Tuesday features are on baby break!

Programming note!

Even in the face of life events like having a newborn, I still consider my commitment to you sacred. So I thought I'd formally let you know that I'm taking a break from my Tuesday features for awhile, to welcome my son into the world, and all the lack of free time that implies.

Back in April, I began doing Second Chances, a feature where I reexamined movies that I hadn't liked as well as most people. That ran for 10 weeks. In June, I took a summer break from that in order to do Double Jeopardy, which was just the opposite -- I wanted to see if I'd liked certain movies too much. That also ran for 10 weeks, and then last Wednesday, my son was born. Perfect timing in terms of symmetry with the first series.

At one point I talked about returning Second Chances in the fall, but I think I'm going to give it a break until 2011. I'll have enough to keep up with, without having to figure out what movie I'm going to re-watch each week, and how to budget my available rentals in order to get those movies to me. Besides, all we can reliably pay attention to right now seems to be undemanding comedies.

I'll continue to write my Decades series, in which I watch three movies from a particular decade (1920s-1970s) each month. Expect the next in that series tomorrow.

Thank you. You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.

Second Chances is on summer break!

Sorry, those of you who were hoping I'd spend today reassessing my thoughts on the John Candy classic Summer Rental. It's just poster art to accompany the following announcement ...

I'm taking a summer break from the Second Chances series that has been running in this space on Tuesdays for the last ten weeks. Ten seemed like a nice round number, after which I needed to pause my DVD player for a little while.

I've actually enjoyed doing this series immensely, and it's gotten some of the best feedback I've had since I started writing my blog. In fact, I probably have it to thank for catching the attention of some new readers who seem to have come back for more. I thank you very much for reading.

But a couple weeks ago, when I found myself planning out my viewing schedule for another week, and trying to work in re-watching yet another movie that I hadn't liked that much in the first place, it occurred to me: It's exhausting when you have to watch one movie per week that you're not very excited about. Actually, it's more than that for me, since I'm reviewing a lot of really bad movies that I'm seeing for the first time, as well. So between reconsidering those movies I was down on, and watching my ordinary complement of bad movies, the stuff I really wanted to see was getting squeezed out, and the whole thing felt a little too much like work. (Plus, almost every movie I've reconsidered in Second Chances seems to run between two and two-and-a-half hours.)

So I thought, what better time than summer to take a little break from all this "work"?

I should pause to acknowledge what a success the project has been so far. Of the ten movies I re-watched -- Gangs of New York, Hoosiers, A History of Violence, The Others, No Country for Old Men, Brick, The Hurt Locker, Thank You for Smoking, The Thin Red Line and American Gangster -- only the first on that list was a movie I ended up liking about the same or worse. Every other film improved with a second viewing, in some cases significantly.

Which is actually both good news and bad news. On the one hand, the point of watching movies is to like them. The more you like, the better you will enjoy the time you spend watching them. It's especially nice when you can move toward the majority opinion on movies, so when you're discussing them with people, they don't think you're crazy.

On the other hand, I cherish not liking certain films -- it's part of my identity as a film fan. Before this project, I cherished the fact that I didn't like Brick, the fact that I didn't like American Gangster. I had a rant ready to go on both films, and would bust it out whenever the opportunity was right. So now that I like both films better, it feels like some part of me has died -- some little part, to be sure, but something that has a tangible quality to me. Even if I'm now "right" whereas I was once "wrong." And that's another concern this project has brought to light: What does it say about your critical faculties, if you find yourself revising your initial assessment on 90% of a random sample of films you re-watch? Okay, they aren't really random -- they're films that were generally considered good, which means there was a greater likelihood I'd feel better about them, divorced from whatever specific circumstances may have caused me not to like them in the first place. Still, I can't say that this project hasn't made me doubt and question myself a little bit.

But that's the brilliance of being a film fan. Our relationships with these films are living entities, which grow and evolve over time. It would be quite boring if you were too stubborn to ever revisit the judgments you make about films. There's nothing worse than being entrenched in an opinion, just because you think you'll look weak if you reverse yourself.

So that's what I'm going to keep doing, except I'm going to switch it up. Next Tuesday and for the rest of the summer, I'm introducing a new series called Double Jeopardy. That's right, it'll be just the opposite -- I'm going to re-watch films where my affection for them was what went against the grain. I'm going to see if I was crazy for liking Film X or Film Y, when the rest of the world thought they were absolute crap. It'll be "double jeopardy" for those films -- they were found innocent during their first trial, but I'm going to retry them in The Court of Vancetastic, and see if they still look as innocent on the second time through. I figure, at the very least, I'm spending the carefree summer hours re-watching movies that I actually liked. Then again, I guess you could argue that expecting to like something better is a nicer way to spend your summer than expecting to like something worse.

Here's hoping Double Jeopardy yields as interesting results, and prompts as interesting discussions as Second Chances has. Most of all, I hope you the reader find it interesting.

And when it's time to go "back to school," as it were, in September, Second Chances will be back with a whole new batch of films.

See you next Tuesday for the premiere of Double Jeopardy. Or before then, if you care about reading my other stuff. :-)

Does the fact that it happened matter?

This is the tenth in my series of posts called Second Chances, in which I revisit films I liked less than most people liked them. It runs on Tuesdays.

American Gangster was not on the original list I made for Second Chances. I thought most people pretty much agreed with my assessment of it.

But then I wrote a post that got a lot of people's attention, in which I accused Ridley Scott of, er, a "creative slump," and used American Gangster as one of my primary examples of why he's no longer the auteur I once loved. I believe I actually called it a "waste of celluloid." Several commenters jumped to the defense of the 2007 film, and I vowed to watch it again.

Well, they were right, for the most part. Right after finishing my second viewing of American Gangster, I changed my "thumbs down" judgment to a "thumbs up" in my official spreadsheet. The movie actually does compare favorably to a Scorsese film in a lot of ways. It's impressively crafted and benefits from good performances. Most importantly, one of my primary complaints -- that the protagonist and the antagonist aren't even aware of each other's existence until 80 minutes in, and don't meet until the movie's nearly over -- did not seem such a problem for me this time. I was actually sort of fond of the structural choice, of the parallel lines that were moving closer to a point as the story moved forward.

I do still want to talk about the thing that remains a big problem for me, though not a fatal one. This problem deals a significant artistic blow to the project in its last ten minutes, which is why it stuck in my craw so much. It's just that time when a perfectly good movie can be undone by a temporary lapse in judgment.

Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) is the villain in this film. No two ways about it. He's not the pawn for some other evil mastermind; he's the evil mastermind himself. He douses a guy in gasoline, lights him on fire, then puts three bullets in him. He shoot a man through the forehead in broad daylight, in the middle of a busy street. He beats a guy within an inch of his life by slamming his head repeatedly against a piano -- and that's one of his friends. No, Frank Lucas is not a nice guy. (I'll pause to acknowledge that Josh Brolin's Detective Trupo functions as co-villain).

But in the last ten minutes of the film, Scott and writer Steve Zaillian try like hell to reverse the characterization they and Washington have worked so hard to establish. They want us to hug the guy.

Read no further if you don't want American Gangster spoiled for you.

With less than ten minutes to go in the movie, Frank Lucas turns state's evidence. What follows is a montage of scenes of Frank and Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) connecting people via lines on chalkboards, intermingled with scenes of bad guys being led away in handcuffs. This montage closes with a picture of Washington's face, his eyes twinkling with joy, his face bursting out in the carefree laughter of a man in love with life. Not the scowling gangster we've been watching for 140 minutes.

