Famous Flops: Bamboozled

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, where I watch one movie per month that was considered a financial or critical failure and see if it deserved to be so shunned.

When Spike Lee turns off viewers, it can be for one of two reasons: 1) The subject matter is too in-their-face, and they just don't want to pick up what Lee is putting down; 2) The movie is simply poorly made.

Lee does have a few in the second category (She Hate Me, Red Hook Summer), but the ones people remember are the ones that just pushed their buttons in the wrong way.

I knew Bamboozled would be an example of Lee alienating his potential audience through excessively strident commentary, but I wanted to see if it was also a hack job.

Before I tell you what I thought, though, I should let you know why Bamboozled stopped some people from even seeing it in the first place.

Lee's 2000 film is about an Ivy League-educated black television writer who inadvertently revives the minstrel show, a highly racist variety program in which black actors wore blackface and acted the fool for an hour while perpetuating the most pernicious racial stereotypes imaginable.

But see, he was trying to prove a point, and it just went too far.

Damon Wayans portrays Pierre Delacroix, who is tired of the latent racism he must deal with on a daily basis from execs at his network. When they demand that he create a network hit that will appeal to black audiences, he sets out to create the most offensive show he can imagine, envisioning that this gross error in judgment will lead to his immediate firing (and therefore allow him to work at another network without breaching his contract by quitting).

Of course, as must happen in any good satire, the show is unexpectedly greenlit and becomes a huge hit, even turning blackface into a nationwide fad.

And yes, Bamboozled IS a good satire. In fact, I ended up thinking it was sort of great until the last 15 minutes or so, when it downgraded itself to merely very good.

But you can see why the movie turned off critics and audiences alike. It's a fair question to ask whether putting so many of these offensive stereotypes on display, even to discredit them in no uncertain turns, does more damage and gives them more power than if they were permanently marooned in obscurity. I mean, the minstrel show takes place in a watermelon patch, for God's sake.

I come down on the same side it would appear Lee came down on: It's better to confront this ugly history head on, to educate as a way to never repeat, than to pretend none of this ever happened. If you watched Bamboozled and came down on a different side, I guess couldn't blame you.

The one thing I don't want you to do is write it off as a misfire that shouldn't be seen. In order to make this film, Lee had to struggle with many of these same questions himself. And you know it was a struggle. This is a man who stretches to find signs of racism even when most people would agree it's not there. To contribute to the introduction of images of racial hatred that a new generation can't unsee ... it must have damn near killed the man.

Good thing he has so much interesting to say, and handles it so deftly. You can see just how much the elements of Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show horrify those involved, and the film is practically brimming with viewer surrogates. If you're not Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson, the prospective stars of the show, giving each other sideways glances during the pitch meeting, or if you're not Jada Pinkett-Smith, Delacroix's assistant, biting her tongue so as not to jump out of her seat, then you're certainly a room full of white television writers, exclaiming in disbelief when notified that the show will be set in a watermelon patch.

What's so deft about Lee's commentary -- before it goes a bit overboard -- is how it shows us how tricky satire can be, both in reference to the Mantan show and to the very film he's making right now. There's a fine line between criticizing something and celebrating it, just as there's a fine line between getting paid by the man, and getting played by him. Lee's movie clearly suggests that some Hollywood actors -- Will Smith actually gets named -- aren't much better than the jive-talking "porch monkeys" seen on the Mantan show, given that their primary value to a movie exec is to be sassy and bring in black audiences. (I would not use the term "porch monkey" myself, except that the Mantan show's outrageous name for its musical accompaniment is The Alabama Porch Monkeys.) Lee points the finger at certain black superstars for being complicit in their own dehumanization, even (and perhaps especially) if they're earning millions of dollars in the process.

So I can see why Bamboozled pisses of big-name black actors, and I can see why it pisses off anyone who is predisposed to hating Lee, but I can't see why it pisses off anyone who likes to struggle with issues of modern racial identity the way Lee struggles with them here. If you want a movie that'll make you think, Bamboozled will do just that.

Before I wrap up, I did want to address the issue of whether Bamboozled was poorly made, from a technical standpoint. At first I thought it might be, or at the very least, that I had to adjust my picture settings on my TV. See, the movie was shot mostly on Mini DV digital video to keep the production costs down. This gives it a grainy look, much rougher than what you'd expect from a seasoned filmmaker. And initially it was displeasing to me.

When I realized that the film's look was a function of the medium in which it was shot -- and that this medium was likely a necessity of having subject matter that couldn't get much financial backing -- I shrugged off the surface aesthetic unpleasantness of it. In fact, Lee makes some interesting stylistic choices with his film stock, using digital video for all the "real" scenes and film for the actual footage of Mantan's show. That choice worked for me.

The whole movie worked for me, really.

In October I'm going to go with a fairly obvious choice, if I can get my hands on it here in Australia: Cutthroat Island, the movie that single-handedly bankrupted Carolco Pictures and effectively ended the careers of Renny Harlin and Geena Davis (though both have continued to work in less prominent capacities).

If I can't get my hands on it, well, it'll be something else.

Spiraling downward, spiraling upward

There was going to be a theme to Monday's double feature one way or another.

If I'd piggybacked a free viewing of The East onto my paid viewing of Blue Jasmine, it would have been a double feature devoted to rich crooks getting what's coming to them.

Frances Ha started ten minutes later and was 30 minutes shorter, so it won out, making for a double feature that included one Woody Allen movie and one that pays homage to Allen (specifically the black and white cinematography of Allen's earlier works, notably Manhattan).

The real theme of the double feature, though, was probably this: women whose lives are coming unraveled, and what they do to try to halt the downward spiral.

If you don't want to know any more about Blue Jasmine and Frances Ha, stop reading now.

I'll say it upfront: Blue Jasmine is one of Woody Allen's darkest films. It concerns the widow of a Ponzi schemer who hanged himself in prison, played by Alec Baldwin, who is turned out into the world without any of the money she once relied on for daily creature comforts. This forces her to throw herself into the care of her sister, unrelated by blood because they were both adopted, who lives in San Francisco with a fiance who is anything but Jasmine Francis caliber. This despite the fact that Jasmine and her husband lost every penny that her sister Ginger and Ginger's ex-husband had invested with them. The structure of the story has been compared frequently and quite justifiably to A Streetcar Named Desire.

At first, Frances Ha runs the risk of seeming as frivolous as Blue Jasmine is heavy. It's a character study of a feckless 27-year-old Brooklyn hipster named Frances, who spends the first third of the movie bouncing from one quirky episode to another among fellow Brooklyn acquaintances. Just when you are starting to get annoyed by what seems like a steep decline in ambition on writer-director Noah Baumbach's part, you start to get a real idea about the consequences of Frances' flightiness, lack of drive and lack of accountability. She has a fight with her best friend, who functions really more as a love interest in what becomes a romantic comedy/drama between two heterosexual women. From here her living situations and work prospects become increasingly more dour as she stumbles onto a path toward actual ruin.

