How to Avoid Bad Movies

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. I’m told nobody reads anymore, but that people have infinite patience for talking heads on screens. That being the case, you may as well gather up the family, kick back, and launch the video. If, on the other hand, you’re old school, the text is still here, along with original art by my daughter.

Introduction

Okay, we’re into our eighth month of shelter-in-place and we’re running out of movies. We’ve seen the Oscar nominees and all the films friends have recommended and, it seems, are down to the dregs. It’s bad enough wasting time on a movie that ends up being lame, but now we’re spending half an hour researching what to watch and still coming up short.

In this post I’ll give you fresh guidelines on how to dodge bad movies. I’ll also provide a list of ten critics who should be banned for life, and why. Along the way you’ll get critiques of five awful movies that critics loved … not just to warn you away, but to examine how highly acclaimed movies can be so bad. Finally, I’ll provide a list of the twenty best movies I’ve seen in the last few years, just to end on a positive note.

Can’t we just follow the star ratings?

It’s common practice to vet movies by looking at their IMDb user ratings and/or Metacritic scores. I’m only halfway on board with this. I know I can’t trust my fellow man, because Avengers: Infinity War has an average IMDb user rating of 8.4. Meanwhile, no fewer than a dozen sequels have been made to The Fast and the Furious, so it’s obvious the unwashed masses are just pushovers.

The professionals ought to do better. For many months I’ve been choosing movies based largely on Metascore, that being the averaged ratings from (supposedly) “the world’s most respected critics.” To some degree, this works, as I’ve been warned off of countless movies that look good on paper, like Everything Is Illuminated (which scored only 58 points though the novel on which it’s based is fantastic) and Step Brothers (a mere 51, despite Rolling Stone naming it the 17th funniest movie of all time).

While Metascores do seem capable of outing bad movies, they’re far from totally reliable. I keep sitting through awful movies that have sky-high average scores. Multiple critics will give some film a perfect 100 and it’ll not just be meh, but actually totally lame. It seems that when a movie—especially a very serious one—tries really hard but crashes and burns, it’s almost guaranteed to be highly praised by critics anyway. I have a theory: when the plot and the point of a movie are totally unfathomable, a certain type of highbrow critic will want to rave about it, perhaps hoping to seem far more sophisticated and perceptive than his readership.

Last Year at Marienbad, though it’s too old to have a Metascore ranking, exemplifies the kind of relentlessly highfalutin movie that gets elite critics all hot and bothered. And yet, it completely sucks. The two main characters are annoying and unrealistic, their romance completely unconvincing and tedious, the dialogue maddeningly obtuse. Original? Perhaps. Watchable? I want that 94 minutes of my life back. (I fact-checked the length and it’s a good thing … I’d have guessed it was at least three hours long.) And yet critics adored this movie (or pretended to).

Check out the little video homage Richard Brody (the sometime New Yorker critic) pays to Last Year at Marienbad here. If you can’t help but roll your eyes at the film footage, and Brody’s bloviating about it, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about … the hyper-intellectual over-the-top highbrow nonsense so many critics indulge in. Even the mainstream critic Roger Ebert wrote, I kid you not, in his (retrospective) review of Marienbad, “I sipped my coffee and nodded thoughtfully.” It wasn’t enough that he liked the movie … he wanted us to actually picture him discussing the movie with a fellow intellectual, so we can appreciate how elevated their discourse was.

This weirdness can be explained in terms of mimetic theory. In her great book The Possessed, Elif Batuman, citing René Girard, the father of mimetic theory, describes it thus:

According to Girard, there is in fact no such thing as human autonomy or authenticity. All of the desires that direct our actions in life are learned or imitated from some Other, to whom we mistakenly ascribe the autonomy lacking in ourselves… The perceived desire of the Other confers prestige on the object, rendering it desirable. For this reason, desire is usually less about its purported object than about the Other; it is always “metaphysical,” in that it is less about having, than being.

Stay with me here. The purported object, in this case, is the movie, and the critic is the Other. By asking us to picture him discussing Last Year at Marienbad while sipping his coffee, Ebert is inviting us not so much to contemplate the movie, but to imagine what it’s like to be him, to be so smart as to actually understand this utterly cryptic work. It’s not so much that the movie itself is desirable; the review is about being the kind of moviegoer that can appreciate such a fine, subtle, highly sophisticated film. (It doesn’t matter that Ebert may be making fun of himself, just a bit, in his review … it’s still a fawning endorsement of a bullshit movie.)

Audiences who go in for these highly praised but inscrutable films are sharing in the illusion that there’s something to “get,” if only you’re smart enough. Believing that they “got” the movie is a matter of cognitive dissonance: I must have liked it, because it’s such an amazing film for those alive to its brilliance. Once this self delusion is built, it’s hard to tear down. Even when someone cries bullshit and says, “That movie was lame, I was totally lost” these fans just feel extra smug and elite, stroking their goatees (or bare chins because in the moment they forget they don’t actually have goatees), looking down on the naysayer, lost in their metaphysical identification with supreme intellect.

(This isn’t to say I’m a lowbrow cretin who only enjoys dippy comedies or action movies. As detailed here, I think my highbrow credentials are in pretty good order.)

Mick LaSalle, the San Francisco Chronicle movie critic, who has been at it since 1985, strikes me as pretty reliable. In a recent column he put forth a very useful idea: “With a bad story, the best you can hope for is a movie that’s bad in such an original way that critics, for a time, will insist it’s great. Like Last Year at Marienbad.”

Look, I don’t mind if I end up being underwhelmed by a lowbrow comedy like Wet Hot American Summer, even if Rolling Stone called it the 38th funniest movie of the 21st century. If I choose to ignore the 42 Metascore, well, caveat emptor. But when 26 different critics give a movie like There Will Be Blood a perfect 100, and the Metascore is 93, and I find the movie a bit tedious and its ending unforgivably ill-considered and poorly executed, erasing any meaning that could have been built up over the previous 2 hours and 38 minutes, I get a little pissed. So I’ve selected five highbrow movies with absurdly generous reviews and will walk you through exactly how they go wrong, and how we go wrong watching them. (Note: I have not actually watched Wet Hot American Summer.)

Warning: my commentary is chock full of spoilers. Because you absolutely should not watch any of these awful movies, in my opinion there’s nothing really to spoil.

Under the Skin (2014) – 80 Metascore

This highly artsy sci-fi movie features Scarlett Johansson as some kind of space alien who goes around seducing men and luring them to her weird lair where they sink down into some subterranean liquid and dissolve. She has some kind of supervisor who drives a motorcycle. Eventually she goes rogue and tries to have actual sex, which doesn’t work out so well, and eventually some asshole lights her on fire. It sounds more exciting than it is. Actually, it was godawful slow. Fortunately, we were streaming it online so we were able to speed it up … first to 1.25 times the normal speed, then 1.5, and finally all the way up to twice the normal speed and its pace was still glacial. The official runtime of the movie is 1 hour 48 minutes, but even with the second half sped up it felt like well over two hours.

