"The Elephant Man": An exploitation movie through and through

The Elephant Man
(David Lynch, 1980)

2 stars

This movie made me sick. And when I say “sick,” I don’t just mean “morally offended;” I mean actually, physically “my-stomach-doesn’t-feel-good” sick. I was so nauseous at one point that I had to leave the room.

I’ve liked other movies that made me feel this way: Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” is just as disgusting, unsettling and hard to sit through, but I gave that movie four stars and put it in my all time top ten list. The difference is that “Straw Dogs” was disgusting for a reason: Peckinpah was making a point about man’s primal savagery and inclination to violence. “The Elephant Man” has no point to its nastiness. It makes us feel bad simply because David Lynch wants us to feel bad.

Honestly, this movie has no point. It has nothing to say about John Merrick, the “Elephant Man” (1862–1890). It has nothing to say about his life or condition (except that he was so hideously disfigured that he had to sleep sitting up, so the weight of his head wouldn’t crush his windpipe). It has nothing to say about how it must have felt to suffer from such a terrible deformity, but still possess the mental capacity to understand misery. The movie has nothing to say about Merrick, period; it just wants to exploit his ugliness.

Merrick isn’t a human being to Lynch, he’s a tool. The movie doesn't want to get to know him as a person, it just wants to use him. Don’t let Lynch fool you with scenes that pretend to “develop” Merrick – they’re just shallow ploys to get him to laugh, cry or quote Shakespeare on cue for instant emotional effect. Look at the scene where Merrick reveals that likes music: Does Lynch tell us that because it’s important information, or because he thinks that using that story is an easy way to make us cry?

But most of the time, Lynch just wants to make us feel queasy – it’s like his trademark (just watch a few clips from “Eraserhead”) – or his favorite sick game. With Merrick, he’s discovered a gold mine. All he has to do is bring him on screen, rub our faces in his deformities, make us listen to his pained, slurred speech and Bam! Instant nausea.

But it’s not Lynch’s insensitivity that really offends me; it’s his pretentious dishonesty. Lynch has nothing to say and he knows it, but instead of coming out and admitting it, he tries to hide behind phony statements and messages condemning “the exploiters.” (One scene has the angry circus manager confront the doctor played by Anthony Hopkins and accuse him of exploiting Merrick for personal gain.) Their shallowness is obvious: they feel very tacked on, like Lynch threw them in at the last minute to give the movie some “noble” reason for existing. It’s unenlightening and hypocritical.

Why did they set the story from the doctor’s perspective, and not Merrick’s? It puts us on the outside. Merrick is a naturally sympathetic character, but we never connect with him because we’re always looking at him from an outsider’s perspective. We’re basically encouraged – encouraged – to look at him like a freak. (I can’t tell if this was intentional, but there’s no denying that it makes it even easier for Lynch to disgust us).

Honestly, Lynch doesn’t know what he’s doing. He makes some very strange storytelling decisions, like showing us the Elephant Man several times during the first twenty minutes, but then trying to build suspense around his appearance when the nurses enter his room. (Are we supposed to forget what he looked like?) That would be like showing us the shark at the beginning of “Jaws,” and then spending the rest of the movie trying to keep it hidden. (He’s also watched a little too much Stanley Kubrick: One scene is eerily reminiscent of “Spartacus,” and the ending is way too similar to the end of “2001.”)

I wasn’t kidding when I said this movie made me sick (I’d hate to watch it if I actually was sick). It wouldn’t bother me if Lynch was doing it for a reason. But he isn’t. Lynch has no good reasons. He made this movie solely to disgust and unsettle us; if I told him that I had to leave the room, he’d probably smile, because he achieved his goal. “The Elephant Man” is an exploitation picture through and through, and watching it is just as bad as going to the circus to stare at the freaks.

"Zodiac": Unfocused, but almost brilliant.

Zodiac
(David Fincher, 2007)

3 stars

An air of uncertainty permeates every scene in “Zodiac.” David Fincher’s film is based on a true story about a serial killer called the Zodiac, who operated in Northern California between 1968 and 1971. During that time, he killed five people (although some say more) while taunting newspapers and police investigators with more than a dozen letters and coded ciphers that always began with the words, “This is the Zodiac speaking.” Then suddenly, he vanished. The police spent years on the case, following every lead, interviewing every suspect, but in the end, no one was ever caught. The case remains open to this day.

“Zodiac” takes this story and turns it into a procedural in the vein of “All the President’s Men.” But there’s a huge difference – “All the President’s Men” had an ending. Nixon was guilty, so everything got wrapped up neat and tidy. “Zodiac” doesn’t have this luxury. Because the killer was never caught, the story doesn’t have an ending. And if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know how to get there?

