Staring at Mortality

Death scenes make for potent drama, right? There's the death that causes one of the characters to rage against the heavens (as seen in many of these clips from The Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars series)...



There's the quiet passing and whispered goodbyes (this also from The Lord of the Rings at the request of my younger daughter)...



And then there are the scenes where the filmmaker shows us the quiet moments before death and lets the audience make the logical and emotionally wrenching conclusion about what will happen (like this scene from Titanic that always kills me)...



Why are so many of our stories filled with death? For one thing, it's a way to bring the story to a close. When the character dies, his or her story is finished. (Spoiler alert: Unless you're Gandalf.) It ties up a loose end in the plot and gives us greater insight into the characters, although that last bit comes very close to sounding like The Dark Knight's Joker. ("You see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which of them were cowards?") I do think that it's somewhat true to say that at the end of your life, when there aren't any more personal consequences for what you say or what you do, you can really be yourself.

I guess that cinema mortality provides us with a safe space to contemplate our own inevitable demise and by extension what kind of person we want to believe we are, which is why a film like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is so watchable. In it, everyone is faced with imminent doom so there's a reaction in there for everyone to identify with. (Warning: spoilers throughout.) There's suicide, assisted suicide, anger and rioting, no-holds-barred partying, denial, extreme denial through survivor mentality, hopeless resignation, and a final search for purpose and meaning. Somewhere in the film there's got to be a scene where people in the audience could say, "That's what I would do."

Maybe we'd have a series of reactions as we grieve for ourselves. We'd go through all of those stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - at our own pace and in our own order, but I think that all of us want to believe that when we finally come to our own end that we will have made it to acceptance. That's what kills me about the Titanic scenes - the acceptance. I know watching the movie from a historical perspective that nearly everybody on that boat is going to die; that some of them could find acceptance and peace in their final moments is the kindest blessing we could wish on them. So to see that blessing granted is almost like witnessing a miracle.

The end of Seeking a Friend similarly had me choked up. As Penny (Kiera Knightley) and Dodge (Steve Carell) lie in bed facing each other waiting for the meteor to collide with Earth and end all life, Penny is still bargaining. She doesn't think it's fair that she just found love; she just wants a little more time. This reaction elicits both empathy and tension from the audience. We have come to expect that love through adversity is rewarded in cinema. We want them to have more time together too, but at the same time we realize that the meteor is unstoppable. We tensely await the moment she accepts her fate because to leave her trapped forever in our minds in a state of anxiety is just too cruel.

It's Dodge who brings about a feeling of catharsis for both Penny and us. He brings her to accept both of their deaths. He reassures her that their destinies only came together BECAUSE they had so little time left - that the end of their lives also brought them the thing they had both been seeking: true love. Perhaps that sentiment is corny, but it is the other aspect of cinema deaths that we personally crave - meaning.

Our fiction is very good at providing meaning. Everything in a book, movie, or TV show is there for a reason; it has a purpose. And the deaths in these stories are imbued with meaning. They happen for a reason. That person's life and death had an effect on the universe. Someone was there to mourn them. Someone was there to shout, "NOOOOOO!"

And I think we all crave that for ourselves - the comforting knowledge that we had an effect, that we mattered, that someone else cared, that our lives had purpose and meaning. Cinema deaths allow us to experience that vicarious death. We are both the dying and bereaved. And we cry at movies, not just because a character that we have come to appreciate is leaving us, but because we are leaving them. But we leave knowing that we will be missed, which is really all we can ask of life.

So we continue to watch sad movies really because they give us hope for ourselves. As we vicariously experience the end of the character's lives, we too prepare ourselves to face death. Watching them meet their finality with grace, dignity, and acceptance, surrounded by people whom they have impacted,  gives us faith that such a thing can happen for us to. That, in our final moments, we too will receive that kindest of blessings.

Next up: Something less morbid: Neil Young whips his hair back and forth.

Face the Horror Movie

I have just a few faces when I watch horror movies. Just four really.

1. The "Really?" - I make this face usually at the beginning of the movie. It says, "The filmmakers really want me to believe that people act like this?" and "People are really scared of this kind of stuff?"

