Thursday, February 04, 2010

 

Cinema Manifesto: Romantic Comedies

Most romantic comedies are neither comedies nor even faintly romantic. Hollywood hardly makes a romantic comedy these days unless it has some sort of ridiculous gimmick. Movie people have something they call a log line which is usually a one sentence summary of the film. For most romantic comedies the log line involves some sort of idiotic high jinks.

Here are a few egregious examples of this practice:

Two people make an agreement that if neither of them were married by the time they turned 28, they would marry each other.

Benjamin Barry is an advertising executive and ladies' man who, to win a big campaign, bets that he can make a woman fall in love with him in 10 days. Andie Anderson covers the "How To" beat for "Composure" magazine and is assigned to write an article on "How to Lose a Guy in 10 days." They meet in a bar shortly after the bet is made.

Julianne fell in love with her best friend the day he decided to marry someone else.

A pushy boss forces her young assistant to marry her in order to keep her Visa status in the U.S. and avoid deportation to Canada.

Beth is a young, ambitious New Yorker who is completely unlucky in love. However, on a whirlwind trip to Rome, she impulsively steals some coins from a reputed fountain of love, and is then aggressively pursued by a band of suitors.

I know, I know, you are saying “Please, please just fucking stop already.” I just have one more that you may like:

A group of high school football players have a bet to see who can impregnate the most girls before the end of the season.

I just made that one up but I expect some Hollywood agent to smash my door down with an offer any minute now. I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the Microsoft Word program there is a template for creating romantic comedy log lines and this is what Hollywood writers use to crank out this seemingly endless supply of insultingly bad movies.

Just why Hollywood has this compulsive need to summarize a film in one sentence is beyond my understanding. Do people really base their movie attendance on a one-sentence synopsis of the plot? Do movie goers really want to see a romantic comedy that is constructed upon the basis of a moronic gimmick? Does anyone really like Sandra Bullock? How much would she charge us to stop making movies?

Here’s an idea for a romantic comedy: a story about two normal human beings with average jobs who somehow meet and are attracted to each other? It’s such a completely crazy idea that it just may work.

Labels: movies

11:28 AM

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Sunday, January 03, 2010

 

My Top Movies of the Decade

First of all I must warn you that the following list is a list of opinions, and worse yet, they are my opinions. I am not much of a list-maker; I find them rather annoying in most cases, especially in the case of the other lists I have seen published on the best movies of the decade 2000-2010. These stupid lists of “great” movies are what prompted me to create my own top ten. I think that movie critics are about the lowest form of life—at least in the realm of writers. The critics for the major publications have their faces buried so deep in the asses of the big studios that they just aren’t worth reading for any reason. I’ll never forget when Anthony Lane for the New Yorker went on and on about what a fantastic movie Speed was. What a stupid cunt.

I especially hate it when critics tell me how I am supposed to feel about something, like Pete Travers for Rolling Stone saying about his list, “These are the 10 that deepened with time and dug their way into your head and heart.” Then he puts mostly shit on his list, at least in my opinion. The Departed doesn’t even rank in Scorcese’s top ten list let alone the top ten of the decade. You may feel differently but I thought that No Country for Old Men had nothing to say, the book and the film. I didn’t find it the least bit interesting. And There Will Be Blood at his number one spot? I couldn’t watch that movie twice on a bet, but that is just my opinion. Not one of my movies intersects with Traver’s list.

10) Munich (2005)
This is by far my favorite Spielberg movie which isn’t saying a lot. I read the book this was based on many years ago and I always thought that the story would make a terrific film. Believe it or not, the book didn’t have Spielberg’s depth of feeling about the nature of violence as a tool of politics.

9) Tapas (2005)
I had to include at least one Spanish film on this list and I add this one unapologetically. The simplest of small stories which give us a bird’s eye view of life in this Barrio of Barcelona. Why does Hollywood have such a difficult time making movies about the lives of people who actually have to work for a living? Hollywood’s idea of a normal job is an advertising executive. This movie was probably made on less than what it cost to make the trailer for The Lord of the Rings.

