for these guys and that anything like it is a mirage, but why can’t that be presented soberly? There’s something film-school phony about the justification for showing boobs. And anyway, Miss December was flown to a nearly-abandoned base in Vietnam and prostituted herself to the troops in a vapid daze? That doesn’t make any sense.

But fine, a lot of things in the movie didn’t make real-world sense; it was mostly buildup and omens and horror. And somewhere toward the end it dropped the line of tension, and by the time Martin Sheen is in Brando’s presence and narrating, “This was truly the heart of the jungle” or whatever, the horror of which the man speaks has slipped out of the movie. It’s quite possible that in the shorter, original version of the movie that everyone prefers, this isn’t the case. The colors on this Redux look lovely though.

Music, credited to the director and his father, music producer David Rubinson, and a whole lot of musicians, is actually quite good, and carries big chunks of the movie on its back. The “love scene” at the plantation is a glaringly misscored exception – again, the man has some nerdy ideas about love scenes.

I didn’t watch this on the subway but I did watch it on my iPod. Watching a movie on the iPod is less likely to suck me in to a self-forgetting state of complete escape than watching it at home or in the theater – obviously – and previously I would have thought that was a loss. And I suppose it is a loss; but there is a compensatory gain. Watching a movie without forgetting myself means watching it more intelligently; I feel better able to track the plot, the craft, and the aesthetics all at once. This appreciation might be a bit colder but it is clearer and more complete; I feel like I’m getting directly to the way I’d feel on a second or third viewing. A movie watched on this screen is less of an experience to which I submit, more of a cultural object that I can willingly consume and digest. This is the way people talk about movies and the way I am thinking about movies when I make a Netflix queue or take recommendations or browse a “100 best” list. But the enveloping experience has its place too.

Yes, maybe this movie would have worked better that way, surrounding me beyond thought. But I think it’s fair to say that if a movie holds up only when it goes undigested, it is inferior to a movie that can do both. So maybe I missed out on some of the potential savor of this experience, but my opinion is probably the same one I would have arrived at afterward. And I don’t have time to savor everything there is, so fine.

This did make me want to reread Heart of Darkness. This was Movie You Must See Before You Die #653.

Finding Nemo (2003)
directed by Andrew Stanton
co-directed by Lee Unkrich
screenplay by Andrew Stanton, Bob Peterson, and David Reynolds
on a story by Andrew Stanton

Again, on the iPod. I think Pixar reads just fine on a little screen. On the other hand it’s all about textural gratification and maybe I would have gotten some more of that if I’d been really surrounded by those fish and bubbles. But I think I got plenty.

Have I seen all the Pixar movies now? I think not but I can’t figure out which other ones I’m missing. Except for Cars – I know I haven’t seen that. Maybe on the flight home from this trip I’m on I’ll pick that one up. [ed: didn’t.]

Just checked the list online and that is in fact the only one I have left. [ed: but now, by the time I’m posting this, I also have WALL-E to contend with]

People love this movie but I thought it was flimsy. The script seemed like the script for an attraction at Disneyworld, not for an actual movie. The scenes of learning and growing were insufficiently essential to the plot and felt phony; the tone for these scenes is determined by formula far more than the actual moral content. I already knew that Finding Nemo was about fish and bubbles, but what is it about thematically? It took most of the movie before they had to fill out that box: it’s about facing fears and letting go of growing children. And for Ellen DeGeneres it’s about, um, not forgetting. Or… making friends. Or about refusing to accept that you are just a comic relief character, in a movie where every secondary character is just a comic relief character. It’s about struggling bravely against your crippling comic relief characteristics. “Only when I’m around you, protagonist,” she pretty much says, “do I feel whole. And I don’t want to lose that.”

The movie is an episodic quest with no particular sense of gathering urgency or beckoning mystery. It’s just a series of episodes strung in a row. These are intercut with scenes of of Nemo in a fishtank that don’t go anywhere. Is there some other lesson to be learned in these scenes, about some different facet of facing fears and growing up or something? Did they think there was? Not sure. But they don’t go anywhere.

