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?

written by Eliot Stannard
after the novel by Hall Caine (1895)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Another one on the subway. Hitchcock’s last silent.

The Ring felt foward-looking and bold in some ways; less so The Manxman, which was pretty much just a typical weepy melodrama for the Mrs. Zero crowd. Both are “two guys one girl” love triangle movies – and in both movies, one of the two guys is played by Carl Brisson – but The Manxman is much soapier and stagier. Odd in fact to see Mr. Brisson’s acting style seemingly regress here in terms of cornball emoting. Though I guess I’m projecting a historical bias in seeing naturalism as progress. His makeup, in contrast to his performance, is actually more naturalistic in this later movie. In The Ring, Brisson has been more touched up with lipstick and eyeliner than his rival; in The Manxman it’s the other way around. I tried to figure out what the “lipstick and eyeliner” look was supposed to connote back then, character-wise, but couldn’t. In both movies, Brisson is the younger and more naive of the two men. In The Ring our sympathies are pretty much entirely with him; in The Manxman they are more divided – all the better to jerk your tears with! So anyway, I don’t know what 20s audiences saw in that look, but I’ll tell you what I see: a guy wearing lipstick and eyeliner.

The cinematography is very prettily done for what it is, especially when it gets at a landscape. In both movies, Hitchcock creates a few striking setups with very small figures in a large space. On reflection, I guess that kind of image recurs in his famous movies too, but here, in silent black and white, it had greater impact. There’s really only one showy trick: a dissolve that turns the ocean into ink in an inkwell. You can only pull that one off in black and white!

Rather than summarize the plot I will simply offer a single screenshot and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader:

I was interested to note how much dialogue is left up to lip-reading and deduction, in both The Ring and The Manxman. Intertitles (and stuff like the above) are used extremely sparingly. I approve; title cards just make silents seem like deaf talkies. Solutions that do without them are more elegant. But doing without titles requires more concentration, and flatters the intelligence.

I’ll tell you one word in particular that never appears in this movie: “Manxman.” I kept waiting to find out what it meant and then the movie was over. So I looked it up online. It just means someone from the Isle of Man. Oh. Now I’m trying to figure out which of the two men was the titular Manxman. Not clear; might have to read the novel to find out. This is not going to happen.

The attached piano score on this DVD, presumably again by Xavier Berthelot, was much better than the one for The Ring. The slower pace and broader emotions here are an easier assignment, but he also just seemed more in tune with what was going on.

The movie was a little half-hearted in some ways, but markedly enthusiastic about giving us close-ups of the pretty girl. She was cute, and if I know anything about Hitchcock, that may well have been the whole point of the movie. Is Anny Ondra (= Ondráková]) the first “Hitchcock blonde”? Maybe, but I’m not sure that’s a particularly interesting distinction. Somewhat more interesting is that she later married Max Schmeling and hung out with Hitler, making Eva Braun jealous. Here are some photo cards for your private albums, kids.

You know, a few days having passed, the movie seems a little more enjoyable in retrospect. It was at least a schlock tragedy rather than a mere schlock romance, and within the bounds of a dated formula, it had its own kind of dignity. Or maybe it’s just that watching it on the subway made it seem like my own private friend and I feel loyal to it as a result.

written and directed by Alfred Hitchcock

I got an iPod that can play videos! Now I can watch movies while I’m on the subway!

For my first commute movie I watched The Ring, the first selection in that DVD set of early Hitchcock movies I picked up at Barnes & Noble for Beth on a whim a few months ago. We haven’t watched a one of them yet.

But now I have! ON THE SUBWAY!

