Even the couches couldn't save it

One of the reasons my wife and I love going to the Landmark on Pico is that occasionally, you get one of the couch theaters. That's right, of the approximately 12 screening rooms, two of them are equipped with couches. These screening rooms seat about 25-30 people total, in couches that accommodate anywhere from one to three people. Whether or not you can rightly call it a couch when it seats only one person, the single-person "couches" have the same leather-cushion stylings that make it a more comfortable viewing experience than we're usually used to, so the term seems to fit. (Oh, and the seats are assigned, which prevents someone from getting there early and stretching his/her entire body across a three-seat couch.)

We never specifically plan to see a movie just because it'll be in a couch theater. On the times that we've actually tried to do that -- "Let's go see a movie in the couch theater tonight" -- it's either something we've already seen, or something we don't want to see. After all, for them to screen a movie where the maximum possible seating per screening is 30 people, the movie either has to be fringe to begin with, or on its way out after running for several weeks. So the times we've ended up in a couch theater have always happened by surprise.

In fact, the very first time we went to this theater, right after it had been renovated, was to see Timur Bekmambetov's Day Watch, the sequel to Night Watch, in the summer of 2007. Already in love with the beautiful renovations to the lobby/snack bar/etc., we experienced the coup de grace upon walking into the theater and seeing a cozy room full of couches. We were disappointed with the movie, but enthralled by the viewing experience. I saw Once in such a couch theater about six weeks later. It was one of my favorite films of the year, and the couches made it even better.

Then it took more than two years for me to return. Somehow, the movies just never lined up correctly. Our triumphant return to the couch theater was last November, when we saw The Men Who Stare at Goats. Loved that movie, loved that viewing experience as well.

And so it was with some amount of excitement that we realized our 2:20 showing of Dinner for Schmucks yesterday afternoon would be in one of these screening rooms. The movie had been out for two weeks and its viewership was certainly on the wane, so the couch theater was an appropriate home for it.

But never before have those couches felt so uncomfortable.

Simply put, we should have trusted our initial instincts about the movie. When I heard that a remake of Francis Veber's The Dinner Game was coming out this summer as a vehicle for Steve Carell, I was instantly turned off by the idea. It wasn't because I was protecting the integrity of the original -- my wife and I saw it and liked it, but it's one of those movies I remember almost nothing about. No, it's because I've been down on Steve Carell for quite awhile now. I skipped his first two movies of the year (Date Night and Despicable Me) in part because he was in them, though I hear each movie has its merits.

But then the trailers changed both of our minds, and Dinner for Schmucks quickly became a priority. We almost saw it on opening weekend, and then had a busy weekend last weekend with our baby shower. So we scheduled it for our next available opening, yesterday. Which could be, depending on a variety of factors, our last theatrical screening together before our first child is born. At which point, everything changes, and a movie night will become a real rarity indeed, involving a babysitter, and possibly leaving your phone on vibrate in case something goes wrong. (The baby's due date is September 5th, but we are kind of expecting it will come before the end of August.)

Well, suffice it to say that the movie is all over the map. Its most obviously problem is structural. They don't even get to the titular dinner until the third act. Before that, it's a bunch of silly set pieces that involve a bunch of Three's Company-style misunderstandings involving Paul Rudd's character, his girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak), his stalker (Lucy Punch), and the artist whose show his girlfriend is curating (Jemaine Clement). Carell's character is the special ingredient that causes each incident to be misconstrued. Let me just say that it's exhausting spending more than an hour waiting for this dinner to arrive, and having to endure the branching off of numerous subplots -- Carell's character also has an ex-wife he's pining after and a rivalry with an IRS agent played by the newly overexposed Zach Galifianakis, who has the power of mind control. The dinner only arrives after the end-of-the-second-act crises, at which point, you've had it up to here.

Oh, and did I mention that it's really not very funny? I only chuckled a few times, and they were mostly in the promising first 15 minutes.

There were two good things about the movie: 1) Jemaine Clement. His out-there artist, who produces these gothic paintings of himself in which he wears antlers and hooves, is consistently a hoot. You wish he had been part of a better movie. 2) Carell's much-heralded "mouseterpieces." They deserve to be heralded, but they also point at one of the reasons this is a dumb movie. The thing that's supposed to be ridiculous about Carell's character is that he makes these dioramas featuring stuffed mice, posing in famous paintings or other scenes out of his imagination. The thing is, they're really good -- most people would be proud to have the talent Carell's character has. But the dead mice playing dress-up are supposed to be the main source of mockery and derision surrounding him.

So as I was watching, and as the movie was sinking down into the mire of irredeemability, I found myself shifting my position dozens of times -- I couldn't get comfortable in the most comfortable seating accommodations you can find. Which goes to show you that comfort is truly a matter of perspective. If you're watching a great film, you can sit in a hard wooden seat with nails poking out of it, and not notice.

If you're watching Dinner for Schmucks, even the world's most comfortable barcalounger would feel like a torture device.

Tainted!

I went from February until July without writing about Flickchart on my blog -- and now I'm doing it for the third time in the space of two weeks. Sometimes things just go that way.

And because I know the Flickchart creators sometimes look in on my blog, I want to start by telling them that I don't blame the site itself in the least for the following story -- I blame my computer, pure and simple.

Okay, so I'm very anal about making sure all my Flickchart duels have the correct winner. If you choose poorly or hastily between the two choices in front of you, the site has a handy-dandy Undo button, which I have availed myself of on numerous occasions. I don't want to let a single poor decision creep through and muck up my whole list.

Yesterday, my computer acted up in a way that took the ability to go back and correct right out of my hands.

I'd just gotten home from work and hauled my computer onto my lap for a couple minutes of random dueling. I love these little Flickchart breaks, which are usually finite in duration according to little parameters I put in place. I'll say "I'll duel until I get one lower film to beat a higher film," or, "I'll duel until I get one duel featuring one of my top 20 movies." Because I've done over 83,000 duels, either of these can take a little while -- anywhere from one to five minutes. And then I'll go do something else.

But because of some state the computer was in, where the inner circuits were telling it that the mouse click mechanism was depressed, or because of some way my palm was brushing over the mouse pad in between my two thumbs, I suddenly made a flurry of unknown duel choices. The posters rapidly changed, and I noticed that results were being recorded -- this film held its position, that film jumped forward 700 spots. I was aghast by the 700-spot jump, but it wasn't the end of the world -- it was the original Friday the 13th jumping from a spot that was probably too low (in the 2700s, out of 2950) to a spot that was slightly too high (in the early 2100s). Because Flickchart sometimes freaks out a little bit in situations like this, where a flurry of unexpected stimuli registers actions on the site, the Undo button was not available as an option. But having Friday the 13th ranked in this position didn't seem fatal to the integrity of the list.

I thought I was past this temporary trauma, but then it happened again, this time faster and with more dire results.

The little flurry ended with Inside Man jumping 800 spots, from around 1000 to #220. Looking at my live list of rankings just now, that means it beat Total Recall. Sure, there are plenty of people who might rank Inside Man above Total Recall, but I am not one of them. However, again I decided I could live with it. Inside Man would eventually make its way back to the appropriate spot through the random dueling process. I could live with it being ranked higher for six months or a year before finding its rightful place again. But just to make sure there was not a third session of random ranking, I closed my web browser and reopened it.

There were no recurrences of the problem, but it was only a few minutes later that I discovered one of the consequences of this uncontrolled period of blind ranking.

I got a duel between The Story of Us and Mission: Impossible III, and I gave the win to The Story of Us. You can imagine my surprise when Flickchart proceeded to jump The Story of Us from #1300-something in the standings ... all the way up to #25.