You’ve seen the first fifteen minutes of “Law and Order,” when they don’t know who they’re looking for and keep running into dead ends? Stretch it out to two-and-a-half hours, and you get “Zodiac.” It’s the only procedural I’ve seen that spends just as much time on the false leads as it does on the real ones (which, of course, could easily be false leads). There’s a scene, about halfway through the movie, where a young mother and her baby become stranded on the side of the road. A man pulls up beside her and offers her a lift to the nearest service station. Even though she’s nervous, she gets in. They drive for miles without seeing anything until eventually, a service station appears in the distance. But instead of slowing down, the man drives right past it. By now, the woman is extremely nervous; she holds her baby tightly. “I think you missed it,” she says. “It was closed,” he replies. There’s a long pause. “Before I kill you, I’m going to throw your baby out the window.”

The next time we see her, she’s crying hysterically on the side of the road.

Whether or not this kidnapper was Zodiac has been debated over and over and over again. The woman thinks so, and Zodiac himself claimed responsibility in a letter he sent the police over four months later. But the letter is so vague (not to mention incredibly late), that many, many people believe that he was just trying to take credit for someone else’s crime; he could have written it after reading a newspaper article for all we know. But it’s included here because it might be valid.

This is true of almost every scene in the movie. Everything is included. Everything. There’s a scene where Zodiac calls into a TV talk show, except that it isn’t Zodiac at all, but someone pretending to be him. A scene where a reporter uncovers evidence of a 1963 murder that may or may not have been Zodiac’s first killing. A scene where a newspaper cartoonist discovers a series of handwritten movie posters with writing that a handwriting expert assures him is as close to match as he’s ever seen – only to learn that the suspect didn’t draw the posters. Fincher can’t cut the superfluous – as far as he knows, everything is superfluous. The real leads could easily be red herrings and the best evidence could be hiding right under his nose. How can he know? All he can do is include as many of the facts as possible, point out the problems with the conclusions and hope for the best.

As you can probably tell, “Zodiac” is pretty unfocused. That’s why it works. It gives the movie a sort of start-and-stop momentum, alternating exhilaration over finding clues with frustration and tedium when those clues turn out to be red herrings. It's the kind of movie that sends you running through a dark tunnel, only to slam you into a brick wall when you come out the other side.

Just like the Zodiac.

"Babel": Pointless. Empty. Critically Acclaimed.

Babel
(Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, 2006)

1 star

Pointless. That’s the word that comes to mind when I think about "Babel." Pointless. Why was this movie made? What great statement do Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga have to make about life, the universe and everything? I kept waiting for the big scene where all the connected strands would come together and I’d suddenly understand everything. But it never came. It was like I’d done almost three hours of work and suddenly found out that I wasn’t going to get paid.

Honestly, what’s the point of "Babel?" That we’re all connected? I’m sorry, but how does the fact that events in Morocco have ramifications in Mexico illuminate some great human truth? In the age of the internet, that’s almost a given, something that can be summarized in a sentence. Filmmakers like Iñárritu need to learn that interconnectivity in of itself isn’t a theme. It’s a technique; you use to show something else. For example, events “Short Cuts” are just as random and coincidental as the events "Babel," but in "Short Cuts," Robert Altman was making a point about how accidental and random life could be. In "Traffic," Stephen Soderbergh was showing us three different ways to approach the war on drugs. Hell, even “Crash” had a point behind its interlocking stories. “Babel” makes no points; Iñárritu expects the style’s self-importance (because only important movies bother with time-shuffling) to substitute for meaning.

He also expects self-importance to substitute for meaning in the scenes dealing with “important” subjects like border control. Alright Alejandro, you show a woman getting deported. So what? That’s only half the job: You have to say something new and enlightening before it becomes important and meaningful. And no, the fact that she’s lived here for over fifteen years doesn't count – everyone already knows that happens all the time.

“Babel” is the worst kind of shallow movie: the kind you have to think about before you realize there’s nothing to think about. Look at the scene where the Moroccan boy sees his sister naked: Initially, it seems artistic and powerful. After all, how could something like that not have meaning? But then the holes start to show. How does this tie into the boy shooting the bus? Is it some sort of commentary on masculinity? If so, what’s the comment? That being attracted to your sister and shooting a bus are both very bad ways of showing off your chest hair?

Further adding to the pointlessness, there’s some obtuse political commentary that basically amounts to the equivalent of an angry internet rant attacking George Bush, only less informed. Seriously, how does the movie benefit from the inclusion of a broadcast where newscasters blame terrorists for the bus attacks? I know some people would say that it shows how the government jumps to conclusions, but when a bus full of American tourists gets shot in the middle of a Muslim country ... well I'm sorry, common sense dictates that terrorists did it, not dumb little children with military-trained-sniper aim. (Don’t even get me started on how unrealistic this movie is). Iñárritu is only complaining because he knows that he has nothing meaningful to say and wants to score a few points with liberal film critics around the world. After all, tell them something they agree with and they’ll be more than happy to overlook a few flaws, like, say, the lack of thematic unity.

