A FEW WORDS ABOUT HARRY KNOWLES

The gentleman in question

(Like a lot of bloggers, unencumbered by the professional obligation to churn out immediate responses to the brutal mass murder in Colorado Friday midnight, I'm prefacing this post by saying this was supposed to go up Friday morning. When I woke up and turned on my computer, I saw, yeah, maybe this isn't the best time to rant about Harry Knowles. It was a time for contemplation for many, and for me a full day of sitting around stunned at what that malignant little fuck—I'm not giving him the satisfaction of saying his name; he has no name—did. Anyway, I don't really have anything to contribute to that discussion beyond the anger and sadness so many others share, intensified in this particular case because movie theaters are a place I've felt safe and free my whole life, especially in times when I felt in danger or trapped. I basically co-sign everything my good friend Filmi Girl says in the introduction to this post, so check that out, then come back, and watch the below video to transition back into our completely unrelated regularly scheduled programming.)



So, earlier this week, before anyone other than critics and a few lucky bloggers (and people like me who aren't quite as fancy as the former just yet but still a little fancier than the latter) had had a chance to see The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, and for better or worse the ur-Internet movie blogger, spoiled the sweet living fuck out of it. While that's a little shitty, Mr. Knowles did admittedly preface everything with a spoiler alert, so it's not as bad as it could be. What is, and what makes this more notable than just internecine nerd grumping, is the way in which Knowles registers his “[p]rofound disappointment.” It's a stunningly lousy piece of criticism, fodder for everyone who would join Kevin Smith's recent crusade against not only critics themselves, but the entire form.

Whether or not Knowles' piece was meant as a “formal” review or not is a bit beside the point. Ain't It Cool is, by virtue of having been around the Internet practically since before civilians even knew what computers were, an institution. Its editorial perspective is right there on its sleeve, with its heart: ain't movies cool? I'm hardly in a position to disagree. In principle I'm right there with them. I love movies with a fierce intensity. Movies can be about anything and everything, so to love movies is to love life itself, at a certain point. On the other hand, loving cinema does not mean one loves all movies. Some are better than others.

I would submit that if the way in which your love of movies manifests itself is in the desire to write about them, you owe it to yourself and other movie lovers to at least try to get at what a movie is, rather than focusing on your own personal reaction to it to the exclusion of all other things. Criticism is not a simple matter of “I liked it” or “I didn't like it.” A big part of it is considering factors outside the self; while ultimately purely objective observation is always going to be impossible because the observer is part of the observation, it's incumbent on the observer to do the best s/he can. The best parts of oneself—knowledge, wisdom, and empathy—are the best tools of observation.

Where Knowles fucks up in that Dark Knight Rises piece, and the entire experience of watching the movie itself, from the sound of things, is in that inability to step even an inch outside himself and the Dark Knight Rises screenplay he'd already written in his head. (He's no stranger to reading the wrong script, if you'll recall his embarrassing adventures with that fake Prometheus script back in April.) Reading his reaction to the movie (since calling it a “review” is a bit much), everything that pissed him off relates to a choice Christopher (and brother Jonathan) Nolan made either in transposing characters from the comics into the very different realm of cinema, or in the effects of those characters' action in a world they, the Nolan brothers, not Harry Knowles, created.

Among those effects is something that relates to a larger discussion of fandom and sexism that's come to a bit of a boil this year. In the case of both this summer's previous mega-blockbuster superhero movies, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, women critics were subjected to shit like “Stick with rom-coms, bitch” for weighing in with anything other than adulation. In gaming there was the whole “getting the player to identify with Lara Croft by her getting almost-raped” crap and that woman's Kickstarter to fund a study of sexism in gaming that led to a deluge of threats of rape and a Flash game where the player could punch her in the face. Given this context, a discussion that has been unavoidable in fandom circles for months, it's a sign of great negligence that Knowles would register the following complaint (bolded emphasis mine, not his; shitty writing his, not mine):

“It is just at this stage that the film loses all sense of urgency. I mean, you have a city with a strange respirator men with an army of thugs and every hardened criminal in the city – and it doesn’t end up looking like Old Detroit from ROBOCOP? I mean – there’s 1000s armed bad guys and the city isn’t being raped and pillaged. Instead they set up courts to make people walk on ice?”

Yes, Harry, there are thousands of armed bad guys and the city isn't being raped and pillaged. Perhaps Christopher and Jonathan Nolan do not share your lazy conflation of rape and pillage with dramatic urgency. Perhaps they also share a frame of reference not entirely derived from other movies with no aesthetic, philosophical, or any other connection other than being movies. If anything, the absence of rape and pillage in this case could be interpreted as a) Bane not being an anarchist, because he's not an anarchist, and b) a sign to pay attention because (pardon the overly literal reading) something's happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Knowles?

I should clarify that accusing Harry Knowles of rape advocacy based on the above quote would be inaccurate. But it's indicative of a fundamental lack of taking a moment to think about other people and how they might think or feel, which is the same fundamental problem with his entire reaction. The near-mantra which the repetitions of “bullshit” become is derived almost entirely from the movie's interpretation of the comics being different from Knowles'. There is, I hate to break it to him, no one set-in-stone interpretation of the comics, which are, as a writer I rather like pointed out in The Atlantic recently, the product of many different authors and the different perspectives each brought to the material. Then, there are things such as Bane being “no longer South American,” which is an assumption based on the absence of it being spelled out, and not something there's any evidentiary basis to state as anything other than an assumption. And, even if he's not, not to be mean or anything, but who gives a fuck? If Knowles had liked the movie (on whatever squishy inarticulately-conveyed basis) he certainly wouldn't have.

While we're in an interrogative mood, another “who gives a fuck?” subject is Harry Knowles himself, as in “why should we give a fuck what he has to say?” His is not an a priori irrelevant voice. However irritating he's become both online and in Austin (and holy shit, if you want to hear invective, just wind Austin critic types up with a question about the guy and watch them go), and however many writers have come along who are better at doing what he does than he is (Ain't It Cool is home to some fine ones, as well as some not so fine), online movie and fandom discourse is what it is to a significant degree due to Harry Knowles' influence. And a lot of people still read Ain't It Cool. So when he hops on his computer the day before one of the biggest geek movies of the year and writes something this stupid, it's irritating.

It's also bad for criticism in general. I haven't had much to say about Kevin Smith's ridiculous and weird anti-critic tirades (in keeping with the “it's not always about me” theme here, Scott Weinberg basically nails the whole thing in this piece), but Smith and Harry Knowles are essentially on the same page on this subject. Their (apparent) weird mix of unquantifiable emotion, dogmatic certitude, and the utter refusal to address either is one of the most annoying things about movie geekery. Asking why something is “awesome” or “sucks,” or having to explain, does not in any way cheapen the experience of a movie, and in a lot of cases enriches it. Getting deeper on a movie you liked and discovering that, in fact, there are some things wrong with it doesn't mean the subjective, emotional experience of liking it is any less valid. All it means is that the movie in question did some things well and other things not so well. One can like a “bad” movie and not enjoy a “good” movie. No matter what the case, understanding is a net good.

Throwing stones at nerds, admittedly, will lead to a lot of shit getting broken in my glass house (which, because I'm a nerd, is a 1:1 scale replica of Dr. Manhattan's Martian palace in Watchmen). But, in terms of the discussion at hand, I find it particularly grating when unexamined feelings are presented as having any kind of relevance, and when the process of examination is dismissed as either boring or the occupation of sour-grapes killjoy assholes. I also think voices with large audiences of listeners should endeavor to say things of meaning and value.

Of, course, that might just be a by-product of my remembering that once upon a time, nerds were supposed to be smart.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON WHY EVERYONE NEEDS TO CHILL OUT ABOUT JOHN CARTER

(photo by StampyTurtle on Flickr)

So, John Carter is in theaters now, and there's an odd dynamic developing. This isn't the first time this has happened, but it's the first time I've been caught in the crossfire, so I'm noticing it more, to wit: the kind of things people who liked the movie are saying about people who didn't. For weeks now there have been stories all up and down entertainment media about the fact that John Carter cost $250 million, and was not only expected to suck but to lose more money than any movie in the history of the business. I weighed in on this narrative earlier this week, maintaining optimism both for its commercial and artistic prospects, partly because I knew I was going to have to review it for Next Projection. When I did, I discovered that there was a reason the narrative about it being shockingly expensive and not very good had developed. It was because, to my eyes, it was shockingly expensive and not very good.

But opinions are, as the poet said, like assholes, in the sense that everybody's got one and they're frequently full of shit. I try my best to be enlightened and not let anger fuck me up—though it frequently does—so I'll lay my cards on the table about my own perspective:

1—I went in, as I always do, wanting it to be good.
2—It was a little clunky.
3—Its clunkiness was exacerbated by being projected in an unwatchable format.
4—I can't say this enough, 3D is bad enough but 3D IMAX is a hate crime against cinema.
5—In spite of the unspeakably awful presentation, I tried my best to be fair about the movie.

But in spite of being the most serious intellectual in three counties, possessed of immaculately refined tastes, and fucking awesome, occasionally, people disagree with me. Which is fine. Without different perspectives, there'd be no discourse, and were there no discourse, we might as well feed ourselves to the fuckin wolves. And so it is that a number of people, a lot of whom I respect greatly, liked John Carter, and found it to be the thing I thought it missed the mark in trying to be: a rousing SF fantasy popcorn epic. You say it owns, I say it makes Dune look like it was directed by Robert Bresson. It has ever been thus.

But the pro- and anti- camps have been talking a bit of shit, and it's getting a little out of hand. I'm going to be paraphrasing a bit here and there, and withholding names because I don't have anything personal against any of the parties involved (so if you see yourself quoted or paraphrased, don't be mad, please.) But here's the basic gist of a few strands of the conversation:


“Any critics who thought this was confusing need to go back to critic school.”

One very crucial hair needs to be split here: when a critic describes something as confusing (as I did John Carter, if not in so many words) that critic is not necessarily admitting to have been personally confused. I personally knew what was supposed to be happening in John Carter, but the way in which things unfolded was a bit fucky. This is what I, and most critics worth half a shit, mean when we say something is confusing.