This close-up of Washington's face is a big problem for me. It's as though the man is "finally free," like he's been trying to get out the whole movie, and has finally made it. But it's not true. Frank Lucas never wanted to get out, he just wanted to make more and more money, peddle more and more influence, and intimidate more and more people. There was never a scene in which we felt like this was a lifestyle in which he was imprisoned; it was the lifestyle he chose, and the lifestyle he loved. He should hate having to cooperate with the police, but instead, it looks like he loves it.

After this we learn that Richie Roberts became a defense attorney, and that his first client was ... Frank Lucas. It's supposed to be this moment of perfect irony that's supposed to make you smile. But let's examine that for a moment. Why are we smiling? Is it because "these guys are more alike than they think" and "they'd make a perfect team"? It can't be. Roberts is a "boy scout," as one crooked cop calls him -- he turns in $1 million in found money, and he can't abide by the very idea of breaking a law. Lucas, on the other hand, never met a law he didn't want to not only break, but obliterate beyond recognition. Why do we even feel like Lucas deserves someone like Roberts? Why should Roberts' moral high-mindedness be used in the defense of this scum? It doesn't feel like "smiling irony" to me -- it feels more like "wincing irony."

Of course, the closing image of the film does not leave Frank with that broad smile and hearty laughter we saw before. After serving a 15-year sentence, Lucas walks out out of the prison ("Bye Frank," someone says -- see, they thought he was a "nice guy" in prison too). As the gate closes behind him, he's left with a blank look on his face -- nowhere to go, no one to greet him -- as Public Enemy's "Can't Truss It" plays in the background, a great indication of the time that's passed and the ways Frank's world has changed.

So Frank goes from a murdering drug kingpin to a cooperative stool pigeon to a broken old man. It's a comeuppance, I guess. But it doesn't fit his character. Like Scarface before him, this guy needed to go out in a hail of gunfire. At least that's how they set up this version of Frank Lucas.

Except that's not what really happened. And that was the point of the commenters who disagreed with my assessment of the ending of the film. "Should they have made up a different ending?" one asked.

It's an interesting question that requires further discussion. Okay, you've got a problem: You want to make Frank Lucas this bad-ass gangster, which he undoubtedly was, but what happened in real life was that he went state's evidence, spent 15 years in jail, and then came out a foggy, unmoored old man. Do you change the ending?

No. You can't. So you change the beginning and the middle.

It's too jarring to force a 180-degree turn in our perspective of the film's primary villain in the last ten minutes (really, five minutes) of the movie. So we need to see the cracks in him earlier, the indications that there is a morally upright person hiding in there somewhere, who may actually want to do the right thing on some level.

Those who disagree with me would insist that the filmmakers tried to humanize Frank by documenting Frank's love for his family, specifically, his mother. He buys his mother a massive (I mean massive) home with a sprawling front lawn, which is really better described as a neatly manicured open lot, it's so big. And he sits around large tables with his extended family, where everyone laughs and passes piping hot dishes of food.

But what love does he really show them? He actually corrupts them beyond salvation. He turns his law-abiding brothers (one of whom he beats mercilessly in a car later on) into common thugs, and makes even his own mother an accessory after the fact to his villainy. This is not love. Buying the house is showiness, strutting of his bling. And bringing in his brothers is just so he can trust his criminal associates, which is hugely important in any such enterprise.

The most affecting moment related to Frank's emotional inner life is when his mother tells him he's gone too far, and that his family, and she specifically, will leave him. (A short speech that in itself earned Ruby Dee an Oscar nomination.) Here, Frank does seem to feel a little guilt over everything he's done. But it's not convincing. I mean, what son doesn't feel shame when his mother is scolding him?

Since you have to assume that many of these scenes are fictionalized, to some degree, it would have been very possible to write a scene or two in which Frank shows signs of wanting to be a better man. I'm not talking about departing from the historical record, but just little details, any little signs of humanity, that would make the coda a bit less abrupt. Because even though you are dealing with a real person who actually lived, in the most immediate sense, he's a character in this story, and he has to function as an effective character in this limited context. If some small tweaking is required, you have to do it. If you don't feel like you can do that tweaking without violating the truth, well then, don't tell this story. Or tell this story in a different way, with a different ending, that doesn't try to violently pull us into Frank's corner at the 11th hour, after we've spent two hours hating him.

I understand there are a couple arguments that mitigate what I'm saying a little bit. (That's classic Vancetastic for you -- make the opposing arguments in advance, almost like I don't want you to comment on this piece at all!) You could say that the real villains in this movie are the corrupt police officers, who are pretty much all arrested (or take their own lives) in those final ten minutes. And looked at that way, Lucas can assume a co-protagonist function, and the real antagonists still get theirs. You can also argue that race should be taken into consideration in the way we look at Frank. Maybe he gains sympathy simply by doing things that only Italians were previously capable of, and that we should view him more positively simply because of some kind of impulse toward affirmative action. Maybe his upbringing, of which we don't see much, and his oppression by society at large, is as responsible for making him who he is as a deep-seated personal malevolence.

But that doesn't feel like the movie I was watching. I was watching a movie in which Frank Lucas is an evil, evil bastard -- a clever, economic genius of a bastard, but an evil one nonetheless.

Until the end, when he suddenly isn't.

(One last thing I didn't like about Frank: His use of his catchphrase "My man." Every time he spoke it, I felt it was a strained attempt to create a pop culture catchphrase that was supposed to be bigger than the movie. I understand it was supposed to be ironic -- he said "My man" to people when his smile was fake, and he was just plotting how to remove them from the picture, by any means necessary. But the difference between this and a wise guy patting you on the back right before he whacks you is that Frank says "My man" to people who have just openly insulted him, meaning there was no alternate "surface" meaning, only the ironic one. I thought this reduced it from a potentially clever catchphrase into a mere gimmick used incongruously.)

Second Chance Verdict, American Gangster: A highly accomplished, gritty-looking mob vs. cops movie that bails out on its convictions right at the end.

Terrence Malick loves blowing grass

This is the latest in a series in which I reconsider acclaimed films I didn't like as much as most people did. I call it Second Chances, and it runs on Tuesdays.

Not that kind of "blowing." Get your mind out of the gutter.

"Blowing" like the regular kind of blowing, and "grass" like the regular kind of grass. (Though he might like inhaling the other kind of grass, I don't know.) And Terrence Malick can't get enough of it, if his last two films are any indication.

For the first time in this series, I prepared a viewing of a film by watching another film from the same director. I had been reading a lot on the blogosphere about The New World, and how strongly some of my fellow film bloggers felt about this retelling of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, which some of them considered among the best films of the 2000s. I thought The New World might help me get in the Malick mindset, and give me a fresh perspective on The Thin Red Line, which I had found protracted and pretentious at the time.

It worked, to a point.

I say "to a point" for two reasons:

1) I only watched about half of The New World, at which point I had to shut it off due to DVD quality issues. It was blotching and freezing, and wiping off the disc on my pant leg didn't help. So after trying to fast forward through the problem scenes a couple times, and realizing they were all problem scenes, I decided to abort. I'd rented this from the library, and figured I'd just proceed with an unscratched copy from Blockbuster.

2) Even though I was enjoying The New World more than The Thin Red Line -- a sign either of being 12 years older, or genuinely liking Malick's approach better this time -- it only ingratiated me to his style of filmmaking a little bit more.

