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.

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

Beck’st Spotlight - What Beer Goes Best With “Remains of the Day”?

Introduction

Every once in a while, a Beck’st comes along that is so monumental, it deserves its own blog post. This is one of those times.

What? You haven’t heard of Beck’sting? What rock have you been sheltering-in-place under? Well, click here for my original Beck’sting post, which will tell you all you need to know about this global phenomenon.

A Beck’st isn’t just a photo, but a photo with a caption or other gloss, along with the dialogue a good beer snapshot inevitably elicits. I’ve included those, along with the initials of all involved. Where you see one letter only (e.g., “E—”) that’s somebody’s spouse, kid, or another friend.

A little background

Back in 1994, my wife and I did a cross-country bicycle tour. Along the way, we stayed for a couple of days with my friend DW and his wife down in Ventura. It was a great visit, the highlights being a) getting a gun pulled on us, and b) watching The Remains of the Day in the theater. Having a gun pointed at me was pretty exciting, but the movie bored the crap out of me. I sat there thinking, “When is this gonna end? And how can Anthony Hopkins’ character be so annoying and useless?” Frankly, I’d have bailed early, but I knew DW had really been looking forward to the movie. (Did I say “movie”? I meant “film.”)

So, we left, when it finally ended, and when DW asked how I’d liked it, I decided I had to come clean. I admitted I’d been less than gripped by it. So had E—, my wife. DW’s reply was something like, “Thank God! I was bored out of my skull. I totally would have walked out, but I assumed you and E— were enjoying it!” The Remains of the Day has been a running joke ever since.

Remains of the Beck’st

DA: E— and I decided that it’s not enough to watch The Remains of the Day on demand via streaming platforms, even if that’s how all the cool kids do it. For a movie of this exalted intellectual caliber, we need a physical copy, just in case the Russians take down our Internet. I can’t wait to watch it again tonight. We might even watch it twice tonight!

P.S. Yes, the stemware is to add insult to injury.

JL: I for one appreciate your dedication to the old and trusted, even if the new is more “convenient”! But my main reaction to this photo was the absolute certainty that that beer would taste so much better straight outta the can than in that silly glass! Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go and stream “Sense and Sensibility” on my iPhone via Netflix for the 172nd time.

DA: You’re probably right about the beer tasting better right out of the can, but the inconvenience of pouring it gently into the stemware glass without generating too much foam, and the added nuisance of having to hand-wash the glass later (since the dishwasher would over time damage the Duvel logo) together became irresistible.

DW: I love the graphics of the can. Loads of irony going on here. I am amused by how they are putting the slogan “Mas Intensa” on a session IPA. “More Intense” is not how I would describe a session IPA. Maybe it’s more intense than a Corona? The other irony that just kills me, is that you have a VHS tape of Remains of the Day in your household and, not only that, it clearly states “Be Kind and Please Rewind.” So you must have purposely forgotten to return it to the Blockbuster or other neighborhood movie rental store, paid the fines, or timed it perfectly when you knew the store was going out of business, so you could keep a copy of this great movie to show your kids and rekindle the past. I am impressed. I once read that Lady Gaga frequently watches Remains when she needs to tap into her creative stream. Well done, DA.

DA: You’re so spot-on about the can. It’s pure nonsense, really. There was nothing intense about that IPA (except the price, E— having purchased it at some chichi Spanish delicacy boutique). It’s the weakest IPA I’ve ever had, both in flavor and ABU (at a mere 4.5%, it makes even the watery lagers seem powerful). On top of all that, it’s not even 12 ounces! It’s 11.2, that being the American-market labeling equivalent of a third of a liter. Why didn’t they do a half a liter, which would be just over a pint? Because they hate us. They’re downright un-American!

We did end up watching Remains of the Day, over two nights. It was a special treat for this convenience-averse viewer because we hadn’t used our VCR in so long, the batteries in the remote had corroded, destroying the electrical contacts. I tried to fix it with aluminum foil, and though I was unsuccessful, the process was very engaging and absorbing, almost as much as Remains itself. As for the movie, all I can say is that the wisdom of age has made me ever more receptive to its subtle charms. Repeated viewing affords the cinephile the opportunity to imagine himself as the auteur, making subtle changes to actually enhance the film, or at least bring it into closer alignment with a modern audience. 

