"Because then I couldn't be in it" and other Impossible thoughts

Having been teased by the sensational opening 15 minutes of Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, I was really looking forward to a full movie dealing with the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands on the shores of the countries abutting the Indian Ocean. (It was a tease also in terms of the potential for that dud of a movie, but that's another story.)

So when I saw the first trailers for J.A. Bayona's The Impossible, I knew it would be on my must-see list, likely in the theater. And so it was that I sat for a few extra minutes in my parked car the other day when I heard star Naomi Watts being interviewed on NPR prior to the film's release.

It was a good interview in which Watts sounded typically intelligent and graceful, but one moment could have thrown her if she'd let it. (I don't know if they're given the questions beforehand, but I doubt it.) Interviewer Melissa Block asked Watts if it gave her pause that this movie focused on the smallest demographic of people who died in the tsunami: European tourists, as opposed to Southeast Asians, who made up probably 99% of the casualties.

Here's a paraphrase of how Watts responded: "Well when I learned that it was a serious filmmaker who was going to approach the topic sensitively, I didn't worry so much about that."

But here's what she easily could have said: "But if it was a movie about a Thai family surviving incredible odds, I couldn't have appeared in it."

And I honestly think this would have been a reasonable, if probably too frank, response.

As an actor, especially an actor who takes herself as seriously as Watts does (has she ever appeared in a comedy?), you thrive on the opportunity to play roles that aren't just a carbon copy of the last role you played. A woman who improbably lives despite being at ground zero of the deadliest tsunami in history is a pretty unusual character to be able to play. And I think you'd agree that if a truly serious movie about a topic like this is to be made, it has to be based on historical fact. It can't be just some fictional person surviving some fictional tsunami, because then it just seems like it could never have happened.

So if Watts were ever going to be in a position to star in a movie about the 2004 tsunami, that movie would have to be about a white couple (Spanish in real life, British here). Are we saying she should turn down this opportunity just because the movie might have the unfortunate unintended consequence of making it seem as though the life or death of this English woman is "more important" than the life or death of the Thai woman serving her drinks in her cabana? That's not Watts' responsibility. She's just the hired help, and she's hired to help the director make the most sensitive possible movie he can about a British family trying to survive a horrific natural disaster. She succeeded, I'm pleased to say.

What she could have said and it would have been true, but thank goodness she didn't: "You can't make a movie like this about a Thai family. No studio would ever give you the money, because they think nobody would watch it. And they'd probably be right."

Some other Impossible thoughts:

In their shoes

In case you can't tell from what I've written so far (and how could you?), I did actually see The Impossible, on Christmas Eve. Which was a funny day to see it for a number of reasons that had the effect of putting me even more in this family's shoes.

That's of course the desired outcome of any movie about a natural disaster in which you follow the struggles of a couple key characters -- to feel like you are really going through what they're going through. But in my case it was a lot more specific in a couple interesting ways.

For one, I happened to see the movie on December 24th. This also happens to be the very day the Bennett family's story begins. They touch down in Phuket on Christmas Eve 2004, two days prior to the giant wave that tried to smash them to bits. It was odd sitting there in a theater in Southern California exactly eight years later, having the same proximity to Christmas they had, the same hope inspired by the holiday -- a hope that was to be dashed on Boxing Day, only they couldn't have known it then.

Then that night, to mark Christmas Eve, they participate in a ceremony on the beach in which hundreds of paper lanterns are sent floating into the sky. I had witnessed this very thing myself, also on film, in the movie I had re-watched just the night before: Tangled. In fact, as I was watching one of the most famous sequences in Tangled (famous in part for how effective the 3D is during that scene), it occurred to me to wonder whether sending floating paper lanterns into the sky is a real thing, or just something invented for this Disney fantasy world. Who would have thought it would have taken just 16 hours to have my question answered.

