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In
death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name!
Project
Mayhem was the coordinated acts of disruption and destruction carried
out by the followers of Tyler Durden, in Fight
Club; the statement was by one of those followers who exemplified
the militaristic obedience of the
group; when one of them died (the only death in this very violent movie), their
leader called him by his name, Bob Paulson, and the followers reminded him that
in Project Mayhem no one has a name; but the man objected strongly, and then
there was the wide-eyed realization: In death, a member of Project
Mayhem has a name! His Name was Bob Paulson became a chant
or cheer in the movement.
I watch films sometimes to learn how
people unlike me--different age and different worldview--are feeling. Fight Club was recommended
by students with more enthusiasm than any other movie, but I sensed I
didnt want to see it, that it would be too violent for me, that it would
offend my taste and moral sense.
But my plan in general is to see such a movie anyway, for the learning
experience, for background as a college professor.
I
did find it hard to watch, but I respected it. It offended my sensibilities in ways I
expected, and I chose rather to read about it than to watch it again. I learned that it has a cult following,
which explains the extreme enthusiasm I heard in my students. I was told by a female student the book
is better, and the man who lent me the film said his copy of the book was
ragged from rereading. So what is
the power of this book and film?
I
respected Fight Club because it was intelligent and had a daring
thesis, and it was not obnoxious or annoying, not stupid in the
way that I find hard to take in films, although it did have a faintly
flat-footed campiness. It was bizarre,
but thats not a mark against it.
In this respect it reminded me of a favorite of mine,
Fight
Club was not filled with gratuitous violence. (We only use that word in this way when
we use it in this clichi, and I guess it means the filmmaker throws in
lots of free violence to keep our base instincts aroused.) I believe there is only one death, as
mentioned above, and we do not see it happen. So this is not
This
is probably the most important quality of this film, that the fights are real,
physically real, viscerally brutal. This apparently is their appeal: that
the violence within is allowed to wreak havoc in the real world, on the
basement floor, so to speak. My
wifes response was that the extreme attraction comes from the indulgence
of sadistic and masochistic impulses.
My student friend who lent it to me responded that it is sadism, because
the characters "get pleasure out of causing pain, and feel most free when
they are fighting. He added
these pieces of the script: "I wanted to destroy something
beautiful." "After fight club everything else gets turned down. You
are never as alive as you are in fight club." But for him that is not a
diagnosis that dismisses the movie as an unhealthy thing, just a fact about
what works in the actual psyche of men, the notion of masculinity that draws
both men and women. The film
is a definition of masculinity under attack. It begins with a support group for men
with testicular cancer; The Bob Paulson who died is of that group; it continues
with the fact that the insomniac Narrator visits all kinds of support groups
surreptitiously, pretending to be a variety of harmed people, as does the girl
in the story.
I
am poised between dismissing it as the indulgence of a pathological tendency,
as if it were a porn flick or of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre genre, and
embracing it as the articulation of a world view--but clearly this
phrase suggests everything of order and control that Fight Club
does not believe in. It is a
world view, a generational identity piece, but the tortured identity of the X
and Millenial generations has a
pathology within it, I am afraid, reflecting cultural realities that are
not a happy story. So I do not
dismiss it, as a mental health practitioner would not say that his client on
the couch should not have those sorts of dreams. This is a dream that someone had and
that millions of young people found tugging strongly at something within themselves. The
fighting might not be a good thing, but it is about something.
Tyler
and his friend were the middle children of God. They were fighting mad about a neglect
that was an actual fact about them and their fathers, which we know through
their muttered reminiscences, but also a manifestation of a larger nihilism in
which society fails to find a caring Father or any moral structure that can be
trusted. And, worse, the moral
structure and fatherhood that exist are perceived to be corrupt, a deception, a
sham. This perception is a profound
self-doubt of our society. Not to
be angry would be a deeper nihilism, a hopelessness become more total for not
being allowed to show its face.
This is why, I think, the brutal realism of fists and bruises
is the key to the movie. It
is the point of contact with a very real problem.
Fight
Club has a political side, and the fight clubs themselves proliferated
and erupted into Project Mayhem, which was a form of incendiary terrorism aimed
at the system while avoiding loss of life. I felt the political thrust was shallow,
too nice. It was not
about real terrorism, although finding ones name in death leans
in that direction. It was more
psychological than political, about who our fathers
were more than about the power structure.
Of course, who our fathers were is connected to the power structure, and
the system reflects choices made by our fathers and
forebears.
In
this regard, I found myself connecting this movie with the fact that my father
died about the same time I watched it, and with a book I took from his shelf
and read, which was _American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer_. Oppenheimer was
the Father of the atomic bomb, and my father built bombs. When I was 19 this fact settled on me,
not with bitterness or protest, but just as a fact. Early in his career he worked for Linde
Air Products, a contractor in the Manhattan Project, and on the wall of his
office, as we packed it up forever, I found a certificate from the War
Department recognizing his contribution to the war effort. Late in his career he was the head of
Sandia Corporation at its
Being
anti-nuclear was somewhat obligatory for a college student at the
Oppenheimer
did not work against the use of the bomb in
The
scientists could not stop that.
Immediately after the war
The
generals mightily prevailed over the scientists, and fear was prevailing over
hopeful intentions. Mutual fear and
defensive self-interest
ran the world for 50 years, or perhaps always have . It was only because the reasonable
scientists glimpsed a rational alternative that the logical dysfunction becomes
visible: one man fears what the other does because that man fears what the
first man does because he fears...and so on. Enemy becomes a
value judgment that is totally relative.