It wouldn't have surprised me if you told me that Baumbach's movie had the bleak ending, and Allen's found a light at the end of the tunnel. Baumbach's most recent film, Greenberg, is almost unremittingly acerbic (though I loved it), while Allen's most recent film that I've seen, Midnight in Paris, delivers a big ol' happy ending (though I didn't love it).

Well, the two have switched now.

It's with something close to sadism that Allen documents Jasmine's decline. For starters, Jasmine is almost impossible to like. Her few gestures toward emotional charity are almost immediately neutralized by some careless remark or action, and even the realization that she's being difficult or unkind doesn't change her approach to the next similar situation. We do sympathize with her from time to time, as when she is working dutifully to be the best dental receptionist she can be, but is sexually harassed and eventually assaulted by her boss. However, she's the epitome of a one step forward, two steps back type of person, as she eventually does meet someone who could deliver her back to the life of privilege she so desires, but she screws it up through a number of deceptions that are of debatable necessity. This leaves her, devastatingly, broken and alone on a park bench, talking to herself.

Meanwhile, Frances is pretty likable, though you do want to shake her sometimes because her social half measures seem in some ways more damaging than simple bad behavior. This too has consequences. It becomes clear pretty early that France is a hopeless case, and consequently, she has a number of trials to endure. There's the loss of her hipster best friend to a preppy square who intends to marry her and domesticate her. There's the loss of her paid apprenticeship in a dance company because, though the head of the dance company won't say it, she's just not good enough. There's the eventual loss of her ability to continue living in New York because she no longer has the money, which culminates in a humiliating job back on her college campus at Vassar, pouring wine at school galas. But the ending of the movie is there, just waiting to provide her salvation. As if by an unseen deus ex machina, she gets her shit together, forms her own (low-level) dance troupe that achieves the acclaim of her former boss, makes up with her best friend, and secures her own New York apartment -- albeit in the less glamorous neighborhood of Washington Heights.

The movies are each other's polar opposites, in a way. Blue Jasmine has realism on its side when it comes to the facts of the case, of what happens to these characters, while Frances Ha can claim no such realism. However, Frances Ha has more emotional realism, which is why I ultimately preferred it.

What Frances Ha does so well, without having to put too fine a point on it, is to illustrate the severe failings of a dream mentality we can all sometimes get swept up in. There's some part of the dream that's attainable, but not quite enough, resulting in painful near misses. Take the episode where Frances impulsively decides to correct the fact that she's never been to Paris, using access to a free place to stay while she's there to excuse putting an impossibly large sum of money on a credit card for her last-minute tickets. Because she has to be back by Monday morning, she goes for only two days, so spends the entire time awake at night and asleep during the day because she can't kick her jet lag. She also keeps trying to get in touch with a friend who is in Paris. We think the friend is blowing her off or isn't even there in the first place, but only when Frances is in a taxi back in New York does she get an excited return voicemail from her friend, who not only wanted to see her but to introduce her to an eligible friend. Meanwhile, while in Paris, Frances missed her estranged friend's going away party prior to leaving for Japan -- an olive branch extended at the last minute, when it was too late.

I related to Frances' situation because I've certainly had times where the best move would have been to just stay still. By trying too hard to fix something, I broke it further. The chapter that follows for Frances -- the humiliating return to her college campus to live in a dorm and work among people six to eight years younger than her -- felt like the true fallout period from an epic emotional mishap.

However, the difference between them that makes Frances worth rooting for and Jasmine worth condemning is that Frances, overall, wants to put good into the world. Jasmine wants to extract whatever she can from that same world, as long as it benefits her.

I guess it's my twin senses of humanism and optimism that make me question whether Jasmine's journey has the ring of emotional truth. It's Allen's intention that we should feel like the ending he's chosen is the right ending, the just ending, for Jasmine -- it seems on some level, then, that he just wants to make his own contribution to a recent genre of movies in which the villains of the financial crisis receive their just desserts. So he has to really prevent us from liking her, and the way he does that is to never allow us to fully endorse anything she does, even though she's our protagonist and we spend the most time with her. Eventually, it rings false.

Any person whose story is worth telling has to be likable enough that they fail because of an epic flaw, some deficit that dooms them to their fate but stands in contrast to many of the good parts about them. Jasmine doesn't have this single flaw that mars an otherwise good person; she's a patchwork of flaws, of angers, of jealousies, of pettinesses. Maybe my problem with Blue Jasmine -- which, I should say, I like only a little less than Frances Ha -- is that Allen shouldn't have structured a story around a person if she was going to be impossible to redeem.

I've intentionally failed to mention the actresses who play these two roles so far. As you know, they are Cate Blanchett and Greta Gerwig, and I'm pretty sure you know which is which. Both do such a superlative job delivering on their director's vision for those characters that I don't think you can give the performance edge to either. As Blanchett's character is more or less based on Blanche DuBois, and Gerwig's is inspired by a hipster mentality in which emotions are purposefully small-scale or ironic (see the entirety of the movie The Comedy), Blanchett clearly has the more Oscar bait moments. But Gerwig may have emotional truth on her side.

And yeah, that could be because she co-wrote her own character. 

My son's first movie

Not everyone can be lucky and have something like Star Wars be the first movie they see in theaters.

Some people, like my son, have to settle for Planes.

I was on the cusp of my fourth birthday when I went to see Star Wars in the summer of 1977. While I can't swear it was the first movie I ever saw in the cinema, I'm pretty sure that it was, and I don't care to ask my parents to have them correct that impression. In any case, neither of them were great cinephiles (though my mom has become something of one), so I doubt they would have pressed me into service any earlier than that.

Me, I'm a different story. I am a cinephile, and I've been waiting for this day to come ever since I took my son to see a Mommy and Me screening of Little Fockers (see here for the account of that) back in December of 2010.

In fact, a movie like Star Wars seems like a rather odd choice to introduce your child to the movies. It would be kind of like taking my son to see Star Trek Into Darkness as his first movie. A bit mature, if you ask me. I mean, stormtroopers are getting blasted left and right, spaceships are exploding (and no one's parachuting safely into space), and one of the most beloved characters disappears to his death after being hit in the side by a lightsaber.

Something like Planes is the more responsible choice, if inevitably less classic.

And so it was earlier this summer that I targeted Planes -- "from the world above Cars" -- as the first movie my son would see at the movies. He loves everything related to Cars, and has since added Cars 2 to his list of conquests. One factor was probably also that I'd willingly leave Planes in the middle if he just couldn't continue in that environment. Well, not willingly, but I'd do it.