My headphones are great and all, but a silent is a good choice for the subway. This version has an improvised-sounding piano score a la the good old days, which is (so far as I can tell) totally uncredited on this DVD set. Following these particular transfers back through their “StudioCanal” logos, however, I presume that this is the soundtrack from the 2005 French DVD release, which was credited to one Xavier Berthelot. He seems to be playing on a synthesized piano rather than a real one, and frequently when he Mickey-Mouses the action it becomes clear that the sync is off by a second or two. That’s no good. For the most part, the score meanders as though the pianist hasn’t seen the movie yet, and focuses on the superficial at the expense of the underlying significance. That may well be historically accurate, at least for a lesser movie house in 1927, but the style of the music itself wasn’t, and once real authenticity went out the window, the music might as well have been better and smarter. Several times I wanted to turn it off so I could get a better sense of what was really going on, but that wouldn’t have been satisfying either.

The movie is a very rudimentary melodrama – two boxers fight for one girl, known as “The Girl” – but the filmmaking holds up very well. The technique seems ahead of its time; particularly so, in fact, when contrasted with the dated substance of the story. The performances are quite relaxed and tasteful compared to the wide-eyed knuckle-biting that one might expect from a movie like this, and it’s very well shot. Hitchcock pulls all sorts of clever artsy tricks out of his sleeve that stylistically fall somewhere in between Murnau’s Sunrise (from the same year) and the trademark Hitchcock visual style of the later movies. Several scenes ended with sardonic visual “winks” that I think I would have been able to recognize as Hitchcock without any help.

But the movie is far more memorable as a string of cinematic ideas than as any kind of emotional experience. Because of the care and attention to detail, at first you might think that it’s a nuanced elaboration on the typical melodramatic love triangle, but the nuances don’t tally up properly and it all ends as patly as any other forgettable formula flick. Hitchcock the writer doesn’t fare as well as Hitchcock the director, but I get the impression that the writer was mostly interested in setting the director up with things he wanted to shoot visually.

I particularly liked a shot of a boxing match, framed as though the viewer has just entered at the back of a large audience and is not quite able to see the boxers over the silhouetted heads of the crowd. Also a startling effect when the camera takes the POV of a drunk and the image smears as the camera begins to tilt queasily downward. The whole movie builds up to – surprise! – a boxing match, and the finale is a very laudable attempt to make a high-tension scene of action. It’s not nearly as polished as the action sequences that Hitchcock would later achieve (and which would go on to engender a whole realm of filmmaking in themselves) but it’s smart and looks good. When the camera pushes in on each of the boxers in turn as they approach each other, it feels like we’re seeing the future of movies. TCM could totally put that shot in a promo.

Anyway. Naomi Watts was pretty good as “The Girl” in the American remake but the rest of the story got a little muddled. Jack Black was miscast in my opinion. And when Doris Day screams it’s not as scary as in the Japanese version.

But that’s Hollywood for ya!

High Plains Drifter (1973)
directed by Clint Eastwood
written by Ernest Tidyman

Thanks, TCM.

This movie simply does not make sense, morally or otherwise. I’m not going to enumerate the problems. It has only two things going for it to distinguish it from other bleak westerns, and they’re the two reasons I watched it through to the end.

One is that Clint, in the role of false idol, makes the wicked people of Wickedville undertake a series of absurd tasks (painting the town red to look like hell, preparing a picnic welcome for their enemies) purely for grim ironic value. Awfully theatrical, would-be-literary stuff for the genre, especially dissonant when the rest of the movie has such a cheap, exploitative flavor. That kept me watching, just to see if they were really going to paint it red. Yup, they did.

Two is that the Clint character is so unbelievably steely that the movie ultimately has to suggest that he is not a real person but rather some kind of avenging ghost – that is, the character follows its Clint Eastwood-ness into a cul-de-sac of impossibility, from which the only escape is a supernatural explanation. Those mannerisms turn out not to be any real cowboy dude – his character is officially explained as having been no more and no less than the essence of his mannerisms.

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy myself watching it. But only because “it was on.” I’m glad I didn’t rent it and set aside time to watch it; I would have enjoyed it much less. I am surprised to note that this is #546 of the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, which series of lists I’ve taken an interest in lately. I don’t think you must see this.