“It's boring that everyone's piling on and trashing John Carter.”

This carries with it the implication that liking something that everyone dislikes is more interesting. This one's kind of sticky, because it's true that each should make up his/her own mind, and not reflexively go with the all out of comfort and solidarity. Especially in communities that can be as insular as the film blogosphere, there's a lot of apparent sameness. It's not just in criticism, either. When I was in college, I used to go to a lot of dance concerts, because physically fit girls in leotards = win. They were a lot of fun, and not just because of the leotards, but one thing that I noticed was an awful lot of virtually identical choreography. It wasn't because the girls were lousy choreographers; some were better than others, as it is in all walks of life. It was because they were always doing guest spots in each other's pieces and sitting in on each other's rehearsals, and as happens in any endeavor, sometimes they found themselves with like an hour to finish their 'ography and had to throw in some tried-and-true maneuver just to finish the damn thing. And the tried and true, by nature, has been tried and proven to succeed, so rather than do some lunatic shit that might not work, better to play it conservative. It won't wow anyone, but it also won't have them being like, “Wow, you suck.” Of all the examples of proximity breeding sameness, the college dance concerts always sticks out because it was physically demonstrable. Criticism is a different beast only in that ideas don't have tits that look really good in leotards. Or something like that.

Now, a dancer can potentially sprain an ankle or blow out a knee doing some crazy difficult shit no one's ever tried before. Movie critics aren't at that kind of risk, but back in the day Paul Schrader did get fired for panning Easy Rider, and I've been accused of having no soul for not loving the Star Wars movies, and for not having a sense of humor for hating Waiting For Guffman. Now, Schrader went on to write Taxi Driver and fuck Nastassja Kinski and I have a middle finger each for the Star Wars and Guffman people, so this isn't the apocalypse or anything, but unpopular opinions lead to fights and sometimes there's better shit to do.

On the other hand, not all sameness is created equal. Sometimes, what appears to be a bunch of sheep baaing and dickteasing Welsh people have among their number a wolf or two in drag. Which, in this case, means people like me who didn't like John Carter because we didn't like John Carter, independent of anyone else's opinion. It may be black and rectangular like a monolith, and it may make everyone go apeshit and start braining each other with leopard bones like a monolith, but it ain't necessarily a monolith.


“Yay! I'm glad you like John Carter too! [unlike these other sticks in the mud].”

Hey, being able to share how much you dig something with someone else is awesome. And, no shit, I'm glad someone liked John Carter. I wanted to, and might have if it hadn't been for that bullshit IMAX fuckshit. The movie was basically sitting in my lap, shouting at me, and prying at my ocular nerve with a crowbar for two-plus hours, which is exhausting at best. If it was up to me, I'd be right there with y'all fapping to happy memories of Lynn Collins and being all into it when the Thark or the Tharks or whatever the plural is crashland the hovercraft into the thing at the end and help Tim Riggins kick ass. I mean, shit, I'm right on board with both and I didn't even like the picture. But I'll make this deal: I'll assume you all like the picture in the same good faith in which I didn't.


“John Carter was fucking retarded. Anyone who likes this movie is also.”

Fuck you. Stop conflating your own dipshit opinion with empirical fact. A lot of people who are a lot fucking smarter than you liked this movie.


Anyone who's deriving pleasure from the picture flopping and the potential damage to Andrew Stanton's career

You all can blow those huge white furry ape things Tim Riggins owns in the gladiator scene. There's an ugly tendency in modern culture to hate all success with the same fury as undeserved success, and that shit needs to stop. Even though I find Pixar's memetic omnipotence a little disturbing, Andrew Stanton sufficiently made his bones with that company with Finding Nemo and WALL-E that it's only right that parent company Disney tell him, “Hey there! We like money and you made us lots of it, so now we're going to let you do whatever you want.” It reflects well on them that they let him do that, too. So Andrew Stanton wanted to make a $175 million movie version of an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. So it ended up costing between $250 and $300 mil instead. Big fuckin whoop, Disney's got money. And yeah, a guy who spent his whole career with complete control over every element of his films shot in live action with people and weather and a crew he had to keep fed and coffeed and days when everybody's just not feeling it ended up with something that's a little less perfect than his earlier pictures. Again. So fucking what. He made the Mouse a shitload of money. They can write this one off.


The only point to all of this is, there aren't sides. We're all people who like movies. Judging someone on the basis of their liking or not liking one isolated thing is dumb, whether it's to align yourself with them or against them. And letting yourself get worked up about someone liking or disliking something you like or dislike is also dumb. Let's all just breathe in, breathe out, and move on.

LET'S GIVE OUT SOME AWARDS! THE "BEST" OF 2011

The more generic the better, that's our motto.

This year, inspired by the glut of awards-season stuff I've been reading for weeks on Twitter, I decided to give out my own awards. Mine are free of the capricious political bullshit (to say nothing of the sentimentality) that infects the Oscars. No, mine are more likely to result in my accidentally awarding Best Supporting Actor to Rajon Rondo because I'm getting distracted by the Celtics-Heat game on the TV as I type this. Which would be a neat little surrealist statement about how stupid movie awards are, but I'm going to stay on topic. EVEN IF IT KILLS ME.

As you'll notice, there are categories here that you won't find on the Oscars. These awards, not having been voted on by any kind of electoral body or bunch of critics or even my mom or her cat—and lemme tell ya, the cat was pissed at the over-representation of dogs this year, damn—just me and my lil ol' foul-mouthed lonesome. So these are all my usual blend of hyper-erudite genius, axe-grinding, and wildly overblown advocacy. And, of course, lots and lots of fucking cursing. Which is why the only possible nickname for the first annual Movies By Bowes ™ Academy of Motion Picture Farts and Scientology Awards is . . . The Fuckos. Let us now begin. Some spoilers, unavoidably, so be forewarned.


ACTING:

Best Performance By An Actor, male: George Clooney, The Descendants. It's an amazingly good performance, with so much done in the eyes. It helps that the movie's fucking great too, but a huge part of it being great is Clooney. This was a great year for lead performances by men; there are at least seven that I wouldn't mind seeing win the Oscar. For the Oscar, because it'd be awesome, I'm advocating Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor, but this here's “best” and that means Clooney this year. Though seriously, Brad Pitt in Tree of Life or Moneyball, Clooney, Gary Oldman, the dude from The Artist, Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes . . . loaded fuckin' year.

Best Performance By An Actor, female: Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method. When I first saw this, I couldn't quite figure out what it was about her performance that struck me as off. I thought it might have had something to do with Keira Knightley not having the formal training that Fassbender, Viggo, and everyone else had. But something I couldn't quite describe was telling me “Resist the knee-jerk reaction that she sucked. She didn't. Figure out why she didn't.” And the conclusion I came to was that her character (and characterization) was a challenge to the way men traditionally view women. She's very sexual but not in a way that's geared toward pleasing men. She's way the hell smart. And by the end of the picture, when she's figured out how to make her way in the world, she doesn't really need Fassbender (the POV character for dudes in the audience) anymore. So that's the character. As for the performance, Keira Knightley keeps throwing in these little darts to keep everyone off balance, so that no one, in the movie or out, quite knows what to make of her. She pulls all the focus to her, which sometimes works to the detriment of the movie at large but since A Dangerous Method is, more or less, all about her—she's the engine that drives the whole thing, including the Fassbender/Viggo Jung/Freud relationship—she did the job. And that's why Keira Knightley's performance in that picture deserves a little more love than she's been getting this award season. (6/1/12 EDIT: The preceding paragraph was written before I saw Young Adult. Charlize Theron was better. Sorry, Keira; I still stand by the above assessment of your performance, you have to share the trophy though.)

Best Performance By A Movie Star, male: I know, I know: “What the fuck, George Clooney's not a movie star?” Yeah, he totally is, he just happened to also out-act all the AC-TORRRRRs this year. This here's about swagger, ownage, and charisma, the un-subtle arts. And this category was looooooooooaded this year. From Vincenzo Gasolina (not to mention the Rock, nor Paul Walker) in Fast Five, to Baby Goose in Drive, to Salman Khan in Bodyguard, to Shahrukh Khan's both-barrels bid to reassert his status as king in Ra.One and Don 2 (hey, what can I say, they grow good movie stars in India, about which more later in the acting categories), it's Shahrukh's American analogue who takes this one: Tom Cruise, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Dude hung off the hundred and what the fuck floor of the fuckin Burj Khalifa (roughly “REALLY FUCKING TALL BUILDING” in Arabic) by himself and did all that wacky rappelling shit and propped himself up on the fucking building by basically telling the building “Building? I'm a fuckin movie star. I can just chill here, right?” and the building went, “Sure. You are Tom Cruise, after all.” It was real nice to see Tom Cruise be the Tom Cruise that made him Tom Cruise again. That movie was fucking dope. Good to have ya back, Tom.

Best Performance By A Movie Star, female: Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I still think the book is horseshit and that Lisbeth Salander is a creepy jerk-off fantasy. But holy God Rooney Mara swaggered in that. The script material undercut her but she was just like “Fuck this shit, I didn't get all these piercings for real and start smoking for real and get in shape for all those nude scenes I didn't really need to do but did anyway because I ain't no punk . . . I didn't do all this fuckin shit to let a fuckin script undercut me. Prepare to be owned.” Et voila.

Best Performance By A Dog: Another weirdly loaded category this year. I was about an inch and a half from giving this to that wonderfully taciturn long-faced dog in Hugo, especially because Marty being a wise-ass with the 3D really let us into that dog's trip, but I have to be a conventional asshole and give this one to Uggie in The Artist. It is “best” performance by a dog, after all.

Best Performance By A Cat: The Cat, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Before Stieg Shithead Larsson (spoiler alert) iced the cat in a sensationalist hysterical bid to get the audience to really hate the bad guy, there was enough business with the cat that Daniel Craig got to chill with him a bit and let David “Honey Badger” Fincher make the dumb joke “huh huh Blomkvist is a pussy, get it? Hahahahaha” because why not. I liked that cat. I didn't like him getting iced. (End spoiler)

Best Performance by a Dude Playing A Chimp: This whole category is just cuz of Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Caesar is truth. Caesar is revolution. Caesar Occupies your entire shit. Yeah a huge part of that was the VFX, but they just rendered what Serkis gave 'em. Don't forget this movie, and don't sleep on it. This was good stuff.