The real problem is the fear-filled interaction. Anyone can see how
absurd it is, and yet all the power of the world is caught up in it.
I
actually believe this is not the final analysis of the situation, and if the
scientists had their way a deeper threat would still be among us, because even
their best-laid plans would succumb to the self-righteousness of the human
spirit. But it was painful to watch
the military and political powers right and left march heedlessly into the arms
race, driven by their perception of their rightness, which defines itself in
the mirror of the enemys wrongness.
Perhaps
the most intense kernel of meaning in Fight Club is that humans
find meaning in the battles they fight.
This could be a critical claim, lamenting that the generals in their
Nuclear Fight Club are so foolishly pitted against each other. But to criticize in that way might lead
into the nihilism that says, We are all the same, really, so lets
just be nice. It could be
the scientists solution of rational globalism, which could turn
oppressive quickly, like the ideals of the Communists. The simple formula for peace is not so
simple.
I
prefer to think that Fight Club finds meaning in the battles we
fight and does not turn that to a be-nice criticism. Rather, it is a cry for meaning and reality On the
surface it is dysfunctional, but under the skin it is more like the immune
system producing awful symptoms while fighting the greater menace of
meaninglessness. If so, it is not a
nihilistic story but counter-nihilism.
And I think this is true because of the power that it has with its
readers and viewers. If it were a
preachy movie about how we ought to act, there might be smug satisfaction with
it and it might win some awards.
Clearest case of that, I think, is The English Patient,
which was nihilistic and beautiful and full of politically correct attitudes.
Those people were in the War but opted out and believed in nothing.* The same year, The Devils
Advocate roared through the theatres and had us trembling as we walked
out into the afternoon sunshine of normal American-shopping-center life, but
the Academy at Hollywood looked nervously in the other direction. Some movies leave you comfortable, but
Fight Club does not.
Instead, it stirs up a deep response. There is a passion there that preachy,
be-nice movies do not create.
The
other day I told a new philosophy class that I used to think the answer to life
was be nice, but that equipped me for divorce from my first wife.
From a song lyric I got, Heres my simple plan: You be my loving
woman, Ill be your loving man. That plan does not work. My father was good at being nice, but
that was not his gift to me. Oppenheimer
was a powerful leader due to his expansive intelligence, but he was a pleaser
of men, too, and he and his cohorts hoped the whole world could be nice
together, which means he never penetrated to the real issues with which we have
to deal.
One
part of _American Prometheus_ stood out for me as revealing, though
uncharacteristic of the book as a whole, which did not try too hard to look
beneath the covers at psychological secrets.
To the readers of Life, Time, and other popular magazines, Roberts family life
may have seemed idyllic. Photographs depicted a pipe-smoking father
reading a book to his two young children as his pretty wife looked over his
shoulder and the familys German Shepherd, Buddy, lay at his feet. He is warmly
affectionate, wrote a reporter for a cover story on Oppenheimer for Life magazine, with his wife and children (who are well
fed and very fond of him), and attentively polite to everybody. . . . According to Life, Oppenheimer walked home each evening at 6:30 p.m.
to play with the children. Each Sunday, they took Peter and Toni out to
hunt for four-leaf clovers. Mrs. Oppenheimer, whose thinking is also direct,
keeps her children from cluttering the house with four-leaf clovers by making
they eat all they find right on the spot. (p. 405)
The title of the chapter where this slice of Life appears is a quotation (they all are), and it
reads, I Am Sure That Is Why She Threw Things at Him. In reality, the
marriage was difficult, though it lasted, and the children had troubled
parenting. A neighbor observed, His family relationships seemed to be so
terrible, and yet you never would have known it from Robert. You would never
have known it from Robert, or from Life
magazine. So
what is truly bizarre? Fight
Club?
Or is it the Life magazine vignette with the
four-leaf clovers and the uncluttered house and well fed wife and children so
fond of him, or Robert Oppenheimer himself, attentively polite to his neighbors
across the wide, green lawn?
I know that the realistic and rebellious hearts
of these last two generations have surmised that Ward Cleaver of Father Knows
Best was probably beating his kids. It is a bitter exaggeration, I suppose, but
the suspicion that lies upon these past fifty years is worth listening to. On the other hand,
so is the counter-claim that in the mid-century we had a vision of family and
fatherhood, institutions that are the cement of society, without which we cannot
survive, but which are being whittled away by forces determined to undermine and
destroy us.
The really hard question is whether fatherly authority and
righteous leadership are missing in action because our society will not tolerate
them, or whether our society does not tolerate the images of what is in fact
corrupt. Ward
Cleaver is fiction, and to call him a child beater is to make an editorial
point; Oppenheimer was real, and for Life to paint
him as it did is to show that everything good and noble could be a sham.
Yet Oppenheimer was no villain. Our fathers for the
most part meant well.
The generations of this past century are spelled out as the Builders,
the Silent Generation the Baby Boomers, and then Generation X or Y or
Millennial. Oppenheimer and my father were in the Builders, although my
father was closer to the Silent Generation. The Silent ones fought the Depression and the
War or lived through it as children and gave birth to us Babies and raised us on
Spock and inadvertently lit the fire of the Sixties, and then our children
revolted quietly deep within, as revealed in their response to art like Fight
Club: by the deep sense of an answered quest. Their fathers and grandfathers lived in a
world deeply intolerable, possibly because it was thought to be fighting the
wrong battle, and probably mostly because of the silence. All is well. We are on the right side, fighting the enemy
who is on the wrong side. Thus we have our meaning. All is well. Have a four-leaf
clover. Be nice.
