Treading water

Yesterday, I saw my 36th film released in 2012. (John Hillcoat's Lawless).

If I want to get to last year's total of 121 before my late January ranking deadline, I'll have to see 85 more films from 2012 in just over four months. That's more than 20 per month -- a high total even if I were to forgo watching my usual complement of older films.

So yeah, I ain't gonna be seeing another 121 films before the morning the Oscar nominations are announced. But at this point it's looking like even 100 films is pretty unrealistic.

Which is why it was sort of disappointing I ended up watching The Dictator a second time on Saturday night. 

My wife and I had talked about watching something new for our Saturday night movie, and I was all excited to add to my paltry total of 2012 films. But the Redbox options were pretty thin. The most interesting choices I scouted at a kiosk on Saturday afternoon were The Woman in Black, Lockout, Mirror Mirror and Man on a Ledge. Really, I'm not even interested in Man on a Ledge, but I took it down as a possibility because both my wife and the movie's star (Sam Worthington) are Australian. (Similar logic held for Guy Pearce and Lockout, though I am interested in seeing Lockout.)

She did some of her own research online, and mentioned two titles: The Dictator and Bernie.

Both of which I'd already seen.

Both of which I'd really liked, but both of which I'd already seen.

She knew I'd seen them -- actually, she'd forgotten I'd seen Bernie -- but her response to my four movies was less than listless. Which I certainly understand. If you don't watch that many movies these days, you want the ones you do watch to be good. Most people aren't just checking things off lists, like I am. (And toward that end, at least now I know I'm clear to watch those four movies on my own.)

She wouldn't have forced me into The Dictator or Bernie, but I was in an agreeable mood, so I gave her the choice of which one she wanted to see more. She chose The Dictator. And so it was written, and so it was done.

And so I got another large helping of Sacha Baron Cohen offending all races, religions and people of refined tastes in equal measure.

As it happens, this stuff plays a lot better on a first viewing.

But I didn't go into the viewing feeling pessimistic about it. After all, there's a precedent for this kind of thing. It was around this time last year that I watched Greg Mottola's Paul for the second time, under similar circumstances. I had already seen and loved it, and I wanted my wife to do the same.

The big difference? I felt the active desire to see Paul a second time, while I suspected that The Dictator would not survive another viewing in my good graces.

Indeed.

But another big difference is where I find myself within the ranking year. Right now, I'm staring at my lowest total of movies in a year since I started writing this blog back in 2009, and probably for a couple years before that. Which shouldn't be a huge surprise. With each passing year, my responsibilities increase, and my free time to fritter away on movies grows less and less. Even if I know it's probably inevitable, it's still depressing.

I'm choosing to look at my second viewing of The Dictator as a blessing in disguise, though. Since watching it the first time -- the night before it came out, if you remember this post -- I've heard several people say they utterly detested it. Which got me wondering if it was just my release-eve screening and the vibe people had going that made me like The Dictator so much -- that made me, in fact, declare it the best of Cohen's three star vehicles.

My second viewing disabused me of some, though not all, of those notions. The four stars I had deliriously given it on Letterboxd should clearly be revised down to at least a 3.5, possibly even a 3. And some of the things that made me laugh the first time just made me groan this time.

But even as I treaded more water on assembling my 2012 list, I did gain a benefit from seeing The Dictator a second time. Now I won't go and do something foolish like put it in my top 10 for the year. In fact, I came very close to putting last year's Hall Pass in my top 10, until I watched that again before my deadline. It only went down to #12, but that felt better than at #8, where it had been previously. (Out of 121 movies. Yes, I know how that looks.)

In an ideal world, you'd see all the movies you could possibly see in a given year -- and then before you finished your rankings, you'd see them again. Only then could you really have a good sense of what belongs where.

The reason for this is pretty simple: context. Our feelings toward movies are so dependent on context that a single viewing of a movie can often be skewed in one direction or another by a very good or a very bad viewing scenario. Over two viewings, the context averages out a bit and becomes less important. You could say that The Dictator desperately needed a second viewing, to offset the unusual circumstances of watching it in a packed theater with a game crowd on the night before it opened. You could say that for me to assess it in a way that more accurately represented my true feelings toward it, The Dictator desperately needed a second viewing at home on the couch, one where I was cringing with the sense of personal responsibility for every offensive thing Cohen's character said or did. (You see, a certain ownership comes with recommending a movie.) My wife has a good sense of humor and laughs at many of the same things I do, and to be honest, this kind of cringing is key to the bite of Cohen's comedy. But I still felt embarrassed a couple times at the enthusiasm of my prior endorsement, given the true comedic quotient of what was up on screen.

The true quality of The Dictator probably lies somewhere between the two.

Maybe I'll discover that on my third viewing next month.

Spare me the complete scenes, please

I noticed a disturbing trend in the trailers I saw before The Dictator on Tuesday night. Specifically, the comedy trailers, which were all but one of them.

Not just snippets of "funny dialogue," but entire scenes.

Like, eight consecutive lines of dialogue each, for two or more characters, in the same setting.. 

If it had happened in just one trailer, I might not have noticed it. But since it happened in two, it graduated to the level of a post topic.

It may be no coincidence that both The Watch (formerly Neighborhood Watch) and That's My Boy felt they needed to supply whole scenes to convince us the writing is funny. If the trailers are any indication, neither movie looks likely to supply many laughs. (There's a reason I put "funny dialogue" in quotes earlier.) And as an added sign of desperation, The Watch trailer had to drop in about three f-bombs, in the hopes that merely employing profanity is enough to convince audiences of the writers' comic genius. Red band trailers are a little puerile, aren't they?