This is when I slapped my forehead and knew that my Flickchart rankings had been irrevocably tainted.

What apparently happened was that Mission: Impossible III had won a blind duel that had jumped it all the way up to #25. So when The Story of Us beat it, it assumed the #25 spot, pushing the Cruise flick down to #26. Consulting my rankings again, it appears that M:I III had won a blind duel against ... wait for it ... Fargo. The horror.

I sat for a moment and wondered what I would do. I actually like The Story of Us quite a bit -- it's a candidate to be reconsidered in my Double Jeopardy feature that runs on Tuesdays, since most people (those who have seen it, anyway) do not share my high opinion of it. But #25? I couldn't handle it. I could see it belonging around 800, but no higher than that.

And it wasn't just one interloper, but two. The fault really lay with the elevated ranking for Mission Impossible, but the problem had already started to multiply. Now, in order to force those two movies downward to their correct spots, I would need other films to beat them -- which shouldn't be a problem. But then I'd have to deal with the separate problem of those films being ranked too highly. Before long, my top 100 films would become unrecongizable.

I realized there was only one thing I could do: I had to remove the offending films and start ranking them again from scratch.

For an ordinary Flickcharter, this might not be such a big deal. But for an anal retentive bastard like me, I felt the pain. You see, Flickchart keeps a stats page of how your films have performed over time -- how many times you've ranked each film, and what percentage of duels it's won. An anal retentive bastard like me believes that those stats have some kind of intrinsic value -- they mean something in the imaginary "record books" that no one but me (and others like me) probably cares about. So my pain wasn't so much a result of the fact that I'd have to begin the process anew of getting these movies to their appropriate spots in the rankings, but that I'd be wiping out this history -- this history that means something intangible yet powerful to me.

But I had to do it.

I first went to the page for The Story of Us. I'd ranked it 56 times and it had won 59% of its duels. I clicked Remove From My Flickchart. I clicked Add to My Flickchart. When you add a new movie, it subjects it to three random duels to get an initial ranking. It won two of those duels. Its new stats? Three times dueled, 66.67% won.

It was harder when I moved on to the next two. Both Mission: Impossible III and Inside Man were part of the initial 300-400 movies they give you automatically when you first join Flickchart, movies that are considered the most popular. (They do this so that new Flickcharters aren't immediately confronted with My Dinner With Andre and The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain.) So these two movies had been dueled a lot more -- as it happened, 99 times each. Oy. Pretty soon, they too were back down to three duels apiece. And the integrity of my list had been restored.

Oh, I decided to just leave Friday the 13th where it was.

All in all, not a big deal. So why am I writing about it today? In fact, why am I writing so many words about it that the sensible ones among you have already stopped reading?

Well, it's just another insight into the passion I feel both for movies and for lists. And now you get why I have such passion for Flickchart, 'cause it's got both. If you haven't started yet, what are you waiting for? www.flickchart.com

Demographics for dummies

The usual goal, with any film that gets released, is to reach as many different types of viewer as possible. That's the way you make the most money. And that's also why you sometimes see several different TV campaigns that are distinctly different in tone -- one that might push the romantic side of a movie, one that might emphasize its funny parts, one that might make it look like a thriller. It's all just a matter of cleverly editing the available footage.

Considering this, can you remember a weekend that was more packed with new releases that didn't give a damn about appealing to anyone outside their target demographic?

The three major new releases this week -- Eat Pray Love, The Expendables, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- are each basically the prototypical example of the type of movie they are. Eat Pray Love -- adapted from a self-help book, starring Julia Roberts, and featuring dozens of exotic locations -- is squarely aimed at women age 18 to 49. The Expendables -- a testosterone-laden gathering of everyone who's ever starred in an action movie since 1984, and directed by the king of that group, Sylvester Stallone -- is intended purely for the men in that same age range. And Scott Pilgrim vs. the World -- starring teen icon Michael Cera and based on a graphic novel -- is for everyone under 18, of both genders.

So, pretty much everyone will have something to see this weekend. Those over 49 will probably go see Eat Pray Love. Which I'm predicting will be the weekend's box office winner. Hey, it's Julia, after all.

However, it will be interesting to monitor the performances of the other two, as they are each something of a test of the viability of a certain type of movie.

The Expendables is the one I'm most interested in -- not in terms of wanting to see it the most, but in terms of how it will fly with audiences. As I wrote last year when 12 Rounds came out (check out the post here), the "action hero" as such is something that doesn't really exist anymore, like he did in the 1980s -- except in this movie. In fact, this movie is giving some seriously out-of-work actors (Dolph Lundgren, anyone?) another chance at glory -- which may be either a brilliant move or an extremely stupid one. There's a reason guys like Lundgren, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal don't appear in movies you've ever heard of anymore -- the audience simply stopped wanting to see them. At least Stallone didn't go that far down the list to Van Damme and Seagal, and smartly hedged his bets with some guys who have current box office appeal, such as Mickey Rourke, Jason Statham and Jet Li. But even Stallone himself is a total relic these days -- the man is 64 years old -- so it will be really interesting to see if audiences buy a movie in which he is basically the star, and basically playing the 1982 version of himself.

As for Scott Pilgrim, that's the one of these three that I would probably see, but only because I'm still trying to hang on to that 18-year-old version of myself. Actually, I know it could be really good, but I also have my doubts, in part because of my well-documented case of being over Michael Cera. (There's something about the earnest way he's rocking out on the guitar in this poster that just rubs me the wrong way.) But I did discuss the possibility of seeing it a couple weeks ago with a friend, so that may transpire. In terms of being an observer of the film industry, I'm interested to see just how much box office clout Cera actually has. His roles have been steadily increasing in profile in recent years, as he's been breaking out of ensembles and starting to really carry movies himself. This is the first summer release he's had since last year's Year One, in which Jack Black did at least as much if not more of the heavy lifting in terms of trying to bring in audiences. This time out, he has no co-headliner, so it will really serve as some kind of gauge of Cera's ability to sink or swim. Let's hope having Edgar Wright as director can only help.

Eat Pray Love? I will see it on an airplane sometime.

Multiple reincarnations

The truly iconic characters in our collective cultural history have a way of continuing to pop up over and over again. You can't keep them down. We seem to have an insatiable appetite to revisit them every couple years, to look at them in a new way.

Superman. Robin Hood. James Bond.

La Femme Nikita?

Sure seems like that. The character created by Luc Besson for his 1990 film La Femme Nikita -- a junkie convict made over as an elegant government assassin -- is about to get reincarnated for the third time. Those four incarnations include twice at the movies, and now, with this fall's Nikita set to premiere September 9th on the CW, twice on TV.

The arresting billboards of Maggie Q in a slinky red dress (not pictured), lying on her left side next to a sniper's rifle that runs almost the length of her body, have started to multiply in the last week or two, and they've certainly caught my attention. At first I thought "That's a smart idea, to make a weekly hour-long drama based on La Femme Nikita." And then I thought, "Wait, they've already made a weekly hour-long drama based on La Femme Nikita."

Who would have guessed that this Nikita character had such ongoing perceived relevance in the zeitgeist?

She first appeared, of course, in Nikita (released in the U.S. as La Femme Nikita, and most commonly known that way), the film that put Luc Besson on the map. Anne Parillaud originated the character, and French treasure Tcheky Karyo co-starred as her handler. The film was an international hit, and though it was not Besson's first feature, it definitely seems like a key to the direction his career took after that. Besson went on to make several prominent films with tough female characters, such as Leon (a.k.a. The Professional), The Fifth Element and The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.