*The English Patient example points to a whole other side
to this essay.
Possibly we are at a time when we are ready to learn that buying into
causes for which we fight wars is the worse thing we humans do. Maybe the purposes
and pleasures of war are played up in a huge, false image, and we ought to see
through that image and recognize that desperate men full of selfishness and fear
fight wars against their wills because of systems
put in place by unthinking men.
When I was a Sixties college student we asked, What if they gave a war
and nobody came?
I am not ready to say that there is nothing to be gained by looking in this direction. But
Fight Club is fighting a different battle.
January
07: Well, now that Ebert and Roeper (but where is Roger Ebert?) have given their WORST MOVIES for
2006, putting The DaVinci Code in 2nd place, I can
speak up. The night before Thanksgiving my World Religions class watched
it and a 60 Minutes video that shows how badly it messes with the truth.
We didn't expect good attendance, so we had this optional class and watched it,
and then Sylvia and I did, too. Bad. Bad
intentions. Bad
acting. Bad
hair. The reviewers focused on the bad hair problem, but my problem
was that Tom Hanks was catatonic and frozen-faced. I thought since he
secretly hated the movie so much he was not able to get his face to work, so
they decided to write it into the script that he was traumatized. But a
student told me it is in the book, so I guess he was supposed to not act in this
movie. But a smile would have helped. Bad acting, bad script, bad intentions, bad factual
connections, bad view of religion, bad view of Catholicism, bad view of
Christianity, bad view of Jesus. I have to say, though, the movie
did not shock me. I was glad to see how bad it was. Being shocked is
giving a movie too much credit.
Some
Christian movies have been good, which is not always the case. We loved
"One Night with the
King" and "The
Nativity Story."
Trying to
decide if I will love or hate "Little
Miss Sunshine" . . .
The other
day we rented "Jesus Camp." I had no idea what to expect. I learned it
exists from a note I saw at school and thought it had to be Christian bashing,
if anyone there was thinking to show it. Then I read the cover at the rental
store and was mystified about the point of view. If Ebert et al liked it that can't be
good. But we
watched it and found it hard to put in a box. It was not Christian bashing that brays
heedlessly at a caricature. It was a film documentary of the religious
right made with their cooperation and not edited prejudiciously. Ted Haggerd was in it, but I don't know the timing of the
movie with respect to his fall, and the film didn't bear down on him. He looked silly, but
it felt like acting silly is part of what he does in public life. So this movie was an
objective look at a ministry--a remarkable lady and some amazing kids growing up in her
influence. But
apparently we were supposed to be alarmed. The soundtrack was pure ominousity, if there were such a word. Animosity was hidden
in the music.
The actual
comment was from a radio host who earnestly implored that we come to our
senses. He
seems a Christian who thinks this is not the real thing. I was not totally
comfortable with what was shown, because the RR seems too political, and my
end-times thinking doesnt have us reclaiming
We were
supposed to be alarmed at these kids, but I read in the paper that night about
the kids from a high school here who followed the cheerleaders from
The credit
to the movie is that it was edited neutrally enough that those so inclined can
be alarmed while those leaning the other way can rejoice. But that shows the
width of the gap in our culture.
Two years
ago . . .
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- If I ever get a
chance to work on this page, I will write about this movie, which is, in my
opinion, totally cool. Best Movie of 2004 -- well, Roeper said it was #2, and the Academy did not
respond except by nominating
Kate Winslett for best
actress. She and Carey were both great.
Nihilism 2002
"When I can't find a single star to hang my wish upon,
I just move on"
(sung to the
credits of "
Thinking about what I would write
about "
lampooned. What
makes "
"About Schmidt"? Scary. This was not a best movie nomination,
but Jack Nicholson got best actor nominations and awards. What is
scarier than a movie with Jack Nicholson as the bad guy? A movie in
which he is the nice guy, the normal one! He's meek in this role.
But around him lurk some awful people, awfully normal and real. And it is
scary for a director to touch upon the problem of boredom. He won't be allowed
to bore the audience, but he can make them squirm. It's a good movie, if
you're willing to see a little of the real world, but caution is advised.
We tried "The Pianist." He did
get Best Actor. Still, the movie did not click for Linda or me. It
had all the right ingredients, War, the Holocaust, Music, a love interest.
But the ingredients never got stirred. We never got stirred, anyway, and I
am not sure why. Probably I should try it again.
Then we tried "Gangs of New
York." We found it brutal and did not finish it. It was not because
we won't watch violence as part of a strong story line, but because, for some
reason, neither of us cared to see the brutal story reach its conclusion.
Everything and Everyone in the story failed to get our sympathy. It was
visually garish and dramatically unappealing. I found myself wondering if
it was genuinely historical, or
another example of editorial anachronisms in film. (making them think the way we think they should have
thought). Possibly I missed this movie because of my own mood, but
we stopped near the end and never went back to it.
There were a few other minor players I paid attention to,
like "The Life of David Gayle," which I found interesting in the complexity of
its plot but a little annoying (Kate Winslett) and ultimately contrived. "Catch Me
if You Can," was fun and
interesting. There were chick flicks that the girls helped us relax in and
enjoy. "Legally Blonde" has a great title. This is a celebration of
femininity that feminists might miss. It was watched again in the waning
hours of 2003 by two blondes and two brunettes and, sometimes, me. In the
other room, Linda and her blonde friend Marty and I watched "Antwone Fisher," which is an effective drama for
which the title character and lead deserves recognition. We also watched
"The In-Laws," which I thought was about the stupidest movie I've ever
seen. But Linda is rewatching it now and thinks it is great.