The release date -- the U.S. release date, that is -- was also only a couple weeks before his third birthday. I decided that age 3 would be my own line of demarcation between "too young" and "mature enough to watch a movie in theaters."

Truth is, I was probably pushing it, but we'll get to that in a minute.

The Australian release date of Planes was this past Thursday, timed to take advantage of school holidays. In a sign of something you would never see in the U.S., Turbo -- another movie that owes a big debt to Cars -- was also released that day. I haven't found (or looked for) a source to check Australian box office figures, but I'd be surprised if those two movies didn't split their audience and make half the money they could have made if they'd had their own weekend free from competition. That's not to mention Smurfs 2, which opened only a week before, also to take advantage of the aforementioned holidays. My wife explains to me that they wouldn't want to open these films in winter (i.e. July and August) because the kids don't have a break from school providing them an opportunity to drag their parents to one of these movies -- it'd be a bit like opening Smurfs 2 in mid-January or mid-February in the states. I see the point, but I still think it's less than ideal.

Anyway, this did leave the theater less than half full during a prime Saturday afternoon slot at a beautiful art deco theater in nearby Yarraville -- a theater so beautiful that it deserves its own post on another occasion. It was initially going to be an excursion undertaken by just my son and me, giving my wife some time on her own. But she decided it was a milestone she didn't want to miss, so she accompanied us to The Sun in Yarraville for that 1:40 screening.

The strong start

The first chance for my son to react poorly to the situation was when we sat down to a very large image of a racing snail. The trailer for Turbo was on, and how he responded to the cinema-sized image would be key in determining whether he was really ready. His eyes were as wide as saucers, and my wife and I exchanged one of those looks of parental pride that make your children roll their eyes by the time they're 10 or 11.

The 20-minute itch

To my surprise, it was my wife who had to get up to leave the theater first. She did this after only 10 minutes. I figured she needed to use the bathroom -- she's pregnant, so this is a frequent need -- but in fact, she had to text her friend whom we would be visiting after the show for an early dinner. She returned with a bag of Jaffas, a terrific chocolate candy with a thin outer shell that she'd introduced to me back home, having returned with some bags from a solo trip Down Under. Jaffas are a traditional Australian theater snack, and I was overjoyed to be reminded of their existence.

My son was immediately all over the Jaffas, which was fine -- anything to distract him from his itch to get up and walk around the theater. That worked for about two or three minutes. Then my son was scrambling to the floor and trying to make it past one of the two of us -- which one didn't matter.

We each had a turn scooping him back up to his seat, but young children are tough -- they're both very determined and very wriggly. He was going to go wandering, or die trying.

I let him escape to the aisle, where he walked down to the front row and across. The whole front section was empty, so he wasn't bothering anybody, and if this had been one of those Mommy and Me sessions, I wouldn't have cared too much. But it wasn't. I thought maybe he just wanted to sit in a different seat, so I followed him down and plopped him in my lap in the front row. This is, of course, a terrible way to watch a movie, so I was somewhat relieved when that wasn't the cure-all to his fussiness. Soon he was on his feet again, and it was clear that scooping him up again and bringing him back to our seats again was going to be an exercise is Sysiphean futility. 

Only 20 minutes, I thought. We're going to have to leave after only 20 minutes.

There had been mention beforehand that if one of us had to leave with him, I'd be the one to do it, as a treat to her. This, however, was when we thought he might get too fidgety to continue with only 20 minutes or so left. Only 20 minutes in? Well, we had no plan for that.

She ended up taking the initiative to take him outside, and I started to panic a little bit. How long would they be gone? What was I supposed to do? I'll take any chance I can to watch a movie unimpeded, but if they were gone for more than five minutes I knew I'd have to follow them out.

Less than two minutes later, they filed back in, and it was clear my son had a renewed determination to sit still. I don't know what she said, but it worked like magic.

For a while.

The repeated empty threat

Little kids have very short memories, so his resolve to behave himself didn't last the whole movie. Far from it. In fact, it was probably less than ten minutes later that he started to renew his escape attempts.

However, we found we could placate him temporarily by hauling him onto our laps. I also bought him off for a few minutes with a bag of cookies in my pocket. But what really worked was something we both discovered independently of each other:

"Do you want to leave?"

I knew this was an empty threat, because we wouldn't have given up that easily. And he often sees right through our empty threats. But he was apparently enjoying Planes enough that he truly feared we might carry this one out. Each time he was asked this question, he shook his head.

"Okay, then you have to stay in your seat."

And miraculously, he would.

For a while.

Our darkest hour

Everyone knows that a protagonist's darkest hour comes right at the end of the second act, and this was the part of Planes when I faced my own greatest challenge to finishing the movie.

My son just could not be contained anymore, and I decided it was finally time to "parent up" and take a short excursion in the lobby with him. I steeled myself for the idea that it would be a permanent departure from the movie. It's clear he was in exploring mode, and when he scrambled up the stairs outside to some of the third-floor screening rooms, it seemed for certain he'd given up on the movie.

One delightful result of this excursion -- which I should be saving for that theoretical post devoted to The Sun -- is that this theater has a special Hogwarts dining hall room upstairs, which can be booked out for parties. It's maybe 1/20th the size of the "actual" Hogwarts dining hall, but it was all ready for today's party when we got there. Finger sandwiches and other goodies were laid and just waiting for the kids to get out of either Planes or Turbo. To my surprise, my son didn't actually go for any of the food.

When he was content to descend the stairs again, I tried one last attempt at reasoning. I explained that the movie was almost over, and pulled out our sadly overused bribe: I told him he could have a treat afterward if he was good for the rest of the movie.

It cost us an overpriced cupcake at a nearby coffee shop, but we did get to watch the end of the movie.

Thoughts on Planes

It looked gorgeous and had incredibly generic characters and story. That's about all you really need to say.

Conclusion

Although this screening was pretty much a success, my son had nothing to say about it afterward. We kind of expected him to be asking to get his own Dusty Crophopper toy, or talking about a career as a pilot. But all he cared about was the treat. In the end, yes, our son is a little too young to be going to the movies.

So we decided we'll wait another six months before we take him again.

That'll put him close to the age I was when Star Wars left me wanting to grow up to be Luke Skywalker.

A whole different classification

One of the topics I've been concentrating on in my early Australia days is the differences in phrasing.

For example, movies don't have ratings here. They have "classifications."

In fact, there's a little promo that plays before most movies that indicates the importance of making sure a particular film is suited to your children. The tagline is "Check the classification." There is a corresponding website run by the Australian government.

At first I thought it was just Australia trying to be different. I thought "What's wrong with the word 'rating'? Go jump in your lorry and piss off."

Then I got to thinking that "rating" is not a particularly accurate term in the first place. Forget for a second that you have grown up coming to think of film ratings as G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17. Doesn't the word "rating" seems like it should have a lot more to do with how good the movie is than the eyes for which it is intended? "How do you rate that film on a scale of 1 to 10?" That kind of thing.