8) Gladiator (2000) Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
I wanted to have at least one blockbuster on my list just to prove that I’m not against the idea, it’s just that I hate shitty blockbusters. This made the list because it received a solid thumbs-up by dozens and dozens of bar patrons around my neighborhood this afternoon. I had to run a few errands around Ruzafa this afternoon and I noticed when I looked into a bar that Gladiator was playing on the television on the local channel Canal Nou. Not only was it on the TV but I noticed that all the patrons were watching it. I did what I had to do and then stopped in for a café con leche at my corner bar called Bar Canadá. I was just I time to see the final scene. There were about ten customers in the bar and everyone, including the bartender, was watching the movie intently. I’m sure we had all seen this movie at least three times but it is hard not to watch it whenever it is on the TV..

I was reminded of Master & Commander and had to quickly withdraw Gladiator, sorry. I couldn't possibly leave M&C off this list so I'll have to shoe-horn it in here. I love the Patrick O'Brian books and this was a remarkable adaptation of two of them.

7) High Fidelity (2000)
A great movie from a great book, one of the better novels from the 1990s. I even liked Jack Black in this movie but it was the first time I had seen him.

6) The Dark Knight (2008)
I think that what I like most about this movie is that they took a genre that I despise and that I think is mostly for booger-eaters and made a decent movie that isn’t too retarded. I guess this makes two blockbusters on my list—I’m practically in the mainstream. I hate critics who feel that they need to fill their list with hoary little indie films that no one has seen (and probably for good reasons).

5) The Lives of Others (2006)
It’s tough for me to really love a movie in a language that I don’t speak at all, and I have seen few German movies in my life, so this film really made an impression on me. A good man triumphs over the pettiness of the state. I saw this during the tail-end of the disastrous Bush era and one line at the end of the movie almost floored me with its relevance. The protagonist is finally facing the communist party creep who all but ruined his life and he tells him, “I can’t believe that my country was lead by men like you.” The central character reminded me a lot of detective in Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith who wasn’t a communist party guy but was more communist than all the party leaders.

4) Michael Clayton (2007)
I just thought that the acting in this was brilliant. A legal thriller but this movie is so much more than that. What makes this so remarkable is how the director makes you put the pieces together while giving you just the minimum of information. The personal relationships are explained in the briefest fashion yet if you do the work you can cobble together an incredibly complicated story. Just think of the interaction between Michael Clayton and his two brothers in the film. Hardly anything is revealed yet there exists a rather profound depth to their relationships if you connect the dots. This is a movie that makes you pay attention and then rewards you for your effort.*
*This just in: Up in the Air is every bit as brilliant as Michael Clayton. One of the more quotable movies that I may have ever seen.

3) The Pianist (2002)
This movie was brilliant on so many levels, an epic film about the horrors of Nazi Europe with a good portion of it from the perspective of a guy peeking out of a window in an apartment where he is hiding. I thought it was much better than Schindler’s List.

2) The Hurt Locker (2009)
A really stupid title for a really great movie. I have no idea what the title means and if this movie did poorly at the box office I would place the blame on the label. This movie was about a U.S. Army bomb squad in Iraq. As a child I remember watching the news about Viet Nam and seeing lots of helicopters. That war seemed to be defined for me by helicopters. The war in Iraq has been about IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. The film only delicately addresses what a piece of shit the war is and instead it focuses on the dedicated soldiers we send to do our dirty work. The director really got the whole military scene. Everyone looked and talked like soldiers. There wasn’t a single cliché in this movie (except one time when a soldier screamed, “Fire in the hole!” but I can forgive that). There wasn’t any “Do we cut the blue wire or the red wire” bullshit that you see in every movie about bombs. There wasn’t some Al Qaeda mastermind pitting his wits against the good guys. It was just a movie about men doing their jobs in a hellish situation. At one point one of the soldiers admits, “I fucking hate this place.”