Raddest Old Guy: Amitabh Bachchan, Bbuddah Hoga Terra Baap. He is the Big B. All hail. There were other cool things about this movie, like Sonu Sood and the adorable Charmy (oh, Charmy . . .) but it would have just been another “meh, whatever” picture without Amitabh holding it the fuck down in the lead. He's pushing 70 but still owned the living crap out of every bad guy in the whole picture without even smudging any of those crazy white suits of his.

Best Nudity: This is a total protest category about how all the goddamn time in movies filmmakers feel like they have to justify nudity or de-eroticize it and it all has to be for some kind of “purpose.” Fuck that shit. So, while 2011 featured a lot of very attractive actresses appearing full-frontally nude, the context was frequently such that the audience was being scolded not to find it hot. Emily Browning in Sleeping Beauty, lit and made up luminously, is being pawed by skeevy old dudes, who are saddened by the experience (also that movie is inert, miserable crap). Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, we already covered that. So I guess by default it's Carey Mulligan in Shame because at least, brother-sister weirdness aside when Fassbender finds her in the shower, she's just kinda kickin' it, and she does look good, and the purpose of the scene isn't to leer over her or make her into some bullshit fantasy character. Actually, my rationalization just convinced me to strike the “default” part of that. Carey Mulligan, Shame.

Best Dudity: Michael Fassbender, Shame. Of course it was him. It had to be him. Michael Fassbender has a very good chance of being the first actor in the history of the Oscars whose penis gets a nomination while he splits the vote between his performances in this, Jane Eyre, A Dangerous Method, and X-Men. Cue months of tabloid stories about the split in the partnership between Michael Fassbender's Penis and Michael Fassbender; Fassbender's penis will go off to LA and make big gaudy movies and wear gold chains and hang out with fast women and start doing coke, while Fassbender spends most of his time bereft, on airplanes, heading to do another play or art movie, missing his old friend, before a tearful reunion in the third act preceding a renewed and glorious collaboration as the music and credits swell. A final kiss will only be possible if Fassbender does some serious yoga in preparation.


DIRECTING:

Steven Spielberg, energized by War Horse and Tintin, plans to direct this many movies in 2012

Best Directing, Big Budget: Martin Scorsese, Hugo. I had problems with this picture but exactly none of them had anything to do with what Marty S. brought to the table. Marty had a big fuckin' vision, he got someone to give him $150 million and some 3D cameras and he went and got a DP and a design team that'll make ya change gods. Marty got performances out of the kids, he kept Sacha Baron Cohen from flipping out and taking over the movie, and he got Ben Kingsley and said, “Be Ben Kingsley.” And Ben Kingsley said, “Fuck that, I'm gonna be George Méliès.” And Marty said, “Works for me. See you on set.” This picture drove me bonkers while I was watching it because I wanted to go find the writers and kick them in the balls for not being able to keep up with Marty's brain, but the more I think about it, the more I'm like, goddamn, that Marty S. sure knows what the hell he's doing with this filmmaking racket. If he keeps it up he might make something of himself.

Best Directing, Small Budget: Joe Cornish, Attack The Block. Yeah, $13 million's a lot of money in regular people terms, but it's a fuck of a lot less than 150, and Attack The Block's a better movie than Hugo is, so the math is pretty much done. In ten years, people are going to be like, “Yeah, I saw Attack The Block in theaters” and people are going to be like “Whooooooa . . . cool!” Because in ten years Attack The Block is going to be a cult classic of near-Lebowski (chill the fuck out, I said “near”) proportions. This is absolute. Quote this back to me in ten years and I'll say, “Don't ever argue with the big dog, the big dog's always right.”

Best Directing of Actors: Alexander Payne, The Descendants. This would have been close if Woody hadn't fucked up Rachel McAdams' character in Midnight In Paris, but he did, so it's not. Payne got performances out of George Clooney, multiple different kids (the youngest we can credit to Payne and maybe even Nick Krause as Sid channeling a hetero Keanu, but to be fair, when Shailene Woodley decides it's time to move on from that life of the American teenager show or whatever it is, she's going to be just fine with or without Alexander Payne), Beau Bridges, and the less scary killer from Scream, who's now all growns up and stuff. They all feel like real people who are of that place; whether or not they actually resemble native Hawaiians is up to Hawaiians to say, but there's a great connection between the actors and the place, and it's a movie to a very large degree about place. And that's that.

Best Directing of Ownage Sequences: Nicolas Winding Refn, Drive. Could just as easily have been Justin Lin for Fast Five, Brad Bird in Mission Impossible: Motherfuckers I Shot Tom Cruise Hanging Off The Top Of The Fucking Burj Khalia: A Brad Bird Film Directed By Brad Bird's Testicles (the only reason he doesn't win this is because Tom Cruise owning Michael Nyqvist at the end wasn't as impressive as it might have been because, come on, Michael Nyqvist? Still a pretty cool sequence with all the moving parts, but definitely loses points because by that point Tom Cruise has demonstrated sufficient awesomeness that getting his ass kicked by the guy from the shitty Swedish Girl With The Dragon Tattoo seemed implausible.) No, The Long And Winding Refn takes this one because hammers, straight razors, and Clippers games. And for involving Albert Brooks in an enterprise where he owns someone somehow other than verbally (and then doing it again) and having the audience be like, “Daaaaaaaamn, Albert Brooks a bad motherfucker!” rather than “Really? Albert Brooks? Please.” That right there wins this category, no question.

Best Understated Yet Vividly Clear Political Statement: Asghar Farhadi, A Separation. This movie was so goddamn good you forget it's a foreign movie—shit, I forgot I was reading subtitles—because the people are so recognizably and universally people. Then you're like, why's she so dead set on amscraying the country with the daughter (who's amazing in this, by the way), and why are these random schlubs in shitty offices wielding omnipotent power over these people's . . . ohhhh, right. It's a totalitarian regime where religion and the state control everything. That didn't even hit me until the final scene, at which point it just popped up in high definition like, “oh yeah, none of this shit needed to happen.” (Ed. Note: the reason Rise of the Planet of the Apes didn't take this is, if you'll recall, the political message wasn't subtle. It was “FUCK THE STATE, WE DROP EVIL WHITE GUYS IN SUITS OFF OF BRIDGES IN FLAMING HELICOPTERS UP IN THIS. WHAT.”)

Most Unexpected Homage: Woody's fucking Inception trip in the Belle Époque sequence in Midnight In Paris. Okay, okay, I know it wasn't a straight-up homage to Inception. It just needs mentioning how great Midnight In Paris was a few dozen more times. And because the idea of Woody Allen directing Inception is really funny.


VISUALS & EDITING:

Raoul Coutard

Achievement in Camera Mastery: Emmanuel Lubezki, The Tree Of Life. Know why all the voice-overs in that were spoken in stunned fragmented whispers? They were watching the dailies while trying to talk. Those images were powerful, dude.

Most Immersive Production Design: The team that brought you Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I said in my Tor.com review, it felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s. And, well, yeah. It felt like they had a time machine and shot on location in the 1970s.

Best Use of Visuals As an Expository Tool: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They packed hundreds of pages of Stieg Larsson's bullshit into brisk, completely coherent minutes. That picture may have been two and a half hours but it was a fast two and a half, for sure.

Best Shot: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman + David Dencik + airplane slowly taxiing up behind them. Mmm mmm mmm that's some good stuff. Though, call me crazy, that one continuous shot in Hanna when Eric Bana walks through the airport, gets each baddie hiding behind each pillar to start following him, then lures them down into that underground walkway and owns all of them, concluding with throwing a knife through a dude's face (done without cutting away!) is a close second, and even better than Joe Wright's massive Dunkirk shot in Atonement, which was cool but it was also the only good thing about that movie. But there's something to be said for understated subtlety, which is why the Tinker Tailor airplane shot takes this one.

Uncanny Valley Memorial Achievement in VFX Verisimilitude: Rise. Dude Caesar was fucking real. (Resisted the urge to give this to the kid in Hugo, because otherworldly though he and those anime blue eyes were, he actually was a real person, I'm told.)

Best Editing, Action Movie: Drive. Cheating slightly because it's not an action movie, per se (as that batshit insane lawsuit plaintiff realized, much to her dismay) but the action sequences in this are put together fucking amaaaaaazingly. Patience goes well with action. Who knew?

Best Editing, Non-Action Movie: A Separation. Trust, that editing is crazy good. That movie isn't much more than people talking for an hour forty but damn is it ever intense. That's part writing and part performances, but the medium is montage. (Not in the Team America sense, wiseass, we talkin bout Eisenstein.)

Best Editing, “Damn, that picture didn't feel near that long” category: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Two and a half hours, and it barely felt half that. Runner-up, Fast Five, which—bizarrely—was two hours and twenty minutes long. It felt like the hour forty-five it should have been in any rational universe, which leads me to believe that Justin Lin might know the Jedi mind trick.


MUSIC:

Best Original Score: Attack The Block. Nothing else other than Hanna even need think about asking to be part of this category; while the Chemical Brothers did an excellent job with that, that movie wasn't propelled by the score to the same extent Attack The Block was. Attack The Block owns all. Not only does it work perfectly in the movie, it's the best goddamn writing music ever recorded.

Best Original Song: “Life's A Happy Song,” The Muppets. Though I'll hear arguments for several other songs from that movie. And the title song from Bodyguard, with the whistle-whistle, flex-flex, guitar-guitar hook. But “Life's A Happy Song” for the win.

Best Basically Original Song: “A Real Hero,” Drive. Everyone whined about it being in their heads for weeks/months afterward but you know why? Because it's a good song, that's why.