Neither is "classification" perfect, though. It sounds more to do with genre than appropriateness. I'd say "classification" might be "horror" or "horror comedy" or "horror comedy musical documentary."

So what is the right term? I'll have to think on that.

For now, though, let me explain what the classifications are here in Australia. They're not so surprising, except for some seemingly meaningless distinctions that make them a bit eccentric. There are longer explanations of the classification, but I'll just give the briefer ones that appear when you hover the mouse over the classification on the website.

G - General - "Suitable for everyone."
My comment: No surprises there.

PG - Parental Guidance - "Not recommended for children under 15; may contain some material that children find confusing or upsetting."
My comment: This would be comparable to our PG, but it seems stricter. I don't think anyone would say that our PG movies would provide a challenge to children all the way up to 15. 

M - Mature - "Not recommended for children under 15; may include moderate levels of violence, language or themes."
My comment: Moderate levels of themes -- so, this one has a moderate dose of redemption, while this one has a smidge of overcoming obstacles? I understand the distinction they are trying to make between PG and M, but it would seem more useful if they would change the age cutoff. When both have the same age cutoff but each has a different description of why it's not recommended, it tends to muddy things. Also, "mature" seems too advanced a term for what they are really trying to indicate here. Our equivalent is probably PG-13.

MA15+ - Mature Audiences - "Restricted - unsuitable for persons under 15; may contain strong content."
My comment: Now things are getting a bit screwy. This would also be like our PG-13 except for the term "restricted," which doesn't come into play in our rating system until you get to R, whose cutoff is age 17. Plus, what's the meaningful distinction between the descriptors "mature" and "mature audiences"? Is the first group not a group of movie viewers, but maybe savings bonds? In the fuller description it also says that persons may be required to show proof of age in order to purchase a video game or attend a movie with this classification. So where does that leave us for ...

R18+ - Restricted - "Restricted to adults."
My comment: Okay, so this is our R, and it changes the age to clearly indicate 18. But because the term "restricted" is being used a little loosely -- coming into play as soon as age 15 with the MA:15+ classification -- it begs the question of what does it really mean to "restrict" a person. Especially when there is this classification ...

X18+ - Restricted - "Restricted to adults - contains sexually explicit material."
My comment: This would be our NC-17 ... except that it's actually our XXX. The website goes on to explain "This classification is a special and legally restricted category which contains only sexually explicit content. That is, material which shows actual sexual intercourse and other sexual activity between consenting adults. X18+ films are only available for sale or hire in the ACT and the NT." To translate that last part, only available in the Australian Capital Territory (which includes the country's capital, Canberra) and the Northern Territory (which includes such cities as Darwin and Alice Springs). This means that pornographic movies are part of the conventional classification system, which the NPAA in our country doesn't deign to do. But it's also not as straightforward as it appears to be; I live in Victoria, and I have noted pornographic movies for sale in a video store in downtown Melbourne. Though who knows; maybe the movies I assumed were showing "actual sexual intercourse" were not doing that after all. And where does this leave NC-17? There basically isn't an NC-17 in Australia, unless you consider it to be R18+, which I don't think you do because such films as Hostel and Evil Dead are R18+

Doing a little more searching, it appears that our R's in the U.S. split up between MA15+ and R18+. For example, Kick-Ass and Drive -- both definitely R's in our country -- are MA15+'s here. Each of those movies have at least one scene of such extreme violence that you can't imagine a country, in good conscience, allowing a 15-year-old to see them. Yet Australia does.

It's one of many conundrums about this country, apparent contradictions built into its fabric. In some ways, this is a very conservative country. There is a famously long list of films that were banned in Australia upon first release, including Pink Flamingos, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Salo. The uncut version of Human Centipede II: Full Sequence is still banned, as is A Serbian Film (though I'm pretty sure that's banned in the U.S. also). On the other hand, language standards are considerably more permissive than in the U.S. The local "alternative" music station (called Triple J) regularly plays songs containing profanity, and even DJ's themselves say the word "shit" on the air (just heard this yesterday). Regarding Kick-Ass in particular, the use of the C-word -- considered by some (including me) to be possibly the most universally offensive word in the English language -- permanently removed it from possibly being given a PG-13 in the U.S. Here, some Australians call each other this word in an "affectionate" way -- which may be how Kick-Ass was allowed to get "only" an MA15+.

I'll try to make note of more of these classifications as I see the movies.

As for my alternative term to "classification" and "rating," well, how about "flag"? How is the movie "flagged"?

Eh, I guess I'll leave this one up to the professionals.

Mums and bubs

Still getting used to some of the different terminology here in Australia, but this one wasn't too difficult for me to figure out: "Mums and Bubs."

I know quite well that "Mum" is short for "Mummy" which is a British/Australian translation of "Mommy," because we use it in our house. My wife is "Mummy," not "Mommy." I try very hard to always remember to pronounce the vowel as a U rather than an O, but I rarely change it when reading a storybook that says "Mommy."

"Bub" -- well, we don't use that one, but I've been here long enough (almost a month now) to know that a "bub" is a baby.

So as I was reading up on Hoyts, the predominant cinema chain in Australia, I learned that they have special Mums and Bubs screenings at participating Hoyts locations. They are twice monthly, and the ticket is only $9 for the caregiver (I am the "Mum" in this situation). The child is absolutely free, as long as he or she is under five.

Score, I thought.

I have my son two days a week, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Naturally, the Mums and Bubs sessions are on alternate Thursdays.

Un-score.

So, won't be doing that, at least for now. However, I did look to see which theaters were participating theaters, just to tease myself.

The one in Victoria Gardens, which I will be visiting again soon for more furniture needs from Ikea, is indeed a participating location. However, I had to laugh when I saw the movie they're showing this Thursday:

White House Down.

Now, I know that Mums don't only want to see harmless romantic comedies and movies that they would otherwise be compelled to see with their children anyway. But I had to laugh when I saw that they're encouraging you to bring your young children to see a movie in which terrorists take over the White House and kidnap the president.

The littlest ones will be okay. They'll cry, or be good, or sleep, probably independent of what's actually happening on screen. Though the explosions certainly won't be particularly soothing for a child who's just nodding off.

It's the older ones I wonder about. They say children under 5 get in free. My son just turned 3, and it's already been probably two years since I would have wanted to expose him, even indirectly, to a movie like White House Down. It's only PG-13, not R, but my son has ten more years before he's 13. That's ten years of understanding what's going on in a movie like that but not really being old enough to process it without giving him nightmares.

Though maybe it's just a function of the age we live in. When I was over at a friend's house on Saturday, his eight-year-old son was playing a game on the computer where tanks were blowing up other tanks. I don't mean to suggest I was some crotchety old moralist who was shocked by this commonplace reality of 21st century life ... just that maybe I'm being a crotchety old moralist now by feigning shock over the Mum and Bub screening of White House Down.

