directed by Alfred Hitchcock
written by Ernest Lehman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

** Well, maybe in Passion, sort of.

directed by Paul Provenza

A movie where a lot of different comedians tell the same joke is a good idea – seeing people trying to make entertainment work is always interesting. Seeing multiple attempts at the same material, in parallel, can call both the craft and value of art into focus and can offer a chance to really appreciate the skill and effort of each artist. I still think a great movie could be made that would just be a simple document of many different actors performing the same short scene, as in an audition. Whenever I’ve found myself as one of the people “behind the table” at acting auditions where everyone reads the same scene, I end up feeling that I’ve watched a fascinating study of the scene itself and of the individual actors – and through them, of big issues like art and human nature as a whole. Really.

The Aristocrats, at least in theory, had the potential to offer that sort of insight, and some of the reviews I read suggested that it would. (A.O. Scott, attempting to demonstrate that he had seen beyond the veneer of potty-humor, called it several silly things including “one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism in any medium I have encountered in quite some time.”) But it fails. This is not to say that it is not amusing and/or worth seeing (it’s a bit long and fairly monotonous, but I generally enjoyed myself), just to say that despite its pretentions of being a window onto wider issues, it actually offers little insight into comedy or comedians, or even, ultimately, into the particular joke that it’s all about.

The movie is doomed to fail, really, by the choice of material. The joke (Guy goes into a talent agent to pitch his family’s act, says, “[elaborate pitch for surreal stage routine so repellent that it shocks those listening to the joke],” talent agent says “and what do you call yourselves?,” guy says, “The Aristocrats.”) is not a true joke, and is thus unsuitable for this documentary’s purposes.

Yes, it has a punchline, but the punchline is only funny in that it defies expectations – specifically, the expectations that are held for the JOKE, rather than for the situation. It is only a meta-joke*, a joke that toys with audiences grown accustomed to standard joke formats. This seems like a blatantly obvious thing to point out, but several people in the film talk about how the point of the joke is that the name of the act is so absurdly misguided and quaint after all the vulgarity, and some of the comedians who tell the joke seem really to believe this.** They are wrong. The humor is in fact that the joke-teller has gone to such indefensibly offensive ends for this shaggy-dog punchline. It’s just anti-icing on the cake that the punchline is, in an incredibly faint way, identifiable as a garden-variety “high/low joke.”

On a related note, I have long felt that it is a significant cultural error to have made “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!” our all-purpose archetypal “joke,” since it’s only funny because it’s an ill-formed joke – i.e. it has a question and answer but the content is unfunny. Watching this movie I felt like the same mistake was being made – the movie was all about comedy and yet had this un-joke at its center.

The movie recognizes that the joke is all about shocking the audience, but the shock is only in response to the fact that the joke-teller is being so tasteless as to think it is acceptable to tell this joke. Certainly nobody is shocked that the man in the act eats his own poop or whatever; we’ve already written off his reality as being ridiculous***. Since the humor, therefore, results from the dynamic between the comedian and his audience, it is a joke that can hardly work out of context (the context is, as acknowledged in the film, the only reason that Gilbert Gottfried’s much-praised telling of the joke at the Hugh Hefner roast was so apt and successful), a joke that can hardly work in a staged performance situation (such things are meant to be told one-on-one, like scary stories), a joke that really can’t work in a movie (where the performers are nowhere near their audiences in space or time), and a joke that absolutely cannot work more than once, no matter how different the telling. All we can enjoy about seeing different people play with the joke is see what their imagination does to fill a space where there is no viable comedy goal, nothing left to accomplish. We see comedians falling back on their generic tricks, on their other material, because they have been asked to tell a non-joke to people who already know that it’s a waste of their time.

Alternately, we see less lazy comedians giving their best shot to writing new material “inspired by” the original non-joke, which has the potential to be an interesting exercise in its own way, I suppose, but I didn’t think any of the results were all that great. Sarah Silverman’s “I was an Aristocrat” routine, which gets singled out for praise in many reviews I’ve read, seemed to me like just an application of a typical deadpan formula (perhaps one of semi-recent vintage, but I’ve certainly seen it many times before). The movie also features applications of useful inversion formulas, anti-climax formulas, etc. Could have been interesting if they’d broken that down.

Anyway, the comedians in the movie are generally smart about all this stuff, and there is a fair amount of acknowledgement that a singularly unenlightening subject has been chosen for the movie. The implication of the filmmaking, though, is that the filmmakers, by perversely choosing the “wrong” joke, have actually gotten at something revealing. But every time one of the subjects said, “Why’d you have to pick this joke? This is a terrible joke and I don’t think it’s very interesting,” I tended to agree with them. The fact that the excessive gross-out riff is an undeniable element of American humor – pathetic, childish, and generally unfunny, but valuable in its way, as such – is something I’ve known since elementary school recess, and this movie didn’t add depth or breadth to that knowledge.

At the very least, given the concept and the interviewees, there was a fascinating movie that could have been made about the art, craft, and philosophy of humor, and these filmmakers willingly threw away that opportunity. What they actually made is just a good-natured, long, repetitive montage of occasionally-funny dead-baby-joke “jamming.” Seems like a waste. Still worth seeing though, for all the famous people joking around informally. I enjoyed the movie, I would say, in the same way I enjoy all behind-the-scenes footage.

Oh, also, I know this was a zero-budget casual movie, but of the few actual cinematographic choices involved, several struck me as dumb. Why did they shoot some people with two newsroom-style perpendicular cameras and have them look into both? That was awful.

* Wikipedia currently has separate but overlapping articles on Anti-humor, Meta-joke, and (soon to be deleted) Non-joke.

** Paul Reiser, in particular, makes a game effort to make the joke work as a joke about the extreme misguidedness of the eager Aristocrat. I respected him for trying – at least he, unlike most of the comedians in the movie, was trying to actually sell the joke – but there’s just no way. It’s like trying to sell the idea that, no, there really is something kind of funny (and sad!) about this dog not actually being as shaggy as everyone says, after all that…

*** Which is why comedians in the movie get laughs talking about how in reality, the man with the act would have been jailed and the talent agent would certainly have tried to prevent the horrible act from happening – it’s all absurd, because of course these stick figures have never come anywhere near reality, where they could do anything actually offensive. It’s only the comedian drawing the stick figures who can be held responsible for their actions.

directed by Harry Winer
screenplay by W.W. Wicket (pseud. for Clifford Green) and Casey T. Mitchell
after a story by Patrick Bailey and Larry B. Williams

When SpaceCamp came out in 1986, my mother suggested that we go see it, but I refused. Later, when it was available on video, she suggested that we rent it, but I again refused. I remember telling her why: because I already knew what was going to happen. Kids were going to accidentally get sent into space and then come back. I didn’t need to see that. Her response was that maybe it would be exciting to see how they managed to get back. But I knew that it wouldn’t.

