by Wagstaff
One of my favorite bits in the movie Slacker comes near the very end, after a barkeep rushes some patrons out of a bar so that he can close it down and go home. He gets in his car to leave, starts the engine, and then with a nod of his head he signals to an attractive female standing outside to get in, presumably to hook up for a one-night-stand. She obliges, and next we cut to the couple in bed at early dawn. The guy is still crashed out, but the girl is already awake and sitting up. She slips her bare, comely legs into a pair of cowboy boots and walks out into the morning like some vagabond spirit. As she’s leaving the house 
(here is the part I like) she passes by a guy crouched over a small television set, intently watching an old movie, smiling and rocking back and forth. We don’t know for sure, but I like to think that he has been up all night and is watching his third or fourth movie. I recognize this guy because, well, that’s me, or rather, I used to be him because I haven’t been that guy for a long time now. I used to stay up all night alone, smoke cigarettes, and watch old movies with a private enjoyment. I’d rock back and forth and watch early Wild Bill Wellman movies, or Eddie Cantor making whoopee, or just whatever came on Turner Classic Movies. This was back when I had cable and worked the night shift, before the wife and family I have now, before I grew out of my twenties and realized that, yes, I do indeed require sleep.
Nowadays, I hardly ever sit through an entire movie alone. At home, I find myself walking away from a movie at every opportunity, and I rarely travel away from home to a movie theater. Of late, I mainly use movies as a sleeping aid. To be more specific, I use the DVD commentary tracks that are (thankfully) so common now. Back when I had cable television, C-Span was my preferred dozing agent. Give me a boring Senate committee hearing, or some panel of reporters and editors at a navel-gazing journalism and ethics symposium and, man, I was out like a baby. But now, audio commentaries do the trick, and I often put them on, close my eyes, and drift away listening without ever watching the movie. To get me through a movie these days, I need an audience of people. I need my friends. A while back, there was an excellent post here at the House about horror movies and violence. The ensuing comments thread was of a very high quality. I was a little awestruck, and I couldn’t say much. It was all very interesting, but I hadn’t seen the recent films they were talking about. I felt like Henry Hill in Goodfellas.
“Henry, you don’t talk much.”
Henry: “I’m just listening.”
After that post, I decided that I needed to watch a horror movie and went to the video store. I just couldn’t put myself in the mood to watch teenagers getting tortured and killed in Europe, so at first I was tempted to go for a classic with a commentary: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with very effective acting) or Last House on the Left (never really seemed like a horror film to me). But no, I needed something new. I’ve always had a predilection for zombie flicks, so I rented the remake of Dawn of the Dead. My wife dropped out of the movie after about forty minutes. She used to love horror movies. She took me to see Hellraiser III on our first date, definitely not my idea, but somehow, since she became a mother, she is more squeamish when it comes to watching some bad shit go down. I stuck with the movie for another twenty minutes before I got restless. It was okay. The second rate acting slightly improved upon the third rate acting in the original, but otherwise it didn’t stand up to the 70’s masterpiece. I could take it or leave it. I felt completely neutral toward it. The thing I felt most palpably was the missing presence of a teenage audience on a Friday night. This stuff was a lot more fun back when your friends were laughing and groaning, or when your sweetheart was clutching your arm. Or hell, at least give me a Saturday night dollar-movie crowd, like the good and rowdy ones I knew when I lived on the south side of the tracks. Those people up on the screen were idiots for walking backwards in the apprehensive dark, and the crowd around me would sure enough let them know it. Often an empty beer bottle could be heard rolling down under the seats across the concrete floor, pausing momentarily at someone’s heels, until they lifted up their shoes to let it complete its journey to the bottom. The conditions and circumstances of seeing a movie matter.
I think I’ve had this conversation with my wife and just about every one of my friends:
Friend: “I haven’t seen such and such movie.”
Me: “Yes you have, it was Brixton Square about eight years ago. It was late afternoon with about a dozen people inside the theater. We sat up front.”
or
“Yeah, you’ve seen it. It was over at A’s mother’s house with X and Y. In the upstairs guest bedroom. I was sitting on the floor, you were sitting on the bed.”