Maybe more than anything it seems like a disconnect. Are a bunch of mums with babies hanging off their teat (there's that local lingo again) really going to be that interested in a Roland Emmerich action movie?

Maybe not -- but maybe they would be interested in a Channing Tatum action movie.

And now we're getting somewhere in understanding this ...

What Vance Knew: Next to nothing

I saw the title of the movie What Maisie Knew a couple months ago when it was playing at the Landmark Theater on Pico back in LA. To the extent that I considered it at all, I considered it to be some kind of indie thriller in which a deaf-mute girl had witnessed a murder, and investigators would have to work overtime to figure out what she had seen. I guess a movie like that might be called What Maisie Saw, but I digress.

In other words, I had no idea it was a) based on a Henry James novel from 1897; b) about the effect on a six-year-old girl of a separation between a rock star (Julianne Moore) and an art dealer (Steve Coogan), her parents; c) about to become one of my favorite films of the year.

I've written before about how great it can be to go into a movie knowing nothing about it. What Maisie Knew may be the most pleasure I've gained from a movie I was most indifferent about seeing.

See, the local arthouse theater (30-minute walk) has discount prices on Mondays. That's $6 for movies before 4 p.m. on Monday, whereas the standard price for all other times is a whopping $19. "The cinema has gotten expensive," the ticket clerk admitted to me when I expressed shock that there was no matinee price, before forking over $19 for Beyond the Hills on a Tuesday afternoon at 12:20 a few weeks back. "But we do have special prices on Mondays."

Special indeed. I've never seen such a discrepancy between the regular price and the discount price at a movie theater. In the U.S., usually it's maybe $12.75 for the regular price and $9 for the matinee. At this theater, the regular asking price is one of the highest I've ever seen, and the discount price one of the lowest.

Then and there I decided to see a movie before 4 on Monday, every Monday. It's one of the three days my son is in preschool, so I can easily afford to do it. In fact, I almost can't afford not to do it. Given how expensive everything else is in Melbourne -- I haven't had sticker shock like this since I lived back in New York -- spending $6 to be at a movie for two hours is like saving me from spending twice that on something else. It's like the time I was stranded in Vegas an extra day (the fifth day I was there), and went to see Pay It Forward because I knew I could lose no more than $10 during those two hours.

Last week's Monday movie was easy. I'd been excited to see the new documentary about J.D. Salinger, and it had just opened the Thursday before. (Movies do that here, open on Thursdays.) So catching the first showing of Salinger was a no-brainer.

This past week, I had more of a challenge. I wanted to see something playing early, which limited me to three movies that I hadn't seen/had any inkling to see. The first was Blue Jasmine, but I just wasn't feeling it. The second was Mood Indigo, the new Michel Gondry movie, which apparently doesn't even have a U.S. release date lined up. That detail gave me pause. Besides, the What Maisie Knew start time lined up better, and I liked not knowing anything about it. That can sometimes steer me away from a movie, but it was a draw in this case.

Well, I loved it.

It was immediately clear that directors David Siegel and Scott McGehee had just the right touch in telling an adult story essentially from the perspective of a child. They knew how to make this affecting material touching without being cloying, mature rather than manipulative.

They?

How about she?

What Maisie Knew is filled with very good to great performances, from the always reliable Moore to the increasingly sophisticated dramatist Coogan, from the up-and-comer who's been eluding me (Alexander Sarsgard) to the fresh young face who may just become an up-and-comer (Joanna Vanderham).

But neither Moore nor Vanderham is the "she" I'm talking about.

That she is a young actress named Onata Aprile, who gives quite simply the most naturalistic performance I've seen from a child actor. We're always inclined toward exaggeration when raving about something we love, and sure, Aprile may not be the best performance from a child actor that I've ever seen. But in the post-movie glow that's still clutching me a day later, she sure feels like it.

To know what I'm talking about you really have to see the movie, but it's downright preternatural. Almost all of Aprile's performance is a reaction; she never has to say more than about a sentence at a time. But this is what makes her performance all the more remarkable. The performance -- nay, the whole movie -- relies on the subtle changes in her facial expressions to gain whatever power it has. And since What Maisie Knew has a lot of power, it means Aprile absolutely mastered what was required of her. I doubt she will get an acting nomination at this year's Oscars, simply because What Maisie Knew has ended up being a pretty small movie despite its glowing reviews. She deserves it, though.

I won't go on at length about the languid cinematography, the wrenching plot details or the movie's many glorious tonal grace notes. Those should be for you to discover.

It's too late for you, because if you've read this, you already know a lot more than I did going in.

If that's what it takes for you to see this movie -- to know a little more about What Maisie Knew -- then I'm willing to make the sacrifice. 

Greenbox

So one of the disadvantages of living in Australia is that you have to wait longer for certain movies to come out. I'm not sure when the following movies actually opened here, but they're still playing at the local arthouse theater: Mud, Before Midnight, Beyond the Hills, Upstream Colour (they add the U here) and The Great Gatsby. All of these came out in May or earlier in the U.S.

One of the advantages, however, is that other films come out earlier. Take the Four Weddings and a Funeral ripoff -- frankly, the ripoff of any number of romantic comedies -- called I Give it a Year. I notice it only had its limited theatrical release in the U.S. about a month ago.

Here? I was able to rent it a Greenbox kiosk earlier this week.

Of course, they don't call the Hoyts kiosks "Greenbox" -- not that I know of, anyway, though I haven't discussed it with any Aussies -- but in all other respects these kiosks seem to be following the Redbox model.

A few slight differences:

1) It costs $3.50 to rent a movie for one night, rather than the $1.20 (before taxes) it was costing at Redbox before I left. That price is consistent with the SAM (Standard Australian Markup).

2) You can buy previously viewed copies of movies. Don't think Redbox wastes any of its limited real estate per kiosk on that. Costs are prohibitively high, though, something like $12.99.

3) The extra real estate devoted to previously viewed copies for purchase means there are no random back titles. I don't know how often people rent the Redbox random back titles, but they must do decent business or else Redbox wouldn't bother stocking them.

Even with the increased cost per rental, it's still a savings of something like $1.50 from the standard rental price of a new release at a video store (such as Video Ezy in nearby Flemington, of which I have recently become a member). So I'd be all over these Hoyts kiosks, except ...

... there isn't really one near me. The one from which I rented I Give it a Year is a 35-minute walk, and I'm only making that walk because my son is still in his last days at his old preschool before he moves to the new one around the corner from us. My last day walking him there is Monday. Only last Monday night even made sense as a day to sample the Hoyts kiosk, because I knew I was going to be walking my son back to the area the next day. He's been going to that preschool on Mondays, Tuesdays or Fridays.