The Simpsons Movie (2007)
directed by David Silverman
written by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Ian Maxtone-Graham, George Meyer, David Mirkin, Mike Reiss, Mike Scully, Matt Selman, John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, and others

The lack of any consistent attitude toward its own characters has rendered The Simpsons far less interesting than it once was, years ago. Where once the show was about a family, now the show is about The Simpsons, and the writers are keen to let us know that they think the whole idea of The Simpsons is ridiculous. The only way they can redeem the tedious task of coming up with more shit for The Simpsons to do, they want us to know, is by heckling themselves and getting to be class clown in their own classroom. This is then immediately followed by the shit they dutifully came up with, which claims to be of actual interest as a plot, or as an emotional situation. But after being repeatedly reminded that The Simpsons is just another damn franchise and can you believe you’re watching a damn movie of it, and can you believe how ridiculous this plot is – in fact, we intentionally made it the most ridiculous thing we could think of! – you can’t help but feel detached. Thin soup compared to the days where the Simpsons were handled like characters and not just action figures. The only possible metric now is whether each discrete joke is good. Check plus! Check minus! Check! Check minus! An hour and a half of that.

If that’s going to be your game, Airplane at least is both giddy and deadpan; The Simpsons is neither.

A reasonable number of the jokes were reasonably good.

Final grade: check.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
written by Maya Deren
directed by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid

18 minutes, avant-garde classic. I swear I made this movie on video, starring my sister, when I was 12. I’m not sure how I was aware that films like this existed, but I was absolutely making fun of them / indulging in their tropes with our video camera as a kid. And then again in high school, I put a good deal of time into making a silly surreal short that takes place in a dream, very much in the spirit of this movie. I must have been imitating something I had seen, but it couldn’t have been this, because I only saw this for the first time a month ago. So at some level, somewhere in our culture, clearly this has been influential.

It looks cheap and loose, but I don’t think that can possibly have been avant-garde chic; it was just made on the cheap. Ms. Deren is apparently supposed to be playing that tried and true character “A Woman,” but her appearance reveals her immediately not to be a generic person at all, but in fact some sort of artsy eccentric, the kind of person who might make this movie but would never have been cast in it if it had been made by anyone else. This gives the movie the feeling of being an amateur, backyard affair. That too, is no chic – it’s just the truth. Nonetheless the vibe is right for the material – dreams and visions are themselves a loose, backyard business.

The dreamily cyclical construction is strong and artful and the most interesting thing here. The images are of various qualities – some of them you have to do the work on their behalf. The mirror-face creature was neat. But, unlike my teenage parody-homage efforts in this genre, this seemed have a specific intended meaning, and it seemed to be a very rudimentary and melodramatic feminism, and I didn’t care for that. An evocation of dreams is all well and good, but if you have something to say, say it. Ms. Deren, do you have something you want to share with the class?

Avant-garde techniques are obviously legitimate. It’s when the avant-garde purports to be addressing social wrongs that it becomes deserving of ridicule. An experience that is esoterically refined is unlikely to be an experience with enough direct force to create social change, and vice versa. The only thing that social responsibility and esoteric refinement have in common is that they are both ways artists can justify their work – when an artist grabs at both rings at once, it’s time to call them out as pretentious – or, what’s more generous (and more common), as having insufficient clarity of purpose.

Meshes of the Afternoon was a little pretentious but I’m glad I saw it. 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die #157.

Juno (2007)
written by Diablo Cody
directed by Jason Reitman

In the end, a cute enough movie, but Diablo Cody should not have won an Oscar for this. The script is larded with her personal knickknacks, a barrage of affectations apparently meant to charm us but too scattershot in execution to even gather any coherent force of personality. Which is to say her dialogue is like a MySpace page. Luckily, about halfway through, her zeal for making every sentence sassy starts to wane as she gets bogged down by the plot that she has to make work out, and she finally steps aside to let us just see the movie. That’s a good move because the movie itself has been made by pros.