And darn it! I know that I’m usually right. It’s funny, I have a pretty poor memory in most regards. My wife can remember the names and houses of all her second grade friends. I can barely remember a couple of my highschool teachers, but if I can remember the movie at all, I will remember where I saw it and who I saw it with. Go ahead and test me. The same applies to where I was sitting while reading a particular book. Often I remember the circumstances of seeing a movie more clearly than anything in the movie. Most film criticism is rightly focused on the movie itself. The purpose of this essay is to clear a little spot of ground for the circumstances that surround watching a movie, the things that affect so strongly how we see it. Before I proceed any further, maybe I should beef up my argument that circumstances matter a bit more, in case some of my readers aren’t on board with my premise. A good friend of mine always gets annoyed whenever I describe a film as a good chick flick, or as a good guy flick. There is no such thing, says he. A movie is either good or bad, period. 
Then I say that genres should be taken on their own terms. We’ve been arguing about this for over a decade. My best rejoinder would be an extreme example I use to make him admit that circumstances are indeed relevant. Let’s pretend for a minute that Airport ’75 is an excellent film that achieves greatness. I contend that it would not be an excellent film, it would in fact be a horrible film to show as an in-flight movie on an airplane. Again, circumstances matter.
Songs and movies are like ships that move in and around and through our lives. They gather memories and associations like barnacles. Favorite films that we’ve seen many times become crusted over with past remembrances, unless by chance some new circumstance is powerful enough to eradicate some part of our old selves. If you doubt this, just look at Matt’s Five for the Day: Branded post. Read the comments and then tell me that movies don’t come along at certain points in our lives and brand us emotionally or make our brains resonate with synaptic energy. At the risk of boring my readers, here I must descend through a little of my own movie-watching history. I can’t go as far back as Odienator, to birth, but you will think it’s far enough, I’m sure. I’ll leave aside the fast changing circumstances of movie going that were before my time, the days of newsreels and programmers, the days before 1948 when The United States vs. Paramount Pictures Inc. broke up the studio-owned 
theater chains forever. What days those must have been! I also missed the golden age of the drive-in, although for a time in the late 70’s every movie I saw was at a drive-in in Walnut Creek, California. I was a late comer to Star Wars, seeing it near the end of its long run at a drive-in twice. The first time double-billed with The Shootist, the second time billed with Laserblast. When I was a wee lad, I saw The Towering Inferno while in my dad’s cabin aboard the aircraft carrier Midway. This was my first big perception vs. reality moment. The pretend fire I watched on the small black and white monitor was much scarier that the real deck fire that crews were rushing to put out somewhere above me. The movies we saw at our community center in Japan made a searing impression. We spread our blanket on the floor and watched: Car Wash, Baby Blue Marine, Let’s Do It Again, The Longest Yard, Nickelodeon, Bad News Bears, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, both of Richard Lester’s Musketeers movies, From Noon Till Three, The Fortune, Cinderella Liberty, Silent Movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, W.C. Fields and Me, The Sting, The Last Detail, and a bunch of Disney stuff like No Deposit, No Return, Mary Poppins, and Gus. This was all before I realized that movies were made things. I was one of those people Joe Gillis was referring to when he said “audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.” For the kids, we got our Saturday morning cartoons projected. Mostly lame Hannah Barbara toons like Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Atom Ant, and Secret Squirrel. We had one Warner Bros. cartoon, "The Dover Boys", which we watched over and over. They even showed a few old time serials. But for us boys, the grand highlight, the very best of all, were the NFL films narrated by the great John Facenda, whose voice was like some blind poet. The Homer of the NFL. 
We would gaze in awe at the epic battles fought by larger than life heroes, as the camera zoomed in tight to follow the long arc of a perfectly thrown spiral pass, staying with the ball as it flew against a backdrop of blue sky, down through a multicolored blur of spectators, and landed gently in a receiver’s outstretched hands. We never saw the real football games on television, and afterwards we would reenact the scenes just like it was another movie with characters and a plot.
Later, when I was a teenager, I regularly attended midnight screenings of one of the most circumstantial movies ever: The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It felt fresh and liberating to feel at home in a movie theater, to treat it like it was your living room, to dress any way you wanted, and to hurl out loud obscenities in public. I think some small envelope was pushed the first time I ran up to the front to spin the world and I ran my hands across that big magic silver screen. It seemed noteworthy to see a small corner up close, with its tiny black holes, its glitter, and its many mysterious stains.