1) The Wire (2002)
Yes, I know this wasn’t a movie. What it should have been was a wake-up call to the movie industry to get their shit together and start making better feature movies. The days when TV takes a back seat to films are over. I can’t remember a movie this decade that I looked forward to seeing with as much relish as I looked forward to seeing every new episode of this fantastic series. I could say the same for other series like Generation Kill, Entourage, Dexter, and The Shield, to name just a few.

Forget about James Cameron and his big budget, 3D science fiction extravaganzas (although I’m not really knocking Avatar, I’d love to see it), The Wire was much more groundbreaking and innovative. It is as close as cinema has come to duplicating the power of a novel.

Labels: movies

6:57 PM

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Saturday, January 02, 2010

 

My Cinema Manifesto

I just want to put into one essay a lot of ideas and observations that I have about movies. It always amazes me just how few good movies are made in any given year. I realize that everyone has different tastes. The world is certainly a much better place because so few people have tastes like mine. With this said I find it hard to believe that anyone likes Sandra Bullock. Even her parents and other relatives must hate her movies.

I would like to begin by saying that although I pick on Hollywood movies a lot I don’t think that they in any way have a monopoly on shitty movies. There are dozens and dozens of bad independent and foreign movies made every year. I pick on Hollywood because they have the monetary resources to make the best movies yet they often fall back on the most tired clichés and gimmicks in the movies they produce when they should be constantly breaking new trails and upholding the highest standards in quality. I don’t believe that people want to see lousy movies and if by chance a really lousy movie makes a ton of money it’s only because the producers spent a ton of money to market their shitty movie. People will basically see what they are told to see. I could doctor up a security video from a convenience store with good music and editing and get a bunch of people to pay to see it if I had a big enough budget to market my film. To say that people like lousy movies is a self-fulfilling prophecy made possible by good marketing.

Movie trailers are made in order to convince or trick people into shelling out the cash for the tickets to actually see the movie in a theater. Making a good trailer is an art in itself but in general the quality of the trailer reflects the quality of the movie. If there is more than one explosion in the trailer of a movie then it will almost assuredly be a piece of shit. If you have no idea what the movie is about after watching the trailer then you probably won’t after seeing the entire movie.

As far as I am concerned, as soon as the lights are dimmed in the theater until they come back on at the end the director should entertain the audience. This means that the opening and closing credits should be worth watching. You have a very fixed amount of time in feature movies with most clocking in at about 90 minutes. This means that you don’t have time for 10 minutes of boring credits. Every frame of the movie should advance the story in some way. The closing credits aren’t as important as the opening credits simple because you can walk out without watching them. If I were making a movie I would want to hold people in their seats until the very end and you aren’t going to do this if you just have a bunch of names up on the screen. I usually find that boring opening credits signal that the movie is also going to suck.

One of the most unoriginal gimmicks in film making is when they use a song to convey to you with the lyrics exactly how you are supposed to feel in that particular moment. Music should be used as a compliment, not to corroborate a bad story. Musical clichés are also annoying as hell. For example, say there is a scene at a fancy black-tie party. About nine out of ten times the music will be Mozart’s A Little Night Music because this is the cliché for classical music. Just try a little harder to be original is all that I am asking.

If the great television in the past few years—mostly compliments of HBO—has shown us anything it’s that there are a lot of really good actors out there that we have never seen before. I always thought the acting was superb in shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Entourage, and The Shield, to name just a few. So why does Hollywood act as if there are only about 15 people qualified to star in movies? We have actors that made one mildly successful film in their youth and then we are saddled with them for the rest of their lives, like we owe them some sort of pension plan in the movies. They are harder to fire than a federal employee. I say we implement the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” rule for actors. They get three movies and then they have to go do something else for a living for at least five years. This will give us time to forget about them which will make them more believable in their next role.

