Watching a Movie with Mom & Dad

My mother joined us here yesterday, and since I’ve been introducing her to Tarantino (she’s going to teach a course on art history in September, and also has to teach a little about modern film), Death Proof, a movie I love and my dad really likes as well, was on the menu. We watched it in two segments: the Texas part yesterday, and the Tennessee part tonight.

The verdict? She pretty much hated it.

And don’t just chalk that up to her being a mom - she’d dislike that excuse as much as Abernathy. I watched scenes from True Romance (the opening and the infamous Walken/Hopper scene) and Reservoir Dogs (the opening diner scene and the scene in the car) with her, and Pulp Fiction in its entirety, and she really liked all of that.

But cars getting banged up? Such a waste, and what for. Such bad manners, to demolish a car that isn’t even yours (I’m exaggerating for comic effect, but that’s the gist). The car chase will probably figure in her dreams. And all in all, she thought the story was too thin, and she just “couldn’t do anything with it”. It didn’t speak to her, and she found it unpleasant to watch.

I kind of understand it. While Pulp Fiction is chock-full of references, it has a very clear, complex and very ingeniously structured story of its own. I personally find Death Proof fascinating on its own, and I think it has a rich text as well as a rich subtext, but it’s a much more elementary tale. Much sloppier, too: my dad had added, in memory, a scene in which they return the car and retrieve Lee, but in truth the film ends abruptly at the cathartic high point, leaving a few threads totally unresolved.

I’ve been thinking about why I like Death Proof a lot these past few days, because of how flat Vanishing Point fell. Kaj left an elaborate defense on my previous post, and he makes some valid points. Vanishing Point does, indeed, have an interesting existentialist subtext, but what I stand by is that the text is very dated, unsatisfying, and yes, boring.

The DJ, for example, is yet another annoying instance of the “magical black guy”-cliche. The driving was nicely grounded, true, but it got VERY monotonous and repetitive, and car noise Kaj loved so much grated on both my dad’s ears and mine. And on one point I will strongly, unrelentedly disagree with Kaj: he says “the dialogue, well, compared to Death Proof, it’s not that bad.”

Excuse me? I know Tarantino has been accused of diminishing returns, and I know many critics found the girltalk annoying and mindless in the extreme. But while the dialogue in Vanishing Point is excruciatingly on-the-nose and corny (want to show someone loved the main character? Have her say “I love you, I love you, I love you” over and over again), there’s a rhythm to the girltalk in Death Proof, an ebb and flow and a melody that’s just amazing to listen to. And the actresses, especially Sydney Tamiia Poitier (who is totally believable as a radio DJ) and Tracie Toms, make it sing.

Is the subject matter bland? Yes, absolutely, and most probably on purpose. Is it naturalistic? Not even remotely, nor is it meant to be. But through the meaningless, sometimes maddeningly inane dialogue, we get to know not only these characters (who are all, except maybe for Zoë Bell, archetypes) but this world and its rules. Rules deliberately tweaked, slightly, from the standard slasher-movie tropes: girls who withhold sex aren’t automatically immune (but mommies, even unmarried, are, in an interesting contradiction), and we have here not just a reversal from victim to aggressor, but one almost explicitly from sexual victim to sexual predator (”Oh, you know I can’t let you go without tapping that ass… one…more….TIME!”).

I tend to go on about this movie, don’t I? Enough for tonight, in any case: I have a glass of rosé waiting for me, and I want to enjoy my last evening here in la Douce France.

Quick Thoughts: Dark Blue

It’s been a while since I did one of these quick thoughts bits, but I watched this, half-asleep, on TV last night, so here goes:

Kurt Russell is one of these actors who get better the more grisled they get. Younger, he always looked just a bit too goofy, but now he’s instantly riveting, the lines on his face enough to tell us immediately: this guy has lived. In Dark Blue, he plays a crooked cop, one who thinks he’s doing the right thing, but kills more often than necessary and almost feels entitled to fabricate evidence. He is, of course, accompanied by a rookie naif who will open his eyes to the wrongness of his ways (no spoiler there).