The most interesting thing about the movie for me, for which I suppose Diablo Cody deserves credit, is that after establishing that in the movie’s worldview, Jennifer Garner’s character is a joke and not to be approved of, the movie slowly and quietly goes about approving of her. Even though she represents the sort of square person who would think that the dialogue in this movie is sophomorically self-indulgent. Maybe, the movie says by the end, that’s a more grown-up thing to think. Of course that doesn’t redeem the script entirely. But it did help me leave with a more pleasant taste in my mouth than when I had begun.

I don’t know if this is a socially irresponsible movie or what but it didn’t bother me. While I was watching it, anyway. I guess kids probably shouldn’t see a movie that makes teen pregnancy look like hip, cozy fun.

Now that I think about it, maybe this was a bad movie. But in the moment, I felt otherwise, so I’m going to go with that.

Breaking Away (1979)
written by Steve Tesich
directed by Peter Yates

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die #647. That’s three down right here!

Mom’s been telling me to see this for and years years, but I think I might have waited too long. Right before I finally saw it, she actually said, “well, we liked it when we saw it 30 years ago; I don’t know what it will seem like now.” Yeah. It seemed dated. I could recognize that it was warm-hearted and unassuming, and could imagine what it might have been like when it wasn’t dated. But now it is. It plays like an after-school special, somehow both too earnest to take seriously and too silly to take seriously. There is the slight impression that it is all being read to us by a school librarian. It’s all about spending time with the characters, but the characterizations are RL4. Everything in the plot is standard fare, so it’s gotta be all about the particular atmosphere, and I think I just came too late to this party to develop any attachment to it; my childhood warm 70s atmosphere movies were other movies, and I seem to have outgrown the ability to instantly experience atmosphere emanating from everything – the saddest part of leaving childhood, frankly. I don’t have any problem with this movie or its fans; I just don’t know what it can be worth to me at this point; the goods themselves seemed to me very obviously unexceptional in every respect. I would be interested to hear an argument as to why this is an enduring classic rather than just a movie that felt heartwarming to people in 1979.

So, I just now googled around to find people saying why they love it, and the gist seems to be that it perfectly captures the feeling of being adrift in life after high school. To me it all felt rather blunt. Hanging out at the quarry and talking about whether or not to get a job is pretty on the nose, no? I think the bar for average mimetic subtlety in films, which has been steadily on the rise since the Great Train Robbery days, has gone up significantly even since 1979. Even the dumbest piece of Hollywood crapola these days has a fairly refined sense of how to polish a filmic moment; and on the other hand an artsy contemporary film that eschews polish is, you can be sure, going to offer a more sophisticated model of human experience than did Breaking Away.

So maybe, I’m hearing in what I’m saying, the answer was, I needed to watch this as a period piece, just as I would watch a Mary Pickford movie or something similarly stage-icated. Whereas I just watched it looking for a cute movie that might look like the 70s but would otherwise speak to me “directly.” It’s a little upsetting to think that a movie made more or less within my lifespan – a good movie, one that you must see before you die – is now so dated as to require historico-aesthetic distance to appreciate. Well, I guess all movies do, a little, once they’re more than a couple years old. But usually I just find myself latching on intuitively and playing my mental part with no difficulty, without conscious effort. Maybe the problem here was that Breaking Away now lies just on the cusp between movies that are “on average, contemporary in style” and movies that are “on average, dated in style” and so my instincts got confused and failed me.

Or maybe it just hasn’t aged so well, plain and simple. I don’t know; you tell me. It may also be that I don’t care that much about cycling. But I thought nobody did!

directed by Alfred Hitchcock
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
after the novel The Rainbird Pattern by Victor Canning (1972)