We don’t always watch movies for entertainment. The reasons we go to the movies can be as myriad and multitudinous as our reasons for taking any action in life. During the hot summer months, we might go to the movies just for the air-conditioning. We might want to get off the streets, or hide, or just sit down for a span of two hours. I have one friend who swears by the therapeutic, healing power of a good nap during a silent film. For him, going to a theater and sleeping through Wings, Pandora’s Box, and Fritz Lang’s Nibelungenlied acted as a gentle balm that soothed his spirit, and he counts it as a high point of his cinema going life. The circumstances abound. Seeing the musical Oliver! Outside on the grass at a campground will always be how I remember that movie. In grade school, they used to gather us up and make us sit Indian-style on a hard basketball court to watch things like Escape From Witch Mountain or the later, bad Pink Panther movies for reasons that I still can’t fathom. Our asses were sore but at least we weren’t in class. A cruise ship is a strange place to see a movie. I watched Green Card once (yawn) and Once Around not once but twice on a ship. It was a vacation from a vacation, with all those other supposedly fun things to do competing outside for your leisure. When I worked as a projectionist, oddly enough, I seldom watched the movies. It was uncomfortable to stand and look through that little window, and besides, it was an awesome job if you wanted time to read. I would just watch the end credits of everything before I threaded the film and set a timer for the next showing. People definitely have their favorite movie theaters. I wish I could go to more of them. The first time I saw an old 3 to 4 ratio movie on a truly tall screen was at the Walter Reed auditorium in NYC for a Robert Aldrich double feature of The Big Knife and Attack! 
It was a real eye opener. Size matters, and they don’t make theaters tall enough anymore even if they wanted to show old classics. The Castro in San Francisco is another great theater. Its sizeable gay community makes it the most ideal audience for watching old films I think. The crowd catches every innuendo and their laughter makes you notice things that otherwise might have slipped by. I always loved the little theater that my brother constructed when he was twelve or thirteen years old in his bedroom closet with some pillows, a sleeping bag, a TV, VCR and a snack tray. He would watch Bogie and Bacall, and all those 1940’s Warner Bros. films directed by Michael Curtiz or Raoul Walsh. Good times in that cozy little sanctuary, I’ll bet. Falling in love with Ingrid Bergman and doing god knows what else. Maybe there should be a Mile High Club for movie buffs. What’s the weirdest place you saw a movie? I’ll have to think about that one. I’ve heard stories of people having sex in movie theaters, but outside of a porno house that’s just so wrong. I have done it at home, though. You know that the movie is good when you only screw during the commercials!
Circumstance even dictates which movies that we see in the first place. I watch different sorts of movies with different people. With one friend it will be your basic Hollywood mainstream blockbuster, with another group of friends it is always some kind of campy T&A from Something Weird Video, another friend likes avant guard and hates anything with a narrative. My brother and I can happily geek out on the same stuff, so it will be the oldest William S. Hart western we can find, or a super long Bible epic, or Ozu. I can’t think of another person who would get excited when I say “let’s watch 55 Days at Peking.” When I am all alone, I will soonest reach for a documentary.
Everybody knows that with live theater, every performance is different because the actors and the audience feed off each other, but what about something that never changes – canned goods – movies? I am not that fond of it now, but back when it came out I loved Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I saw movies for free then, and I must have sat through that movie eight or nine times. Every time the audience’s mood and reaction was different. They laughed or didn’t laugh at different places. Even in a mostly homogenous Midwestern multiplex, there is enough variegated humanity filling the seats to make each and every audience unique. It seems impossible to predict what an audience will react to, and movie producers will never unlock the mystery of an audience’s mood. What two atmospheres could be more split than a crowd at a radio screener for, say, a movie like Predator, with the Rock 100 the KATT-suited guy running up and down the aisles, and posters and T-shirts hidden under a few seats, and a 10:00 a.m. critic’s screening of the same Predator, with six or seven guys sitting as far apart as possible?
I think that a truly great movie can triumph over the most adverse mood, and some good time friends can have fun and triumph over the worst movie imaginable, but there is a huge swath of middle of the road pictures that is highly susceptible to the circumstances of the viewer’s mood. If we are feeling fine, perhaps we derive more enjoyment than the movie merits. If we are in a foul mood, we sometimes don’t cut a decent movie any slack.