I was correct. It is now 19 years later and I have seen SpaceCamp and can report to the world that it is indeed not worth seeing.

Beth has a story about SpaceCamp that I have been given permission to tell here. She really liked SpaceCamp, as a kid, and rented the video repeatedly. One day she saw that the local newspaper’s TV schedule listed SpaceCamp as a two-star movie. Disturbed, she asked her mother how it was possible that the newspaper only gave it two stars. Her mother replied that it was probably because newspapers cared about things like lighting and sound quality. Good answer.

The laziness of the screenplay is severe. No thought seems to have been given to the question of making the characters appealing rather than annoying. Nor does any of the attempted character interest (or humor) make any sense; it’s all just copied out of the mid-80s “a-bunch-of-kids” playbook. Kate Capshaw’s character, ostensibly the authority figure, follows exactly the same cues, which is an actual error in hack-work. Frequent and extended references to Star Wars are, as with Kevin Smith, a good indicator of complete creative bankruptcy.

That one of the screenwriters chose to duck out under a pseudonym suggests that either a) It wasn’t this bad the way he wrote it, or b) he was only getting a paycheck – the story-writers had already doomed this to trash. Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine that the fault is actually the director’s (or the actors’) – though it is indeed poorly directed and acted. And edited.

I wish I had known in advance that Leaf Phoenix and Joaquin Phoenix are the same person.

The movie is both a Happy-Meal-cutout version of NASA (staffed by clueless technicians and a crazy talking robot!) and a thoroughly branded advertisement for the real NASA, which doesn’t sit well. I assume that the crucial negligence and rocket booster malfunction were even less delightful to audiences in 1986. The movie plays like one of those embarrassing promotional or instructional videos that add “Hey, Joe, what’s that you’ve got there?” characters and dialogue to what would otherwise be dry content… except that the movie consists only of those characters, and the real NASA has been driven entirely offscreen. But the movie maintains that same sense of having been created by enthusiastic businessmen who possess only a distracted amateur’s understanding of what will be entertaining. Occasional footage of the real shuttle, taken from different film stock and poorly integrated, serves to remind us of the extremely remote connection to reality that is nonetheless the only reason that the movie exists.

The movie does contain, however, a sequence in which a kid floats off helplessly into the void. It’s not very well written or shot, but it doesn’t matter – that’s a death that kids actually fantasize nervously about, and there it is being played out on the screen. I’m not going to say it redeemed the movie, but it was certainly a high point.

Music was once again by Mr. John Williams, in his trademark 80s-patriotism mode. It was no “NBC News Theme,” but it was certainly professional, which put it so far beyond the rest of the production that I was almost embarrassed for it. “Don’t get so heroic!” I wanted to tell the music, “that’s obviously a model and nobody cares anyway!”

This is actually a real mistake made by a lot of movie music – wherein the music attains a level of sweep and impact to which the movie cannot rise. I think a lot of directors, and perhaps composers, think that they can redeem weak-blooded filmmaking with strong music, but it never works that way. At least not for me. Music’s best bet is to match the level of the visual and thereby endorse it, rather than be caught leaving it in the dust as it goes on to greater things; that looks bad for everyone. I think John Williams frequently makes the mistake of thinking that he can save movies from themselves – when there is a dramatic gap in the movie, he tries to fill it. I recently listened to some of his Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone music independent of the film, and was surprised to find that I thought it was pretty apt and well done – because during the movie, I had thought it was noisy and uninspired. I think that I was actually responding to the movie’s being unbearably flat and dead – and so was he, by writing a lot of music meant to convey things that the image didn’t (like fun and excitement, for example). Unfortunately, in the context of a movie, that generally doesn’t work, and the independent value of the music gets lost – it just sounds like it’s watching some other movie or is insensitive to this one. The image always precedes, no matter how crappy.

On the other hand, in this case, the composer’s characteristically awkward comments about the film on the score LP suggest that he was indeed watching some other movie. Maybe John Williams’ problem is that he genuinely isn’t sensitive enough to movie-quality:

In the creation of SpaceCamp, Director Harry Winer and Executive Producer Leonard Goldberg have given us a marvelous movie! The film succeeds as pure entertainment while simultaneously succeeding on several other levels… I feel honored to have been asked to compose this score, and I feel particularly proud of my association with SpaceCamp and its creators.

The ellipsis elides some patriotic effusions about the space program. How embarrassing!

I think I’ve used the word “embarrassing” five or six times in talking about this movie.* I have no regrets there.

* Depending on how you count: two, three, or four times.

directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by Michael Crichton and David Koepp
after the novel by Michael Crichton (1990)

I grew up thinking of Steven Spielberg as one of the basic brands. I didn’t just like his movies; he was, like Disney, a cultural axiom. I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the extreme foreignness of people my age who were brought up to have reservations (or worse) about the old Disney properties. On the other hand, I never felt any particular loyalty to Warner Brothers cartoons, though I enjoyed watching them, and childhoods that embraced those as being culturally fundamental strike me as similarly alien. There must be a name in marketing for that kind of acceptance, acceptance that goes beyond mere critical opinion to being part of one’s cultural cosmology. In fact, it can be quite independent of opinion: as a kid I never really thought “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was any good, but I watched it anyway because it was, for want of a better word, undeniable.

Anyway, Steven Spielberg was undeniable in my childhood, and furthermore, I actually liked watching our video copies of E.T., Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Duel, and, eventually, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But at the time that I was reaching the age of general movie-readiness at 11 or 12, the Spielberg brand had gotten weirdly sidetracked by stuff like Always and Hook, and when Jurassic Park was announced, there was a sense that this was my first chance to be present for the unveiling of one of these momentous things. For all intents and purposes, those other movies had come out before my time, alive though I may have been. I guess there must also have been some sort of unprecedented all-around hype for the release, since my grandmother felt compelled to come out of moviegoing retirement, for the one and only time, to accompany us to see this dinosaur action movie, of all things.