For instance, consider the big scene where Lord Darlington, the English gentlemen of the estate (and of course Anthony Hopkins’s boss), has gathered the heads of state of western Europe together with a German delegate and is convincing them to adopt the appeasement strategy as their response to the Nazi regime. Christopher Reeve, the American delegate (and tycoon) gets up and gives a speech about how the people there are all perfect gentlemen but as politicians they are all amateurs and should leave this up to the professionals. A stirring speech, to be sure, which had me thinking to myself, “Amer’ca!” but then of course all the Brits and the craven Frenchmen et al totally disagreed, and in their very proper and gentlemanly way they basically kicked Reeve to the curb (or “kerb” as they’d have spelled it). As a viewer, and as an American—born American—I couldn’t really handle this scene. Of course great cinema is supposed to be unsettling, but still, this was a bit much to take. So I think a slight rewrite of this scene could have improved the movie, particularly for the patriots in the audience. Instead of clearing his throat and sitting back down, Reeve could have said, “You know, we’re just not going to accept that answer.” Darlington, being perplexed since Reeve was the lone American in the giant banquet hall, would say, “Excuse me, but ... what do you mean, we?” To which Reeve would slyly reply, “Me ... and Smith & Wesson!” Then he’d pull out his 44 Magnum [or 1930s equivalent) and escalate the peace process, if you catch my drift.

But of course the whole Nazi appeasement angle was just a side show, the real “action” being the fraught, eternally nascent relationship between Hopkins and Emma Thompson, the besotted housekeeper. There’s that utterly gripping and engrossing scene in Hopkins’ private study where he’s reading a book and takes pains to hide it when she arrives, and—perhaps because she’s besotted not only by Hopkins but by a few proper British 20-ounce pints of Mahou Màs Intensa Session IPA, or the 1930s equivalent (we don’t know what because the drinking occurs off-screen)—she pursues him about it, literally backing him into a corner, relentlessly repeating her inquiry as to the book, and then literally prying it from his fingers to discover that it’s just a banal, prosaic romance novel by some lowbrow hack (perhaps whatever that period’s equivalent would have been to Kazuo Ishiguro). Hopkins is flummoxed and embarrassed and assures Thompson that he only reads it to improve his vocabulary. She doesn’t buy this for a second and a charmed smile flits over her face as she recognizes this softer side of the starchy, staunchly professional head butler. It’s a very moving scene, but frankly I found it a bit too intense, even after repeated viewings. I know I should be stronger than that, and after all I knew what I was signing up for with this film, but still, it’s just so wrenching, like the emotional equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting if rendered in dialogue, and I really think a touch of levity would do so much to bring the viewer back from the edge. So in my version the book would turn out to be pure smut, the 1930s British version of Penthouse Forum, so that we in the audience could have a good laugh. And Hopkins could say, “I only read this to improve my understanding of the coarse vernacular of the lower servants, so that next time the under-butler or a footman uses a phrase like ‘one-eyed trouser snake’ or ‘I came Lake Superior [or whatever large English lake would fit here], I should know to what he is referring.” Thompson could grin lustily and say, “I know better, you dog!” Then she’d stick her tongue in his ear, and Hopkins would finally get out of his comfort zone, gratifyingly arriving in ours.

When I woke up this morning, my first thought was, “I can’t wait until this weekend day is over so it’ll be evening time, and we can watch Remains again.” I even toyed with watching it as a matinee, but of course any sophisticated viewer of a fine film like this knows the viewing properly begins in the gloaming, so that when the movie has been fully savored it’s bedtime. But then I realized this movie was becoming an obsession. These are intense times for me, with COVID-19, my broken collarbone, an impending election, and several more Mahou Màs Intensa Session IPAs still in the fridge. I think I need to give my poor psyche some respite, and shelve Remains for a while. But I know myself too well ... owning that film on VHS is just too strong a temptation. I would be putting that tape back in right after dinner, telling myself I’m only going to watch the first five or ten minutes but knowing full well I’d be in for the full two-hour-plus journey. Cold turkey is the best way. So today, we’re going to take the videocassette out to one of those little “Free Library” community book boxes and leave it for some other lucky person to stumble across.

Will I be rewinding the tape? No! As you probably already know, “Be Kind - Please Rewind” is a ruse perpetrated by the Videocassette Industrial Complex to give video rental outfits an excuse to fine you for not rewinding. All VHS aficionados know that the tape is in a vulnerable state—much like anyone who has just viewed Remains—right after it is played, due to the heat from passing through the player, and can actually be unduly stretched out if rewound right away. This surely accounts for why this copy of Remains, like all of them surely, has been so badly damaged from repeated, same-seating viewings that the audiovisual quality is severely diminished. The picture is as blurry as a pointillist painting and the sound as muddy as your spouse’s stern lecture when you’ve got a pillow over your head. Not that this is such a bad thing, though … I think I’m going to miss the soft-focus warmth of VHS when I digitally stream The Age of Innocence this evening.

Additional reading

For more Beck’sts, click here or here, and if you’re looking for the Becks’ts that commemorate my late father, click here. For my most recent Beck’sting post, click here.

