The Ten Films I've Seen Most Often

10. For Your Eyes Only (1981) Roger Moore, Carole Bouquet, Topol. Until I was twelve years old, I wasn't aware that anyone other than Roger Moore had played James Bond. This was one of the first Bonds I remember seeing in the theatre, and it's the one I watched most often on cable or video. Though in later years I found other Bond pictures I've liked better, this was for a long time my favorite, and it's still in my top five. The ski stunts alone are worth the price of admission, and watching Bond have to elude his would-be murderers in the world's wimpiest Peugeot cinches it for me.

9. Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb 1964 Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden: "You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" This is one of my favorite pictures to quote, and of all of Stanley Kubrick's films--and I love them all--this is the one that most often finds its way into my DVD player. In this picture he gives Peter Sellers a workout that would have killed just about any other actor, and I love every minute of it.

8. Superman: The Movie and Superman II Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Terrance Stamp, Gene Hackman. I find it easier to consider these films as a unit. For some people, Sean Connery will always be James Bond. For me, Christopher Reeve will always be Superman, and all others will be pretenders to the throne (yes, Brandon Routh, I'm looking at you). Reeve managed to find ways to be compelling and charismatic as both Clark Kent and Superman, and, in the sequel, revealed that, for Superman, the wish-fulfillment fantasy is to be Clark Kent--though he sours on the reality of being Clark Kent awfully fast. It's amazing how much the Superman character develops in these two pictures, and after that, almost anything would have been a letdown. (Though they didn't have to let us down quite so far or so fast, did they?)

7. Tootsie (1983) Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Bill Murray. Sydney Pollack. There were summers where I'd watch this picture two or three times in a day. I used to know it from memory, and would run through the first scene between Michael Dorsey and his agent, George Fields, in my head while on walks. "YOU WERE A TOMATO! A TOMATO DOESN'T HAVE LOGIC! A TOMATO CAN'T MOVE!" "That's what I said! So how can a tomato sit down, George?" I'd quote it as well. "I don't believe in hell. I believe in unemployment, but I don't believe in hell." I loved the writing. I loved Hoffman in a dress. I loved Bill Murray's entire role. Goddamn it, I love it all!

6. Wargames (1983) Matthew Brodderick, Ally Sheedy, Dabney Coleman. So many of my favorite movies involve Dabney Coleman in some way. (A couple of my favorite TV shows too.) There was never a man so good at being wrong about everything. Coleman raised being wrong to an art in Tootsie, 9 to 5 and this film about a computer that, because it doesn't know the difference between games and real life, tries to destroy the world in order to win a game. Though the film's ideas of what computers can do seems more fanciful now than when the movie was released, its message and its method are still compelling.

5. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, James Earl Jones. The best of the Star Wars pictures, which used to mean more than it does now, Empire boasts character development, witty dialog, outstanding special effects, and the most dramatic lightsaber duel in the series' history. Favorite line: "Hey, your worship. I was only trying to help." "Would you stop calling me that?" "Sure, Leia." Never again was the series that funny.

4. Airplane! (1980) Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Julie Hagerty, Robert Hays. Everybody knows this film by heart, so I won't bother quoting it. It's impossible to explain in a synopsis how funny it is, so I won't bother to summarize. I'll just say that never have I laughed so hard, for so long, at one piece of film. However many times I see it, I can't stop giggling.

3. Goodfellas (1990) Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro. Whenever students ask me how to open a story or an essay, I refer them to one of the first lines of this movie: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." The movie gets right to the point, and it stays on the point, unraveling The Godfather's myths about the mob to reveal how much of it had to do with just getting the best bread in the store and the best table in the club. From Ray Liotta on the front lawn to Joe Pesci's "Funny Guy" scene to, well, everything else, the movie never strikes a false note. Once it starts, I can't stop watching it.

2. Real Genius. (1985) Val Kilmer, Gabe Jarret, William Atherton. I first caught this movie on cable. My mother was watching it, and I, at first, wasn't too impressed. By the middle, however, I was hooked on this story about socially awkward genius's who were trying to prevent a crooked professor from using their laser as a space-based assassination weapon. This was partly because I thought of myself as a socially awkward genius, and partly because I wanted to be Val Kilmer's version of a socially awkward genius. I think I watched this movie roughly seven-trillion times. But I still haven't seen it as much as I've seen...

1. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Ricardo Montalban. Star Trek movies have never been, and likely can never be, better than this one. Do you hear me, Mr. Abrams? Nicholas Meyer took a Star Trek episode, "Space Seed", that was decent but not brilliant, and turned it into a meditation on revenge and the necessity of accepting loss that I still need to watch every now and then, even though I've committed the film to memory.

So that's it. The final proof that, in spite of my best efforts, I'm trapped in the 1980s. Oh, well, like all the rest, I'm a prisoner of a time. Cover my face.

Sydney Pollack Died

"Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn't."
Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) Eyes Wide Shut

Indiana Jones

I just returned from a late screening of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Is it a fun picture? Yes. Does it have great action sequences? You bet. Is it as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark? Get serious. My reason for feeling that way? I don't want to spoil it, but you'll find a lot of dangling plot threads in this movie, more than I'd expect from a story that's been through as many revisions as this one has.

Still, it's great to see Ford back in the hat. It's great to see Karen Allen anywhere. And it was especially great to see Indiana Jones try to survive a nuclear test. That alone is worth the cost of going to the theater. So go.

It's Up

After a month of sporadic, poorly organized labor, I'm ready to launch the soft, supple, surprisingly limber and sexy website to be known forever as The McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse. It's the new portal for all my past and future audio projects, including Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and Christian Science. Bookmark it, link to it, stick out your tongue and lick its shiny boots, marry it and move to the kinds of suburbs populated by upper middle class neurotics who hold key parties and carry on cold, detached affairs (all-in-all, The Ice Storm was a pretty good picture), or, if you're more conventional, click the damn link.

New Stuff

You'll notice if you look in the right column that I have links to feeds for both Let Us Sit Upon the Ground and, the new podcast, Christian Science. I'll soon be able to direct you to a new website, the McCroskey Memorial Internet Playhouse, where you can find all my audio projects in one location.

Ah, my expanding empire!

Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End

Three hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours...

Three mindbendingly dull hours I'll never get back...

To understand how I feel about Pirates of the Carribean: Blah, Blah, Blah... all you need to know is that a major plot point involves all of the Pirate Lords converging on a place called Shipwreck Island to engage in...A MEETING! A ROUNDTABLE FRIGGING DISCUSSION! They could have booked a fucking Marriott in Singapore or wherever the hell they were, but they go instead to Shipwreck Island, a name which promises, but fails to deliver, actual shipwrecks. (I understand in the first draft of the screenplay of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, Mola Ram holds a thirty-minute seminar in the Temple of Doom--complete with slides and a generous Q&A session--about the votive objects of the Kali Cult and the veracity of heart-removal legends. Impatient, Indiana Jones cracks his bullwhip and asks several pointed questions about Mola Ram's scholarship.) This is the key symptom of POCBBB's mortal disease. There isn't a promise that this movie makes that it doesn't break. Instead of a streamlined, amusing comic adventure starring Johnny Depp as the world's feyest buccaneer, we get nothing but a parade of special effects, rambling psychotic explanations, and battle scenes notable for their lack of actual battle.

In this movie, two huge fleets of warships line up to have a fight that promises to make Trafalgar look like a sculling contest between the Harvard and Princeton alums. Do they do battle? Keira Knightley gives a speech that supposed to be a rousing, St. Crispin's Day/Braveheart style address to the pirate sailors to prepare them for such a battle. But in the end, only two ships fight. They then carry the battle to a third ship--the one carrying the movie's major villain. Does the Major Villain fight back? No! Does he call upon his big ass fleet to help? No! He stands there and lets the two ships blow him off the water. Why? I don't know!

And it's not as if the movie didn't try to explain! The first two hours consist of little besides explanations, endless, painful, impenetrable explanations whose every word added another layer of confusion. The el-cheapo-stinko movie The Cave Dwellers has a famously bad scene in which a boring old guy calls time out on the movie he's in to summarize, for twenty minutes or so, the previous movie in the series. But with the bigger budgets that Jerry Bruckheimer can muster, everybody gets a whack at being the boring old guy. The result is a narrative so convoluted, so unfocused, that for all its supposed intricacy it feels more like a story a four-year-old is making up as he goes along.

