Remember your history

I mentioned yesterday that my wife was out of town this past weekend, paving the way for one of my patented movie binges.

What I didn't mention was that I did something slightly different this time around. Instead of just voraciously consuming as many previously unseen movies as I could, I consciously sought out movies that I'd loved, but seen too few times. The perpetual compulsion to add to my collection could wait for one weekend, as I deepened my knowledge of some old favorites.

So I took a trip to the library Friday after work, considering only titles that I'd previously seen. At least that's how I started out. But as I swept through the vast collection at the Venice branch of the Los Angeles Public Library -- a collection that I've only recently discovered, which dwarfs the offerings at other branches -- at least five of the 15 or so DVDs I was having an ever-more difficult time holding were previously unseen. Hey, old habits die hard.

But you can only borrow three at a time, so I had some work to do.

I took the unwieldy stack of DVDs and laid them out on a book shelf that came up to around my midsection. When I emerged after a number of very difficult decisions, I'd settled on three titles that I had seen exactly one other time, just as I'd planned.

Here's what I came up with:

1) The Player (1991, Robert Altman). I couldn't believe I'd seen this great film only once, but my list at home said that this was indeed the case. (And even if the list is not 100% historically accurate, over time it takes on the certainty of historical fact.) I know I saw Altman's next film, Short Cuts, at least two times, but apparently my first viewing of The Player was also the lone viewing. This was the perfect example of a title I hoped to find -- something I'd immediately recognize I needed to see again as soon as possible. So this was also the easiest decision, and I started watching soon after I got home. So many brilliant details, so much good stuff in this film.

2) I Am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence). I wanted one of the movies to be something big and epic, and actually had Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in my mind for this slot. It's the only Lord of the Rings film I've seen only once. But the vast Venice collection came up short in this respect, so I Am Legend jumped to the top. My wife and I loved this film when we saw it in IMAX two years ago -- plus, I'm always drawn to visions of post-apocalypse where they really care about the details of what a world like this would be like. Times Square overrun by tall grass and deer? Yup, I'm in. I watched it late-night Saturday night.

3) The Big Lebowksi (1998, Joel Coen). This cult favorite is also some people's favorite Coen brothers movie, and was probably singularly responsible for significantly raising the profile of the White Russian. However, I was only vaguely positive on it when I saw it a decade ago, so I thought I should definitely revisit it. Only problem is, I didn't. I had it lined up to watch on Sunday night, and was even prepared to have a White Russian or six while watching. (Though I had no plans to watch it wearing a bathrobe.) But I waited too long to start, and then discovered that the thing is 127 minutes long -- not something I wanted to get myself into after 10:30 on a school night. Since it was due back on Monday, I'd have to let this one go by the boards.

Maybe it was the hole left by The Big Lebowski, but I found myself drawn to the local Blockbuster on Monday to pick up something else for my third film revisited. That third something was:

3) The 13th Warrior (1999, John McTiernan). I ranked it during the day on Flickchart, and thought to myself, "Damn -- for the number of times I've pimped this film to somebody, I can't believe I've only watched it once." Blockbuster didn't let me down -- they could have very easily not stocked it -- and I came home with it, watching it in the late afternoon (I get out at 4 on Mondays). In my review of it I referred to it as a "subtle historical epic," and that's pretty much true. While it doesn't have the epic sweep of a Braveheart or a Lord of the Rings, it's got a really interesting cast of characters, comprised mostly of 10th century Vikings, and the Arab diplomat (Antonio Banderas) who travels with them to their homeland to fight cannibalistic mist creatures. A really interesting film.

And you know what?

I didn't like any of the films as much as I'd remembered. Time has a way of coloring your perception of things. Sure, it had only been two years since I'd seen I Am Legend. But the big screen -- especially an IMAX screen -- can really inflate the value of a good film, making it seem like a great one. I think I Am Legend settles in somewhere around "very good." The biggest dropoff of the three was probably The 13th Warrior, which struck me with its originality when I first saw it ten years ago, but yesterday left me with considerably less of a sense of wonder. The least dropoff was The Player, which is still a great film, just not the world-rocking film I remembered it to be.

But you know what else?

Whether I liked the films as much is hardly the point. The point is that all film fans need to remember to take time out of their busy viewing schedules to go back to the same wells again. Those were good wells -- the water was cold and pure and tasted good. And watching these films again really nourished me.

The reality with most films is that they aren't quite as good as you remembered them when you watch them again. This is of course not always true -- there are some films where the more details you spot, the more you fall in love. But my guess is that a lot more films don't have the impact they first had, simply because you already know what will happen, because you no longer have the thrill of first discovery. And that's okay.

I guess it's worth asking whether it wouldn't be better to stop at one viewing, if this is going to be the case. That may be the only way to preserve the unfettered love you have for the film in question.

But I don't have that kind of foreknowledge, and I'll take the risk. Any film I love needs to stand that test of a second viewing. If it's not as good as I thought it was, that's probably worth knowing.

Especially when I'm, you know, ranking all the films I've ever seen ...

Conventions we've come to accept

Whatever you think about Mel Gibson, if you've seen Apocalypto, you have to admit that it raised the bar for authenticity of spoken dialogue. Gibson made an extremely bold decision that paid off -- he had his Mayan characters speaking in the Mayan language. And since all the film's characters are Mayan, the whole film is in that language.

