ELE vs. EE

This is the story of how two acronyms denoting the apocalypse, each prominently using the letter E, chilled me to the bone.

SPOILER WARNING

Last night I watched Deep Impact for the first time since the late 1990s, and I'm happy to say it really held up. Held up? some of you will ask, since you're probably of the opinion that the movie didn't hold up even back in 1998.

Well, you're wrong, and part of that may be because you lump it in with Armageddon as one of the two asteroid movies that came out in 1998. But aside from the fact that both movies feature a deadly asteroid hurtling toward earth, and both movies feature teams of astronauts trying to drill nuclear devices into these asteroids to blow them apart, Deep Impact and Armageddon couldn't be more different. While Michael Bay's movie is all about jingoism, machismo and action, Mimi Leder's movie is actually a drama set against the potential end of the world, supported more by acting and characterization than by big set pieces. (Though it does have a really big one at the end, and it's worth the wait.)

But I think part of the reason I was more primed to enjoy Deep Impact than Armageddon, even back when I watched them both for the first time (and only time for Armageddon, I can guarantee you), comes down to a little three-letter phrase from the beginning of Deep Impact that always chilled me: ELE.

You see, a reporter played by Tea Leoni (who's quite good in this film) gets wind of what she thinks is a scandal involving a cabinet member having an affair with a woman named "Ellie." It turns out, Ellie is not a person but an acronym, ELE. She and the president (Morgan Freeman, great as usual), who she's quite surprised to see after being essentially kidnapped by FBI agents, have an entire conversation about ELE without being on the same page -- he thinks she knows that the earth is going to be hit by an asteroid, she thinks he's stalling and covering up a sex scandal. However, the movie's not trying to make her out to be a dummy -- she catches the president say "Ee-El-Ee" rather than "Ellie," and she realizes everything is not what she originally surmised. She does the 1998 equivalent of a Google search (the difference in technology reminded me how far we've come in 13 years) and finally comes up with the following meaning for ELE:

Extinction Level Event.

Did you just get the same chills I got?

There are few three-word phrases that can more quickly convey the gravity of a situation than "extinction level event." Like, this shit that's going to happen is going to wipe out everybody -- all humans. And who knows how many other species as well. And you can pretty much forget about the plants. The rocks may be okay, and possible the water.

Better get those astronauts on that shuttle to try to blow up that rock.

It wasn't until watching last night, however, that I realized that ELE shares letters with another acronym, this time only two words, that I saw in the movie Knowing two years ago. That also chilled me to the core in that context, in another movie dealing with the potential end of the earth.

Knowing is definitely a more ridiculous movie than Deep Impact, so I won't try to wade into its plot or fact-check myself for accuracy. But suffice it to say that Nicolas Cage's character has found, in a time capsule from the 1950s, a series of numbers that appear to be predictions of disasters around the world, incidents in which a significant number of people (more than 20) die. These handwritten predictions show the date and then the number of people who die in each incident, including such famous incidents as September 11th. However, the numbers run out at some point. The last date -- a date still in the future of the movie's present tense -- shows the date in question and then the number 33.

Except it isn't the number 33. It's the letters EE. Cage's character reads it as 33 because it's consistent with the pattern, where all the other incidents include only numbers and no letters.

But he eventually figures out what EE stands for, and I'm again getting chills as I write this:

Everyone Else.

That's right, on the last date predicted, an event occurs in which everyone else on the planet will die.

Everyone Else. The biggest number there is.

The woman who discovered this pattern of disaster and death went crazy. They find a room where she stayed, where every surface in the room was covered with the scrawled letters "EE" and the scrawled words "Everyone Else." Wouldn't you go crazy, if you discovered a pattern of death that continued to prove its 100% accuracy over the course of time, and the last incident involved the death of all human beings?

I would.

Damn, maybe I should watch this movie again this week as well.

I want to end with a few more words about why I like Deep Impact so much. It could be the feminine sensibilities director Mimi Leder brought to the project, but it's the best kind of disaster movie -- one where getting to know and care about the characters is of paramount importance, not showing explosions or other types of destruction. And in order to do that better, they cast good actors, actors who can actually make you feel.

One of the reasons I wanted to revisit this movie is because I did feel when I first saw it -- I felt a lot. In fact, I don't (but probably should) mind telling you that I got a little teary during Deep Impact. Not once, but several times.