I will wind this down with a mention of maybe the most purely circumstantial movies of all, the movies that we haven’t seen. We all carry these movies around in our heads. Movies that we long to see, but are really just constructs in our mind. Perhaps they are conjured up by an alluring title, or fed by some passage of a critic’s prose that caught our imagination. If and when we ever see them, they might be better or worse than what we imagined, but they will always turn out to be strange and different. Sometimes the films we have yet to see are the best ones of all. So here, I end with a toast. Get your cyber glass ready. Here is to all the movies we haven’t seen, to all the audiences that have been and will be no more, and to the audiences to come. Those wonderful people out there in the dark. Cheers.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Watching Movies: Circumstances Matter
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24 comments:
Well, I feel I must expand on my old anti-chick flick argument. My problem is that it assumes that all women will react to the movie the same and that men won't appreciate it, which is not the case. I love Terms of Endearment, but something like Beaches is a piece of crap. Too often the terms "chick flicks" or "guy flicks" are used as excuses for movies the viewer themselves know are bad but can't admit it. As you said, movies are either good, bad or somewhere in between. You can't make a movie that's going to satisfy an entire gender (or race for that matter). That's not how individuality works.
EC: My problem is that it assumes that all women will react to the movie the same and that men won't appreciate it, which is not the case. I love Terms of Endearment, but something like Beaches is a piece of crap.
I think BEACHES is the reason why most men cringe at the thought of a "chick flick." I did a survey once on my old website about chick movies, and discovered that most guys who responded had seen Beaches, usually by force, and it scarred them to the concept of any movie geared toward women.
Hollywood is so interested in cookie cutter filmmaking that they tend to take what they think a race or gender will enjoy and cram it into a hopscotch-board movie. You hop from one cliche to the next, hitting all the "marks" before the film is over. Beaches is exactly like that. It's to "what women want" as Soul Plane is to "what Black audiences want."
I am not ashamed to admit I've loved plenty of "chick flicks," even ones that my Mom, a chronic Lifetime Network watcher, found too much to bear. "These bitches have too many problems!" I recall her saying during Steel Magnolias. It was my Mom who suggested a certain chick flick I won't mention should be "used to combat hot flashes because there's so much damn estrogen in it!"
I would LOVE to see that on a poster!
Geez, Wagstaff! So much good stuff here...where to start?
Those people up on the screen were idiots for walking backwards in the apprehensive dark, and the crowd around me would sure enough let them know it.
When I was growing up, my Pops would occasionally take me to 42nd Street to see a double feature (I saw Car Wash that way--it played with Willie Dynamite aka the "movie where Gordon from Sesame Street played a pimp"). The audience would whoop, holler and talk back to the screen. Sometimes what they said was better than the movie.
In Jersey City, we had the State Theater, which was as close to a Times Square grindhouse as I could get without taking the train. They always had the slasher/horror movies there, and for them, R was the 18th letter in the alphabet, not a rating that prohibited me from seeing the movie.
We had a rowdy crowd of regulars who attended the kung-fu movies and the slashers. I vividly recall this girl who was always there talking to the screen. She looked and sounded like Hattie McDaniel. Her heavy voice always came from the back of the theater, the part usually frequented by the weed smokers whose product gave me a searing headache and subsequently ensured I would never smoke a joint.
"Mmmph! Kicked his ass!" she would say after someone got whomped by a Shaolin monk or a Snake Fist Fighter. And at least once during EVERY horror movie I saw there, this girl would yell out at the screen "DON'T GO IN THERE, WHITE LADY!" For anyone who used to read my old site, and wondered why I called 80's horror movies "DGITWL flicks"...now ya know.
I can enjoy (or dislike) movies at home without an audience, but in the case of horror movies, it's always more fun to be at the theater. People jumping and screaming always adds to the experience, even if you aren't scared.
the grand highlight, the very best of all, were the NFL films narrated by the great John Facenda, whose voice was like some blind poet.
Yes! I loved listening to that guy's voice. He made me love football. Jesus, what a voice! I loved it almost as much as I loved "the agony of defeat" part of ABC's Wide World Of Sports, when they'd show that guy wipe out on the ski jump.
Maybe there should be a Mile High Club for movie buffs. What’s the weirdest place you saw a movie?
I saw Akira at a club in NYC called The Limelight. It was an abandoned church that had been converted into a drug-infested night club. It remains the scariest place I've ever been in my entire life, short of the old Jersey City Medical Center.
I’ve heard stories of people having sex in movie theaters, but outside of a porno house that’s just so wrong.
Oh, you KNOW I was gonna take the bait on this one!