The rookie’s played by Scott Speedman, who does a serviceable job, I suppose. He’s a little blank, but he’s probably supposed to be, and his change of heart is very, very sudden, but it works in the cliché-ridden environment of the film. All in all, it’s a nice corrupt-movie to spend an evening with, and the Rodney King riots make for an interesting - and unsettling - background. The movie doesn’t quite work as a thriller (there aren’t that many thrills) but as a showcase for Kurt Russell’s weary, lines face it succeeds.

Youth Without Youth

Youth Without Youth: an ironic title for a movie so obviously made with an old-man’s perspective, and all about the fear of growing old, the fear of slow, inevitable decay. “Youth is wasted on the young”, says the cliché, but the movie suggests it might be wasted on the old, too.

This movie is an intriguing creature, more poetry than narrative. It’s meant to be philosophical but ends up as more of a dream on philosophy than a true exploration, flitting from one thought, one question to the next without even attempting to find answers. It is, in some ways, a mess, but what a gorgeous, evocative mess it is, from the old-fashioned opening credits to the sad, resigned finale.

The Librarian

The battle over who’s going to get to review the new Indiana Jones sequel for filmtotaal is already raging, even if no press screening dates have been announced yet. I’m keeping out of it. I don’t want to see Indiana Jones at a press screening by myself, even if it’s bound to be full of illegally brought guests. I want to see with Indy 4 with a group of friends, of specific friends, in a crowded theatre on opening night, where we’ll hopefully get to mock it and thrill at it in equal measures.

The thing is, Indiana Jones was always a throwback with a wink, inviting you to laugh at it a little, winking at you, while at the same time offering a bigger, better version of the action scenes and heroic acts seen in old adventure serials. The enormous boulder rolling towards the hero, the macho posing: it’s not just a cliché because of Indy, it was a cliché BEFORE Indy. Indiana Jones is a mockery cum homage of the serials George Lucas and Steven Spielberg loved when they were little boys, and that’s part of what makes those movies so enjoyable.

So what happens if you double that, and pay a slighting mocking homage to Indiana Jones, without the budget, the filmmaking skills of Spielberg and, well, Harrison Ford?

Punch-Drunk Love

I went over to my friend Stefan’s place tonight. To watch “a movie”: we hadn’t quite determined which one. I’d brought the three DVDs I bought today (Bogart&Bacall in To Have and Have Not and in The Big Sleep, and Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in The Lady From Shanghai), but mostly to show them off. He had quite an impressive amount of films on his computer. We almost settled on In Cold Blood, but it was over two hours long, and considered Punch-Drunk Love instead.

“What’s it about?”, he asked. “I’m not sure”, I answered honestly. “I think it’s supposed to be an oddball rom-com. It’s from the guy who did There Will Be Blood and Magnolia.”

Punch-Drunk Love it was.  A housemate was called in, and got the same reaction. And in the first fifteen, twenty minutes, many “huh?”s ensued.

Caché

It’s been almost a week since I finally saw Caché, Michael Haneke’s lauded 2005 film about a couple that discovers they’re being watched. And the reason it’s taken me so long to write about it, I’m almost ashamed to admit, is that I was extremely underwhelmed.

Did I miss something? Was I too tired when I watched it, too relaxed, not concentrated enough? An 8.3 on metacritic, 88% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes…I kept examining myself, trying to figure out what it was in me that prevented me from liking this movie.

But what could it be?

Ghost World, or: Enid > Juno

I think tonight was the third time I saw Ghost World. In any case, it was the time I liked it most. Loved it, even. And it crystallized, to me, why I couldn’t love Juno.

On the surface, the two films are rather alike: the protagonist is an adolescent girl, an outsider with eclectic taste and a general contempt for the world at large. After a critical juncture - graduation, pregnancy - they develop a bond with a middle-aged man who shares some of their tastes and hobbies but who is seen as a loser by the world at large, a bond which ultimately becomes uncomfortably close, and in the end… well, in the end they grow up a little, not necessarily wiser or better, just slightly older.

Yet, it’s the differences that matter.