However, I wouldn't count me out of the Hoyts game. Was it Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park who said "Life finds a way"? You can paraphrase that quote and apply it to me:

"Movies find a way."

No Bourne in their identity

Hello everyone.

I am simply overflowing with new post ideas, since so much has changed between the way I watched movies in the U.S. and the way I watch them now.

However, computer issues have conspired against me. The biggest is that I have not had regular access to the internet ever since I arrived in Australia. I could get online at my father-in-law's house for my first eight days in town, except the wifi signal was bad in the wing of the house where I would have preferred to do my internetting. I ended up doing most of my internet activities during bouts of insomnia. Then for the past ten days I've been without internet at all at our new house. There was supposed to be a seven-day wait between when my wife ordered it and when it was ready to go. Truth was, only the router came in seven days -- the internet itself was not up for another two days. (You'd think it would be the other way around -- flip a switch and have the internet on almost immediately, then have to wait for the router. It was not the other way around.) Only problem with that was/is, we don't have any phone jacks in our new house, so we can't get DSL until that's resolved.

Then last night my computer wouldn't start. It's been having awkward shutdowns for a couple months now, and I think it finally gave up the motherboard last night. I'm hoping for the best but fearing for the worst.

Without internet on my phone -- which I just picked up on Friday -- I would probably be legitimately crazy, rather than just on the verge of insanity as I am now.

However, I don't want these issues to defeat me, so I am putting up a new post on The Audient today, dammit. It's Monday for me but Sunday for you, and this Monday/Sunday will have a new Audient update.

So let's start with that "welcome to Australia!"-type email I discussed in my last post.

How about we start by telling you how to pronounce the name of the city where I now live?

There are two wrong ways for Americans to pronounce the word "Melbourne," and one right way. Let's start with the wrong ways, one of which is brought to you by the Jason Bourne franchise.

If you pronounce the second syllable of "Melbourne" the way they do it in The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum and The Bourne Legacy, you're doing it wrong.

However, if you go too far in the other direction and under-pronounce the last syllable, you are also doing it wrong. Adam Kempenaar of the Filmspotting podcast, bless his heart, has been trying to say it correctly for a couple years, and not succeeding. He pronounces it as "Melbin."

That would be right -- if he were Australian.

Australians say "Melbin" because their accent leaves them naturally inclined to under-pronounce the letter R. Take the example of one of my first dates with my wife. She was talking about the massive rock formation in the middle of the Australian desert known as Ayers Rock. Because I had never heard of this massive rock formation and because we were in a very loud bar, I thought she was saying "Ez Rock." I knew that sounded ridiculous, but I couldn't figure out what she was actually saying until she spelled it for me.

Adam K. should only be saying "Melbin" if he would also say "Ez Rock." He's essentially doing an impersonation of an Australian accent, which is frowned upon.

The correct way for an American to say "Melbourne" is "Melburn." That way, you still get to deemphasize the second syllable (and thereby avoid sounding like a dorky American), but no one can accuse you of doing your best Paul Hogan impression either.

Even though I know this, I still have my own mishaps. The other day I was talking about a street called Bourke Street, and I was pronouncing it Bork, like the failed candidate for a seat on the Supreme Court under the first President Bush. (Robert Bork, he was.) I should have known, following the same rule as for Melbourne, that it would be Burk, not Bork. Yet I made the mistake once more before committing it to memory.

Nobody's perfect.

So, you are allowed a couple mistakes, but you should practice so as to avoid them: "Melburn. Melburn."

Good.

Next time: Something that's actually about the movies.

Famous Flops: The Room

 
This is the latest in my monthly series Famous Flops, in which I watch one absolutely terrible movie and tell you what I think of it.

By all rights, my first post after arriving to Australia (almost a full week ago) should be some kind of "welcome to Australia, Vance!" post. However, I have deadlines to keep, and only a precious few days remaining in August in order to serve up my monthly installment of Famous Flops.

It seems like forever ago that I saw The Room, since so much has happened in the interim. In fact, I still had a few days remaining at my job when I took to the theater on the night of Saturday, July 27th (technically cheating since the screening should have fallen within the month of August) to watch a movie so famously bad, they now show it at midnights on Saturdays in cities around the country, including North Hollywood, CA. I feel like I haven't worked in forever, so this tells you how long ago it was -- it was forever ago plus a few days.

This movie is terrible, of course.

But first a little history, personal history, about it.

I was living in Los Angeles when Tommy Wiseau's craptastically wonderful film was first released back in 2003. I remember thinking of it as some kind of Los Angeles institution akin to that ageless (i.e. very old now) pink Corvette-driving "beauty" Angelyne. One look at the billboard and you could tell that it was not a reputable production. Yet that billboard stayed up there on Highland, I think it was, for years, meaning that it did indeed have some kind of dollars or marketing muscle or something behind it. My fascination increased.

Sometime last year I learned that it was playing at the Laemmle in North Hollywood at midnight on the last Saturday of every month. I tried to get a crew to go on Thanksgiving weekend when a friend was in town, but you'd be surprised about how people ultimately react to a midnight movie when their backs are against the wall. They passed.

About three days before the last Saturday night in July of this year -- in other words, the last Saturday I'd be eligible to see The Room in Los Angeles before leaving for Australia -- the scarcity of my remaining opportunity struck me. I knew I needed to move now if I wanted to make The Room -- the full-on live experience of watching The Room, not just a DVD viewing -- happen. I emailed a couple friends and one bit. We set it up for that Saturday.

There's a great story that goes with this viewing, but I'll save it until after I give you my impressions.

First I should probably set the scene. There's an idea that The Room is a cultural heir apparent to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and seeing the live screening did nothing to disabuse me of that notion. For starters, it was packed. Not sold out, but populous enough for a midnight screening to earn the description "packed." The next thing I noticed was that people were bringing props, a la Rocky Horror. Plastic spoons were one particular prop. A football was another, though to the great consternation of many audience members, this football was lost/misplaced early on, never to be recovered. Lastly, the audience was buzzing with electricity. When the movie inexplicably started about five minutes early, disappointed audience members still filing in loudly exclaimed "It's not midnight yet!" To no avail, of course.

Okay, the movie.

Yeah, it's awful. Here are some overall comments/impressions:

1) There are about four sex scenes within the first half-hour. However, these are not lurid sex scenes designed to titillate. They are "romantic" sex scenes, involving cheesy music, rose petals, and both participants with expressions on their faces like you might see in an ad for an erection pill. What's most comical about these scenes is that they are ALL romantic, even though the same woman appears in all four, but has two different partners. The movie means for us to believe that she has an equally romantic relationship -- in other words, a relationship that the movie itself supports her having -- with both men.