High-Tech Spy-Thriller Action-Wedding Family-Issues drama . . . you know the
genre. I guess this is the risk with movies, that one will seem terrible and someone else
will find it great. I love "
The film
that really got my attention was "Adaptation," which I wrote about at Father's
Day this year. If you've seen it or read about it, you know it is a kind
of screen writer's marvel. It was nominated at the Oscars for the best
adapted screenplay, but didn't win, although it did win at other film
awards. The nomination and awards were given to Charlie Kaufman and his
brother Donald Kaufman, his twin. (I find myself singing, "Genghis Khan and his
brother, Don, could not keep on keeping on," from Dylan's "You Ain't Going Nowhere.") But Donald Kaufman does not
exist. It is the mix of real life and writing that makes this film so
interesting. The film is the story of the writing of the screenplay for
this film. It is the story of its own writing. Is that
possible? When it is over, you look back and think, yes, all of this could
have happened, even though you know it is partly fictional. It is a
coherent story of what could have happened in the writing of this story.
But I find myself asking, At what
point did he stop writing and start having the experiences that were part of the
writing? What events happened to him, as opposed to being written by
him? As soon as I ask that question I find that the story to be truthfully
told has become different, and I am thrown into a self-referential paradox
again. Someone in class said you can tell the story of the writing of the story,
but only in the present tense, which is how the film ends. Anyway, it is a
clever script that leaves these things in a nether world. The intrigue is
increased by the presence of a screenwriting seminar teacher who tells the
writer what he needs and what he must not do. Later you wonder if that is
exactly what he did. But these technical and metaphysical tricks make the
movie 'interesting', not necessarily good; what makes it good is descriptions of nihilism
that are in it. Philosophy is largely the study of nihilism in the human
condition and the consideration of possible solutions to it. What this
film offers as a remedy is not profound, but the description of the problem is
apt.
"Adaptation" is the
story of the writing of a film adaptation of a book about a man who studies and
steals orchids. _The Orchid Thief_ by Susan Orlean is a real book, and the 'thief', John LaRoche, is a real person.
The movie shows us people searching in swamps for a rare and other-worldy orchid, the Ghost. Unreachable,
glorious beauty hidden away in the swamp of . . . well, let me not get melodramatic with thoughts of
swamps of this or swamps of that. Hidden away in the swamp. The
nihilism-aestheticism theme is a thing of beauty in itself. However, there
were no answers in the film, except for the one that Kaufman found from his
invented twin brother, which wrapped up the story nicely and made it work, which
was the only task of the whole thing. But it is not the best or truest
story, I don't think. You don't solve life's problems by realizing that, "It's
not what loves you, but what you love," which was Donald Kaufman's parting
wisdom.
The movie that surprised
me most was "Frida," which I
thought would be too serious on the nudity scale, because her artist husband,
Diego Rivera, used nude models in more ways than one, and she was highly charged
herself. Well, it was serious that way, but it was a beautiful movie,
too. It was nihilistic; her surrealistic art was all about pain. But
I found I loved the characters in it, and I loved the love they had for each
other in the long run. I also found it visually and musically beautiful, a
trip to a new land, connecting with our visits to
But when one speaks of a trip to a
new land, "Lord of the Rings: the
My
procedure has been to ask what it means when Americans, or at least their
cultural leaders in
2002 was
different, more encouraging, in a way. Again, "
Its drama and acting were about as
non-nuanced as "
As such, "
And, yes, it was beautiful.
Well, that is almost my 2002 tour of
cinematic nihilism. Until the very end of 2003 I did not see "The Hours,"
because I heard it was too disturbing. But we got it last week.
Linda did not love it, because she does not study nihilism as I do. To her, it
is a lot of unhappiness for nothing. That is what nihilism is about, of
course, but not too many people choose to reflect so much on it. "The
Hours" is another one that messes with your mind a little by having the story
include the writing of the story,
and by bringing the same person to life in three different times and
places. The author of The Hours does this, based on a Virginia Wolfe novel. I
didn't quite know who
Virginia Wolfe was, or why we should not fear her ideas (as implied by the play
and film, "Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?"). Now I know she is about
despair. Her character is always putting on parties, but, in the words of
Richard Brown, the poet about to die of Aids, she does so just "to hide the
silence." So this, too, is aestheticism unveiling itself, art seeing its
poverty. Here the dramatic roles are deep and profound, and while some
characters play the game others see through it. "
I can only hope that not too
many see "Chicago" and walk away tittering like its protagonists, for that would
be like the nobility in France who laughed at "The Bourgeois Gentleman" for
trying to be like them, but who never saw their own follies as the object of the
portrayal. And I can hope that the truly bleak messages like "The Hours"
and "Pollack" and "The Man Who Was not There" do not lead many to suicide. It is good that
the art world is seeing its poverty, but it is also good news that there is real
Meaning and Truth.
January 1,
2004
RECENT MOVIES - - - -for better or worse (recent in this
context has very little meaning, now that 2007 is almost over.)
I did not see Waiting
to Exhale. I
just borrowed the title for my complaint/theory about
Joshua below
We at our house
are starting earlier on the 2003 movies of note than with the 2002 ones seen
last year, but still a number are awaiting comment, like The Return of the
King, which we still hope to see on the big screen, Bruce Almighty, Matrix 2 and
3, and the ones really left in the wake, that is, forgotten. This is
not to mention the one getting all the attention right now, "The Passion of the
Christ."