Upon returning from this historic occasion there was the sense, in my family, that it had been both thrilling and fun and, simultaneously, all-around not very good. I remember feeling, during the opening scenes, the grown-up-flavored disappointment of recognizing that despite the brand, the dinosaurs, and the hype, “Steven Spielberg” had made something was not, in fact, undeniable.

Huge swaths of this movie are eminently deniable; most of the non-special-effects time is, to one degree or another, clunky and unconvincing. Spielberg has a very strong sense of pacing and of visual storytelling, but in his movies of the past 15 years, he has done a frustratingly uneven job of actually delivering screenplays, line-for-line, to the audience. In Jurassic Park, it frequently seems like he made production design choices for each scene as a whole and storyboard-style choices for the shot compositions, but didn’t have any particular strategy for conveying the actual individual lines and stage directions in the script. As a result, a lot of sequences play as annoyingly artificial – almost condescendingly so – because the writing, never quite integrated into the filmmaking, hangs apart from it in a dumb, transparent way.

For example, an early scene, wherein Sam Neill describes death by velociraptor to intimidate an annoying kid, falls completely flat. It’s downright embarrassing. But despite what it might seem, the scene as written is reasonable enough, and watching it again, I think that Sam and, yes, that unpleasantly cast kid each do a perfectly serviceable job. So why does the scene feel like such garbage? I blame Spielberg. He shoots it like he knows that it’s cute (“when you see that claw, I want you to bug your eyes out, okay?”) but doesn’t expect us to really care about what’s being said, only the overall gist of the intimidation – the actual dialogue gets hung out to dry. The audience (and the director) are just waiting it out so we can get a cheap punchline when the kid whimpers at the end, defeated. Spielberg sells the broader cliché and deals with the specifics impatiently, and as a result, the specifics end up seeming like a charmless burden on the scene, an inefficient and annoying way of accomplishing something that, as Spielberg sees it, is fundamentally crude and simple.

Put another way, in actors’ terms: Spielberg doesn’t help try to “find the truth” in the scene as written – he approaches the scene in terms of its function, and lets the actors worry about making what they’re doing seem likely. But since he’s using his camera to sell something else, they don’t really stand a chance.

This happens again and again. In the awed moment of seeing the dinosaurs for the first time, Neill’s character tosses off a whole bunch of “scientist” dialogue, like “We could tear up the rule book on cold-bloodedness. It doesn’t apply.” The scene tries to swallow this up because it doesn’t really want him to be having this kind of reaction in the midst of all that awe – but he says it all the same, and we in the audience squirm and think, “That’s so lame that he’s saying that! This script is so dumb!” Or the scenes at headquarters, with Wayne Knight spouting tech talk and Samuel L. Jackson sucking absurdly on a cigarette. Koepp and Crichton put this stuff in the script to be heard, but Spielberg decides to shoot it like it’s just background noise, and it ends up seeming gratingly phony. He should either have shot to the dialogue and made a slightly more Crichton-esque movie, or have said, “sorry guys, but I’m cutting this script down to a little comic book dialogue and that’s it, because that’s all I want this movie to be.” The “Mr. DNA” cartoon as technical explanation seems exactly on the level that Spielberg was willing to care about, whereas the “frog DNA somehow made it possible for the dinosaurs to reproduce” thing is obviously way over the sci-fi head of this basically scienceless monster movie, and should have been excised completely, rather than being pared down to a worthless nub.

In retrospect, I think this sort of problem was the reason that Amistad was so unpleasant and ineffective. It’s not so much that it was sanctimonious – it was that it used the specifics of the script as a mere means of getting at the big clichés. Spielberg does his best work when he actually cares about getting the details across, when he thinks that what is happening in a given line or in a given moment could, in and of itself, be interesting to the audience. I think this is probably how he managed to make something worthy out of Schindler’s List – because he was unable to fall back on seeing any given event as being just a mechanism for creating some larger effect; he had to address each point as though it mattered. He certainly has the skill to do something strong with anything that matters to him.

In Jurassic Park, clearly what matters to him is the action sequences. The bit with the tyrannosaurus and the minivans is far and away the best thing in the movie, and holds up well. The bit with the kids being stalked around the kitchen by velociraptors is also pretty satisfying. The scenes where people are talking to each other are as boring to us as they must have been to Steven.

Let me however mention that despite Spielberg’s apparent disinterest, Bob Peck manages to eke some appeal out of the absolutely bone-thin non-character of Muldoon. I also feel warmly toward him because he was the lead in the excellent Jim Henson short The Soldier and Death.*

I ended up watching this again recently because I suddenly found myself with the opportunity to study the actual orchestral score to John Williams’ incidental music – something one generally cannot do. More on that later. I didn’t have a very clear memory of it, apart from the two main themes, which on first viewing, I remember, seemed overblown and unappealing, as though John Williams were making a clumsy attempt to sound like himself. (There’s also a very short motive signifying dino-danger – comparable to the “Jaws” motive in function, really – which is fairly effective though it’s never quite isolated clearly enough for the audience to really “learn” it.) Now, with benefit of the score, I can say that the two big melodies** are indeed rather weak as tunes, though thinking of them as solutions to specific expressive film-scoring problems has given me slightly more respect for them. I think that’s my review of the music as a whole – it doesn’t really add up to anything musically satisfying or even particularly coherent, but every problem posed by the movie is solved cleverly, expertly. Watching the movie with the score in hand makes it that much clearer to me just how many problems there are to solve in a movie like this. In a little interview I found online, the composer says

Jurassic Park has a 95-minute score. It pumps away all the time. It’s a rugged, noisy effort – a massive job of symphonic cartooning. You have to match the rhythmic gyrations of the dinosaurs and create these kind of funny ballets.

