The Exorcist

Your mother reads reviews in hell. So, I had been avoiding watching this movie, because I am as far from a horror movie fan as you can get. I hate horror movies. But, when this one popped up on Netflix Instant Streaming, I didn't figure I had any more excuses to avoid it. I had been dreading it, but I ended up with the same feeling I had after watching A Clockwork Orange - that was it? That was the movie that shocked and terrified audiences and led to a moral panic about degeneracy and the need for increasing disgusting spectacle in movies? And then I thought, of course, yeah, that's the point. If a pansy like me can watch movies like this and go "Meh", we've obviously gone well-past what Roger Ebert lamented in his original review of The Exorcist: "Are people so numb they need movies of this intensity in order to feel anything at all?". I've seen more gore and filth seeing the YouTube commercials for The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. The only horror movies I've watched are because my sister likes horror movies, and sometimes used to take me to see them, and who was I to say no to a free movie ticket and popcorn, but while I've never seen a horror film as complex as The Exorcist, it wasn't the gross-out fest I was expecting. This is another movie that pop culture osmosis and special effects have not been kind to. The Regan puppet is obviously a puppet, and while the psychological aspects of the film are interesting, everyone knows the major lines, the basic plot, the gross-out parts, and is on the look-out for them. While I will forever tout the supremacy of practical effects (look at Mad Max: Fury Road vs. Transformers or just compare the old Star Wars to the prequels), some just don't age particularly well. I guess you couldn't really get Jim Henson on the horn and ask him to make a seamless masturbating puppet (though by all accounts, he did have a strange sense of humor, so he might have done it). There just aren't really surprises in the film anymore, so watching it is more an exercise in curiosity than an exercise in horror and suspense. And that creates a huge weakness. If you have a pretty good idea what's going to happen in a horror movie, can it be at all frightening? It can be shocking or disgusting, but can you really, truly, viscerally experience the emotion of fright? I can't say whether The Exorcist has scares left for the right audience. It's an interesting piece of film-making. It's one of the few times I've seen tilted angles used effectively. I would say it's worth the watch as a curiosity piece at the very least, especially considering the huge impact it's had on pop culture. But if you are the type who watches horror movies looking to be disturbed and frightened, I wonder whether this film can actually do that. It's a tough question, and there are only a couple other horror movies on the List for me to ponder this question over.

M*A*S*H

Suicide may be painless, but this movie sure isn't. I know most people are judging by the television show, which started out clever, then gradually turned more and more preachy and annoying. A lot of people never watched the movie or read the book the show was based on. I haven't read the book, and after seeing the movie, I have no intention to. I have a lot of respect for the Armed Forces in general, and the MASH units of the Korean War did some truly amazing things. They pushed medicine ahead with their innovation and technical skill. And sure, I suppose it was more interesting for jaded viewers sick of the Vietnam War to watch army doctors boozing and chasing women. I'm sure plenty of that went on. When I worked in a photo lab, a patron who had worked in a MASH unit asked if I wanted to see some of the slides he had converted to photographs. They included slides of a double amputation in progress, which he called “Pretty neat to watch”. So I understand the grim sense of humor and the thrill-seeking. What I don't understand is the cruelty and pettiness accompanying them. The problem is when they pull down the tent for everyone to see Hot Lips naked, they gather the camp so everyone can laugh at her. Even her nickname is from them pulling a dirty trick and broadcasting her sexual encounter with Frank all over the camp. And “Trapper” John is explained to have gained his nickname from raping a girl in a subway car. These casual throwaway lines and situations about sexual assault just disturbed me deeply. I know we're supposed to be thinking about the brutality and mindlessness of war, but instead I was thinking about the brutality and mindlessness of the men. I'm sure it was a novelty having a war movie where only one military character earns any sort of respect, but if I watch a movie about lowlifes, I want the movie to know that they're lowlifes. I can't recommend this one. Sure, it filled a cultural niche at the time, but some works are better as curiosities. Besides being a generally plodding, dull affair about hateful men, it's also really uncomfortably rape-y.