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E-mail me here.
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.

Movie Review - Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok

Introduction

This week I thought I’d step aside and let somebody else contribute to albertnet.  In this post, the film critic Maynard Steele reviews my stop-motion animated movie, Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok.  Here is the movie:

Movie Review – Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok

Making movies is one of those vocations that doesn’t require any specific education or credentials.  Many is the actor who, after achieving fame and fortune, tells a fawning magazine, “What I really want to do is direct,” and then proceeds to do just that.  And sometimes a director has no film background whatsoever, such as James Cameron, who was an English major until he dropped out of college to become first a truck driver, then the second highest-grossing film director in the world.

It would seem wise for an industry outsider making his or her first film to start out with something simple.  Top-grossing director Steven Spielberg began his career with Duel, a very basic action movie about a psychotic tanker truck driver terrorizing an innocent motorist.  For Cameron, it was Piranha II – The Spawning, which was about flying piranhas attacking people.  Both directors waited until they had more experience before getting all film-school-y.

At first glance, the debut movie from blogger Dana Albert looks like a safe bet:  a basic action movie about dinosaurs attacking a motorist.  But from the opening frame of the film, we see that Albert is trying to achieve a level of sophistication that a motion picture newbie would be wise to avoid.  His camera fixes its attention not on the action itself, but on the stage set where the stop-motion animation is done.  A weak voice-over from Albert, mumbled and ineloquent, gives us some background on the making of the movie.  This “meta-film” movie-within-a-movie device has stymied far better directors than Albert.  For example, Joe Wright’s recent Anna Karenina featured a stage set where we viewers, as though in the audience at a play, watch the action unfold.  Why not immerse us in Tolstoy’s world, like the novel does?  Such added artifice almost never works, and is particularly weak in Albert’s film.

There’s also the matter of the medium chosen for this film.  When bloviating to the press, Albert has claimed that his decision to use stop-motion animation for Amok was a simple matter of budget:  he couldn’t afford live action special effects or CGI.  But I’d guess there’s more going on here:  I think he secretly hopes reviewers like me will compare him to such icons as Bertolt Brecht, who used absurdly basic props (e.g., a cardboard box labeled “sleigh”) to keep his stage play audience at an intellectual distance from the drama, to ensure that their rational, critical minds weren’t subverted beneath emotions and strong association with his characters.  Only a desire to ape this kind of device could explain Albert’s use of crude plastic dinosaurs and Lego in his film.  It’s a cheeky move, considering the vast intellectual gulf between geniuses like Brecht and mere hacks like Albert.

That said, the action in Amok unfolds crisply and the camera-work—this was shot using a handheld Motorola Droid—is efficient and unfussy.  Albert’s collaborators, other first-timers including his two daughters and his mother, do a great job with characterization.  (Different dinosaurs were manipulated by different hands, and it shows.)  Most of the movie was gratifying to watch.  Seeing the dinosaurs rallying to flip Lego Guy’s car over on him, I found my pulse quickening dramatically; I haven’t had such a satisfying visceral response to cinematic violence since the restaurant assassination scene in The Godfather.  Small details like the way Lego Dude’s arm thrashes wildly as he’s pinned under the car are either a tribute to, or subconscious imitation of, something from a Sam Peckinpah movie.

All of this might have helped me forgive the weak start to the film, except that at the very end, Albert again inserts another blatantly artificial effect:  a giant human hand appears, its finger pointing at—what?  The answer is, who cares?  This kind of abrupt rupture of scene is doubtless meant to recall other, greater works in which the creator shows his hand, dissolving the world of the narrative.  Albert, who wrote his college thesis on Vladimir Nabokov, may well have had Bend Sinister in mind, in which the ill-fated main character is rescued by the author:  “Just a fraction of an instant before another and better bullet hit him, he shouted again:  You, you—and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages….”

I can’t help but think how much better Amok might have been with some tighter editing.  Normally there is a post-production process, involving focus groups, that ensures a film doesn’t overly indulge a director’s vain artistic flights-of-fancy—but in this case the producer was the director’s mother, who probably couldn’t bear to oppose her son.  A briefer, leaner Amok might have worked as a straightforward action flick, with the film-school shenanigans held out for the “Director’s Cut” DVD.

At the same time, I have to concede that something would be lost through such a revision.  Clearly Albert had something serious in mind with this movie.  Beyond the crowd-pleasing gore lurks a subtle didactic message that lingers beyond the cheap thrills.  Could we surmise from the film’s shortcomings that this greater meaning is accidental?  No, it’s intentional, and we can tell this, oddly enough, by the film’s MPAA rating.