Like the man says, it’s a huge heap of disjointed cartoon music that plays as a very literal accompaniment to almost every shot. I suspect that my criticism of the directing might apply here as well; the best scene in the movie is unscored, and it seems like maybe the whole thing would have been scarier and more involving if the music had taken a less balletic, more dramatic approach, playing the content rather than the kinetics. But that’s obviously not how Spielberg saw it or wanted it. The movie as a whole is a ballet of cars falling down trees and dinosaurs jumping through ceiling panels – a ballet where half the time, people aren’t dancing much, and are instead reading lines out of a Michael Crichton novel. Oh well. We all managed to sit through it; it may be lame but it’s all perfectly cheery and inoffensive. There’s hardly anything left in the movie that makes me cringe. Hook will take me longer, I’m afraid. Amistad isn’t going to happen.

* Not to be confused with this.

** An acquaintance in college offered, for the climax of the hymn-like theme, the lyrics “We are dinosaurs, we are dinosaurs, we like to-o roar” and for the heroic main theme, the lyrics “We’re so amazing; we are made from DNA.” These are funny.

directed by Brian De Palma
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen
after the novel by Stephen King (1974)

I’ve got a backlog of nearly a month’s movie-watching to address. Luckily, a lot of it was pretty trashy stuff, so I’m hoping to zip through it quickly.

Carrie is pretty trashy stuff. Actually, the word I want to use is “sleazy.” This is the word that has come to mind for every Brian De Palma movie I have seen. Granted, I’ve only seen a few, and they didn’t include Scarface or The Untouchables, his “good” movies. But having seen The Fury (1978) and Snake Eyes (1998) to completion, and, on TV, most of Body Double (1984), Mission to Mars (2000) and Femme Fatale (2002), and some of Mission: Impossible (1996)… and now, of course, Carrie… I can say with some confidence that the man’s oeuvre is, on average, totally sleazy.

Or wait, is it “trashy” after all? What is the difference between sleaze and trash? To me, “trash” is something that aims shamefully low because it doesn’t care, or doesn’t know any better, whereas “sleaze” is something that aims shamefully low because its value system is actually inverted. Someone is sleazy if he does something low knowingly, and likes it. Sleazy movies are the ones that proudly say “some fuddy-duddies out there might think that it’s not right for us to put this in a movie – well, sorry, grandma, ’cause that’s the way it is!” The archetypal example would be onscreen nudity that the filmmakers dare you to write off as prurient, which is, in fact, blatantly prurient. That’s the first shot of Carrie, and the rest of the movie lives up to it nicely.

People who defend Brian De Palma will say that in his movies he “plays” with exploitation, “refers” to it, and that part of that “play” is dipping down into it a bit, which, yes, is a little bit sleazy, but knowingly so. That’s some pretty darn generous benefit-of-the-doubt. When I watched The Fury, a real live proponent of De Palma was present, and afterwards said that the movie had clearly been intended as a parody-criticism of action movies. When asked about John Cassavetes COMPLETELY EXPLODING INTO GORE at the very end of the movie, he said that it had obviously been a joke because it had been so outrageously tasteless. “Come on,” he said, “he showed it from six different angles. That’s not moviemaking, and of course De Palma knows that. There’s no other explanation.” But I think there is: sleaze.

My main thought while watching Carrie was that the flamboyant “Hitchcock Rulez!!” visual style managed to render trash out of the images themselves. You can call it “over-the-top” if you want, but that suggests someone who has taken good aim and gone too far in an otherwise reasonable direction. Whereas I didn’t feel like this movie took particularly good aim to begin with. The odd compositions and split screens and excessive camera movement didn’t seem like they were motivated by any kind of respectable impulse – they were directorial quirks that didn’t serve the material – something that could never be said of Hitchcock. The movie just seemed like a collection of seriously junky details that the filmmakers happened to think were cool. The story as filmed, which is pretty sparse to begin with, just felt like an excuse to show a girl get blood poured all over her. Stephen King obviously had some sexual repression/awakening/coming-of-age schlock in mind when he wrote it, and De Palma was certainly happy to put that stuff in the movie, film-school style, but it seemed extremely clear what his real interest was.

Umberto Eco has a little essay where he says that pornographic films are characterized by the need to waste our time with incredibly boring stuff, so as to set off and heighten the porn itself. He sums up: “If you are in a movie theater, and the time it takes the protagonists to go from A to B is longer than what you would like it to be, then it means the film is a porno.” I would add the more obvious reason that pornography is full of mindless tedium: filmmakers know they need a certain amount of material to create the sense of involvement that comes from a full-length form – this goes for romance novels too – and because they really don’t care that much, they do it in the laziest possible way. This movie felt like porn – a lot of time-killing and then something sleazy. Or trashy.

And it sounded like porn, too – a really astoundingly bad score by Pino Donaggio.

That the high school in the movie is called “Bates High School” is a good indication of both De Palma’s self-indulgence and level of sophistication.

I intended going to talk about the specifics of the movie, and also about apocalyptic endings in general, but I seem to have spent most of my time here complaining that Brian De Palma is sleazy and/or trashy. Hey, did you know he had a daughter named Lolita with James Cameron’s ex-wife? Seriously.

I still want to see Scarface.

Given that I still have SpaceCamp to write about, I think this has been plenty.

Oh but of course first: the pre-movie book covers. From left to right: first edition, first paperback edition, crazy first UK edition.

directed by Garson Kanin
written by Bella Spewack and Samuel Spewack
story by Leo McCarey, Bella Spewack and Samuel Spewack

Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I saw this on TCM. I think it’s proper to say I caught this on TCM, meaning (to me) that before it began, I neither knew that I was about to watch it nor had any particular intention to watch it, ever.

I had caught the first three-quarters of it, also on TCM, some months earlier, and had enjoyed it well enough, and was glad to get the chance to see the rest. But there was no need. A lot of the movie is loose and tepid, and I had already seen all the good stuff. Now that I’ve seen the whole thing I know that the good stuff accounts for a dissapointingly small percentage of the whole.

The good stuff is mostly Cary Grant clowning. His unique quality as a comic actor is, I think, that he himself is amused by what’s going on, but isn’t generally at liberty to come out and be open about it, 1) because as a charming well-bred fellow, it’s more suitable for him to say something witty, and 2) because it’s a movie and it would be improper for his character to be amused by circumstances that couldn’t possibly be amusing from his point of view. That is, his constant understated amusement reads both as a charming attribute of his character and as the proof that he is not really the character after all, that it’s all just some fun. This is a very hard line to walk, as evidenced by someone like Jimmy Fallon, whose willingness to be amused by his own performances is detrimental to the material both internally and externally. Whether or not it is calculated (but especially if it is), it is indefensibly unprofessional. Oh yeah, but back to My Favorite Wife. Cary Grant gets to do some fun stuff during the early honeymoon hotel sequence, and has a few more moments of pleasant goofiness scattered through the rest.