And yet, a dozen critics gave this movie a perfect score of 100. For example, Donald Clarke of the Irish Times raved about it. Did he literally call it perfect? Well, no, and his review does allude to “occasional outbreaks of ambiguity” and allows that “the chain of command between the alien and her biker superiors is a little unclear.” Uh, yeah. The biker had nothing to do with anything else in the movie, we just got a lot of footage of some guy driving around on a motorcycle and occasionally dismounting and walking around. Calhoun goes on to say, “The drift of the plot is, however, always easy to grasp.” Well, duh … because the same damn thing happens over and over again, the repetition being utterly senseless and frankly cruel. Clarke concludes, “Under the Skin manages to foster empathy with an entity as isolated from human experience as an avalanche or a weather system. Such achievements tend to allow films to be classed as masterpieces.” Okay, first of all, if he admires empathy, why does he have none for the innocent people he’s recommending this terrible movie to? And second of all, “tend to allow films to be classed”? WTF? How does an achievement “allow” anything? Who taught this guy how to write a sentence?

I suppose I could sequentially rip apart every rave review of Under the Skin, but there’s a more important problem to address: Metacritic claims that Anthony Lane, of The New Yorker, who happens to be my favorite critic, also gave it a perfect 100. Naturally, I was skeptical. Not all (or even most) critics give movies a numerical rating, and I’ve seen before how Metacritic will sometimes assign a really high score to an only somewhat positive review. So I immediately clicked the link to the full review. My discovery? Anthony Lane didn’t even review this movie! The New Yorker review is from Richard Brody, and could not possibly be given a score of 100. Brody writes, “The conceit … offers immense promise,” but goes on to say:

It’s not a vision or even an idea, it’s a premise, and one that’s left completely undeveloped. Glazer evokes the idea of strangeness without actually seeing much, showing much, or revealing much. That job goes to the insistent music, which forces a stereotypical eeriness, as in the scores of fifties sci-fi B-movies, but without the hysterical exaggeration—without the fun.

He praises Johansson’s acting, but declares that her 2007 movie The Nanny Diaries “is a much better movie than Under the Skin.” The Nanny Diaries has a Metascore of 46, with New Yorker giving it, by Metacritic’s reckoning, a mere 40 points. So much for trusting Metacritic on this one.

(Note that Anthony Lane has written about Under the Skin, within a profile of Scarlett Johansson. He’s clearly smitten with her and does praise the movie, but it wasn’t a review per se and shouldn’t earn the movie 100 points.)

Now, I wouldn’t ask you to ignore all these 100-point reviews just because I hated this movie. Many real critics also butchered it. Rex Reed, in The Observer, praises Johansson’s sex appeal, skin, and smile, but laments her “stunning ignorance about how to choose the right roles.” Mick LaSalle, in the San Francisco Chronicle, gets right to the heart of the problem: “Under the Skin can be confused for a movie that hides its meanings, when it’s really a movie that hides its meaninglessness.” He calls BS on the high-minded ambition of the movie and decries its boring repetition:

So this is no normal woman. This isn’t even a normal homicidal maniac. This is someone on some kind of supernatural harvesting project. This is clear from the very first minutes, and the movie never advances beyond that. Instead virtually the entire action of the film just repeats the same kind of event - she goes out, looks for a man, etc. As one might imagine, this becomes quite dull, even sleep-inducing, especially considering the movie’s overall cast of slow-moving gloom.

Metacritic assigns a rating of 50 points (out of 100) to LaSalle’s review, which I think is really, really generous. My wife and I hated this movie. We should have just shut it off, but when a movie has such a high Metascore, we have sometimes fallen prey to the “sunk cost” fallacy … thinking we should give a movie the chance to redeem itself. As agonizingly slow as the movie was (even when sped up), we just kept watching, until we finally finished and were utterly disappointed—not just in the movie, but in ourselves for having faith in it.

So, there are two lessons to be gleaned here. First, don’t always trust the Metascore. Second, fail fast … if a movie sucks after 30 or 45 minutes, it’s mostly likely going to suck all the way to the final credits, no matter how many critics fawned over it.

To be continued…

Well, I’ve clearly run out of space here, or at least you’ve run out of time or patience for now. Check back in a week, for Part II: the next four movies to avoid, the ten critics you should ban for life, and the twenty best movies I’ve seen lately.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—

Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Leap Years & Leap Seconds

Introduction

Tomorrow is the start of a leap year.  What does this mean, besides the obvious bit about there being a February 29?  Why do we observe leap year?  What folk traditions surround this?  What is a bissextile year?  What practical matters does the leap year introduce?  Is “Leap Year” a good movie?  What is a leap second?  I will answer all these questions, and more, in this post.

A helpful mnemonic

You probably already know this by heart, but here’s a handy mnemonic for keeping track of the number of days in each month: 

30 days hath September, April, June, and November.  All the rest have 31, except for February, which usually has 28 but has 29 on leap years, which occur every four years unless the year is divisible by 100 but not by 400, a distinction we make to account for the slight rounding error that occurs by counting each year as 365.25 days when it’s actually 36.24; by skipping leap years on turns of the century that are not divisible by 400, the Gregorian calendar is able to compensate for the 11 minute loss of accuracy each year.

From a completely self-serving standpoint, we could probably dispense with leap years, since the drift in the calendar would take several generations to really foul things up.  But is that really the kind of world we want to leave to our grandchildren’s grandchildren?

Are you looking for an easy way to tell if it’s a leap year?  They tend to coincide with Presidential elections.  But you have to be a bit careful:  even though 2000 was a leap year (being divisible by 400), 2100 won’t be.  If you’re lucky enough to be alive in 2100, you’ll have to keep that in mind.

Folk traditions around leap year

According to Wikipedia, “In Ireland and Britain, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only in leap years....  Supposedly, a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then age five and living in Norway), required that fines be levied if a marriage proposal was refused by the man; compensation was deemed to be a pair of leather gloves, a single rose, £1 and a kiss.”

There’s just so much to react to here!  First of all, it puts me at ease about the upcoming American Presidential election.  Scotland is in pretty decent shape, as far as I can tell, despite having once been ruled by a five-year-old who wasn’t shy about pushing through sweeping legislation.  So, whoever wins our next election, how badly could he or she really screw things up?