Even back then, it was perhaps inevitable that La Femme Nikita would get remade in Hollywood. That remake materialized in 1993 and starred Bridget Fonda, dropping the word "Nikita" from the marketing in favor of the highly generic title Point of No Return. Opposite Fonda was Gabriel Byrne. Simply put, I hated this film. I'll never sit through it again to rediscover what I found so objectionable about it, but let's just say the hatred was palpable. In fact, it's the only review I've ever written for my website that they've taken down and not replaced with another writer's work. I never found out why this happened, preferring to chalk it up to an anomaly, but I suspect that the extreme vitriol in my review had something to do with it.

Nikita was back for a third round in the form of her first television incarnation, which restored the original French title -- or, I should say, the American adjustment of the original French title -- in 1997. La Femme Nikita starred Peta Wilson, with Roy Dupuis stepping into the handler role. It's hard to believe, but this show ran on USA Network for parts of five seasons -- this was back when fringe networks could stick with their programming forever because they had so few viewers, relative to the other networks. I only saw one part of one episode, but it was enough to solidify in my mind the idea that Wilson was smoking hot.

The 2010 version of La Femme Nikita, called just Nikita, makes the character a non-white for the first time -- or not totally white, anyway. (Maggie Q was born in Hawaii to a father of Polish, French Canadian and Irish descent, and a mother of Vietnamese descent.) I guess that's a good sign of our ethnically diverse times. As another sign of our times, it's chronologically separate enough from the first three incarnations -- which were all more or less in the 1990s (Wilson's show went off the air in 2001) -- that it qualifies as sort of a reboot. It would appear that she'll have her most youthful mentor yet in the form of Shane West, who is only 32. Gotta get those kids interested.

As I said earlier, I'm captivated by the posters -- they tap into some deep-seated idea of our primal notions of sex and death. But will I watch the show? Heck no.

The big difference between now and 20 years ago was that the idea that chicks can kick ass was actually something of a new notion in 1990. Yeah, there had been Wonder Woman and Charlie's Angels and a couple other instances of women in pop culture beating the crap out of people (or aliens, thanks to Sigourney Weaver), but many of those instances were steeped in camp.

Now? We see a chick who can kick ass every five minutes in the movies or on TV. And while I think that's an excellent step forward in feminism, I also think it's a little boring -- especially because they're still presenting it as though it's a highly fascinating, highly clever "twist" on a male-dominated paradigm.

Need some examples? How much time have you got?

Let's see, in no particular order ... there was Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns, Halle Berry's Catwoman in Catwoman, Jennifer Garner's Sydney Bristow on Alias, Carrie Anne Moss' Trinity in the Matrix movies, Angelina Jolie's Lara Craft in the Tomb Raider movies, Charlize Theron's Aeon Flux in Aeon Flux, Kate Beckinsale's Selene in the Underworld movies, Milla Jovovich's Alice in the Resident Evil movies (and one more still to come), Michelle Ryan's Jaime Sommers on The Bionic Woman, Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Lena Headey's Sarah Connor on The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Yvonne Starhovski's Sarah Walker on Chuck, Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jennifer Garner again as Elektra in Daredevil and Elektra, Milla Jovovich again as Violet in Ultraviolet, Angelina Jolie again as Mrs. Smith in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (and as Evelyn Salt in Salt, and as Fox in Wanted), Halle Berry again as Storm in the X-Men movies, Jessica Alba as Sue Storm (slight difference) in The Fantastic Four movies, Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow in Iron Man 2, Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II in Watchmen, Uma Thurman as The Bride in the Kill Bill movies, the trio of women in the two Charlie's Angels movies, Jessica Biel as Abigail Whistler in Blade: Trinity, Chloe Grace Moretz as Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass, Sigourney Weaver twice more as Ripley in two more Alien sequels, the heroines of the three Besson movies mentioned above, and eventually, a long-awaited big screen version of Wonder Woman, starring TBA. (I could go on, but when I asked how much time you had, I should have mentioned that my time is finite as well.)

Like I said, I'm all for the gender equality. But what it means is that just trying to hook us with the idea of a female assassin isn't really going to get you anywhere in 2010 ... even one as sultry looking as Maggie Q looks in the promotions.

But should they try? Sure, why not? We all know how far name recognition gets you. I just find it interesting to realize that "Nikita" is now a name that has such recognition. She's not Cinderella, nor Cleopatra, nor Snow White, nor Rapunzel, nor Joan of Arc, nor some other famous female in either the non-fiction or fiction universe, who has been familiar to us for centuries. She's an anarchy-loving punk in a modest little French film, who got arrested for shooting a cop in the face, then was made over into a sophisticated woman and lethal weapon. And she's now in her fourth pop culture incarnation.

More power to her.

Keys to the kingdom

I've written about my use of the Flickchart website (www.flickchart.com) numerous times on my blog. For a description of what it is and does, I invite you to look at the original post here.

Writing this post garnered the attention of the Flickchart founders, Nathan Chase and Jeremy Thompson, who were either trolling randomly for mentions of their site on the blogosphere, or have some method of being notified automatically when such a mention occurs. Nathan is more the public face and Jeremy is more the programmer -- at least that's how I understand it. So it was Nathan who commented on my first post, which led to an email relationship, and ultimately, friending each other on Facebook. I was also asked to participate in a user showcase on the Flickchart blog, and have written several pieces that have appeared there.

But it wasn't until this past week that I actually got the keys to the kingdom.

You see, the Flickchart database grows largely by users submitting obscure titles for approval. It surely originated from a large collection of familiar titles, presumably the result of Nathan and Jeremy racking their own brains or consulting famous film lists. But for as long as I've been a Flickcharter, there has been an option for users to submit titles that don't appear in the database. You provide the information -- title, release year, rating, cast, director, running time, etc. -- and someone at Flickchart finds the corresponding poster art, then verifies the accuracy of the information you've provided.

Now, that someone is me.

Or rather, I am part of a team of someones -- there seem to be about 16 of us. Last week, Nathan reached out to us to ask us if we'd be interested in helping approve the backlog of user submissions, which had crept up to about 3,000 titles. We had been contacted specifically because we were deemed to be trustworthy, and had showed a demonstrated ongoing commitment to Flickchart and to building the Flickchart community.

Needless to say, I was thrilled. It felt very exciting to think I'd have the chance to get a truly behind-the-scenes tour of how it all works. Not only that, but I'd be able to step out of the tour and actually take the controls.

I couldn't get started straightaway. I was in the midst of the busy final week before our co-ed baby shower, which we held at our house this past Sunday. (I discovered on Sunday morning in an entirely different context that it's considered sort of a faux pas to host your own baby shower, but let's just say that we don't consider ourselves close personal acquaintances of Miss Manners.) So I thanked Nathan and told him I'd be able to get started on it this week. In the meantime, as I was Flickcharting in my downtime, I witnessed the torrent of films that had been approved since Nathan had reached out to us -- and got into a minor panic, not wanting all the titles to be gone before I had a chance to do some approving.

And so it was, in my hurry, that I got off to somewhat of a bad start with my first titles on Monday. In my eagerness to get involved, I may have read the contributor's guide too quickly -- something we were specifically told not to do. And though my first approval went through fine -- Perceval (1979, Eric Rohmer) -- I made a goof on my second one. I was having trouble pulling the poster for the 1950 version of King Solomon's Mines, starring Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr. The approval site has a handy-dandy mechanism that automatically queries a number of other helpful sites, such as IMDB and (it so happens) the website I write for in order to verify content, and a couple other sites to find poster images. But the methods for loading the posters differ depending on which site you get them from. I found a King Solomon's Mines poster no problem -- several, in fact. But at first I couldn't get it to load, and then, inexplicably, it loaded 16 posters -- eight copies each of the English and Spanish versions of the poster you see above. (Foreign posters are welcome as alternate posters -- it's fun to see them come up when you're doing duels.) I eliminated the excess ones and thought I approved the entry correctly, but when it showed up in my dueling a few minutes later (how's that for instant gratification), there was no poster for it at all.

