The Play's the Thing

“A movie should not be judged on what it’s about, but how it’s about it.” – some guy, not me, but I wish I said it first

Friday night rolls around, wifey and I are both tired and want to sit/lay down for a couple hours and watch something, and we head to the iTunes store to rent a movie.  Then I remember how differently I watch movies than most people.

Now I’m certainly not trying to belittle other people’s watching habits, but I feel I must explain myself.  Those of you who know me know that I love me some movie-watchin, maybe a little too much.  How does all that random knowledge of dumb movies floating around in my skull help me in life, you may ask?  (It doesn’t, by the way.)  What’s the big deal about movies?  Why can’t I just be content to watch what everyone else watches?  Why can’t I just like what everyone else likes?  Why do I have to be so difficult?  Why why why?

Maybe I’m a bit picky, a movie snob, an arthouse goon if you will.  It seems to me that the majority of people watch movies to escape life, to turn off their brain for 90 minutes, and to relax.  I have realized that I watch movies for the exact opposite reason: to connect, to think, to ponder, to be challenged and enlightened, to feel something.  Oh sure, I can have fun in movies too, we all have our mindless pleasures (Top Gun is pure 80’s radness).  But it occurs to me that people write off certain movies because they don’t want to think, or because it’s not relaxing.  Perhaps some movies get written off because they don’t end with a nice little bow tying up all the loose ends.  Or maybe the possibility that the two good-looking people on the movie cover might not end up together is just too much to bear.  Understand that I’m not saying I don’t like cinematic junk food either, it has its place and all, but sometimes you just need something more substantial.  How would you feel if you could only eat candy bars all day for a year?  (Bad example, cuz that would rule.)

Top Gun is a testament to the awesomeness of the 80's

It all began with Ghostbusters (a great movie, and a perfect example of cinematic junk food).  I was 6, and I became obsessed.  I ate Ghostbusters, slept Ghostbusters, breathed Ghostbusters.  And from this obsession grew an encyclopedic knowledge of everything about that movie.  I’ve watched it dozens of times.  I have it memorized.  I know all the names in the credits.  And that’s how I learned about moviemaking as an industry.  I loved learning neat little things like the real names of the people who played the Ghostbusters, and that there were people who actually sat down and wrote it out, just like how I wrote my own stories on the kitchen floor.  Then I started wondering what the heck a “director” did, what was this talk of “cinematography,” how and why does sound need to be “mixed,” etc.  After seeing a couple more movies I saw a pattern in credit sequences, and even started recognizing some of the same names in different movies.  I learned that the director was the most important guy, cuz his name was always listed before the movie title (a Steven Spielberg film) and at the very end of the credits (directed by Steven Spielberg) in case we forgot, I suppose.

Cracking wise and busting ghosts,

Ghostbusters started it all

And then (this is where it gets maybe too intense) I would start scanning the back of the TV guide, where all the week’s movies were listed, and I would just learn facts about everything.  Each movie would list the top stars, the year it was made, a short summary, and a rating out of four stars.  Some kids read comics, I read the dang TV guide.  I memorized that stuff like it was the Articles of Faith.  I was a sponge.  And I could recall most of these factoids on demand.  It really was quite ridiculous.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was really just the next logical

step after Ghostbusters, cracking wise and busting ninjas

One thing that was rather curious to me was that the movies I liked were always given two or three stars, never four (and to my credit, never one star either).  So I got to thinking that if Ghostbusters was only a three star movie, imagine what a four star movie would be like.  I tried one out and could not even get through more than a few minutes.  (It was black and white, a death sentence for a kid my age.  Can’t even remember what it was.)  So I ignored most four star movies for a long time, assuming they would be old and boring, and in black and white.  I stuck to my type, made it through the Ghostbusters phase onto Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then to Terminator movies and other assorted action movies.  I remember being quite enthralled with the world of mobsters when I saw The Untouchables at around 9 years old.  The world of the 30’s caught my fancy, and I actually checked out and read several books from the library on Al Capone and the whole Prohibition era of Chicago.  This naturally led into my fascination not only with the Mafia, but with what I thought at the time to be a more mature style of movies.

