I studied quite a bit of film in college. I took classes on noir, on apocalyptic film, on Orson Welles, I even took an ethnic studies class that concentrated on the representation of first generation Asian immigrants to the West Coast. In four years at Berkeley, if there was a film showing I probably saw it.
Good things and bad things came from this. On the bad side, I became a film snob. If there was too much CGI or too much gratuitous, pointless violence or if the director used too many quick cuts without giving purpose or meaning to each individual edit, I would immediately pan the movie. It didn't matter if the film ended up with 8 Oscar nominations or the Jury Prize at Cannes. If I found a cliché or a superfluous moment I blasted it and reduced its worth to the domain of the tasteless and mildly retarded.
One instance in my sophomore year was particularly emblematic of this mindset. I went to a dinner party for about 20 people that my girlfriend's parents threw. During a lull in conversation as we sat down to the first course, someone asked me what I was studying. I mentioned history and film and before I knew it I was going off about what a completely inaccurate, clichéd faux arthouse abortion of a film Braveheart was. If memory serves, I ended my soliloquy with the line "you think you can get away with saying something as gay as 'they can take our lives, but they can never take our freedom' just because you paint half of Lt. Riggs' face blue, put him in a skirt, throw him on a horse, and film him galloping around the verdant Scottish highlands!? I'm still trying to figure out how they cleared out all the inbred sheepfuckers from their earthen hillside hovels in order to film those scenes in the first place!"
According to Amy, my girlfriend, it was those last lines that cemented my fate with her family and her family's friends. Not only had nearly everyone at the table seen the movie and loved it, but all except for 2 had some degree of Scottish blood coursing through their veins. What made my breathless critique that much worse was the fact that, as I found out a few years later, Braveheart saved Amy's parents' marriage.
They were having a rough go of things in the months leading up to the film's release. Amy's mom was near the end of her rope with Amy's father. Her mom came from the old school though and was of the opinion that you battle through the hard times, not give up because of them. In what Amy described to me as a last-ditch effort, her mom planned a date night. They would go out to dinner, have a couple drinks, and see a movie.
They saw Braveheart and it was the first time Amy's mom had ever seen her husband cry. He was so moved by the sacrifices of Lt. Riggs in a Skirt and so touched by the pain he went through when they killed his wife, he broke down as they left the theater and spoke openly and romantically to her for the first time in fifteen years.
I know, how nauseating is that?
Anyway, my tirade ground the dinner party to a halt before the entrée had been served. The spirit of light-hearted conversation that is the trademark of a successful dinner party had been bitch-slapped and hate-fucked in less time than an Andy Rooney segment. Within 30 minutes everyone had gone home. Within a month, Amy and I had broken up.
There is a very common plot arc used in sitcoms and PG-13 feature films in which a teenage girl has a boyfriend who goes away to college while she stays back in their hometown--either because he is a couple years older or because she has some pressing family obligation that keeps her there. The couple insists to each other and those around them that their love is true and will survive the tests the older boyfriend is sure to face in his new environment. Invariably, he changes and the relationship withers on the vine.
I don't think this is what Amy's parents were alluding to when they told a mutual acquaintance that the reason we broke up was because I "went to college and turned into a fucking asshole."
Besides film snobbery, the other bad habit I developed was the ability to predict what was going to happen during a movie, when it was going to happen, and to whom. This skill really isn't all that special once you understand that directors typically foreshadow every event, major or minor, by juxtaposing scenes, imagery, quick cuts, dialogue, anything really, that have seemingly no direct connection to each other.
A woman wakes up in her bed next to a man. You can tell that this is the morning after some primal, drunken, semi-anonymous sex. She gets up obviously hung over and goes to the bathroom. She looks in the mirror with that "jesus what have you done now?" look on her face and then dives out of the shot toward to the toilet and throws up.
What does this tell us? She's pregnant. The throwing up is usually enough of a hint for directors but those who lack subtlety will take it a step further and cut immediately to a scene involving the baby of another character; trying to hammer home the point that this girl is going to be pregnant as a result of this drunken one-night stand and it's going to be a big deal later on in the film.
I used to do this with every film I watched. You name a movie that came out between 1999 and 2001 and I probably ruined it for whomever I was with. It got so bad that one of my girlfriends during this period refused to see movies with me. The only way I could get her to come with me was if I went by myself first and then took her a couple days later. That way, she figured, I already knew what was going to happen and I would spend the two hours "enjoying" the movie rather than trying to dissect it like a "pain in the ass know-it-all."
She was right except for the whole "enjoying" part. I realized at some point in 2001 that I had not liked more than a half dozen new movies in the previous 5 years. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Usual Suspects and L.A. Confidential as movies I truly loved from that period and Usual Suspects came out in '95. As was par for the course in those years, the simple enjoyment I experienced from those films was ripped from my clutches and hammered repeatedly like a dead kitten in a Chinese kitchen.