Hurriedly, I emailed Nathan and asked him to fix it "before anyone ranked it." (As if someone ranking it would mean it could never be edited again.) He did and told me "No worries." And truly, I probably shouldn't have worried about it too much -- but when you've been singled out because of your perceived ability to follow instructions and your potential for quality control, and you blow it on your second entry, you worry about having violated that trust.

I seem to have remained busier than I thought I'd be in the two full days since the baby shower, so I've only approved about eight more titles, which I've cherry-picked from the list -- the list is presented in the order of the oldest submission first, but I've been picking and choosing from later in the list on the theory that it would avoid me trying to approve the same title at the same time as someone else. (Nathan told me I shouldn't worry about this, but I guess I'm good at worrying.) I thought at this point you'd be interested to see some of those titles -- see how deeply we've gotten into the dregs of the cinematic world.

I've also approved:

The Mosquito Rapist, a.k.a. Bloodlust (1976, Marijan Vajda)


Pirates (2005, Joone)


Hellevator: The Bottled Fools (2004, Hiroki Yamaguchi)

Ah, cinema. It is a many-splendored thing.

But what I think may be most exciting about being part of the approval team is that I can now bend the Flickchart database to my will. Sure, first I'll help clear out the backlog -- and there are still some 2,000 titles left, even though I feared that my fellow contributors would clear them out before I had a chance to get there. But after that ... well, after that, I can add, and instantly approve, all the remaining titles that I've seen that are not yet in the database. I now have a clear path to start ranking every movie I've ever seen, which I keep track of in an Excel spreadsheet. And that, dear friends, is the ultimate goal of my use of Flickchart as a resource.

First things first, however -- like mastering this whole poster download thing. And getting exposed to a lot more really bizarre movies from the cinematic universe.

The merits of a "minor" film

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm revisiting certain underdog films -- films that I liked a lot, but other people did not -- and giving them a "second trial," to see if they deserve my support.

With accomplished directors who boast large bodies of work, there's a tendency to refer to their lesser films as "minor." There are a couple ways to interpret this word "minor" -- either the film had big ambitions, but wasn't hugely successful at achieving them, making it only good instead of great, or the film had small ambitions to begin with.

A good recent example of this seems to be Shutter Island, which was referred to by many as "minor Scorsese." I would argue, actually, that Shutter Island is a combination of both definitions of "minor" I've given above, which makes it kind of the perfect example of a "minor" film. On the one hand, it's a genre film, so that sort of makes it "minor" by default, considering the way Martin Scorsese has busted genres in the past. However, on the other hand, it had a largeness of scope to it -- just think of the grandiose helicopter shots of that island -- so it's also kind of a "big" movie that only halfway succeeded in its ambitions. "Minor Scorsese" to be sure.

I think you would agree that "minor" is not an insult -- in fact, sometimes it's not even a backhanded compliment. It just means you aren't necessarily going to discuss this film when surveying the major works in this artist's career. And sometimes, that's a good thing.

Take U-Turn. It is very definitely "minor Stone." And to me, that's very definitely a good thing.

See, Oliver Stone is a director whose every film is "major." The man almost always has some grand sociopolitical agenda. He's made a movie about the Kennedy assassination. He's made a movie about Richard Nixon. He's made a movie about George W. Bush. He's made a movie about Alexander the Great. He's made a movie about 9/11. And he's made not one, not two, but three movies about Vietnam. And those are just his films based on real events. This is to say nothing of the various messages and intentions in his films about fictitious subject matter.

So when he makes a little film noir set in the desert, like U-Turn, it feels like something of a relief from all this bombastic seriousness of purpose. We still get to see the filmmaking style that's so captivating -- kind of like a restrained version of Tony Scott -- without all the thematic baggage.

Yet U-Turn was widely dissed by critics. The site I write for gave it a 1 1/2 star review. Metacritic gave it a 54, which is not terrible, but is not up to the usual Oliver Stone standards. Could it be that people want seriousness and bombast from an Oliver Stone movie, or else they won't be happy with it?

So as I watched U-Turn for the second time last night, I was trying to pick up on what people didn't like about it. And couldn't.

I think part of the reason I liked U-Turn so much, when I saw it in the theater back in 1997, was that I thought it contained residuals from Natural Born Killers three years earlier -- one of Stone's most controversial films, which I consider a masterpiece, difficult to watch at times though it may be. Some of the most memorable passages of that film are set in the deserts along Route 66, the route Mickey and Mallory Knox take on their killing spree. Simply put, Stone's filmmaking style is a perfect match for the American desert. You can see the gritty grains of sand in his lens, the dueling stillness and violence of the American southwest, with its unrelenting heat and unforgiving lawlessness. The place is symbolized by its broken, dangerous characters and the kitsch of its roadside Americana, influenced by Mexican and Native American cultures. Simply put, it's as cinematic a setting as there is.

So Stone returns to that world through a low-level hood in a Mustang convertible, played by Sean Penn, on his way from Somewhere to Somewhere, having to stop in between at Nowhere (Superior, Arizona) for a blown radiator hose. Penn's Bobby Cooper owes a $30,000 debt to gangsters, who have recently taken two of his fingers as a warning. The payment is in his trunk, but it's not that easy. First, in an extremely long and unforgiving 24 hours, Bobby must get jerked around by a shady mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton at his scuzziest, in scummy coke bottle glasses), seduced by a local Latina (Jennifer Lopez, looking sultry during her pre-2000 run of very good film choices), punched and then propositioned by her husband (Nick Nolte, looking as grizzly as ever), eyeballed by a local sheriff (Powers Boothe), not-eyeballed by a blind Vietnam war vet (a nearly unrecognizable Jon Voight), held up for his duffel bag full of money in a grocery store (where his money ultimately gets destroyed by buck shot), flirted at by a local teenager (Claire Danes) and threatened by her sometimes-boyfriend (Joaquin Phoenix, all hot air).

The film is not only a noir, but it's a black comedy that is downright hilarious at times. (Especially funny are the scenes involving Danes and Phoenix -- when Bobby finally tires of Phoenix' posturing and starts pummeling him, Danes rushes to his side as he's crying like a little baby, and yells out at Bobby, "Yew killed him!") Like a prototypical noir character, Bobby is constantly getting beaten up in one way or another -- he collects all manner of scrapes, scars and bandages as the day goes on, and one recurring joke has him constantly unable to quench his thirst, as the old-fashioned soda bottles he's always popping open (purchased with his last few dimes and quarters) are forever getting knocked out of his hand for one reason or another. Stone's love for noir conventions are all over this film, as Lopez makes a perfect femme fatale who may be involved in a handful of double or triple crosses, as her various allegiances are revealed throughout the course of the film. And in what appears to be a direct nod to Chinatown, there's even some possible "She's my daughter! She's my sister!" incest here, and Nolte's character even looks a bit like John Huston. (And Penn's bandages remind us of the one Jack Nicholson wears for the second half of Chinatown.)