Hitchcock’s final movie. I’d heard that this was “a return to form for Hitchcock” and “slight but entertaining” and “a cute comedy-mystery” and the like. But it actually was pretty shameful stuff. That it was stupid was not really a surprise; what was sad was that it seemed actually sloppy, unprofessional. Hitchcock was very old and not doing too well by the time he made this, so I can’t hold it too much against him that it feels unpolished and vague; but Ernest Lehman was only 60, would go on to live almost 30 more years, and has no excuses. His screenplay (which Wikipedia tells me won an Edgar award for mystery writing!) is dumb not only in its larger structure but also in the details of each dialogue. Nearly every scene consists of two characters swapping summations of the current state of affairs, peppered with embarrassing less-than-double-entendres. When Eva Marie Saint says “I’m a big girl,” and Cary Grant says, “Yes, and in all the right places*” we cringe a little (don’t we?), but roll with it because it’s Cary Grant and he surely knows what he’s saying. When Bruce Dern says – oh god, something about peering into his crystal balls, or something, I’ve blocked it out – we cringe again, deeply, and this time, because it’s just Bruce Dern, we have no other recourse. My point here is that Ernest Lehman was always a bit adolescent when it came to sex, but at least in the 50s everything felt oblique to begin with, so a little snickering and turning red about sex seemed like just what the doctor ordered. Now it’s 1976 and it just seems immature that Ernie is still snickering and turning red. The movie revolves around two totally boring, low-chemistry long-term couples, both of which frequently resort to contorted metaphors and winking to talk about the prospect of potentially having sex. Which they do not, by the way, do at all in this movie, even off-screen, so the talk is just in there because Ernie felt it was mandatory. Which is also a bit sad.

There is a workable premise here, which is: our bumbling heroes are arbitrarily entrusted with the task of finding a long-lost heir to a great fortune, about whom nothing is known. Meanwhile, we the viewers find out that this long-lost heir is now in fact a nefarious criminal. What will happen next? From this premise, any number of things could happen that would be interesting, and I guess one or two of those things did ultimately happen, but they turned out not to be interesting after all.

Both the bad guy, William Devane, and his partner, the totally unsexy doofus-faced Karen Black, have more or less no screen charisma, though I’ll grant Devane that he has intriguingly weird teeth. Bruce Dern seems convinced he is playing a colorful character, and he certainly does do a lot of fidgeting, but of negligible interest to the audience. Barbara Harris fares the best, which isn’t saying much, by piling on the ham in her ham sandwich role. But wait, who are these people, again? A fake psychic and a cab driver and a what? Eh, forget it, I don’t care.

There is a pretty good runaway car sequence, shot more or less identically to the one in North By Northwest, but with somewhat better footage. But no music and no Cary Grant so it’s about even. There’s also one nice shot, a long shot of a cemetery, where two figures walk in parallel down different paths toward their convergence. It was interesting, but a little depressing, to find out that this one shot that struck me as attractive had actually been laboriously planned out by Hitchcock, with the paths specially constructed for the film, so as to suggest the lines in a Mondrian painting. Yes, I guess it sort of did look like that, but knowing how much thought and effort went into that one moderately interesting shot, I feel far less pleased by it. Couldn’t some of that effort have been redistributed into the rest of this silly movie?

Music is by John Williams, not quite so on-the-ball as with Jaws the previous year. The themes are cute, and harpsichord and piano on melody lend a certain 70s period flavor that I enjoyed. But as usual, he has a tendency to lay it on just a little thicker than he realizes – anyway, thicker than this eggshell of a movie can withstand. I had occasion to hear some of this music in advance of seeing the movie, and it primed me for something fun and dated, in the vein of the early Columbo episodes that Beth so enjoys. But Columbo, for all its sleepy hokum, has a certain degree of formulaic rigor. This just rolled around. Poor Hitch.

Trailer 1 and Trailer 2. Links work right now, anyway.

Covers of the first edition, and the pre-movie tie-in edition, of the book – is it possible that anyone, anywhere, has read this? – upon which. For those who are wondering, “Mrs. Rainbird” is the name of the rich old lady who wants her missing heir found. Now you see.

* presumably i.e. principally the breasts.

directed by Ridley Scott
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples
after the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick

Another one that I saw not so much because I wanted to see it, but because everybody else has seen it, and enough is enough.