You see, to me, Terence Malick's approach to cinema can be defined by the idea that he likes how it looks when tall, blowing grass appears on film. Whether it's Virginia of 1607 or Guadalcanal of 1943, blowing grass frames men in moments of great intellectual and emotional crisis, and darn it if it doesn't look pretty.

The Thin Red Line is nothing if not pretty, especially as shot by master cinematographer John Toll. Like the part of The New World that I saw, it's essentially a nature film in which human beings sometimes seem more like necessary props and parts of the environment than specific characters. Neither film is plot heavy in the slightest, though both tell a story that's famous to us -- in the case of The Thin Red Line, even if it's not the most famous battle in World War II, at least it's the second film version of the James Jones novel on which it was loosely based. Perhaps this is intentional on Malick's part: If he tells a story we already know, he doesn't need to tell it with very much concern about communicating its particulars, and can concentrate on his high-minded intellectual ramblings about good and evil, life and death.

In 1998, these ramblings frustrated me to no end. I felt toyed with after The Thin Red Line. Terrence Malick had gathered together no less than 42 familiar actors (or actors who would go on to have big careers, making them even more familiar on a second viewing), given almost none of them a proper introduction, and then sent them through one really long battle scene, one really long segment of pointless aftermath, and one short offensive at the end. Meanwhile, he'd had at least a random half dozen of them narrate their thoughts in the most soporific tones imaginable, with the most broad, pretentious pontifications on fate and human nature you could conjure. Which seemed especially strange in a show-don't-tell medium, in which Malick clearly displayed mastery over the visual side of the medium.

Watching The Thin Red Line the second time, I don't feel quite so offended by all of Malick's pontificating. I understand that this is an arthouse war movie, probably more than I was prepared for it to be when I first went in. However, I did inadvertently set myself up to feel frustrated once again by its imposing length. For some reason I convinced myself it was only 2 hours and 20 minutes, so then, when I realized it was still going to wade onward for another 30 minutes, it renewed some of the impatience with Malick that I had been trying to quell.

The film made me wonder how much of the experience of watching a film should be beauty for beauty's sake. It's true that I was captivated by Toll's cinematography, of which that gently blowing grass was a primary, front-and-center example. And so this made the basic physical experience of watching the movie pleasant. And sure, who doesn't love watching Jim Caviezel swim in the beautiful South Pacific with a lot of native children? It is, on the most basic level, a pleasing experience.

But it's where Malick thinks that his movie is the most profound thing that's ever been made that The Thin Red Line loses me. There was a time in the history of cinema in which war movies existed primarily to celebrate heroism on the battlefield, in which people died, but not in very horrible ways, and the patriotic music on the soundtrack was supposed to make you feel pretty damn great about the American war effort. Of course, eventually this approach was supplanted by the "war is hell" approach, as particularly exemplified by the Vietnam movies of the 1980s.

By 1998, however, I already knew that war was hell. Just earlier that year, I'd seen a particularly convincing entry into "war is hell" cinema named Saving Private Ryan. Maybe The Thin Red Line came too soon on the heels of Ryan, but the theme seemed beaten into the ground even just six months later. Malick included one too many meaningful looks between soldiers and melodramatic swells in the soundtrack for my liking. All of this stuff I get: War is fought by young people who are scared and confused; soldiers are sent to their deaths for purposes that gain no strategic advantage, by commanding officers who are removed from the circumstances; battlefield injuries are frightening and gruesome; even the enemy is just as scared and helpless as you are.

In devoting so much time to several examples of each of these truths, Malick was drumming things I already knew into my head, and without much subtlety. I remember one particular image that stuck with me as an example of his overwrought approach to the material: An American soldier screaming silently as the music swelled, but not on the battlefield during a moment of chaos. Rather, this was after the Japanese camp had already been taken and held, and he was screaming/crying about some vague atrocity he'd committed, or someone else had committed, or something. I GET IT. WAR IS HELL. PLEASE TAKE YOUR FOOT OFF THE PEDAL NOW.

I will say that the film was interesting to watch just to see all the actors it brought together, and how some of them looked so much younger. For example, only 12 years ago, we didn't even really know who John C. Reilly was. Or Adrien Brody. Or Ben Chaplin. Or Jim Caviezel. In fact, the number of recognizable faces almost distracts from Malick's intentions of creating his poetic, anonymous every-soldier movie. There's also Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Stahl, Kirk Acevedo, Dash Mihok, Jared Leto, Nick Nolte, George Clooney and John Travolta. And that's only who I can remember without consulting IMDB. (I just looked on wikipedia, and apparently there was also footage that was shot but not used featuring Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman, Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke. Just imagine how much more spread thin it would have felt then.) Was it really worth it to get all these guys together, just because they were big fans of either Badlands or Days of Heaven? Especially since it meant that it would be even less clear which ones were worth following, and which weren't? And especially because it meant that certain cameos, such as the mustachioed Travolta or the throwaway final scene with Clooney, were basically just laughable?

The Thin Red Line proves that it's entirely possible to make a beautiful film that doesn't really succeed on its own terms. I am comfortable with saying that I find most of the movie totally beautiful to look at, and sort of even get into the vibe of the film, while still saying that the approach is ultimately scattershot and wrong-headed. I know Malick is trying to take me out of my comfort zone of having a single protagonist, and I know Malick is trying to confront me with the soldiers' pseudo-intellectual musings about the nature of mankind. But it doesn't mean I have to love it.

However, I do have to accept that this is the essential Terrence Malick in his all his grass-blowing glory. His next film, starring Penn and Brad Pitt, is called The Tree of Life, and is scheduled for release this fall. If that title weren't telling enough (and didn't remind me enough of Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, another film Malick would have been comfortable directing), then how about this for what passes for a synopsis on wikipedia: "It's the tale of a Midwestern boy's journey from the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as a 'lost soul in the modern world,' and into his quest to regain meaning in life."

Second Chance Verdict, The Thin Red Line: I won't curse its name like I used to, but I still think a tighter film with fewer characters and less philosophical meandering would have suited me better.

And why didn't I like this movie again?

This is the latest in my Second Chances series, in which I'm re-watching certain movies to figure out why I didn't like them as much as most people did. It runs every Tuesday.

When I was making up my list of movies to re-watch for this series, many of the titles jumped to their place on the list, without me giving them a second thought. Thank You For Smoking was one of them.

But as I was re-watching Jason Reitman's directorial debut with my wife on Saturday -- she was seeing it for the first time -- I could not for the life of me figure out why I had viewed it in such a negative light.

Okay, two things jumped to mind, but they were both pretty minor. And one of them was a complete misinterpretation.

The two things I told people, when they asked me what I didn't like about Thank You For Smoking, were:

1) I couldn't believe that for a film about smoking, there was not a single shot of a single person smoking during the entire movie;

2) I didn't like the Merchant of Death characters.

Let's take the first one first. Duh, Vance. It's an anti-smoking movie. Sure, Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckchart) is the protagonist, and sure, we're supposed to sort of like him, and sure, he's a lobbyist for big tobacco. But it doesn't mean he's supposed to be successful at what he does, at least not as far as we the viewers are concerned. In fact, one major plot point is that Nick is trying to get tobacco use back into movies, to make it sexier. He wants the movie's heroes, not just its RAVs (Russians, Arabs and Villains), to smoke. There's a whole proposal to have Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones engage in a post-coital smoke in outer space in their upcoming movie, with a steep price tag for each. Any instance of cigarette smoking in Thank You For Smoking could, accidentally, have the same effect on us, making it look either sexy or cool.