There is nothing worse than hearing movie dialogue that sounds like it was lifted directly from another movie. This is just lazy writing. How many dumbass dialogue clichés have you heard over and over again like broken records? I can’t even count how many times I have heard the line “Fire in the hole!” screamed in a war movie. Even if soldiers actually say this in combat—and I doubt they do—I just don’t ever want to hear it again in a movie. I wrote a whole comedy essay about buddy cop clichés I could probably extend it to book length. The problem is that most writers in the movie industry do little besides watch movies. Even if cops do say all of the dorky lines you hear in cop movies it’s probably because they are just parroting the films they see. As a writer a lot of times you should be inventing your own lingo.

Think of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange. He invented practically an entire language because he didn’t want to use the slang of his day for fear that it would very quickly sound outdated. Instead, he created a new language that still sounds cool and fresh today almost 50 years after publication. We have actually incorporated a lot of the dialogue from this novel in our speech. A lot of film dialogue is just taken from other movies. It’s like a tick that is so fat that it doesn’t realize that it has its fangs sunk into its own ass.

Labels: movies

12:01 PM

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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

 

Siete Minutos

My standards aren’t very high when I go to see a movie in Spanish. It’s basically more of a language exercise than entertainment, but it’s not like I don’t want to be entertained in the process. I go to a little movie house in my neighborhood called Cinestudio d'Or which shows a double feature for 2.50€. Cheap tickets are a definite plus when you are thinking about seeing a movie that you know probably won’t be very good. It’s not like I think American movies are any better and I never pay to see them. I just like sitting in a theater and being forced to listen to Spanish for a couple of hours. Going into a nice, air conditioned movie theater is sort of nice on a very hot afternoon especially if you bring in an ice cold can of beer.

7 Minutes begins with a pretty unoriginal premise and then goes straight to the clichés we all expect from “romantic” “comedies.” I like to put both of those words in separate parenthesis because they are rarely romantic or comic. This movie does little to change my mind on the subject. Why every writer and director wants to be like Woody Allen is a mystery to me seeing how he hasn’t made a good movie in over a generation. At least this movie didn’t have some talentless fuck from the recent cast of Saturday Night Live or one of the other small stable of actors that Hollywood puts into every “romantic” “comedy” they crank out every year like strings of lousy sausages.

I hate being a critic, at least about individual works. I certainly don’t mind slamming the entire movie industry. I enjoyed this movie simply because I liked the fact that I could understand about 93 percent of it. ¿Bastan 7 minutos para encontrar el amor de tu vida? (is 7 minutes enough to find love?) refers to the speed dating session a group of hopefuls attend at the opening of the movie. Like just about all American movies of this genre, it seems that Spanish directors also feel the need to pitch their idea with a silly gimmick. Whatever (lo que sea is how I think that is translated into Spanish), at least I made it to the end, which is more than I can say for the Turkish movie dubbed into Spanish that was the second half of the double feature.

Besides the language lesson, watching Spanish movies—good and bad—strengthens my cultural literacy here in Spain. The cold beer was great after a long bike ride earlier in the afternoon. Besides, I just like going to the movies.

Labels: movies, Valencia Spain

8:21 AM

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Saturday, February 07, 2009

 

Cousin, Cousine

Cousin, Cousine directed by Jean Charles Tacchella was probably the first French movie I ever watched, at least in French with English subtitles. I was in my first year of college French at Indiana University and this movie was suggested by my teacher, a very enthusiastic grad student and mentor to all of his students. At that time the Midwest was my birthright and I had rarely traveled outside its familiar confines. I knew that I wanted to get away from where I had lived almost my entire life up until then, but I didn't know how to do it or know where to go. I was studying French mostly because it was a required part of an undergraduate degree. I suppose that I just saw it as another course, like economics or history. After watching this movie at an off-campus art house movie theater, I couldn't help but think that the French were very different from the people I knew. At that time, as far as I was concerned, “different” was the same as “good.” I immediately developed an overly-romantic view of France that I hold to this day. Cousin, Cousine also gave me an overly-romantic view of love that I have maintained to this day.