Most of the movie is about the production design, which is pretty impressive, in that comic book way. This particular brand of “wet grimy computer buildings” has pretty much gone on to become its own pulp industry. I don’t know that it all stems from this movie – probably not – but the movie is certainly a major milestone in the cultural development of “wet grimy computer buildings,” and it did come off as an important “text” to know, in that respect. Blade Runner may not contain the entire genome of futurist urban sci-fi noir, but it’s early enough and famous enough that I’m tempted to take it as spokesmovie for the genre.* Tempted, but not convinced, because it wasn’t that good. The conceptual (and visual) space in which the movie takes place has obviously been assembled with love, but the plot and pacing seem to have been worked out with relative disinterest, or perhaps in confusion. The noir playbook seemed to have been on hand but unread. Harrison Ford apparently has said something disparaging about the movie to the effect of “I played a detective who didn’t do any detecting.” He’s right – it’s not a mystery movie. It could maybe have been a sci-fi movie, but since it’s played as a mystery movie, it ends up not really being an anything movie. I haven’t read the Philip K. Dick original, but I gather that it’s not nearly as “noir” as this movie attempted to be. There’s an inherent worldview conflict between Dick’s swirling paranoid mysteries and noir’s weary hardened grimness, and it wasn’t resolved. By the time the bad guy was trying to kill our hero, then saving his life, then dying quasi-tragically, I knew we had truly lost our way – the movie didn’t know what it was about.

I saw the “Director’s Cut” version, in which one is supposed to wonder, at the end, whether maybe Harrison Ford is himself a doomed android. That this suggestion is neither surprising nor interesting – basically, it’s just another option out of the box of fictional options – is evidence that the movie hasn’t done its job.

The first shots are long-shot miniatures of the city, spewing industrial fire and looking generally like cyber-hell. Vangelis is on the soundtrack making his synth go “vwaaah.” We are meant to be awed by this vast alienness. This endless nightmare is now the world: VWAAAAH! It made me happy, somehow. Movies nowadays try to pull that kind of fantasy establishing-shot awe all the time, but they never manage it with as much force as they did back then. For one thing, miniatures and matte paintings are scarily tactile in a way that CGI will never be. For another, what then was an actual motivated directorial idea (“Let’s start with an awe-inspiring shot of the whole city”) is now enacted only as a category of cliche (“Let’s start with one of those awe-inspiring-shot-of-the-whole-city things.”) This silly example maybe informs the old question of whether it’s arbitrary to value creative ideas more when they’re new than when they’re widespread and familiar – sometimes the familiarity is not just historical fact but also inherent in the execution. That is, it’s not just that we get numb to things as they become customary – they’re actually handled differently. In this case I think the most quantifiable differences were that the shot was held much longer than it ever would be today, and that the soundtrack went straight for the gut of “cosmic awe” in a way that, I think, contemporary audiences would consider embarrassing or over-the-top. That’s most likely because neither they nor contemporary Hollywood believe that anyone will experience actual raw naked awe by just watching a fantasy movie. That’s an old-fashioned kind of goal. Old-fashioned like 1980.

I don’t know if you were aware, but Daryl Hannah has designed two board games.

Cover of the first edition of the book upon which.

* Always shocking to realize that a thing made since my birth was an “early” example of anything.

written and directed by Steven Spielberg

This movie is pretty nuts. As I said at the beginning of this entry: when I was a kid, movies made sense to me only as pure successions of events and feelings – the way a pop album seems to make a vague and misty kind of overall “sense” after you get to know it. My example there was The Empire Strikes Back, which, upon adult review, revealed mundane and rational efforts toward sense-making and reminded me how much was lost on me as a kid. Close Encounters, I find, has gone in the other direction entirely – what intuitively made color-and-sound sense to me as a kid now seems bizarre because I can get nothing else out of it – it refuses to reveal any other kind of sense. If you stop to ask why anything in this movie is happening – really, almost anything in the movie – you find yourself faced with a strange and potentially disturbing fog. All roads lead back to the senses.