Your typical action movie is PG-13.  That rating, more than any other, brings in the teenagers, who are the darlings not only of Hollywood but practically every other industry as well.  PG movies strike teens as lame, which is why they’re an endangered species; teens need to know a film will be edgy.  (Before the PG-13 rating, George Lucas fought to have Star Wars rated PG instead of G, for fear it would be thought of as square.)  And yet, Albert campaigned vigorously, and successfully, to have Amok rated G!

Why would he do this?  Is there precedent for a violent movie getting a G rating?  In fact there is:  the 1972 sci-fi flick Silent Running.  Though it’s not a hugely violent movie, every single human character is killed.  The main character, Lowell, objecting to the planned destruction of the last flora from earth, housed in spaceship-attached greenhouses, murders the entire crew—bludgeoning one to death with a shovel—and then kills himself.  Only the plants survive (and a few robots).  Why the G rating?  The MPAA must have decided that the environmental message was just too important to withhold from any part of the moviegoing public.  (Environmental ethics aside, I think it was actually the piped-in Joan Baez music that drove Lowell over the edge.)

Albert also has a message to impart, to as wide an audience as possible.  Through his Brechtian machinery, Albert asks the audience to draw back, detach from the bloodlust, and reflect on what he’s seen.  What really happened here?  At first blush, it seems the simplest of plots:  a car crashes into a dinosaur, and several other dinosaurs converge on it and kill the driver.  But how and why does the driver crash his car?

Watch again:  there’s a passenger on the back, lacking not just a seatbelt but a seat, who falls out and lands grotesquely on his back.  This distracts the driver, who—panicking—actually takes his hands off the steering wheel.  This is why he veers right and plows into the stegosaurus.  He’s immediately attacked by a dinosaur to our right, who might just be hungry, but the other dinosaurs—witnesses to this driver’s incompetence—are clearly retaliating when they roll his car up on him.

Are we supposed to identify with the motorist, or the dinosaurs?  For my money, it’s the dinosaurs.  The movie satisfies because so many of us—as pedestrians or bicyclists—have felt so vulnerable when a car has endangered us … but what if we were giants and could slake on our basest thirst for revenge?  In his blog, Albert is fond of mentioning the “lizard brain,” and what better manifestation of it than the actual walnut-sized brain of Thunder Lizard?  The dinosaurs get to carry out the retaliation we only dream of.

And yet, there’s always that pulling back, that emotional detachment Albert builds in to the movie.  He’s telling us yes, enjoy the revenge theme, but then remember your essential humanity; we had a little fun here, but only giant lizards are allowed to kill.  And there’s more to it:  he’s inviting us to watch again, and look more closely.  What else do we notice about the film, upon repeated viewings?  Did you catch what happens to the passenger, whose fall started the violence in motion?  Apparently unhurt, he gets up and flees the mêlée!  The cause of the crash, the flailing of the arm, the flight of the passenger—we don’t see these at first, just as drivers see so little of what’s going on around them.  It all just happens too fast, which is why we should all drive slower and try to pay more attention.  And that, we realize, is the central message of this film.

Why not just say so, then?  Well, Albert has, but words can be so easily ignored.  Surely Albert has chafed at the limitations of mere text, and nobody likes a high-handed lecture or public service announcement.  The brazen fun of Amok—its rapture of violence—transcends the limitations of priggish, didactic works.  Notwithstanding its art and subtext, Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok is an action flick at heart.

Bride of "Pink Floyd The Wall"

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

Introduction

As I described in my previous post, I recently watched “Pink Floyd The Wall,” having last seen it as a teenager.  Viewing it from my adult perspective, I realize that it’s far more coherent than the chaotic, nightmarish extended rock video I had originally taken it to be.

The movie has countless narrative threads, not nicely woven but often tangled and knotted:  the death of Pink’s father, his overprotective mother, his miserable school experience, his failing marriage, and his drug problem.  These are represented in part through an endless array—actually, more like a disarray—of symbols:  hammers, flowers, conveyer belts, airplanes, worms, and others.  Trying to follow every thread and analyze every symbol could be an endless undertaking—an analytical morass. 

This essay focuses on Pink’s wife, because—as I shall argue—she is by far the most important “brick” in Pink’s wall.  To make this case, I will concentrate on just one symbol.

Structure

The first thing we notice about this movie is that the chronology is all jumbled up—instead of a straightforward account of Pink’s life, we get his current situation combined with a mess of flashbacks.  The jumbled order creates the overall effect the moviemakers desired, but arranging the events chronologically can help tell us how Pink got here.