Best Use of a Previously Existing Song: the Soviet national anthem, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. That scene at the Circus' Christmas party before any of the bad shit happens, and they're all a little lit and start singing along . . . that's just awesome. It's a nerd joke, it's them kind of making a dark joke about the enemy, but also, all political implications aside, that's a really good fucking song; The Hunt For Red October would have won this category with the same song in 1990.

Best Song Cast As Pearls Before Swine In A Shitty Movie: “Shelter,” The xx, I Am Number Four. Terrible movie, and the song was used really badly, just because the xx were trendy when they were shooting the movie. But, even though no one cares about the xx anymore (nor do they care about I Am Number Four, thankfully), this song is still great and their album has a bunch of other good stuff on it.

Best Soundtrack: Midnight In Paris. Seriously. This might have been Woody's best soundtrack ever. “But what about the soundtrack to Drive?” What about the soundtrack to Drive? Woody's got Sidney Bechet, Josephine Baker and Jacques fucking Offenbach on this fuckin thing. The soundtrack to The Descendants with all the Hawaiian stuff is right up there, but when Woody's awake and paying attention to detail, really good things happen.


SILLINESS:

All due respect to Melissa McCarthy, this was the year's breakout comedienne.

Best Joke: When Kumar goes to cop some weed off Patton Oswalt's mall Santa in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, and he's going through all the Christmas-themed kinds of weed and a couple Hanukah ones, Kumar mentions something being as good as the “Diwali Dank” Patton Oswalt had had in October. That was a damn good joke.

Funniest Movie: The Trip. Going by US release date, it totally counts. GENTLEMEN TO BED.

Achievement in Unintentional Comedy: Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. Everything about this is funny, from the fact that they made a movie out of the most boring part of Atlas Shrugged, to the fact that the adaptation goes out of its way to make the material seem as dumb as possible. Not enough was made out of the fact that the director voted for Barack in '08; this movie seems like an out-and-out trollpiece, presenting Atlas Shrugged just straight enough that all the Randian dummies will get boners about there being an Atlas Shrugged movie, but engaging in a whole bunch of subtle acts of sabotage (and some not subtle ones, like directing the male and female lead, the latter of whom can be seen in the above photo, to act like robot tards) so that the end result just flat-out fucking sucks. I cannot wait for parts two and three. Can. Not. Wait. The only way to improve on the first one is by hiring Tommy Wiseau.

Best Deadpan: Corey Stoll as Hemingway in Midnight In Paris. That speech he gives Owen Wilson capped with “Think about it” was gold.


OWNAGE:

The concept, reified.

Best Car Chase: Oddly enough, I think I gotta go with Priyanka chasing Shahrukh in Don 2. All charges of n00b infatuation with Bollywood can be referred to my dick. The car chases in Fast Five, the seeming clear favorite, were great and everything, but they were just like the car chases in the other four movies. And Drive was Drive, but that was more “good filmmaking” than “dope car chases,” which aren't mutually exclusive or anything, but when I think car chases I think of the director turning to some Australian 2nd unit director with an incomplete complement of eyes and limbs and going “it's all yours,” to which the Australian replies “Lit's git ta fuckin wehhk, mate!” and next thing you know stunt drivers are nearly getting blown up driving Dodge Chargers through oil tankers and shit. (Ed. Note: Australians own.) Now, the car chase in Don 2 wasn't, on the surface, all that flashy. It was just a basic meat-and-potatoes car chase, but with an ineffable batshit insanity that made it fucking rad. Also, Shahrukh fucking destroys his car, and as we all learned from The Blues Brothers (in which is the greatest car chase of all time) at the end of the car chase the car has to just be like fuck it. I'll debate this one, but only to a certain point.

Best Fight: Vincenzo vs. The Rock in Fast Five. Just don't even step to this one. I don't care that Justin Lin gets trendy with the shaky cam. I don't care that it was relatively short. It's Vincenzo Gasolina fighting against The Fucking Rock.

Best violent death: In a year with many contenders, among them several grisly ownings in the bullshit historical epic Ironclad, the gorilla grabbing his nuts and going “sure, I can take on a helicopter with machine gun turrets with nothing but my bare hands” (not only did he win, the evil white guy in a suit—who was played by a black actor, proving that Evil White Guy In A Suit is an attainable state of mind that crosses racial barriers, just as Cate Blanchett proved in Hanna that it transcends gender barriers too—eats it in the ensuing crash) in Rise, and The Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, the prize has to go to Albert Brooks owning Bryan Cranston with that straight razor in Drive. He slices his wrists open lengthwise, and then while Cranston bleeds out he's like reassuring him that the worst part is over and he'll be dead soon. I mean holy fucking shit. Albert Brooks. Good God.

Best shirt removal: This is only a category so I can say what's up to Salman Khan in Bodyguard. The way the water hose filled his shirt up with water til it exploded, revealing Salman's muscles really needs to be seen to be believed. It manages to simultaneously be hilarious, ridiculous, awesome, and frankly kind of inspiring. And each quality depends on the simultaneity with the other three. There really is only one Salman Khan.

Greatest “Go fuck yourself” moment: The above-mentioned bit with the Rock casually putting two in Joaquim de Almeida's dome without breaking stride to go be homoerotic with Vincenzo, in Fast Five. I mean, come on. It's a shame JDA couldn't have still been alive for a second to be like, “Wow, yeah, okay, I understand the magnitude to which I just got owned.”

Best explosion: Gotta be when John Boyega, as Moses, detonates his apartment to kill all of “dem tings” at the end of Attack The Block. Not only was it a cool explosion, it was also Moses. Moses saved the fucking planet. Trust.

Best revolution: Caesar. Rise.

Awesomest hero: Moses. Attack The Block. Which, by the way, for anyone wondering how the Badass World Cup turned out, an update: there was a huge scandal surrounding North American Group Stage, when due to the fact that none of the participants would concede, America ended up pulling some 1980 Moscow Olympics shit and decided to withdraw from the competition entirely. The rest of the world kind of shrugged and went, “Well, with Makmende, Mad Max, the guy from The Secret In Their Eyes, Moses, and Tequila and Tony, America wouldn't even be a top seed, and fuck you guys for not letting Canada and Mexico play.” The only thing is, with America out of the Cup, American media stopped treating the Cup as if it existed (same as it ever was) and the wildly entertaining knockout stages, resulting in Moses' eventual victory, were lost to posterity. (Ed. Note: rumors that the real explanation is that Movies By Bowes ™ simply got bored with the conceit and had to write about other shit to pay the bills are scurrilous fucking Communism.) The point is, Moses is a hero. He saved the planet from dem tings. You do not attack the block and not get owned.


And those, dear readers, are the first annual Fucko Awards! Tune in in a couple days for the Top 11 movies of 2011!

GOD SAVE FU MANCHU, MORIARTY, AND DRACULA

xkcd, reminding us that even goatse is going to get the fucking  "remember when" treatment

Any number of movie writers have already given forth their “2011 is the year of nostalgia” thinkpieces, so rather than either pile on or write one of those dumb attention whoring “those other movie writers are retards” posts I'm going to tell y'all why it's natural at this point in the great human experiment that the past be on people's minds, and why the three foremost examples in what is now fashionable in some circles to call the “nostalgia porn” genre aren't really nostalgic.

As to that first point, shit's changing. From the Arab Spring to the Occupied Autumn, the great lurching shift toward a fully 21st century reality is underway in many parts of the world, right on schedule. A hundred years ago it was Europe going bugfuck and going “YO IT'S TIME FOR WORLD WAR ONE, BYETCHES,” two hundred years ago it was Napoleon flexing his nuts and acting like such a dick everyone thought he was shorter than he was because overcompensation was the only possible explanation. Hopefully this time around we can avoid as many people getting killed. But, anyway, major shifts that change everything frequently happen right at the beginning of the second decade of the century. And, when Everything Changes Forever, it's only natural that people start looking back at the world that was, and because the future is uncertain and—to some—scary, a certain glow of fondness is going to illuminate those looks back.

These aren't the only times when people look to the past, of course, but times like these there's more in the noosphere than usual, to the point where it's the prevailing theme in American cinema this year. Three pictures come to mind along with the subject, all very well received, all factoring heavily in awards-season speculation. They are:


Midnight In Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

I absolutely loved this movie, in spite of the one—not insignificant—flaw of Rachel McAdams being such an asshole it's almost like she's a revenge character. All she does the whole picture is, along with her mother, bust Owen Wilson's balls without motivation and to operatic excess. While she's intended to be a function of Owen Wilson's dissatisfaction with the venal, ignorant modern world (and while she seems totally unrealistic, someone—a relative, though I won't say which one—actually did say something as shitty to me once as Rachel McAdams does when she shushes Owen Wilson because Michael Sheen is talking) Woody kind of overdoes it with her, to the point where you're like, “If she really thought Owen Wilson was such a choad, why'd she get engaged to him?” His motivation's a little easier to understand; weak and shallow though it makes dudes look, there's an awful lot of mean dumbness we'll accept from someone as good-looking as she is. Yeah, go ahead, roll your eyes. Truth is truth. Anyway, enough of that shit, let's get on with the 90% of Midnight In Paris that totally fucking rocks:

Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter who's trying to write a novel, and somehow manages to convince his asshole fiancee (Rachel McAdams, see above) to come to Paris with him while he works on it. She keeps dragging him around to tourist-y shit, often with her “friend” whom she's (a little too) obviously fucking (Michael Sheen, in the greatest portrayal of that guy who dominates every conversation with his copious and frequently inaccurate triviata on any given subject OF ALL TIME). So one night Owen Wilson's out walking the streets while Rachel McAdams is doing something to make the audience hate her, and he has a seat to catch his breath and have one of those “holy fuck I'm in Paris” moments when, as a clock strikes midnight, a 1920s car pulls up and F. Scott Fitzgerald offers him a ride. Fuck. Yes.

Woody does some of the best work he's ever done with the 20s sequences, capturing both the allure and the parts about it where you're like “uhhh . . . yeah, not so much” (i.e. keeping Zelda Fitzgerald from jumping into the Seine every five minutes.) Owen Wilson's open-minded, open-hearted, open-mouthed wanderings through this vividly rendered world rubs off after not much time at all, and it's tempting to just quote the whole thing, but if you haven't seen it yet that's not fair, and anyway, isn't the point. Nor is the fact that the guy who plays Hemingway is fucking amaaaaaaaaaaaazing (Corey Stoll. Remember that name.)