In 1995, Usual Suspects was nominated for two second-tier Academy Awards (both of which it won, amazingly) but was dwarfed and lost in the shadow of, guess who, Braveheart. In 1997, L.A. Confidential was nominated for 9 awards and won only two in, not surprisingly, the second-tier categories. The film lost in every other category to Titanic. Ti-fucking-tanic.
I hate Titanic with the fire of 10,000 suns.
That movie sucks so thoroughly if it were a blackhole it would crush all the other sucky movies within its reach under the weight of its suck. How can you honestly expect me to have any respect for a movie in which the dialogue between the main characters doesn't use pronouns? To be fair though, I have to give a nod to Titanic for one of the unintentionally funniest scenes in the history of film.
The scene occurs in the sequence where the ship finally breaks in half and the bow pitches up vertically. Everyone that had run to that end of the ship (Jack and Rose included) is now left hanging from the railings. The camera sweeps around and looks down the length of the ship from what is supposed to be Jack's point of view. Just then some guy lets go of the railing and goes plunging straight down to the icy waters below. As luck would have it, however, the stern section of the ship had already pitched vertically and was in the process of sinking to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Its descent was not complete at this point and its two massive propellers were still sticking completely out of the water. The camera stays on the plummeting man all the way down the length of the bow. There is pandemonium and deafening chaos. Women are screaming, deck chairs are shattering, metal is twisting, water is crashing into the sinking ship. As the man plunges to his death he clips one of the massive propellers with his head. Against the cacophony of this chaos, you can hear very distinctly a TINK as his head makes contact.
In the middle of a stunned and quiet theater I burst into laughter. I tried to stop laughing but I would just end up choking. People began staring and finally an usher came down the aisle to tell me I would have to leave if "I couldn't be respectful." That didn't help matters either, so I got up and went to the bathroom. I still haven't seen the 15 minutes I missed. I'm guessing it sucked.
Since then, whenever I see clips of James Cameron at The Oscars throwing up his hands while accepting the award for Best Director and screeching "I'm the king of the world," I want to reach through the television, grab his Oscar statue and ram it so far up his gaping, semen-crusted butthole that Linda Hamilton would have to shove her penis down his throat just to push it out.
It was about this time that I realized I needed to change my attitude toward movies.
The biggest problem with film study and film snobbery is that they make you forget the first and primary purpose of film: entertainment (unless of course you are Leni Reifenstal and you're more interested in stoking the flames of German anti-semitism and filling the blonde, blue-eyed ranks of the Aryan uber-race). I spent three years concentrating on the dark cloud and approximately 15 minutes on the silver lining. As I discovered in the years since college, that was a huge mistake and one I would do my best not to repeat.
In that spirit, I made the decision to see any movie at any time and do my best to enjoy them for those things they do best. It took some time to adjust my hate-tinted glasses, but adjust them I did.
Bad Boys 2? Dialogue: atrocious. Plot: generic. Explosions, car chases, and obligatory 'you so crazy' black guy jokes: AWESOME.
Any Given Sunday? Football scenes: nauseating. Oliver Stone putting himself in his own movie...again: annoying. LL Cool J bitch-slapping Jamie Foxx in the shower: WORTH EVERY PENNY.
It's been a personal movie Renaissance. I feel like what Helen Keller might have felt like were she suddenly able to see and hear (she can stay mute for all I care). I've seen dozens upon dozens of films and found a way to enjoy each one...until a couple months ago when I went with a friend to see Be Cool.
I will pause here so I can walk outside, collect myself, and resist the urge to join a domestic terror cell.
[pause]
In case you haven't seen it, let me try to explain to you the extent to which this movie is an open, festering herpes sore on the rabid, child-eating dingo vagina of movie sequels.
The sequel is by its very nature a tricky enterprise. Not only does it not exist without the creation of a preceding film, but it owes that existence to the success of the preceding film and those specific attributes that made the film appealing in the first place. This means that, out of the box, a sequel already has a standard which it must live up to.
Until about 10 years ago, this was a very difficult task. For a sequel to be greenlighted by a studio, its predecessor had to be both financially lucrative and uniquely entertaining. The sequel had to be able to tell a related story that could stand on its own while at the same time adding texture to the previous film. Essentially, both films had to be special.
Think about it. Before Batman and Jurassic Park in '92/'93, the list of successful major motion pictures with successful sequels is short and filled with some of the best movies ever made: The Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, Superman, Rocky, Alien, Terminator.