At first it seems like a straightforward exercise to put the movie’s events in order, starting with Pink’s dad being killed in WWII and ending with children cleaning up after Pink’s wall comes down.  But right away we run into trouble:  the scene of children cleaning up isn’t an actual event in Pink’s life—it’s a figment of his imagination, just like the animated sequences in the movie.  (No, strange humanoid creatures with snouts like gas masks didn’t really lumber away to safety under a freeway overpass.)  Pink’s flashbacks are a mix of actual memories (e.g., Pink being chewed out by a schoolmaster, Pink caring for a dying rat), and his flights of fancy (e.g., students trashing their school, Pink wandering through a battlefield looking at corpses).

Two points of view

There are two narrative points of view in this movie.  We have the objective perspective showing what is “really” happening to Pink “now” as he sits locked away in his hotel room.  The second perspective is Pink’s inner world:  his memories and his delirious visions, which engulf his mind as he molders away in his chair.  Neither point of view can give us the full story.  On the one hand, the objective perspective is limited to the present, which shows us a lot about the result of Pink’s problems but not so much about how he got here.  On the other hand, peering into Pink’s mind is problematic because he’s what we English majors like to call an “unreliable narrator”—he cannot give a clear and satisfying account because he’s a flawed character to begin with, not to mention being drugged-out and on the verge of complete mental collapse.

To examine the central question of the movie—what is Pink’s problem, really?—it’s useful to look at both perspectives.  I will start by recounting what is seen from the objective point of view:  the real-time events leading to Pink’s final collapse.  Then I will mine his memories and visions to shed light on the trajectory of his sad case.

Pink as we see him

Here is what actually transpires in “real time” during “The Wall.”  Pink sits in his chair and watches TV.  He soaks in his private pool.  He tries four times to phone his wife (three times from his room, once from a pay phone in an alley).  He picks up a groupie, terrorizes her by chasing her around the room throwing things, and completely trashes the place.  He soaks some more in the pool.  He smashes his TV.  He arranges the detritus in his room into a highly organized pattern.  He shaves off his chest hair and eyebrows.  He makes one more unsuccessful call to his wife.  Then he settles back into his chair and becomes catatonic.  Finally, his manager, along with some hotel staff and paramedics, break down the door to his room and revive him.  He is dragged to his concert in a limo.  He ends up sitting out the concert in a restroom stall.  The End.

As we watch Pink in his room, his expression is largely vacant, but (even beyond his sudden rage when he trashes the place), we do get plenty of clues about his inner turmoil:  he smashes a glass with his foot; he goes through the TV channels faster and faster, punching angrily at the remote; a tear slides down his cheek.  Every time he uses the phone, we quickly see him go from placid to despondent.  He drops the handset instead of hanging it up.  He rips the cord out of the wall.  He slides down the wall by the pay phone as if his legs will no longer hold him.  He smashes a wine glass into the phone.

Phones

The first instance of a phone in this movie is very telling.  The phone appears in one of Pink’s first flashbacks—not a memory, exactly, since it was something that happened before he was born.  It’s his father’s dying moment, during a WWII battle.  The British are being shot to pieces and Pink’s father races into a bunker to phone for help.  As he desperately cranks the handle on the wind-up field telephone, a German plane drops a bomb on the bunker.  The last we see of Pink’s father is his bloodied hand slipping off the end of the phone receiver, which dangles from its cord.

What’s curious about this scene is that we, the viewers, cannot take it as fact.  The whole bunker has been blown up, so nobody who witnessed Pink’s father’s death would have survived.  Meanwhile, the phone call he died trying to make never went through.  The entire scene is Pink’s conjecture about his father’s final moments.  The phone itself is a detail Pink contrived.

There can be no question that the death of Pink’s father marked the beginning of Pink’s troubles.  But unlike Pink’s other problems—his overbearing mother, his cruel schoolmasters, his unfaithful wife—the lack of a father is not a brick in his wall.  A lack is not something you can wall yourself off from.  Pink’s father does not show up to testify against Pink in the trial sequence of the movie.  As we shall see, he serves a different role.

The next phone in the movie is one we hear before we see it.  As it rings we’re looking at a Polaroid snapshot on a bedside table:  Pink and his wife, the happy couple.  The camera pans over to the ringing phone, also on the table.  The scene switches to Pink’s hotel room, where he’s just placed the call.  The song “Mother” begins.  What we see during this song is the most important sequence in the movie in terms of explaining Pink’s plight as he sits locked in his hotel room.  We shall give it a close inspection.

As the phone rings and rings, Pink blows his nose (he has a cold), checks his watch, figures the time zone difference (from the alarm clock behind the bed we see that it’s just after 6 o’clock in Los Angeles, so it’s about 2 a.m. at home).  There is no answer.  Pink slowly hangs up the phone, has a memory or vision of he and his wife kissing, and then suddenly rips the phone cord out of the wall.  Eyes welling up, he hugs his pillow and remembers when, as a sick child having feverish visions, he had climbed into his mother’s bed and snuggled against her.