I like the filmmaking, too. The cinematography (by Robert Richardson) has a grainy, throwback look, and its used in perfect tandem with Stone's editing style, which often shows small pieces of the action -- close-ups, throwaway shots -- in quick succession, but not to excess. The film's style has its personification in the character of Darryl, the mechanic played by Billy Bob Thornton, who is one giant greasy tribute to poor hygiene and bad teeth. He's superficially harmless, but this hick has malevolence running through his veins.

So why didn't people like it? Not sure, exactly. I guess it might be 20 minutes too long, as it cracks the two hour mark. I guess it might not be exactly what you would call a feminist film, as the film's two main female characters are portrayed as slutty and devious, and are each on the receiving end of violence from men. But I would argue that this is a film where there's no one to cheer for, man and woman alike. For some people, that could be the ultimate reason they didn't dig U-Turn. For me, when done right, that can be the makings of the best black comedies out there -- maybe "noir comedy" is the appropriate term in this case.

And maybe by making this comment on the irredeemability of mankind, Stone is sending one of his usual "big" messages after all.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, U-Turn: Stone should find his way into "minor" territory more often -- as long as it's truly "minor," and not just a major film disguised as a minor film, like the disagreeable Any Given Sunday.

Endangered species

When Rob Reiner directed Stand By Me in 1986, it seemed poised to be as surefire a hit as there was that year. The fact that it was based on a short story by popular horror novelist Stephen King was tangential to its prospects -- in fact, you could argue that most people didn't even know that, since the movie itself is not a horror. What drew audiences -- both young and old -- was the promise of nostalgia for 1959, with a soundtrack full of popular period hits, and the type of relatable coming of age story with just enough genuine danger to seem edgy.

For children of the 1980s, it was no surprise that our parents were interested -- my dad was 20 in 1959, my mom 16. But I don't think we even needed that connection to be interested ourselves, just as we didn't need that connection to be fans of A Christmas Story, set about 15 years earlier. We just wanted to see a good story told well, regardless of who was starring in it, and when it was set. (I'll try to ignore the fact that River Phoenix was probably considered a heartthrob then the way Robert Pattinson is considered a heartthrob today, and be content granting my generation a certain purity in its interest in Stand By Me.)

Something makes me doubt that today's young viewers have that same pioneering spirit.

Nearly 25 years later, Reiner is directing another film that will earn obvious comparisons to Stand By Me, even though the subject matter seems to dwell in the considerably lighter territory of first crushes (whereas Stand By Me dealt with poking corpses, dodging trains and evading bullies with switchblades). Flipped, which opens today, is set in 1962, a mere three years after Stand By Me. But the passage of a quarter century makes it feel like it took place 100 years before that, practically speaking.

Simply put, Flipped feels like a total anomaly. It's been so long since a coming of age story set 50 years ago has received such a wide release and been so heavily marketed, that my wife and I were left scratching our heads when we saw the trailer. Before we figured out why we were flabbergasted, we were reaching for the right description of the trailer we saw -- what was wrong with it that flummoxed us so much.

Well, there was nothing wrong with it. Flipped looks like it might be cute, even good, though Reiner hasn't been the same director in the past decade as he was previously. (It's no coincidence that the poster says "From the director of Stand By Me and When Harry Met Sally" -- two movies that came out in the 1980s.)

What was wrong with it was this: It seemed like a relic from another era. Something subtle has changed in our collective viewing habits, such that this kind of movie has almost disappeared from the landscape.

Yep, the 20th century period piece is officially an endangered species.

Period pieces from other centuries are endangered to an extent, too. But you're always going to find people interested in costume dramas, if only for their high production values and classical subject matter. Conversely, the interest in movies with '57 Chevys and doo-wop singers seems destined to dwindle and dwindle until there's nothing left. In fact, I think we may have already reached that point. The weekend box office for Flipped will render some kind of judgment on that.

Flipped is not the first movie that has created this kind of reaction in me. I remember thinking the same thing when I saw the trailers for My One and Only, last year's Renee Zellwegger vehicle that's set in 1953. I remember thinking, "Who wants to watch that kind of movie in this day and age?" Sure enough, few people did -- despite the presence of Zellwegger, the film couldn't scare up $2.5 million at the domestic box office. Other years have likely featured other anomalies like My One and Only, but the fact is, I don't remember them off the top of my head -- which speaks to the very point I'm making.

At least with that film, however, the studio viewed it as a marginal commodity to begin with, not sinking very much into advertising. (That film was also released in August, which may be deemed a suitable month to gamble on this kind of movie.) Flipped is different in that it has been backed by a genuine awareness campaign. The trailer played before the popular summer movies directed at young people (I believe we saw it before Toy Story 3), and there are hundreds of billboards up around Los Angeles. Warner Brothers is throwing all its weight behind this movie, and we're about to find out whether it was a smart move.

So why can't today's kids take an interest in Flipped? Maybe all they need is one good, memorable movie of 1950s-early 1960s nostalgia, and it will kick off a wave of others, just as any other thematic trend comes out of nowhere and takes hold. But I kind of doubt that. Maybe I'm just turning into a curmudgeon (at the ripe old age of 36), but I think it's hard to grow up in an era when you're so surrounded by high-tech gadgets, and have the same kind of appreciation for low-tech stories. And it's not like this generation is the first to lose some of its focus. Where we were watching Stand By Me in 1986, the generation before us would have been losing themselves in a book rather than a movie. Bloggers blogging in 1986 would have called our generation lazy for needing to have visual stimuli do the work of creating characters and settings for us, rather than leaving that up to our imaginations, as would be the case if we were reading.

It's only logical that people want to see movies that have at least a tangential overlap with their experiences. That's why I expect another film that opens today, Middle Men, to do significantly better than Flipped. Middle Men, about the advent of internet porn, is set in the 1990s, a time that's recent enough for today's viewers to remember, but old enough that it's starting to seem like a distinctly different era. The early years of the internet seem like a terrific period subject to get today's viewers, since many of them have witnessed the massive transformation of the medium in their own lives. That increasingly less familiar sound of an old dial-up modem will still resonate with viewers for a few more years, enough to make them laugh and nod their heads in recognition. Period pieces will never go away entirely -- it really just depends what period is most relevant to the viewers.

And to end on a slightly more positive note, I think it may actually be the 1950s and early 1960s themselves that are at a peculiar disadvantage in this discussion. Let's face it, this was a relatively boring decade plus in the United States. The Eisenhower administration was a remarkably stable time, a Korean War here and there notwithstanding. Music was light and fluffy, people seemed innocent. Movies set just ten years earlier will probably continue to resonate with people long after the 1950s have become a permanently square topic for mainstream films. In the 1940s, you had World War II, and the post-Depression hardscrabble existence being experienced by most Americans.

Maybe the problem with movies set in the 1950s and early 1960s is the absence of conflict. Because after all, isn't that one of the basic cornerstones of narrative filmmaking -- conflict? The more epic the better? This era was bookended by periods of heavy conflict -- World War II on one side, Vietnam on the other. What came in the middle was just pompadour haircuts and waitresses on rollerskates.

So if I'm saying the Twilight generation doesn't want to watch something because it's too frivolous, well, I guess that's about the best compliment I can give them. And if true, it's quite the paradox indeed.

Literally nothing they won't remake

I enjoy days when I don't have a specific post planned for that morning, because it gives me the flexibility to be shocked enough into writing an impromptu post later in the day.

Today is one of those days, as I just discovered that I Spit On Your Grave has been remade, and will be released worldwide this fall.

Criticizing remakes has been all the rage on the film blogosphere, to such an extent that you are now more likely to see posts that defend remakes. This is both a form of backlash, and a form of anti-snobbery that I think we can all appreciate. I find myself in the latter category, as I feel good every time I re-assert my appreciation for "low culture" and its potential to be extremely pleasing in its own right.