Personally, I’d like to bring back this leap year marriage proposal law.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that men are the only ones allowed to propose marriage in this day and age.  Yes, the prevailing tradition is still for the man to pop the question and present the ring, but he wouldn’t do so without some kind of tacit advance consent, unless he’s a fool.  In other words, the thinking man won’t propose to his sweetheart unless he’s quite sure she’ll say yes.  In this way, the woman is actually holding the cards.  (Of course you could mix & match the pronouns around all you want here.)

The part of that law I like, though, is the compensation the man must provide when turning down a proposal.  To bring back that law would create jobs, or at least create income for a daring woman.  She could find some schmuck who doesn’t seem her type, then do everything in her power to alienate him, and then propose, just so she could collect her gloves, flower, money, and kiss.  Sure, £1 isn’t much money today, but adjusting for the inflation since 1288, it would be a considerable sum.

You may be wondering:  is courtship the aspect of leap year that introduces the term “bissextile”?  Well, I hate to break it to you, but this term isn’t nearly as racy as you’d think.  “Bissextile year” is just another term for leap year.

Is “Leap Year” a good movie?

I’ll be honest with you, I never much cared for doing research, but this blog sometimes demands it.  When that happens, I’ll always prefer a popular video over some thick book.  Thus, I was pleased to see that the third Google hit on “leap year” was a movie by the same name.  Better yet, “Leap Year” stars Amy Adams, whom I enjoyed watching in “Junebug,” “American Hustle,” and “Big Eyes.” 

Alas, my hopes fell when I went to IMDb and saw the Metascore for “Leap Year” ... 33 out of 100, one of the lowest scores I’ve ever seen.  (Consider that “Star Wars:  Episode I – The Phantom Menace” got a 51.)  I scanned the highlights from various critics:  “A by-the-numbers romantic comedy as predictable as it is cloying,” “Virtually every word and plot turn is insincere, manufactured, unfelt and dishonest,” “Mostly awful,” “It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year,” “Using Love to Shed Pounds and Boost Confidence in School,” “A retread of just about every rom-com cliché ever turned,” and—wait!  What was that bit about using love to shed pounds?  Oh, an ad crept in there.  Geez.

Looking for any shred of silver lining, I consulted the IMDb Parents Guide:  “No sex scenes. A woman is briefly seen in her underwear.  There is a short fight scene, but it is not very frightening, and could even be considered comical.”  I think when the viewer can’t tell for sure if a movie scene was meant to be funny, that movie is automatically in trouble.

What does leap year mean to me?

At first glance, it would seem that as long as we avoid the movie “Leap Year,” we won’t be materially affected by there being 366 days in 2016.  That said, the following leap year, 2020, is going to cause me some heartbreak.  You see, I have this great wall calendar commemorating the 50th anniversary of my dearly departed favorite restaurant of all time, and though it’s a 2009 calendar, all the days of the week are the same between 2009 and 2015.  Thus, I got to enjoy the use of it all year long (it’s hanging out in the garage).  I was hoping to use it again six years from now, but leap year gets in the way.

How does leap year interfere?  Well, here’s the thing.  Normally, the day of the week on which January 1 falls will change by one day each year.  The year 2013 started on a Tuesday, 2014 started on a Wednesday, 2015 started on a Thursday, 2016 will start on a Friday, etc.  The term “leap year” derives from the fact that a day of the week is “leapt over” during a leap year.  That is, instead of 2017 starting on a Saturday, it will leap over Saturday and start on Sunday (owing to the extra day in February).

If it weren’t for leap year, we could reuse our wall calendars every seven years, meaning I could re-hang my La Fiesta calendar in 2022.  Leap years make it more complicated.  Because 2012 was a leap year, and skipped over a weekday, I got to use my 2009 calendar again this year (2015 instead of 2016)—so I saved a year.  Does that mean I’ll get to use it again in another six years?  Well, 2016 being a leap year will speed things along, like 2012 did.  But 2020 is also a leap year, so 2021 will leap over Thursday and land on Friday.  That means I won’t get to use this calendar again until 2026!

Not only will this require me to be more organized, but for a whole decade I’ll have to keep that calendar from being “disappeared” by my wife.  This will be a bit like secreting a war refugee in my attic, because my wife is the polar opposite of a hoarder.  For example, if my younger daughter stops playing with a stuffed animal or toy for any period of time, it goes to this purgatory area in the closet for a few weeks before being given to the Goodwill.  Whenever I’m at home I have to be careful to keep moving, lest my wife drag me out to the curb with the garbage and recycling.

What is a leap second?

My family, I’m proud to say, is a bunch of nerds.  Tonight, for example, my brother Bryan will entertain guests at a New Year’s gathering by giving a short lecture, including a demo, on the slide rule.  Similarly, on Christmas Eve, my wife gathered the kids and me in the living room to hear her read aloud from a speech titled “Pericles, in a Deathless Funeral Oration, Sums Up the Glory That Was Athens,” written in 430 B.C.  (I found the speech enjoyable, even the part where my kids burst out laughing because I was snoring.  Later in the speech I got confused about whether I’d heard the word “turban” or “turbine,” and apparently I talked in my sleep because this got another big laugh.  Neither word actually appears in the speech; I’d dreamt it.)

Furthering my family’s nerd cred is the exchange of e-mails we’ve had about leap years. I sent out the handy mnemonic that started this blog post, and my older daughter offhandedly asked, in reference to the rounding error that makes leap year necessary, “Yikes... couldn’t they just fix the rounding error in the first place?”  This question may have been rhetorical, but my dad provided a very thorough answer, explaining that it isn’t exactly right to say we make a rounding error by calling a year 365.25 days when it’s actually 365.24.  The truth is more complicated than that:  

“The mnemonic has 97 leap days per 400 years, so instead of a simple 365.25 days per year (which it would be if there were 100 every 400) the current calendar gives 365 97/400 or 365.2425.  The actual number of days per one year, from measurements, is a bit different, and wanders a little from year to year, unpredictably [due to tides slowing down the earth’s rotation, and the cycle of water freezing and thawing, which brings about changes related to conservation of angular momentum].  So to keep our civil clocks in match with the much more regular rhythm of the standard atomic clocks, ‘they’ add a leap second sometimes.  This has been necessary 26 times since 1972, the most recent being at time 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 60 seconds on June 30 of this year.  That minute had 61 seconds!”

My niece chimed in, recalling how excited her dad (i.e., my brother Bryan), had gotten about the last leap second.  She asked the other e-mail recipients, “I’m curious, ‘mathletes,’ how you’d calculate when to add the next leap second.”  This, too, elicited a very detailed and math-infused answer from her grandpa, which began, “Interestingly, it is not just a question of math, but one of exacting observational astronomy.  Oh, there is some math involved, but it is quite straightforward.  And there is a decision to make:  what is a ‘socially acceptable’ time to insert (or delete?) the second.  Midnight on June 30 is the very middle of the calendar year, a seemingly reasonable time to adjust the clocks.”

