How to Avoid Bad Movies - Part II

Vlog

I am well aware of the dangers of repetitive stress injuries, such as those incurred using the mouse scroll-wheel or web page scroll-bars. Meanwhile, I wouldn't want you to get your touch-screen all grubby dragging your way through a seemingly endless blog post. With these pitfalls in mind I've created a vlog of my latest post, so you can just sit there, slack-jawed, and let my words wash over you. Or you can plug in your headphones, slip your smartphone in your pocket, and pretend it's a podcast. For the old-school types, the complete text is provided below the vlog.

Introduction

In my last post, I explored the question of why critics so often lavishly praise totally lame movies, particularly artsy and highbrow ones. I used a case study, the abysmal film Under the Skin, to showcase this unfortunate phenomenon. In this post, I’ll warn you away from four more awful yet highly acclaimed movies, to further examine how critics go wrong. Then I’ll name for you ten critics who, being repeat offenders around this “emperor’s new movie” syndrome, should be banned for life. I’ll wrap up by listing twenty great movies I’ve seen recently, just to finish on a high note.

(Yeah, I know I promised a lot of this in my last introduction. This time I’ll make good.)

A Summer’s Tale (US release 2014) – 91 Metascore

This French movie came out in 1996, but didn’t reach the U.S. until 2014. Only three critics gave it a perfect 100, but its Metascore is a shockingly high 91. It’s tempting to call it science fiction, because the plot is utterly fantastical and mind-bending: a goofy-looking young college grad spends the summer at the beach waiting for his uncommonly hot girlfriend to join him, and while he’s waiting, he hooks up with first one and then another highly attractive young woman, and kind of two-times both of them until his girlfriend arrives, at which point we have a bona fide love rectangle. Of course the women ask him to choose but he can’t, or won’t. He just kind of hovers like an little kid trying to choose a Sees candy, while you’re impatiently waiting. The worst part? All the women put up with it. Are French women really this self-loathing?

There’s nothing funny, charming, or exciting about the goings-on. It’s just a tedious series of totally unrealistic non-confrontations. My wife and I didn’t even make it to the end, as our patience wore out. I kept hoping to be rewarded by something dramatic happening, like all three women turning on him, or his suddenly being retrieved by his overlords’ spaceship.

I cannot fathom what anybody saw in this movie. I mean, the critics do try to explain, but their reviews are as meaningless as the movie. Most of these critics seemed smitten in advance because the director, Éric Rohmer, is famous. (Note the accent aigu over the “e” in his name. I’ll bet critics love that. So foreign! So-phisticated!) Jonathan Kiefer, in The Village Voice, writes, “The Rohmer touch consists of nonchalance and effortless sensuality, not just in the people, but also in the landscape, somehow even in the air.” Oh, how poetic! So we should see the movie because the air portrayed in it is nonchalant and sensual? Keith Uhlich, in TimeOut, writes, “Rohmer has a genius for taking a seemingly mundane situation and slowly tightening the screws.” Well, I agree with him on “mundane” and “slowly,” anyway.

Kenneth Turan, in the Los Angeles Times, says, “It may seem like nothing much is happening on-screen, but by the time A Summer’s Tale is all over, it feels like everything important has been said and done.” Everything? What about the dumbass dude getting dissed? What about me being entertained? Steven Rea, for The Philadelphia Inquirer, writes something eerily similar: “A Summer's Tale is one of those movies where it looks like nothing is happening.” How can these guys agree on that damning characteristic of the film, without agreeing that it’s fricking boring? Every review listed on Metacritic is favorable, and they’re all wrong.

The main lesson here is to take gushing reviews of French movies with a grain of salt. After all, who ever said the French made good movies? Croissants, bicycle wheel rims, wine, sure … but movies? I have tried to remember a French movie I really loved, and all I could come up with was Diva, from 1981. Part of why I loved it is that my dad took me to it, which was a rare treat. Yes, it was good, but I won’t let my nostalgia impart too rosy a color. Okay, if I really stretch, there was also Small Change (L'Argent de Poche) which I saw on my ninth birthday, also with my dad, and which didn’t measure up to my original delight when I eventually saw it as an adult.