These days, anything that performs above average at the box office is liable to be serialized. For the love of christ, they made THREE Blade movies. THREE! Wesley Snipes should never be in three of anything. The first one co-starred Stephen Dorff. Stephen Fucking Dorff! You know the fate of cinema is circling the drain when they make a sequel to a Stephen Dorff vampire movie. Be Cool is but the latest and biggest corn-speckled turd to land atop the steaming mountain of shit that is post-'92 film sequels. It is the shit-cherry on the shit-sundae.
I don't think I can describe the movie to you. Doing so might send me into hyperventilating, anger-induced seizures, nevermind that I walked out after 45 minutes. I've seen hundreds upon hundreds of movies in the last 10 years and this is the first one I've ever walked out on. I'm afraid if I try to recount the 45 minutes I watched, I might lose all my faith in mankind, move into a shack in the wilderness, and start writing treatises with no punctuation.
Normally I would say, 'see for yourself,' but I cherish not being the target of a contract hit. What I will do is give you the highlights, or lowlights as it were:
The first scene is a cocktease. It's John Travolta and James Woods driving in a Cadillac. Woods is dressed very much like his character in Casino and he's pitching a movie to Chili Palmer, Travolta's character. The dialogue's a little forced but it's not that bad. The music is good and the fact that James Woods is in the film gives you that little glimmer of hope that this movie's not going to suck . Three minutes later he's killed by a Russian mobster who drives up, crashes into Chili's car, and unloads an entire clip in the direction of a corner café. He hits James Woods, the plate glass storefront window, and Chili Palmer's Cadillac. Let the suck begin.
The assclown who adapted this abortion of a screenplay then decides to use the smashed up Caddy to reintroduce the car gimmick from the first film. In Get Shorty, Chili flies out to L.A. from Miami and needs to rent a car. He wants a Cadillac but all they have left is an Oldsmobile Silhouette minivan. Chili grudgingly accepts it and tells everyone he meets that it's the "Cadillac of Minivans." In Be Cool, a rental car agent shows up to the scene of the shooting with Chili's new car. Chili, of course, has requested a Cadillac and, of course, the agency doesn't have one. Instead, the agent hands him the keys to a two-door hybrid vehicle.
What happens next? You guessed it. Every time someone asks him about the car he tells them it's the "Cadillac of Hybrid Vehicles." I'd be willing to bet they even replicate the scene from the closing credits of Get Shorty with the overhead shot where they show Chili and a whole host of others leaving from outside a studio lot in a bunch of fucking minivans. I'd set the line well below even on that one. Fusaichi Pegasus was a shorter favorite.
It only gets worse from here. The next half hour is filled with utterly infuriating dialogue spewed forth by a string of A-list stars playing characters thinner than wonton wrappers. Uma Thurman, Harvey Keitel, Vince Vaughn, The Rock, Cedric The Entertainer, Andre 3000. They all play characters so vacant and annoying that, were they real, you would run them down in a crosswalk.
The worst of that group are probably Cedric The Entertainer and Andre 3000. Cedric is so aggravating he should change his name to Cedric The Enervator because sitting through a scene with him will most certainly exhaust your will to live. He and Andre 3000(Better Actors to Play this Role) were cast to fill the "strong, quiet cool black guy" role played brilliantly in the first film by Delroy Lindo.
I'm sure after being cast they met with the director who told them "look fellas, I'm not going to lie to you. This movie is so poorly written I've seen better dialogue on refrigerator poetry magnets. To make up for it we need to get more black people in the seats. They'll watch anything with a couple of black guys in it. That's where you come in. We're gonna make you gangsters like Delroy's character, but this time, instead of giving you a strong, powerful presence, we're gonna give you guns, and throwback jerseys, and SUVs with center-spin rims, and make you more obnoxious than Chris Tucker on a meth binge. You'll even get to speak some of your people's street lingo! How does that sound, dawgs!?"
It was after the scene in which Andre 3000 whines like a baby to Cedric The Enervator about never getting to shoot anyone that I threw my empty soda cup to the floor in frustration, grabbed my jacket, got up, and forced my way down the row and out of the theater. My friend was close behind laughing. AT me, not WITH me. The next twenty minutes were a profanity-laced tirade about the death of American cinema and me wanting my $9.50 back. I don't remember much of what I said that night because when you can't stop yelling you forget to breathe and all the blood rushes from your head. I was told by my friend, however, that the words 'jihad' and 'vendetta' were used repeatedly at a very high volume.
Look, I can't tell you not to see it. You're all adults. Do what you want. If you hate yourself, go ahead and rent it. If you like irredeemably bad movies, buy it. Besides a coaster or a gag gift, the only real use I can think of for Be Cool is as a relationship compatibility test. Watch it with your significant other. If they like the movie, smash their head against the kitchen counter and throw them in a grocery store dumpster. They're not just unfit to be your spouse, they're unfit to live.
So much for the personal movie Renaissance. What can I say, even The Reformation had a Counter-Reformation.
Posted by nils at 3:08 PM