When I went to see On the Right Track, that Gary Coleman non-classic where he picks the winning horses, two people four rows from us were having very loud sex in those movie theater seats that used to slide out when you sat on them. Everyone stopped--even bag lady Maureen Stapleton stopped reciting her dialogue onscreen--to admire the sheer audacity of these freaky bastards who were fucking at a kids movie. The ushers came--well before our freaky bastards did--and dragged them out of the theater.
If you use the Bill Clinton definition, I've never had sex in a movie theater. If you want sheer honesty, I once got a certain type of large truck-like vehicle in the balcony of the Loew's Jersey Theater during Peter Hyams' Running Scared. No wonder it's the only Peter Hyams movie I enjoyed.
According to Oliver Sacks, all of us are to some degree autistic, and that "yes, you have seen it at X location" is a conversation/argument I seem to have with friends and family on a loop. I find this so dispiriting because it's as if I may as well have been alone; what I perceive as communion is to them ephemera--like I asked them about a specific time they brushed their teeth. When I think about a film, the very first thing that comes to mind is the theatre and where I sat and who was with me. Glad to know this is a phenomenon of sorts.
like you, i am capable of going off on extravagant verbal jags about the movies
so i started a blog
pls. check me out sometime
sportcoatspeculator.blogspot.com
thanks!
--patrick
I'm the same way with films--I could tell you the last film I saw before the last time I moved, or the first film I saw after, or which friends I saw any given film with (or, in the case Mr. Death, that I saw it in a completely empty theater).
I love watching films with friends and family, even if they're bad ones. I remember my sister and I were watching a film with our grandmother once and none of us liked it much. All three of us realized it at the same time: I said the editing was bad; my sister responded that the music was bad; my grandmother responded that she liked the flowers in the background. And then we all laughed, because none of us had commented about the story.
A big audience definitely helps a comedy. I think that might be why the sitcoms put on the laugh tracks; I guess they don't trust a solo audience to recognize the funny.
Tuwa: my grandmother responded that she liked the flowers in the background.
I'll bet those flowers were the best thing about the movie.
Odie: "I once got a certain type of large truck-like vehicle in the balcony of the Loew's Jersey Theater during Peter Hyams' Running Scared."
Huh?
It starts with H and ends with 'ummer'.
I always knew I was an antisocial bastard, but good lord, not to the degree that my views differing from the majority on public consumption of film would indicate. I can't stand the public experience part of movie watching these days. Every time I make it out to a theatrical showing, I come out saying I'm never going to the movies again, I need to just save and buy a bigscreen TV, then wait for the DVD. I know the state of theatres is an issue these days, but I don't think this view would have been different in the old days. All this stuff people cite as loving makes me twitch.
I saw Akira at a club in NYC called The Limelight. It was an abandoned church that had been converted into a drug-infested night club. It remains the scariest place I've ever been in my entire life, short of the old Jersey City Medical Center.
Obviously, I don't know you Odienator, but I read your posts alot amount and find this interesting. After a number of your posts revolve around how after what you've seen, cinematic horror just doesn't scare you, I must laugh that The Limelight is the second scariest place you've ever been, unless this was a particuarly rare night there. I don't know the old Limelight, but have plenty of friends who did, and they tell me it was much the same as the non-NYC-Macaulay Culkin movie making-clubs I misspent my youth in. Sans Priscella Queen of the Dessert outfits, though. Funny how different things strike different people.
This reminded me though of one of my unusual movie viewings, that of Ghost In The Shell. This gay club in Albany would once a week have a non-gay night where the DJs played industrial music and projected anime on a huge white sheet. Drunk, sitting blasted on the balcony, I stared for basically the whole running time (except for other trips to the bar) at Ghost In The Shell, which I hadn't seen. Never being a big anime fan, I sat thinking two things: a. My god, those Matrix guys are hacks! b. This is awesome. Sober, a week later, I watched it at home. Man did that suck in comparison. It played infinitely better as a silent movie with an electronic music score that made me half deaf.
Cheers.
The cops are on their way to arrest me on the charge of contributing to the delinquency of a Jeffrey! Jeff, you're an accessory! :)
Wagstaff: Later, when I was a teenager, I regularly attended midnight screenings of one of the most circumstantial movies ever: The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
I am suddenly having visions of Wagstaff singing "toucha-toucha-toucha-touch me! I wanna be dirty!"
I had friends who, like you, went every Saturday night to the Village to see it. I went with them twice, and neither time was particularly enjoyable. But when I finally got to see the movie sans audience, I realized just how tolerable the audience interaction made it. It's easily one of the worst movies ever made. So your point is certainly made in that regard.