Beth is saying that she thought the fishtank scenes were a vain attempt to create suspense. Like cutting to Dorothy and an hourglass running out. But if so, they loused it up by piling on the color characters and whimsy until those sequences didn’t feel the least bit dangerous. Their color character machine was on overdrive in this movie. It’s all well and good to draw up a character design sheet, to cast someone famous, and to come up with a delightful distinguishing quirk. Pixar can do that over and over and over and not break a sweat. The real question is whether the movie needs those characters. I felt like this movie was just shoveling from their pile of pre-production concepts onto my head in big heaps. Here are Nemo’s three friends at school and each of their personalities and here are each of their parents and their personalities and here’s his teacher and his personality and here’s the seven inhabitants of the tank and each of their personalities and here are the three sharks and their personalities and WAIT WAIT, we also have this great turtle character that he meets, here’s his personality, and then there’s a baby turtle, here’s his personality, and WAIT WAIT this is our design for the pelican, here’s his personality, and these are his friends, and these are the seagulls….

AAGH! ENOUGH! And yet with all that, I felt like our principal leads were under-developed. They too were just “personalities” like everyone else. The father – the lead – needed to have a little more going on than “he’s an over-protective father – and he’s played by Albert Brooks!” and Ellen DeGeneres definitely needed more than “she’s Exasperating Comic Sidekick – and she’s Ellen!” The world-doodling machinery that drives these movies – Character Development by this team, Story Development by that team – is not always in the best interest of storytelling. I felt like this whole movie wasn’t in the best interest of storytelling.

The jokes were forced too.

So that all said; it was cute. It was inoffensive and basically pleasant to look at and probably fun for kids – little kids. But I got a fair bit more than that out of Toy Story and thought it was fair to hope for it here.

All watched on the ipod, mostly on airplanes.

Murder! (1930)
screenplay by Alma Reville
based on the novel and play “Enter Sir John” (1928) by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson
adapted by Alfred Hitchcock and Walter Mycroft

In some raw statistical sense, it may seem noteworthy that this early Hitchcock is a murder mystery, but that doesn’t mean it’s in any way like watching “a Hitchcock movie.” The script and direction are dull and stagy – except for a few touches of experimentation, which don’t generally work very well. One particularly absurd novelty is a “subjective” close-up, apparently meant to show just how lush the rug of a wealthy celebrity feels to his poor visitor: the man’s feet are shown sinking into a fantastical waterbed surface. This is inserted for one second into the middle of an otherwise fantasy-less movie.

One sequence is pointed out in the books for being a bold early use of sound in film. There was no technical way of combining multiple tracks of sound, so for a scene where the character’s inner monologue is heard against Tristan und Isolde, the pre-recorded monologue was played back from a phonograph on set, and an orchestra just off-camera performed the music live, while the actor stood and made thinking faces. This is interesting in the history books but it doesn’t change the fact that the resulting scene is completely ridiculous; the musical juxtaposition comical and awkward. Is it supposed to be comical? It’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be silly in this crooked movie; Hitchcock’s whimsy is all over the thing but without proper signposts for the audience, so it can’t be enjoyed, only squinted at in confusion.

The pacing is stultifying; the protagonist isn’t introduced until 30 minutes in, and it still takes us several scenes more before we realize that, yes, this guy is actually the protagonist of the limp movie we’ve been watching in bewilderment for half an hour. Only the climactic scene manages to sustain a sense of tension on its own terms. The rest just drips by like we’re watching a blocking rehearsal.

The plot is that an actor has been killed, apparently by another actor, but a famous actor finds himself investigating the case and discovers that the murder was really committed by a different actor. Theater is a theme. The final shot, which is the best in the whole movie, seems to be showing us that our hero and the woman he exonerated are now a happy couple in a drawing room… but then the camera pulls back and we see that it’s happening on stage before an audience; the real happy ending is that our hero gave the woman a good part in his next play.

The bad guy in this movie is clearly gay, and in the book is (apparently) explicitly said to be gay, which is a secret he doesn’t want revealed. In the movie, however, the plot makes clear that, despite being totally gay and a professional cross-dresser, he is not in fact gay, and his shameful secret is altered to be that he is a half-caste. Interesting to note that this change, meant to make the movie less offensive to the sensibilities of 1930, actually makes the movie more offensive today.