If I were religious, I'd want to know just how much penance this movie counts for.

Blowing Way Past the Point

Do I doubt that Salon's Cary Tennis is a friendly, helpful, courteous, kind, shirt-of-your-back sorta-kinda sonofagun? No. But I sometimes wonder why he's paid to give people advice. This letter in Salon struck me. It's from a guy who wants to know how to cope with his disgust at his friend's openness to teaching young earth creationism in a science class (at a Christian school, presumably). Here's a snip of Tennis's response:

As I walked around Stern Grove in San Francisco this morning, I thought of my own early exposure to the science of single-cell organisms, atomic theory and geology. I was given a solid foundation in how the earth was formed, how elements are structured and how life processes occur. What I cherish most about that early exposure to science is that it gave me a coherent story of creation. It started with simple things and proceeded in an orderly and gradual way toward the more complex, revealing, in the end, literally everything under the sun.

What I loved about science was the story it told. It provided a creation myth.

I do not mean to say that science rests on belief, that it is not factual. What I mean to say is that our attachment to science, and our deep need for what it gives us, can cause us to act unscientifically in its defense.

So what would a true scientist do when confronted with this situation? Let's say a true scientist is visiting us from another planet, trying to observe and record significant phenomena so he can better understand what is going on in the universe.

Would a true scientist experience revulsion and nausea at the scenes of our culture that you describe? Would a true scientist observe the teaching of mythology to children and label it child abuse? Would a true scientist refuse friendship with another person because that person engaged in the teaching of these strange and wondrous mythologies to children?

If a true scientist came upon a pre-modern culture living right in Manhattan, would he be revolted and nauseated? Would he claim that in transmitting its mythology to its children this pre-modern culture was committing child abuse?

Why is it that colorful beliefs and mythologies are fascinating in other cultures, but considered pernicious in our own?

To answer Tennis's question, yes I think a scientist from another planet, Mr. Spock, let us say, would be appalled if a science teacher used his class to teach mythology as if it were science. He would come away mystified about why a species that had spent centuries accumulating evidence and testing theories against it to determine how life developed on this planet, and how this planet developed in this universe would decide to toss all of that over the side and teach an ancient fable as if it were confirmed theory. He'd then recommend that we be kept out of the Galactic Federation until we matured as a society (or blew ourselves up, or proved an impediment to the construction of a hyperspace bypass).

I have no objection to teaching the Bible in a literature course, or a course on religion, or even (with some caveats) a course on history or western thought. Only recently, I had to crack open The Book of Revelations to give a student some context for understanding Yeats's "The Second Coming". I was careful to explain that I wasn't proselytizing--when my student asked me about my religion, I told him I was an atheist. I went on to explain that, whether he chose to believe in some, all, or none of the Bible's stories, a working knowledge of them is essential to understanding much of western literature.

But a science class is not the place for the Bible. The Bible has no science content. The Genesis story is a poem about the creation of the world. It's built on metaphor and fantasy, not data or observation. Teaching Genesis in a science class will leave students unable to understand what the scientific method is or how it works. The same goes for every other creation myth humanity has told itself. And it's not an issue of preferring more exotic cultures to North American fundamentalist ones, as Tennis charges. Mr. Spock and I would be just as appalled if someone proposed to teach the Bakuba creation myth, which holds that a god named Mbombo vomited up the universe during a series of bouts of indigestion, as if it were science. I dearly love Ovid's account of the formation of the world in The Metamorphoses, but if a rich eccentric seriously proposed digging for evidence of the Age of Gold and the Age of Brass, I'd back slowly away from him while suggesting he get the counseling he so desperately needs.

It's a dangerous thing to confuse myth and science, or myth and history. And we don't even have to look a humanity's major disasters (World Wars, inquisitions, genocides, witch burnings) to see that. The Bush administration is evidence enough of the perils of willful delusion. Encouraging children to substitute fables for realities is an insult both to fable and reality. It is a form of abuse, and while, if I were the letter writer, I'd try to couch my objections delicately, I'd certainly make it clear that teaching lies to schoolchildren could cost the teacher at least one friend.

Do We Know What We're Talking About When We Talk About Movies?