Did you know they had a Sound of Music midnight show here? That had to be about as enjoyable as a root canal from Laurence Olivier. I remember the news reporter interviewing a guy with a cardboard box tied on his head. "Why not a kitten tied to your head?" I yelled at the TV screen. "Why pick an easy Favorite Thing, ya weirdo?" There were also guys dressed like nuns, which I suppose solves a problem like Maria.
James: After a number of your posts revolve around how after what you've seen, cinematic horror just doesn't scare you, I must laugh that The Limelight is the second scariest place you've ever been, unless this was a particuarly rare night there.
What I saw there wasn't so bad (not even the guy who was wearing nothing but dry cleaning plastic, nor the Goth chick who looked like the guy from Hellraiser); I was freaked out by the mise-en-scene. Just the mere thought of it having been a church beforehand gave me the booboojeebies. It felt Satanic. Guess it's the lapsed Baptist in me.
Just being there creeped me out. It had nothing to do with what I saw there. I mean, I've seen plenty of naked dudes and chicks whose heads looked like they'd pissed off Martha Stewart while she was sewing. But I'd never been in a church where people were doing dope and screwing to techno music. Guess I've led a sheltered life, n'est-ce pas?
tuwa says: A big audience definitely helps a comedy. I think that might be why the sitcoms put on the laugh tracks;
Laugh tracks always make me think of Tony Roberts in Annie Hall saying " all right, now give me a medium-sized chuckle." Comedies definitely benefit from a large audience when it comes to agreeable laughter. My most intense hilarity at a movie, however, usually happens alone or with a couple other people, but laughter is contageous. If I'm in a room with 400 people laughing their heads off, I will probably start laughing even if I never heard the joke. I know some people get annoyed, though, when watching a comedy with a large audience because the loud laughter can drown out the 2nd and 3rd beats of a joke.
Last night I watched Under the Tuscan Sky. It was a good flick and it was definitely chick. Diane Lane has really come into her own and is hotter than ever. It was a star turn in a vehicle that gave her lots to do and the room to do it in. She was good. They gave her plenty enough rope, and she never hung herself with it. The chick I watched it with dug it a lot, which I am sure colored how I saw it. Who we see a movie with affects the levels that are set on our scrutiny controls. Had I seen it with another buddy, we might have been prone to pick on the movie, such is the dynamic of our friendship. If either of us had watched it alone, we probably would have enjoyed it. Does this make me a weak-minded slave to the reactions of other people? Maybe it would if it was something I was never aware of, but I usually try to factor it into my personal assessment of a movie.
Moderator:
If you don't want to post my impressionistic response to today's topic that's fine. But could I ask you a favor? Could you post it so that I can copy it down into my journal? Upon further reflection I've decided that I quite like what I wrote even if you didn't or didn't think it was relevant to what you're discussing. Or could you email back to me? I would really appreciate that. If you do this I will never visit this site again. I promise. My email is chrisokum2000@yahoo.com. Thanks.
As Rex Reed said on the radio in the opening of Lost in America: "If it's funny, I'll laugh."
Odie: I am suddenly having visions of Wagstaff singing "toucha-toucha-toucha-touch me! I want to feel dirty!"
So sorry to inflict that imagery on you, Odie, but I'm afraid it's probably accurate enough. I guess people got off on TRHPS for different reasons. Some were into the Camp or Goth scenes. For some, it may have been the movie's easy acceptance of - nay, its downright advocacy for omni-sexuality. And then there were the girls. What was it Chris Rock said about girls (and guys) who have tongue piercings? Personally, I never gave a flip about the movie. My fun had everything to do with the company I was in. That, and the thrill of hearing persons of both sexes shouting the most Filthy McNasty things at the screen till they were hoarse.
Wagstaff: So sorry to inflict that imagery on you, Odie, but I'm afraid it's probably accurate enough.
Don't apologize! My imagination has a bigger budget than RHPS, so your version became a big Busby Berkeley meets Showgirls-style number! (What happens in Odie's head stays in Odie's head--and with good reason!)
You know, I thought the lyric was "I want to feel dirty" (as you corrected) but when I went to the lyrics site, the words clearly said "I want to BE dirty."
WS: Who we see a movie with affects the levels that are set on our scrutiny controls.