An odd bit of trivia: Hitchcock shot a German version simultaneously, with different actors on the same sets, imitating what the English actors had just done. Called Mary. Apparently it’s absolutely lifeless by comparison – which is a pretty terrifying thought.

The Skin Game (1931)
screenplay by Alma Reville
based on the play (1920) by John Galsworthy
adapted by Alfred Hitchcock

Also quite dull, but for different reasons. The film also feels slack and can get confusing (secondary character introductions aren’t delivered cleanly enough) but nonetheless has its head on somewhat straighter than Murder!. Unfortunately, that head is telling a very boring story. Two rich families – one old money, one new – channel their social irritation with one another into a feud over a piece of land. Ultimately, a bit of blackmail used as a bargaining chip gets out of hand and someone dies, and in the end the old-money patriarch is left in stunned self-disgust, wondering when his good British decency left him. “What’s gentility worth if it can’t stand fire?” And curtain. Material like this can only be worthy of a movie if the acting makes it so and if the director gives us room to savor the performances. On each of those counts, the movie only deserves a shrug. Edmund Gwenn is great as the angry new-money guy; everyone else does a fine enough job but not enough to draw us into this dull little world. And Alfred Hitchcock is clearly to blame for not caring much about it either.

“Skin game” apparently means the same as “confidence game” – i.e. scam, grift, swindle. It sounds silly every time it’s said in the movie; at the end he says it twice in a row, with gravity, and that sounds twice as silly. “What is it that gets loose when you begin a fight, and makes you what you think you’re not? Begin as you may, it ends in this… skin game! Skin game!” I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m sorry, Mr. Galsworthy, that sounds silly.

I am amused by this DVD’s attempt to leverage the word “skin” into squeezing some sex out of this stone. Also, note that by saying that it takes place in “a peaceful English village…” they seem to be implying that something shocking happens. Buyer beware!: This movie actually does take place in a peaceful English village!

I of course watched it on a nice classy DVD, not a tawdry bargain-binner like that.

Rich and Strange (1931)
screenplay by Alma Reville and Val Valentine
based on the novel by Dale Collins (1930)
adapted by Alfred Hitchcock

Apparently this isn’t really based on the novel; the novel and the movie were developed in parallel, both based on conversations Dale Collins had with the Hitchcocks while on a cruise together. Some sources have it that the credit should be “based on an idea by Dale Collins” – the movie itself just says “by Dale Collins” under the title. The novel is quite a rare and forgotten item these days.

This is a completely eccentric film; after sitting through two films rather lacking in personality, the verve and idiosyncrasy of this one were a pleasure. But it’s thoroughly peculiar. A mess of ideas have been cobbled together into something tonally quite confusing. It seems to be some kind of parable of marriage, but extracting a moral from the whole is next to impossible.

It is certainly strange, and at least in the sense of providing food for discussion, rich. The title is a reference to The Tempest: “But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” A title card is kind enough to reveal this in the course of the movie; though it is a sound film, there are quite a few scene-announcing title cards. The subject of the film is the sea-change of a marriage: young and listless Mr. and Mrs. are suddenly given a lot of money to travel the world, and set off on a tourist cruise. On the ship they begin affairs with other people and find themselves drifting into completely new lives. Then some totally unexpected weirdness happens that I won’t give away.

The two lead characters and performances are so extreme and bizarrely unlike each other that it is difficult to accept that these two people are in the same movie – even less that we are meant to think seriously about their marriage to one another. But we are. He’s a scowling baby, to the point of clownishness, and she’s a glamour girl with absurd super-diction. It is disorienting and, when they try to work out their problems, oddly upsetting. Possibly that’s part of the point? Hitchcock is smirking and poking fun at things throughout, with his recognizable touch. It’s essentially a comedy. But unlike his other movies, here the joking tone makes way for seriousness, rather than the other way around. It feels as though the drama as much as the comedy comes directly from the man’s personality, which is not generally what one feels with Hitchcock, who is usually more interested in spinning a sturdy tale than expressing himself. Writers have argued that this is a particularly personal film for Hitch and one of his only films with autobiographical elements. I believe it.