Recently viewed, for
better or worse:
The Others - very well done ghost story
In
Second Hand
Lions. If all's well that ends well, then this movie succeeds, but
it look pretty desperate for a long time as it tries to get rolling. We
warmed up to it and found the ending cool. The ending, by the way, said
that what is true is not whatever we decide to believe, but what is actually
true. A little philosophical realism can be refreshing, especially if it
supports our romantic hopes, rather than squashing them, as realism tends to do.
Bend it Like
Beckham. Heartwarming. Highly recommended. If you are over 30 and not
from
Whale Rider. This is like
"Bend it like Beckham" in showing the love of a father and the struggle of
letting a daugher become who she
really is. Fiddler on the Roof is the template for this pattern.
Whale Rider and
Alex and Emma. I'm a sucker
for movies where the character is a writer and he (or she) has to write the
story in order to keep on living it. "The Hours" and "Adaptation" are
a heavyweight examples, while
this one is clearly a lightweight, but pleasant.
Seabiscuit. I'm confused. This is nominated for
Best Film, on Ebert or Roeper's 10
Best list, etc., and since it is a
horse movie we expected to love it. But the story unfolded so slowly and
with so little explanation of where it was going that I found myself crying out
for a screenwriter, a director, or an editor. I read some more reviews,
and two from NY Times saw what I am talking about, but I listened to Ebert and
Roeper again, and they were
enthusiastic about the strengths of this movie. It apparently touches a
lot of the right buttons. My sister and dad just discussed it in email.
The book is excellent, I guess; the movie acceptably good. I think perhaps
I watch movies too late at night.
On that note . .
. January 7,
2004 "Network"
(1976)
************
I had a bizarre aesthetic experience during the night.
We went to bed fairly late and watched "Bonanza" for a while, knowing that a
nearby channel was playing "Network," which I figured would be another
professional workplace drama like "Wall Street" or "The Paper," with interesting
issues but subject to possible mediocrity. I fell asleep and woke up with
a fearful groan that had more to do with indigestion than anything I knowingly
dreamed about. Then, somehow, "Network" was playing on the television, and
Robert Duvall was waving his arms and shouting in a way that made me think, "Why
does Duvall embarrass himself with poorly written roles like this? Does he
need the money?" Then some network mogul had a slipping network anchorman
by the ear. I say "slipping," not "fallen," because the tussle was about
ratings, not moral behavior. The boss sat him down at the end of a huge
banquet table in a cavernous ballroom and assaulted him with a tirade about the
fact that there are no nations, no democratic processes, no individual
decisions, only Business. Business runs the world! It is a worthy topic, and I
thought this melodramatic over-exposure, similar to a scene I saw of a James Bond
super-criminal, might be useful in the classroom to raise a question, but
something not so campy would be better. When the hair-raising speech was
over, the cowed anchorman looked up in awe and said, "I have seen the face of
God!" Then he began preaching that message in the bizarre sets of his
network news show. Meanwhile, Faye Dunaway was some kind of a
behind-the-scenes manager totally obsessed with the fact that ratings were
slipping, and she was breaking up with her short-term partner,??? , insulting
him grossly about their sexual life. The two of them made up a new word, I
think, if I was hearing correctly,
an unpleasant term that meant the woman was trying to make the man feel bad
about his sexual equipment. (Fortunately, I've forgotten it.) Their
parting was carried out at the same high-volume, super-dramatic tone as the
speeches I had already heard. I thought, "Hmm? Faye Dunaway.
Has she done anything since 'Bonnie and
Of course, by now it is obvious it
has to be satire, but satire can fail! You can't take a horrible movie and
declare it satire or parody or spoof or farce. It has to work, on some
level. I recall that "Princess Bride" switched suddenly for me from bad
acting and bad writing to not-taking-itself-seriously and doing it with
aplomb. But that is not an instant fix. Satire, yes, with a point to
make yes, but satire is intelligent and has a light touch.
By then we were near the
end. Robert Duvall was running a meeting of higher-ups and discussing
calmly whether to kill the anchor man. "Kill him?" I thought. "Do
they mean fire him? Probably not, in
this movie. They probably mean kill him. They were discussing
the fact that this could happen live, before a studio audience and national
viewership, but the Network must not look bad. And then the weird,
bizarre news show opened up,
and soon the anchorman began to preach, and then he was shot through the
head. A narrator who had been piping up now and then said, "And this
is the first time in history that a newsman was killed for poor ratings."
And the credits (if that word can be used) began to role.
I saw all of this in disbelief, and
then I thought, "Well, that nice man who introduces the Turner Classic Movies
films will appear-- Robert Osborne -- and explain all of this to me, and I can
go to sleep." He did appear, and he said that "Network" was nominated for 10
Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenwriting
(won) and four acting awards (best actor twice, one posthumous) and was the
second film in Academy Awards history to win three of the four acting
awards.
Applied Aesthetics has become a
vicious science. Someone is trying to rearrange my neurons in a grotesque
pattern. Then I begin to think that there parallel universes interlacing
themselves among the past seasons of the Academy awards. When I read
somewhere that a movie I knew little about was named Best Picture or
something like that, I sometimes ask myself, "When? Where was I?" I
have been following the awards for a few years, but they seem in retrospect to
sneak in extra years that I never knew about. Maybe this is how they
reward people who are well liked but have never won anything and make bad
directors feel successful. They create a false past, as in 1984, and let almost everyone win there. In that
parallel universe, the aesthetics are reversed, so bad is good and good is
bad. Then movies like "The Royal Tennenbaums" and "The In-Laws" and "Moulin Rouge"
have their moment in the sun. But to have this parallel universe show up
in my bedroom at 2:00 a.m. is very disconcerting. It took me another hour
to mentally write this essay and then drift off into laborious dreams.