Mother

Now, before you get all Freudian on me, remember that Freud was full of crap, as the movie’s creator, Roger Waters, was sure to have recognized.  The expression on grown-up Pink’s face in this scene tells of despair; young Pink’s expression in the flashback shows fear.  Neither condition is anything close to desire.  Have you ever, in moments of futility or despondency, thought, “I want my mom!”?  That’s what’s going on here in Pink’s hotel room.

By this point in the movie, the rock songs and their accompanying scenes have established that war is hell (“Goodbye Blue Sky”); so is its aftermath (“When the Tigers Broke Free,” “The Thin Ice,” and “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1”); and that Pink’s schoolmasters were dicks (“The Happiest Days of Our Lives,” “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.”)  Presumably, “Mother,” and the visions and memories that go with it, will establish how overprotective and stifling Pink’s mother is.  But that’s not what we see.  In fact, what we do see of the mother tells an almost opposite tale.  She doesn’t take Pink into her bed when he’s sick—she gestures to him to stay in bed, and closes his door as she leaves.  She’s not smothering him; he’s seeking her out.

Pink runs through two versions of this memory.  In the first, he creeps slowly down the stairs and into his mother’s room.  In the second, he’s running to her room, and when he gets there he sees himself in bed next to her—sort of.  This time, instead of young Pink in the bed with his mother, it’s a decomposing corpse.  The point is this:  Pink isn’t repelled by an overprotective mother—he’s terrified of becoming a mama’s boy, of trying to snuggle with her all the way to his grave.  (It’s not hard to see how an insecure, fatherless boy could have this fear.)  In this light, the lyrics of the song—“Momma’s gonna keep you right here under her wing,” “Momma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm”—aren’t necessarily something she ever said.  They could easily be the kind of taunts young Pink inflicts upon himself.

Consider what comes right after the vision of the corpse snuggled in bed with his mother:  we go straight into the scene of Pink’s wedding.  Significantly, his mother is not in attendance.  Pink has successfully broken away from his mother by replacing her with a wife.  Unfortunately, spurning the love he needs seems to become a habit:  twice during this song, we see him pulling away from his wife.

Wife

The first time Pink rejects his wife, she’s giving him a striptease while he’s watching soccer on TV.  She playfully blocks his view; he cranes to see around her.  This scene is interposed with young Pink using binoculars to watch a grown-up neighbor undress in front of her window.  He’s smoking an illicit cigarette, which he hides along with the binoculars when his mother opens the door to check in on him.  Young Pink’s sexual awakening, and his cigarette, symbolize his desire to grow up and break away from his mother.  Turning back to the seduction scene, grown-up Pink rejects his wife’s advances—at the time.  Sometime later, when it’s dark in the room, he reaches for her, but she turns and rolls away.

What is going on here?  Was Pink just really into the televised soccer game?  Of course not.  He looks bored by it, until his wife starts trying to seduce him.  Then he looks slightly annoyed, but there’s also the tiniest flicker of a smile playing on his lips.  He’s screwing with her, testing her.  But why?  Well, Pink is insecure, and if love is defined as unconditional positive regard, he’s introducing conditions:  will you still love me even if I’m a pain in the ass?

Second rejection:  Pink is at home, composing on the piano, and his wife comes in and greets him.  He ignores her.  “Hello?  Hello?  Is there anybody in there?” she says.  Still nothing.  She waves her hand in front of his face.  Finally he looks up.  He’s stoned.  She jokes, “Do you remember me?  I’m the one from the registry office.”  Pink looks back down at the piano.  As his wife leaves the room she looks back over her shoulder, to see if just maybe he’s going to get up.  He doesn’t, and she closes door behind her.  Again, we must consider the point of view here:  this is Pink’s own recollection.  That we see his wife look back means that he sees her look back.  Though he pretends to ignore her, he isn’t.  He’s testing her again.

Next we catch a glimpse of Pink walking through an airport—a very recent memory—and we get a scene of his wife sitting in a chair crying.  Then Pink is in his hotel room, phoning her again.  When again she doesn’t pick up, he smashes a glass with his foot.

Infidelity

As we hear the line “Mother will she tear your little boy apart?” Pink tells himself the story of his lonely wife being seduced by another man.  She meets this man at an anti-nuke meeting where he is lecturing.  She catches the man’s eye, and after the meeting, when she gets up to leave, she looks over her shoulder at him.  Unlike Pink, the anti-nuke lecturer accepts her wordless invitation.  In this vision, Pink has worked out the logical result of the marital stalemate at the piano, replete with self-flagellating details.