What is, is a scene right at the end of the second act, where Woody (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it yet) gets his Inception on and goes for a fantasy dreamworld within a dreamworld, taking Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard, with whom he's fallen in some pretty apparently genuine love, to her favorite time in history, La Belle Époque. By this point in the movie I was enjoying Woody's little fluffy ode to every college freshman's first time machine destination and admiring the craft behind it, but once Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard hit Belle Époque and kick it with Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin and the three of them start talking about how the Renaissance must have been the best time to be alive I went “ohhhhhh shit . . . bravo, Woody. Bravo.”

Cuz if anyone's earned the right to be a little nostalgic, it's Woody. Between everybody busting his balls about how his movies aren't funny anymore (which they've been doing literally almost as long as I've been alive; he made that joke himself in Stardust Memories, which came out the month before I turned 2) and his well-documented and controversial marital habits—not to mention the fact that he's 76 now—you could hardly blame Woody for being like, “Man, remember the past? Wasn't it better, without all the ball-busting?” But no, he looks back, sees that it's awesome, and still comes firmly down on the side of “Live in the moment. Resist nostalgia. Now is all you really have.” I could hug Woody for that, if I wasn't worried that he'd break. The picture ends perfectly. If anything was going to be his highest grossing picture of all time, it should be one this good.

Sticking with New York filmmakers, next up:


Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

I've documented my dislike of most 3D movies, and my position about it being more a commercial than artistic innovation, a number of times. That being said, I'd be a fucking idiot if I didn't trust that Martin Scorsese would do something worthwhile with it. Not everything he's directed has been good, but you know if you see his name on something, you know his burning passion for cinema is going to show through, and there's going to be at least one thing in the movie where you're like “damn, okay, I haven't seen that before.” Even something like The Color Of Money, which he admitted to making (fittingly enough) for the money, still has something (The Color Of Money itself, in the right mood, is awesome.)

Hugo, as one would hope from Marty S., has by far—it's really not even close—the greatest 3D visuals to date. (Speaking of things I've said a number of times but can't say enough, fuck Avatar right under its blue fucking tail.) Marty and production designers Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo create a magical storybook Paris through which DP Robert Richardson's camera zooms, swoops, and hides right on the other side of a wall or window peaking in. There are some of the most gorgeous blues I've ever seen. It's got every last bit of visual grandeur $150 million can buy, and a bunch extra that you can only get when your director fucking means it, and Marty S. fucking means it.

The story, adapted from the Caldecott-medal winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is, on one level, about a boy named Hugo who lives in a train station who gradually befriends an elderly man who turns out to be pioneering filmmaker George Méliès. On another level, it's about the transformative power of movies, and how they're the stuff dreams are made of. On a lower but no less important level, it's about trust, friendship, purpose, and love. All things I'm totally on board with.

Only problem is, Hugo's got about an hour and a half of story stretched out over about two hours and ten minutes. The distension of the running time is largely due to the fact that Hugo and Méliès go through the motions of being, respectively, a mute and an evil old bastard for about a half hour, when in fact Hugo has plenty to say (kid's a borderline genius) and Méliès is a really nice guy who's a little down on his luck. The problem with the beginning being so interminable is that at no point in any of it are we given any insight into why Hugo can't just talk to the old guy and why Méliès is such a prick to the kid. Then, all of a sudden, as if the first half hour of the movie didn't exist, boom, we have the actual story. From there, the story is . . . okay. I feel slightly like an asshole bitching about it because the movie's heart is in a very good place, and a certain amount of simplicity and heavy-handedness can be written off to Marty aiming the picture at kids. But withholding the reasons to care about the main character and the character who ends up being the picture's moral center for over a quarter of its running time keeps Hugo from being a complete success.

That said, Hugo's absolutely worth seeing, and worth seeing on a big screen in 3D, because you absolutely positively for real reals haven't ever seen nothing like this. Even if it fails as narrative it succeeds absolutely in being a lecture on cinematic epistemology with professor Scorsese. In making a picture in digital 3D about the very earliest silent movies, Marty telescopes the entire history of cinema into one movie, a linkage made all the more explicit with some shockingly brilliant post-converted footage from Méliès' own films, which simply and beautifully makes the point that one movie is every movie. Even if Marty doesn't make little kids want to run out and see a bunch of silent movies, he makes a pretty good case that the little fuckers are shitheads for not wanting to.

Even the fact that the writing drove me insane but I loved everything else ends up being a testament to the power of the director and crew of a movie. Also, if you told me that Marty S. had pulled you aside and said, “Look, if you repeat this I'll deny it but this whole fucking picture is a massive memetic experiment to program little kids so that they become devotees of the theory that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true author of a movie, and a number of things you as an adult don't get but that are going to be little semiotic time bombs for anyone under 12 that result inevitably with their ability to write 500 page exegeses of G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, and D.W. Griffith by the time they're 15,” I'd slap my forehead and go, “IT ALL SEEMS SO CLEAR NOW.” Plenty of people I trust and respect were transported by Hugo. Something about it kept me at arm's length the whole night. I thought it was a little clunky, though I can't front on its sincerity. C'est la vie.

Speaking of French, our last picture:


The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius)

Now, this, my friends, is what the fuck I'm talkin' about. It deals with a lot of the same themes as Hugo—silent cinema and the appreciation thereof, most prominently—and also has a scene-stealing dog (much like the two pictures themselves, I suspect one will either prefer the alternation between stoic contemplation and feverish, sloppy pursuit of the dog from Hugo or the zany mugging and pluckiness of the dog in The Artist; both dogs are microcosms of their respective movies.) And they're formal mirror images of each other: Hugo used all the modern technology money can buy to pay homage to the earliest movies, where The Artist uses the visual style and techniques of 20s and 30s cinema to tell the always-relevant (especially today) story about how time marches on, and marches past whoever can't keep up.

With a couple notable (and stunning) exceptions, The Artist is done totally straight as a late-period silent movie. Its protagonist, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is a massive star in 1927 Hollywood, with charisma for days, and broad mugging for weeks. After the opening of his latest hit picture, George literally bumps into a young woman named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, whose beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe), who, as it turns out, is an aspiring actress. And does quite well, seeing as how her beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe. IT'S AS IF YOU'D NEED TO FILM HER TO GET THE POINT ACROSS.

Good thing The Artist is a movie, then, that's what I'm saying. The story gets going once sound is introduced, as muckety-muck John Goodman and a bunch of the standard evil white guys in suits you get hanging around any movie company (though John Goodman is, as his name implies when you bifurcate it, one of the good ones) inform George that it's either start talkin' or start walkin'. George, pissed, bankrolls his own epic silent melodrama, that ends up opening the same say as Peppy's latest. You know which one wins and which one goes down in flames. I ain't gotta spoil it.

The movie doesn't end there, though. It continues through a bunch of capital M Melodrama to an ending that's at once triumphant, wistful, and even a bit sad. But every second of it hums with a love of movies and an uncanny skill in recreating the cinema of early Hollywood. It succeeds in a way a picture like Far From Heaven (which I, by the way, really liked) doesn't in managing to make the recreation more than an academic exercise; The Artist actually is a “you'll laugh, you'll cry” movie exactly like the ones to which it pays homage. The dance sequences are killer, the leads are perfect in both look and demeanor, and the dog is just the best.

As much as it would appear, in a thousand different ways, like The Artist is the most nostalgic of the three, when Jean Dujardin's smiled his last smile, Bérénice Bejo is done being like “there isn't another actress alive who could have done this as perfectly as I just did. Bask” and the dog has pulled his last pratfall, The Artist is really a movie about the importance of adapting to changing times. The inability to do so nearly breaks George. It is, of course, still very much about respecting the past—Peppy's efforts to pay respect to those who've come before verge on saintly—but since the embodiment of the importance of that respect also fits flawlessly with the modern age, it's clear that the message is not to live in the past, merely to just remember, every now and then, how awesome it was.


Since I clearly have a lot of work to do founding this religion based on Bérénice Bejo (and since she's Hazanavicius' wife, keeping one step ahead of his jealous wrath if he thinks I'm crushing on her too hard) it would probably help to define nostalgia, and why none of these pictures succumb to the temptations thereof. There's a difference between looking back and being like, “Yeah, that was nice,” and yearning painfully to live in the past. Midnight In Paris looked like it was going to be the latter before Woody, at the perfect moment and in the perfect way, revealed nope. He even has Owen Wilson (did I mention he was terrific in that? I probably should: he was terrific in that) quote Faulkner's famous line “The past ain't dead. It ain't even past” in a context that suggests that the past not being past is a sign that it's always with us in our memories, but that life is lived in the world itself, not in our heads. Hugo isn't nostalgia, it's a history lesson about the primacy of film conversation. And The Artist, the sneakiest of the three, employs about as many nostalgia-inciting elements as there are stars in the sky to tell a story about changing with the times.

So, if in the Year of Nostalgia, none of the most “nostalgic” movies really are that thing, what are they? Three movies that came out the same year as each other; a year where people have been tending to reflect on the past a bit, to be sure, but a meditation on a thing is not the same as the thing itself, just as depiction is not endorsement. Even if my enjoyment was variable with the three movies under question, all deserve better than to be dismissed with one adjective, most especially if it doesn't apply.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I was told by a creative writing professor in college that one should not write road novels, because she thought they betrayed the writer's inability to think of a proper plot. I was told by another creative writing professor that all good writing originates from a sense of place (though she implied that the only legitimate kind of writing was short autobiographical fiction by women in New Mexico about deceased parents and guilt about the Native American genocide, which is weird because she wasn't from New Mexico; as you might imagine, she and I got along so famously that she tried to have me expelled.) Although I disagreed with them on both these points (respectfully and disrespectfully, respectively) it's through having studied with both of them that I figured out how road narratives work when they work. It's when place contributes to the evocation of character, and the journey of the lead character(s) from A to B is the entire point of the narrative. Yes, 19 year old creative writing students deciding “I'm going to write a novel about a bunch of us in a car to California smoking weed” should be discouraged from actually writing that novel. But for stories involving an actual intellectual/emotional/other journey, of import to anyone other than the protagonist him/herself, literalizing that by having the character make a physical journey works just fine, and can be a nice lil ol metaphor there. Thus, today I'm going to write about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Motorcycle Diaries, and The Trip. (Note: the following contains a few random spoilers here and there, but only for movies that are old enough to buy cigarettes.)