Of the set, I would recommend Rich and Strange and The Ring first, The Manxman when you’re up for some simple melodrama, and Murder! and The Skin Game only if you’re feeling indulgent and historically curious. Or are on the subway. Or an airplane.

directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by David Koepp
story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson
based on characters created by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman

Short review: “It could so easily have been so much better but oh well.”

Very long not-review:

Somewhere in some press release or other, Steven Spielberg said something like “Indiana Jones really belongs to the fans now, so we owe it to them to get it right.” I made up that quote entirely but I swear he did say something much like that.

I’ve never read any of those Star Wars or Indiana Jones “novels,” but I’ve played a licensed video game or two in my time, and I know what they’re like – they expend an enormous amount of their creative energy on the task of being “on brand.” But a brand – a vague collective notion, a thing that by its nature really does “belong to the fans,” and is therefore the principal resource mined by franchising – can have a life of its own. The brand derived from a movie continues to mutate and evolve as culture chews and rechews the cud, while the original movie sits inert. Raiders of the Lost Ark is never going to change, but the specific cultural memory of it, as of everything, is always in flux.

Over the past twenty years, the only forces at work on the Indiana Jones brand have been nostalgia, imitations and knock-offs, franchise stuff like the video games, and (most nefarious of all) geeky fandom, that slow rock tumbler made of millions of obsessive minds, which can eventually convert any cultural object into a shiny nugget of aesthetic abstraction, suitable for fetish purposes. What I am going to say in a couple paragraphs, after a digression on this last notion, is that the new Indiana Jones movie has no particularly authentic connection to the previous movies – after all these years, they made a movie of the brand rather than the character. But first those paragraphs I mentioned.

I just read this book about nerds and the author, I think, neglects an important nerd-related mental phenomenon: the process of fetishization. The author of the nerd book says that nerds are drawn to models of reality that are rigidly rule-based and logical (which are appealingly manageable to those who have poor social intuition). To me this is the social-skills variety of a more general mental phenomenon, available to all but more important to nerds. This phenomenon, which I guess I’m calling fetishization for now, consists of always seeking out the more refined version of an aesthetic stimulus. Aesthetic rationalization I suppose you could call it. “Cognitive focusing,” the guy who eavesdropped on me in a restaurant told me it’s called.

Okay, here’s a way I can talk about this. I read an article once about research into sexually attractive features on animals, explaining why things like antlers evolve to become more and more exaggerated. The reason is that apparently, to the brain, if antlers = good, then big antlers = more good. I may be misremembering the study, but as I remember it, it was saying that this is not necessarily because big antlers actually connote greater health than small antlers, but rather because the brain always responds this way to pre-programmed sensory stimuli. The more intensely “on model” the stimulus is, the more intense the brain’s response. And apparently the brain rates a bigger version of a thing as more intense, as being more truly that thing. Likewise a version of a thing with fewer other distracting features – a purer version of the thing is more intensely the thing. The article that I remember (Discover magazine maybe?) went on to say that this accounts for the tendencies of human pornography to caricature sexual features. If breasts provoke a response in the brain, impossibly giant breasts may well provoke that response more particularly and intensely. Preposterous exaggerations and simplifications get not just a pass but an endorsement from the brain, because the brain is looking for particular forms on their own terms.

Of course, people are susceptible to this in different degrees and on different fronts. Certain nerds, it seems to me, are generally more interested than most in obtaining the purest, most refined, most inflated form of their aesthetic stimuli. But certainly everyone is subject to this desire to want their next hit of something to be a little stronger, a little more on the sweet spot. And, if I haven’t made it clear already, in my philosophy it’s a desire that we should fight against, because it’s the desire for the world to be a set of products designed for us rather than the other way around; it is a desire that draws us away from things as they are.

Chasing that sweet spot means people – again, certain nerds, mostly – end up preferring their culture with breast implants and huge antlers, all in the name of being truer to their memory of the original stimulus. To them it will always feel like a sincere pursuit of the ideal, or at least like a pursuit of the bigger, better, next thing. This is all by way of saying that the brand of Indiana Jones has made room over the years for a slicker, pared-down, more intense notion of what goes on in Indiana Jones movies.

