"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.