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

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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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From the Archives - Robin Killed Off!

Introduction

What’s up with all these comic book movies? They’re coming out constantly. I had to sit through Thor recently, because my wife has a thing for Chris Hemsworth. (I went along because Thor also stars Natalie Portman.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, this movie was pretty much unwatchable. We fast-forwarded through all the non-Earth scenes, which was like three quarters of the movie, and were still bored out of our skulls.

Curious about how this comic book movie thing got going, I decided to check out the original Batman from 1989. This film, more so than the Superman from 1978, seemed to spawn all these others. Superman was kind of nerdy and clearly targeted at kids, whereas Batman was evidently trying to be hip—and something adults could watch.

So: was the 1989 Batman any good? No. It looked pretty good but my wife and I found it really tedious. Clearly the movie industry is on to something, though, because these movies are undeniably popular. Batman was skillfully marketed and pulled in more than $40 million in its first weekend (vs. the mere $7.5 million that Superman made). Since Batman, there have been 20 movies based on DC comics and 47 movies based on Marvel comics. Maybe some of these are pretty good, but I think the bigger point is the crossover appeal: they draw in current teenagers for the obvious reasons, but also appeal to people my age who dug the comic books as kids and are prone to nostalgia.

As uninterested as I am in comic book movies, I was crazy about Batman as a kid. Watching the Batman movie awoke a dim memory I had of writing an essay about the Dynamic Duo some thirty years ago. And look, here it is now!

Robin Killed Off – October 29, 1988

When I was a little tyke, four or five years old, my life revolved around cowboys. Not real cowboys, who spend all day herding cows across the desert on a long drive, but the ones that spent all their time shooting at Indians or bad guys. The Lone Ranger was my favorite. I just thought it was so cool that he wore two belts, one to keep his pants up and the other for his gun holsters (or “holsterns” as I ignorantly called them). I had a Lone Ranger coloring book that showed him making his silver bullets, with the mold and everything. Too cool! Silver, the Lone Ranger’s white stallion (or “white-a-stallion,” in my benighted jargon) was just the most magnificent beast on the face of the earth.

I wore a cowboy hat for about two years straight. Nobody ever saw my hair during that period. I even wore that hat in the bathtub. When my kindergarten teacher told me to take it off, I refused. She went and got the school principal, and when he tried to take it away from me, I bit him. Everyone in my family remembers that hat and my cowboy fixation, but might not remember what replaced my “cowboy days.”

It was Batman who took over my imagination after cowboys inevitably got stale. Batman was so noble and good, yet so rock-‘em-sock-‘em tough, that he was a natural replacement. He didn’t have a horse, but he had a really cool car, a cool boat, and of course the Bat Cave.

Besides being strong and bold and good, the Lone Ranger and Batman had something else in common: a sidekick. The Lone Ranger had Tonto, and Batman had Robin. This seems like a wise arrangement. Sure, the hero is the greatest and all, but it’s also nice to have someone to relate to. Perhaps by seeing ourselves in the sidekick, we get to admire the hero in another way: he’s kind of like a cool big brother. For the humble among us, it’s hard to imagine ourselves being truly heroic, but we could relate to at least tagging along and helping out here and there. It’s hard not to love the underdog who’s always doing his best and sometimes even saves the hero’s bacon.

So imagine my shock and chagrin today when I read the following headline on the front page of the “Calendar” section of the L.A. Times: “Holy Finale! Comics Hero Bites The Dust.” Accompanying the article was a graphic illustration of Batman carrying a charred, shredded, blood-oozing corpse, who apparently had been Robin. The caption read, “Batman carries tattered body of Robin, as Dynamic Duo is halved.”

What the hell?! Nobody is supposed to die in the comics, at least nobody good! The Lone Ranger never killed or even badly wounded an outlaw—he just gave him a lecture and put him in jail. On the Batman TV show I used to watch [the original colorized series from 1966], Batman never hurt anybody, and neither did Robin; they just worked the bad guys over for a while and then surrendered them to the authorities. It was just enough action to be exciting without being crude or traumatic. Even the bad guys weren’t that bad. I remember an episode where the Joker tied Batman and Robin to a buoy with a bomb connected to it. Before leaving them to their fate, the Joker—strumming a guitar—sang them a little farewell song (and then gave them ample opportunity to get away unscathed).

But here, plain as day, Robin was flat-out dead. And he didn’t died of pneumonia, either. I quote from the article: “Robin is killed off in next week’s issue of Batman comics, blown to bits—BAM!—by a bomb planted by Iran’s new ambassador to the United Nations, who turns out to be another of Batman’s old foes, the Joker.”

That’s disgusting! The picture in the comic is even more revolting! A fella doesn’t even see such carnage in rated R movies! Since when is this appropriate fodder for kids’ imaginations?

I’m reacting to more than just the age-old gripe against exposing kids to violent images. Consider this: the Dynamic Duo, for almost fifty years, have been more than just characters—they’re real heroes to these kids. Every time the Dynamic Duo was in a bind in one of those wacky TV episodes, I’d be on the edge of my seat, pulling with all my heart for the two, just like a grownup watching his home football team in the grips of a key drive. Have 7-year-olds really changed, to where they can take a hero’s death in stride?

But the most hideous aspect of this tragedy is that the Joker didn’t really kill Robin: the kids themselves did it. The article says, “According to a spokesman for D.C. Comics, which publishes Batman, Robin was killed off by readers by a vote of 5,343 to 5,271 because he was considered a ‘twerp’ and a ‘little brat.’” To me this looks like another triumph of a big kid over his annoying little brother. These modern too-cool kids seem to have stopped caring about the underdog. Where kids once humbly related to the lesser character, now they have no use for him.

Look, I know comic books mainly exist to entertain, but was there really anything wrong with a small dose of didacticism? Is it just hopelessly nerdy now to try to steer kids in any positive direction, like supporting an underdog? Is it more important to give them what they want—i.e., to let them vote on the fate of a character—than to tell them the story the creators want to tell? What’s next? Do readers get to vote on everything?

It’s not that I consider myself some societal watchdog, some sociological scold. More to the point, I guess I was always heartened at the very existence of a weaker character. I always knew I’d never be Batman, but could see myself as a possible Robin. I loved that a powerful, cool man like Batman could respect Robin for what he was, despite what he wasn’t. In other words, I am acutely aware that I’ve been cursed with all the traits that got the Boy Wonder killed. It seems now that anyone lacking a huge chest, fistfighting prowess, and outsized bravado is nothing more than a twerp. The Robins of the world don’t seem to have a chance anymore. When the next generation is voting to have Robin killed, I fear for society and I fear for myself.

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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.