**********\
Maybe "Seabiscut" is nominated for Best Picture to be nice
to someone, in a year when it can't possibly win (against "Return of the
King"). If it did win, we'd all slide away in spiraling universes of
aesthetic chaos.
**********
I watched Seabiscuit and Network again.
Seabiscuit got to my heart, the
second time;
Network left me feeling sorry for the world that had to make
such a depressing movie about itself.
Most recently, we watched a movie
not widely known and maybe not released in the normal channels,
I saw it was about a
man in a small town doing miracles. I was in the middle of reading a novel
about the same thing, Peace Like a River. I hypothesized that the movie
would be different in one way, due to the medium and possibly due to the source,
which I did not know. I supposed that the man doing miracles in "Joshua"
would be a politically correct and popular guy, while the man doing
miracles in Peace Like a River (Jeremiah Land) is
known to his town as different but strange and possibly crazy. He
has huge problems and prays and gets amazing answers, but no one is gathered
around. In fact, the teller of the story, his 11 year old son,
Reuben, begins by saying the reason he is alive (a miracle) is perhaps
just to be witness to these events that few others see. The kids and I had
surmised also that if the movie is truly Christian (thus not humanistic and not
politically correct), then it might be "cheesy" ( a word used often in our household and well
understood, although I suppose we could use a thesaurus).
Well, we were
partly right. It was a little cheesy as it began, but it succeeded well
enough, dramatically, to be worth viewing. And it was true that Joshua had
almost no enemies. Only an uptight Catholic priest resisted him, and he
was won over, too. But the film actually transcended both of our
categorizations. It turned out to be the playing out of a simple premise:
what if Jesus came to town? A very challenging assignment for a film, I
admit. It worked pretty well.
Of course people may
argue fiercely over what is the true picture of Jesus. And I'm not going
to argue that no one should argue about that, because even though we could
easily be jerks doing so, we could be nihilists if we don't worry about it at
all. So I return to my original point: the film saw that religion will
often oppose Christ, as it did in the real thing (which makes me want to begin
to comment, prematurely, on Gibson's film, though I won't). But it does not
recognized the "religion" that is in all of us, the humanism that could be
secular or religious and that would ultimately find Him hard to
accept.
The novel, by the way,
is wonderful. I am near the end and have no idea how it will end. It
is a happy story, and yet a fully happy ending seems impossible. That's
the miracle, I guess. But I can't think of one that won't be either
semi-tragic or unbelievable.
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Be-Sure-and-Miss-it-if-You-Can Department
bad movies: The DaVinci Code (see
above) |
comment: |
Mummy, Speed, (their sequels) Heartburn, Nothing but Trouble, Vertical
Limit, Armageddon, Independence Day, Best of Show, Out of Time,
|
If you want words to say how bad a movie is, try this
link. But otherwise don't; there are more worthwhile things to do read user
reviews of bad movies, and, besides, one guy liked it! |
Worst Title: Pokeman: the first
movie (and last, we can hope!) (did I mispell it? good!) |
|
Best Title: Legally
Blonde |
they say the sequel sucks |
|
|
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|
|
In a Class by
Itself
Movies are not necessarily excellent movies, though many are. They
are simply movies that are different from almost any other
movie.
Lord of the Rings: the
Adaptation -- the most
interesting movie ever made, and also excellent in many ways.
Babe
The Gods Must Be Crazy
Princess
Bride
Forrest Gump
Oh Brother Where Art Thou? The link to imdb.com
is not current
The Royal Tennenbaums (??????????) (Bad? Or did I miss something?)
Moulin
Rouge (??????????????????????????????????????????????)
These may require a new class, the "What-did-I-miss?"
category.
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"When a Man Loves a
Woman "
"The Substance of Fire "
"Before and After"
"A Family
Thing"
"Antwone Fisher"
BELATED REVIEWS (getting more belated all the
time):
"Love Stories Then and Now" (on "Love Story" (1970) and "Shadowlands" and "Bounce")(but I forgot
what "Bounce" was about!)
"Two Evil
Movies" (on "The Devil's Advocate" and "The English Patient") (I haven't
written it, but I make the comparison often in other contexts.)
"Senseless Acts of American Beauty" (How the
bumper sticker about "senseless acts of beauty" relates to "American Beauty" and
to Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the
Wind." It is about aestheticism, and, in this case, a deadly case of
it.) This review will probably never get written, but I do mention in
class very often that American Beauty is a
clear and extreme case of aestheticism as a world view.
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Old Stuff, receding into the
past, soon to be deleted,
Summer 2002:
Message in a Bottle -
(on
TV) A review prejudiced me,
and I found it boring, though it has potential as a love story, and I love the
sea and boats. Maybe it is Kevin Costner I find boring. The
girl, Theresa, reminded me of someone, but I had to look it up to be sure.
She is the Princess Bride and Jenny in "Forrest Gump."
The Wedding Planner - Cute,
fun. I spent most of my time wondering if that really was Pete Sampras's girlfriend, playing Fran, the
bride. Seems I'd watched her watching tennis a lot. It turns out she's his wife.
Pay it Forward - people are calling this the best movie
you ever saw. I need to watch it again, staying fully awake. I don't
think I'm going to call it the best movie ever, but I am very curious about what
it is that causes such a response. (More later . . . maybe)
The Three Musketeers -
too silly for me, but not for the kids. The king and queen
appear 13 years old.
Dune
- the four hour plus
version, which Linda says is the only movie doing justice to the books.