Here’s the main reason “Babel” is pointless. Judging from the title and tagline (“Listen.”), it’s a film about miscommunication, right? But none of the conflicts and problems are caused by miscommunication. There’s no miscommunication with the bus shooting (that’s caused by dumbness), no miscommunication at the village (insensitivity), no miscommunication at the border (dumbness again). The only part where there's any miscommunication is the Japanese segment, but even that’s more about depression and loneliness improperly expressed.

All of “Babel’s” problems can be traced back to the screenplay. Iñárritu is a very talented director and his direction here is phenomenal – I didn’t realize how much the movie sucked until after it was over. The acting is all top notch (even Brad Pitt is good). And the editing… well, here’s a note to the person who claimed that I only understand editing: if that were true, I’d be giving Babel four stars instead of one. It’s just the script that sucks. It feels like Guillermo grabbed four rough drafts from the bottom shelf of his writing drawer and combined them into one movie, hoping that pretentious critics across the country would find a point (and write lengthy essays explaining it for him).

It probably would have been better if he had stuck to one script, instead of trying to cram four stories into one film. Any one of them could have made a good enough film by itself: The core stories and characters could potentially be interesting and compelling; do a little expanding and you’d even find a theme or two. But putting them together is just asking for trouble. It’s like trying to combine four short stories into a novel. It simply doesn’t work.

Those of you who know me understand that despite my boisterous exterior, I will never use the words "I'm right" when talking about anything, especially a movie. I'm an open-minded person, and even though I may have strong opinions, I like to think that I can find merit in every argument. Not here. When it comes to "Babel," I am right. The world is wrong. This movie is so empty I could rent it out for storage. I’m not unsympathetic, I’m not intolerant, I’m not biased (although I am Republican). I’ll never disregard a movie on politics alone. Never. If a movie has something to say, I’ll listen. “Babel” just doesn’t have anything to say.

"Black Hawk Down": One of the best, most insightful war films ever made

Black Hawk Down
(Ridley Scott, 2001)

4 stars

Watching Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” is like taking the endurance test from Hell. It throws us right in the middle of the desperate fifteen hour struggle for survival that took place on October 3, 1993, when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu, Somalia, leaving more than a hundred Army Rangers trapped under siege. For two solid hours, we’re trapped under this deafening assault of gunfire and explosions that never, ever lets up, not even for a moment. We hear nothing but battle, and see nothing but blood.

Scott pulls no punches; he wants “Black Hawk Down” to be the most realistic representation of battle ever put on screen. And he certainly succeeds on a visual level. (In one scene, a rocket blows a man clear in half; we see his intestines lying on the ground beside him. Even “Saving Private Ryan” wasn't that brutal.) But anyone can bombard us with carnage; what makes “Black Hawk Down” special is how Scott uses film grammar, in addition to the sights and sounds of battle, to make us feel what it must have been like to be caught up in this desperate, heated and unexpected struggle for survival. (And he did it so well that he earned himself an Oscar nomination for Best Director.)

His strategy is to make the battle scenes incomprehensible, so not only are they big, loud and bloody, but they're impossible to follow. Shots come and go so fast that every event is reduced to little more than a shapeless blur, you can’t tell the difference between any of the soldiers and since there’s no attempt at establishing any sort of geography, we never know where anyone is or where they’re going. It initially seems like a flaw. (“You’d think," complains Jeremiah Kipp of filmcritic.com, "we’d at least have some small understanding of what was going on”). But think – how did the soldiers feel? Do you think things made sense to them? Were they sure and confident? Because we’ve been conditioned by generations of war movies to expect things to be coherent, we try desperately to make sense out of the senseless. We become as confused, aggravated and frustrated as the men we’re watching.

That’s not sloppy filmmaking, that’s realism. The same thing goes for a lot of other decisions, like the ones concerning the lack of political context (“Once that first bullet goes past your head, politics goes right out the window,” says one soldier) and character. “Black Hawk Down” takes the “United 93” approach to character: There’s no backstory or depth; all we have to go on is a name and a face. It’s not a flaw: There’s no time for deep reflection and inspired monologues when bullets were whizzing past your head.

I’ve always been confused by critics who’ve attacked this movie as "racist." Yes, it’s true that the Somali are portrayed as a screaming mass of bloodthirsty savages, but stop and think for a second. The story is about besieged Americans trapped under siege; every Somali they see wants to kill them. Do you think that between running for cover, they were telling themselves, “Hey, I bet there are a lot of good people in that screaming mass?” Of course not. That’s not racism, it’s perspective.