Forrest Gump

Reviews are like a box of chocolates. You know what you're getting if you have a good sense of smell. I somehow never connected that this was a Robert Zemeckis film. Somehow you don't think Back to the Future and Forrest Gump. I'll get right out there and say I fall into the camp that finds Forrest Gump cheesy, schlocky, corny, trite, whatever adjective you want to affix to a schmaltz-fest of self-indulgence. I also find this movie really problematic as a disabled person, since it hits so very many tropes about how rotten life is for us disabled people if we don't find someone else to glom onto like a big ol' leech. Now, I'm physically disabled, not in any way mentally disabled, but the whole movie reminds me of the now famous scene in Tropic Thunder. I've heard people ask "If you're not supposed to go 'full retard', how much are you supposed to go?". The answer, not just about the mentally handicapped, but about the congenitally handicapped in any way is "Enough to make the able-bodied feel inspiration mixed with pity. Not enough to get them angry or uncomfortable". And Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan both fill that role. Forrest by being such a good-hearted nitwit that he becomes an easy target for just about every person that he bumbles into, but he makes out well, so no one has to get outraged, and Dan by being detestable until he becomes inspirational. Look out, it's SUPER CRIP TO THE RESCUE! On a technical level, the movie is amazing. The insertion of Tom Hanks into historical footage is still pretty damn impressive. The lip-synching is pretty good if you're not watching a few inches away on a tablet screen. The sets are great. The soundtrack is great. The cinematography is usually quite good. It's just these problematic as hell characters. You've got the trope of the abused child will grow up to be a promiscuous drug addict and a self-absorbed user, you've got the Super Crip tropes, you've got the stereotypes about Southerners, and through it all, this self-congratulating air that seems really unique to Baby Boomer films. It's weird, when I've watched a ton of WWII propaganda films that portray whatever unit as brave and courageous and the best ever, but somehow, they didn't seem as self-absorbed. This movie is a love letter to Baby Boomers, while conveniently glossing over any negative parts of Boomer culture, except of course Jenny's spiral into drug addiction and death from something (the frontrunners are AIDS and Hepatitis C). Part of me wonders how much of the praise of this movie is purely on technical merit, and how many is from warm fuzzy-wuzzies over how great Baby Boomers were. There is technical merit to this film - I would never say there wasn't. But the best recommendation I can give it as a piece of writing is that Weird Al made a really funny parody of it. I hate this movie, but not even the blood-boiling hate that other movies have made me feel. My hatred for this movie is like my hatred of Gatorade. Syrupy-sweetness to be choked down when necessary, then forgotten about the rest of the time. I've seen far worse movies, but at least they could make me feel the distaste.

The Producers

And now it's Springtime for Reviews. And maybe Hitler, but hopefully not. This is the first of three Mel Brooks movies on the List that I'll be reviewing (alphabetically, Blazing Saddles comes first, but I've seen The Producers both more often and more recently). Where did it go right? The question is more where didn't it go right - it doesn't have the cheerful vulgarity of Blazing Saddles or the direct spoofing of Young Frankenstein, but it presents the best of the Mel Brooks formula. Take an inherently ridiculous situation and see how much more ridiculous one can make it. He has also been unafraid to continue the WWII propaganda machine's work of turning Adolph Hitler into an object of ridicule instead of terror. Scholars have debated that question endlessly: do we do disrespect to the dead or to the survivors by making that evil man out to be a clownish goofball? My own personal opinion is no, we don't. Hitler was a very comical person in a lot of ways. There are multiple personality quirks that make him ripe for mocking, not to mention the key absurdity in the movie - casting a drugged-out hippie as Hitler (or in the musical, casting a flamboyantly gay man, but the movie of the musical is nowhere near as good as the original film). I think the major disservice is done when you make Hitler out to be this cackling evil orc sitting in a darkened bunker muttering "Jews..." under his breath. That comes down to the human tendency to recast evil humans as complete monsters, lest we see any reflections of ourselves in them. It's much easier to think of Hitler as some sort of bridge troll than it is to think of a hypochondriac who really loved dogs and Walt Disney films, and also thought a bunch of people deserved to die. That really is why this movie is so enduring, I think. It gives us permission to laugh at Hitler. Not just the situation that the fanatical Nazi playwright (whose name translates to "Love Child" - not a very subtle joke about him being a bastard) somehow doesn't notice that his producers are Jewish. Or that his director is very, very flamboyantly gay (and again, has the very unsubtle name of "De Bris", a fun joke in both English and Hebrew!). This is up there on the level with Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator doing a delicate balloon dance, including butt bumps, with a globe. For years, we censored the Looney Tunes and Disney shorts that were made for propaganda purposes, because we feared that not taking Hitler seriously would mean we didn't take the Holocaust seriously. Except by making MECHA-ROBO-DEVIL-HITLER, we've turned that page of what makes things like the Holocaust happen in the first place. Mel Brooks understands this better than most, and so he doesn't just give us permission to laugh. He forces us to laugh by making the situation as intolerable as possible to the sensibilities. He doesn't make Nazis look like an awesome force of nature, he makes them look like bumbling idiots who somehow don't realize that they are working with the things they hate the most. This is a lot on the philosophical nature of what makes the movie good and enduring, without mentioning things like most of the jokes land, including the dated ones about hippie culture. It's not mentioning the fabulous performance of Gene Wilder, who goes through the movie like a neurotic version of the Hulk. It's not mentioning Zero Mostel's fabulously sleazy Max Bialystock. It's just talking about why we laugh so hard when we see this film. Mel Brooks can be very hit or miss for me. I enjoy about half of his movies, and can't even make it through the other half. But The Producers is a must watch.

