News You Can Bruise for 2013 November 1

This month features Hollywood hits past and present, plus an indie movie that made it big, plus whatever 8½ is. Coming this fall!

• Gravity (2013): I like to try and reverse-engineer the elevator pitch for this movie. I think it's one of these two:
  1. "What if we made the first minute of Armageddon into a full-length feature?"
  2. "What if we made one those educational films they show at the planetarium, except as an action movie?"

  With these pitches in mind I'm able to reconcile myself to the big problem with Gravity: the characterization and plot are on the level of a video game cut scene. But look at the alternatives! Educational planetarium films have no plot or characterization at all. Whereas if Armageddon had no plot or characterization it would be a big step up. Put that aside and the moviegoer can treat Gravity as a technological proof-of-concept, like the rotating teapot. And as a technological proof-of-concept this movie is absolutely wonderful.

  If you've read Constellation Games you might remember Ariel's crippling fear of being in space. I played it up quite a bit for the book, but that comes from me. This is the most terrifying film I've ever seen. I was scared for pretty much the entire running time. But unlike other scary movies, the scary thing in Gravity is also the beautiful, exciting, attractive thing. It's exhilarating.

  Sumana and I saw Gravity in IMAX 3D. I thought the 3D was pretty effective, and the IMAX really gave me the feeling of "planetarium film gone wrong." (IMAX sound is really obnoxious, though.) I would say either see it on the big screen or skip it altogether. I mean, you don't watch planetarium shows on your television.

  Finally despite my complaints I would like to put in a good word for Gravity's plot. There's an obvious and well-worn path that Gravity could have taken with the interaction between its two characters. At first it looks like the movie's going that way, but it's a fake-out. Then later on, as I was kind of expecting, the possibility rears its cliche head again. But it's another fake-out! Thanks for doing that.

• Red River (1948): Howard Hawks finally discovers John Wayne, the man who can convincingly play the Cary Grant role in Only Angels Have Wings. Wayne would be typecast as his Red River character for the rest of his life and beyond, which is unfortunate because this guy is a frigging sociopath. I mean, I like me some John Wayne. He's great. I just think he's pretty obviously not the hero of these movies.

  I saw this film in 1997 and liked it a lot. I still like it, though I think it could be tightened up quite a bit.

  Some miscellaneous notes:

  • This movie has the same character arc as Only Angels Have Wings, in that the final shot strongly implies that the main character may have just experienced an emotion.
  • Joanne Dru demonstrates Hawks's Third Law of Movie Plotting: "Any sufficiently brassy dame is indistinguishable from magic." Seriously, she bops into this movie and solves all the problems like she's Doctor Who.
  • The movie's main narrative problem is the captioned summaries that pop up after nearly every scene and telegraph what's about to happen. Just get rid of them. It's 1948. We know how to watch a Western.
  • The only Native American character with a speaking part is actually played by a Native American, Daniel Simmons.
  • My puerile 1997 parody of Wayne's "ten-year squat", during which he delivers a stirring monologue about beef, holds up pretty well. (Not linking this, because it's juvenalia and kind of embarrassing, but you can find it on this site.)
• Ball of Fire (1941): Sumana was interested in seeing Sergeant York, but then she saw that Barbara Stanwyck was in this movie and wanted to see it instead. (We don't usually see two museum movies in one day.) Fine with me! Things got even better when the opening credits revealed a screenplay credit for the sainted Billy Wilder. That's when I knew this would be a great movie.

  I was especially excited to see Gary Cooper's portrayal of a linguistic descriptivist. I brought this up with Allison Parrish, who was skeptical:

  it's hard to imagine a movie from that era approaching language differences between social groups perceived to exist in an unequal power relationship
  ...
  it would be good to know about a movie from that era with those tropes that isn't just... immediately terrible and offensive
  (like my fair lady)
  (which is like my least favorite movie ever)

  Ball of Fire deals with all these important issues to my satisfaction. It's also a hilarious movie with a Billy Wilder madcap feel. Sumana loved it even more than I did. However, given Allison's shameless, shameful hypocrisy on other issues (only hypocrisy could be both shameless and shameful), I predict she won't be satisfied.

  PS: although Gary Cooper is very much a descriptivist when it comes to vocabulary, he's a prescriptivist when it comes to grammar. I thought that was really strange, but Allison says: "I think it's fairly common to accept slang/neologism as okay, even among hardcore prescriptivists."

• Gravity (2013): Yes, I saw this movie twice. After writing the review above I took what it said seriously. I wanted to ride the roller coaster again, so I decided to strike while the iron was hot and the movie was still being shown at roller-coaster size. I went with Beth and Nandini and Girish to a non-IMAX 3D showing.