“Black Hawk Down” isn’t perfect. "Pearl Harbor" producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s fingerprints are all over this movie. There’s a lot of very, very cheesy dialogue (“I’m here to kick some ass!”), stuff like a militia leader who serves as the villain in a story that doesn’t need one and a subplot about the deaf soldier that’s supposed to be funny, but is really just offensive. (Imagine if Paul Greengrass had added comic relief to “United 93”, and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what’s going on here.) Thankfully, Scott’s more radical vision dominates the picture.

You may be asking what’s the point? Why would anyone ever want to subject themselves to such a brutal experience? Because great films enlighten us. My mom’s cousin is a major in the Army, and he served a year in Iraq. He was never trapped behind enemy lines, but he and his company took fire every night. He lived under a daily fear of being killed. I can’t imagine what that must have been like, but at least now I have an idea.

"The Getaway": What happens when you pair a badass director with a badass action star? You get a bad movie.

The Getaway
(Sam Peckinpah, 1972)

2 stars

Wow, Steve McQueen is a crappy criminal. During the course of “The Getaway”, he botches a bank robbery, loses the money to a second-rate con artist, tries to kill a guy by shooting him in the shoulder, manages to get every cop in Texas on his tail, stops at a restaurant while those cops are on his tail and finally, to evade capture, hides out in the back of a garbage truck.

How did this happen? It’s all wrong! This is Steve McQueen, we’re talking about here. The Steve McQueen. The ultimate badass, the king of cool. The guy who jumped the fence in the motorcycle, the guy who escaped the island prison camp, the guy who chased two crooks down the streets of San Francisco in a ’68 Ford Mustang. Isn’t there some kind of law against putting him in movies where he’s an incompetent idiot?

Listen to his brilliant plan for robbing a tiny, one-room bank in a small town in rural Texas: “The diversionary explosives are placed sixty seconds apart,” he says. Diversionary explosives? Has he seen this bank? (Rhetorical question – of course he’s seen the bank, he took about a million unnecessary photos of it and has a copy of the blueprints sitting behind him.) It’s tellered by little old ladies, for God’s sake. The security guard’s gun isn’t even loaded. Diversionary explosives are completely pointless. His partners understand this. “That’s a walk-in bank, man,” says Rudy (Al Lettieri, who played Sollozzo in “The Godfather”). Does it ever occur to Steve just how right Rudy is? No. No it does not.

Of course, after the plan fails (surprise, surprise!) and Rudy starts trying to kill everybody, etc., we're treated to scene after scene of criminal stupidity: Steve trying to kill Rudy by shooting him the shoulder. Steve trusting Ali McGraw with the money. Steve letting children on a train see his face. My favorite act of criminal stupidity was when he stops at a restaurant (not a drive-thru, mind you, but a sit-down restaurant) when every cop in the state knows who he is and what he looks like. Seriously, this is Darwin Awards stuff.

But it isn’t just that Steve McQueen plays a crappy criminal – that I could at least understand, if not approve. It’s that he plays a crappy criminal who thinks he’s the baddest kid on the block. All throughout the movie McQueen sports his trademark steely-eyed badass glare, even when he’s doing things like riding a bus back into the town he just shot his way out of. He never gives off the impression that maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s playing his image in a role that’s the complete opposite of that image and it’s so jarring it’s painful. How painful? Knives on a chalkboard. A chalkboard with kittens on it. Cute kittens. (Imagine if Al Pacino had played the inept bank robber in “Dog Day Afternoon” as a sure, confident badass who knew exactly what he was doing, even when the cops had him surrounded, and you’ll have a good idea of what’s going on here).

What was Sam Peckinpah thinking? He was the most badass director ever, and here he’s given one of the most badass movie stars ever – and he makes him roll around in the trash with Ali MacGraw? I guess he was trying to demystify the Steve McQueen legend (he did call "The Getaway" his first attempt at satire), which I can appreciate. Of course, I can also appreciate the fact that it completely doesn’t work. I don’t know why. Maybe some stars are just immune to demystification. Maybe he was just too obvious about it (rolling around in the trash isn’t exactly subtle). Maybe someone should have told Steve McQueen, “Hey Steve, you’re not a badass in this one.”

Other casting mistakes hurt this movie. For example, Sally Struthers plays a woman that Rudy enlists to help him on his chase. Yes, that Sally Struthers. It’s more than a little bit creepy having to watch Sollozzo from “The Godfather” have sex with Gloria from "All in the Family." Plus Ali MacGraw just sucks. She plays Steve’s wife/escape partner, and we’re supposed to sympathize with her because this whole situation is putting a strain on their marriage or something, but we don’t because she just can’t act. At all. (At one point, she tells Steve “We won’t be the same anymore.” Really? I thought. You certainly don’t seem very distressed about it.) Thankfully there’s a nice scene where Steve McQueen pimp-slaps her. I like to think it’s because he’s tired of her sucking so much at acting.