But it doesn't mean I can't register shock every once in awhile about exactly how far things have come.

I Spit On Your Grave? Really?

I've had occasion to discuss the 1978 original a couple times on my blog already. (Check out my label for it if you're interested.) So you already know I find the film interesting -- and that I feel a significant amount of guilt in saying this, because I know many people find it loathsome.

So today's outrage is not because I think the evil of that graphic, bloody exploitation movie is being re-released on the world. In fact, my outlook on it probably shouldn't even be characterized as outrage, but rather, disbelief. There's no morality attached to my perspective at all -- there's simply a surprise about the business decision that allowed this film to be greenlit.

Granted, it's not starring anyone I've ever heard of. (Though looking at this production still, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that Nicole Kidman was the star -- tell me you don't think that looks like Kidman.) Granted, Anchor Bay Entertainment is not exactly a major distributor. (Though I'd certainly heard of them.) And granted, it premiered at horror festivals earlier this year, meaning that it was looked upon somewhat marginally.

But the fact that it exists at all shows you just how far name recognition will get you.

I mean, just look what Roger Ebert wrote about the original: "The story of 'I Spit on Your Grave' is told with moronic simplicity. These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit." He called the movie "a vile bag of garbage ... without a shred of artistic distinction. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life."

As indicated above, I don't necessarily agree with the strident nature of Ebert's comments. But let's just say I never thought I would have to be discussing a remake of it. The movie seems to be particularly a product of its place and time, which is not to say that the late 1970s were a time when hillbillies regularly gang-raped innocent women. Just that it was made at a time when exploitation movies had the potential to exist as fodder for intellectual discussion. Exploitation movies made today would not seem to have the same possible sociopolitical relevance ... though I guess I can't really say that for certain until we're 30 years removed from today.

I just watched the trailer, and it looks pretty legit -- high production values (which the first film did not have) that look completely in line with the post-Saw, post-Hostel standard. It's not such a surprise that it's being marketed as a straightforward horror/torture porn -- I guess that's probably more or less how the original was marketed, but I was only five at the time it came out, so even if I'd managed to see the trailer somehow, I wouldn't have had much to compare it to. It also has a legit writer, Jeffrey Reddick, who created the Final Destination series. With Meir Zarchi, who directed the original, serving as a producer, it's possible it could be a competent film that still has the outrageous quality that Zarchi brought to the original.

Far more likely is that it will blend in with a dozen other anonymous torture porns that appear to promote violence against women. In fact, come to think of it, the worst fate for the I Spit On Your Grave remake is not for it to be too shocking -- it's for it to be too boring.

I guess we'll find out on October 8th.

A study in contrasts

Charlie St. Cloud had a pretty ho-hum opening weekend, especially for what the studio was hoping from a Zac Efron movie. It picked up $12.4 million, which projects to a likely final total in the vicinity of $30 to $40 million.

Whether that was a factor in the following decision or not, sure enough, as I was driving home from work on Monday, the ten-story Charlie St. Cloud poster I wrote about last week was being systematically removed, a mere 7 to 10 days after it was originally erected. As I passed by at 65 mph, the guys on their window washer's lift were down to just the final ribbons of the right side of Efron's face. And yesterday, the building was back to what it had always been, as seen above. (Note: After posting this, I just realized I took a picture of the wrong building. I was going to let it go, but I didn't want those of you who compared and contrasted to think I was crazy. Or lying.)

It's not so unusual, I guess. All movie advertising is geared toward the opening weekend, after which it is assumed that the film -- unless it's really special, which Charlie St. Cloud isn't -- will get eclipsed by the latest and greatest new release. It's an endless cycle with very predictable outcomes, as reflected in a steady box office decline that's so reliable, it could probably come with its own mathematical formula. They could have left the Charlie St. Cloud poster up for another week, but to what purpose? Just because it was such an effort to put it up in the first place? No, this is the real world -- it's time to move on.

The reason I'm really writing about it today is not because of Charlie St. Cloud, per se, but because of the contrast with another movie advertisement that's just three-tenths of a mile up the 405 freeway.

Specifically, this one:















That's right, your eyes are not deceiving you. That's a poster for Just Wright, which was released on May 14th, nearly three months ago. And though IMDB still lists box office updates for it, which means a scant couple thousand dollars here and there are still trickling in, the movie has not cleared more than a million dollars since the week ending June 6th.

If Charlie St. Cloud is emblematic of the pragmatic approach to advertising, I'm always interested in examples of the opposite approach, which involves essentially abandoning a billboard and continuing to pay rent on it long after the movie in question has come and gone. It's as if time is standing still at the top of this signpost for Hollywood Park Casino -- which I've always found somewhat of a curiosity itself, as the casino is actually located at least a mile or two to the east of the highway, rather than directly underneath, as this sign seems to indicate. (It's actually a racetrack, but I'll use the terminology they use for themselves.)

My best guess is that this is no ordinary advertising space open to the public, that Hollywood Park Casino advertises movies (or other services) in that space that they believe will somehow bring more people to Hollywood Park Casino. However, the only relationships I can see between Just Wright and a gambling facility are pretty flimsy, because you're gambling on horse racing here, not on basketball. If I were being really cynical, I'd say the folks at Hollywood Park are advertising a movie they think will bring more blacks to the casino, because they operate under the theory that blacks are more addicted to gambling than their white counterparts.

But I'd never be that cynical, would I?

Ten years and 25 minutes

This is the seventh in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm trying to figure out if I was crazy for liking movies most people didn't like, by watching them a second time.

It took me nearly ten years to watch the final 25 minutes of Disney's The Kid. Therefore, I spent nearly ten years thinking it's a much better movie than it actually is.

I didn't think I'd missed that many minutes back in the fall of 2000, when I watched the movie on the plane from New York to Los Angeles. I can't remember which trip it was, though I think it was the October one -- the first of two trips (the second coming at New Year's) that convinced me it was time to move to Los Angeles, which I did the following spring. My airline made the strange choice of playing two movies for the five-hour trip, something I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since. However, they started the second movie -- Disney's The Kid -- too late in the trip to be able to finish it.

From the pacing of the narrative, it looked like there were 10, 15 minutes at most remaining in the movie when they shut it off. It had already reached the crisis at the end of the second act, and I had a pretty good idea how the remainder of the third act was going to unfold.

At least, I thought I did. Fast forward ten years.

But before I get to that, let me tell you just how much I liked the 80 minutes of The Kid I did see. Quite simply, I was tickled pink by it. The story follows Russ Duritz (Bruce Willis), a Scrooge-like image consultant living in Los Angeles, who's about to turn 40. He's handsome and successful, and has a pretty almost-girlfriend (Emily Mortimer) whom he keeps disappointing. His world gets shaken up when he is suddenly confronted by the eight-year-old manifestation of himself (Spencer Breslin), who doesn't know how he's gotten there, but is definitely flesh and blood, as everyone else can see him and interact with him. Young Rusty is dumpy and has a lisp, and older Russ can only see bad memories of the child he was. However, it's soon clear that Rusty is there to teach him to be a better person, to remind him of the good parts of himself that he walked away from when he became this allegedly more successful human being.

Sounds Capra-esque if you're being generous, cheesy if you're not, right? Actually, not really. Director Jon Turteltaub gives the proceedings a lot of heart, but it's Breslin who steals this show. The child actor -- who was also great in the second Santa Clause movie -- has impeccable comic timing for being so young. Almost everything he says or does inspires giggles, and he gets the most out of Willis, who has always been good when acting harried. Their odd couple pairing is highly watchable, and Mortimer has great chemistry with both of them, most notably young Breslin. Add in a funny turn from the great Lily Tomlin as Russ' assistant and a nice cameo from Jean Smart as a local anchorwoman, and you've got a warm family movie that actually reminds adults of a time when they didn't feel so cynical toward movies with simple and heartfelt messages.