2) Tommy Wiseau. He is probably the worst actor who has ever lived. He looks a bit like Gabriel Byrne, but there's no comparison between their abilities as thespians. Wiseau's unplaceable European accent probably contributes to his poor line readings, but only so much. You're not just picking on him because he has a funny accent. You're picking on him because he is a truly terrible performer.

3) The football. About five different times in this movie, characters engage in carefree sessions of football tossing. This is regardless of what's going on in the plot (plot? what plot?) and seemingly without reason. None of these characters seem athletically inclined, generally (although there's also an extensive jogging scene), nor would they seem interested in football, in particular.

4) The plot. What plot? As far as I can tell it's about a guy (Wiseau) who is losing his wife (Juliette Danielle) to his best friend (Greg Sestero). However, it is frequently very indirectly about this. There's also a part where their teenage neighbor gets involved in some kind of drug deal gone bad, but it's handled so non-specifically (we never learn what kind of drugs, or how he got involved) that it becomes just another one of the film's laughable elements.

5) The technique. Just awful. Establishing shots of San Francisco -- and there are many, usually involving the Golden Gate Bridge -- linger on for 10-15 seconds longer than they should. The dialogue is Z grade. Characters appear mysteriously and become important without being introduced or contextualized. Characters also sometimes look at the camera or make inexplicable gestures/glances.

6) I could go on.

7) But what I really want to say is that the participation of the audience, while active and in many ways quite fun, sometimes served as a distraction for me. Knowing how terrible everything about this movie was, I sometimes regretted having real howlers in the dialogue drowned out by their rejoinders. I don't suppose there's anything I could have done about that except for see the movie first at home, and then come to the theater. However, I think seeing this stuff for the first time on a big screen is key to your enjoyment of it, so my complaint about losing some of the priceless craptasticity is only a minor one.

Okay, so, the story.

When The Room ended and we got up to leave, I patted myself down and realized I did not have my keys. As it was nearly 1:45 a.m. and I had to get home, panic set in almost immediately. Sorry, I should tweak that last statement a little bit. As it was nearly 1:45 a.m. and I had to get home, and my wife was already in Australia, panic set in almost immediately.

I first examined the area around where I was sitting, since the most likely explanation was that I'd lost my keys between the seats. It's happened before. But they were not there. I then thought that perhaps I had left them atop the urinal in the men's room, since I had indeed relieved myself before the movie started. They weren't there either.

Panic really started to set in when I couldn't find anyone who worked at the theater still there. I assumed there must be someone in "the back room," an area behind the concession stand where it seemed most likely they'd be. But leaning over the concession stand and repeatedly saying "Hello? Hello? Excuse me?" yielded no results. This was starting to get truly frightening.

Actually forging back behind the concession stand finally prompted a woman in the lobby to identify herself as a member of the staff. Pretty dick move on her part not to say anything before then with a very obviously agitated customer desperately trying to identify her, so I guess it was a good move on my part to breach the employee area. I asked if any keys had been turned in to the lost and found. She said no, but I was welcome to look. Meanwhile, my friend was doing a much more thorough search of the theater.

Suddenly I knew where they were, and where they almost certainly would no longer be:

On the roof of my car.

My car, which was parked on a side street off a main thoroughfare, on a Saturday night in North Hollywood.

I started running at full sprint, sure that they would be gone, sure that my car would be gone, sure that I would be out the amount of money I hoped to make on my car when I sold it in a few weeks, sure that I would have lost all the personal items in the car as well. I felt a cold sweat break out on my forehead and ran faster.

It took only about 20 seconds to reach the car, where I immediately saw a shimmering object on its roof, right where I expected it to be.

I scooped up those keys, breathed a massive sigh of relief, and somehow ran back to the theater even faster than I'd run to get to my car. It took another 30 seconds for my friend to emerge from the screening room (and I was now locked out so I couldn't get to him), but when he did, there I was, dangling the thought-to-be-lost item in glorious victory.

When I told him where they, in fact, were, he laughed in disbelief and ecstatic joy.

Here's what happened: I arrived a few minutes earlier than he did, and while waiting for him, I stood outside my car and smartphoned for a few minutes. When I do this, I usually just toss my keys on top of my car, then grab them before I go. In this case, I expected him to call me when he arrived and I'd go meet him at the theater. Instead, he was walking toward me and talking to me on the phone, so I naturally started to walk toward him when I saw him turn the corner and come into my view. No thought was given as to whether the car was locked or I even had my keys.

So my keys sat on top of my car for nearly two hours, from 11:45 to 1:45, in what used to be a kind of seedy neighborhood but has now improved slightly, and my car was not stolen.

I'll just have to thank my lucky stars for that one.

Okay, on to September. As I'm still getting my bearings and I don't know what my new methods of acquiring movies will be (we can still watch Netflix streaming using a special plug-in, but I don't know yet know how I'll get DVDs and BluRays), I'm going to leave my next month's choice open-ended. Let's face it -- you weren't going to watch it beforehand anyway. No reason more than one of us has to subject ourselves to this crap.

Transporting my whole movie collection

Just a short one today, probably my last in the country. And you get no picture. Sorry.

So when you're considering how much space you have to bring things with you in a move to, say, Australia, and you're a movie buff, one of the first things that occurs to you is that you can probably only afford to take a dozen of your favorite movies at most. You'll probably have a half-dozen must-haves, then the rest would be movies you love but haven't seen recently. Anything you have seen recently probably stays behind.

Uh uh.

The other choice is that you leave the cases behind, and throw all the DVDs and BluRays themselves into one of those Case Logic folders you once used to carry around your CDs.

As luck would have it, I had one of those folders. And, as even greater luck would have it, I had a package of fresh new sleeves to replace the broken ones that had been in there from the time it actually carried those CDs. I don't even remember getting those replacement sleeves.

So last night, in front of the Red Sox-Yankees game (probably the last baseball game I'll see on regular TV for awhile), I sat in my mostly bare living room and systematically loaded that baby up.

Even funnier was that I had a steak knife next to me to open a good 20-30 packages I had never even opened before. A DVD/BluRay is meant to be opened, and now, finally, all mine have seen the light of day.

I was getting brash. I took multiple copies of Raising Arizona, just to be sure. I took both the DVD and the BluRay of Donnie Darko, because I think the BluRay is the director's cut only. I was even taking marginal movies with me. That's how compact the thing is.

One small way Australia will feel more like home, sooner. 

The Interrupters, with interruptions

On Thursday I told you about a movie I watched at home without a single pause. Straight through, two hours and five minutes, start to finish. (It was Philadelphia.)

Today I watched another sad movie with hard truths about a different big city, which I also gave a five (out of five)-star rating.

The difference was, I had to pause The Interrupters about 37 times.

Didn't seem to make a difference in how much I loved it, though.