The explanation went on from here and involved meridian transit telescopes, measurements taken at a very  specific time of day, the effect of the Earth’s rotational precession (i.e., of the fact that it wobbles) on when equinoxes occur, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t really understand.  I wasn’t about to tackle the math involved, but was intrigued by the “socially acceptable” aspect of the leap second, and the friction that inevitably results when scientists present their findings to those who turn them into public policy.

Reading up on the leap second on Wikipedia, I discovered (not surprisingly) that politics does influence the leap second’s implementation (more on that in a minute).  I also discovered some other interesting tidbits, such as this:  “Muslim scholars, including al-Biruni in 1000, subdivided the mean solar day into 24 equinoctial hours, each of which was subdivided sexagesimally, that is into the units of minute, second, third, fourth and fifth, creating the modern second as 1⁄60 of 1⁄60 of 1⁄24 = 1⁄86400 of the mean solar day in the process.”  

I’m guessing that if Donald Trump were to become President, some cabinet member who happened to read up on leap seconds could approach him with the fact that it was Muslim scholars who defined the method by which we subdivide our days, and drop the name “al-Biruni” a bunch of times, and Trump would immediately want to take the USA off of the 24-hour, 60-minute, 60-second standard.  (Never mind that the sexagesimal system originated with the Sumerians and Babylonians.) 

Why would anybody want to open this can of worms?  Well, if we were to adopt a decimal basis for measuring time (as feasible an alternative to the current scheme as any, and probably easy to sell to The Donald), this might be a nifty back-door into finally getting the US into the metric system, albeit a modified version that uses base-10 for everything, including time.

I was also interested to read, on the Wikipedia leap second page, about problems that the leap second has caused with computer systems, due to its six-month notification not being enough time for developers to prepare:  “A number of organizations reported problems caused by flawed software following the June 30, 2012 leap second....  Despite the publicity given to the 2015 leap second, Internet network failures occurred due to the vulnerability of at least one class of router.  Also, interruptions of around 40 minutes duration occurred with Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple’s music streaming series Beats 1.” 

That list reads like a “who’s who” of needless time-wasting Internet social media and passive entertainment platforms, doesn’t it?  I think that instead of abolishing the leap second, or getting developers to step up their game in preparing, we should create a national holiday around the post-leap-second outage, where for forty minutes after each leap second, people engage in offline, timeless activities like face-to-face socializing, reading books, and maybe venturing outdoors.  (Presumably this interruption will begin at 23:59:60 UTC, which would be 15:59:60 Pacific, a perfect time for a stroll.)

I was similarly intrigued to learn that Google, never one to be pushed around by governing bodies or consortiums like the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, has their own scheme for handling the leap second:  “Instead of inserting a leap second at the end of the day, Google servers implement a leap smear, extending seconds slightly over a time window prior to the leap second.”  I’m not sure exactly what to make of this workaround, other than to note that “leap smear” would be a good name for a rock band.

And on that note, I wish you a happy, healthy, and rockin’ 2016!

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--
For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Chasing “Andrei Rublev”

NOTE:  This post is rated R for pervasive mature themes and mild strong language.

Introduction

This post has given me a bad case of writer’s block.  The topic, the 1966 Russian film Andrei Rublev (Андрей Рублев), is just too huge.  I can’t review this just as a movie—it’s much more complicated than that.  It has been called “the greatest movie ever made” and “a very long film about bearded men.”  As The New Yorker observed, the film—about a 15th-century icon painter—was blocked from being shown in the Soviet Union because the government considered it “ideologically ambiguous in places—an error regarded in Russia as more dangerous than mayhem.”  Andrei Rublev is like this giant heavy weight that can bear down on you even when you’re not watching.  What I’m going to try to do here is capture the experience of my monumental struggle of going toe-to-toe with this movie.  Twice.

By the way, before you decide this topic is too nerdy, and/or that this movie is just a snooze-fest for intellectuals—kind of a My Dinner With Андрей”—think again.  This movie softens the viewer up with long, dull stretches, only to suddenly shock him with a brutal Tartar raid, a nude bacchanal, or a scene of brazen ideological ambiguity.  It is as harrowing as it is dull.

Why should you read this?

Read this post if you’ve never heard of Andrei Rublev before and/or you’re considering watching it for the first time.  Are there spoilers here?  Yeah, there are, but believe me, with this film it’s better to err on the side of knowing too much than being mystified throughout.  According to one critic, “[Director Andrei] Tarkovsky himself said:  ‘We worked at drowning our idea in the atmosphere, in the characters.’”

If you know you’ll never watch the movie, read this to improve your cultural literacy, and to know what you missed.  Plus, maybe after this post you’ll change your mind and give the film a try.  (Which you should, if for no other reason than its name-brand director.  Another notable film by Tarkovsky is The Steamroller and the Violin, about a boy who is endlessly teased for playing the violin until he befriends a road worker, who teaches him how to drive his steamroller.  Apparently it ends there, before becoming the most badass revenge flick ever.)

If you’ve already seen Andrei Rublev and just love all the endless commentary about it on the Internet, you might be hoping I can offer a fresh perspective.  Could I be better than the 100 IMDb reviewers?  Well, I am a pretty eggheaded guy, but I’m also not afraid to call a spade a “pompous, self-satisfied, overeducated spade”—to its face.  My credentials as a highbrow type, who nevertheless  appreciates lowbrow sensibilities, can be found here.

My first time watching the film

I first encountered Andrei Rublev when my mom, visiting from Oregon, brought it with her from her local library.  This was a two-cassette copy on VHS.  Now, right off the bat, there’s something wrong with viewing an art house movie on VHS.  Here’s what Tarkovsky intended for us to see:

You know that on-screen notice that says, “This film has been modified from its original version.  It has been modified to fit your screen”?  Here’s what that’s referring to:

When a movie is modified to fit the squarer TV screen , a bunch gets cut off the sides.  Directors in the ‘80s and ‘90s actually compensated for this by putting important action in the middle of the screen.  Tarkovsky, needless to say, did not.  But that’s not even the worst of it.  Our VHS copy of this film was of absolutely terrible quality and looked something like this:

It was actually even worse because it was really grainy.  The whole movie seemed to take place during a blizzard.  (“I’m just so cold watching this!” my wife complained at one point.)  It’s hard enough trying to tell the characters in this movie apart (them all being bearded and hooded) without such a poor image.  I couldn’t follow anything and kept falling asleep.  Not being actually tired, I wouldn’t sleep for long, but every time I awoke, the action onscreen had gotten even more confusing and my poor brain—surely in self-defense—would power down again.  I think I fell asleep about forty times.  Once, I awoke to see a character flying high over the steppes in what appeared to be a homemade ultralight, like what killed John Denver.  This caused me a fit of confusion that was just short of apoplectic.  Though I was the first to abandon the film, my mom and my wife eventually gave up as well.  I don’t think they even made it to the second cassette.