You know what bothers me? Well, plenty of things. But what's bothering me at the moment is imprecise writing. Case in point, Armond White's essay in the New York Press called "WHAT WE DON’T TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT MOVIES". What starts as an essay bemoaning the proliferation of bad writing among internet film critics goes on to make a series of hasty, and increasingly bombastic, generalizations about all film critics.

Example:

What we don’t talk about when we talk about movies these days reveals that we have not moved past the crippling social tendency that 1990s sociologists called Denial. The most powerful, politically and morally engaged recent films (The Darjeeling Limited, Private Fears in Public Places, World Trade Center, The Promise, Shortbus, Ask the Dust, Akeelah and the Bee, Bobby, Running Scared, Munich, War of the Worlds, Vera Drake) were all ignored by journalists whose jobs are to bring the (cultural) news to the public. Instead, only movies that are mendacious, pseudo-serious, sometimes immoral or socially retrograde and irresponsible (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Army of Shadows, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Zodiac, Last Days, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, Gone Baby Gone, Letters From Iwo Jima, A History of Violence, Tarnation, Elephant) have received critics’ imprimatur.

I'd like Mr. White to show me just who ignored War of the Worlds. If he felt like it he could spend a day reading the reviews listed for it at the Internet Movie Database. The same goes for Munich and World Trade Center, both wide-release pictures by two famous directors (Spielberg and Stone, respectively). Akeelah and the Bee, lacking a big name director or a blockbuster budget, still managed to secure good notices, including a four-star review from Roger Ebert, who also conferred a special jury prize on the picture when he released his Ten-Best list. While it's true that he didn't finance a ticker tape parade for the movie along Chicago's Wacker Drive, I don't think anyone can say he ignored the movie or gave it anything less than his complete support. Instead, it puts the lie to White's second claim in the paragraph that "only movies that are mendacious...have received the critics' imprimatur."

I bring Ebert up here because Mr. White goes to considerable lengths to attack the various things Ebert has allegedly done to destroy film criticism, and film, and indeed the entire moral structure of the universe as we know it. (That last bit was an exaggeration. I apologize for it, which puts me one up on Mr. White.) White contrasts Ebert's era with that of Sarris and Kael in order to demonstrate that, by making film criticism accessible to the unwashed, Mr. Ebert has...well, I guess I'll have to quote Mr. White to explain:

To discuss movies as if they were irrelevant to individual experience—just bread-and-circus rabble-rousers—breeds indifference. And that’s only one of the two worst tendencies of contemporary criticism. The other is elitism.

This schism had an ironic origin—the popularization of film criticism as a consumer’s method. A generation of readers and filmgoers were once sparked by the discourse created by Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris during the period that essayist Philip Lopate described as ìthe heroic era of moviegoing.î The desire to be a critic fulfilled the urge to respond to what was exciting in the culture. Movie commentary was a media rarity in those days and relatively principled (even the Times’ Arts & Leisure section used to present a forum for contrary opinions). And then the television series At the Movies happened. Its success, moving from public to commercial broadcast (who can tell the difference anymore?), resulted in an institution. Permit an insider’s story: It is said that At the Movies host Roger Ebert boasted to Kael about his new TV show, repeatedly asking whether she’d seen it. Kael reportedly answered “If I want a layman’s opinion on movies, I don’t have to watch TV.”

Kael’s cutting remark cuts to the root of criticism’s problem today. Ebert’s way of talking about movies as disconnected from social and moral issues, simply as entertainment, seemed to normalize film discourse—you didn’t have to strive toward it, any Average Joe American could do it. But criticism actually dumbed down. Ebert also made his method a road to celebrity—which destroyed any possibility for a heroic era of film criticism.
At the Movies helped criticism become a way to be famous in the age of TV and exploding media, a dilemma that writer George W. S. Trow distilled in his apercu “The Aesthetic of the Hit”: “To the person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference.” It was Ebert’s career choice and preference to reduce film discussion to the fumbling of thumbs, pointing out gaffes or withholding “spoilers”—as if a viewer needed only to like or dislike a movie, according to an arbitrary set of specious rules, trends and habits. Not thought. Not feeling. Not experience. Not education. Just reviewing movies the way boys argued about a baseball game.