Then something else occurred just yesterday. As I was driving in to work, I popped in an audio book I received for Christmas: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. Reading his own work, Bryson discusses very early on that it's impossible to tell which stars in the sky are alive and which are dead, because in some cases their light has been traveling to us for thousands of years. This same thing is discussed in The Impossible as a young boy and an old woman are looking up at the night sky. She uses the word "impossible" -- thereby providing the most overt meaning for the title -- in discussing how to tell that very thing, which stars are alive and which are dead. It's clearly intended as a metaphor for their current situation, where the reigning chaos has left it impossible to know who's alive and who isn't.

Eschewing vanity

One of the reasons Naomi Watts should get to play whatever role she wants is that she puts so much of herself into each performance. This has always been the case with her. If you're like me, you first became aware of her in Mulholland Drive, where she gives one of the most fearless performances I have ever seen, yielding completely to whatever David Lynch wanted her to do. Since then, it's just been more of the same. She never seems to balk at nudity, and you also get the impression she couldn't give a shit whether or not she's shot in a flattering light. All that matters is the work.

It wouldn't surprise you to know that this same Naomi Watts shows up for work here. She spends much of this movie caked in blood, hyperventilating, screaming out in agony, and generally looking three shades of green.

But the moment that really struck me was after she's weathered the two initial waves that tried to KO her. While walking through some reeds with her 13-year-old son (the revelatory Tom Holland), she turns to him, and he awkwardly registers that one of her tank top straps has ripped, exposing one grime-covered breast to the world. Dutifully, she ties the loose strap to the strap on the other side, and starts walking again.

Through this one little moment, you really believe that this tsunami is the kind of thing that would leave a person so exhausted and so unguarded that she might temporarily forget the ordinary human instinct toward shame. On the larger scale, it also made me recognize that this is the method that makes Watts such a good actress -- she isn't aware of shame, and she throws herself into a project like it's a tsunami that wants to chew her up. Only if she emerges from it beaten and bruised does she know she's done her job.

No strings attached

I won't lie to you -- I got emotional a number of times during The Impossible. Now that I'm a parent, I'm a sucker for anything that involves children in peril.

According to one review I read, the reason I got emotional was because of composer Fernando Velazquez's manipulative score. The reviewer noted "His score for The Impossible is so over-the-top melodramatic that at times it borders on parody."

It got me thinking. Yes, I suppose that we wouldn't become emotional in as many movies if there weren't string instruments at the ready to let us know it's time. But is this a bad thing?

One of the great assumptions when discussing scores is that if a viewer isn't shrewd enough to note when he/she is being emotionally manipulated, he/she is some kind of unsophisticated rube. But I'm here to say this kind of thing is not universally bad. If you don't notice the strings are manipulating you, then they've done their job. They've given you the emotional catharsis you were yearning for. If you weren't yearning for it, you would have heard those same strings and laughed.

And speaking of laughter, I think there's a useful analogy to be made with laugh tracks on sitcoms. A sophisticated viewer is supposed to categorically disdain the laugh track, to consider it the single most fraudulent thing about a comedy designed to be consumed by idiots. But those kind of broad generalizations just don't hold water.

When used well, a laugh track can provide the small amount of encouragement necessary to nudge you into your own laughter. Consider the case of one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, Seinfeld. Now think about watching Seinfeld without the laugh track. It would be indescribably odd. I've chosen Seinfeld because it's pretty much television teflon -- no one you talk to about it could mount a serious complaint against it. Yet Seinfeld uses its laugh track the way Fernando Velazquez uses strings: to cause you to acknowledge and give in to an emotion you are already experiencing.

The idea is supposed to be that a genuinely emotional moment in a movie should be so pure, such an unpolluted creation by the actors and the director, that it should translate to all audiences without anything so vulgar as music to call attention to it. But that's simply not realistic. Movies are the end result of the contributions of many collaborators, and the composer is hardly the least of them. If you wanted to take this argument to the extreme, you could say that no movies should have any music, because the purpose of all music is to enhance emotions that should be able to express themselves through words and actions alone. But movies would be a pretty dismal pastime if none of them featured music.