I nowadays find it essentially impossible not to ask “so what am I seeing, here” about things I see in movies. It’s not a conscious choice, it’s just how grown people react to stimuli. Short of being 8 years old, I’m not sure how one is supposed to re-attain the placid state of unquestioning acceptance that the movie requires. Only an 8-year-old can comprehend the conceptual chyme of He-Man or Pokemon without concentrated effort; it comes down to the ability to ignore implications. If you ignore the implications and stick to what’s happening in front of your eyes only, Close Encounters can be experienced as a reasonable succession of related events, and to the degree that they are individually interesting to watch, it’s a fun movie. But it doesn’t add up, intellectually speaking, nor – and this is what’s weird – does it even make sense as pulp. What genre of pulp is it?

The final scene seems clearly to be saying something heartwarming about brotherhood and “we’re all in this crazy universe together; re mi do do sol = love.” And the rest of the movie leads, more or less, to that scene, but it in no way lead to that message – it’s full of other, completely contradictory stuff, like the horror scene where the sky breaks into Melinda Dillon’s house. “Come in through the door! Come in through the door!” Fun to watch but absolutely unrelated. As is the main Richard Dreyfuss story of life-discarding obsession, which our hero follows to its ultimate conclusion, stepping off the planet forever. Towards what? Something transcendentally wonderful, apparently – Verklärung of some kind, the creepiest possible prize. He’s taken into the heart of mystery without it becoming unmysterious, which might mean something to us as viewers (in that sound-and-color sense) but is simply impossible for him. The absurdity is made clear by that ridiculous extra scene they added to the 1980 version, where you get to see what it looks like inside the spaceship: Looks like the rest of Roy Neary’s life is probably going to be terrifying and incomprehensible! Follow your dreams, kids! At the climactic moment, the music blossoms into “When You Wish Upon a Star” – but who said anything about wishing? He got zapped in the head! The movie wants to be about the magic and wonder of wishing, the feeling of wishing – but not wishing FOR anything.

Maybe in its objectless sense of yearning and its completely diffused generic spirituality, the movie is an unintentional metaphor for the formless discontent in the heart of the American middle class. (Or maybe everyone in contemporary society! I only know about the American middle class.) After all, we’re meant to understand that Roy Neary has, in fact, made a wish – because he’s explicitly shown to be a middle-American everyman, so he must of course have made the vague wish that every middle-American everyman makes: to maybe be rich and famous or something, I dunno. Or, like, to cure cancer, or like, fly on a UFO, something like that. I definitely want something, but I seem to have food and shelter and a job and a family and a train set and Goofy Golf, so that can’t be it, but I swear there’s something else I want. Maybe it’s to leave my wife and kids and drive through a fence with the single mom from down the street. Whatever it is, it’s real, real important and I don’t have it yet.

The movie is the fulfillment of that exact fantasy – that SOMETHING will finally happen, and it will be glorious, and important, and mean something – in all its lack of content, and that lack of content is what disturbed me this time. The big number at the end of the movie is a musical conversation between the aliens and the people, but the people do not actually participate, nor do they know what they’re saying! The computerized keyboard somehow starts to handle our half of the dialogue for us. One of the technicians comments, “It’s the first day of school, boys!” But of course neither he nor anyone else present is learning anything, or even obliged to pay attention. Someone else asks “What are we saying to each other?” I don’t know, man! I really don’t know! It’s a sequence about the joy of communication with ABSOLUTELY NO COMMUNICATION! Right now this somehow seems deeply sad to me.

When I was in high school I came up with this thing that seemed pithy at the time, possibly because I was in high school – that Close Encounters was Old Testament to E.T.‘s New Testament. Certainly the Jesus/E.T. parallels are blatant enough – healing powers, message of love, dying to save Elliott and then being resurrected and returning to the heavens while spiritually remaining “right here” – not to mention Peter Coyote’s character being named “Dr. Pontius Pilate”*. The Close Encounters/Old Testament connection that I saw at the time was only that the aliens, like the God of Abraham, are totally unpredictable and not above shock and awe tactics in pursuit of goals that only they can fully comprehend. E.T. comes in the form of a little man, more or less, whereas these gods summon clouds and pillars of fire. But now I see a further connection – that the ominous and inscrutable character of the Old Testament God arises from the choppy synthesis of the Old Testament itself – separate stories with quite different conceptions of God all rammed together – and that Close Encounters operates the same way. What mystery it contains arises from its being a fairly addled movie.