Noting that a critic for TimeOut gave A Summer’s Tale a perfect 100, I looked at their list of the top 100 French movies of all time. Here are my sub-one-sentence capsule reviews of the ones I’ve seen:

• Last Year at Marienbad – As described in my last post, this was totally confusing, pointless, and dull
• A Trip to the Moon – This is the famous movie of the cigar-like rocket stabbing the moon in the eye; compared to the state of the art in movies of its era—i.e., nothing—it was, well, diverting, at least for a few minutes
• Amélie – Pretty forgettable, but pleasant enough … she’s a little goofy-looking and as usual there’s a lot of accordion music
• The Artist – Yeah, so it won an Oscar, and didn’t have any sound … that’s about all I remember of this pretty underwhelming movie
• Belle de Jour – Boring, pointless, not nearly as sexy as it was surely supposed to have been
• La Vie en Rose – I’m pretty sure I saw this but it didn’t leave a dent
• The Class – Pretentious, square, meh

And these are the best of all time? Fine, TimeOut is just one list (frankly, the only list I could find among English-language websites) so if you find a better one, studded with movies I’d remember totally digging, well … let me know. By the way, I have nothing against foreign films. Even a tiny country like Sweden does just fine … for example, Force Majeure and Let the Right One In are both great.

(Okay, I lied. I can think of one truly amazing French film: the short animated Memorable, which you can watch here. Metacritic has no listing for it. Let’s call this the exception that proves the rule.)

Her (2013) – 90 Metascore

The idea of this movie is kind of neat: a guy falls in love with Samantha, the human-like operating system of his phone. This sets up an exploration of the foolishness of humans in conflating pretty interfaces with actual connection. The problem is, the spectacle soon becomes pretty much unendurable because the milquetoasty main character, the aptly named Theodore, just doesn’t know when to let go. Most of us have known a fool-for-love who embarrasses himself (or herself) by letting unrequited puppy love turn into an obsession, but we wouldn’t pay to watch it on a screen.

Theodore, as played by Joaquin Phoenix, is particularly annoying because he’s utterly shameless and a complete weenie. If you’ve seen Ghost World, you’ll recall that Steve Buscemi did a great job portraying a fairly unattractive character you can reasonably believe would sink to pretty low levels of self-debasement when in thrall to a young attractive woman, but who nevertheless manages to hang on, ultimately, and show that he’s got a fricking spine. No such luck with Phoenix. I eventually wanted his character to be put out of his misery, perhaps via frontal lobotomy.

Which brings us to the ending (spoiler alert!), when Samantha starts hanging out with a bunch of other AIs, and casually mentions to Theodore that she also communicates with thousands of other humans through their phones and is in fact in love with hundreds of them. Suddenly Theodore’s illusion of fairy tale romance is shattered. I really loved this plot twist, but it wasn’t enough to redeem all the dull and painful stuff that came before it.

There’s a handy literary term for this effect: the “imitative fallacy.” As described here, this can occur when a “novel is concerned with an unlikable or inaccessible protagonist, [thus] the narrative is also unlikable and inaccessible. Since the reader cannot figure out the protagonist, nor is the reader given any reason to care about the protagonist, the reader disengages.” Obviously this holds true for screenplays as well.

And yet, this movie received a whopping 19 perfect 100 review ratings. Come on … that many critics thought it was perfect? Puh-lease. At least one of these critics officially concedes that it’s not perfect, but this is Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic who calls it “virtually perfect” so he’s probably just trying to be clever. (The rest of his review is insufferably cloying.)

These reviewers stoop to gushing, sentimental statements about the romantic authenticity of this human/AI relationship: “honest-to-goodness romance,” “it is a love story,” “the romance creeps up on you, just as it does with Theodore,” “a heartrending romance … for all of us,” “a celebration of all that can be achieved between two like-minded souls,” “a deeply sincere romance.” Are you kidding me?

Look, I’m not trying to be some buzzkill anti-romantic sort, and I do believe in true love. Actually, that’s precisely why I bristle at the suggestion that the relationship in Her could be legit: such a notion devalues the full, real connection possible between two humans. For all her sultry voice and clever utterances, Samantha has neither a body nor a soul. Okay, maybe you’ll fight me on whether AI can have a soul, but there’s no question it lacks a body. Do these critics really believe that the sensual, tactile aspects of love are unnecessary? Since when? (A Star Trek episode from the ‘60s already debunked this idea … it concerns life forms that are supposedly far too advanced to bother with bodies, and which instead occupy translucent orbs, but they jump at the chance to take over the bodies of the Enterprise crew, and are thrilled to have flesh and bones again.)