It's as with anything. If it's done well, it's good. If it's done poorly, it calls undue attention to itself. If a sitcom isn't funny and there are bales of hysterical laughter coming from the laugh track, you notice it and think the laugh track is awful. Similarly, if the actors haven't succeeded in making you feel the emotions of a certain moment, and the strings swell to compensate, you laugh where you should be crying. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

So what I can't quite figure out about this guy's review is that he finds everything else in the movie strong. He praises the acting, the writing, the directing. If the score didn't call attention to weaknesses in those aspects of the movie, then it probably actually called attention to how great they were.

Wait, this guy directed The Orphanage?

I still haven't seen The Orphanage, so I don't know how odd it is that J.A. Bayona directed that and then this. But I'm sure some people think it's strange that he's going from a literal horror movie to something that can be described as a metaphorical horror at best.

Well, I don't think you'll be disappointed, and the evolution from one type of movie to another makes sense in a couple key scenes.

That's right, one of the things that removes this from the squishy realm of "inspirational drama" is that there are a couple set pieces that use actual horror tropes to convey what the characters are experiencing. There was at least one that didn't make any literal sense that I could determine in what is otherwise a very realistic movie. It may have been something that was purely impressionistic, and is the kind of thing that makes me appreciate this movie all the more.

Conclusions

1) If staying in a resort on the coast of the Indian Ocean, try to get a room on the second floor.

2) When you hear what sounds like a herd of elephants stampeding toward you, don't wait to see what it is -- just head up the nearest tree.

3) If you fail in the first two and get struck by the wall of water, do your best to avoid hitting any stationary objects in your path or moving objects rocketing toward you.

4) If you can, see The Impossible.

Is naked the same as nude?

So I joked on Thursday about "dirty old men" being one of the intended demographics for Red Riding Hood. That may have been a somewhat subjective assessment of the film, and it may be closer to the truth than I'd like to admit. (Most good jokes are, aren't they?)

You see, I seem to have developed something of a fascination with Amanda Seyfried. There's just something unique about her. She's beautiful, there's no doubt about that -- but she's not cookie-cutter beautiful. Her big, round eyes set her apart, and there's something girl-next-doorish about her. I guess you'd describe it as an unconventional type of beauty, but that's not exactly it either, because unconventional beauty is not traditionally agreed upon by everyone -- and I think almost everyone can see the beauty in Ms. Seyfried. (Sigh-fred, not Say-freed, as I've learned just this past week.)

And so I'd be lying if I didn't admit that the promise of Ms. Sigh-fred appearing nude in Chloe was one of the reasons I prioritized watching it. Fortunately, since I am also a follower of the career of director Atom Egoyan and have seen most of his movies, that wasn't the only reason. But I try to be honest with you, my dear readers, and I know you won't hold it against me if I admit that I wanted to see what Ms. Sigh-fred's boobs look like. (She's 25 years old, or only 12 years younger than me, so it really doesn't make me that dirty.)

Only I didn't get to see them, or I didn't really. I never got what you would call a clear look at them.

And that made me ponder the difference between "appearing naked" and "nudity."

Seyfried is definitely naked, a couple times, in Chloe. But I wouldn't say she's ever actually "nude." And that's because there are lots of ways to film/photograph people being naked, without showing "the good parts." It's why celebrities appear "naked" on the front of countless respectable magazines, but never appear "nude."

In order to have actual nudity, you have to have show one of the following:

1) The right nipple;

2) The left nipple;

3) Public hair;

4) A penis (men only, ha ha).

And if it's male nudity, only the fourth one really counts -- male pubic hair is not real nudity.

This introduces a lot of paradoxes. It means you can spend an entire movie without a stitch of clothing on, and never once actually be "nude," depending on how cleverly you're shot. It also means that you can have all your clothes on, and still be "nude," if the action calls for one of your nipples poking out of your shirt (and only if you're a woman; male nipples, of course, are not nudity).