In the bonus materials, Steven Spielberg, interviewed on the set of Saving Private Ryan (1998), clearly wants to distance himself from the younger person who made Close Encounters, and who thought it was an important movie to make. He seems about as embarrassed as one could be about such a phenomenonally successful and beloved movie. Which is to say slightly embarrassed.

It’s okay, Steve. You don’t need to be embarrassed. Nobody’s paying close attention to it and I promise I won’t try to ever again. As color and sound it’s still fun. It’s more like a music video than a movie, in some ways. All that pointless forward momentum and those empty climaxes – that’s what music is. It all quite resolutely signifies nothing and who says that can’t be satisfying?

Maybe it sounds like I say that, but I don’t. Oh wait, I sort of did up there, didn’t I. When I said that I’m not 8 years old and can’t watch it like that anymore. Yeah, but maybe I can if I’m sleepy.

* Joke.

directed by Robert Altman
screenplay by Robert Altman and Frank Barhydt
based on the writings of Raymond Carver

This one’s just a two-word review: “Shit Cuts.”

No, just kidding. But I do want to keep this short, and I wasn’t thrilled about this pretentious ponderous movie. All the Robert Altman movies that I’ve seen – which is only a few, but a famous few – have this remarkably dead, false feeling. The camera just sits there (except for when it occasionally careens around hyper-purposefully) and the actors go about their scenes like actors going about scenes. Maybe it’s supposed to play as a cool, literary distance, but to me it usually feels like the bread never rose. I see that things have been written, staged, performed, and shot, but I feel like they’ve been intentionally prevented from cohering to one another by any means other than pressure; that once they leave the frame, all the elements clatter back down on the table, totally inert. There’s no sense of a force of art or belief or anything that binds the actors to each other, to the sets, to the writing. There’s no stick in it. And given the kinds of things Altman does oh-so-intentionally – parallel stories rubbing shoulders, parallel dialogues rubbing shoulders – not to mention the fact that his movies, including this one, are so widely respected: I have to think that the loose, limp, humorless, ain’t-got-that-swing of every damn scene is somehow part of some kind of vision. But I don’t think it gets him anything; I think it’s just a mistake, a basic artistic shortcoming. The Player is good despite the fact that it feels like a world made of all soft-velcro, no hooks. Credit Thomas Newman’s score for submerging the whole movie in a vibe, any vibe, and thus saving it for the audience. Gosford Park was also dead on its feet, but at least had busy writing and production design that could be enjoyed nonetheless. What bits I was able to like about Short Cuts I liked similarly – only with a considerable handicap taken into account. As scenes played out, I was able to imagine how, in their original Carver short story form, they might have had some kind of edge. But as they actually stood, they had been completely defanged by the blandness that was in every frame. Nashville saved itself somewhat by having some really peculiar content; everything in Short Cuts, unfortunately, was really very straightforward. All the less reason that it should have been allowed to be so flagrantly slack. I’m all for leisurely pacing, but only when the film goes deep enough to sustain my thoughts over the long shots. Here each long shot was just a chance to ensure that the ball was good and dropped.

Lyle Lovett is in this movie as a baker. He supposedly acts testy and then cruel and then remorseful and maybe some other stuff, but you could have fooled me because it’s Lyle Lovett and he just looks like a banana bread the whole time. The whole movie was like that, Robert Altman apparently likes it – I mean, he cast Lyle Lovett! – and it’ll take a whole lot of Siskels to convince this Ebert that it’s anything but clumsy and deadening. And three hours of clumsy and deadening makes for a boring-ass movie.

Didn’t expect myself to be this negative! At the time I was open to it; I didn’t mind watching it. But in retrospect it really let me down. Let the record show.