The Terminator is the stuff little boys eat up like cake

The Untouchables bring down the

Capone mob in a very stylish 30's Chicago

At 11, I still wasn’t quite sold on “four star” movies yet, but my mom had been wanting to show me her favorite movie Dances with Wolves for a while.  I was dreading its three hour length and its “grown-up-ness;” it just sounded like a really serious bore to me at that age.  But I sucked it up and watched it with her.  I don’t know what happened between the time I tried out that old black and white movie and the time I saw Dances with Wolves, but I was floored.  Maybe it was the Injun blood in me, but I had never been so impacted emotionally by a movie before.  The other stuff I was used to watching was fun fluff, but I hadn’t realized that I was missing out on feeling stuff in movies.  Three hours was too short.  I just wanted it to keep going.  Then I watched it maybe half a dozen times more over the next couple months, eating up the fluidity of the storytelling and the cinematic techniques employed to make it pop and bring it to life.

White guy "turns Injun" in Dances with Wolves,

simple story made entirely absorbing by pure craft

You could maybe say that I started to get slightly elitist after that.  For a while, I was only interested in four star movies, and not just ones that the lame TV guide gave four stars to, but I started actually listening to critics and taking their advice.  If there was a movie I wanted to see and then I heard it got bad reviews, I didn’t want to see it anymore.  And vice versa.  It really opened my eyes to all types of possibilities.

Jake La Motta uses boxing as his penance in Raging Bull,

like watching a train wreck in slow-motion

The rise and fall of the Corleone family's New York empire
is told over 80 years and two generations in The Godfather trilogy

Since then, I’ve tried to search out movies of all kinds and not just ones that are about stuff I like.  It keeps me on my toes.  In high school my bro Dan and I waded through the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Movies of All Time list, catching them on TV and, if need be, renting them from Blockbuster.  Yep, I watched every single one of those dang movies.  It was quite an educational experience.  There are movies on that list that have become some of my favorites ever that I might not otherwise have had the inclination to see, others that didn’t quite melt my butter but I can still appreciate their importance and why they deserve a spot on the list, and others still that were a complete waste of my time.  That list put me through a lot of crap, but I wouldn’t have changed any of it.  (I mean the experience.  Not the list.  My own list is another topic entirely.)  Certain movies I was expecting to like really disappointed me (Rear Window), while others I was dreading have since ended up in my DVD collection (Singin’ in the Rain).

GoodFellas hurtles you through three decades of Mafia life
with breakneck speed, by the end you want out bad

Apocalypse Now shows a Vietnam straight out of Isaiah,

complete with swarms of fire-breathing locusts (helicopters)

Currently I’m working my way through all the “Best Picture” Oscar winners, albeit at a much slower pace, but the purpose is the same: to keep my mind open, to learn, to be challenged, enlightened, to be shown something new, to connect, to feel.  The best movies can do all those things.

A Nazi war profiteer realizes the terrible human

price of the Holocaust in Schindler's List

2001: A Space Odyssey is merely concerned with such trivialities as,

oh I dunno, mankind's place in the freaking universe

There's much more happening in movies than just the story.  Next time you watch a movie, look at the reasons why something is shown from the angle that it is, why a scene is lit a certain way, why is it paced the way it is, why the characters say things the way they do, why anything really, and what does all that stuff contribute to the story.  It's all done that way for a reason, and the fun is figuring out what that reason is.  The best movies have answers for all those questions.  The ones that disappoint me are the ones that are only concerned with getting from point A to point B in the plot, without offering anything more.  I would liken it to reading a good book.  Watching movies gets a really bad rap compared to reading books, but to me they both have the potential to be quite a worthwhile experience, it just depends on what you read/watch and how you read/watch it.

Or in other words, yes I'm a snob.