Over the years since then, I decided that I must have been caught in an emotionally vulnerable place in my life, and that the movie couldn't be both as subtle and as affecting as I remembered it. Nope, wrong. It is subtle, and it is affecting. I'm pretty sure the same moments that got me last time got me again (more spoilers):

1) When Leoni's reporter (now anchor) reads on the air that no one over the age of 50 will be part of the lottery to see who gets government protection in underground caves. She's just been handed this text for the first time on air, and she pauses after reading the sentence, realizing what it means. Leoni doesn't go to some big emotion, she just sits there, looking down, thinking about what she's just said. Leder stages this scene perfectly, because we see it from the perspective of her mother, played by Vanessa Redgrave, who's watching her daughter read the announcement on her home TV. Redgrave doesn't go to a big emotion either, she just shifts her body in a way that indicates she knows what this means: She will not survive the asteroid strike. I tell ya, that combination really got me.

2) When Leoni gives up her spot on the helicopter to her friend and mentor, played by Laura Innes. The look of gratitude on Innes' face on the other side of the helicopter window, as it lifts into the air, at this moment that they know they'll never see each other again, is priceless. Sure, this moment or a moment like it occurs in hundreds of movies involving life-and-death scenarios. It's a tribute to these actors and this director that they got it just right in this one.

3) When the teenager played by Leelee Sobieski must make a split-second departure from her parents, just hours before the asteroid is set to strike. The amateur astronomer who discovered the asteroid (Elijah Wood), who's Sobieski's neighbor and new husband (they married so she could be saved along with him), has made a selfless trip on motorcycle back to find his wife. When the military convoy came to pick them up, she impulsively stayed with her parents after they weren't on "the list." Now he's come back for her, and her parents make her go with him, and take her baby brother/sister, knowing that it's their children's only chance to survive. Sobieski is wonderful in this anguished scene, where you realize how young she is -- "No, Mommy, I don't want to go!" Her frantic tears are just the kind of thing you can imagine happening in a moment when you have to leave your family, now, and you know you will never see them again. You don't even have time to formulate a proper goodbye. I was probably struck more by this scene even than I was the first time, now that I'm a parent. As her parents watch her disappear on the back of the motorcycle, it's devastating. Her mother breaks down in tears and her father, barely holding them back himself, hugs her from behind. It's emotional gold.

Going even further than recommending Deep Impact, I'm going to say that it should be used by any filmmaker trying to make an effects movie without sacrificing character. I've just hit on three really good, really gut-punching moments, but the whole thing is remarkable for its ability to involve you in the inner lives of its characters. It's not what studio execs demand first and foremost from a movie like this, but maybe they should.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out so well for Deep Impact -- it made $60 million less domestically than Bay's emotionally fraudulent competitor, and Leder has only directed two features since then: the 2000 flop Pay It Forward (talk about emotionally fraudulent), and the 2009 film Thick as Thieves, which also features Morgan Freeman.

Well, it had a deep impact on me, at least.

A wonder stuck on one hit

Back in 2003, shortly after I first saw Donnie Darko, I was having a conversation about it with a friend. This was my second friend to show a slavish devotion to this one-of-a-kind film, the friend who introduced it to me being the first. Seeing that others were crazy about it as well helped deepen my appreciation of the cinematic discovery I'd just made.

The name of the director, Richard Kelly, came up, and I asked my friend what the deal was with him. Ordinary name, no previous credits that I was aware of. "I don't know," answered the friend, his voice rising at the end to indicate his own amazement. "He just came out of nowhere I guess."

And so I came to mythologize Richard Kelly as some kind of J.D. Salinger of filmmaking, a guy who had burst on the scene to present us this singular vision, then might just slink back into the shadows of seclusion. I cautiously dared to hope for an impressive follow-up to Donnie Darko, but I almost couldn't imagine Kelly producing anything else. It was like Donnie Darko was so mind-blowing that it could exist as the entirety of his career, and that would be enough. What else was there to say?

And maybe he should have stopped right there after all.

You see, Richard Kelly is as much a flesh-and-blood human being as the rest of us, and his subsequent career choices have each been painful reminders of that fact. The Box, his third directorial assignment, due out tomorrow, does not figure to change that.

But let's take things in chronological order.