His scenes with Irene Dunne show them to have satisfyingly similar instincts about how to balance the characterization with the absurdity. I should see The Awful Truth, their previous – and by all accounts much better – movie together. As I said above, and I’m sure I’m not the first to observe this, the appeal of the screwball style derives from simultaneously being in the story and not really being in the story. It works particularly well with couples, because it’s closely modeled on the kind of attitude longstanding couples can have toward their own well-worn schtick. Screwball is warm and satisfying in the way that it’s warm and satisfying to see a couple playing at being mock-frustrated with one another: they’re free to pretend only because they’re actually so stable and content.

That thing about both being in the story and also outside it, having fun with it, accounts for the good-natured appeal of so much old comedy. That’s how the Marx Brothers are, too, and Bob Hope, and lots of other “classic” comic performers; it’s a vaudevillian sort of attitude toward material, one that doesn’t privilege content over entertainment. I’ve heard someone (Christopher Guest?) say that for something to succeed as comedy, the stakes for the characters have to be real and have to be high. But that’s not a universal; that’s a recent attitude, and it creates comedy with a different, less sympathetic flavor. In that school, you’re really laughing at the characters; there’s no with because they’re not laughing at all. Frequently they’re quite genuinely upset. You might still have sympathy for them, but it’s dramatic sympathy for characters, not that old sense of actual comic camaraderie.

But old-style “inclusive” comedy has always lived on, in diluted form, in the sitcom, among other places. Of course, it’s hard to say whether that really counts as living on, since sitcoms (particularly the warmest, most inclusive ones, like Home Improvement et al.) are generally idiotic, and they also frequently seem to forget how the game works. Witness Drew Carey’s grotesquely stupid show, which seemed actually to take pride in how little it believed in itself. But the “quality” sitcoms, like Frasier, have managed to maintain that sense that the people who live in a comedy are really there but are always, in some unshakeable way, having fun. Unlike Spinal Tap and, you know, any of those movies where bad things happen to Ben Stiller’s penis.

The high point of My Favorite Wife is right in the middle, when Cary Grant learns that his wife was, in fact, with some dude when she was shipwrecked on a desert island for seven years. Irene Dunne makes the dude out to have been some harmless wimp, but Cary Grant is suspicious. He tracks the guy down to see what he looks like, and finds that he is Randolph Scott, hanging out by a pool with several women at his side. Cary Grant’s anxious jealousy/sexual discomfort peaks as Randolph Scott shows off his broad-chested body to the crowd in an athletic performance on rings before diving into the pool, to admiring applause. The sequence quite explicitly stands in for Cary Grant jealously imagining his wife having sex with this guy, which is a bit dirtier than anything I expected in a movie from 1940, and the heightened, exaggerated quality of it all delighted me both times – Scott’s ridiculous, self-satisfied grin as he casually launches into his acrobatic routine, Grant’s cringing as though he’s seeing something nightmarish, all to the winking strains of, I believe, the Skater’s Waltz (or a close approximation). I generally like scenes in comedy where something goofy and exaggerated is staged for the benefit of one of the characters; I like watching people have to cope with seeing silly things. The Coen Brothers use some form of this setup in almost every one of their movies.

But after that things start to go downhill. The irritatingly protracted final sequence had all of us groaning with frustration. The elements of the story seem perfectly sufficient for this sort of movie, but scene for scene, the setups just aren’t funny enough, and the efforts to make something out of almost nothing are only occasionally successful. I blame the writers, for sloppy pacing and weak “jokes,” and the director, who lets everything linger just a little too long.

The movie is said to be inspired by Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden,” (uncredited, but Dunne’s character’s name is Arden…) which I attempted to read in preparation for writing this, but gave up when I saw how long it was going to take. It’s so long! I’ll read it soon and report. On first look, it seems like it’s also the inspiration for Cast Away, the Tom Hanks movie.

Here’s a picture of Bella and Sam Spewack, the writers, better known for writing Kiss Me, Kate. Everyone knows that pretty much all the pictures on this site are thumbnails, right? Click on the picture for the bigger version. You knew that already, right?

written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

This was my first Jim Jarmusch movie.

The whole first section of the movie felt ultra-low-key, as though nothing was really happening, despite the various things that happened. At the time I was worried that the entire plot would slip past this way, like less than a shrug; but of course that’s not how the movie proceeds. In retrospect, the lazy stasis of the first act of the movie served a valuable function: it was the boring level ground of the present, below which the character digs and finds remnants of his past. It gives the audience that feeling of mild malaise that haunts the character, and to which we (and he) refer later, trying to find a way to connect that long, slow blandness to his other experiences. That is to say: that portion of the movie gave me a feeling for “what it’s like to just be at his house” that was crucial for the emotional impact of the whole. And any kind of unconventional pacing (that ends up working) appeals to me. So I thought that was a cool aspect of the movie.

I thought it was interesting that the movie got one of its biggest laughs out of the fact that the Lolita character is in fact named “Lolita.” Or rather, it gets the laugh out of the fact that Bill Murray’s character amusedly recognizes this to be outlandishly blatant of the movie/his universe. A lot of the laughs came from his character getting to observe the oddities that have been placed in his path, but I thought this one was particularly unusual, since the oddity is not really that he’s in the company of this girl named Lolita, but that Jim Jarmusch has been so bold as to write Lolita into his script. When the character chuckles, that’s what we take him to be chuckling at. Except that for him, we have to assume, it’s an existential chuckle.

I also suspected that there was a larger nod to Nabokov and to Lolita going on. I think Nabokov probably would have enjoyed this movie. It shared with Lolita that sort of dry-wet sense of whimsy and a melancholy fantasy of driving around the backroads of the USA. It also, like Nabokov, relished both the absurdity and the mystery of symbols and correspondences – the pink, the typewriters, the dog named Winston – and kept lightly pulling the drama around in unexpected circles rather than in a straight line. I think Vladimir would have identified with both the milieu and the dramatic aims. And I have to assume, given the presence of Lolita, that Jarmusch had something like that in mind.

