Five At A Time #4: Midichlorians

#16: Deep Red

Here’s the shitty truth, I don’t like it either: Suspiria is Dario Argento’s best-known movie because it’s probably his only good one. Like Seijun Suzuki before him, he makes movies that have fun soundtracks and he has great taste in interior design but picks/writes scripts that are convoluted and overlong in ways that don’t benefit their B-movie trappings. Example: I don’t know why the murderer killed everyone in this. It’s a dumb movie that you have to pay a lot of attention to in order to figure out what’s going on, which is a drastically unfun combination of attributes. Even its individually excellent components don’t make a lot of sense when put together the way they are in Deep Red; I don’t know why you’d want a bouncy jazz-rock tune soundtracking a woman getting her face boiled off in a bathtub unless you’re one of those Eastern Eurpean perverts from the ’70s who’s trying to talk about fascism or something by using stream of consciousness absurdism and I’m almost positive that’s not what Argento was going for here.

There is one part, and I’m going to talk about it a lot because it’s rare that I see such a stroke of genius in a movie I find overall to be obnoxious and dull, but the part where the evil little robot walks into the study is the most upsetting shit I’ve seen on a screen in a long time. Argento had the very astute notion to frame the shot so that the puppet strolls towards the viewer from the bottom right corner of the screen. It’s a nightmarish image from a very literal understanding of that word. It’s like sleep paralysis: here’s something horrible right across from you and you can’t close your eyes or move out of its way or do anything about it at all. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it and I can’t understand why because it seems like the only way you’d ever want to do horror after you’ve seen the example set.

No one will ever be able to accuse Argento of being a bad visual composer or of having poor taste in aesthetics. But he is a fantastic example of how easy it is to throw film buffs off the scent of a bad movie, how having a good director of photography can turn a nonsensical, tedious Hitchcock homage into a venerated cult classic. It’s not really a bad thing that people like this movie so much as it is telling: if the vibe is all you come for, the vibe alone is apparently all you need.

#17: Moonlight

Which one of you hid the director’s cut? This isn’t the final version of this movie. It can’t be. This is an epic character drama in the style of Cinema Paradiso or Boyhood or Children of Paradise that some unconscionable butcher maimed into a 110 minute Sparknotes edition of the film it was supposed to be. Nothing is going to convince me otherwise. You can’t do a movie like this in under 2 hours. You can’t. That’s not long enough to live with Chiron; his life is supposed to be a painting but all we see here is a sketch. We barrel through the most impactful moments of his life so that we can see the broad strokes of who he is — gay, poor, black, sad — but nothing is given time to grow, there’s no windup to these moments. It’s a rapid-fire sequence of emotional cues that crash into each other until the credits roll.

This needed to be two movies. The movie we ended up seeing needed to be 100% devoted to his childhood, all 110 of those minutes. Give us 120 to 150 to see what he’s like as an adult, to live in his mind, to see how little or how much he changed away from and into Miami when he left for the trap in Atlanta. Nothing less will do. Moonlight is good, but it could have been extraordinary, and I’m confident that the real version of it, whatever may have happened to it, is extraordinary. Where’s the rest of it?

#18: Manchester by the Sea

Boy, what a fucking horrible movie. What an utterly meritless trough of maudlin slime. Simple-minded, simple-hearted, soulless. Fuck.

Here’s a much nicer man, a user on Rateyourmusic who goes by “onethink,” explaining why this movie is such a piece of dog shit:

He pretty much hit the nail on the head, didn’t he? Manchester by the Sea is toothless, joyless, cloying, as much a saccharine fabrication as any shitty teen movie from the Reagan era but sociopathically obsessed with its own mediocre and misguided understanding of lived human experience.

I turned this movie off after the big long scene where he accidentally sets his kids on fire and kills them because I found it too uproarious to be able to pay attention to anything that happened after that point, I couldn’t stop laughing. I started quietly chanting, out loud, child’s charred skeleton, child’s charred skeleton and the film produced their immolated bodies, to the tune of swooning violins no less, as if by magic. But there’s no magic needed to predict something that stupid and obvious when a film has made it clear it doesn’t care how you feel or what you think, it’s going to try and make you feel something and tell you what to think. Fuck off.

Also, noted woman-molester Casey Affleck’s brilliance performance: is this what passes for acting? You just sort of fold your arms and yell and grumble and look disconcerted and they give you an Academy Award? I mean, I sort of knew that already, but it’s remarkable to see it play out in such a nakedly rote and empty display. The nakedness of it all! It practically taunts you with potentially interesting turns before settling back into its lazy, easy manipulation. Whoa, is Affleck’s character gay, is that why he’s drunkenly rambling over to those two guys? No, he’s the shitty bro you think he is and he’s going over there to kick their ass. Does his family hate him so much they faked his brother’s death so that they could talk about his condition in a private hospital room without his interference?!?! What!!! Nope, it’s a sloppily edited flashback. Oh, he’s playing beer pong with the broskis and he hates his wife? Yeah, I hate movies, too.