1) Domino (2005, Tony Scott). The first time Kelly's name materialized in the credits after Donnie Darko was in this hyper-stylized assault on your senses, a truly vulgar creation designed to glamorize the life of Hollywood princess-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey (Keira Knightley). Tony Scott took his worst instincts and turned Kelly's script into a jittery, stroke-inducing strobe light of a movie, which fetishizes violence, cigarette smoking, and pop culture. I blame this turkey more on Scott than Kelly, but mostly because I have Kelly on a pedestal -- the bare bones of his script couldn't have been that good.

2) Southland Tales (2007, Richard Kelly). All the large-scale ideas that got smaller-scale execution in Donnie Darko get driven over the top here. A truly epic mess about a cross-section of truly idiotic characters in Los Angeles of the not-too-distant future, Southland Tales tackles nothing less than Big Brother, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, neo-Marxism, celebrity, alternative energy, drug abuse, the Iraq War, and time travel. Most bizarre is the cast of has-beens, featuring the likes of Jon Lovitz, Cheri Oteri, John Laroquette, Wallace Shawn, Nora Dunn and Curtis Armstrong, with Seann William Scott, Dwayne Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Mandy Moore serving as the supposed A-listers of the group. It's as bad as it sounds, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it occasionally crosses into the territory of "so bad it's good." Will probably be a cult film at some point, but not the way Donnie Darko is considered a cult film.

3) The Box (2009, Richard Kelly). As this movie has not come out yet, I am left only to speculate. But let's just say the ads have not inspired me with very much confidence. The scenario -- "if you press this button, you will be given $1 million, and someone you don't know will die" -- almost sounds chilling. But the ads have inadvertently echoed the terminology of the Saw franchise, as Frank Langella (missing the left half of his face) says the words "Make your choice," echoing the command spoken by Tobin Bell's Jigsaw numerous times throughout that series. What's more, outside of Langella, it's not a very heavyweight cast -- Cameron Diaz and James Marsden have their time and place, but a Richard Kelly mind-tripper doesn't seem to be one of them. In fact, the cast is one of the main elements that undermined Southland Tales, though that wouldn't have been good even with a slate of Oscar winners. To give a couple more first impressions: The footage looks grainy and washed out, and the poster is as generic as can possibly be, befitting an anonymous thriller from the 1980s more than a potential masterpiece from a supposed wunderkind.

4) Other projects. Kelly's name is often heard in connection with Knowing, the Nicolas Cage vehicle that came out earlier this year. He was once attached as director (The Crow's Alex Proyas eventually did the deed), and he is listed as a screenwriter on the film some places, but not others. The confusion is just as well for my current thesis, since I actually liked Knowing. Then there are a couple other films he's produced through his production company, called Darko Entertainment, including World's Greatest Dad and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I liked the former and did not see the latter, but I thought the trailer for the latter looked absolutely terrible (a bachelor party gone horribly wrong -- ho hum). It's funny, in looking up Kelly's credits, I see he is also listed as an executive producer on a film I'm going to be seeing this afternoon, in an advanced screening, called Rogue's Gallery. My wife works for/with one of the other executive producers, which is how we're getting in.

Since there are really only three main films after Darko where Kelly's been credited with a significant contribution -- one of which has not even come out yet -- it may be both premature and unfair for me to go on record as disappointed in him. After all, The Box could just as easily give me those Darko chills again. I should know, from plenty of experience, that films are often much better or much worse than they appear in their ads.

So instead of specifically indicting Kelly, let me just say this: It ain't easy being a genius. You have to keep following up and following up and following up, and any future project that isn't viewed as improving on your body of work, inevitably detracts from it instead. Maybe Kelly will never again make anything nearly so good as Donnie Darko. Since I currently have the film ranked as my third-favorite of all time, I could hardly blame him for this.

Here's hoping that Richard Kelly can settle somewhere in the middle -- that he can stop monkeying around with bombastic, untranslatable visions, in a vein effort to duplicate Darko, and can just be satisfied making solidly crafted movies instead.

Before he was the director of Donnie Darko, Kelly was just a film student at USC, a guy with two short films to his credit. He was human like the rest of us, and can be so again.

Cosmic vs. personal significance

In the last week, a couple movies I wrote about in the abstract earlier this year have come home to roost on video. First it was Push last Wednesday, which was as god-awful as I predicted in this particular piece of satire. Then Saturday it was Knowing, whose numerological theme inspired me to come clean about my own obsession with numbers.