Ever since that day, Andrei Rublev has been a running joke among my mom, my wife, and me.  We try to work it into conversation at every opportunity, as in, “I thought Avatar was a pretty cool movie, but it was such a blatant rip-off of Andrei Rublev,” or “Hey, look, the Key Grip on this movie was Mitch Lillian!  Wasn’t he a grip on Andrei Rublev?”

So when, a few weeks back, my wife came home from the library announcing she’d checked out Andrei Rublev on DVD, I assumed she was joking.  She was not.

Why watch this movie?

Don’t let me sour you on Andrei Rublev .  It is a well loved film.  The average IMDb user rating is 8.3, which tops 12 Years a Slave, Argo, The Artist, The King’s Speech, and The Hurt Locker—i.e., the last five Oscar winners for Best Picture.  It has more ten-star IMDb reviews than I’ve ever seen.

That said, this movie isn’t for everyone; it seems to favor the intellectual élite.  Frankly, there seems to be a bit of “emperor’s new movie” effect, with each reviewer seeming to be one-upping the next.   The first ten-star review is titled “The Pietà of Filmmaking.”  I guess I’m just not up to this reviewer’s level because I had to look up “Pietà,” which means “a picture or sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Jesus Christ on her lap or in her arms.”  So how is this movie the filmmaking equivalent of that?  Am I supposed to feel unworthy that I can’t grasp the meaning here and am too lazy even to ponder it?

This review says, “Score it 11 out of 10” and also “It is a difficult movie to follow. One might liken it to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake as a work of genius so monumental and complex, and so disdainful of traditional narrative form, that it requires extensive thought and study to understand it.  And even after studying it, watching it repeatedly, and reading Tarkovsky’s own comments about it, one still finds it opaque in many ways.”  Yeah, “one” might liken it to Finnegan’s Wake, if one could manage to read Finnegan’s Wake in the first place.  Who is this “one,” anyway, who has the patience to watch a 3½-hour movie repeatedly?

Of course, it’s not just amateur reviewers who praise this movie.  The original review in The Guardian, in 1973, states, “Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie works through a slow, unstressed accumulation of scenes and images.”  Doesn’t sound like the formula that would get a new movie green-lighted … but maybe that’s what makes this one special. 

There’s something odd going on:  the confusing, misunderstood-genius flair of Andrei Rublev has somehow infected the reviewers.  The Guardian reviewer goes on to say of Tarkovsky, “He pared drama of vision; the deliberate grandeur of perception.”  That’s not even grammatically correct.  Worse, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.  It’s just a tossed salad of words that sound kind of impressive together.  Is that what it takes to describe this movie?  The abandonment of cogent thought?

The New Yorker review from 1969 offers praise that is easier to digest:  “It is a film that is fascinating, enriching, full of the sap and the soup of Russian rural life, of dirt and dirty girls, of trees and fields, and of people.”  Fair enough, but … aren’t dirty girls people too?

Ah, perhaps I’ve just caught the interest of the reader who may not care who said what about this movie, but is intrigued by the “dirty girls” notion.  Dirty as in dirt-covered, or as in libidinous?  Good news:   the New Yorker goes on to describe “a too long spring-bacchanal scene of naked full-busted and full-buttocked girls and bearded naked men.”   (Note that “girls” in this case means “women.”  That’s  the sexist language of 1969 coming through, I guess.) 

I think it odd how the men are described as not only naked but bearded.  I mean, just about all the men in this movie are bearded.  Is “bearded” in this context supposed to be as enticing as the women being “full-busted and full-buttocked”?  And speaking of “full-buttocked,” why haven’t we ever come across this description before?  It would have been so useful to rappers like Eminem (in “Ass Like That”) or Sir Mix A Lot (in “Baby Got Back”).

You might also wonder how a bacchanal scene like this could be described as  “too long.”  And yet, like everything else in the movie, it is.

By the way, promoters of this movie weren’t shy about using the sex angle to garner interest.  Check out this poster, which prominently features a very minor character:

My second viewing

Checking out a DVD from the library means you have all the time you need to watch it.  This is a blessing but also a curse.  Night after night we procrastinated.  The mere thought of tackling the movie again was enough to make me irreparably sleepy.

Finally, one night, we put in the DVD.  We were immediately struck by the excellent video quality.  Not only is the aspect ratio restored to movie screen dimensions (i.e., the sides aren’t chopped off), but all the blur and graininess are gone.  Look:

But what the hell was that onscreen?  Just like you, my wife and I were shocked to see, against the backdrop of a church, what appeared to be a gigantic scrotum.  What kind of sick person would put that into his movie?  As the camera panned down, in its slow, unstressed way, I realized this wasn’t a scrotum but some kind of homemade hot-air balloon.  For like twenty minutes we see a bunch of identical Russian peasants running around yelling as the balloon gradually breaks its tethers, and then some guy flies off in it.  There are no subtitles in this scene to explain what the yelling is about.

Would the dialogue have been discernible to a native Russian speaker?  I don’t know.  The DVD jacket advertises “New English subtitles translating 40% more dialogue,” suggesting that the bar had previously been set pretty low.  (The audio isn’t very good, by the way.  Later in the film, I replayed a brief scene several times to try to learn the Russian for “motherfucker,” but I couldn’t hear the word clearly enough.)

Who knows, maybe you’re not supposed to grasp what’s going on.  We watched this balloonist fly over the bleak Russian landscape for a good while, until he finally crashed.  Who was he?  What was he doing up there?  Was the balloon made for him, or had he stolen it for a joy ride?  Did he survive the crash?  And what did this have to do with Andrei Rublev, the icon painter?  None of these questions was answered.  Nothing made sense in this chapter, the first of nine.

I’m not going to walk you through the entire plot of the movie, but let me share with you some highlights, to convey how difficult—and yet beguiling—Andrei Rublev turns out to be.

The second chapter is almost as mysterious as the first.  Three monks leave their monastery on horseback, muttering something about going somewhere else to seek their fortunes as painters.  It starts to rain.  They seek shelter in a barn where a jester entertains a bunch of peasants with a disturbingly bawdy performance that goes on and on.  Finally the monks show their disapproval, which puts a damper on everything, including the movie.  Then some soldiers arrive and haul the jester away.