2. The "Eww" - I make this face when something is gross or unsettling, like the zombies are tearing their victim open or the violin music starts to go up two octaves.

3. The "No!" - This is for when I'm really into the movie, and the people on screen don't do what I say.

4. The "Grudge" - I save this for when the movie is in full swing. I pretend that I'm a crazy ghost because there's no way the scary stuff on screen will come out of the television and mess with a scary ghost. The scary stuff will be afraid of me.




I try not to watch scary movies when other people are around.

I get weird looks.

Next up: This Geico commercial

The Dark Knight: You Can't Handle the Truth

Warning: Spoilers throughout.

As Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy concludes, it’s a good time to reflect back on what the previous two films have had to say about the human condition. Yes, these are movies where people seriously wear capes and spandex, but make no mistake: these are films that also seriously ask questions philosophers and moralists wrestle with all the time.

The most important questions for me in The Dark Knight (the second movie of the trilogy) deal with our ability to discover the truth and our moral obligations to share it once we have it. Wanting to know the truth is seemingly fundamental to us as humans. Science is founded on the search for truth. It’s a cornerstone of religion: “I am the way, the truth, and the light.” In our personal relationships, if someone were to say, “That story she just told you isn’t what really happened,” how many of us would say, “Whatever, the first story was good enough”? No way. We’d pester the other person until we knew every juicy little detail.

So what do we make of The Joker in this scene? What's the truth of this scene? (The person who posted this video helpfully cut out the car chase shots from this section, but it will look a little choppy.)

How much of what The Joker said there is true? Do we believe him when he says that Dent's scarring and Rachel's death were nothing personal? Does he truly not plan anything? He certainly seems genuine in his "apology," and in this scene he seems to be treating Harvey as an equal. The Joker doesn't lie to his equals; for example, he lets the mob bosses that he is the one who stole their money.

But he's a notorious liar; that he tells two distinctly different stories about how he got his scars is the most obvious example of his penchant for deception. And he's definitely the bad guy of the film. Harvey Dent is the good guy. So why does Harvey believe The Joker and accept The Joker's worldview?  Good guys should be able to tell truth from lies, right from wrong. We need the good guys to be able to do that because the bad guys can't.

Batman and Commissioner Gordon decide that Gotham needs as many good guys as it can get. Harvey is the White Knight of Gotham, and when he becomes Two Face and begins to kill people, Batman and Gordon reason that Gotham has lost its best hope. So, to give hope back to Gotham, they conspire to blame Batman for Two Face's killings and his holding Gordon's family hostage. They plan to lie to the world about the circumstances of Harvey's death, making Batman a villain and Two Face a hero.

Aren't the good guys supposed to tell the truth? I mean, Superman stands for truth, justice, and the American way; truth is the FIRST thing he stands for. Batman and Gordon just want to make sure that The Joker doesn't win, that he doesn't break the spirit of Gotham. But when the three great spirits of Gotham - Harvey, Batman, and Gordon - have turned to killing, terrorizing, and perpetuating lies (at the great potential risk to Gordon's family's mental health [aren't they going to have to lie too?]), when the good guys use the tools of the bad guys, don't the terrorists win?

Next up: I look at horror movies.

When Spoilers Spoil!

Are spoilers a good thing or a bad thing? Spoiler alert: I'm going to have it both ways. Here's the podcast!

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Click here if you'd like to read a report of the Christenfeld and Leavitt study.
Click here if you'd like to read A.V. Club writer Zack Handlen's thoughts on spoilers.
Click here if you're tired of spoilers and want to watch cute videos of cats. Spoiler alert: Cats will fall off of things.

Come for the Movie; Stay for the Experience

The rest of the kids were out at recess, but I was alone with my teacher planning an unprecedented event. In two weeks, my grade school would have a VCR (!!!), and I got to help choose which movie the whole fifth grade would get to see. It was a logistical nightmare. With only one television and ninety kids, how would everyone fit into one classroom? The solution was to get three television sets (I think one of the teachers brought one from home). A consultant from Radio Shack was brought out to determine the lengths of coaxial cabling we would need. The principal brought a popcorn machine to hand out treats during the show. The superintendent came out to watch with us for a while. A local news team was on hand to cover the event. A squadron of fighter planes flew overhead and a parade ten miles long kicked off the whole event.