Another paradox is that showing your butt is no longer considered nudity. It was at one time. But possibly around the time Dennis Franz showed his butt on NYPD Blue (which was probably 20 years ago now), the derriere was officially no longer nudity. This is why when we saw Jennifer Aniston's butt in The Break-Up, no one really got all that excited about it. Yeah, there was talk about how Aniston was showing her butt, but it couldn't properly be characterized as a "nude scene" -- even though Aniston was naked in the scene, and she showed her butt. Nor could it be characterized as a risk on Aniston's part -- it was just keeping with her career-long attitudes toward showing her goods.

And so yeah, not much that you could characterize as actual nudity on Seyfried's part in Chloe. A lot of butt. A lot of back and legs. A lot of "side boob" -- another kind of one-time nudity that has since been de-classified as such. Even one shot from the front that's so brief and so obscured that it doesn't really qualify. You couldn't walk away from Chloe saying that Seyfried wasn't naked -- she most certainly was. But nude? Not really.

You do get nudity in Chloe, but it's all courtesy of Julianne Moore, who practically has a clause in her contract requiring nudity. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that Moore has appeared nude in a third of her films, and at least half the films she appeared in that had an R rating. In fact, one of the most famous bottomless scenes in movie history is from Robert Altman's Short Cuts, when Moore has something like a five-minute argument on screen, all the time completely naked from the waist down.

And this brings up another interesting thing about nudity, something I am certainly not the first person to observe. Why is female pubic hair considered the Holy Grail of nudity? Again I am not the first to say this, but it's just hair. There shouldn't be anything inherently titillating about hair. Yet when a woman goes nude below the waist in a movie, it doubles or triples our notion of how daring she is, how much she's willing to expose herself. And of course it sends ratings boards into a tizzy. Just from a little hair.

In an era where a bikini can be shown on TV as long as there are teeny, tiny patches of fabric covering the nipples and the pubic hair, it makes me wonder if the societal opposition to nudity will one day fall entirely, just as the word "fuck" may one day be permitted to play on TV. I guess I have to say I doubt it. The political groups on both sides of the aisle who oppose indecency, for different reasons, may have less and less of a leg to stand on, but it'll be a long time before they allow themselves to be legless.

But here's the real thing about nudity -- it's not even really what we're looking for, per se, when we watch a movie that's meant to titillate us. One of the sexiest performances I can think of in a mainstream film is the performance submitted by Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive. As far as I recall, Watts is neither naked nor nude at any point during the film, though she's done both things since then. And she does have a famous scene of masturbation in Mulholland Drive, but that's not even what I'm talking about when I say her performance is sexy -- that scene has more to do with a weird kind of violence against herself. No, I'm thinking of the scene where she's on that audition, and she's involved in a kiss with one of the other auditioning actors -- who I think may also be one of the producers or something, creating a weird power dynamic during the kiss. I saw the movie only once, ten years ago, and frankly, did not like it very much. But that scene sticks with me because of how hot Watts made it, and probably always will.

So, Chloe. It had some of what made Mulholland Drive sexy, but it also ended up feeling fairly banal to me in many other respects. It's what I'd heard about Chloe, with one exception -- another blogger whose opinion I trust. Well, if you're reading this, sorry -- I just didn't see it. Mild thumbs down for me.

But it was fun to see Amanda Seyfried's side-boob. ;-)

So many movies, so little sex

Samuel L. Jackson has appeared in exactly 100 feature films.

(Wow, what a time for me to check IMDB for his career stats, right?)

I'm talking movies in which he either appeared on screen or provided a voice to the narrator or one of the characters. Those count. What I'm not counting is all the TV shows, TV movies, short films and video games where he is also credited, adding girth to an already impressive IMDB page.

Of these 100 movies, I have seen 43, most recently Mother and Child on Monday night.

Mother and Child also marks the first time I've seen Samuel L. Jackson do a sex scene. Heck, it may be his first sex scene.