  The second time around I thought I could sit back and pay attention to details. But I didn't notice any new details! I also decided to try and watch the movie as some kind of spiritual/existential analogy, because I think that's what the moviemakers intended. And... yeah, that's there, and there's a lot more of it than in other action movies, but I don't think it elevates the movie above being a roller coaster.

  As long as I'm revisiting things I would like to call out my favorite shot in Gravity. Near the end when Sandra Bullock is swimming through Tiangong, she passes through a brightly lit room full of rows of grass. They're doing some kind of grass-in-space experiment. It's the first bit of color in the whole movie and a little preview of what's to come.

• Halloween (1978) It's generally agreed that Halloween spawned the slasher genre, but I'd argue that it also signals the dawn of the Lifetime Original Movie. This is a movie in which the female characters are very well realized, with realistic dialogue, and the male characters are either pompous incompetents or stalker serial killers.

  I don't like horror films but I like John Carpenter a lot. I've now seen three of his films (the other two being the more sci-fi They Live and Dark Star) and I really admire his ability to mix minimalism and over-the-top insanity. Most of Halloween is like they filmed a particularly racy Babysitters Club book, relying entirely on dramatic irony for the tension. And then it just goes crazy. People in the theater were laughing at the obvious fake-out endings. And then the real ending--even more insane!

  Miscellaneous notes:

  • It was weird to see the museum theater completely full of people about my age. That never happens.
  • I'm not the first one to make the Howard Hawks/Howard the Duck connection; the boy in this movie is reading Howard the Duck comics while watching Howard Hawks's The Thing From Another World.
  • I didn't care for the film's anti-sex message, but I did like that Jamie Lee Curtis's character defends herself with a knitting needle and then a coat hanger. It's the little things.
  • Curtis is great BTW.
  • I'm never sure whether a Donald Pleasance role is supposed to be funny, or whether he even thinks he's playing it funny. He is always funny, though.
  • I recommend Dark Star if you're an MST3K fan, and not (just) in a "would be funny on MST3K" way. It's a super cheap movie but it shows what Alien would look like as a comedy. And it looks like MST3K.
• El Dorado (1966): I think ninety minutes is the ideal length for a movie seen at the museum. El Dorado is over two hours and that's way too long for a movie that kinda wants to be a comedy but can't go all the way. It can't go all the way because by 1966 the "John Wayne" brand has become immutable. The good side of that is that the rough edges present in Red River have been filed off. "John Wayne"'s sociopathy makes a lot more sense in a movie where he's a hired killer, not a rancher. He can even be a sympathetic character here. But that's not such good news after all, because Red River was a much better movie than El Dorado.

  Even boiled down to the comedic elements El Dorado is a mixed bag. Wayne has a lot of good one-liners, and good comedic chemistry with James Caan; not so much Robert Mitchum. Caan has a hilarious "I've got the worst fucking attorneys" moment, which is cancelled out later by the most offensive vaudeville yellowface I've ever seen. Don't believe me? Here's someone calling AMC's cutting of that scene "P.C. at it,s worst." [sic]. (I agree you shouldn't cut offensive stuff from movies, but you also shouldn't have put that in the movie to begin with.)

  In fact, this is one of those situations where I'm gonna give you the best part of the movie and relieve you of the need to see it. Here's the "worst fucking attorneys" moment (also taken from IMDB):

  Cole: What was the idea of diving under those horses?

  Sheriff J. P. Harrah: Diving under those horses?

  Mississippi: Yeah. A man can't shoot good when his horse is jumping, and a horse will not step on a man.

  Sheriff J. P. Harrah: He won't?

  Mississippi: He will?

  Other thing of note: Nelson Riddle soundtrack is pretty not-there except during an exciting nighttime chase sequence, when it takes a welcome, incongruous turn into hard-driving jazz.

• 8½: My patience with Fellini has reached its end. He casts a jaded eye on dysfunctional relationships, which is fine on its own, but not when combined with his Hollywood belief in tacked-on happy endings. I can see how filmmakers love him—I'd sure love to get away with a character who runs through my stories commenting on how improbable everything is—but I don't make 'em, I just watch 'em. I still want to see Satyricon, but that's because I love the book, not because I'm looking forward to seeing Fellini handle the material.

  Lots of good visuals in this one, though. I didn't expect a spaceship!

Bonus discussion: After seeing The World's End and then Gravity twice I'm now quite familiar with the trailers for a number of movies I won't be seeing. In particular, it looks like Hollywood ruined Ender's Game the way we all knew they would. An Ender's Game movie should not look like an action flick. It should look like a Youtube video of a boy playing DotA, and then he gets called to the principal's office.

Totally gonna see the second Hobbit movie, though. (q.v.)

Next month: I really have no idea because the museum has been putting its schedule up later and later. Looks like still more Howard Hawks, and some interesting-sounding Norwegian stuff from Anja Breien. Then, who knows?