Saturday Night Fever

You can tell by the way I use my keys, I'm a nitpicky person, no time to talk. So.... this is the second time I've seen this movie, and I still don't get why it was Gene Siskel's favorite film. Everyone in the film is just so incredibly hateful. The cinematography is rarely good (it's best at while shooting dancing scenes, but then it decides to flip around so you can't actually see the dancing, just the shoulders). The sound editing is terrible - the music blares at you like a very disco-oriented foghorn, while the dialogue was apparently recorded three blocks away with a mini-mike inside a coffee can. I also have to wonder just what the hell it was with John Travolta's early career and him sexually assaulting girls in the backseats of junky cars. Did directors really think we wanted to watch John Travolta try to rape a girl in full color two times? It's even weirder than Tom Hanks's thing of peeing scenes, though thankfully Travolta has stopped doing the sexual assault scenes, and Hanks has not stopped doing the peeing scenes. Ah well. On the the actual movie, which is probably the most depressing movie to ever have a wide level of cultural osmosis. Watch John Travolta strut down the street to "Staying Alive"! Watch every conceivable character in film and television do so as well! Watch him stuff his face with pizza and chew with his mouth open, then sexually harass a few women! Watch them leave that little part out in parodies... So the basic story is that he's Tony, the all-around family loser and disappointment, soaked to the bone in what social justice types call "toxic masculinity" (drinking, fighting, chasing women, harassing women, bragging about how much sex he gets...), working a dead-end job, hanging around with even bigger losers, and the only thing he's good at is dancing. He's really good at that. And I will not knock him for that - he is an amazing dancer. It would be a lot more fun to watch him if the camera didn't think I wanted to see what a split kick looked like from a crotch-eye view, but there are a good number of scenes where the camera actually pans back and lets him dance. He realizes how lousy and unfulfilling his life is when he meets a social climbing dancer, who he blows off his former dance partner for. There's a side plot about how big a jackass he is by ignoring his friend who is desperate about his pregnant girlfriend, and another side plot about him treating the girl who likes him like garbage, and his brother dropping out of the priesthood, and him getting jealous when his dance partner, who has made it abundantly clear she does not want to be in a relationship with him, does anything with another man. And one of his friends is jumped by a Hispanic gang, so the little knot of Italian knuckleheads go and bust their heads, and then find out maybe they got the wrong guys. And then Tony realizes how false and hollow his life is when a Hispanic couple outdances him and yet only win 2nd place. This movie just strikes me as a total mess. I can see why it's "historically significant", because it did heavily affect the trend of disco in the country. It affected fashion, dance styles, music, and made Travolta into a superstar. But I am just not seeing where all this "deep, affecting drama" is coming from. I'm just seeing a bunch of foul-mouthed jackasses make even bigger jackasses of themselves, interspersed with some often weirdly shot dance numbers. If I'm going to watch a dance movie, I think I'll stick with Astaire or Kelly. At least the characters in those movies are likable, while I found myself wanting to hit every character in Saturday Night Fever with a hammer.