Obviously there have been other road movies. I've seen many of them, just as I've read many road novels (the enduring popularity of which can be blamed entirely on On The Road, which is the most important book in the world when you're 15 but is completely unique and impossible to emulate, even by its own author). There's Easy Rider, but Easy Rider was about Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda looking cool on motorcycles, not character development; Billy and Captain America don't change at all, unless you count when they get lit the fuck up by those dudes in the truck at the end (which sort of counts, death being a change). And there's Thelma & Louise, as Isaac Butler pointed out, which has character development, and does involve a road trip, but belongs to a separate genre, the “outlaws on the run” movie (see also Bonnie and Clyde, True Romance, Thieves Like Us, etc etc.) With those pictures, having The Man (in more ways than one, in Thelma & Louise's case) on one's ass means that the leisurely, unhurried pace necessary for characters to realize shit or mature or what have you on their own schedule is obviated, and that “take your time, we're in no rush” element is a very key element to the three movies I want to talk about.

The least of the three, in terms of heft and cinematic adventurousness, is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

Which is not to say that it's not a delightful movie, because it is. It's also a movie that history has had a few drinks with, because now we can say that it stars Agent Smith, Leonard Shelby, and General Zod (Ed. Note: government names—Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp) as the most fabulous cabaret act in all of Sydney, Australia. Weaving and Pearce are industry-standard drag queens, though Stamp is a trans woman, as a wrinkle. The story is set in motion when an old friend of Weaving's offers them a gig out in Alice Springs (for those of y'all not up on your 'Strayan geography, Sydney's way in the east and is one of the world's cultural capitals and Alice Springs is a couple thousand clicks inland in the Northern Territory, which is basically Crocodile Dundee's turf) and the girls hop on a bus called Priscilla and go have themselves a road trip.

The journey inland clearly parallels Weaving's and Stamp's attempts to make sense of their respective pasts; Pearce's job is more to be comic relief, which he handles brilliantly, but his character isn't given as much depth as the other two. By the time they, and the story, reach(es) their/its destination (fuck you, pronouns) a lot of positive change has taken place, and life can move forward, in brainmeltingly awesome costumes. A large element in everything turning out okay is represented, symbolically, by our protagonists managing to transcend their otherness (which is manifest) and connect with their country and its people. Stamp plays a recent widow who—mild spoiler alert—meets a really nice small town guy who doesn't give two fucks what kinda genitals s/he was born with, he's just mad into Terence Stamp. Hugo Weaving—slightly spicier spoiler—reunites with his not-yet-divorced wife (the old friend who gives them the gig, no less) and young son, with whom he finally forms a father-son relationship amidst the central Australian countryside. One could even make the argument that given Alice Springs' geographical centrality, he journeyed to the heart of Australia, and in bringing his son back with him to Sydney at the end, he brings his rediscovered heart back with him. Oh, yeah, that's right, there's more to that movie than a bunch of ABBA, CeCe Peniston, and Alicia Bridges. Recognize.


Next, a radically different movie (that I stupidly left off my top 10 of the last decade, when it really should clock in at #2), The Motorcycle Diaries:

Get it? RADICAL? See, it's funny because it's Che Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries, of course, is the story of a very young, not-yet-Che (Gael Garcia Bernal, fucking awesome), who hops on a bike with his pal (Rodrigo de la Serna, just as fucking awesome) for a roundabout tour of South America on their way from Buenos Aires to a leper colony in Peru where they're volunteering and eventually to Caracas. Of course nothing goes the way they plan it, and by the time they get to the end of their journey, proto-Che is at the beginning of the journey that leads to becoming Che, and achieving dorm-room-wall immortality.

It's a story that underscores the principle that a story being happy or sad depends on when you call “cut.” Had it gone on—like Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic—it would have gotten to the years when Che's good intentions confronted uncooperative realities (to be kind) and he started killing people and fucking shit up (to be less kind). The Motorcycle Diaries stops at a point when young Ernesto still has his whole life ahead of him, yet it's still a complete journey. Going from a liberal but sheltered medical student to a passionate advocate for social justice is quite a leap.

Like Priscilla (Ed. Note: I know this is the first time you ever saw anyone compare these two pictures. I know I'm awesome, you don't have to say it), the characters' journey in The Motorcycle Diaries is paralleled by the massive geographical distance traversed. In this case, the variety of geography is also vast, from snowcapped mountains to deserts to jungles. And, like the journey itself does, proto-Che connects all of these terrains, and the people who inhabit them, coming to regard South America as a continent rather than a group of discrete nation-states, and South Americans similarly as one people. From there, the obvious next step is that the world and all its people are as one.

Director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera do a good job in The Motorcycle Diaries of not judging proto-Che either way, instead letting the events unfold and simply pointing a camera at them. The way those events unfold make it seem inevitable, in the sense of the natural world to which the picture is so indelibly linked, that proto-Che would undergo the moral and intellectual journey he does. But, rather than the movie suggesting that anyone would have this reaction, it restricts itself to its observation on its particular characters. Proto-Che is proto-Che. You are you.


Fuckin' hell The Motorcycle Diaries was good. Anyway, moving on:

The Trip

This right here is a road picture as only Michael Winterbottom could make, and only in England. Edited down from a BAFTA-winning six-episode TV show about Steve Coogan (Steve Coogan), having been talked into a tour of restaurants in the North of England by his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who's gone back to America because things aren't going so well, being “forced” to ask his friend Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon) to accompany him on the trip because he “can't do it alone.” And so they spend five days driving around England, eating in restaurants, and talking. And talking. And talking. And talking.

The Trip contains more references to other Michael Winterbottom movies than anyone could possibly be expected to catch without an annotated edition. Catching them all, thankfully, isn't the point, but it does well to note that Michael Winterbottom is a total fucking wiseass, always fucking with audience expectations, throwing change-ups (googlies?), keeping us on our toes.

For this reason, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a Michael Winterbottom road movie takes place in England, a country you can drive across in one day (provided you don't hit traffic). It's also a place that gives the sense of always having been there, and that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The same goes, more or less, speaking very generally, for the people as well. While this may not be true in every case, it's still true that there's a prevailing sense of England and its people being this way.

So a road movie where Steve Coogan doesn't really go anywhere or do anything, beginning and ending with him alone moping in his apartment, just trucking along in an anhedonic funk, occasionally sniping at Rob Brydon to hide his secret jealousy of Brydon's relative happiness (and extremely loving marriage), is kind of the perfect English road movie.

I give Winterbottom, Coogan, and Brydon a lot of credit for making the fact that The Trip is almost casually perfect of secondary importance to it being one of the funniest and most quotable pictures in like ever. I'm not even going to embarrass myself trying to describe how awesome the jokes are, so I'm going to let the movie speak for itself. Also, bear in mind, when you watch a whole hour and forty-five minutes of this, the cumulative effect just makes it funnier and funnier:



This one I posted last November before I even knew what The Trip was:



Finally, maybe you have to be an actor to think this is the funniest thing in the fucking universe but I am so it is:



I mean holy shit this movie is so fucking good. The fact that it speaks that perfectly to what it's like being an actor AND has a deeply considered and holistically perfect sense of place AND is a mirror image of the classic road movie AND in so being ends up being one of the best extant examples thereof is . . . well, unlike Messrs. Coogan and Brydon, I have no words. (Also, footnote: Rob Brydon is amazing in this, and Rob Brydon the character is one of my favorites in any movie in years. And, second footnote: I love how Steve Coogan is so willing, in this, Tristram Shandy, 24 Hour Party People—kind of, as that was Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson as Steve Coogan—and Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, how Coogs is willing to the point of eagerness to portray himself as such a raging twat. He always gets it juuuust right before he alienates everyone. It's quite the balancing act.)

Okay, since it's getting to time to say QED and drop the mic, to recap: a successful road narrative in its given medium is dependent on the relationship between character and place, with the place being the progenitor of the character(s), and the change in place paralleling the change, and hopefully evolution, of character. It's not the subtlest metaphor in the world, but there are certain stories—like the three discussed above, and a number of others, I'm sure—that need to be told that way. That's right, motherfucker. Q. E. D.

[drops mic]

YOU'RE ALLOWED ONE

“That word is special. We only use it for something really important.” 

---Hope and Glory

For a variety of reasons, I find the movie industry's adoption of the PG-13 rating as the only acceptable mainstream standard annoying. One of those reasons is variety: while I understand the industry's desire to make movies that are all things to all people, I personally like to change it up every now and again. While I might be in the mood for a touching, heartwarming tale of family reconciliation one day, I might be in the mood for gruesome, blood-soaked ownage the next. And, every now and then, a little sex. Another reason the universality of the PG-13 sucks is how arbitrarily it's defined. Sexuality, forget it, nothing more explicit than cock/clit teasing allowed. Violence, that you can have all you want. You get the feeling Scarface would be a PG-13 today if they cut the number of times Tony Montana says “fuck.”

But that last is one of the things I'm starting to enjoy about PG-13 movies. Among the stupid, arbitrary definitions of the rating is: you can say “fuck” (as you may have gathered, one of the favorite words here at Movies By Bowes ™) once. That's it. Occasionally someone sneaks a second in there—like in Ocean's Eleven—but the second one tends to be either mumbled or spoken, as in Ocean's Eleven's case, in a heavy enough accent that the Republican soccer moms on the ratings board might not have processed it as a “fuck.” But, for the most part, PG-13 movies are allowed one.