She and the girls watched it twice,
8.5 hrs. I got sleepy both times and never got into the
drama.
August-September 2001
(excerpted from a family letter)
I guess the movies is the other main thing about my vacation and
this summer. We read about how many lousy movies just got made, and we saw a
few, but some excellent ones, too, going to a few afternoon shows and renting
others. This afternoon we saw Jurassic Park III, which is considerably better
than II, though undeveloped and unbelievable in places. The action scenes and
the visuals seemed improved over the original, and the plot, though
unbelievable, set up a good situation to escape from. But it was confused. We
were told they were not back on the original island, with its wrecked hi-tech
facility, but on the other, alternative site, also a wrecked couldn't arrange to
shoot the sequel where they shot the movie (and thought we'd notice).
I was interested with the first movie in its view of human
technology, the "Jurassic Park Syndrome," as I call it, in which we see that we
cannot control nature as we thought we could. "It's not nice to fool Mother
Nature!" (For you oldies who remember when margarine first began to taste good.)
In the first
The really good movies? I mentioned a while back
"Traffic" and "Cast Away" and "Almost Famous." We saw "Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon" again, at home, and I started to get impatient with it. It's lovely
enough, but what is it about? A rebel
without a cause? We talked about that classic and its title, and the
girls observed that James Dean was not a rebel with no reason, because his parents gave him reason to be
angry. He was a rebel with "no cause," nothing to believe in. That's what made
him the icon of the coming generation, because the rebellion of the sixties
generation was not against something and for something, as with a Marxist or
some other politico, but against the fact of there not being a purpose. But,
anyway, I don't know what the girl in "Crouching Tiger" was trying to do other
than angrily express self-will. In the end, she sleeps with her boyfriend and
then dives off the cliff into an unnamed oblivion. My recommendation? Don't watch it twice. I also
though, the first time, that this was an amazingly generic movie, culturally.
That will sound strange, as it was clearly Chinese and 19th century and
connected with the world view of those times and of the martial arts. But it
struck me as the world-wide culture of the video game more than anything else,
including the physics of it. When the man was dying, his girlfriend urged him to
face his death as the religious liberation that it would be, but Romanticism won
out over religion, and he declared, "I'd rather be a ghost, drifting by your
side as a condemned soul, then enter heaven without you."
Well, the Good movies? "Chocolat" was lovely and had a nice
touch in the end, but it struck us as dangerous. Legalistic religion can be
deadly ... that's true enough, but is that what we need to hear today? The
implication was that after the religious people fell and proved themselves
human, then the people who always were human, the humanistic pagans, would be able to live their trouble-free
lives. So, that movie didn't win the day, either, for our household. Right now I
am looking at "Pay it Forward," which has been denounced by some people I know
but gets high praise in my classrooms and in the aisle of the video store: "the
best movie you'll ever see!" I heard last night, and my students are saying the
same. I'll have to watch it and figure out why.
I seem to have trouble coming up with the good movies I
saw. But that is because I have not mentioned "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" This goes on my
In-a-class-by-itself list.
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top
After getting the soundtrack from my sister, I wanted to see
Wonder Boys. With four Bob Dylan songs and other stuff of our era on the
soundtrack, and being a story about a professor who is a writer, it seemed to
have great potential for me. But it didnt quite fly. (By the way, Roger Ebert
loved this movie and tried to talk it into the 2000 Oscars. It did get an award through
Dylan's song, "Things have changed."
The acting is fine. It took us a few moments to recognize
Marge, our favorite Marge (see Fargo in the Class by Itself category), but
when I did recognize her it was by her voice, her Swedish Minnesotan voice, so
if shes an Oscar winning performer, maybe I shouldnt have heard Marge in her.
But everyone did well enough in their roles. Michael Douglas was good, but we
didnt end up caring as much for this professor as we needed to. Linda found him
too scroungy. My problem had more
to do with the story.
The plot worked, a kind of black comedy, because I wondered
how the professor could ever extricate himself from the impossibly long weekend
that makes up this story, and it had an interesting post-sixties twist (post
in the sense of wiser than, or critical of-- thoughts of those no longer
enamored with our favorite decade). He cant write his second novel because he
has 2700 pages and cant make any decisions about anything, nor about his
personal life, and this has to do with dope. He passes his stash, finally, to a
student janitor who says he gets high only when working. So its post-dope,
and post-non-commitment. But though the movie had relevant messages, it didnt
have a moral edge. Homosexuality was laughingly abided, and we were supposed to
believe that the young new writers talent would set aside all the dangers he
was wading into in this story. The hero and heroine kept their baby and got
married (maybe), and their spouses stayed away or disappeared painlessly, along
with, we are meant to presume, all the problems those relationships must have
had. Of course, I dont expect movies today to operate by the same moral sights
I do. Others may feel neutral about homosexuality and wouldnt be put off by it.
I did find the people in those roles likeable and interesting. But when a film
does purport to have a message, then it bothers me that it does not go deep
enough and does not address the real issues, or that it throws me confusing
curves. It is because the college girl preaches to the professor that the movie
has moral intent. But she may have been
wanting to seduce him, too; the story was unclear. Other minor roles were
bizarre and hard to place into the current of the story.
If all the sexual matters can truly be handled so
innocently, then perhaps this story works. But I still see it as a moral message
that overlooks almost everything important. Ultimately it says that whoever can
live decisively enough to write well can have all the human happiness there is
to have. The professor gets past that hurdle and goes on to successfully tell us
this story of his, which I cant quite believe. He had complained himself about
the multitude of lies told by the newly discovered young novelist, the rich
young man/street person with parents/ogres who love/beat him. But the young man
can tell a story, and that seems in the end to be all that matters. He goes
smilingly off into his future, which, as far as I can see, will only repeat the
professors follies.