That's an interesting concept. It doesn't apply to me, as my viewing is the same no matter whom I am with, but I can see where you're coming from with this.
When I watch a movie with someone, whether it's at the theater or at home, I rarely interact with that person until the movie is over. I think it has to do with the fact that most of my moviegoing is done alone. My lack of interaction is why movies were the worst place I could take a date. (I once infamously said "well, if you wanted to make out, we could have gotten a room! It would have been cheaper than this damn movie!")
Odie, that was an error on my part when I copied you, actually, and not a conscious correction. Now that you mention it, I am hearing "Touch Me" as "I wanna be diiirty." I know I should have a reference browser up when I'm doing these things. Earlier I got the title wrong for Under the Tuscan Sun.
Wagstaff: intriguing article.
I'll say this about my own movie-watching. I'm not an insomniac---I may stay up pretty darn late on some nights, but it's not necessarily because I can't go to sleep or anything. But, with some exceptions---good action thrillers, mostly---it's often a struggle for me to get through a movie fully conscious at nights. Doesn't necessarily even matter if I'd taken a power nap during the day; nights seem to pose problems as far as getting through a movie without feeling my eyes get heavy.
Actually, it's worse: unless I've taken a power nap before seeing a movie in the afternoon, sometimes I might have trouble staying awake then too!
Maybe it's just all the worrying I have a tendency to do in my personal life---wears me down during a given day.
But I definitely get and agree with the gist of your piece: circumstances sometimes influence how you experience a movie, and thus how you respond and think back on it later.
Let's not forget other possible circumstances, however, that might influence your response to a movie. I know that sometimes I rewatch films I used to love in the hopes that I could somehow experience those same excited feelings again. As a kid, I remember being positively thrilled by, of all movies, Die Hard 2 (hey, cut me some slack, I was a younger boy then!). I have the film on DVD, and sometimes I watch certain scenes just, I guess, to try to see if that shootout at the skywalk or the snowmobile chase still excites me like it used to. Same with Airplane!: when I first saw it, I thought it was the funniest thing I've ever seen; now I seem to groan more than I laugh out loud at some of the dumber jokes in that spoof. Didn't Pauline Kael, in a review, once cite some professor who said he'd give anything to be able to read Shakespeare for the first time again? I think that suggests what I'm getting at.
Also: I wonder if sometimes reactions to movies are influenced also by what you personally think a movie should be or is trying to be rather than what it is. Spielberg's Munich, for instance: I loved the film when I saw it in the theater, but, thinking back on it, I sometimes question whether my high regard for the film (based on one screening) comes merely from the fact that it confirms my suspicions about the falsity of revenge flicks in general---how I've come to be suspicious of films that make vengeance the motor of a plot by suggesting that it'll somehow right a wrong or cleanse one's soul or something. Munich clearly doesn't believe that, and I respected the film for that, and was even thrilled by its message---but I wonder if I didn't make too many allowances for its talkiness or its perhaps melodramatic characters (in that case, I mean characters who basically represent different points of view each).
Anyway, one last thing: I dunno, but for some reason this article reminded me of a well-known quote from Godard's Masculine Feminine---you know, the one where Jean-Pierre Leaud's character professes that movies usually disappointed him because they weren't the movies he secretly wanted to live. I know that's not quite what you're saying, Wagstaff, but I think a love for films and what they may mean to an individual personally---whether as some kind of dream machine or as a sleeping pill, heh---is behind both this post and that quote.
Hope all that made some sense; this is probably the longest comment I've made on this blog in quite a while, so forgive me if I've jumped around too much.
That circumstantial relationship with movies is a big factor for me when it comes to horror movies. I was born on Halloween so anything horror takes me back to that feeling of wonder and anticipation of Halloween from when I was very young.
There's another component to it, too. For me it's like blues music. I don't listen to blues because I want to be sad. I don't watch horror because I want to be scared. Blues and horror are all about that connection with another person in pain. We all identify in some way with those things that hurt us, and the most primitive hurtful things make us all see ourselves in other people no matter how different from us that other person may be. That's either a really life-affirming noble thing or a really sick voyeuristic thing. Maybe both.
Harry, I listen to (and sing) blues songs because they allow me to say "Shit, I got problems, but I'm glad I'm not this guy!" It's the aspect of schadenfreude that makes the blues the perfect salve for any wound of the heart and soul.