The reason why I've recently become very fond of this rule is that filmmakers, tailoring their script toward the commercially-friendly PG-13 rating, have started to realize that if strategically deployed, their one “fuck” can be extremely memorable, maybe even the best quote of the movie. I just saw Super 8 the other day, and it's awesome and the second coming of sliced bread and kittens and sunshine. It's a PG-13 movie because writer-director J.J. Abrams is a pretty PG-13 guy; not knocking him, it actually works really well for him, since he can totally make the kind of movies he wants without having to censor or euphemize too much.

Super 8's one of those movies that shouldn't be spoiled, so I won't go into too many details, but there's a bit where all manner of hell has just broken loose, and this one guy has totally just slept through most of it, and walks over, looks at a massive pile of shit that's just been destroyed and goes, “What . . . the fuck?” in this perfect line reading. It's easily the funniest thing in the whole movie.

Then, of course, there's the magnificent Fast Five (the year's second-awesomest movie of the year so far only because Super 8 is really sincerely that good), also a PG-13, which also deploys its one “fuck” quite well. When The Rock and his gigantically muscular ownage squad touches down in Rio and Rock liaises with the Brazilian cops, he delivers his curt tough guy speech, and caps it off when the Brazilian cop asks him if he needs any help by responding “Stay the fuck out of my way.” Awesome.

In both instances, the solitary “fuck” got an enormous, enthusiastic response from the audience. This is partly because hee hee “fuck” chuckle chuckle naughty naughty. But also because each movie used its one “fuck” to its maximum strategic potential. It's like Abrams writing Super 8 and Chris Morgan writing Fast Five went “How the fuck can I make my fuck work for me?” and came up with the right answer. I like to picture both of them sitting at their keyboards after writing the line in question and going “Heh heh. 'Fuck.' Hehehehehehe.” This is because I'm 12. In a related story, this is why I liked both of those movies so much. And yet I digress.

I think that, rather than rail against the MPAA for its arbitrary, irrational, hypocritical, pointless social conservatism—a losing battle, since they're never going to change—the more effective way to point up just how dumb this shit is is by continuing to do what Abrams and Morgan did in their respective scripts. By making such a big deal out of the one permitted “fuck” they actually call more attention to the word than in an R-rated movie (or this blog, to be painfully honest) where it's like “fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck” til it just becomes background noise. So, by keeping the “one fuck per PG-13” rule, intending to minimize “bad” language, the MPAA has actually, for lack of a better term, fucked up. If I can remember the exact scene and character and context under which the guy in Super 8 and The Rock in Fast Five said “fuck,” but couldn't begin to tell you all the different people were who said “fuck” in any given R movie—and I was paying more attention to other stuff in Super 8 and Fast Five, believe me—the “one fuck per PG-13” rule is not serving its intended purpose.

The MPAA basically has two choices. The first (not that I intend to give them any ideas, mind you) is to simply ban all “bad” language. They can totally get away with this, since the First Amendment only applies to government censorship, and the MPAA is not, de jure, the government. But even though they could get away with pulling that kinda shit doesn't mean they won't look like total fucking assholes if they try to. The other choice is to lighten the fuck up (so to speak) and stop tripping about a commonly used, extremely versatile word. If the MPAA is so concerned about kids and want to protect them, the way to be an uptight conservative fussbudget and actually do some good is to get more concerned about violence. I like ownage as much as the next guy, and I was watching extremely violent shit since I was very young, but I watched all that shit with careful parental supervision. My mom was always there to explain that what I was seeing was not only fucking awesome but just a movie. Since not everyone is as lucky as me (she took me to The Terminator, Robocop, Total Recall, and all the Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal you can shake a stick at in the theaters, among many many others) and since all those pictures I mentioned in that aside wear their R rating with defiant pride, it would behoove the MPAA, if they're going to “protect” kids, to enforce some standards about the way violence is portrayed in movies rated PG-13 and under. Language is just language, you know, sticks and stones may break my bones, but “fuck” can never hurt me. Sure there are situations where it's impolite to curse, but if you think about it, you can determine which ones those are.

Sadly, the whole “one fuck” rule derives, in large part, from not thinking. The simpler and less flexible the rating rules are, the easier it is for the Republican soccer moms to just dismiss something as an R. One fuck per PG-13, and it can't be “I want to fuck you” or have anything to do with the old in-out, otherwise boom: R. So if the MPAA wants to play it this way, and be dicks pointlessly over one special word, screenwriters owe it to the notion of justice (and trolling) to weaponize their “fucks.” After all, the only good thing about censorship is making the censors look like assholes.

SERIOUS CINEMA FOR CIVILIANS

I've written before about the needlessly contentious relationship between film writers and civilians, mainly as a chance to be rude to more successful critics, often in vague, non-specific terms, about what I think they're doing wrong. This doesn't accomplish much other than make me look like an asshole, so I'm going to try a different tactic, one that I think more serious cineastes should take (naturally, since it's my brilliant fucking idea): reach out to civilians.

None of them are reading this blog, obviously, because they're all off doing whatever civilians do. I mean . . . what the fuck do they do with the time that we're writing 7000 word articles about the role of UFA in shaping the visual aesthetic of Hollywood's First Golden Age, or getting into fistfights with people over Terrence Malick movies? Whatever they get up to, that's not the point, we could spend years of field research tagging them and studying their habits, but why waste all the tranquilizers sedating them when we can use them to get high (and anyone who's tried to watch a Godard picture from after 1967'll tell ya: getting lifted helps). Point is, we all know a civilian or two—they're fairly easy to identify—and it's about fucking time we let them know we're not big scary eggheads with insular vocabularies and superhuman boredom thresholds. At the core, we're just like them: people who like movies.

This is the thing a lot of the civilians I talk to get hung up on: because of the unctuous jerkoffs who take five minutes to say the word “film” and insist on the brilliance of shit that sounds fucking boring (or, worse, the unctuous jerkoffs make it sound fucking boring), civilians think “serious” cinema is not for them, and regard art cinema and entertaining movies as two disparate entities. This is a shame, because while there are any number of art pictures that are challenging to their audiences, there are also a whole lot of really great “films” that also rule the fuck out of shit as “movies.”

The intent of this post is to give us—because don't even try to bullshit, if you're reading this, you're One Of Us—the vocabulary to let civilians know that just because it's serious doesn't mean it can't be serious fun. So, first, an important distinction:

Film vs. Movie: Basically they mean the same thing. A lot of people use “film” and “movie” interchangeably, which is fine, for the previously stated reason, but you want to watch it with the word “film” in certain contexts, especially when dealing with civilians. A lot of them hear the word “film” and go, “ooh, that sounds serious,” and while we all know serious is (or can be) awesome, your civilian might get a little wary. Especially if it's used as a suffix to the words “foreign” or “independent” you might end up totally fucking blowing it. So if a civilian asks you something like “what kind of movies do you like?” don't make the mistake of ending the conversation by being like “I like foreign and independent film” because they're just gonna go, “Ahhhh,” and pretend to be interested and end up either changing the subject or leaving. On the other hand, if—for whatever fucking reason, and goddammit this had fucking better be because the civilian brought him up—Ingmar Bergman gets dragged into the conversation, there's no ifs ands or buts, the only acceptable phrase is “Bergman film.” This holds true for a select few foreign and art cinema directors. But the handy thing is, you're usually not going to be talking about any of these directors until way past the entry level, and by the time your civilian is watching Wild Strawberries or whatever they're not going to be civilians anymore, so it's a moot point.

This is not a rant against the word “film.” When we're among our own kind, we can use whatever language we want, be as pretentious as we like, and the only danger is mouthing off to someone smarter than you or getting busted trying to pawn off something you've read as your own thoughts. Then, there's no real danger of anything except looking like a dickhead. You're not alienating a potential movie lover. Cuz really, that's the thing, we want more people loving movies, and feeling uninhibited about liking good ones.

Basically, we want to use friendly, non-intimidating language. I find the word “picture” to be the best of all possible worlds. It's a little old-fashioned, so older civilians won't find it threatening. It's short for “motion picture,” so it makes sense, and it's not excessively casual like the word “movie” can be under the wrong circumstances. But the coup de grace is that it's so fucking pretentious a lot of serious cinema people will cringe occasionally, and what good is hanging around with serious cinema people if you can't fuck with them and give them dyspepsia every now and then? The best part is, only serious cinema people know how pretentious it is, so you've basically got your own private screening going on in your head while having a seemingly innocuous conversation about a “Humphrey Bogart picture” with your nice civilian friend over a beer.

So, good, we've got our civilian all warmed up. We still have a bunch of big fucking obstacles in our way. Our tripartite demon of civilian fear and loathing is thus:

Old
Foreign
Independent

All three of these shibboleths cast massive, dark, foreboding, frigid shadows over our nice, friendly civilian and send them scrambling to watch unspeakable things, movies which I shan't even name for fear of upsetting the more sensitive readers out there. Our challenge is to present these types of movies in as palatable a way as possible. Not to tell them, “This is good, thus you must like it.” Describe why it's awesome, and if you do so properly you get “That sounds awesome.” Then all you gotta do is watch the fucking movie, better known as the fun part.

Of paramount importance, of course, is picking the right movie. Let's start with “old” (read: anything made before the civilian in question was born).


OLD

The way to figure this out is to figure out what your civilian actually likes, because if you try and force what you want them to like on them, le jeu sont fait, motherfucker. So here's a couple hypothetical answers to the (impossibly reductive, but fuck it) question, “So what do you like?”

Civilian: “I like ownage. Who in old-ass movies owns the shit out of people?”

Answer: Humphrey Bogart



Beginner's Level: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon
Intermediate: The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place
Advanced: well, shit, if they're at the advanced level they're probably off watching The African Queen and The Caine Mutiny and shit on their own initiative. Good job.

Keep in mind the purpose of this post is to provide general unsolicited advice, and so the question becomes, who has the broadest appeal? For ownage alone, one might be tempted to answer “John Wayne” and while it's true that John Wayne did own, there's the political problem. Like in fucking Hondo when he's out there protecting the woman and her kid and he throws the fucking kid in the river to teach him to swim and growls something right-wing and the woman gets all aroused. That scene aged badly. Bogart works better, as he makes up for not owning as many dudes as John Wayne did by really makin em fucking count. Major Strasser. End of list.