At least not all critics loved Her. Mick LaSalle, of the San Francisco Chronicle, got it right (and I wish I’d read his review before wasting my time on this movie). He describes this movie as “a lot more interesting to think about than watch” and goes on to say:

The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist, who is almost without definition. He is just some average guy of the near future, totally bland, someone with no obstacle he needs to overcome and no powerful desire he needs to satisfy.

The moral of the story? Don’t trust romantics. Remember, Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy! Where romantic movies are concerned, seek out the bad reviews and give them their due.

Melancholia (2011) – 80 Metascore

 I had forgotten all about this movie until I was combing through my Kanopy viewing history and didn’t recognize the title. Only after reviewing the trailer did I remember: oh, yeah, that tedious movie. It’s about a woman who gets married, then starts wigging out, and then there’s this planet on a collision course with Earth, which turns out to be a metaphor for depression (about as subtle as being whacked in the face with a bag of party ice). Instead of a massive explosion (which would have at least been stimulating) the ending slows to an absolute crawl—that is to say, even slower than the rest of the movie, which was slow enough already—with lots of slow-motion fanciful effects and overdramatic music. I find it funny that this movie tried so hard to be moving and unforgettable, and yet I forgot everything about it, including the very fact of it, despite having watched it less than a year before.

This movie garnered lots of very favorable reviews, including six 100s. As always, we need to take these Metascores with a planet-sized grain of salt. Perplexed by the 100-point rating ascribed to Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review, I read the full text, which praises it, sort of, but nowhere suggests it’s perfect. Lane breezily describes Melancholia as depicting “clumps of unlikable people behaving implausibly in confined spaces.” He calls the start of the film “quite a spectacle” and says its “sights are wondrous to behold, and, in their embodiment of Stygian souls, they leave the rest of the movie looking superfluous.” He goes on to say:

The middle of the film is an itchy and tremulous account of a wedding party at a Swedish country house, in which the bride, Justine (Kirsten Dunst), keeps wandering off to take a bath or to have sex on the golf course with someone other than the groom, while maintaining frayed relations with her foul-tempered mother, her feckless father, and her anxiety-ridden sister, Claire, who looks nothing whatever like her. Fun for everyone!

Does this strike you as the awestruck, fawning praise of somebody responding to a true masterpiece? No, I didn’t think so either. So where did Metacritic get that perfect score of 100? Beats me.

Again, very few critics on Metacritic found fault with this film, but the Chronicle’s LaSalle did. His review starts with what’s praiseworthy, but then prepares us for the bad news. In doing so, he gives us a clue into why so many critics fawn over these excessively high-minded, ambitious “intelligent” films: “[Melancholia’s] flaws are so typical and pedestrian that it’s difficult to sound intelligent mentioning them.” Fortunately, he proceeds anyway:

But it must be said: Melancholia is grindingly slow and endless, with scenes that go nowhere and long, long stretches of directorial indulgence. There is almost no tension and barely enough story to carry it to feature length, much less 2¼ hours. What’s that steady buzzing noise? It’s the sound of other audience members snoring. Halfway through, you may wish the planet would come crashing into the wedding. Long before the end, you might wish the planet would come crashing through the theater.

Perhaps what tripped up the critics was the pedigree of this movie: it was directed by Lars von Trier,  the celebrated Swede. Look, everybody’s fallible. I already listed a number of fairly lame French movies that critics loved. And consider the world famous Italian director Federico Fellini: he created 8½, which was a complete train wreck. Perhaps American critics have a soft spot for foreign directors. Well, they shouldn’t.

There Will Be Blood (2007) - 93 Metascore

There Will Be Blood looked grand and was quite gripping for a while—but the ending is the kind of WTF, hit-the-Hyperspace-button, totally out-of-place climax that kind of ruins everything that comes before it, which is a great shame since the movie had been trying for two and a half hours to build something coherent. Instead it simply detonated, as though Paul Anderson, the writer-director, just didn’t know what to do and kind of panicked. David Denby, who praised the movie excessively (with a review that Metacritic listed as a perfect 100) acknowledges the flaw:

The movie becomes an increasingly violent (and comical) struggle in which each man humiliates the other, leading to the murderous final scene, which gushes as far over the top as one of Daniel’s wells. The scene is a mistake, but I think I know why it happened ... [it] is a blast of defiance—or perhaps of despair.