At the time I first saw it, though, I thought this was a gaping hole in Reitman's execution. I thought that he had "forgotten" to show people smoking, or something. I now realize that it was, of course, quite intentional. Even the characters you know smoke -- Nick among them -- are never seen smoking. The most you ever see him do is eyeball an empty pack of his own cigarettes.

This is, of course, counter-intuitively brilliant. So counter-intuitive that it left me flummoxed for the four years since I'd first seen the movie. I mean, what would Fast Food Nation be without showing some gross-looking hamburger patties? What would Traffic be without showing someone's life go off the rails from using drugs? Yet Thank You For Smoking works differently. Not only is it a comedy, for starters, but the negative impacts of cigarette smoking are harder to dramatize, unless you're going to start hauling out a lot of scenes of people dying of cancer in hospitals. And that just doesn't work in a comedy. No, images of cigarettes end up seeming cool, in spite of the message you are actually trying to send about them. It's one of their great paradoxes -- the industry keeps its customers, and gains new ones, with poison labels on the packages, and in other countries, even pictures of diseased lungs, etc. Which is why Reitman's only choice was to show no one smoking at all in his movie about smoking.

Okay, on to the second issue.

The Merchants of Death. Every week, Nick meets with two other high-powered lobbyists, one for the alcohol industry (Polly Bailey, played by Maria Bello) and one for the firearm industry (Bobby Jay Bliss, played by David Koechner). They drink and tell war stories and laugh about the fact that they promote industries which kill people.

I didn't really buy these characters, and still don't. It's a bit of a narrative convenience that Nick is friends with exactly two other lobbyists from the two other industries that would fall under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. I think we are meant to see these characters as metaphors, but the rest of the film is told with a decent amount of zany realism, so it forces us to accept these characters as real characters, too.

And I just didn't buy them. I didn't buy that they would get together and talk shop about the noxious things they did for their jobs. I didn't buy that they would honestly brag about which industry kills the most people each year (though to be fair, I think it's less a sadistic impulse and more a gauge of how well they succeed at something so disagreeable). But what I really didn't buy was that they would take such an interest in each other's lives. At their core, these characters should be like Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) from Reitman's Up in the Air. All they should care about is what they do and how well they do it. They shouldn't, for example, reach out to and need other human beings. And they certainly shouldn't/wouldn't be in the audience for their friend's son's debate competition, as Polly and Bobby Jay are shown doing near the end of the movie.

But as the other two Merchants of Death make up only a fairly small part of the movie, it's hardly a major criticism.

As for the rest of the film ... well, I found it daring, smart and funny. I also realized this time that if I find the protagonist problematic and unlikable, that's not because the movie hasn't done its job -- it's because it has. Nick Naylor does redeem himself over the course of the narrative, but you're not supposed to like him that much at the beginning, when he excuses his work as a means of paying the mortgage. And when you feel like he's trying to sell you something, you're supposed to feel defensive and irritated by his attempt, especially if it sort of works.

As if to confirm I was wrong all along, my wife liked the movie a lot. And, I guess, I did too.

But was I wrong all along? Funny thing is, when I checked my spreadsheet of movies afterward, to turn my "thumbs down" assessment on Thank You For Smoking into a "thumbs up," I saw that it already was. I had liked Thank You For Smoking when I originally saw it -- more than I'd disliked it, anyway. It was at some point in the interim that I'd decided it was no good, going against even myself to reach that conclusion.

Some things may always remain a mystery.

Second Chance Verdict, Thank You For Smoking: Apparently, I did like it, and I still do.

Overrated for all the right reasons

The following is part of my Second Chances series, which involves revisiting acclaimed movies that I didn't love as much as most people did. It runs on Tuesdays.

I had a very peculiar perspective on last year's Oscar race. The film I wanted to win was Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. But it was pretty clear that wasn't going to happen. So I had to pick a horse that was actually in the race, and it was really a two-horse race between Avatar and The Hurt Locker.

Strangely, I picked the film I liked less.

That's right, I wanted The Hurt Locker to win, even though I had it ranked a full 31 slots behind Avatar on my 2009 year-end rankings (#37 vs. #68).

You'd think that kind of thing would be cut-and-dried, but of course it isn't. I may have thought Avatar was a better version of what it was trying to be than The Hurt Locker was of what it was trying to be, but I was also hugely sick of James Cameron by that point. Avatar had horrified me by becoming the highest grossing film of all time with a sub-par story, and I was feeling more and more warmly about the story of Kathryn Bigelow being recognized for her years in the industry, which produced at least one truly great film (Strange Days). Besides, there were plenty of other films I ranked ahead of The Hurt Locker that I wouldn't have thought should beat it in a (theoretical) best picture race -- I won't name them here, because some of them are too embarrassing. It's just the nature of the kind of year-end list in which you reward romantic comedies that were much better than you expected them to be, and punish, relatively speaking, war movies that didn't quite live up to the hype.

I actually saw The Hurt Locker very early in its hype cycle -- in fact, I think I saw it before anyone else I knew saw it. So when I came out of the theater disappointed -- thumbs up, but still disappointed -- it was based purely on the success of what I saw before me, not on knowing it was one of the most critically acclaimed films of the last couple years.

Two things in particular bothered me about The Hurt Locker: 1) its episodic nature, 2) its main character. Let's start with the slightly easier one.

Few films are structured as generally unrelated episodes, and there's a reason for that. We the audience crave the traditional three-act narrative. We want to have a conflict set up in the beginning, and watch as it evolves toward a conclusion, one that springs logically from what has come before. This doesn't mean we want movies to be cookie cutter versions of each other, but that's the beauty of the three-act structure -- there are plenty of things you can tweak and change, and still stick to that basic structure in a way that will satisfy even the most particular film fans.

You could argue that The Hurt Locker has a general three-act structure within its series of episodes. You do, actually, follow the emotional journey of three main characters -- more on that in a minute. But the actual action that takes place is almost completely episodic. None of the incidents portrayed in The Hurt Locker relate to any of the other incidents, except tangentially, and more problematically, they don't build in intensity over the course of the narrative.

If screenwriter Mark Boal had at least given us episodes that were exclusively related to the defusing of bombs, The Hurt Locker would work a little bit more for me, almost like a series of half-hour TV shows, in which hot shot bomb technician Will James (Jeremy Renner) must sort out a different crisis with a different improvised explosive device each week. But one of the film's most interesting interludes is actually one of its most detrimental to the cohesiveness of the whole. I really enjoy the scene where James, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) happen across a team of British soldiers with car trouble, and come under the attack of an insurgent sniper. It's long and drawn out, and involves a lot of counterintuitive philosophy about what's needed to flush out an unseen assailant. But what does it have to do with preventing bombs from exploding? Not a whole lot. It's just another incident in these characters' lives, which is fine -- but which means it's probably superfluous. In the world and timeline of any movie you see, there are events that befall the characters that are not dramatized, precisely because they don't advance the narrative nor tell you more about the characters in question.

I remember feeling especially disappointed during the scene where James tries to disarm the innocent man who has the bomb locked to his body -- the film's final set piece. I could tell by the film's pacing and the amount of time that had passed that this was probably the last scene, but nothing else about that scene made it seem like it had greater stakes than any other scene. Sure, it ends with James unable to defuse a bomb for the first time, but that's because it's the only bomb he encounters with a timer. In a traditionally structured film, James' failure in this scene would serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that he's not invincible and that his cocksure methods don't always yield results. Instead, the man blows up simply because there are too many locks for James to cut in the allotted time. James puts himself in harm's way to try to save the man, but that's not really any different than he's been doing the whole movie. Boal and Bigelow try to get us for a moment by suggesting that James might have been killed in the blast, but it's only a moment. Then his body twitches and he's fine.