But “The Getaway” isn’t a total loss. I liked the rural Texas atmosphere (you can tell that this movie wasn’t shot on sets in LA), and Peckinpah’s trademark bloody slow-motion shootouts are here in spades. The last shootout in particular is one of his best. (But even here you can see how inept Steve McQueen is. At least throw the bullets where he can’t get at them when he wakes up a few minutes later). Peckinpah was a great director and even his failures were infused with his uniquely dark, rebellious world view.

Who else could take the simple act of blowing out the headlights on an empty cop car with a twelve-gauge shotgun and make it feel like some sort of grand, exhilarating act of defiance?

"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind": “Unhappy memories! Yet be welcome, for you are my distant youth.”

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004)

3 ½ stars

If relationships only exist in our minds, then what would happen if two people forgot that they ever knew each other? Logically, they’d pick up and move on with their lives; if they saw each other on the street or at the bus stop, they wouldn’t look up twice. But is love really that mental? Is it possible for a man who forgot everything he ever knew about his wife to (if he saw her again) still love her, even if he didn’t know why?

Tough question. What makes “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” so good is that it doesn’t really try answering it. (Yes, Joel and Clementine get back together at the end, but the movie never tells us why.) Hell, it doesn’t even openly ask it. Instead of long, eloquent monologues where the characters ponder deep questions of love and memory, it just gives us a simple (okay, complicated) story about what happens to Joel and Clementine when they go to a doctor to erase themselves from each other’s minds. The thinking? That’s our job.

Listen to that premise again: When people want to forget something in this movie – a disastrous first date or an embarrassing come-on, for example – all they have to do is make an appointment with a team of specialists and presto! Memories gone. (Lucky bastards. When I want to forget something, I have to spend months pushing it into the deepest, darkest, dustiest corners of my mind.)

Great premise, right? Charlie Kaufman, the same guy wrote “Being John Malkovich,” pushes it so far that you can almost see the seams. (And I mean that in the best way possible.) We see some weird stuff as the movie skips back and forth in time, charting Joel and Clementine’s relationship in the real world, in Joel’s memories and in those memories after the “doctor” starts, um, messing them up: Joel hiding Clementine in an unhappy memory where his mom walks in on him masturbating. A “previously erased memory” with faceless people straight out of “Jacob’s Ladder.” Disappearing houses and people. Memories that know they’re memories. (It sounds confusing, but as Roger Ebert points out, we never feel lost because we have an emotional core –Joel and Clementine – leading us along.)

And Michel Gondry finds the right way to film it. (Just watch the repressed childhood memories, or the scene where Clementine disappears in front of Joel’s eyes.) Normally I hate it when music video directors try making movies: their quirkiness and extreme attention to detail usually overshadows the story and makes the movie feel gimmicky. But when you’re making a movie that literally tours us down memory lane, you need these directors. Can you imagine what would have happened if Sydney Pollack had tried filming this story?

But as much as I want to avoid dying a painful death at the hands of Michel Gondry fans, he’s not the most original director working today. Aside from the standard music video director tricks that I’ve seen in everything from “Panic Room” to “Son of Rambow,” a lot of Gondry’s quirks (shaky camerawork, jump cuts, flip-flopping tone, impulsive/crazy women) come straight from French New Wave directors like Godard and Truffaut. In fact, if Truffaut were still alive, I probably would have assumed that he had made the movie. I’m not saying that Gondry is a thief (every director has influences) and I’m not saying that his style didn’t work for the movie (because it did), I just don’t want anyone thinking that he’s even half as original as guys like Terrence Malick or Werner Herzog.

For almost four years now, people have been telling me that I needed to watch this movie. I don’t know why it took me so long; memory is one of my favorite subjects. Maybe I assumed that Kaufman and Gondry took the Hollywood route and turned it into a plot device (don't ask me why), instead of actually trying to figure out how it works – and asking us tough questions about how much control we’d like to have over them. God knows I’ve done things that I’d rather forget, known “friends” who I’ve wanted to erase. But give them up? Never. Grating as they may be, those memories are part of me; erasing them would be like stabbing myself in the stomach. Remember the scene with the Alexander Pope quote? I would have used one from Georges Courteline:

“Unhappy memories! Yet be welcome, for you are my distant youth.”

"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre": It works; that's undeniable. Does that make it good? I'm not so sure.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(Tobe Hooper, 1974)

2 ½ stars

Two words spring to mind when I think about Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre": “fucked” and “up.” Less a horror movie than a carnival geek show; less scary than disturbing, demented and gross; less “hold your breath in fear” than “puke your guts out in disgust,” it’s not something you watch after a heavy meal.