Okay, so that was the part I saw.

(Spoilers, as if you care ...)

Right around the time the airline shut off the video for landing, what would have happened is that Russ and Rusty would have driven through a tunnel somewhere in Los Angeles, and come out the other side wearing 1968 clothing and driving a 1968 Porsche convertible (as opposed to Russ' 2000 Porsche convertible). Then they would have driven to a schoolyard to witness young Rusty fight a bully -- a bully who knocked him over with one punch the first time these events played out, directly resulting in years of loserdom. Of course, since old Rusty has taught young Rusty to fight in the few days they've been hanging out, now young Rusty beats up the bully -- which doesn't seem to be the exact right message, but this isn't the worst part. Then it turns out that this is not the crucial moment that made Russ such a self-loather -- it turns out that Rusty got in trouble for winning this fight (but did he actually win the first time? I'm confused) and that his cancer-stricken mother had to report to the school to pick him up. Then later on, his father shakes him and says "Are you trying to kill her more quickly?" or something similarly scarring. Apparently, the adult realization that he wasn't responsible for his mother's death (mind you, none of this had been discussed in the film until this point) is the trigger to starting to approach his life differently. Russ and Rusty end up at Santa Monica Airport at a diner called the Skyway Diner, where they see an alternate version of Russ as a mustachioed pilot, with the dog that young Rusty always said he wanted, and Mortimer's Amy in tow as his wife. Call me crazy, but this mustachioed Bruce Willis does not really seem like an improvement on the one we've known throughout the movie -- he just looks cheesier.

The whole movie is based on a fantastical premise, of course -- we're supposed to believe that Russ is being visited by an eight-year-old version of himself, and that several other people accept this on face value. However, as far as suspension of disbelief goes, it's a lot easier to accept this one basic premise than to have to accept the second one, that Russ kind of time travels back to his own childhood, and this creates an alternate timeline for Russ that may just be imaginary. We never quite understand in what reality pilot Russ with the mustache exists, and where that Russ goes. But young Rusty does finally disappear, and old Russ makes amends with Amy. The end.

So yeah, I really didn't like the ending. And so for the last ten years, I've been praising this movie a lot, when I should have been praising it only a little. How much did I praise it? Well, I ranked the first 80 minutes of Disney's The Kid as my 12th favorite movie of 2000. Out of the 58 I saw in time to qualify. Want to know what titles finished behind it in the rankings? How about Requiem for a Dream at #13? How about The Cell at #17? (Both of those would be top 10 if I re-did the rankings today.) How about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at #20? Yeah, I'll call myself out when it's justified.

So thank goodness for Double Jeopardy, as I can finally finish watching Disney's The Kid, and finally set the record straight -- in my own head, at least.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Disney's The Kid: If the movie had wound down in the present tense with merely the conventional "Look what we can learn from the innocence of a child" message, it would have been a real winner, rather than just okay.

The 1970s: Psychiatry, nuclear paranoia and machine guns

About a month ago, I pledged to proactively broaden my film viewing, back into the pre-1980s decades that are less well represented in my collection of movies watched. I announced a plan to randomly choose from the six decades between the 1920s and the 1970s at the start of each new month, watch three movies from that decade in the coming month, write about them at the end, and then blindly select from the remaining decades for the next month. I'm calling this feature Decades.

For my first month in July, I randomly selected the 1970s and got right to work. However, I must say, it was not the enthralling experience I expected it to be. Part of that surely had to do with the fact that the 1970s are a relatively easy decade for this project, since I'd probably watch one movie from the 1970s every month anyway. As a matter of fact, I was worried I'd accidentally exceed three 1970s movies during the month of July, which would kind of dilute the purpose of the exercise. The other unintended consequence was that I found myself consciously avoiding movies from earlier decades, feeling like I should save them until the month they actually come up to bat. This kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise in a different way -- if my goal is to see more older movies, I should hardly be shying away from viewings just because they don't adhere to some arbitrary structure I've put in place. Lastly, I found that an entire decade is kind of a large period -- the films I chose felt very arbitrary in the sense that they couldn't be concentrated down into some overarching theme. The original point wasn't to have a theme, but as I got started, I felt like maybe it should have been.

Oh well. Let's see how the rest of the decades go. For now, I've committed to at least one run-through of the exercise -- to five more months that will take me up to the end of the year. Then I've got an interesting variation on this idea that I'll debut for the start of 2011.

But let's not be sticks in the mud before the Decades project has even started. And let's kick right into what I watched last month:

High Anxiety (1977, Mel Brooks). Watched: Friday, July 9th.

This film had actually not been on my radar at all until I watched a different film a couple weeks earlier: Reign Over Me, starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. In that movie, their characters go to a Mel Brooks film festival, at which they watch four classics: Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie and ... High Anxiety? I hadn't heard of that last one.

So when I saw it at the library just a couple days after the start of this project, I knew it would make a funny Friday night viewing for my wife and me. Never mind that it wasn't exactly what someone thinks of when they refer to a "70s movie."

Well, it did -- sort of. The ratio of laughs to minutes was fairly low for this, one of Brooks' later parodies -- a parody of Hitchcock films, as the poster above no doubt indicates. That's a pretty fruitful subject, but I found many of the jokes to be somewhat obvious. Not to mention the fact that there were occasional long stretches between what even Brooks himself would probably characterize as a joke. So the pace was kind of sluggish overall, and I found myself falling asleep toward the end. Still, Brooks definitely hits a couple times in this film. There's one funny scene in particular in which Harvey Korman as a corrupt psychiatrist is trying to prove symptoms of insanity in a patient to the new doctor overseeing his institute (Brooks). Every time Brooks' back is turned, he torments the patient in a way that will bring out the symptoms -- each time hiding his antics before Brooks looks around. It's great comic timing, which is the hallmark of Brooks' best work.

The China Syndrome (1979, James Bridges). Watched: Saturday, July 10th.

Since I wasn't aware until sometime in the mid-1990s that Michael Douglas even existed before Romancing the Stone, this is one of those movies that would have surprised me if I'd seen it back then, since Douglas was a successful producer back in the early days -- something I found counterintuitive for an actor who wasn't even established yet. (You're supposed to act first, then graduate to producing). He produced The China Syndrome, and also co-stars (with Jane Fonda) as a cameraman who uncovers evidence of an accident at a nuclear power plant while filming a random puff piece for the local news.

When some of you commented on the post where I introduced the Decades idea, one commenter listed The China Syndrome as a "no-brainer" for films from the 1970s I should have seen. So I put it at the top of my queue, and received it soon after the project started.

We really enjoyed it. It was a good thematic successor to the paranoia trilogy made my Alan J. Pakula earlier in the decade, what with a major social issue and shadowy unseen figures trying to hide their underlying corruption at all costs. At the same time, we noticed that its pacing was a lot more languid than today's thrillers would have been -- in that way, it is very recognizable as a product of its era. This isn't to say it was at all lacking. The idea of the China syndrome itself -- a nuclear reactor having such a catastrophic meltdown that it burrows itself into the earth, where it would next materialize in China (though that's clearly an exaggeration) -- still has potential relevance to us today, in a way that other Cold War movies about Russian nuclear attacks probably no longer do. (Though I think I would still feel tense watching WarGames.) I also enjoyed watching Douglas, Fonda, and especially Jack Lemmon at work.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, Peter Yates). Watched: Thursday, July 29th.