Before I finally talk about the movie, let me note that at the screening, we saw a preview for Star Wars: It’s Come To This, a completely computer-animated super-slick Saturday-morning-cum-video-game thing coming to theaters this whenever. This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. 31 years of cumulative fetishization have rendered this into this.

Okay, so finally to the point of all this. When Mr. Spielberg says it belongs to the fans now, this is what he means. The movie he made in 1980 is less important to his new project than the millions of memories it engendered. Which is to say that this is an Indiana Jones movie that could have been made by any schmuck. As with Star Wars: Episode Colon: Attack of the Star Wars et al. – the problem is that it was made by people whose ownership of the property is still a legal reality but no longer an artistic one. Sadly, all it would have taken for them to regain artistic ownership would be for them to believe that it was theirs. But they don’t; they’re now just like any lowly franchise video-game designer, putting all their energy into making sure it’s Indiana Jones-y enough, whatever that might mean. That means that their work falls flat open for us to critique as a mere series of choices because it has no internal confidence of its own. That’s the main sad thing here. The other is that many of those choices are super super stupid.

The stuff in this movie is all new age Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown crap with dubious associations at best. Crystal power and alien pyramids have no pedigree, no class. That’s awe for morons, just one step away Indiana Jones and the Chain Letter of Death. So that right there is a bad choice. When video games make similar choices, you think, “oh well, they don’t know their business like the movies.” Well, neither do the movies anymore.

Dialogue was clonky and styleless. Terrible “riddles” were spouted, solved, and forgotten in the same breath; the screenwriter had no sense at all for how to handle mystery so that the audience can savor it. Tone was erratic to the point of making one uncomfortable. Jokes were unfunny and often confused. Computer effects were, as always, a sore thumb – the CGI people were delegated more than anyone should have to chew in some of the later sequences. A sense of danger or tension was almost entirely lacking. The bad guy spends most of the movie hanging out and chatting amiably with our heroes. At the end I wasn’t sure the movie was even going to kill her, since she seemed so essentially decent. But it killed her anyway, as per the Formula.

The movie didn’t have any energy left over to get that stuff right because its heart and soul had already been committed to the task of BEING ON BRAND. In the most superficial ways, yes, it was undeniably on brand. But I think that that would have come for free with the costume, frankly. If the original idea was to make this like a 50s pulp sci-fi movie, they should have been unafraid and gone all-out; the character, I promise, could take it. Instead they clung desperately to their playbook while they tried to force a few square pegs through the Formula. Check it out, everyone: This time we’re using square pegs!

It felt like we were watching Indiana Jones himself – because hey look! that’s him, the very same guy from those other movies! – being somehow compelled to say and do dumb stuff. That’s much, much better than can be said for Star Wars: The Phantom Clones in which it seemed that we were watching Natalie Portman herself, being somehow compelled to stand in front of a green screen. In fact, it’s good enough for me to walk away without any bile in my throat. Did they make another Indiana Jones movie? No question. Good. Fine. Score one for nostalgia and let’s try not to think about the details.

The second movie is bad too; for less depressing reasons, certainly, but bad all the same. So there’s a precedent here and I’m perfectly happy – truly – to let this one slide. If they want to make another one I’ll go see it. Maybe having gotten this out of their systems, they’re ready to make one that has its own reason to exist.

Probably not though.

The score was just like the movie – A for effort toward being on brand (well, B for effort, anyway), but what an awkward thing to have to attempt. Why not aim higher – or lower? Or aim where you aimed the first time rather than aiming at the first time? The preceding sentence says what this whole entry is saying, but better. Oh well.

I am, however, very happy to report that I ate a special Indiana Jones-themed Snickers bar (with coconut, to evoke jungle adventure), several boxes of Indiana Jones-endorsed Corn Flakes, and one special purchase of Indiana Jones-endorsed Frosted Flakes. As a result, I am now the proud owner of an Indiana Jones Adventure Spoon. If you Google “Adventure Spoon” you’ll see that I am hardly the only person to be pleased by this item. Mine is the one with the skull on it.

And how can I stay mad at a movie that gives me that? Did I mention that the spoon lights up?