James' motivations seem like a pretty good way to segue into my other main problem in the film, which comes down to his character. Is his character the main character? Or is this the story of Sanborn and Eldridge?

Again that question comes down to structure. Sanborn and Eldridge are in the narrative from the start. They're alongside Thompson (Guy Pearce) when he's killed in the opening scene. (And as an aside, I'm not really sure why Thompson dies in this scene -- he seems reasonably far away from the blast, but maybe that's just how they had to film it. I guess he's supposed to have gotten hit in the back of the head with shrapnel, because his face spurts blood.) Anyway, it's not until the second scene, maybe 15 minutes in, that James appears. He appears as the unpredictable "other" that our protagonists -- at least you'd think they were the protagonists -- have to deal with. He's like a bit of a ticking time bomb himself, distant and unknowable. And like true protagonists, Sanborn and Eldridge go on to have emotional journeys. Sanborn, once saying he's not ready for fatherhood, ends the film weeping and talking about his desire to have a son. Eldridge, afraid of dying, ends up leaving Iraq safe, but with a leg full of friendly fire. We know they are both trying to live out a clock of dwindling days, shown on the screen from time to time, before the end of their tour. Fortunately for them, both do.

And then somewhere in the second act, the ticking time bomb becomes the protagonist. We still don't know Will James, but suddenly, it's his story, he who appears in all the scenes while Sanborn and Eldridge fade into a clearly secondary role. Another way to tell: When Renner got nominated for an Oscar, it was in the best actor category, not best supporting actor. Either of those other two surely would have been nominated as supporting actors, if the Academy had deemed their performances worthy.

So first James is this hot shot who disregards protocol but gets the desired results -- a maddening combination for anyone who works with him. You can't quibble with the outcome, but the means to that end are extremely frustrating. James has the attitude of a disinterested professional brought in to solve the simple problem of disarming a bomb, without attaching any moral judgments to the scenario. He just has a job to do, and that's it. The trickier it is, the more he likes it.

But somewhere along the line, he takes a real position against the Iraqis. They are no longer just an abstract stimulus for his work, but an actual enemy, one that boils his blood. This transition is not handled particularly effectively. The incident that seems to push James from disinterested to interested is finding the rigged body of the boy he believes is the same boy who has been trying to sell him DVDs, with whom he has bonded in a very superficial way. (Of course, it's not actually that boy, which we don't discover until later -- and it's not clear entirely what message we're supposed to take from this -- all hodgies look the same?) It's this incident that directly inspires him to take another merchant hostage in his truck and go off the reservation, which is by far the film's weakest scene. The scene is sort of in keeping with his character, in the sense that he's a risk taker who doesn't follow rules. But it's out of character in that it involves a loss of cool, a bubbling up of emotions we didn't previously think he was capable of.

This scene is a cousin of the scene later in the film, when James forces Sanborn and Eldridge to pursue the ghosts of insurgents he imagines are watching after a successful bomb blast where his team wasn't present. You'd think James would have a dispassionate perspective -- I won last round, they won this round, that kind of thing -- but instead he takes it personally, and like a paranoid, runs off after unseen bombers, getting Eldridge wounded in action. Eldridge later accuses him of seeking an adrenaline fix, and that may be all it is, but it seems like James is finally taking a position in this war, and really cares about beating the enemy. The problem is, this emotional change does not seem earned -- it just gets introduced because it needs to be. Afterward, he goes back and turns the shower on his head to cool himself off, without removing his uniform. The "come to Jesus" moment in the shower is an iconic cinematic scene, but it doesn't really feel earned here.

It's supposed to feel ominous at the end when James returns for another tour, and we learn that he has 365 days remaining. But it's hard to feel that way. Sanborn and Eldridge were the ones who wanted to get out -- James never did. If James doesn't care whether he lives or dies, why should we?

As you can probably tell, my perspective on The Hurt Locker has not changed radically after seeing it a second time. I still have the same basic criticisms. I always thought it was an extremely solidly crafted war movie with some intense moments, but I never thought the moments were as intense as other people did -- simply put, I never really thought there was a moment when Will James might die.

I do, however, insist that The Hurt Locker is overrated for the right reasons. It's a modestly budgeted war movie with a minimum of melodrama. It's a macho movie directed by a woman whose career is easy to cheer. The cinematography is excellent and the performances are first rate. It's the ultimate David that beat the ultimate Goliath (Avatar). I just wish Boal hadn't been awarded an Oscar for his script, because that is and always has been my primary complaint about the movie. Unfortunately, it's a pretty big one.

Second Chance Verdict, The Hurt Locker: A movie it's easy to cheer, even if it's not my favorite movie. And a more deserving Oscar winner than He's Just Not That Into You, The Proposal, and some other movies I ranked ahead of it. (Shit, I just named them, even though I said it was too embarrassing. I hope it shows guts that I'm willing to live with the judgments I entered into the official record).

Hey you kids, get off my lawn

My Second Chances series, in which I revisit popular films that underwhelmed me, runs on Tuesdays.

This will be the sixth movie I've reconsidered as part of my Second Chances series. I envisioned the series as a genuine opportunity to reconsider some acclaimed movies that other people liked more than I did. But I also thought it would be a good opportunity to bang on some movies I dislike. Writing negative things is much easier than writing positive things.

But the project has been skewed much more toward the former than the latter. I didn't think it would be that way when I ended up disliking the first movie I reconsidered, Gangs of New York, just as much as I disliked it the first time. But since then, from Hoosiers to A History of Violence to The Others to No Country for Old Men, I've liked each film better than the first time, and in some cases, a lot better.

So for my sixth second chance, I thought I'd give myself a softball, and I'd hate it out of the park. Rian Johnson's Brick was supposed to be that softball.

So much for best intentions. Or maybe, in this case, for worst intentions.

When I first saw Brick with my wife at our house a couple years back, we were instantly against it. One look at Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Brendan, and it was hate at first sight. I didn't like the way he looked. I didn't like the way he talked. I didn't like the way he dug his hands into his jacket pockets in every scene, no matter how improbable, even running that way at one point. I didn't like the way he used exclusively pay phones to talk to people, since you can't even find pay phones anymore these days, especially not standing alone on empty roads. I didn't like his stupid, bratty face. In fact, I didn't like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, period, for a long time after seeing Brick.

But in that last list of dislikes, I skimmed over the thing that really distanced me from Rian Johnson's movie: I didn't like the way he, or anyone in the movie, talked. Brick is obviously supposed to be a neo-noir, and it's heavily stylized because of that fact. For me, it was too stylized, and the dialogue was the most irritating part of that. These 21st century teenagers were talking to each other in a kind of 40's slang that I found highly distancing, and if finding it pretentious weren't enough, it also made it significantly harder to follow (or care about) the action. A sample line of dialogue:

"See The Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper for Brad Bramish to sell, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said 'Show your hands' if any of them've actually seen The Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."

And this line of dialogue is spoken by a character named The Brain.

Or how about this:

"I didn't shake the party up to get your attention, and I'm not heeling you to hook you. Your connections could help me, but the bad baggage they bring would make it zero sum game or even hurt me. I'm better off coming at it clean."