Where is Andrei?  What does it all mean?  I tried to shrug this off.  In the third chapter, we come upon a character who at first seems to be dead but turns out just to be really, really old.  He starts up a long dialog with this other guy about painting icons.  Suddenly I’m hopeful:  could the younger guy be Andrei Rublev, meaning that after like 45 minutes I’ve finally isolated a character whose actions and words might actually be important?  I’m on the edge of my seat even before the old guy asks him, “Are you Andrei Rublev, by any chance?”  Now my heart is in my mouth!  There’s a long pause and the young man replies, “Nyet.”  Dammit!

That was enough for the first night.  We broke the viewing into three, maybe four nights because we kept falling asleep, and there’s only so much you can take.  But, with all the snow and blur from the VHS version removed, we found ourselves looking forward, in a way, to picking the film back up again.  (I know this isn’t how you’re supposed to watch this kind of movie, but hey, we’ve got kids, and lives outside of our passive video entertainment.)

On the second night, we did gradually figure out who’s who and what’s going on.  Rublev looks a little bit like Woody Harrelson with a beard and a hood.  If you ever watch the movie, keep an eye out for the guy who looks like this:

The basic gist is, Rublev gets recruited by the old guy, Theophanes the Greek, to be an apprentice and (eventually) paint the Last Judgment on the walls of a church.  There’s a great scene where Rublev says goodbye to Daniil, his mentor at the monastery.  It’s a bit of bromance I suppose; Rublev is really emotional and does an interesting hand-jive on the table, fingers drumming and hands moving around like giant spiders, probably because he’s so nervous.  If you watch this scene a couple times, as my wife and I did, you can stretch the moviegoing out even further.

Wait.  Would you want to stretch it out?  Well, possibly.  There’s something kind of pleasant about this movie, once you relax a bit and give up on trying to comprehend everything that goes on.  It’s a good movie for just drifting along, taking in the unusual scenery and attractive cinematography.  Many reviewers have described the movie as soothing; my wife agreed, saying, “It’s almost kind of narcotic.” 

Before Rublev settles down to paint, there are long scenes of him arguing abstract artistic and religious matters with Theophanes in the middle of some blasted landscape.  Some of the dialog is predictable and boring, but other snatches are very cryptic, like when Rublev suddenly yells at his helper, as they’re out wandering in some grassland, “You idiot, you let the glue burn on the flame!” and then some old guy comes out of nowhere, cuffs the helper on the ear, and yells, “You idiot, you let the glue burn on the flame!” as if Rublev hadn’t just yelled this.  (What glue?  What flame?  Where?  Beats me.)  Fortunately, before these scenes become too tiresome, we’re on to the pagan bacchanal scene.

Indeed, these women are full-busted and full-buttocked and nude.  They’re not bad-looking, but fortunately not that good-looking either, which would be silly (like the heroine in Braveheart who is not only really pretty but has unrealistically perfect teeth).  There’s a lot of frolicking in the forest, and Rublev is caught spying on the action by some pagans who tie him up and vow to come kill him in the morning.  He’s freed by a full-busted and mostly nude pagan woman, Marfa, who later flees through the woods, showcasing her full buttocks.  It’s a strange butt, not just ample but oddly square, and my wife said to me at this point, “Please tell me I don’t have a Marfa-butt.”  (She assuredly does not.)  I am quite sure that phrase will be immortalized in the specialized jargon of our family.

Finally, Rublev shows up at the church in the city of Vladimir to do his work.  There’s just one problem:  Rublev doesn’t actually paint.  It’s like a stalled-out government contract job.  We’re supposed to grasp that there’s an artistic dilemma involved here, between what the government wants (a cautionary tale of some kind, I guess) vs. Rublev’s desire for something that expresses the essential humanity of all involved and charts a new course for Russian painting, etc.  But how do you convey that?  Rublev just comes off like a slacker, and it doesn’t make for very exciting cinema.

Maybe that’s why we suddenly get an endless scene of Tartars sacking the city of Vladimir.  (The plot of Andrei Rublev is a bit like how Pauline Kael describes the James Bond movies:  “One damn thing after another.”  Come to think of it, Rublev being rescued by a babe, who’s supposed to be the enemy, is right out of a Bond film, innit?)

There’s a lot to alarm you in the Tartar raid scene (e.g., people’s eyes being gouged out, women being dragged off, dwellings getting torched) but what really jarred my wife and me was a horse falling backward down a staircase.  In this pre-CGI era, how did they get this footage?  We feared for the horse.

The New York Times review from 1973 says, “I wondered … how the director got a horse to fall down stairs.  Was the horse hurt?”  I’m glad somebody else was bothered by this.  What is it with Russian artists and horses?  In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment a horse is brutally tortured; in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina Vronsky (distracted by Anna) crashes his beloved horse during the steeplechase and the poor creature must be put down; in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time the hero literally rides his horse to death.  Such depictions are disturbing enough in literature, where actual animals aren’t involved in the rendering.  I discovered this tidbit on IMBD:  “For the scene where the horse falls down the stairs, it was shot in the head.  The crew acquired the horse from a slaughterhouse, and it was going to be shot the next day, so they decided to use it for the film.”

Perhaps the coolest part of the movie is toward the end when this teenager, bluffing, tells the authorities that he has learned, from his late father, the secret to forging bells (like the kind you’d put in a church tower).  So he gets a commission for this giant bell, which hundreds of poor Russians help build, in the middle of a damn field, casting it in a huge clay-lined pit with a raging bonfire.  It’s the polar opposite of our modern 3-D printing, and an impressive sight to behold.  Could you just rent the movie and fast-forward to this part (perhaps pausing along the way to take in the nude bacchanal)?  Well, you could, but I think it helps to be in a stupor when you get to this scene.

At the very end, the movie switches from black-and-white to full color, and the camera passes (in its slow, unstressed way) over the still-extant icons that the real Andrei Rublev painted.  Many critics have been really impressed by this part, but my wife and I found it infuriating.  The footage is too close-up, like trying to look at an elephant from six inches away.  I knew from what I’d read that this was the end of the movie, but as far as my wife knew, we could have only been halfway through.  When the credits started rolling she gasped, “That’s it!?  We’re done?!  You mean we actually did it?!”

Afterword

Our great intellectual adventure behind us, we decided that the next thing we watched would be more on the lowbrow side.  (I was particularly interested in something more frivolous, as I’d been reading a novel about a 17th-century English village ravaged by the bubonic plague.)  So a few nights later we watched the first episode of Mad Men on DVD. 

Wow, what a comedown.  Every point it made—Women were treated so badly!  Everybody smoked back then!—was so glaringly non-subtle, I found the show tedious, like being fed with a baby spoon.  “Man, is this like a two-hour pilot episode?!” I finally asked, before toggling the display and discovering that we’d only been watching for 45 minutes.  It only seemed long.  I guess after a difficult movie like Andrei Rublev, typical media fare just isn’t difficult enough.