I just watched this movie again recently, a film that was made in 1975 yet holds up extremely well, both as a timeless work of art and as something capable of speaking directly to me. In some ways I think that I haven't changed a single bit over the course of what has been my adult life. I still think this movie is just about the sexiest thing ever put on film, a story about two people who become best friends before consciously and deliberately deciding to be lovers.

I don't even know where to begin as far as my praise for this beautiful film. I love everything about it, even the music remains wonderfully whimsical—a lot of movie scores from the 70s are woefully dated. Cousin, Cousine has soured me on a generation of American films that don't have the slightest clue about how to portray ordinary people. The central characters are a handsome couple but not movie star perfect. They haven't been air-brushed, surgically enhanced, and stair-mastered to within an inch of their lives. All of the characters in this movie have ordinary (if not dumb) jobs. Hollywood's idea of a normal person's job is an advertising executive, and forget about accurately portraying all of the other details of middle class life. I think it was this movie that started my prejudice for books and movies about ordinary people, people I can recognize from my own very ordinary life.

If you haven't seen Cousin, Cousine I think you should give it a look, if you can find it. It should only take about the first 15 minutes or so to turn you into a francophile.

Labels: movies, Valencia Spain

10:59 AM

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Monday, November 12, 2007

 

Directed by Paul Mazursky. Starring John Cassavetes, Gena Rolands, Susan Sarandon, Vittorio Gassman, Raul Julia, and Molly Ringwald.

Tempest

The first time that I saw this film was at an outdoor cinema during the first summer I lived in Greece. I doubt that it is even possible for anyone, anywhere to have a better summer than I did that year. I doubt that is would be possible to improve upon this wonderful movie, although I was beginning to think that I may have overly-romanticized this film because everything else around me that summer was so perfect. This would have been 1984 and I hadn’t seen the film again until last night.

It’s not like I didn’t try to see the film again. When I got back to the States a few years later and the whole video craze was in full bloom I looked for a copy of Tempest in every mom and pop video store in the Washington D.C. area without success. Years after this came the internet and Amazon.com. I tried to buy the film but I could only find it on VHS format and I had already abandoned that technology. I could never find it on DVD anywhere until a few weeks ago. I bought it and had it mailed to my brother’s home in Chicago and he relayed it to me here in Spain. Even Homer’s Odyssey only took ten years.

As I said, I saw the movie at a little outdoor theater in a southern suburb of Athens called Glyfada which, although attached to the sprawl of the capital, has more of a beach town feel to it than big city. These little theaters were rather impromptu affairs that looked like someone had just set out a few chairs in their back yard and invited a few friends over. All that I remember is that they seemed to specialize in movies that were filmed in Greece. This was probably why I went to see Tempest.

My date for the evening was my girlfriend at that time and she had come over to Greece to spend the summer with me. Eileen was tall, smart, athletic, fun, and beautiful. I remember that on the evening we saw this movie she was wearing a white knit dress that showed off her great legs. We had already traveled around Greece quite a bit before we saw this movie so we knew all about idyllic island playgrounds and deserted beaches. In fact, we could have been scouts for future film locations in Greece except that we wanted to keep some of these places secret.

I have praised this movie for so many years that I was a bit worried that it wouldn’t live up to the memory I had of it after seeing it so many years ago. I don’t think anyone could blame me for over-rating it considering the perfect setting for the first time I saw it. As it turns out, I’ve been a bit conservative in my praise.