I liked Knowing not only a lot more than Push -- a LOT -- but a lot more than most other critics liked it. In fact, some of these critics, including the one who reviewed it for my website, considered it sub-Shyamalanesque in the epicness of its failure, the epicness of its ridiculousness. I'm betting the fact that it's a Nicolas Cage movie predisposed them against it. When The Wicker Man and Bangkok Dangerous are swimming close to the surface of your memory as you watch, it's hard not to be affected by that.

Well, I'm siding with one of our most prominent film critics, Roger Ebert, in liking the movie, though I won't go to the lengths he has to defend it. You have to at least like its ambition. I won't say too much about it, because part of the fun is making eerie discoveries as you watch. Heck, even if you decide you hate it, part of the fun would be discovering the hilarious ways it's worth hating. And even if you just watched it for things like the crash pictured above, you'd at least have that.

But I have to admit I have my own reason for liking it more than your average person, a reason most people couldn't possibly share with me. And given how the movie is about Fate, and Destiny, and Predetermination, it's a pretty eerie reason at that.

You see, the movie takes place in Lexington, Massachusetts. But it was shot in Melbourne, Australia.

I grew up in Lexington. My wife grew up in Melbourne.

Ooooh, spooky.

The weird part is not that it was shot in Melbourne. That's becoming a popular spot to shoot your big-budget movie on the cheap, especially for Cage, who also shot Ghost Rider there. Sure, anyone in the know would yell "That's not the Charles River! It's the Yarra!" But most people aren't in the know. (Just how most people wouldn't know that if the plane crashed "two miles short of the runway at Logan Airport," it could not possibly have crashed in Lexington.)

No, the weird part is the Lexington part. The only movie I'm aware of that even has a scene in Lexington was Roland Emmerich's The Patriot, and that's because it takes place during the American Revolution, where two of the most famous battles occurred in Lexington and Concord. So why Lexington for Knowing, a movie where an astrophysicist is trying to predict large-scale disasters involving significant loss of life?

Then add to that the Melbourne connection, and the fact that the movie is about patterns, numbers, and quite possibly the end of the world ...

Ooooh, spooky.

But even if our personal geographical origins weren't involved, Knowing is still spooky, which is why I'm recommending it -- despite some episodes of overacting, and yes, some moments that might remind a person of latter-day M. Night Shyamalan.

"Spooky" ain't easy -- just ask Shyamalan himself, who lost that touch years ago. Alex Proyas, the director of Knowing, seems to still have it. Yeah, you'll get some Dark City here -- hopefully more Dark City than I, Robot.

And if you don't? Well, I guess a movie can't have both cosmic and personal significance to everybody ...

Go find your own!

Numbers must always mean something

Warning: The following post exposes me as a huge nerd, and possibly a person in need of getting his head checked. At least it is meant for whimsical entertainment purposes only.

I'm a numerologist. I should just go ahead and say it. I'm a person who likes numbers and what they may signify, even when they don't signify anything.

This is an apparent contradiction for people who know me, because they know I am primarily, publicly, a man of words. But I did do better on the math portion of my SATs than the verbal, and if you're looking for an explanation for my ability to excel in the world of information technology, then my love of numbers probably has something to do with it.

It also helps explain why I love baseball, the most statistics-driven sport, and especially why I love lists. Where an item is ranked on a list means something to me beyond the surface level.

I also love dates. I remember insignificant anniversaries, and I have a subconscious auditor continually running a check for when a friend's birthday is coming up.

And so it is that I get a little geeked for movies like Knowing, which opens tomorrow. It's all about numbers and dates.

Now, I should say I am not geeked for Knowing in particular. In fact, given that Nicolas Cage is the star, I expect it to file right in there with all the other interchangeable high-concept thrillers he's made during the last, oh, 15 years. Next, anyone? And as for this type of movie -- well, The Number 23 should have steered me clear of them for good.

But I did think the release of Knowing provided a good opportunity for letting you in on the latest obsessive list I've been keeping, because it's just the kind of thing that the hero in a good numerology thriller would do. Only, the fate of the world isn't in the balance. But my numerological list is just as ridiculous as theirs, and if you saw The Number 23, you know it can get pretty ridiculous.

As I've mentioned before, I maintain a number of lists related to the movies I've seen. I won't single them out here -- I'm sure they will come up at other times, if they haven't already. But it had been awhile since I'd started keeping a new type of list -- that is, until about two months ago. This latest is probably the most absurd list I keep, but that doesn't make it any less fun to update.