Here, check out the trailers below:



I'm counting about five scenes here, the first of which lasts, astonishingly, the entire first minute of the trailer. And basically tells you nothing about the movie. It's downright awkward to watch such long scenes play out with such little payoff. I must admit I think the kid with the ice cream cone is kind of funny, but what does he have to do with the creative talents behind this film? That painfully protracted comparison of the alien goo's viscosity to the viscosity of semen -- now that's what I expect from these guys.

In the case of The Watch, I can understand the need for this going-nowhere vagueness about the movie's content. They kind of don't want you to know what the movie is really about. The Watch was almost derailed by the high profile shooting death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of over-zealous neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman. In fact, it's a major surprise the movie is even coming out this year. Too bad Neighborhood Watch is no longer a viable title, because the new title is lame.

Here's the trailer for That's My Boy, a potentially funny idea that looks poorly executed:



This is not as guilty as The Watch in terms of the wholesale reliance on complete scenes, but the one in particular where they discuss the finer points of Adam Sandler's parenting techniques was agonizing for me to sit through. I kept thinking "Please let this end." And not because the dialogue itself is so bad or anything. Just because it seems awkward to sit through such a long, uninterrupted part of the movie -- until you're, you know, actually sitting through the movie. You're waiting for the zinger, which should come in five seconds or less, and then on to the next joke. When you have to wait 20 seconds for it, you've gone limp at least ten seconds before that.

What these trailers tell me is not that comedy writing is much worse today than it has been in the past, because Lord knows cinema history is littered with awful comedies. No, these trailers tell me that the studios don't trust the audience to pick up on nuance, to fill in the blanks, to reach a conclusion based merely on suggestion. Take the scene where Sandler laughs at Andy Samberg's New Kids on the Block tattoo. In the past, the trailer might have been cut to end with Sandler laughing at his own bad behavior, leaving it up to the audience to put two and two together: he gave the tattoo to his son during a drunken stupor sometime in the late 1980s. Instead, they really hit us over the head with the next couple lines of dialogue: "Their heads are all warped!" "That's because I got it when I was in the third grade! My body grew!" And just to hammer it home, a second later Samberg tells he him that he sucks. That clears it up for those of us who thought he liked being tattooed by his teenage father.

I wish I could say that the studios were wrong. Fact is, people probably are too stupid to get nuance these days. And unless you're sure people get what you're saying, you're not sure they'll pay theater prices to see your movie.

It goes without saying that you have to show funny clips from a comedy, so people will want to see it. But you don't have to show the whole scene. I've had experiences in the past where the trailer whetted my appetite for something funny, then I got more than I bargained for when the parts of the scene they didn't show were even funnier. When trailers show everything, you know exactly what you're going to get. Which probably provides a certain comfort for people -- another sad sign of where we find ourselves, collectively, as an audience.

Not that I myself am completely above this. When I saw The Dictator, I was actually disappointed that my favorite line from the trailer didn't make the movie. "America, the birthplace of AIDS," muses Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen) in a moment of faux awe. But he doesn't muse this in the movie, only the trailer. And yeah, I missed not seeing/hearing the line.

That seems like a problem neither The Watch nor That's My Boy is likely to have -- so much good material that you have to leave some of it out.

Acceptable circumstances for viewing a comedy

You may remember in this post I talked about some new rules I had for watching comedies. I was no longer going to watch them by myself -- as in, without anyone I know. Failing that, the theater I watched them in had to be packed.

Plan B came into effect last night.

It was once again $7 Tuesdays at the local theater, though I did not at first understand why my Tuesday choices included The Dictator, which does not officially release until today. However, I soon realized that it was already today on the east coast when I saw it, since the first showing at this theater was at precisely 9 p.m. Without even looking it up I can assume that as long as it's May 16th somewhere in the U.S., the movie can be played. I'm sure there was at least one Hawaiian theater playing it at 6.

I know the theater was at least 37% full. That's the percent sold it was when I showed up a half-hour early, just to be on the safe side. I guess opening night isn't what it once was, or maybe this surprise early showing of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest fooled other people as much as it fooled me.

But I'd say the theater was 70 to 75% full by the time the show started. Entering the screening room five minutes early was enough to get me a seat where I could put my feet up on the bar. Because that's how I roll.

We were a good crowd and we were ready to laugh. And SBC gave us plenty to laugh about. I won't review the details of the movie for you, since they are worth discovering on your own. But just wait for that sequence where Admiral General Aladeen discovers a certain ... pleasure that he never knew about previously.

In fact, I'm going on record: The Dictator is my favorite of Cohen's three starring vehicles, if you are considering the other two to be Borat and Bruno. (My tendencies toward anal retention would ordinary require me to spell out the whole title of Borat, but not this morning.) I didn't like either of those movies as much as I wanted to, but they're still movies I like pretty well. Yes, even Bruno.

So what Cohen was bringing last night was in my wheelhouse.

But I can't deny that the crowd had something to do with it. There was probably a little extra buzz from it being opening night, though I'd be lying if I said it was tangible. We were just ready to laugh, and laugh we did. Pretty much every time Cohen wanted us to, with a couple minor exceptions.

So maybe I've got a new optimism about the idea of seeing a movie on opening night, as long as it's a comedy, and as long as it's only 37% full a half-hour before the movie.

And even if no one I knew was there, it's funny how much like a friend your neighbor feels when you are both laughing hysterically.