This is the sort of movie that’s so bad it makes me wonder what the fuck is wrong with you people. If you attend any theater’s teen playwrighting program, you will find a superior version of this film condensed into a far more tolerable 17-to-25 minutes. That’s what it is, basically: Manchester by the Sea is an Arthur Miller play without focus, insight, wit, or humanity, and it’s two and a half hours long. It’s very possibly the worst fucking movie I have ever seen in my life.

#19: Batman Begins

I was incredibly disappointed by the unfamiliar films I had chosen to explore this month, and happened to find myself in the middle of an uncharacteristically asphyxiating bout of major depression, so I decided to watch some movies I had fond memories of. Batman Begins seems like it could have easily been the victim of rose-colored glasses, that it might actually be a bad movie and I just happened to watch it as a shitty teen who read too many comic books and was just happy to see a big buff boy I liked a lot on screen (thereby validating my own interests), but weirdly enough it basically holds up even now that I’m not really any of those things anymore. Like, is it an uncomfortable libertarian power fantasy? Sure. Is it about a half hour too long, are there two or three climactic fights that could have easily been condensed into one scene? Absolutely.

But there’s an unforseen elegance to the screenplay that I haven’t observed in anything else David S. Goyer has written. For example, the fact that they Spidey up Batman’s origin a little bit — the fact that his dad getting shot is sort of his fault from a certain point of view, not unlike Spider-Man’s negligence in apprehending the thief that would go on to kill his uncle — that instinct, to cheaply “humanize” iconic DC characters like Batman and Superman that tend to be viewed as disconnected and unrelatable, doesn’t work very often. But they don’t dwell on it for long, just enough to give that death scene a little bit more emotional heft. And when Falcone kicks Bruce out of his restaurant and has to twist the knife a little by telling him his dad “died like a dog” in that great cartoony Jersey mobster accent of his — something about it just feels very correct. Very much like a good “adult” superhero comic, still outlandish but not dumb. Or when Bruce gets the upper hand on Ra’s Al Guhl during his final training exercise by disguising himself as one of the other ninjas in the room.

We credit Batman Begins for kicking off a wave of relatively dark and mature storytelling in superhero movies, but it’s strength as a film isn’t that so much as all the personality it has. It’s unexpectedly joyful at points, like the afforementioned ninja thing, or when Bruce pretends to be drunk and kicks all the rich kids out of his birthday party, or anytime Lucius Fox has a bit of fun at his expense. The weakest part of the movie is that last hour or 45 minutes because it lacks all these things, it’s a honeycomb of rambling fights that don’t have the space for any real personalized storytelling. But overall it’s a very complete package, and a surprisingly warm story. Depressed people are attracted to superhero stories for good reason, I guess.

#20: Goodfellas

I’ve seen Goodfellas 3 or 4 times at this point because it’s one of those films that’s unavoidable in the circulation of life; you will have a friend or a relative, perhaps many, that will want to watch it with you more than once, and it will always be hard to turn down, because there’s something weird about saying you’re not in the mood to watch Goodfellas. This had been the first time I’d seen it by myself; make of that what you will.

Anyway: this was the first time I’d watched it and liked it more than the previous times I’d seen it. It doesn’t seem like the type of movies you’d need multiple views to “get,” but it weirdly seemed to click into place this time. I noticed things like the fact that, after being battered with pop hits of the mid 20th century for most of its runtime, there’s almost no music in its final 20 minutes; I hadn’t noticed the line “I guess they really do feed people to lions down here” before, somehow, but it was hysterical when I caught it this time. Even Liotta’s acting, which had been my one major reservation on previous viewing, seemed to make a little more sense to me: for a life this wild and acerbic the POV benefits from being deadpan, almost artificial at times, so that the viewer may more easily inhabit them.

There aren’t many observations left to be made about this movie. There’s a very French quality to it, almost like a very long version of Rififi. Less in terms of the pacing and visuals but more in the density of the frame, the amount of things happening in one shot at any given time. Is that why people like Goodfellas? No. They like it because it lets them be angry, it tells them it’s alright to be angry, you don’t have to temper your rage to ascend and be powerful. That’s not necessarily what gangster movies were about before Goodfellas, but that’s what they are now. I think that’s a good thing, personally. Not all of us are in good enough shape to join a mosh pit.