It's a list of the dates I've seen certain movies -- by date. I already had a list of the order of the movies I see, which includes their dates. But I didn't have a list like the following, and let's use today as an example:

March 19: Roger Dodger (2003), The Emperor and the Assassin (2008)

I used the movie order list to help come up with this. It was a little tedious, but it was fun.

You see, I find some inherent interest -- as insane as it undoubtedly sounds -- in whether there are (certainly coincidental) similarities between movies I saw on the same day in different years. The same year doesn't count, because I might have been watching movies according to a theme that day. Or at least you couldn't say it was totally random. If I were counting movies seen on the same day in the same year, you could argue that I skewed the results to be more interesting. And in fact, if you are really skeptical of me, you could say that I will plan viewings in the future to be interesting, now that this list exists. Which is why I'm telling you about it now -- and I promise, never again. (Maybe.)

Now, I should tell you, I've only kept the movie order list since March of 2002. So the similarities I did end up finding -- some of which are really pretty funny, most of which are just stupid -- date back only to 2002.

Without further ado, I will adopt the persona of Walter Sparrow, otherwise known as Fingerling, otherwise known as Jim Carrey's character(s) from The Number 23. You'll get the dates, the movies, and the frantic conspiracy theory on why they're related. Understand the rules? Okay, there's one more: Films seen on that date that don't fit into the "pattern" have been excluded. Believe me, you'll thank me. But not as much as you'll thank me for the warning at the beginning of this piece, which may have allowed some of you with less time on your hands to skip this post altogether.

Okay, let's begin.

January 5: Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd (2004), With a Friend Like Harry ... (2008). A man named Harry is coming to kill me!

January 31: Bandits (2004), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2006). Those Enron guys were bandits alright! (Eh, not so much).

February 8: Lucky Break (2003), Miracle (2004). A higher power is coming to save me!

Feburay 23: The Last Temptation of Christ (2004), The Devil's Rejects (2006). God vs. the Devil!

March 7: Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. (2002) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2008). Long titles! Names! Colons!

March 9: The Time Machine (2002), Deja Vu (2007). I know I've seen this somewhere before!

March 23: Jackpot (2002), The Bank Job (2008). Money money money!

April 3: Sin City (2005), 300 (2007). Both movies are from source material by Frank Miller! (I do think this one is genuinely weird.)

April 14: Sorry, Haters (2007), P.S. I Love You (2008). Love vs. Hate!

April 18: Big Trouble (2002), Anger Management (2003), Kill Bill, Volume II (2004). If you don't manage your anger, there will be big trouble, possibly resulting in killing! Of Bill! Volume II!

May 12: Super Size Me (2004), 28 Weeks Later (2007). Morgan Spurlock wanted to see how unhealthy McDonald's would make him 28 days later! And 28 Weeks Later is a sequel to that!

July 7: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), Transformers (2007). Machines are coming to get us!

July 19: Eight Legged Freaks (2002), Freaks (2006). Freaks are coming to get us! (Note: These are the only two films I've ever seen with the world "freaks" in the title. You just blew your own mind.)

August 4: Duplex (2005), Monster House (2006). Giant houses are coming to get us!

August 11: Dead Ringers (2006), The Number 23 (2007). Watch out for evil twins! (Plus, I had to get The Number 23 in there again.)

August 21: Still We Believe: The Boston Red Sox Movie (2004), The Bostonians (2005). Boston is coming to drag me back home! (Note: These are the only two films I've ever seen with the word "Boston" in the title -- and I'm from Boston. Mind blow #2.)

August 29: Hero (2004), World Trade Center (2006). Self-explanatory!

September 4: Stargate (2004), Across the Universe (2008). A stargate helps you get across the universe!

September 30: Thirteen (2003), 21 (2008). What did I tell you -- it's all about NUMBERS!!

November 8: Love's Labour's Lost (2002), How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003). Beware lost love!

November 12: The Doors (2005), Last Holiday (2006), Last Days (2008). Impending death! For Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Queen Latifah's woman with a terminal illness! How long will they "last"?!

November 22: Elf (2003), The Queen (2006). Beware characters in fantasy adventures!

December 26: Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Fun with Dick and Jane (2005). Beware Jim Carrey!

And Jim Carrey brings us pretty much back to where we started.

I sincerely apologize for wasting so much of your time.

But don't say I didn't warn you, like a good numerological conspiracy theorist should.

Several times.