You know the story, right? No? Read the title. Now you do. Nothing matters less to Hooper than plot and character, because, after all, they’d only get in the way of the disgusting mood he wants to create. Hell, even suspense gets the short stick; during the few scenes where he tries making us hold our breaths, he almost always undermines himself by (a) ending the scene with a gruesome slaying, or (b) cranking up the weird music and showing us lots of very, very creepy shots of human bones and human skin (or in some cases, chairs and lampshades made from human bones and human skins).

Is it scary? Not really. Even if Hooper had exploited his “insane killer on the loose” story well enough to overpower our apathy to his cardboard characters, that grossness more than overpowers any potential scares. After all, you can’t hold your breath when you’re throwing up. (Not that this would upset Hooper. Watch closely: it’s obvious that he wanted to gross us out more than scare us.)

If you think about it, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" basically created the slasher genre. No, it didn’t establish the rock-solid formula (girls dying after sex, the killer who won’t die, etc.) the way that John Carpenter’s "Halloween," made four years later on an equally small budget, did. But it set the bar. For almost thirty-five years, horror directors have been trying to make a movie that grossed us out as much as this movie, all failing.

How did Hooper pull it off? To paraphrase Roger Ebert, he had originality (maybe novelty) on his side. When he made the movie in 1973, gross-out gore movies didn’t exist. Unlike his “pupils,” he couldn't steal anything from other movies, which forced him to follow his instincts and make the most fucked up movie that his sick mind could concoct. And let’s face it kids, you always get better results when you use your imagination! (If you don't believe me, just compare "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" to one of its rip-offs: The new movies might have slicker technology, but none of those directors had the balls to piss on convention and end the movie with something as gut-churning as Hooper's "dinner" scene.)

But why does this movie exist? I love movies that fuck with my gut – when they do it for a reason. But as far as I can tell, Hooper has no reasons. I mean, why did he make this movie? What’s he trying to tell us? That people are fucked up? Since when is that news?

"Exotica": Prelude to a masterpiece

Exotica
(Atom Egoyan, 1994)

3 ½ stars

Atom Egoyan’s "The Sweet Hereafter" was an emotional experience too incredible for words, a tidal wave of grief, pain, emptiness and peace that hit me so hard that I couldn’t think about anything else for almost a week. (What made it even more amazing was that Egoyan never manipulated, sermonized or spelled anything out.) I’m not exaggerating when I say that it’s one of the twenty best movies that I’ve ever seen.

After watching something that powerful, it’s only natural that “Exotica” (the movie Egoyan made immediately before “The Sweet Hereafter”) would feel a little tame, almost like a warm-up: Like “Hereafter,” “Exotica” stars Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Polley and Arsinée Khanjian; tells its story out of order; and focuses on how people react when they loose loved ones. But with its toned down themes and smaller scale, it feels … well, like something Egoyan only made because he wanted to feel out his targets with small arms before breaking out the chain guns and rocket launchers three years later.

The movie is about the intersected lives of four (apparent) strangers: an IRS agent; a gay pet shop owner; a stripper and the strip-club DJ. (Don’t roll your eyes; Egoyan made this movie long before Paul Haggis and Alejandro González Iñárritu turned these movies into clichés.) At the beginning of the movie, these people seem almost completely unrelated; they cross paths occasionally (the IRS agent is auditing the pet shop owner and visiting the strip club), but that’s it. But soon they start bumping into each other more and more often, opening old wounds and revealing dark secrets, until the end of the movie, when we realize just how closely these “strangers” are connected.

And the more we learn, the more we realize that they’re too complex to be written off as easily as we assumed at first. Take the IRS man: He goes to the Exotica club almost every other night to see the same stripper. Is he a dirty pervert? No. He lost his wife and daughter several years ago; sex means nothing to him. Does he go because he’s so empty inside that he needs strippers to touch him just so he can feel alive?

Have I said too much? I’ve barely said anything. Every character in this movie has a secret and over the course of “Exotica’s” 100 minutes, we hear them all. In the process, the movie touches on deep-rooted feelings of grief, loneliness and emptiness that we’ve all felt at one point in our lives. “There's this feeling I get sometimes that I wasn’t meant to be satisfied,” the DJ tells his girlfriend in a flashback. “It seems to me that every time I'm about to get a hold of something or someone, they just seem to slip away.” (And because the movie is told out of order, we know the second he opens his mouth that this girl will also slip through his fingers, which makes his sad story even sadder.)

The movie isn’t perfect: Some of Egoyan’s time-jumbling confused me, the big revelations didn’t hit me as hard as they should have and … oh hell, I’m only complaining because I stupidly expected it to live up to “The Sweet Hereafter,” a movie so perfect that it didn’t have a single wrong shot. (Why haven’t you seen it yet?) If I had watched it without any preconceived expectations, I probably would have loved it more.