Roman Holiday

Accept a new review, thank you, don't accept, no, thank you. So, here we are at Audrey Hepburn's American film debut (though she had appeared earlier on the CBS Television Workshop). I re-watched it a few days ago, since I hadn't seen it since childhood. It was the first movie I remember seeing where the hero and the heroine fall in love and don't end up together, and I remember it made me unreasonably upset as a wee lass of 7. After all, they were in love! They should be together! I didn't quite grasp the whole political nuance thing back then, though at the time it also didn't seem remotely unreasonable that a couple should fall eternally in love after 24 hours. That's how it works, right? Especially when the nice young man has a gorgeous voice and takes you around on a scooter and you eat ice cream. But this is a fairy tale, and like all other fairy tales, there is a certain leeway in logistics. It also opened up the the era of movies where Audrey Hepburn dodges around some major European city looking impossibly chic with a man who is much older than she is. And a few times she dodges around a major American city looking impossibly chic with a man who is much older than she is. I don't know why they always cast her along side men who were at least 10-20 years her senior. Maybe they thought that played up even more how elegant and fascinating she looked in just about anything - even in her raggedy costume for My Fair Lady. But aside from Audrey Hepburn as style icon (which she was, as well as being a humanitarian, which often gets left out, and a member of the French Resistance, which is just badass), she is everything she was famed for being in this picture. She is elegant, she is coy, she is winsome, she is elfin... she basically just seems like the kind of girl you really would like to spend an afternoon running around Rome with. Gregory Peck starts out delightfully sleazy, before Anya's loveableness appeals to his better nature. I guess you could in some ways call her a forerunner of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but the film handles it so much better than the usual fare. Yes, she is a spirit yearning to be free who breaks down the crusty curmudgeon's walls and ultimately gets him to do the right things in life, but rather than Hepburn bearing the brunt of Peck's character development, Peck provides Hepburn's character with growth of her own. He is the means to her end - she has run away, seeking one small adventure, and his motive for helping her is purely selfish, but while his growth is moral, he provides her with personal growth. The movie is not about him, but about both of them. He gives her a taste of freedom, she gives him a taste of decorum. Neither has complete function without the other, and I think that's this movie's greatest strength. I would definitely say watch this movie. At the very least, you'll have seen a charming film where the hero and the heroine do not throw caution to the wind and run off together (a rarity), or have seen some stunning costume design. And keep a special eye out for the Mouth of Truth scene - that was improvised.

Chinatown

Forget it, it's a new review. So, it's been a few days, but my internet is getting all wonky. I have no idea why, but it's not relevant to my thoughts on Chinatown. It's hard to talk about this movie without addressing the elephant in the room. The giant, child raping elephant in the room. You'd think directing a film that deals in stark detail with the brutal fall out of child rape would have had some effect on director Roman Polanski, but maybe he figured it wasn't so bad if it wasn't incestuous. Who knows? I am usually pretty good at divorcing Art from Artist, but I get a kind of sick feeling over the idea of providing economic support to someone who has done something so morally repugnant. I had somehow missed that Polanski was the director of Chinatown, so I queued it up in Netflix and had started watching it before I realized it. I'm guessing I'll wait on watching Rosemary's Baby. There are over 500 films left to watch - it's possible he'll die before I get to it and then I won't have a moral crisis over whether to give him monetary support by watching the film. So beyond my ethical dilemma, let's talk about the film. There is a reason Polanski does well as a director - he is very, very good at it. Chinatown itself is a film that works on every level. It feels like watching a sleazier version of "The Tell-Tale Heart", like there's a driving pulse behind the action. Jack Nicholson is superbly on the edge, as usual, though he's more restrained than usual in this performance. It's a film that helped convince me that you can make film noir in color, though most directors shouldn't. However, here, all the glitzy colors manage to look sinister. The brighter the lights, the deeper the shadows. The shots in this film were almost as beautiful as in a Kubrick picture. And the plot... it's gripping and terrifying and stunning and horrible. It would be enough of a task to make the audience interested in a film noir about water rustling (which it manages to do), but murder and incest really ramp up the creep factor. Though there is a moment of what TVTropers refer to as "Narm" (a moment meant to be serious or dramatic that ends up being goofy) where Jack Nicholson is slapping Faye Dunaway as she screams "My sister! My daughter!". Faye Dunaway is kind of a Narm Queen, isn't she? But that's all erased in the haunting final line, which is definitely one of the best in film history. But what does it mean to forget the injustice and the evil and just walk away? Is there some sort of significance in Polanski insisting on that ending? I don't know. I'm not a film critic, I'm a blogger. I can't say "Watch this movie" because of my ethical quandary, but I also can't say "Don't watch this movie" because it is a top-notch example of film-making. Now I really understand why Death of the Artist is so popular in literary criticism, but as an English grad student, I usually have the luxury of my objectionable artists being actually dead.