See, I've got quite the challenge these last ten days in the United States before moving to Australia. I have to keep up with my movies, especially since I write a weekly series for another blog that involves one real-time viewing per week. Yet I also have to keep up with, you know, going through every single thing that I own and moving out of my house.

So The Interrupters, the movie I'm watching this week for that other blog series, was what I watched as I rolled my coins into coin sleeves, went through the mail, sorted through our recipes, and prepared my son's crib to be bought by someone from Craigslist (whose arrival I am awaiting as I type this).

You might wonder how a person could properly absorb a movie while doing all these other things.

Well, for one, documentaries are a bit easier than fiction films. In your typical documentary, there's a lot of talking. The images are certainly important as well, but I think it's most important to hear what they're talking about than to see every little thing. And don't worry, I saw plenty of the images of The Interrupters. Some of which I wouldn't have liked to have seen. (How about a shot gang member whose feces are easily visible through his colostomy bag?)

Secondly, well ... I had no choice.

But it didn't make a difference in what I took away from Steve James' documentary about violence on the south side of Chicago, and the former gang members (called violence interrupters, or interrupters for short) who try to intervene at a crisis point to prevent tempers from boiling over into actions that can't be taken back.

Wow, what a movie. James' commitment to documenting this stuff, intimate and unfettered, is nothing short of spectacular, as is the access he's able to get. I can imagine the last thing many of the people who appear in this movie want is a camera in their face, yet that camera was allowed to look at them without blinking. And what a clear-eyed vision he captured of this problem, and the people who are trying to solve it. There are successes, there are failures, their are deaths, there are new leases on life. And it's all there for us to consume, floored as we watch.

Even if I did have to pause it an average of once every three minutes.

Philadelphia with Dad

By now you may be wondering if I'm still here.

The simple answer to that question is "Yes, of course I'm still here, because 'here' is defined as wherever you are at any given time."

But what you really mean is "Are you still living in the United States, and are you still writing this blog?"

I sure am, for 12 more days on the first question, and indefinitely on the second. But I have been super busy. Since I wrote my last post, I've wrapped up my last three days of my job, spent 4+ days in Chicago with Don Handsome, and hosted my dad here at my house for 3+ days of odd jobs around our house that will help prepare it to be rented. I haven't prioritized blogging in those 11+ days of inactivity.

However, how long can I really leave The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure at the top of my blog, before you decide to write me off altogether?

So I decided to tell you about a movie bonding experience I had last night with my dad -- one that I had the first time with him nearly 20 years ago.

Let's start 20 years ago. Or, nearly 20 years ago.

Philadelphia hit theaters on December 24, 1993 -- which may have been the last time I can remember a movie being released on Christmas Eve. I saw it in theaters, and was so enthralled that I watched it again on VHS within a year or two. In fact, it was likely on one of my breaks from college (I was in college until the spring of 1995) that I was sitting in my basement, taking in Jonathan Demme's movie for the second time.

My dad walked through the basement, probably on the way to his shop. He frequently walked through when I was watching something, and might linger for a moment to see what it was. However, he'd always move on within a minute or so, either to give me my privacy, or because the thing I was watching wasn't really worth more than a momentary linger.

Except not Philadelphia. With Philadelphia, my dad sat there and watched. For about 15 minutes.

I was at the age that this should have annoyed me, but it didn't.

In fact, I dug that he dug Philadelphia. "Dug" might be a bit of a frivolous word here, in both instances of its usage in the previous sentence. I was thrilled that he was as emotionally stricken by this movie as I was. There, that's a bit better.

I remember that after the scene where Denzel Washington's Joe Miller returns home to his sleeping family, after hearing Tom Hanks' Andy Beckett deconstruct the greatness of a Maria Callis aria (which he can still hear in his head as he ponders the great personal epiphanies of that evening), my dad turned to me and said "This is a really good movie." His voice was choked with emotion and enthusiasm.

My dad is not a huge movie fan, so I don't have a significant number of movie bonding moments with him. But that was one. And he didn't even see the whole thing. After that scene ended, he left me alone to watch the rest of the movie myself.

Flash forward about 18 years, and it's funny how things work out.

I'd been thinking recently about how it had been too long since I'd seen Philadelphia, and I wanted to see if the movie still left me an emotional wreck. So I ordered it from Netflix ... and then immediately became incredibly busy. So busy that I didn't know when I'd get a chance to watch it, especially facing three straight nights with my dad in town.

I figured, it's time for my dad to watch the rest of Philadelphia.

When I first made the suggestion last night, I'm sure it seemed out of left field to him. It was clear he didn't remember much about having watched the part of it he watched with me. In fact, he even misremembered the title as The Philadelphia Story, which, as you know, is an entirely different movie, one that came out the year after he was born.

Because he's not usually one to turn down a suggestion made earnestly, he quickly accepted the idea, and after dinner ended we started watching. As the opening credits played, I was second-guessing myself all over the place. "How random is it to be showing my dad a seemingly random movie from 1993? What if he doesn't like it? What if he wonders why I've chosen to show him a movie about AIDS and homosexuality? Does he expect me to follow the screening with an admission that I'm leaving my wife because I, too, am a homosexual?" (My dad is strongly in favor of gay rights, so this random fear had nothing to do with him.)

It didn't take long to realize I hadn't miscalculated. In fact, about 45 minutes in, I asked him if he wanted me to stop the movie to get us ice cream. My dad is always interested in ice cream. But he didn't want me to stop. He described himself as so invested that he couldn't pause for even a moment. I can't remember the last time I watched a two-hour movie at home without pausing once.

The movie slayed me again, as it did the other two times I watched it. This time, I noticed just how much Demme uses the technique of having the characters talk straight to the camera, and just how effective that is. Overtly, the characters are not talking to the audience -- they're just talking to another character who happens to be occupying the same physical space on the set where the camera's set up. But it has the covert function of having the actors address us, of confronting us directly with the powerful and invaluable issues at the movie's core.

And yes, I did cry again, at all the expected spots. I tried to keep it as subtle as possible, even though my dad is unusually receptive to that kind of display of emotion.

After it was finished, he unwittingly offered almost an identical assessment to the one he'd given back in '94 or '95:

"That was really, really good."

The funny thing was that he didn't remember having seen the scene where Joe Miller lies in bed with his sleeping wife, staring straight ahead as Maria Callis hits all the high notes in his head. He claimed to have only remembered the scene where Andy and his boyfriend Miguel (Antonio Banderas) visit the Beckett house and sit around with the family, warning them about revelations that may come out in a trial.

I know better. He's 73, so I'll allow him so faults in his memory.

I gave him my own little post-movie comment, one that was also attempting to offer an explanation for my fixation on a pastime that doesn't pay my bills, a pastime he probably can't fully understand himself. After finishing Philadelphia, he may have understood that fixaxtion just a little bit better.

"That is why I love movies" is what I said.