I may be misremembering some of those details, but I do remember that being able to watch Hollywood movies at school or in your home was a big deal. These days, when we can watch movies on our phones, having ready access to big screen entertainment may not seem like such a big deal. We can watch whenever wherever. But does that make it better?

I think it's more cost effective. When the whole family can watch a movie rented from Redbox for a buck or two, it certainly puts paying $46.50 for the fam to see Ice Age 3 in 3D in perspective. A subscription to Netflix or Amazon Prime can lower the per movie cost even further.

The increasing prevalence of HDTVs, Blu Ray players and digital surround sound all help to make the home theatre feel more like a movie theatre, which make it that much less enticing to go out and see a movie elsewhere. Why fight the crowds when you can sprawl out on your couch? You don't even have to sign a loan application to get movie snacks when you eat at home.

All of this is great, and I readily admit that I watch far more movies at home than I do out, but there is something about the movie theatre experience that cannot be replaced. The studios are making more efforts to connect with people wherever they are, but I believe that people who really love movies have to go see them for the best possible experience.

When you go to the cinema, you have a shared experience. There's a social contagion theory - that personal feelings become more intensified and vocal when they're shared with a group - that is missing when you watch a film by yourself or with just a few other people. For example, I don't often find old comedies to be laugh-out-loud funny, but when I watched the 1954 Sabrina with a theatre full of people I laughed along with everybody else - and at things I normally wouldn't have even found funny when watching it alone. Watching Pet Sematary in a theatre with a vocal crowd was one of the very best scary movie experiences ever because before the movie was over I was shouting too: "Don't trust that zombie-lookin' kid! Can't you see he's got a knife?" And taking my kids to the midnight showing of the last Harry Potter movie and finding it full of other Harry Potter geeks dressed in costume was an experience we could never have had at home.

Even with the best home theatre system, the picture and sound in a theatre is going to be better and truer to what the filmmaker wanted you to see most of the time. The smaller the screen, the more compressed the picture is going to be. I remember a sight gag in one of the Naked Gun movies (22 1/2?); there's a moment where Drebin's food is so old that it actually moves across the refrigerator in the background. It was a very funny moment in the theatre, but when I watched it home on cable, my screen was too small to register any movement; the cake (or whatever it was) didn't have far enough to go. In a lot of the big action movies these days, there is so much going on all over the screen that it takes the big canvas of a movie screen to paint it all. And maybe this is just at my house, but I can never turn up the volume to movie theatre levels without someone complaining.

For these reasons I really love movie theatres. One place I used to love to go was The Paramount Theatre in Oakland, CA.

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It is a beautifully restored movie palace that will occasionally show classic films. I saw Gone with the Wind for the first time ever on the big screen with a couple hundred other people. In that place, with that size of a crowd, with that movie, it was almost like I was going back in time and seeing it the way the filmmakers intended it to be seen in 1939.

When I'm visiting family in Delaware, OH, we always make it a point to go The Strand Theatre.

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It too is an old movie house (one of the oldest continuously running movie theatres in the country), but it has been split into a three screen theatre. We enjoy going there because the prices for tickets to first run movies and concessions are very reasonable. Ohio Wesleyan University operates it as a nonprofit organization, which keeps the costs down, and it's a model I wish more communities would adopt.

Nostalgia is a big factor in why my family likes to go to The Boulevard Drive-In in Kansas City.

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My wife and I both remember going to the drive-ins with our families when we were kids - staying up late and catching fireflies before the show, sometimes staying up super late to see two movies back to back, and sometimes having to crawl into the sleeping bag and sleep through the second picture which was just for grown-ups, getting to have snacks at 10:00 at night. Good times. This drive-in, like most these days, has a very local radio station for you to listen to the movie through your car's speakers.