That one was Brendan himself.

To me, this all amounted to Rian Johnson trying to make a bunch of teenagers look too cool ... well, literally, too cool for school. And if there's one thing I hate, it's young people posturing. I'm only 36, not over the hill, but I've been quick to embrace the generation divide between myself and kids who wear their hair like the guys in My Chemical Romance. (I now know there is a word for this: "emo.") No one has hair like that in Brick, but the way they all behave like adults and act super arrogant and dismissive just rubbed me the wrong way. Especially that Gordon-Levitt fellow. I thought if only Johnson had a sense of humor about any of it, it would be that much more tolerable. I didn't think it was a badly made film -- worse, I thought it was a badly conceived film.

In fact, so much did I dislike Brick and all it stood for, I developed a two word dismissal that I used whenever possible:

"Fuck Brick."

Okay, thanks for indulging me -- I've gotten that out of my system.

And now I can shock even myself by saying that I liked Brick better this time.

Not at first. At first, as I heard that highly stylized dialogue tumble out of the characters' mouths, I tuned out all over again. I didn't try to glean meaning from the tortured sentences, and I didn't try to give it a second chance. In fact, I was on my laptop for much of the first hour. That didn't mean I wasn't paying attention, but it definitely meant my attention was divided.

But as Brick moved along, I started to appreciate the actual filmmaking more. One thing I noticed liking was the way Johnson filmed his stylized action. For example, the scene where Tug continues punching Brendan in the face next to his (Tug's) car. It plays at somewhere around one-and-a-half times normal speed, and it gains a real comical physicality as a result. I also appreciated the foot chase that Brendan ends by turning the corner, then reversing his steps and executing a sliding trip that sends his pursuer flailing into a metal pole. It worked for me.

The next thing to rehabilitate itself in my eyes was that too-cool-for-school attitude that I initially disliked so much. Implied in my criticism was that I was expecting some kind of realism from Johnson, that I wanted the kids to be goofy and unconfident, like some real teenagers are. That's simply not his intention. The film has a specific style for a specific reason. The characters in Humphrey Bogart movies are too cool for school. So why shouldn't these kids be? I started to view them as the genre archetypes they were supposed to be, not the real teenagers I once wanted them to be.

Then there's the idea that Johnson didn't have a sense of humor. In fact, quite the contrary. No, it doesn't show up too often, but when it does show up, that may make it all the more effective. If my complaint was that these kids were too mature and too cool, Johnson does all he can to deflate that in one funny scene in which Tug, Brendan and The Pin are all meeting for the first time at the house where The Pin lives with his parents. To underscore the fact these are kids, and perhaps even to make it seem like this is all some melodramatic role-playing game they're involved in, Johnson forces these three super-cool character to endure a scene with The Pin's mom, where she offers them juice and cookies. As powerful as they all are, in their own right, none of them are bigger than the etiquette and politeness involved with parental interactions.

For the record, I still don't like the dialogue.

Second Chance Verdict, Brick: It's not my favorite movie, but I will no longer slag it off to my friends.

What makes a satisfying story?

This is the fifth in my Second Chances series, which runs on Tuesdays. For other entries, please see the corresponding label on the right.

I can tell you the exact moment when No Country for Old Men switches from a satisfying story to an unsatisfying story.

It's when the recently introduced character played by Woody Harrelson is snooping around the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, near where the shootout occurred between Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Harrelson's character -- I'm not even going to name him, which is my comment on his narrative usefulness -- happens to walk out on the bridge leading up to the border, and happens to look down into the same grassy area where Moss tossed the case of money a night or two before. He immediately recognizes it for what it is, notes its location, and moves away, in order not to attract additional attention. Five minutes of screen time later, he's dead, and the money never makes an appearance in the movie again, as far as I could tell from my second viewing.

Huh?

This was my first indication that No Country was going south for me, and they just kept on piling up after that. I've always been a big believer in the idea that your script isn't tight enough unless everything happens for a reason. Harrelson's character is the perfect example of something that happens for no reason. He has one scene where he's hired to find Moss. He has another scene where he finds Moss and talks to him in his hospital bed. He has the scene described above, where he finds the money. And then he has the scene where he's held at gunpoint by Chigurh and ultimately executed.

Even after two viewings, I still can't figure out why his character even needed to be in the movie. He doesn't change the stakes for any character. He doesn't change the trajectory of the plot. He really only exists for a frustrating reason, which is to indicate that good detective work isn't even necessary to find what you're looking for -- sometimes you just stumble across it by dumb luck. Oh, and to provide yet more proof that Chigurh is a cold, heartless bastard, of which we already have ample evidence.

(Note: After finishing this piece I realized that without Harrelson's character, Chigurh and Moss would never get the chance to talk, because Moss calls the room where Harrelson's character is staying, and Chigurh picks up. In this conversation, Chigurh threatens Moss' wife, which has implications later on. However, I'm not sure if having Harrelson's character in the movie was the only way to accomplish these things.)

As you know, the story continues in this vein from there. Moss is killed off screen. Moss' mother-in-law is killed off screen. Moss' wife is killed off screen* (more on that later). Chigurh gets all effed up in a car accident that's so random and sudden that it's sort of like the opposite of a deus ex machina -- it's bad luck descended magically from the gods. And then the movie ends on Tommy Lee Jones talking about his foreboding dream.

Huh?

No Country for Old Men was never a thumbs down for me -- it was always a thumbs up with an asterisk. That asterisk was because the movie challenged our very idea of what makes a satisfying script. As does the Cormac McCarthy story on which it's based, No Country for Old Men leaves us feeling empty and unsatisfied if we are expecting clean, logical resolutions. The movie's motto, condensed to its most basic form, seems to be "Shit happens." And I don't find that to be a very good motto for a movie.

But is that my problem, or Joel and Ethan Coen's? Or McCarthy's? I'd like to think of myself as someone plenty capable of appreciating a non-traditional narrative. And I think there are numerous examples where I embrace such a narrative with open arms. Don't confuse this with me saying that there are certain people in each movie I think should live, and certain people I think should die, or else I won't be satisfied. That's not it either. I just need the explanations for their deaths to emerge logically from the story, and to be dramatized in some way.

What my second viewing of No Country gave me was a little more of an appreciation of what the Coens were trying to do. What I once thought was just messing around with us -- a theory that I considered confirmed when I witnessed the disdainful way they accepted their Oscars -- was, I'm pretty sure, an intentional artistic choice, not just anarchy.

Let's take Moss' death. It's what most people who don't love the film, including me, describe as its single most frustrating moment. Here you have the movie's protagonist, who you've been following almost from the start, through numerous smart decisions, some not-so-smart ones, and a handful of near misses. Then all the sudden he's just lying there, dead, in a doorway. And it wasn't even Chigurh who killed him. It was a truck of Mexican drug runners who were tipped off to Moss' location by his cranky and oblivious mother-in-law.

I now understand that this is the Coens trying to put us in the shoes of the film's real protagonist: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Just as Bell has been a few steps behind with everything else in the plot -- an investigatory deficit that has been good for his health -- he's a few steps behind catching up to Moss. We don't see the shootout that killed Moss because he didn't see it. And in fact, when you come right down to it, we don't see that shootout because it might disappoint us even more than not seeing it. Sometimes in life, the "hero" -- or in this case, the guy who happened across a bag of money, didn't report it, and decided not to give a dying man water in time to help him -- doesn't go down in a heroic gun battle, with the soundtrack swelling to emotionally manipulate us. He just gets gunned down in the doorway of a seedy motel.