The other literary connection that occurred to me during the movie came at the very end, which instantly called to mind of one of the best bits in City of Glass by Paul Auster. Those who have seen the movie and read the book will know what I’m talking about. The concept is slightly different (more stark and magical) in the book, but a comparable impact is still created in the movie – to greater emotional effect, I think. Anyway, with this rolling around in my mind, it happened to jump out at me that in the final “thanks to” credits, there was a thanks to Paul Auster and his wife. Somehow that felt like confirmation that I’d made the “right” connection. I want to at least assume that Jim Jarmusch has read it.

The driving scenes – especially the scenes of driving down wooded roads – were somehow extremely vivid to me and called up the sensation of being a in car better than any movie I’ve seen before. I don’t know whether it was the sound editing or the cinematography or the accumulated atmosphere or my mood that day, or what, but somehow the “yeah, it’s just like that!” factor was high. There was a shot of the map on the front seat that seemed absolutely perfectly true to life. Then again, why wouldn’t it be? I really don’t know why I was having that kind of response. Maybe it was just because those woods looked like the woods where I grew up. I wonder where they filmed it.

Anyway. Of these movies where Bill Murray plays this character (Lost In Translation, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Broken Flowers, and, really, Rushmore), this seemed in some ways the most monotonous character study, because he was called upon to do almost nothing other than just be this guy, going about some business. But it also, cumulatively, offered what might be the most convincing emotional experience that this character has had in any of those movies: he is ultimately slightly jostled. This is interesting to compare with Lost In Translation, where he is ultimately invigorated by real emotional contact. In Broken Flowers, he is ultimately invigorated by a real fear of having no emotional contact. That’s at least how I read it: in the final moments, his vague, distracted ennui breaks through into actual fear that his lonely life truly cannot be made sense of. To me, that seems like the most valuable thing that can be done with this character – peel back his veneer of world-weariness and show the living uncertainty that defines him. I think that’s actually one of several things that Wes Anderson was trying for in The Life Aquatic, but all as seen in the mind of an 11-year-old boy, which is emotionally sort of an impossibility (11-year-olds aren’t world-weary and they wouldn’t understand world-weariness if they tried), and I’m not sure why he thought it could work. It worked here. By comparison, Lost In Translation seems hopelessly romantic. Not that that’s a bad thing. I think that’s what she was going for. But this seemed like a more mature viewpoint.

Of course, this is an over-confident reading, on my part, of a fairly enigmatic ending to a fairly enigmatic movie. I liked the vibe and I liked the ambiguities; even if they meant nothing in particular, they were pleasant aesthetic food to chew on. (Isn’t that, in fact, what Nabokov believed in?) That’s my review right there.

directed by Errol Morris

I watched this on a very hot night after a very hot day, and I drifted into a sleep-related fuzzy state in the middle. So…maybe I shouldn’t be “reviewing” it.

It was interesting. But I feel odd being invited to laugh at real people for who they really are. It’s one thing to notice people yourself and be amused by them; it’s another to make a movie about them and distribute it with the intent of making people laugh. The movie wasn’t exactly unsympathetic to these people, but the quirky framing (did Errol Morris invent that “look?” It seemed ahead of its time) and the maximum-absurdity editing seemed to be saying “crazy show, isn’t it?” I’m not saying that’s irresponsible or mean-spirited. But I was aware, the whole time, that empathy was left up to me; Errol Morris sat it out. Or took it for granted. Certainly the moviemaking itself was, if anything, at the subjects’ expense.*

In the end, I felt an interest in the various figures that went beyond mere amusement. Because any real person, given enough screen time, deserves more than a simple reaction. But again, I don’t know what to say about the film on those terms. If it had just been interviews where people expressed themselves, and that was the entire content, presented journalistically, I think I would have felt differently about this obviously good material. But the movie was made quirky, well beyond the quirks of the people interviewed. I guess what I’m saying is that to me, that sort of detracted from the humanity-encountering pleasures that were the core of the movie.

Also, the overall construction of the movie was pointlessly odd, I thought. The whole first section was devoted to less memorable interviews, about a story that was never quite made clear, and was eventually dropped. The artifice-emphasizing framing and editing were even more present in that section; seemed like Morris was working hard to try to build something with character out of his footage. And yet I couldn’t say what that character was supposed to be. I didn’t really find my footing as a viewer until the more interesting interviews later on. So I don’t really want to give that much credit to Errol Morris for what I got out of it. At least not until I see his other movies.

On the other hand, as I mentioned, I did kinda fall asleep. So, um, forget all this, because I don’t know what I’m talking about.

It was interesting. And amusing.

* I can imagine a fan of this movie saying that it’s actually intensely empathetic, just by virtue of the fact that it gives its subjects the time and space to be themselves, and implicitly says that we owe them our attention. But there’s a difference between thinking that people are intriguingly weird and feeling empathy for them, and when Morris occasionally tips his hand, we see only the former. I can believe that he might well have felt the latter too, when he was being silent, but I can also believe that he didn’t. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s something I had to bring to the movie. That’s all.

written and directed by George Lucas

SOCRATES: This movie may have been somewhat less unpleasant to watch than Episode I and Episode II, but it was still a far cry* from the original movies that I grew up with.

R2D2: Oh come on. Have some perspective. You were a kid and you saw those movies through entirely different eyes. “Star Wars” movies have always had bad acting and writing. Your sense that something has gone wrong is just based on nostalgia and your new “grown-up” standards, not on any objective difference between these and those.

SOCRATES: No, I’m telling you, these are worse, for real. They’re vapid in a way that those weren’t.

R2D2: Pauline Kael et al. seemed to see how equally “vapid” the originals were. You didn’t, which isn’t surprising because you were between zero and four years old. What are you claiming is actually different now?

SOCRATES: The original movies seemed to believe in their stories in a way that these didn’t. When Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed in Star Wars, the movie seems to really believe that something dramatic is happening, and that’s what makes it cool. When Momba-Nil Balloono** is killed in Revenge of the Sith, the movie seems to believe that something really cool is happening, and hopes that will make it dramatic. But it doesn’t. That’s not how drama works. It’s not even how coolness works.