But I don’t want to end this review on a bad note, so let me shift gears and talk about what “Exotica” does perfectly: develop a relationship between grief and sex so real that it completely changed my perceptions of why people go to strip-clubs. I always thought that people went to strip clubs because they were skeevy bastards who didn’t respect women, or because they needed a quick “fix.” After watching this movie, I wondered: Do people go because they have emotional holes that they want – expect – strippers to fill? No wonder the dancing feels so sad.

"Ghosts of Mars": You're never let down when you expect the worst

Ghosts of Mars
(John Carpenter, 2001)

2 stars

For months, all of my friends – even the hardcore Carpenter fans who swear by "They Live" – have been telling me that “Ghosts of Mars” sucked. So naturally I went in expecting to hate it. (I planned on writing an extremely negative review – something along the lines of “‘Ghosts of Mars’ made me hate John Carpenter” – just to prove that I don’t like everything he makes.) But I didn't hate it. I liked it. Kinda. Just a little.

Which isn’t the same as thinking that it’s “good” or “well-made,” so don’t go telling people that Daniel Singleton ranks “Ghosts of Mars” as high as a masterpiece like "Halloween," because I don’t. On a technical level, it sucks just as hard as everybody says. The characters are dull, the atmosphere feels cheap, the dialogue only exists to move the plot forward, and the directing is so amateurish, witless and derivative of Carpenter’s earlier movies that I half suspect that the movie was made by a Carpenter wannabe – a drunk fan who thought that “Prince of Darkness’s” plot (demon mist that possesses people) would have been a thousand times cooler if it had “Assault on Precinct 13’s” action (cops and crooks trapped under siege).

For proof, just compare “Ghosts” to the much smarter "Big Trouble in Little China." Both movies “suck,” but where “Big Trouble” used its suckiness to make fun of mindless action movies, “Ghosts” just sucks, plain and simple. There’s no wit. No satire. No edge. There’s humor, but it’s immature and not very funny. (“I’d only fuck you if you were the last man on Earth. But we’re on Mars.”) I understand that Carpenter might have wanted to make a semi-serious action movie, but I also understand that he’s made at least three semi-serious action movies that exploited and made fun of the genre. Why not here?

Still not convinced? Then just ask yourself how someone who made two of the most suspenseful movies that I’ve ever seen (“Halloween” and “The Thing”) could make such an unsuspenseful movie. Seriously, when an “action-thriller” lasts more than 100 minutes, you expect to sit up or hold your breath at least once, but no, that doesn’t happen here. I blame Carpenter: Instead of building suspense the old-fashioned way (threat establishment, followed by escalating conflict*), he just blasts heavy metal rock as loud as possible, as if he expects noise to create tension on its own, or falls back on cheap shock tactics. (I lost count of the number of times something jumped out at us from the side of the frame.)

But I still kinda liked it. (Kinda.) For all its technical badness, the movie has charm; you can tell that Carpenter (or the drunk fan using his name) had fun making it, and that fun went a long way to keeping me entertained enough not to turn it off after thirty minutes. To quote Pauline Kael:

The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

If you understand what she means, then maybe you understand why I’m giving “Ghosts of Mars” 2 stars instead of the 1 ½ that it deserves.

*Some critics blamed the lack of tension on Carpenter’s decision to not develop the characters, which made it impossible (they said) for us to care about what happened to them. I disagree. I knew (and cared) just as little about the characters in “The Thing,” but I still held my breath for almost the entire movie.

As Hitchcock said (and Carpenter proved), apprehension of a threat almost always outweighs our feelings toward the characters (so even if we hate the mobsters, we’ll still hold our breaths before the bomb under their table explodes). The big problem with “Ghosts,” therefore, isn’t that Carpenter barely develops the characters; it’s that he barely develops the threat. (That, and the flashback structure lets us know right from the beginning who dies.)

A few great endings

Not the only great endings in movie history, obviously (trying to compile that list ain't possible), just some that come to mind when I think about "great endings." Proceed cautiously because obviously, there will be spoilers:

M (Fritz Lang, 1931): Serial killer movies today usually end on an optimistic note: With the killer caught, life can return to normal. Right?

Wrong. As anyone who's lost someone to crime knows, it doesn't matter how quickly the police catch the guy, or how many volts of electricity the government zaps through him, or what new safety measures they create to keep sex offenders off the streets -- nothing can bring back the dead.

Fritz Lang captured that feeling of hopeless nihilism perfectly when he replaced the censor's original ending -- a shot of smiling mothers watching over their children, who are now 100% safe and sound -- with a shot of four grieving mothers dressed entirely in black, lamenting that the killer's death "won't bring back our children."