It's difficult to know if the movie would have been more popular if a) it were in English, or b) Gibson had not just gone on a drunken anti-semitic rant, but $50 million seems a pretty decent haul in the U.S., considering those factors. And the movie itself? A damn thrilling action movie. Gibson did the same thing in The Passion of the Christ with a much larger box office take, but (in my opinion) a far more masochistic and unworthy effort.

For me at least, Apocalypto (and to a lesser extent Passion, which I simply tried not to think about afterward) made me reevaluate the other movies I've seen where everyone speaks in English regardless of where in the world the action is set. And watching Bryan Singer's Valkyrie last night brought those issues up again.

We've come to accept that if American filmmakers in Hollywood want to make a movie about foreign subject matter, to be consumed first and foremost by American audiences, they have to film in English, practically speaking. The most practical issue has to do with the language the director speaks. If you don't understand the language the actors are speaking, how can you even be sure they're saying the lines with the right inflection? I guess we should ask Clint Eastwood, who made the excellent decision to shoot Letters from Iwo Jima in Japanese, but relied on Japanese advisors to make sure everything was copacetic.

But Hollywood has traditionally tried to meet realism halfway, with the characters either speaking English in the appropriate regional accent, or in a generic British-influenced Euro accent that's a catch-all stand-in for "foreignness." Valkyrie deviates from that in one extremely noticeable way: Tom Cruise, the lead, uses his regular speaking voice, the one he cultivated while growing up in such diverse locations as New York, Illinois, Kentucky, Ontario and New Jersey. He doesn't try to sound either German or British. He just tries to sound like Tom Cruise.

For Valkyrie's detractors -- which were not nearly as many as we all originally thought -- this was a distraction. For me, though, it just seemed honest. Singer allowed all his actors to speak in their native voices -- it just so happens that Cruise was the only one who grew up in the U.S. Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, Tom Wilkinson ... all Brits. So their British speaking voices were not fabricated in accordance with the time-honored Hollywood tradition; that's just how they talk. It might be worth arguing that native Brits are more convincing than Americans in movies like this anyway, which is why there are no Americans other than Cruise. But hey, Bill Nighy can't carry a movie.

As I said, I liked Singer's decision. If you know you're not going to be able to make a movie about Nazi Germany in German, why manipulate us in the form of English with German (or British) accents? Just because that familiar convention makes us feel comfortable? Not only might Cruise not be able to do this effectively, but if he tried, it might detract from his performance. Instead, he can just concentrate on acting. And act he does. In fact, Cruise haters won't find a single thing about this performance to pick on. To quote my colleague who wrote the Valkyrie review: "For all the character's noble, self-sacrificing heroism, Cruise never gets hammy or indulgent; there are no ridiculously badass one-liners (those in the original trailer were cut), no Oscar-bait hysterics or vain looking-into-the-distance-with-a-single-tear-in-his-eye. You don't even get that vague, distracting sense of megalomania emanating from his usually self-satisfied grin." (I love this writer.)

But it's not as though Singer is indifferent to the fact that there's some amount of artifice involved in filming in English. And he takes care of this quite effectively. The movie opens with Cruise narrating the words he's writing in a letter, in a tent in Tunisia, where his officer has been sent as a means of hiding him away where his anti-war views can't harm anyone. Here Cruise speaks in German -- and quite well, to the untrained ear. After about a minute of Cruise's German-speak, Singer transitions the dialogue to English, first overlayed over the German, then on its own for the rest of the movie. Message: "You know they're speaking German. But because I am an English speaker and so are you, we are agreeing to do this thing in English."

Singer may have been taking his lead from the legally disgraced John McTiernan. I can think of two other good examples of this same approach in McTiernan films. Though I don't have a lot enduring memories of The Hunt for Red October, I do remember how the characters on the Russian sub start out speaking Russian, and then there's a transition to English after about the same amount of time as in Valkyrie. The example I like better is from the underrated and underseen The 13th Warrior, in which Antonio Banderas plays an Arab courtier who joins the 10th century Vikings in fighting an army of cannibalistic mist creatures. As the viewers' surrogate, Banderas' character speaks in English, a stand-in for Arabic. The Vikings speak in their own language -- they are the film's "other." The film gets everyone speaking the same language in a captivating montage in which English words steadily blend with Norse, as Banderas absorbs their fireside bragging over weeks of travel.

As in any film, ultimately, it's the filmmaking and storytelling that trumps all these language concerns. And it's probably true that if you've got a good story executed well, it doesn't matter to what extent a director honors the conventions or adjusts them to his own agenda.

I do have one complaint about Valkyrie, and oddly, it's related to the semantics of meaning. It has to do with the tagline on the poster, which was one of the reasons (along with the presence of Cruise) that I never wanted to see the movie -- until I heard it was pretty good, that is. Here's the tagline:

Many saw evil.
They dared to stop it.

Of course, what this poster means is "Many saw evil. They dared to stop it." In other words, "they" -- the characters in the movie -- should be differentiated from the "many" who saw evil. However, without the italics -- which you would never put on a poster anyway -- it sounds like "they" is modifying "many," as in "Many saw evil, and they dared to stop it," or "Many saw evil and dared to stop it."

But I'll forgive the humorous semantic ambiguity. Valkyrie is an unqualified success, and whatever errors the marketing department made don't influence that.