I won't mock too hard the idea of a "heroic era of moviegoing". I was once moved to write an epic poem about my experiences watching Goldeneye "'Twas Brosnan's steely gaze 'pon the dish of fire that roused me 'gainst self-slaughter..." Sorry. I won't, however, drop one thing. Mr. White, Andrew Sarris's "era" isn't over. He's writing for the New York Observer and you can read his reviews on current releases whenever you're of a mind to do so. His rival, Pauline Kael, went to the great box office in the sky, but Sarris is still with us.

As for criticism dumbing down...well...I'm not sure about that either. Were daily newspaper reviewers ever writing to people other than "Average Joe American"? After all, Mr. White, and I hate to tell you this, lots of people do just like or dislike movies, and many of them would prefer to know before blowing money on a film whether it's likely to entertain them or not. That's why they're reading the paper or watching television. Those with more sophisticated tastes will gravitate toward The New Yorker or Film Comment. That's why they're there. They have room to publish longer articles and can assume a certain level of reader knowledge. What Ebert did was broaden the audience for film journalism, with all the costs that this involves. It was ever thus that those who talk to the uninitiated have to speak their language, and say things that they'd find interesting. Mr. White can feel free to dislike Ebert for doing that, but before the next time he wants to start a harangue about how Ebert doesn't educate his audience, he should remember that lots of "Average Joe Americans" would never have heard of Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, or Stanley Kaufmann if Roger Ebert hadn't, from time to time, mentioned them in his columns.

There are plenty of other errors and faults in Armond White's essay. I doubt he'll take advice from me, but if he does I'd tell him that a quick read-through of Orwell's Politics and the English Language would be a good use of his time. Nobody who has a lick of sense and one good eye should allow a sentence like "The love of movies that inspires their gigabytes of hyperbole has been traduced to nonsense language and non-thinking" into print. The love of abstract and polysyllabic words that plagues Mr. White's prose tells me that he might have something to learn from Roger Ebert. I may not find the secrets of the cinematic universe in a Roger Ebert review, but at least I can figure out, after the first reading, what the man is trying to say. I've read Mr. White's essay four times now, and though I'm an educated man with a master's degree in English and several awards for fiction writing, I'm still unsure what Mr. White's problem is. The first three times, I thought it might be might be my fault, but the fourth reading left me wondering and now...well...here were are.

The Days of Wine and Roses

I can only guess how audiences who were accustomed to Jack Lemmon in comedies reacted to his performance in The Days Of Wine and Roses. What I do know is that there were moments watching it where I was in this queasy space between wanting to laugh at some of his antics as a drunk and feeling sick at his character's rapid descent into degradation. For this reason, Blake Edwards was exactly right in casting him. An actor better known for serious work might have taken the role so far into pathos that I would have judged his character instead of being invited to share in the humor that Joe Clay (often wrongly) sees in his own drunkenness. Lemmon's performance took me from a kind of guilty laughter to crushing pain sometimes within a ten second period. Lee Remick, whose character starts as Joe Clay's teetotaling wife and ends up sinking even lower than Clay does, is equally effective. The more I see of her work in the late 50s and early 60s, the more I wish I could see.

The movie isn't one for lovers of linear plots. The Days of Wine and Roses meanders from moment to moment, observing Joe and Kirsten's fall in to alcoholism without forcing them to jump through the hoops of a conventional story. Sometimes this hurts the film. I wasn't clear on just how many jobs Joe had been fired from until he mentioned it in an argument with Kirsten, but now that I think of it, maybe this isn't a flaw. Maybe in some ways the meandering and fogginess about specific plot events is meant, like Lemmon's performance, to put me in the head of a drunk.

It's a good movie. See it.

There's No Place Like Rome

Bitterspice and I spent the afternoon at the Seattle Art Museum's presentation of the Louvre's Roman art pieces. Of course, it's impossible to be comprehensive in any one space about a culture as long-lived and diverse as the Roman Republic and Empire, but damn it if this exhibition doesn't give it the best possible shot. From ancient gladiator action figures to a discussion of changing women's hairstyles as depicted in Roman portraiture, from gods to slaves, the exhibition has a lot. I still haven't processed it all, but what I saw was a knockout. Any readers in Seattle who have yet to catch the exhibit have one week to scrape together twenty bucks and go.