2003 - I
saw this again and give it a little more credit than I did before.
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I never read
At this point, my wife said, When was this? and added,
She was right. The sixties are coming; things are going to fall apart! We
smiled together about this while the final scene appeared. Here the young woman
and author speaks with her
publisher, who had brought her to town and spoken on her behalf. He says she has
now been brought into what was up until then a private club, the secret world of
the adults. She agrees. I remembered the amazement my first wife and I and our
friends felt in our early twenties (in the late sixties) when we learned that
life is like a soap opera. That was my initiation into the secret club of the
adults: realization that we actually will do these things they show in those
soap operas on TV, which I had hardly watched. I thought before then that we
would all pretty much succeed at the things we set out to do. I did not expect
the couple who were our closest friends to split up and then that he would fall
in love with her recently widowed mother and they would get married. Nor that
another friend would be silently raped in her guest bed while children slept, by
her host, her best friends husband. Coming of age was to see soap opera coming
to life in our lives.
The young author in Return to
But in this final scene we wonder what she will do, because
we know she has fallen in love with her publisher and editor, a married man, in
fulfillment of the fears of her mother, who had done just that and produced an
illegitimate daughter, this young woman. She says goodbye to him, and you get
the impression she is free of her mothers accusation and thereby freed from the
power of the sin. Such was the hope of those who would write the script for the
sixties.
She does say goodbye but whispers, Darling, as he walks
away. She turns away, but a passion grips her yet. Thus an enterprising script
writer plants a seed for the forthcoming series, which will in fact be a soap
opera. And thus the writer lets it slip that that the proto-sixties faith, that
the only sin problem we have is accusation, will turn out not to have been the
truth. Of course some will say Im just accusing now. Cant she say Darling if
she wants? Okay, but her faith in the moral excellence of youth will be more
difficult to maintain when soap opera things start happening in her life.
Both movies send a mixed message, but I prefer that of
Return to
Double Jeopardy
(frivolous review of unimportant movie)
I told my daughters we saw a new twist on plots while
browsing at the movie store: man commits suicide and frames his wife for the
death . . . Why? This has to be the ultimate bitterness movie. The next day I
realized that was the movie we picked, Double Jeopardy, with Tommy Lee Jones.
And the impression I got from the cover was not quite right. You learn pretty
quickly that the man is still alive. Shes in prison and learns hes with their
son and her best friend. Now what he did makes a little sense: because he has
the son he has the insurance money that was so incriminating for her. But there
are plausibility problems. I am a nagging realist and have trouble with plots
that are hard to believe. But its carried off pretty well. She stops denying
the crime and gets herself paroled, and you think shes on a revenge trip. If
she would just get a private detective, maybe Tommy Lee Jones, who is going to
be in the movie, and prove hes alive, she could be exonerated. But she take matters into her own hands; she
violates parole in serious ways, and Tommy Lee Jones is her parole officer,
hunting her while she hunts the husband. She has a gun, but shes not totally
murderous. She mainly wants her kid back. It all ends up in suitably dramatic
way, and I enjoyed it. But I thought if it were up to me Id rewrite the ending
and expand on the dramatic element that is his explanations about what he did,
and Id have them address my plot plausibility questions.
He told her he would have killed himself, but he lacked
courage. That was really in the movie. Id branch out from there:
Why would you kill yourself and frame me
to solve a financial problem? Thats overkill, isnt it? I mean . .
.
I didnt do that. Thats
just what the cover implied.
Ok,
Sorry. But why would you disappear and frame me? Why not just either kill yourself, so Id get the money, or
...
I didnt want you to have
the money. Im one of those totally selfish characters you see in the movies
sometimes, always men.
Okay. Im
starting to get the picture. But still, why didnt you kill me? Its not hard to
fake an accident when just the two of us are in a sailboat far from shore, is
it? We were both insured; youd get the money, that way, but the way you did it
was so risky and circuitous. What if I woke up while you were spreading blood
around, you and and your
accomplice, Angela--which by the way proves your relationship with her did not
start only after I was in prison, as you claim--
Of course I was lying about
that!
Okay, but if I woke up
while you and she were spreading blood around, what would I have thought? Then
youd have had to kill me, but with all that blood it would be hard to make it
look like an accident. People in oceans can just drown. No mess.
We thought about that. But I could never
bring myself to kill anyone, so I had to take the risk.
And what about the fact that in order for you to get the money after you 'died'
you had to have our kid--and how do you buy a hotel with money in a trust
fund, by the way? Anyway, you could have lost big, because my choice to have
Angela, your girlfriend, adopt my child was not in your control, and you could
have just ended up with a rich kid waiting for his mother to get out of prison.
It still seems like you should have killed me.
Well, maybe I should have. But what about you? Why did you say your were guilty just to look normal and
get paroled and then go off on your own, breaking parole? Why didnt you get a
detective to prove I was alive, which would have gotten you off the hook
entirely?
So how does a
convicted felon with no money get a private detective? I tried to get the
insurance company to listen, but they ignored me even though their own two
million dollars was at stake.
But you took an awful lot of risks! Whats really involved here is whether or
not Im alive, not your ability to make me give you our kid.
Are you trying to pull your macho
rationality on me again? Lay off!
These two could have gone long into the night in this way,
much like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? By the small hours
of the morning the plot would be suitably revised, and one of them could then
have shot the other.
can I get any
smaller?