It is hard for me to imagine that a movie this good could even be made in this day and age. The run time is 142 minutes which for a romantic comedy (or whatever the hell it is) is very, very rare. If these kinds of movies make it to two hours these days it’s some sort of miracle. I didn’t remember that the movie goes for almost two and a half hours but I immediately was aware of the slow and deliberate pace of the story—something not synonymous with boring. The director has a story to tell and he isn’t about to be pressured into rushing things. A more hurried pacing of the film would have defeated the purpose of why the characters had escaped to a deserted island in Greece. In fact, the story involves two islands: Manhattan and an enchanted Greek isle hidden somewhere in the crystal-clear Aegean. It’s difficult to say which one looks more beautiful in film.

As I watched this movie for only the second time in 23 years, I felt like I was watching a movie made by adults, for adults. I don’t get that feeling very often when I watch movies. Most of the time I’m lucky if the movie doesn’t insult me, although I avoid the worst of the comic book remakes and low-brow action flicks. I know that most movies are exactly made with my demographic in mind. Tempest, on the other hand, has found in me the perfect target audience.

Labels: movies

8:24 AM

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Friday, September 07, 2007

 

Guns, Bombs, Car Chases, and Pretty Girls Who Get Killed Off in the Sequel

The new Bruce Willis Diehard movie is called La Jungla 4.0 here in Spain, presumably because there in no way to translate something as stupid as Diehard, at least not four different times as this is the fourth in the series. I was able to download it. I’m a sucker for actions movies even though most insult my intelligence even though I manually lower it to watch these films. I also saw the most recent Bourne film and, like the character in the movie, I have lost my memory as to why I continue watching Bourne movies. What’s that saying about a fool does the same thing over and over expecting a different outcome?

The biggest problem that I have with action movies is that they make the bad guy out to be cartoonishly evil. I always thought that the principal in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off was a better bad guy than all of the villains in action movies. He was really mean, ditto with the coach/detention monitor guy in The Breakfast Club. The villains in action movies have a lot to learn from those two.

Bad actions movies all have the same plot which they seem to have lifted off an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon from The Simpsons. On paper they look something like this: run, run, run, fight, fight, fight. On film they are even more tedious than they are on paper. They are billed as containing nonstop action but I usually get so bored watching them that I feel like fainting. The mayhem and bloodshed are so indiscriminant that after the first scene you become immune to gun battles, explosions, and car chases. I have a theory that if the trailer for the film has more than two explosions then the actual movie will be a complete piece of shit. I didn’t see the trailer for either Diehard 4.0 or the new Bourne thing but I’m sure they had explosions totaling in double digits.

In fact, I’m not even sure whether or not these movies even bother with plots and stories as I can’t seem to remember them five minutes after the movie is over. They are usually about a good guy getting chased by really, really bad guys until the good guy almost gets killed but ends up gutting all the bad guys like so much fresh fish. Throw in a pithy line like “Hasta la vista, baby” (preferably in a Cro-Magnon accent) and call it a wrap.

It also seems necessary to forget all about the laws of physics when making a bad action movie, like the speed of explosions which are usually measured in thousands of feet per second yet movies insist on showing the hero dive away from an explosion to save himself. Movie makers must really think it looks cool to have the hero dive away from an explosion with a gas expansion rate of 26,000 per second because they show it all the time. Maybe we need to teach everyone in Iraq to dive out of the way when one of those massive car bombs goes off.

Instead of romance in the Diehard movie we had Bruce Willis bonding with his daughter. I can’t remember if there was any love interest in the new Bourne movie, perhaps Matt Damon had sex in the backseat during one of the chase scenes.

The worst thing about actions movies is that no matter how many chase scenes, or fights, or explosions, people need to talk once in a while. When they do talk they say ridiculous crap like, “We have a situation,” or some other corny jargon. Instead of using these stupid, boiler plate lines perhaps action movies should just do away with human speech and just stick with explosions.

My favorite dumb part of the new Bourne movie was the hired assassin that was called up to kill the hero. One time he was in London and the other was in New York. It wasn’t explained very well how they knew to have him in place in these two cities. I guess he is like the Dominos of hit men: You get your guy dead in 30 minutes or it’s free.

Labels: movies

11:11 AM

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