Pink Floyd The Wall

NOTE:  This post is rated R for thematic content and an instance of mild strong language.

Introduction

Recently, I watched “Pink Floyd The Wall” for the third time (not having seen it in decades).   I came across it in a big box of videos on loan from a friend to entertain me as I recover from a broken leg.  Inside the DVD case I found this little note:

“The Wall” well deserves to be watched multiple times, and has held up well since it came out almost thirty years ago.  Other movies from that year—even top-grossing ones like “E.T.,” “Rocky III,” and “Porkies”—arguably have not.  

In this post I describe my introduction to the band and the movie; discuss the difficulty of getting to see it again; and review the DVD extras you should check out if you rent this movie.  (In an upcoming post, I’ll analyze the movie itself and put forth what I think is an unusual perspective.)

Discovering Pink Floyd

In 1980, when I was ten, my friend David asked, “What’s your favorite band?”  I knew this was just a ploy to get me to ask him about his favorite band, and I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.  He told me anyway:  “Mine’s Pink Floyd.”  He described this amazing album that had just come out, “The Wall.”  I’d never heard of the album, nor the band.  David did a sales job on me, saying, “On one of the songs it goes ‘And the worms ate into his brain!’”  I took a listen, and was immediately absorbed.  We’d listen to the album all afternoon, looking at the album art and the handwritten (and almost indecipherable) lyrics.  I got some attention at school for my rendition of a background exchange from the album, a women crying “Eeek!” and a man yelling back, “Shut up!”

In those days we grasped little of the meaning of the lyrics; singing them, we sounded many of the words out phonetically, like parrots.  One of my friends would sing “no dark sarhasm in the classroom,” not worrying about what “sarhasm” might mean.  I told him it had to be “sarcasm” but he refused to accept this.  For my part, I had no idea what “psychopathic” meant but couldn’t be bothered to look it up.  I remember arguing with my brothers about the little girl’s utterance before “Goodbye Blue Sky”—was it “there’s an airplane up in the sky,” “there’s a snow plane up in the sky,” or “there’s snow playing up in the sky”?

Around 1985, I won an art award and was invited to a ceremony in Denver to collect my prize.  My parents, recently divorced, bickered over who would drive me.  Trapped between them and their two cars, I struggled to decide.  “Come with me,” my mom said, “and you can have Pink Floyd in the car.”  My dad asked her what Pink Floyd was.  Mom, triumphant, replied, “It’s the name of a band he likes.”  Defeated, Dad snorted, “It sounds like the name of a pig.”

The movie at first viewing

My mom really grew her cool-mom cred when she agreed to take my friend John and me to the movie.  This was 1982, a couple years before VHS rentals.  I was only thirteen and it was rated R, so somebody had to take us.  Right away I knew this movie would be far more harrowing than the album.  Even before the horrific animation accompanying “Goodbye Blue Sky” I was terrified—not just by the movie, but by the prospect of my mom dragging my friend and me out of the theater (as my dad would do the following year at “Fanny & Alexander”).  But to my amazement, mere minutes into the film my mom had fallen asleep!  The sound was jacked way up in there (at many theaters the movie’s producers installed subwoofers to enhance the sound), so my mom’s falling asleep was simply bizarre.  Sleep must have been a coping mechanism, or at least an excuse for not making us leave.  I looked over periodically and throughout the movie Mom was practically catatonic in her seat, almost like Pink up on the screen.

Of course that movie completely blew my young mind.  The images were almost unbearable, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen.  The first thing that struck me was the battlefield scenes:  none of the glory and excitement of typical war movies, such as what Pink watches on TV, but mostly the grim aftermath of collecting the fallen soldiers.  Of course I’d learned about WWII in history class, but in a sanitized classroom-friendly version, never like this.  And then there was the deeply disturbing animation:  those uncanny humanoid creatures with snouts like gas masks; a guy getting brained; a white cross turning red, blood flowing from it into a drain; and of course the seduction, copulation, and mantis-like devouring of one flower by another.  (Roger Ebert wrote, “This is a flower so gynecological that Georgia O’Keefe might have been appalled.”) 

From “The Wall” I got a crash course in the birds and the bees—from the flowers, from the animated version of Pink’s scorpion-like wife, and from live-action groupies.  Even more disturbing were the scenes of a fascist rally and rioting.  Coming out of the theater, I was speechless.  I don’t remember ever debriefing with my friend about it, but that movie has been drifting around in the back of my mind ever since.  (I will not let my kids watch it until they’re at least seventeen.  Maybe not even then; one imdb bulletin boarder wrote, “Maybe it’s better I waited till age 45, cause if I’d seen this at 17 I’d probably have shaved off my eyebrows or something.”)

Chasing “The Wall”

Years after seeing “The Wall” in the theater, I began to want to see it again, with the hope of understanding it better and, frankly, being able to enjoy it more since my mind wouldn’t be so completely blown.  I was torn because though I continued to enjoy the album, I somewhat feared the movie.  I had moved away from home but not yet started college, and my footing in the world was tenuous enough that I sought movies for escape, not so much to get all freaked out or depressed.  Finally, in 1988 I got my roommate to rent it with me, along with a light romantic comedy to bring our spirits back up afterward.

This didn’t go so well.  Unexpectedly, two neighbor girls came over, decided to watch with us, and we ended up passing around a big jug of Carlo Rossi red wine.  Having guests created an awkward dynamic, because one of the girls was gorgeous and my roommate and I both wanted her bad, while the other was, God forgive me, pretty homely.  It might not have mattered if nobody tried to bust a move, but the wine worked its magic and soon my roommate was hitting on the homely girl.  (There wasn’t enough wine in the world to embolden my roommate or me to hit on the hot one.)  To make matters worse, both girls were chain smokers.  Yuck.

I couldn’t focus on the movie.  The girls were talking too much, and the TV had poor, monaural sound, and I was distracted by the spectacle of the homely girl wisely and persistently shutting down my roommate (who’d have had no use for her the next day, it must be said).  The girls bailed on us toward the end, and after the trial scene my roommate and I were depressed and becoming maudlin.  We turned to our second video to cheer ourselves up, only to learn the hard way that “Sid & Nancy” is anything but a light romantic comedy.  The seemingly helpful clerk at the video store clearly had a mischievous streak.

In the intervening years I’ve wanted to rent “The Wall” again, especially after DVDs came out and I bought a large, stereo TV.  (Note to peeping-blog-toms:  it’s not a gas plasma or LCD TV and there’s a rat’s nest of cable going out the back of the entertainment center cabinet and back through, so it would be hard to steal this TV, and you’ll find a much better set at either of our neighbors’ houses.)  But watching “The Wall” would not be a good way to unwind after a workday, and I couldn’t play it loud because of the kids, so it’s never seemed like a good time to rent it.  When I got the loaner DVD, I knew I’d finally get my chance.