 “Mother will she break my heart?”  Of course he’s not really asking his mother this—she’d be the last person he’d ask, and these are rhetorical questions.  They’re directed at his mother because once again, Pink is feeling vulnerable, and once again his vulnerability challenges his manhood.  As we hear “You’ll always be baby to me,” Pink is phoning his wife for the third time, lying in bed in a fetal position.  He drops the phone in despair.  (A final note on Pink’s sense of infantilization:  in the movie version of this song, the musical instruments include a wind-up music box like you would put in the nursery, that plays a repetitive, cloying tune to help your baby sleep.)

As the song ends, we see Pink’s wife in bed with the anti-nuke organizer.  We get a flash of a coin being put in a pay phone.  We hear a phone ringing:  it’s Pink’s bedside phone, at home, the same phone as at the beginning of the song.  The ringing wakes up his wife.  It’s the middle of the night so she knows it’s Pink calling.  She looks over at her lover, silently authorizing him to answer the phone:  a passive-aggressive act of defiance.  He picks up:  “Hello?”  When he hears that it’s a “collect call for Mrs. Floyd from Mr. Floyd,” he hangs up.  The operator is befuddled:  “I wonder why he hung up?  Is there supposed to be somebody besides your wife there to answer?”  We flash to an alley, where the phone booth is.  As the operator tries again, Pink slumps down the wall and drops the phone receiver.  It dangles from its cord.

Reaction

Immediately following this last phone call, we get the most chilling of Pink’s visions:  two animated flowers which become genitalia, the male thrusting violently into the female, which—mantis-like—devours the male.  Needless to say, Pink feels misused.  In retaliation for his wife’s infidelity, he brings a groupie back to his hotel room.  Notably, he doesn’t seek her out, but doesn’t turn her away either:  like his wife, he is passive-aggressive.  But unlike his wife, he cannot go through with adultery.  In imagining his wife’s affair, he’s given her a somewhat suitable lover—at least the guy believes in something—but Pink himself is with a shameless groupie, who is out to exploit her own sexuality for access to a star.  Instead of hooking up, he boils over, terrorizing her and destroying his hotel room.

Surely Pink regrets his past coldness toward his wife—it’s included in his flashbacks, after all—but he also feels like a victim.  Following his big eruption, when he’s returned to watching TV, he has a deranged vision of his wife appearing in the room as some kind of crazed serpentine vagina dentata that comes after him.  The irony here is twofold:  one, the alarming vision of this terrifying wife-demon chasing him around the room mirrors his own behavior toward the groupie just before; and two, the song is “Don’t Leave Me Now.”

Though Pink’s bizarre characterization of his wife is a bit unfair, he rightly recognizes the trouble he is now in with his marriage failing.  We see this during “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3” where the previous flashbacks of Pink and his wife, and the visions of her with her lover, are juxtaposed with scenes of terrible rioting and of WWII battles.  The situation with his wife is causing violence to his life.  The lyrics—“I don’t need no arms around me”—are disingenuous; by seeming to reject everyone and everything, Pink is actually acknowledging his need. 

Very pointedly, in this sequence we get a vision of his father’s bloodied hand slipping off the phone as he dies, followed immediately by a flashback of Pink’s last phone call from the hotel, where he lets the phone slip from his hand.  The song ends with Pink again slumping down the wall by the pay phone, letting the handset drop:  but now it’s not happening in real-time; it has become another in his pile of tortured memories.  What was his dad doing in his final moment?  Calling out for help—but he was too late.  Pink’s phone calls are also a call for help—and he fears it may be too late for him, too. 

Waiting

We have seen that, in the “real-time” course of events, the only constructive actions Pink takes are these phone calls home, four of them so far.  Everything else is either pointless (watching TV), destructive (trashing his room) or just bizarre (shaving his chest and eyebrows).  It’s not entirely fair to say he’s walled himself off from everybody:  each phone call is an attempt to reconnect with his wife.  Surely his intent is to wall himself off, and make a fresh start on his own:  after “Goodbye Cruel World” he arranges all the detritus in his room, washes the blood off his hand (bloodied like his father’s!), shaves himself (a new look!), and gets dressed.  But of course he’ll try calling his wife again.  She’s all he’s got, if that.

What do you do between attempts to call somebody, when reaching that person is all you can think about?  You wait.  You try to kill time.  That’s exactly what Pink is doing throughout the movie.  He’s not watching TV because he enjoys it; he clearly doesn’t.  During “Nobody Home,” he jumps with increasing impatience from channel to channel, lamenting that though he has “thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from,” he’ll never get through to his wife. Eventually we see Pink make his fifth and final phone call; we see the bedside phone at his home once again.  We gather that, once again, she doesn’t pick up.