There's a reason everyone trips about Casablanca. One of the first posts I ever did on this blog was about how great it was, but words are ephemeral. Casablanca will win over anyone except apostate nitpicky killjoy assholes farting about how there's no such thing as “real” letters of transit and all that fuckin shit. Of course, you don't phrase it that truculently to your civilian. You go, “Oh, yeah, I know everybody's been sucking this movie's dick for the last hundred years but trust me, half an hour in, its balls will be on your chin, too.” Or paraphrase. Build up enough trust with your civilian so that if you go “Trust me” they don't just go “fuck you.” Casablanca will not betray that trust.

The Maltese Falcon also works because it's every bit as good as Casablanca is except it won't make you cry. Casablanca occasionally makes people cry, and if your civilian isn't progressive and is mumbling about “chick shit” like romance, show him (chicks rarely complain about chick shit) The Maltese Falcon, which features pretty much nonstop Humphrey Bogart ownage, of verbal, physical, and even intellectual varieties. The Maltese Falcon is powerful shit. People buy fedoras and tan raincoats and shrink six inches and start rolling their own cigarettes to be like Bogart in that fucking movie. As well they goddamn should.

Shocking as it may seem, some civilians might be looking for something other than ownage in their old movies . . .

Civilian: “I like comedies.”

Answer(s): Pretty much anything Preston Sturges ever made.



This one's a little tricky for me because it's outside my usual home territory; any number of you out there better-versed in classical Hollywood cinema than me might be able to think of better suggestions. Preston Sturges works well for civilians, though, because he was such a stunningly fucking good writer and his dialogue and characters hold up remarkably well over the decades. The Lady Eve is fun as hell because Henry Fonda's a dork, Barbara Stanwyck is Barbara Stanwyck, et cetera ad infinitum, so if you want to keep it light, that's a good one to go with, but if you want to blow your civilian's fucking mind, show them Sullivan's Travels.

Sullivan's Travels is hilarious in some places, really really dramatic in others, and ends on such an exhilarating, transcendent note that you'll be talking about how awesome it is with your civilian for hours afterward. You do have to be careful, though, because the dramatic parts may make some tune out, so if you're sensing an unreliable attention span you might want to try something else first.

This is where Billy Wilder comes in handy. Specifically, Some Like It Hot. Actually, what the fuck am I talking about? Disregard all that other shit. Watch Some Like It Hot with your civilian, and say “you're welcome.”


Answer: “I like tearjerkers.”

Solution: There is but one. The man is Douglas Sirk. The movie is Imitation of Life.



Some might say I'm crazy, busting this out for a civilian. And sure, I'm crazy. And sure, parts of Imitation of Life are dated as shit, though Troy Donahue menacingly growling the n-word is one of the funniest things ever. And, yeah, it's over the top. And sure, the average civilian, not (over)thinking the matter, is going to look at the ending and go “Get the fuck out of here, did she really just die of a fucking broken heart?” To which there's only one reply, “Yes, yes, she does.” (Ed. Note: Imitation of Life is fucking awesome). Your civilian will at this point perhaps sneer and go, “Well that sucked.” So . . . what am I on about here? Why did I tell you to throw on Imitation of Life? Because your civilian is going to turn right around and tell you “This sure isn't any An Affair To Remember.”

Therein lies the brilliance of my plan. Only civilians have ever seen An Affair To Remember beginning to end (little known fact: even Nora Ephron, who's not a civilian, only saw the couple seconds of it she used in Sleepless in Seattle). Serious cineastes had to turn it off or leave the theater or whatever after the first five minutes to either throw up or get treated for diabetes. Because your civilian is a civilian, they've seen An Affair To Remember. They all have. They can then use this knowledge to get one up on you, the nominal expert, and the first seed in the orchard that is cinephilia has been planted: the feeling of superiority attendant to having seen something the other person hasn't.

By the way, the whole above scenario is word for fucking word the way it'll actually play out. The sneakiest thing about civilians is that they do know more than you do about old tearjerkers, it's a glitch in the Matrix (by the way, that brings up another excellent point that I'll consign to an aside just to be a dick: confirming to civilians that movies they like are actually good works wonders. Their eyes light up when you tell them, yes, The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia totally count as Greatest Of All Time picks).

So, to make a long story short, the trick with getting your civilian to watch old movies is basically just getting them in the right mood, not being condescending, and picking the right movie. Easier said than done, sure, but so is everything. Except defenestration: throwing a motherfucker out the window is quicker than that long-ass word.


FOREIGN

Much harder. Shit, if you thought getting someone to watch a black & white movie was hard, getting them to watch something with subtitles usually involves bribery of some sort. Or one of those Clockwork Orange-style chairs. I was actually a little disappointed when I got my Lasik surgery back in 2000 that the apparatus wasn't more old-school with razor-sharp shit sticking out everywhere, and no anesthesia and all that cool stuff, me going “NOOOOOOO!!!” as they went for my eyes. Instead everything was all comfortable and soft and they gave me all the drugs I asked for—which, considering I was a couple months shy of 22 was a fucking lot—and said reassuring things to me and I barely felt a thing and only whined like a bitch for like two seconds.

I'm digressing because it pains me, way more than that extremely smooth and painless surgical procedure, to admit how fucking impossible it is to get civilians to watch pretty much anything foreign. The only person who ever figured out how to get civilians to watch foreign movies is Harvey Weinstein, and a distressingly high percentage of the foreign movies Miramax released in the 90s sucked marmoset dick (Cinema Paradiso, Chocolat, shit like that, even if neither of those technically came out in the 90s). How Harv did it, man was not meant to know.

The best advice I can give to anyone who wants to get civilians to watch foreign movies is the way Arthur Dent taught himself how to fly in Hitchhiker's Guide: throw yourself at the ground and miss. By which I mean, if you think about it for two seconds, the whole shithouse'll go up in flames, you just need to go with the organic flow of the universe. If you're with a civilian, and they want to watch anything foreign, don't question it. Just watch (or endure) it with them and hope they like it well enough to be talked into watching something good later. You cannot prod them at all until they've lost their cherry, and even then you have to give them space until they volunteer enthusiasm.

This is the most frustrating thing of all. Much as you know in your heart of hearts your civilian would like a gritty French gangster movie, or a big bright crazy Bollywood masala picture, or a sparse, minimalist Japanese drama, or a picture about a bunch of Iranian chicks who are totally nuts about soccer . . . you cannot make the first move. Just about anything you say to your civilian suggesting they watch something foreign, unless they've given you a clear indication that they're open to it, could result in a “meh,” or the dreaded “I don't like foreign movies, I hate reading subtitles.” And once they've given you that initial sign that they might dig something foreign, be careful. Don't fuck it up, you don't want to create one of those “I saw a foreign movie once, I didn't get it” people.


Hope I didn't bum you out too much, because fortunately, the last one's really fucking easy:


INDEPENDENT

These have the advantage of usually being in color and not necessarily having subtitles. They also have all kinds of cool stuff like nudity that the studios have to foreswear in their idolatrous worship of the PG-13 rating. Or, if you're dealing with someone who isn't into that kind of thing, there are PG-13 and under independent pictures as well. That's the big secret of independent cinema: they're just regular movies that are financed and produced by someone other than a Hollywood executive.

And yet, “independent” movies are regarded as this big daunting thing by a lot of civilians. They tend to have this unfortunate stereotype of independent movies as boring, pretentious, and cheaply made. This stereotype didn't come out of nowhere, there are plenty of boring, pretentious, cheaply made independent pictures. They're also known as shitty independent pictures. The good ones are fucking rad, and civilians will not be able to tell the difference between a good independent movie and a studio picture that isn't one of the big special effects things.

Perfect case in point: back in 1994 when Pulp Fiction came out, none of the dipshits I went to high school with had any idea that it had a whole foofball independent movie backstory, playing at Cannes and all that shit. This was because it was screening in non-arthouse movie theaters, and when it came out on video it was right there on the shelf just like every other “normal” movie.

You can certainly make the case for Pulp Fiction not being a typical independent movie, because it's not. It's got dudes with guns just like studio movies, it's got recognizable movie stars, it grossed $100 million, and got shitloads of media attention. But in that last is the key: getting people who would ordinarily make the “who farted?” face when you say the words “independent film” to them will have no such negative reaction if you just present it to them like a normal movie. It's all in presentation.

Of course, you don't want to bullshit your civilian. Telling them Blue Valentine is just like The Notebook because Ryan Gosling's in it is going to accomplish nothing except pissing your civilian off. What you do instead is get your friend who likes crime dramas and pitch Winter's Bone, for example, as a story about meth dealers and shit and maybe drop some oblique hints about the chainsaw scene. Or, fuck, now you can just tell them Mystique plays the lead. That's a good strategy, finding an actor they know from a big studio picture and being like, “hey, you get to see more of them in this!”

The best thing about getting civilians into independent movies nowadays is that between Netflix and the other nine million ways to watch movies online one of the biggest pains in the ass from back in the 90s and before is gone: access. Used to be, you wanted to see something independent or foreign you had to get on the fucking subway, shlep into either the Angelika or Film Forum and if you were in the Angelika you had to put up with the motherfucking subway going by all the time on top of the incredibly unfriendly ambience, and that's the bullshit you had to put up with in New York, where it was easy. Outside of major cities, unless the gods were kind and granted you an arthouse within driving distance, you were shit out of luck. Now, once something comes out on DVD, it's just a movie. And if you've been good and built up trust with your civilian, they'll look at “keyword: independent” and ask you “Independent, huh? Is it good?” and you'll say yes, and they'll listen to you.

And thus, we come after a long and hopefully entertaining amble to the whole point of this: if you're not a dickface about knowing more about movies than someone else, they're more likely to trust you when you suggest stuff. That's it. Be nice to people and don't lord shit over them, and things will be okay. You may even, after getting an amiable newcomer to the joys of cinema to watch something good with you, create a new One Of Us. Then, when they get to the point when they get that reference, you'll brush a tear away and say, “Oh . . . they grow up so fast!”