R2D2: You’re still just talking in terms of your impressions. If you’d been a kid, you would have liked this movie.

SOCRATES: Hard for me to know what I would have thought of a lot of contemporary culture if I’d been a kid today. Even as a kid, I was certainly capable of thinking that certain things were just too trashy, too undisciplined to take. I never had the stomach for He-Man, or Voltron, or any of that low-frame-rate stuff. I’d like to believe that if I were a kid today, I would think that the new Star Warses were too soulless, too insular/nerdy, too CGI-y.

R2D2: You aren’t really claiming any kind of redeeming value for the original movies, though. If you’re honest and acknowledge your childhood dedication to those movies, you have to admit that worthless, pulpy roller-coaster movies with bad writing and acting were just your cup of tea at one point.

SOCRATES: I’m not saying that this movie was bad because it was pulpy, or a roller-coaster, or “worthless,” whatever you mean by that (something like “humanly irrelevant, purely escapist,” I assume). I’m saying it wasn’t a good roller-coaster. I’m saying that it was bad craftsmanship. For example, unlike a lot of people, I don’t think that Jar-Jar Binks was conceptually an unforgivable abomination – I recognize his kinship with all kinds of stuff that had already existed in Star Wars movies – I just think they totally screwed him up. They just didn’t have someone on staff saying “we have to watch out that it doesn’t get too annoying. That’s just a good moviemaking principle, to not annoy your audience, and I think we need to consider that as we do our work.” Or “this CGI stuff that we’re using, it comes off as a little insubstantial, you know? A little less momentous than, say, miniatures. It doesn’t blend as well with live-action, despite all our valiant technical efforts. So let’s accept that, and think about how to keep it restrained so as not to numb the audience with visual Nutrasweet.” Nobody took those kinds of quality-control steps. So I’m not complaining that they weren’t artistically more mature, I’m just complaining that they weren’t smart about doing their immature thing. I’m saying these movies didn’t handle their material as well as the originals.

R2D2: You’re saying that you weren’t pleased, and then you’re working backward as though it’s some kind of principled thing. But that’s just arrogance. It’s just subjective.

SOCRATES: Um, yes, this is all just subjective.

R2D2: Well there you go.

SOCRATES: That’s a lame argument, R2. Seriously. You were originally arguing that I was unfairly holding the original movies and the new movies to different standards, but I disagreed and argued I was holding them to the same standards, which I accordingly tried to express in terms of principles.*** Now you’re just saying that those principles aren’t objective principles, but that’s irrelevant. We all acknowledge that criticism is subjective. You’re just using it as a smokescreen so that you can back away from your earlier position. Your accusation was that I’m being inconsistent. Stick to that.

R2D2: Calm down, dude.

SOCRATES: I am calm. Don’t tell me to calm down.

R2D2: Dude, seriously, calm down.

SOCRATES: That’s really rude. Don’t do that.

R2D2: I’m just saying you need to calm down!

SOCRATES: You’re just trying to avoid the argument.

R2D2: Dude, it’s just a movie.

SOCRATES: I KNOW.

* “NOOOOOOO!!!”

** Samuel L. Jackson. The real character name is, I think, “Mace Windu.”

*** A couple other principles ignored by Revenge of the Sith (and by other pulpy stuff I don’t like):

I. Design is subordinate to content, not the other way around. Your idea for a cool location might precede the idea for what happens there, but in the final product, that can’t be apparent. This movie had an establishing shot of the beautiful fantasy landscape of the Wookie planet. Good so far. But then nothing happens there. The camera never sits down and lets us feel that we are there. We’re just looking at it. Ostensibly we’re looking at something plot-related, but the irrelevance of the plot, compared to the design, is overwhelming. Princess Leia’s hairdo in Star Wars was cool, but it wasn’t the point of the scenes in which she wore it. Things happened despite the hairdo. When Natalie Portman comes out with the same hairdo in this movie, it’s the point. “Get it?” The movie itself is like the flatbed that carries the parade float of the design. It might as well just be sitting still on the ground. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone was another example of an excellently designed series of still images that was just barely a movie.

II. Lines should as much as possible be interesting in themselves, not only in relation to other lines. Scenes should as much as possible be interesting in themselves, not only in relation to other scenes. Movies should as much as possible be interesting in themselves, not only in relation to other movies.

III. Disney/Dickens rule of characters: if you’re not going for realism, pick two adjectives (or for complex characters, three) and then have the characters consistently be those things. Fit scene-to-scene emotions into the context of those things. Do not figure out scene-to-scene emotions and then hope that they will cohere into overall characterization. For example, in Star Wars, Luke Skywalker was: boyish, eager for adventure. Han Solo was: self-satisfied, reckless, mercenary (but secretly susceptible to idealism). In Revenge of the Sith, Natalie Skywalker was: ??, ??. Ob-Ewan Kenobi was: ??, ??.****

**** REAL PERSON WHO JUST READ THIS: “The whole thing is pretty nerdy, but that last part is like you giving everyone advice on how to make a movie, or just how to do stuff. Don’t you think it’s kind of snotty?”

ME GETTING DEFENSIVE: I’m not actually “giving advice”; I’m expressing my displeasure and dissatisfaction with this movie, which is a normal part of a “review” or “response,” which is what this is. But I don’t like just reading that something was “bad,” so I’m trying to think and talk about what made it bad, which seems more interesting to writer and reader. I’m expressing that in the form of so-called “betrayed principles,” because that seemed to me like the most thoughtful analytic way of handling my displeasure. Do you disagree with the principles? Do you think there’s a better way of expressing them?

REAL PERSON WHO JUST READ THIS: [is eating pizza, stopped listening]

directed by Robert Wise
screenplay by Ernest Lehman
after the stage musical (1959) by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
music by Richard Rodgers
lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
based on the book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949) by Maria Augusta Trapp

Another one on the big outdoor screen. The crowd was dead-set on audience participation and insisted on it like it was a right, even when the movie resisted. Some of the crowd swayed their arms during “Climb Every Mountain.” People eagerly hissed at the baroness, even during her “graceful exit” speech, and booed at Rolf, even when he was just gearing up to sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Mind you, I wasn’t at this. It was just a showing of the movie. But people seem to really believe that an opportunity to clap in rhythm and shout during a movie must not be passed up. The whole phenomenon of Rocky Horror Picture Show-style congregational ritualization of movie-watching is interesting to me, in part because I truly don’t feel the impulse. Seems like movie-watching is already inherently ritualistic.