The question I'm asking myself now is this: Understanding what the Coens were doing with the benefit of time and distance, do I "forgive" them? Do they even need to be forgiven?

At the time I saw it, I was cursing the film's name on the drive home. Needless to say, I was expecting the resolutions of a film like their masterwork, Fargo, in which some people who didn't deserve to die ended up dying, but the film had a kind of bleak neatness to its resolution. When No Country didn't give me that, I considered it an act of sadism and spite by the writer-directors.

Now I'm not so sure. I still think some different choices in the film's last 30-45 minutes would have made it a stronger film. (Because, I think we can all agree, the first half of the film is near perfection.) But I no longer feel like they made mistakes, per se -- I just feel like their choices were not necessarily the ones I would have made. And even after the second viewing, I still would have done away with Woody Harrelson's character.

I said I'd get back to the death of Moss' wife, played by Kelly MacDonald. On this viewing, I've decided that I'm not 100% sure that Chigurh kills her. We see him leave her house, and we assume, based on the morality he's displayed to this point, that he does in fact kill her in cold blood. But now I'm not so sure. I kind of like that the Coens don't tell you for certain. You don't hear a telltale gunshot, and you don't hear anything about her again. She could have lived. Chigurh could have made some kind of 11th hour appeal to his own remaining shreds of humanity. I like films where certain aspects are left unresolved, for you the viewer to determine what happened.

This is already a long piece, but I can't leave behind my discussion of No Country without sharing a different observation I had during my second viewing.

When I wrote my piece ranking the Coens' movies (check it out here), a regular reader of mine commented regarding No Country: "I just felt like I had seen it all before." At the time I sort of embraced the comment, because it was a snide remark about a film that had bothered me (but bothers me less now). But I guess I didn't completely understand it, because a lack of originality was never a complaint I had about No Country. I thought it was the perfect blend of originality and homage to their own previous work. (Can you make an homage to yourself?)

Upon second viewing, I realized just how much No Country alludes to their own work -- and not even the work you'd think it would. Numerous critics observed that No Country reminded them of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple. And while that's true on a surface level, it actually has a lot more in common with ... Raising Arizona, my favorite Coen movie.

Don't believe me? I started taking notes, so check it out:

1) Anton Chigurh is basically another version of Leonard Smalls, the Harley-riding, cigar-chomping, heavily bearded, highly antisocial bounty hunter from Raising Arizona, played inimitably by Randall "Tex" Cobb. Both characters are highly lethal and operate by their own rules -- though because Arizona is a comedy, we don't see Smalls actually kill anyone. Both have an uneasy relationship with the person who hired them, proceeding to either act on their own agenda, or to appear ready to do so. But what tells me that the Coens intended the comparison is that each fires at innocent creatures by the side of the road while cruising by in their vehicle (a car for Chigurh, the aforementioned Harley for Smalls). This is where Smalls does Chigurh one better -- he blows up a rabbit with a grenade and sharp-shoots a lizard out of existence, whereas Chigurh just shoots at (but does not hit) a crow.

2) When visiting the abandoned Moss residence, Sheriff Bell squats down to investigate the hole that was left in the wall when Chigurh blasted the front door lock out of its casing. This is a visual echo of when Leonard Smalls squats down in the abandoned McDonough household to read the word "FART" written on the wall in crayon.

3) Just as Moss is undone by the tracking device in the bag of money, which leads Chigurh to him, so were Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) undone by the blue paint bomb that blows up in the bag of money in Raising Arizona (and sends their car careening out of control).

4) One of the funniest throwaway moments in Raising Arizona is when Gale and Evelle are robbing a convenience store and ask the aged clerk if he has any balloons that make funny shapes ("Not unless round's funny.") There are several moments in No Country that echo this, notably the ominous coin flip scene with the aged gas station owner ("Friend-o"), the scene in which Moss comes to buy clothes in a hospital gown and asks the clerk if he often gets people coming in in his state ("No sir, it's unusual," is the response), and the scene in which Moss requests a second room from the perplexed motel owner ("That room's got two double beds!").

And then a couple similarities to other films:

1) Sheriff Bell and his slowish partner (Garret Dillahunt) have basically the same dynamic as Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her slowish partner in Fargo.

2) In another Fargo similarity, the Coens pan past the dead hotel clerk that Chigurh killed before confronting Moss the same way they pan past the dead parking lot clerk that Steve Buscemi's character shoots in Fargo.

3) In numerous Coen films, the hotel room is a major point of reckoning in the criminal world (Blood Simple, Fargo) and even in the non-criminal world (Barton Fink). It's clear the Coens see hotels/motels as kind of a waystation where major life events occur. Moss stays in four different hotel/motel rooms here, the last of which is where he's killed.

Okay, I've taken up enough of your time.

Second Chance Verdict, No Country for Old Men: My thumb is still up, and the asterisk is still there, but the asterisk is much smaller. This film has a ton of excellent stylistic details, bold decisions, and ominous moods. But I still would have given best picture to There Will Be Blood that year.

A second chill

This is the fourth in my Second Chances series, which runs every Tuesday. See my Second Chances label on the side for other films I've reconsidered after a second viewing.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The chill is an involuntary physiological reaction we experience while watching a movie, when either the images or the music are particularly eerie or foreboding. It essentially relies on our fear of not knowing what's going to happen, and our imagination that whatever happens will be far worse than we imagine.

It's like the physiological response of laughter, in the sense that it relies on surprise to achieve its greatest power. And, like laughter, it would stand to reason that it's not as effective on the second viewing as it would be on the first, since the element of surprise is no longer present.

Why, then, were those chills sprinting down my spine during my entire second viewing of Alejandro Amenabar's The Others?

It's a good question. I should have remembered that the scary bits in The Others are more what's suggested than what's shown, with one or two notable exceptions. Yet I watched that movie this past Sunday in a state of uncertainty about what disturbing images were about to befall me.

As you've probably guessed by its inclusion in my Second Chances series, The Others didn't really work for me the first time I saw it. At the time it came out in 2001, The Sixth Sense was already two years in the past, and M. Night Shyamalan's influence was evident in every horror/thriller you saw. The (spoilers NOW) idea of people you think are alive actually being dead was not only a Shyamalan-like twist, but it was the same exact concept as in The Sixth Sense, even if the setting was vastly different.

But it wasn't just the big reveal at the end of The Others that bothered me, as I sensed myself not liking it as much as I should before that. I think I was also bothered by the fact that the world of the film felt very small, contained, even claustrophobic, as the action was limited just to the house. Add in the fact that not very much happens in the movie, and you've got a little, claustrophobic movie running around in circles in its own tiny space.

Or so I thought at the time.

During Sunday night's second viewing, my opinion of the film was vastly upgraded. Even if I hadn't known on an intellectual level that I was liking it more, I had to trust my physiological reaction, the aforementioned chills. And even if that was due in part to the shriek of violins in the soundtrack, I can't deny that it had an effect on me, and that I found what I was watching to be quite eerie indeed.

So what changed?

I think I appreciate better now some of Amenabar's intentions. The claustrophobia and the narrative inertia, which I considered to be weaknesses of the film, are both, in fact, strengths. If you are a ghost living in purgatory, you would feel a sense of sameness in everything you do, a sense of repetition due to the fact that you can't make new experiences. And from what we understand of ghosts, they are geographically limited in their travels, which is why Nicole Kidman's character gets lost in a dense fog the one time she tries to leave the house.