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000): Hard to believe, isn't it? A kung-fu movie with an ending perfect enough to make my eyes water?

Make fun of me all you want, but I swear to you that when Zhang Ziyi leaped off the mountain, hoping that her death would bring Chow-Yun Fat back to life, I felt tears come to my eyes. It wasn't that she was sacrificing herself to save someone else (something that she never would have done at the beginning of the movie) it was that she was risking everything on blind faith. After all, the story about the boy who leaped off the mountain to save his parents was a thousand years old; for all she knew, it was just a legend. When she hit the bottom, Michelle Yeoh would have two dead friends instead of just one. But still she leaped.

Sacrifice and faith are powerful enough on their own; put them together, and you get endings too incredible to describe.

Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975): I'm not one of those people who thinks that "Nashville" is Altman's best movie (it's a little too long and shapeless for me), but when Barbara Harris climbs up that stage and sings "It Don't Worry Me" to a crowd shocked by sudden assassination -- God my heart drops every time! Some critics have attacked it for implying that we're mindless sheep whose minds go blank the second we see something bright and shiny, but I think that it's a powerful tribute to the optimism of the human spirit -- our ability to triumph over tragedy. If Rudy Giuliani was singing something on September 12, he was singing that song.

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998): For years, I always skipped the last third of "The Thin Red Line." Why? Easy. The first time I watched the movie (at the enlightened age of fifteen), I loved the battle scenes, but hated the long, shapeless, meandering aftermath that Malick followed them with. Besides, I never had three continuous hours to kill.

But a few weeks ago, I was watching the movie with my brother (who had never seen it) and figured, what the hell, I'd give them another shot. God, what a revelation! The post-battle scenes felt just as shapeless as they did four years ago, but now I could finally see the method behind the madness. You see, Malick didn't let them drag on and on and on because he needed to fill space; he was trying to recreate the empty feelings -- the questions, the doubts, the holes that killing leaves -- that soldiers feel after battle. Of course the last third drags: feelings that empty don't call for climaxes. (So basically, never stand by opinions you had when you were fifteen.)

They Live (John Carpenter, 1988): "What's wrong, baby?"

Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982): One piece of paper changes everything Harrison Ford ever thought he knew about his existence. If that isn't poetry, then I don't know what is.


More to come!

Introductions and Explanations -- i.e., Why I named my blog "John Carpenter, Terrence Malick and Me" even though I've never met them.

You're probably wondering about the name. No, I've never met John Carpenter or Terrence Malick, so I guess you could say that naming my blog after them is "lying" because it implies that we've had some wacky adventures together, fighting ninjas or smuggling guns to Guatemalan rebels or something. (Only in my dreams, sadly.)

No, the name is symbolic of my love and respect for two of America's best, most original directors.

Carpenter and Malick? Good and original? Are you crazy? Maybe. Professing admiration for these guys would probably get most mainstream critics laughed out of the office. To most people, they stand for everything that sucks about modern movies: 99% of critics hate how Carpenter makes intentionally goofy movies (with bad actors and worse dialogue), while almost every "regular" moviegoer that I've talked to gritted their teeth and started mumbling obscenities when I mentioned Malick's non-linear structures and poetic voiceovers (which emphasize tone and mood more than plot and character).

But that's the mainstream opinion. The non-mainstream opinion -- the opinion I'll stand by until the day I stop watching movies (or until an important newspaper pays me $15 million to say otherwise) -- is that Carpenter and Malick stand for everything that's right about movies.

Don't misread me: I'm not bashing traditional movies (some of my favorite movies fall into that category) and I'm not saying that Carpenter and Malick are better directors than, say, Scorsese and Spielberg; I'm just saying that it takes a lot of guts to make a movie where Kurt Russell surfs down Sunset Blvd. (Carpenter's "Escape from L.A."), or a WWII movie where the shots of trees run longer than the battle scenes (Malick's "The Thin Red Line"). Guts that most directors don't have.

It's not about quality, it's about daring. Movies are "dream factories," after all. Writers and directors, armed with large budgets and larger imaginations, can create almost anything in the world. A flying city in the sky. A massive, 100,000 sword battle between elves and goblins. A world where an ex-wrestler can find a pair of "special sunglasses" that reveals what he's always suspected: that rich people are actually aliens from outer space who control the world with an antenna on top of an L.A. TV station. And when the sky's the limit, does it really make sense to box yourself in by thinking small?

Over the next few weeks, months or years (sky's the limit), I'm going to use this blog to explore some unconventional movies, directors or movie-related issues -- issues that you might have come across before, but brushed off because they seemed too "stupid" ("A movie without a plot? What a pointless idea.") -- and hopefully change some misconceptions you have about movies. Who knows, maybe I'll convince you to see something that you might have otherwise avoided.