(On a side note, this film has developed a reputation as something best watched stoned.  The IMDb bulletin board page for “The Wall” is full of pointless posts to that effect.  Were I interested in such activity, I had a golden opportunity here, with some rock-star-grade prescription pharmaceuticals left over from the most painful days of my convalescence.  But that’s not my style.  I have only ever used painkillers as painkillers, and I want to be able to think—when I’m watching a movie and when I’m not.  Moreover, I wasn’t interested in having this film freak me out again.)

The DVD

If you’ve only rented “The Wall” on VHS, it’s time to watch it again just for the picture and sound quality.  There’s verbiage on the case about Hi Definition film transfer and digitally remastered Dolby Digital blah blah blah … suffice to say, the DVD looks and sounds great.  The menus have a lot of little gimmicks like Floyd music from other albums, interesting icons, etc. which are fun (though the icons are slow to slide into place and become click-able, which gets a bit tedious).  Note that turning on subtitles doesn’t show you the lyrics, but you can turn the lyrics on separately.  There’s not much dialogue in this movie (Pink has exactly three words), but you should turn subtitles on anyway to catch all the dialogue coming out of Pink’s TV.  You can also tune your sound system through the DVD controls, which is kind of cool.

I’m normally not a big fan of DVD extras—a good movie should speak for itself—and I’m especially wary of musicians talking about their work.  I hated Sting’s 1985 documentary “Bring On the Night,” which a one-star amateur reviewer accurately described as “self indulgent even by Sting’s standards.”  In fact, that movie kind of ruined Sting’s music for me.  This isn’t to say there aren’t great music films out there, like “Metallica:  Some Kind of Monster” and “8 Mile,” but “The Wall” is pretty heavy-handed to begin with and I didn’t want to hear a lot of blather about alienation and metaphorical walls and so forth.

Happily, nobody makes an ass of himself on the documentaries, of which there are two.  One is a documentary of the making of the film, and the other is a fairly recent retrospective.  Both are well worth watching.  There’s quite a story behind this film:  the creator of the album who wrote the screenplay, Roger Waters, fought constantly with the director, Alan Parker, each trying to shape the movie to his liking.  Neither ended up satisfied with the end product; Parker called it “the most expensive student film ever made.”

There is a certain amount of blather involved in the retrospective, but Waters and Parker are thoughtful, articulate, and frank.  For example, Rogers recounts the creative process without casting himself as some sort of sage:  “Alan Parker would ask me, ‘What’s this fucking song about?’ and I’d say, ‘You know, I’m not really sure,’ and I’d dredge up stuff from my past, or sometimes from other people’s pasts.”  Parker, when asked what the point of the movie is, does make a fairly grandiose speech about the wall as a symbol, etc., but then he seems to catch himself, chuckling, “But you’ll really have to ask Roger, it’s his deal.”

The animator, Gerald Scarfe, offers some insight too and it’s fun to see how dismissive he is of the movie as a whole.  An unexpected highlight for me is Peter Biziou, the cinematographer, who revels in his every memory, with a wide smile and a sparkle in his eye that are perfectly charming, especially given the dour reminisces of Parker and Waters.  I wish I could have Biziou for an uncle.

There’s some fun trivia to be gleaned from the documentaries.  For example, we find out why “What Shall We Do Now?” is in the movie but not on the album, which is something I’d wondered about for thirty years, ever since I first saw the lyrics on the album jacket for this nonexistent song.  (Turns out the song simply wouldn’t fit on the LP, and by the time they decided to cut it, the liner notes had already been done.)  We learn why “Hey You” was cut from the movie (more on this later).  We also get a funny story about the collect call Pink places to his wife, with the befuddled long-distance operator—“It’s a man answering, is there supposed to be someone besides your wife there to answer?”—inadvertently salting Pink’s wounds.  To get that bit of dialogue, they placed an actual call from the U.S. to England and recorded a random, unsuspecting phone operator.

Here’s one more example of the usefulness of the documentary.  I’d gotten confused, this time around, about where the big concert supposedly takes place.  Pink’s hotel room is in L.A., but so much of the movie is hallucination anyway (including the whole fascist rally sequence) that I thought Pink might have shape-shifted to London.  I based this notion on the scene in the stadium bathroom.  The sink there is clearly a British model, having separate spigots for hot and cold.  Even if one of these primitive sinks had found its way to an L.A. stadium, the security guard’s expert technique of swishing up the cold and hot water in one fluid motion clearly shows him to be a Brit:

The mystery is resolved in a single sentence from the documentary: “For the American stadium stuff we had to do, we went to Wembley Football Stadium.”

I’m pretty sure there’s a running commentary you can turn on while you watch the movie.  I didn’t check this out because frankly, this movie can become exhausting and there’s only so much of it I can take at one time.  I’ll save the commentary for next time.

Two more videos

As a kid, I was stoked when the movie included the song “What Shall We Do Now?” that was mysteriously missing from the album.  At the same time, I was bummed that my very favorite song from the album, “Hey You,” was excluded from the movie.  Good news:  you can see “Hey You” on the DVD as an extra, though the resolution isn’t very good, for complicated reasons involving lost footage.

“Hey You” is worth watching for three reasons.  First, it’s a great song.  Second, you can decide for yourself whether this number actually deserved to be cut from the movie.  (My opinion:  like most of the scenes cut from movies, it was cut for good reason.)  Third, the omission of this scene ended up changing the rest of the movie significantly.  After deciding to cut this scene, Parker had the idea to re-use most of its video content elsewhere, and he actually re-cut the entire rest of the movie to graft in the extra footage.  I think this is a major reason the movie seems so disjointed at times, with strange visions (such as the riots) that, to me, have as little to do with the movie as they did with “Hey You.”  We also get those screenfuls of writhing worms that got their original context from this song and don’t make much sense beyond it.  I wish I could see the version of the movie that came just before this odd backfilling of discarded footage.

There’s one last video on the DVD, which is the original rock video for “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”  This video is fricking lame.  It was clearly made on the cheap, with rampant recycling of footage and animation.  (Of course the footage is taken from the movie, but within the rock video the same sequences are shown again and again.)  The song itself is easily the weakest of the entire album, with its disco beat and silly lyrics, and the video takes it to new lows in tedious repetition.  But it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to fully appreciate how well-made the movie “Pink Floyd The Wall” really is.

‘This Roman Meal bakery thought you’d like to know.’dana albert blog Pink Floyd The Wall