I also felt an additional eerieness watching Christopher Eccleston's character returning from World War II. He's dead as well, of course, but the difference is that he knows it. This is why his depression is so great. But he recognizes that his family does not know they're dead, and he can't bring himself to tell them. And the fact that they are dead, that she smothered their children, certainly gives him an even greater emotional burden to carry with him to the next plane of existence.

I argued earlier that the chills you experience while watching a movie should be most effective on first viewing. But a movie like The Others (following in the footsteps of The Sixth Sense) has a special value during a second viewing, because it allows you to see the clues and appreciate how they are used to bring about the twist ending. On my second viewing of The Others, I felt like it was plain as day that Kidman and her children were already dead, but I didn't feel like that detracted from the movie. On the contrary. It allowed me to lose myself in the head space of their dreary world, to see the film as Amenabar's personal vision of purgatory, a beautifully appointed purgatory full of gothic imagery, longing and dread.

Amenabar is quite successful at sustaining tension and fear in this film, making us afraid even of a child's drawing of an old woman, with the number 14 written next to it for the number of times she'd seen that particular "ghost." (I'm actually getting chills just writing these words.) The Others is a brilliant example of that minimalism. However, Amenabar did need to give us something corporeal to fear, even if only to please the studio, and that particular scene is quite effective as well. It's the scene where Kidman sees her daughter drawing on her hands and knees on the floor, only it's not her daughter -- it's the face of an old woman in the child's body. If The Others was hurt at the time for following The Sixth Sense, in my personal estimation, then at least it was ahead of the many films that have depicted scary children who speak in tongues in the decade since then.

Lastly I want to praise the three servants in the mansion, who we discover have been dead for over 50 years. The way they glide across the screen, coming toward a helpless Kidman and family, dark shapes with blank faces, is exquisitely scary. Amenabar got that just right, making us fear them without having to go for some kind of inorganic payoff, where they morph into screaming monsters. Their slack faces alone are scary enough.

Second Chance Verdict, The Others: A chilling nightmare and a unique vision.

Re-testing a theory

This is the third in my Second Chances series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm revisiting films I didn't like as much as the average person liked them, to see if I mellow my negative stance upon second viewing.

My wife and I may have been in the minority with our distaste for A History of Violence. But at least we were in synch with each other.

As a matter of fact, our experience watching David Cronenberg's film helped me establish a personal filmgoing theory that I believe in pretty strongly.

You see, when my wife and I went to see A History of Violence, it was back in the days when we still tried to get to popular movies during prime screening times on their opening weekend. And so it was that for the only time in our moviegoing history together, we had to sit separately in the packed theater. When we met up at the end, we both had nothing but negative things to say about the film we'd just sat through. And that's when I knew we were soul mates.

Okay, not really, but it did make me realize something: When two people sit next to each other in a theater, it's very likely that their impression of the film will rub off on each other. Even if they don't emit a series of audible sighs, bursts of derisive laughter or snorts of disgust, their body language (restlessness, crossed arms, etc.) can indicate to the person next to them how they're feeling about the film. And even if the other person doesn't intend to be influenced by these cues, he or she probably can't help it. It's going on on a subconscious level, and it does have its effect. The effect is similar with a positive reaction -- laughter and other sounds of satisfaction can make your viewing partner view the film in a more positive light than he/she otherwise would.

A History of Violence proved that theory by proving its inverse, if that's not too convoluted. Since we were half a theater apart, we had no ability to influence each other's perception. (I should also point out that there were no distracting environmental factors, like ringing cell phones or yakking idiots.) And since we reached the same conclusion independently, the movie had to be bad, right?

Maybe. Or maybe we were just annoyed that we couldn't sit next to each other.

When I gave A History of Violence a second go on Saturday night, I did like it better. Maybe not a whole lot better, but definitely better. In fact, I think the only reason I didn't turn my thumbs down into a thumbs up in my official records was that I wasn't prepared to be viewing this film in a new light yet. My dislike of A History of Violence has been something I've actually enjoyed, and I'm not quite ready to give it up yet.

But the truth is the truth, and this is exactly why I'm doing this project: A History of Violence is better than I've been giving it credit for. Which you know already.

I'll outline my original complaints in no particular order, so you get a sense why I didn't like this film in the first place.

1) Viggo Mortensen. Although I like him well enough as an actor, I found his performance vacant and without affect in this particular film. I guess now I consider that part of the point. His Tom Stall is supposed to be sort of a blank slate, a guy who had to specifically repress the fiery aspects of Joey Cusick in order to evolve into a new identity. You'd expect a little blankness in that scenario. I guess I still find it a little problematic on a basic dramatic level, but I'm okay with it.

2) William Hurt. Hurt's third-act appearance as Richie Cusick was what I considered the most laughable part of A History of Violence. I thought it was an utterly ridiculous example of scenery chewing. Again, I was not as bothered this time. I sat through the movie waiting to burst into hysterics at the horrible acting of this great actor, but it never came. But again I retain a shade of my initial disapproval. I would have interpreted that role differently.

3) The opening scene. I was always a bit bothered by Cronenberg's choice to start on the two criminals that Tom/Joey blows away in his diner about 20 minutes into the movie. It's this wanky single-take shot following Steven McHattie and Greg Bryk as they roll along in a car alongside the motel they've just shot up, and it ends with the revelation of two dead bodies in the manager's office, with Bryk taking a third life (a little girl) right as the action cuts to the Stalls. I didn't really find this necessary -- it concentrates energy on two essentially minor characters, with the purported goal of showing that they deserve to be killed later on by Stall. But I prefer not knowing anything about them -- it's a better proof of Stall's amoral killing instincts. Showing us the bad behavior of the people he kills is an unnecessary -- and possibly counterproductive -- attempt to make the film's morals more black and white.

4) The staircase sex. I almost always find scenes in which two people who are arguing end up having angry, brutal sex in some unconventional location to be melodramatic and stagy. The staircase sex between Stall and his wife (Maria Bello) was no exception, full of histrionics and wild tears. Still bothered me this time, but since I was doing better with the movie overall, I took it in stride.

5) The narrative structure. A History of Violence is only 96 minutes long, so it necessarily has a brisk pace. I appreciated that better this time than I did last time. Last time, I thought the structure felt a bit off, with certain important incidents occurring at unusual junctures of the film, and other incidents not paying off the way they would in a more conventional script. I guess I still think a little character development is lost in the way this story is told, and maybe that's inevitable given the choice to have Ed Harris be the antagonist for the first chunk of the movie, then switch it up to a new character in the final scene. It's a similar problem to what I have with Sexy Beast -- it feels like it's all first act and third act, with no second act. (And stay tuned for my Second Chance viewing of Sexy Beast.)

This viewing also reminded me of the strengths I appreciated during the first go-around, drowned out by my complaints though they may have been. There's something interesting about the idea of a gangster who went straight for so long that he didn't think there was any chance he'd be pulled back in -- a proof of the idea that violent men have long memories. I also liked the brutality with which Cronenberg showed some of the violence, in a way that totally deglamorized it -- specifically, McHattie taking gurgling breaths of his own blood after he's been shot through the head in the diner, and the guy whose nose Stall breaks, seizing on the ground with what looks like a bloody pig's snout.

Second Chance Verdict, A History of Violence: That thumbs up may, reluctantly, be coming soon. Even if it means I have to sell out both my wife and my theory about proximal film viewings.