My third movie also made it onto my queue by virtue of being recommended (and then seconded) in the comments section of my first post. However, it was supposed to be The Long Goodbye, which also came from that comments section. But even though Blockbuster (yes, I'm still hanging on to my Blockbuster account) listed both films as available, Eddie Coyle leap-frogged The Long Goodbye in the queue and got shipped to me first -- at which point I drove The Long Goodbye down lower onto the queue, so it wouldn't become my fourth 1970s movie of July, as previously discussed.

I first started watching The Friends of Eddie Coyle almost two weeks ago, but clearly wasn't in the mood for it that night, as I abandoned it after five minutes and opted for something quite different: The Cell, as discussed here. It took me another week to start watching it again, at which point I split it over the course of two sittings. Hey, that happens sometimes.

This is pretty much the raw and gritty 1970s movie I imagine when I think of raw, gritty 1970s movies. No one gets away clean in this movie of low-level gun runners, bank robbers, and cops who will make false promises to the low-level gun runners in order to try to get the bank robbers. The principle of honor among thieves is put majorly to the test over the course of the narrative, much of which centers around a sting set up to capture a guy who peddles machine guns. There really isn't anyone to root for, per se, but Robert Mitchum's Eddie Coyle is as close as one gets to that, in part because he makes his sad sack so human. The film coalesces from a couple distinct narratives into one as the film moves on, but it's still a very downbeat, quiet kind of movie, with a different definition of what constitutes catharsis. It's serious and sad. As an added bonus, it's set in and around Boston, where I grew up, so it was fun to see the scenery as it looked in the year I was born.

Onward and upward ...

So, which decade awaits in August? Drum roll please, as I dig my hand into my sack of choices ...

Backwards it is. The 1960s are up next.

Randomness is more fun when it comes out more random, don't you think?

Flickchart at 80,000

I've written about Flickchart a number of times on my blog, but I don't think I've written about it very much since I started getting more followers. Therefore, I thought it was definitely time for another plug.

Flickchart (www.flickchart.com) is a brilliantly addictive site where you can rank all the movies you've ever seen, in the form of an endless succession of one-on-one duels. You get one movie poster presented on the left, and one on the right. You click the movie you like better. It's that simple (or deliciously complicated, depending on how much you want to agonize over your choices). Over time, these choices develop into a list of preferences ranked from highest to lowest, and using filters, you can get beyond the list of the most popular movies, into Flickhchart's bottomless database of obscure films you've never heard of. Which is getting bigger all the time. (How can something with no bottom get bigger? I digress.)

The obsession for me started last October, and since then, I've been writing about the site at intervals on my blog. I've been stopping to record my rankings offline every 10,000 duels -- you know, just in case Flickchart goes dark one day -- and usually pick those stopping points as a time to praise some aspect of the site. But as I just passed 80,000 duels and couldn't think of anything particularly interesting to say, I thought I'd use this milestone to take you on an abbreviated tour of my rankings, just to get some discussions flowing and show you where I stand on a random selection of the films I've seen.

But since I'm ranking 2,876 films at the moment, it's going to necessarily be a pretty cursory tour. What I thought I would do is give you my top-ranked film, then give you the films ranked every 100th film from there on out (#100, #200, etc.). When I get to 2,876, I'll stop.

Ready?

1) Raising Arizona (1987, Joel & Ethan Coen). There are possibly 10-20 films that could legitimately take the top spot. For now, I'm comfortable with this one.

100) The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola). Many will consider this too low. I may consider it too high -- for me personally, anyway. Discuss.

200) Natural Born Killers (1994, Oliver Stone). Ostentatiously stylish film. Ranked about right.

300) Waking Ned Devine (1998, Kirk Jones). Before the Full Monty knockoffs started going downhill.

400) The Triplets of Belleville (2003, Sylvain Chomet). Delightfully outside-the-box animated film that's almost dialogue-free. Could go higher in these rankings.

500) The Man With Two Brains (1983, Carl Reiner). "It's pronounced 'Hfuhruhurr.'"

600) The Day After (1983, Nicholas Meyer). Technically a TV movie. Its inclusion on this list should make me feel shame. Then again, it's scary as shit.

700) Ordinary People (1980, Robert Redford). Don't really remember this. #700 is probably too high, but it's being accorded a general level of respect for winning best picture, I guess.

800) The House Bunny (2008, Fred Wolf). Oddly enough, I think this could be higher on this list.

900) The Earrings of Madame de ... (1953, Max Ophuls). Watched in film class back in college. Don't remember.

1000) Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, John Cameron Mitchell). First movie I saw in the theater after 9/11. Also saw it performed live off Broadway, which I liked better.

1100) A Perfect World (1993, Clint Eastwood). Remember this simultaneously being sort of interesting and very flawed.

1200) Australia (2008, Baz Luhrmann). Contrary to the popular sentiment, I actually have a decent affection for this film.

1300) What Happened Was ... (1994, Tom Noonan). Second title on this list that ends in an ellipses. Weird little indie about an awkward date. Pretty good.

1400) Bruce Almighty (2003, Tom Shadyac). I like this film less the more I think about it.

1500) Boys Don't Cry (2000, Kimberly Peirce). I'm sensing some shock from you. I wanted to like this movie more than I actually liked it.

1600) Torch Song Trilogy (1988, Paul Bogart). Paul Bogart was also the name of my high school drama teacher, but I don't think it's the same guy. Hey, two gay-themed movies in a row.

1700) Michael (1996, Nora Ephron). Uninspired but inoffensive middle-of-the-road pap from Nora Ephron.

1800) All Over the Guy (2002, Julie Davis). And that's three out of four gay-themed movies. You'd think I was gay, but I'm not. Then again, they're ranked in the second half of my list. So, I saw them, but I gave them uninspired rankings. What does that mean?

1900) Down With Love (2003, Peyton Reed). Forgettable romantic comedy set in the 1950s, starring Ewan McGregor and Renee Zellwegger.

2000) Blindness (2008, Fernando Mereilles). I expected a lot more from the director of City of God and The Constant Gardener.

2100) I Spit on Your Grave (1978, Meir Zarchi). As discussed here, I may actually like this infamously hated movie better than this ranking suggests.

2200) The Hurricane (1999, Norman Jewison). A ranking anomaly caused by this film being entered into the database very recently, and not having had many duels. Could be a thousand spots higher.

2300) Primal Fear (1996, Gregory Hoblit). I don't really like this movie that's known as Edward Norton's breakout, but this ranking is probably too low.

2400) The Man in the Iron Mask (1998, Randall Wallace). This movie should have gotten a box office bounce by being the first theatrical release for Leonardo DiCaprio after Titanic. It didn't.

2500) Wrongfully Accused (1998, Pat Proft). One of Leslie Nielsen's horrible late-career spoof movies. Just about perfectly ranked.

2600) Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985, George P. Cosmatos). This movie is probably not quite as moronic as I remember it being. Or maybe it's even more moronic. But hey, I really liked First Blood.

2700) The Lawnmower Man (1992, Brett Leonard). Ha, I just talked about this on my blog two weeks ago.

2800) One Missed Call (2008, Eric Valette). Simply abysmal.

And, drum roll please ...

2876) Lord of War (2005, Andrew Niccol). Lord of War is not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it's very, very bad. Even when all the horrible movies above it have filtered down to their correct spots through the ongoing duel process, this could still be in the bottom 20.

That was fun. Maybe I'll do it again at 90,000.