But the place we go most frequently these days is the AMC Studio 30 in Olathe, KS.
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It has 30 screens so even when there's a big event movie, there's always something else to see. They have specialty theatres like the IMAX theatres, Fork and Dine (a more family-oriented set of screens that have "booths" and restaurant-style food service at your seats), and the Cinema Suites (a more grown-up oriented set of screens with reserved seating in leather recliners with food and bar service at your seats).  It's a quality place that combines the best of home comfort and the movie theatre experience.

So I encourage you to make it a point to see movies on the big screen. There are always places around that offer unique opportunities to have the communal experience of sharing a cinematic story. Yes, staying at home is cheaper, but with movies, as with so much else in life, you get what you pay for.

Next up: Spoilers

Turn on and tune in to avoid dropping out

How do you tell when a movie or TV show is any good? That’s an important question, although the answer is very subjective. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure (see the success of Jersey Shore).

Let me tell you how I go about answering the question of quality. The first thing that I try to discern is whether what I’m watching is a movie or a film, tv or TV. Those terms may seem synonymous (or just a matter of capitalization), and for most people they are. I use them to make a distinction about what the work is trying to do. A movie and tv are primarily intended to entertain; a film and TV try to illuminate some facet of the human condition. Movies and tv are lowbrow; the others are highbrow. Film and TV are literature; the others are just stories.

Does that mean that one is all bad and the other is all good? Well, there are times you need a snack and times you need a meal. At the end of a long week, I don’t want to sit down and watch Schindler’s List. On the other hand, a steady diet of nothing but How I Met Your Mother is no better than a steady diet of candy with no fruits or vegetables. (Although such a diet would be legen – wait for it – dary.) Watching too many movies and tv shows leaves you intellectually stunted while too many films and TV shows make you pretentious.

Knowing the filmmakers’ aims is important for setting expectations and gauging the amount of effort you'll have to put into your viewing. For example, the final few episodes of the sitcom Mad about You got very serious as the couple that had engaged in several seasons of lighthearted banter and kooky adventures suddenly began to grow emotionally apart and contemplate having extramarital affairs. This was not the entertainment my new wife and I tuned in to watch.  We wanted tv and got TV.

But sometimes having chocolate in the peanut butter (peanut butter in the chocolate?) is a good thing. I went into The Dark Knight wanting a movie about a guy with a utility belt who fights crime in the dark, and what I got was that AND a thoughtful movie about the nature of truth and morality. The film gave me everything I expected and more.

All of this is just to say that before you judge a work on the big or small screen, I would encourage you to take a moment to align your mindset with the filmmakers’ intention. This will prevent you snobs from delivering a kneejerk dismissal of Friends with Benefits and you slobs from trashing An Education before you see it. If you’ve done your best to see the film in the right frame of mind and you still don’t like it, by all means say so, but at that point you’ll have better reasoning behind your review.

Next up: The Louie episode I promised in my last post; I just needed to get this discussion out of the way first. Oh, by the way, I think this episode would be RATED R if it were in the theatres because of the opening scene before the credits. Louie is filled with profanity and R rated discussions of sex; however, this episode really stuck under my skin, and I want to explore why.

Troll 2 Puzzles and Delights

Troll 2 may be the worst movie of all time. It is #93 on IMDB’s bottom 100 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105643/). It has a 0% critical fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/troll-2/). It is the subject of the documentary Best Worst Movie, which is where I became familiar with it. (This documentary is also available on Netflix Watch Instantly.)

It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Some movies are terrible, but afterward you can say, “At least the acting was good” or “Well, the cinematography was interesting” or “The costumes were stunning anyway.” There is nothing to recommend this movie.

And that is, of course, why it has gathered a cult following. It’s a train wreck of a movie, but catastrophe is compelling. According to Best Worst Movie, the people who worked on Troll 2 set out to make the very best movie they could, but the results show they failed in every way. So there’s a certain level of schadenfreude to it.

I mean, this is a movie where shape-shifting, vegetarian goblins (not trolls) force humans to eat food that will turn them into a vegetable goo buffet. It’s a movie where the scariest monsters look like children wearing potato sacks and remaindered Halloween masks.  This is the movie that asks us to believe that a ghost that can stop time, deliver a secret weapon to his grandson, manifest himself physically to wield an axe and create Molotov cocktails, cause lightning to target people, and yet can’t help inadvertently becoming a peeping Tom on his granddaughter. This is terrible, terrible movie.