Then Pink and his TV are out in a field, with a cold misty wind blowing through:  he’s not at home, either.  He almost doesn’t have one anymore.  Sure, you can say he built a wall around himself, but in a way he’s been cast out, too.  What side of the wall is he really on?

No hope at all?

Pink’s restroom stall flight of fancy, “The Trial,” shows how conflicted he is about his situation.  On the one hand, the witnesses he calls to testify against him—the schoolmaster, his wife, and his mother—are grossly unfair caricatures.  The schoolmaster is a marionette being flogged by his (the schoolmaster’s) wife (!).  Pink’s wife has now become a bizarre cross between a scorpion and a whore.  His mother’s arms become a wall as she hugs him.  If he’s crazy, it’s their fault:  “They must have taken my marbles away!”  The undiscerning (and/or stoned) viewer may take these characterizations at face value, falling for the excuses Pink has made for himself.  Of course we know better:  nothing else in the movie suggests that his mother really was overbearing, and even if his schoolmasters were cruel, how was this a unique problem for Pink among all his classmates?  As for his wife, we have seen that her infidelity is a symptom of marital strife, not its root cause.

On the other hand, the judge in this sequence—who is literally a big asshole—represents Pink’s determination to finally hold himself accountable for his mistakes.  Can he see his own faults clearly enough to accept responsibility?  Possibly the most encouraging line in the song—if we can take it neat, without irony—is the judge (i.e., himself) declaring, “The way you made them suffer/  Your exquisite wife and mother/  Fills me with the urge to defecate!”  The judge’s (i.e., Pink’s) ultimate decision—that the wall must be torn down—seems like the right one.  The question is, will that be enough?

What will become of real-world Pink, who is left hiding in the restroom stall?  If nothing else, the lonely purgatory of his concert tour ends here.  When his manager found Pink catatonic in his chair, he yelled, “You vicious bastard!”  He has no concern for Pink—only for getting Pink to the concert, which we see now he’s failed to do.  Perhaps Pink can slink home, tail between his legs—the big rock star brought low—and make a fresh start with his wife.  I wish him the best.

Appendix – Random Q&A

Q.  Could it be that Pink’s wife didn’t really cheat on him?  Could the very notion of her infidelity be a fiction, like the details of the story Pink tells himself?

A.  No.  The four unanswered calls are not Pink’s recollections, but real events we see for ourselves.  The one time there is an answer, it’s a man’s voice saying “Hello?”  Pink doesn’t imagine this voice—we have the telephone operator saying, in surprise, “It’s a man answering!”  So:  a man answers Pink’s home phone in the middle of the night … you do the math.

Q.  We know that Roger Waters’ father died in WWII.  Is the failing marriage theme also autobiographical?

A.  Maybe.  Waters divorced his first wife in 1975.  Perhaps more noteworthy is that during the creation of the Wall album, band member Richard Wright fought with the others, and ultimately quit the band, in part because his time away from home was causing his marriage to founder.

Q.  Why do we have this scene of a security guard in the stadium restroom fastidiously washing his hands?

A.  It establishes that the restroom stall episode isn’t another of Pink’s delusions.  The hand washing is an activity occurring in real-time outside of Pink’s awareness—we are seeing it, not Pink.  By extension, Pink really is sitting beside the toilet in the stall, unable to perform.

Q.  How do you differentiate between actual phone calls and memories of phone calls?  In other words, how do you count five phone calls?

A.  We can identify discrete calls by noting what Pink is wearing and where he is.  Here are the calls, listed in order: 

1. In bed, clothed (beginning of “Mother”);
2. Sitting at edge of bed, shirtless;
3. Lying in bed, just in boxers;
4. From phone booth (end of “Mother”);
5. Clothed, smashing glass into phone (during “Nobody Home”).

Q.  How can you dismiss the impact of Pink’s miserable school days?

A.  In the scene where the schoolmaster mocks him for his poetry, Pink doesn’t look that upset; his expression says, “Yeah, bugger off.”  And given the poetry itself—lyrics to “Money,” which will be a huge hit one day—Pink’s nascent triumph over the schoolmaster is built right into the scene.

Q.  Why does Pink break the razor blade in half before shaving off his eyebrows?

A.  It’s a double-edged razor blade.  He breaks it in half so he’ll have a non-razor-sharp edge to hold.  Perhaps he’s not as drugged-out here as we might have thought.

Q.  Couldn’t there be a lot simpler explanation for Pink’s final unraveling?

A.  Indeed, it may be that the hideous green carpet in his hotel room finally got to him.  Such carpet could unhinge just about anyone.

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