The movies that tend to invite this kind of treatment are, basically, “fabulous movie musicals!” It’s not just because musicals have songs – it’s because there’s something both artifical/irrational and utterly rock-solid confident about the way they’re presented. They’re sort of magnetic that way, in the way a charismatic cult leader might be magnetic. I’m still curious to hear a really good explanation of why “the gay community” has traditionally gravitated toward things like over-the-top musicals and female cabaret singers, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with these same qualities.

When Julie Andrews ended “My Favorite Things” with a series of stagy postures ecstatically clutching drapery, I thought, “wow, she’s doing something that makes no human sense, but emphatically and with utter assurance! This is what the material demands – and yet who would dare do this today?” Her character’s desire to feel self-possessed in her new and intimidating home is symbolized, fairly absurdly, by her desire to make new clothes for the children; the idea that she has obstacles to overcome is symbolized, again absurdly, by the Captain’s cold refusal to purchase materials for these new clothes; her eventual victory over obstacles is symbolized, quite absurdly, by her realization that the old drapes (she has gratuitously been told that the drapes are to be replaced) can provide her with materials; and her sense of self-assurance is, yes, symbolized by her triumphant musical revelry among the drapes. Symbol upon symbol upon symbol until what we are seeing is more ritual than life. Stylized out of all reality, but not yet out of all meaning.

I took a course on Nazi propaganda film techniques, the most interesting notion in which was that footage of enormous marching hordes, like Busby Berkeley spectaculars, were compelling for their patterns even though those patterns had no “meaning.” “Empty signifiers,” or something like that. “My Favorite Things” is far from an empty signifier, but it’s been stylized in that direction. All the old “fabulous” movie musicals tend toward the meaningless – the purely aesthetic – and audiences frequently love them for their emptiness rather than their significance. The audience shouted “boo” at the Nazis in The Sound of Music like they were so many Professor Coldhearts* and not an actual historical political reality that posed an actual threat to this actual family. And who could blame them? The next thing you know we’re watching a puppet show about goats.

What I mean is that stylized, half-empty signifiers are closer to ritual already and thus invite a kind of frenzy of participatory enthusiasm. (Just ask Rolf!) There’s some deep-programmed (very useful) human impulse toward social ritual. Hence the people dressing up to be a part of the violently meaningless Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the people dying to find a way to incorporate themselves into “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?” Not clear why homosexuality should tie in to this, but I will say that the gay attitude, that of “camp,” has something to do with the poignancy of simultaneously recognizing the absurd emptiness and wanting to be it. The scariest thing about Nazi propaganda was that Nazis didn’t seem to realize that the desire to be a part of shiny-uniformed mass ritual was indulgent, meaningless, and therefore possibly dangerous. Sing-Along The Sound of Music, on the other hand, seems to consciously identify itself as “indulgent” and “meaningless.” Phew.

There’s more to be said in that direction, obviously, but lets just wrap this up with some stuff about the movie.

When I was a kid and this would come on TV, I’d always give up after the first half hour, and watching it again, I remembered why. After “The Sound of Music,” none of the next three songs is satisfying. “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria” is the most plot-bound song in the movie and has that extra layer of opera-style clumsiness that musicals get when they try to explain what’s going on. The sheer lameness of that nun having to sternly say “A clown!” in both choruses puts me in a bad mood. Plus, the song is musically arbitrary. It neither sounds like nuns nor people trying to solve a problem like Maria; it tries to be both amusement and disapproval and ends up being basically the same half-assed barnyard song as “Everything’s Up To Date in Kansas City.” Not that I don’t whistle it; I’m just saying it’s lame.

Then the movie original “I Have Confidence,” which is really well filmed (and Julie Andrews wears a pretty cool hat during this number, I must say!) but never quite convinces me that it’s a real song. The introductory verse is a big mush of nothing, and then when it picks up with the real melody, it just doesn’t have enough personality to recover from our sense of being lost in mush. The performance far outweighs the material, which encourages distracted, lazy viewing in 8-year-olds watching it on TV.

Then the clincher, “Sixteen Going On Seventeen.” This song, as anyone can see in retrospect, doesn’t belong in the movie. None of the other kids gets an identity like Liesl does, and though the Rolf-grows-up-bad storyline deserves some screen time, this song doesn’t really relate to it. In fact I was a bit taken aback by the not-all-that-coy sexual undertones of the song, at least as presented here. The boyfriend says, “boys will want to do things to you that you wouldn’t understand, but don’t worry, I’ll take care of you, wink wink” and then she says, “ooh yes, I don’t know what you could possibly mean, wink wink, please take care of me, wink wink.” Maybe the original intent was for them to seem innocent and the “I’ll take care of you” to be amusing in its naivete, but it all read to me as a genuine “do you know where your sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old is?” warning. Naturally, this doesn’t make any sense to an 8-year-old, and at this point the movie really seems to have wandered off course. Why, why, after dinner, did we follow this girl out here to sing with this guy we’ve never even seen before? I always felt like I was in over my head by that point.

The movie is interesting for seeming like it has a sequel right in it. Once Maria and Captain Von Trapp get married, it really feels like everything has been wrapped up tight and what follows smells a bit like some writer’s clever pitch for “The Von Trapp Family 2.” Now they’re married, but the whole family is threatened by the Nazis and has to flee by singing in a festival! Brilliantly faithful to the original, but with a whole new twist. Obviously, that’s not how any of this was written. I’m just saying; it has that “same characters, new type of plot” quality that sequels do.

The movie really looks lovely throughout, and apart from putting her hand on her head every five seconds, Julie Andrews carries it all very gracefully. There’s something eager and focussed about the way it’s all shot and edited. It never gets tripped up in its own plot, like a lot of sillier musicals, and it never forgets to try to please the crowd. It’s old-fashioned theater thinking in its maturity, just before the call of “but look how ridiculous she looks clutching those drapes!” tore down the whole tissue-thin establishment.

I tried to find the 1st edition (1949) cover of Maria’s book, but no luck, though the book itself doesn’t seem to be rare at all. Here are two post-Broadway, pre-movie softcovers.

* Look it up yourself.