Maybe something is wrong with me, but I rewatch movies because I like them, not because they remind me of how I felt when I saw them first. That seems waaaay too Miss Havisham for me. If that were the case, I'd have to watch, over and over, the movie I saw the day I met the one great love of my life. That movie was Under The Cherry Moon.
Do you wish that on me?!!
Wait wait wait. odienator, don't get me wrong: certainly one should like a movie when he/she decides to watch it again. Maybe some actual great films are worth watching in order to pick up on nuances of theme, character, imagery, etc. Others, though, I re-watch just because I had great fun watching them the first time and I suppose I like to experience those fun feelings again. But don't get the wrong idea: I'm not a crazy obsessive or anything. Just speaking personally when I say that sometimes I re-see movies---usually shallow entertainments like some action thrillers or dumb comedies---simply because I was mad entertained by them the first time I saw them. In those cases, context may or may not count, I suppose.
And I've never seen Under the Cherry Moon. But, if it's that awful, I guess I wouldn't wish that on you.
Kenjfuj:Others, though, I re-watch just because I had great fun watching them the first time and I suppose I like to experience those fun feelings again.
Feelings! Whoa whoa whoa! FEEL-INGS! Whoa whoa whoa...
Sorry to remind the old folks in our audience (myself included) just how much taste we had in music in the early 70's, but I couldn't resist!
I'm willing to go with you on a movie being fun to watch repeatedly. I get a kick out of Spaceballs every time I watch it and, like Blazing Saddles I can recite every single line of dialogue in it. Same thing with Coming To America.
For the record, I had to sit through Under the Cherry Moon 13 times because it was "our movie." The things a guy does for sex...
Kenjfuj: sometimes I re-see movies---usually shallow entertainments like some action thrillers or dumb comedies---simply because I was mad entertained by them the first time I saw them.
Hold that thought! When you see my next piece for the House, you'll understand why.
Speaking of shallow entertainments, I saw the Luc Besson-scripted parkour movie District B13 today. It's no classic, but it's the type of goofy movie of which you speak. To tie in with Wagstaff's entry, the Times Square audience really got into the movie, especially during a scene involving a human head and jail bars. The audience gasped, and that made it worse than it actually was.
If anything, B13 was far more entertaining (and, from a fighting perspective, useful) than that damn French capoeira movie. I mean, if a mugger started tumbling and dancing around during the robbery, I'd kick him in the balls while he was shaking his ass, then I'd take his wallet.
Kenjfuj, I thank you for the longish comment. I like'em long, short, or anywhere in between. I can't say that I ever go back to a movie in order to recapture that "feeling" I had the first time, because it never works out that way, but I do understand the impulse, and that has probably been a motivation for some other things that I've done in life. I do think that many of us are prone to wishful thinking when it comes to a movie, and we will jump through ridiculous hoops to defend the indefensible. "Oh yes, James Bond could too have done that! He probably ate lunch, had a bowel movement, and got his suit back from the cleaners between the scenes; they just didn't show it." Whenever I attempt critical thought, I often try to dig back to those first fleeting impressions I had during a movie, the ones I didn't trust and discarded, because they are usually the truest. My point in the post was not that we rewatch to go back in time, but that movies just naturally accumulate memories and emotional baggage. Sometimes it all backfires. I sort of wish I hadn't tried to watch The Bridge on the River Kwai a few months ago, because it wasn't the great film I remembered. Something about the stiffness of British lips, those tropical maps on the bamboo walls, and the tone of their strategizing struck me as unintentionally hilarious. Odienator remarked about this on one of Edward Copeland's Oscar posts and I wanted to agree. Here was a case of me thinking "Damn, why did I rewatch this? I should have left well enough alone."
Re: Die Hard 2, I always rather liked it, and I think I still would if I saw it today because I never over-liked it. I enjoyed it enough at the time to reconstruct a John McClane real life action timeline in my head, cataloguing his wounds, following his actions, ect. Needless to say, he would've had to have superhuman strength and endurance, plus an ability to fold space and time to accomplish what he did in the movie. And this from a hero the original Die Hard tried to sell as a normal cop rising to the occasion. At least he's normal compared to the indestructible Stallone and Schwarzenegger heroes. On a side note, somebody should do a paper on the kinds of wounds these ultra-tough heroes receive. I seem to remember Lou Ferrigno's Hulk always getting shot in the fleshy part of the shoulder, and in every Schwarzenegger movie it seems like Arnold gets pierced in some way. What's up with that?
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