And part of the pleasure is seeing how bad the movie gets. It starts out awful and then gets worse. Yet, as several people in Best Worst Movie point out, it’s hard to hate this film. The movie reminds me of stories that my kids developed as they played with their toys. In their stories, Cinderella played with Simba while magical unicorns bathed cats in a school bus. I knew that those stories were never going to be good or satisfying in any traditional sense, but there was a pleasure in knowing that almost anything could happen.

Another reason I think this movie has such an appeal is that I think, deep down, most of us realize that if we ever tried to make a movie, it would probably end up looking more like Troll 2 than Aliens. I have a tremendous amount of sympathy for the filmmakers and actors. I can easily imagine myself thinking I was being terribly clever naming the vacation spot Nilbog and scripting a revealing moment when my protagonist would look into a mirror and discover that Nilbog backwards is Goblin. I’d be so pleased that I crafted makeup to look like someone was turning into a tree. I’d practice acting outraged for days so that when it came time for my big “You can’t piss on hospitality! I won’t allow it!” scene, I’d just nail it.

And all of it could be crap. Every last bit of it. That’s the scary part about being creative: our very best efforts are more likely to be terrible than genius or even adequate. But God bless creative people; we keep trying anyway.

Watching Troll 2 helps us recognize that movies are a giant puzzle, and it takes more magic than can be found in a Stonehenge rock swirling with eldritch mists to put all of the pieces together into something that someone else will want to watch and truly enjoy. If just one piece is wrong, the audience can immediately see it when they step back and look at the picture. Troll 2 illustrates just how many pieces there are in a movie because not one of them fits with another. And there, but for the grace of God, go I.

Next up: An episode from the TV show Louie: “God” (available on Netflix Watch Instantly: Season 1, Episode 11)

Taking the Blogging Plunge

As a high school teacher developing a course called Film as Literature, I thought it would be helpful to look at my own feelings about the screen stories that are a part of my life. Although I am an avid reader, I think it's probably safe to say that I have "read" far more movies and television shows than I have books. In fact, I've been keeping track of the number of movies and books I have "read" so far this summer, and movies outpace books two to one.

When I was in college, I tried to have a book discussion group. At the first meeting, we were on top of things and discussing character motivation and themes, but by the second meeting, Book Club was already an excuse to get together and to party. Talking about books is often a bust.

I don't think the same is true about movies and television though. It's very hard to connect to my Facebook friends about things I've read, but a status update about a movie I just watched will always catch a few comments. Movies and television, at least for the time being, still have a positive socializing effect. They give us something to talk about when we can't talk about anything else. On one of my all-time favorite shows, Seinfeld, TV is the only thing that makes George Costanza's relationship with his mother work: "You know, I think we really need to be in front of a television set. You take T.V. out of this relationship, it is just torture." (See http://www.seinology.com/scripts/script-107.shtml if you don't believe me. What a world where we have Seinfeld scripts on demand.) 

Around my house, we're in front of the TV a lot, but not because we can't stand each other. We watch TV shows and movies separately and as a family because we enjoy them, but we do it very passively. We watch and laugh or get tense or cry (mostly I cry; the rest of my family doesn't share this crying-at-movies trait with me), but at the end we say, "That was good/bad/okay/whatever," and leave it at that. As I said, passive.

My wife and I have been pushing our kids and ourselves to do more - to avoid being boring Boyers. Go, do, be, create. This blog is an attempt to avoid being a boring Boyer. I want to develop a method for analyzing the strengths and weakness of the screen stories on television and in film, and I want to sharpen my writing skills. No more passivity.

I want to discuss the things in movies and television that excite, bother, and move me and to explore how and why they affect me in the way that they do. I don't want to sit blankly in front of a screen; I want to analyze what's going on, to learn more about the craft of screen storytelling, and to share those insights with people who are similarly interested.

I hope you'll be there with me - correcting me, challenging me, inspiring me, and perhaps even agreeing with me.

And now I can totally rationalize watching more TV.

Next up: Troll 2 (available on Netflix Watch Instantly).