In Rodrigo Garcia's film, Jackson and Naomi Watts have sex. I know, that sounds funny, but it works for the characters. It's actually kind of a hot scene, but that's because Watts always gives her all to accurately reproducing the throes of sexual passion. Just remember when we first discovered her in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, ten years ago -- there are several unforgettable sex scenes in that movie. Jackson, for his part, is fully clothed, and basically just lies underneath her -- in fact, she orders him not to move. ("Stay still, old man.") But it counts.

Yep, Jackson is old -- 62 years old now. He's not only been in all those movies, but he's been the lead in many of them. And I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've ever seen him engaged in sexual congress.

When I pointed this out to my wife, she agreed and noted that he's not usually cast as the romantic lead in a film. In fact, probably never has he been cast in that role. And though secondary characters do have sex in films, most often we're talking about the male and female romantic leads. Jackson has never been cast as either.

Which makes him pretty unusual for a mega-star. How mega? He's appeared in the Star Wars prequels, a couple Tarantino movies, a couple XXX movies with another still to come (the XXX action movie series, not porn, as I have spent this post making abundantly clear), and is set to play Nick Fury in a seemingly endless series of Avengers movies, having already appeared in the role in both Iron Man films. And those are just his recurring affiliations. He's also been in as many good one-off movies as anyone -- and as many bad. (Hey, the man likes to work.)

Yet, no sex.

So what is it about Sam Jackson that keep him from getting any?

I mean, clearly he's handsome enough. He may not possess traditional good looks, but it's no doubt he has a smoldering allure, not to mention a million-dollar smile. But it seems to have something to do with his typecasting. It's funny to suggest that a man who has appeared in three digits worth of movies would be typecast -- outside of John Wayne, that is -- but it's true that casting directors almost always want Jackson to be a badass.

But the badass gets the girl in plenty of movies. In fact, there are a number of movies where badasses actually kill people while they're having sex.

And maybe that's why Mr. Blue Balls does finally get to have sex in Mother and Child -- he's not playing a badass. In fact, he's playing the senior partner at a law firm, who hires Watts' Elizabeth Joyce. He may be a badass in the legal world, but I don't think that's what we mean by "badass." In fact, it took him becoming a literal gray-beard and an old softie to finally get a piece of tail. If he'd known that, maybe he would have started toning down the volume in his auditions and dying his beard, years ago.

There's another quick thing I wanted to talk about regarding Mother and Child, another strong film in Garcia's canon, and it relates to sex had by the real-life Naomi Watts. The film is too under the radar to get any Oscar nominations, even though I'd argue that Annette Bening is as good here as she was in The Kids Are All Right. But there's a case to made that it deserves a nomination in the category Best Acting by a Fetus.

If you haven't heard about one of the more amazing logistical details of the film, Watts plays a woman whose tubes are tied, but gets pregnant anyway. And in a case of method acting at its most committed, Watts is actually pregnant in the film. But she's not pregnant for the whole film, and here's where the movie seems like an incredible feat of logistics. Garcia must have cast her based on her intention to become pregnant -- although the fact that she's a great actor probably had something to do with it. In the character's early scenes, you can be absolutely certain she's not pregnant, or if so, only a couple weeks. In fact, in another sign of Watts' commitment to her sexuality, she gives a full frontal flash to a neighbor, showing not only her breasts and pubic hair, but also a flat stomach.

But what if Watts hadn't been able to conceive? What if they shot all those early scenes, and then she couldn't deliver on the back end? Would they have needed to use a fake-looking prosthetic stomach? Would they have scrapped the scenes they'd done and started over with a different actress? Or would they have simply waited for as long as it took?

Where things get really impressive is later on, when she's ridiculously pregnant. There's a shot when she's lying on her bed, and turns on her side. Her clearly-real pregnant belly is exposed. And then, about ten seconds into the shot, the baby kicks. The baby kicks -- on film! Should we be surprised that Watts is such a good actor, the talent seeps over by osmosis to her unborn baby? And was that kick just a happy accident, or did they have to film it a hundred times, hoping eventually to get this result?

I may not want to know. It's one of those magical moments of cinema that are best left unanswered.