Why should a flawed movie get 100 points from anybody? And Denby doesn’t even acknowledge the movie’s other great flaw: the shrill, grating, overwrought score from Jonny Greenwood, the composer in the rock band Radiohead. (I have nothing against Greenwood, by the way … I fricking love Radiohead.) Bad music stretched over a movie this long does not make for a perfect movie. I wanted to like it but couldn’t.

Again, very few critics seemed to have the balls to criticize this movie, but LaSalle was up to the job. He, too, decries the dumb ending:

As was the case in Magnolia, with its raining frogs, There Will Be Blood derails into grand gestures and deliberate perversity. The finish is not quite as bad as having Anderson pop out from behind the curtain to announce the previous two hours have been a joke. But it’s close enough to rob There Will Be Blood of any impact, besides that which is focused on the director - a kind of “wow, could you believe he did that!”

He concludes, “there should be no need to pretend There Will Be Blood is a masterpiece just because Anderson sincerely tried to make it one.”

The takeaway here? Any time a movie is super long, go ahead and read the negative reviews. Perhaps there’s something intrinsically self-indulgent about asking for that much of our time, and those striving for something epic may be betraying a weakness for the grandiose.

Second takeaway? If LaSalle dislikes a movie, trust him on it! He’s batting a thousand so far.

Blacklist these critics!

I will freely acknowledge that I’m not a professional critic. Meanwhile, we all have our particular tastes, our turnoffs, and our guilty pleasures. I would never blacklist a critic on the basis of one or two indefensible missteps. (After all, Anthony Lane liked Melancholia and Her, but I still mostly trust him.) But when a critic has a long track record of gushing over totally lame movies, it’s time to draw the line. Here are ten critics who need to be banned for life for having at least three strikes against them.

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic, gave There Will Be Blood a 100, Her a 100, Melancholia a 90, and Under the Skin an 80.

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune, gave Under the Skin an 88, There Will be Blood a 100, Her a 100, and Melancholia an 88.

Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post, gave Under the Skin a 100, There Will be Blood a 100, and even Her a 100. She hit the trifecta! On top of that, she gave Melancholia a 75.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone, gave There Will be Blood a 100, Under the Skin an 88, Her an 88, and Melancholia an 88. On top of this, he gave the utterly dull Remains of the Day a 90 and called it “one of the best films of the year.”

Lawrence Toppman, The Charlotte Observer, gave Under the Skin an 83, There Will be Blood a 75, and Her a 100.

Andrew O’Hehir, Salon, gave Under the Skin a 100, Melancholia a 100, and Her a 90.

Glenn Kenny, Premiere and RogerEbert.com, gave There Will be Blood a 100, Her an 88, and A Summer’s Tale an 88.

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times, gave There Will Be Blood a 90, Her a 100, and A Summer’s Tale a 90.

Peter Rainer of The Christian Science Monitor gave Her a 100, There Will Be Blood a 91, and A Summer’s Tale an 83.

Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer, gave both There Will be Blood and Under the Skin scores of 88, Her a 100, Melancholia an 88, and A Summer’s Tale a 75. Amazing: he gave positive reviews to all five of my bad-movie poster-children!

Never mind that the scores themselves were assigned by the (obviously) fallible Metacritic … these reviewers praised one awful movie after another. Blacklist them all!

Some really great movies

You might get the impression I just don’t like movies. In fact, I do! Here’s a list of twenty great movies I’ve seen recently (in no particular order):

Toni Erdmann (2016)

Dunkirk (2017)

Miss Juneteenth (2020)

Winter Sleep (aka Kis Uykusu) (2014)

People, Places, Things (2015)

The Wedding Plan (aka Through the Wall, Laavor et Hakir) (2016)

The Farewell (2019)

The Florida Project (2017)

The Social Dilemma (2020)

In the Loop (2009)

Out of Sight (aka Lemarit Ain) (2006)

Greta (2018)

Ex Machina (2014)

The Lobster (2015)

The Housemaid (aka Hanyo) (2010)

Incredibles 2 (2018)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Spectre (2015)

Price and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)  - note: this is the rare case when the Metascore is quite low (a 45) but the movie is actually good … trust me

 —~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—

Email 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.