Hi guys:
As usual in “The Movie Club,” my excitement and anger are getting me tangled up before I can even get out of the starting gate. But let me start by correcting something I wrote yesterday re Black Hawk Down—that “the Mogadishu battle was about enough other things that it deserved to be seen in a larger context than that of an old surrounded-by-Injuns Western.” At the risk of sounding P.C., I want to add that the “old surrounded-by-Injuns Western” deserved a larger context, too.
The good news: My 10-best list goes to 12!!! Thank you thank you thank you Sarah for sending me to Donnie Darko, which left me exhilarated by the possibilities of movies again, especially as I’d just come from your other favorite, the dreary, risible Monster’sBall. (Not thanks for sending me to that.) After Donnie Darko, I certainly see why you wanted to open with a discussion of formal daring. How can the picture be described? A Todd Haynes/William Castle collaboration on Catcher in the Rye? It confirms the rightness of one’s adolescent rage without endorsing the unproductive ways in which that rage is sometimes acted out. The staging of the final fight scene was clumsy, and I can’t say I ever got a focus on Drew Barrymore as the teacher, who seems to turn up with the randomness of an executive producer, which she is. (She does look lovely and is as endearing as always.)
I was lucky the film is still playing in New York at one small theater. Its former publicists said they no longer had anything to do with it and directed me to an apparently nonexistent New York distributor’s office. I guess it’s not being pushed for any prizes, huh?
By the way, isn’t it great the way everyone these days has a 10-best list? It was once the exclusive province of people like Andrew Sarris, who spent time adjusting his pantheon like a boy with a bunch of toy soldiers. But now Joe’s Web Site offers the 10 best movies of the year, and so does Melanie’s Movie Guide and Sarah Sue’s Home Page and everyone on every bulletin board in every country in the world. A culture of rankers! “How’s your 10-best list coming?” “Up to eight. Yours?” “I got 12. Have to lose a couple. Want ‘em?” “Nah. Gotta rank for myself.” “I understand.” “I rank therefore I am. The RoyalTennenbaums is the movie of the year! Sir, I exist!”
Glad you still like Days of Heaven, Sarah. Me, too: That Terry Malick sure knows his art history. But concluding that In the Bedroom doesn’t say anything more interesting than “life can seem really nice, and then one day it’s not” is, um, beneath you. The role of nature is established in the first shots of the movie, in the breeze that rustles the leaves above the doomed lovers and later the lace curtains of the grieving parents’ empty house. It’s in Sprout’s gorillalike behavior with his young boys, and it’s in the lobster-fishing scenes, and it’s in the shots of Tom Wilkinson mowing the grass in the empty space after his son’s death. That breeze only hints at the momentous forces under the surface.
As for Spacek’s Ruth, she is a harridan, but she’s a hell of a lot more appealing (and recognizable) than the schizzy space cadet played by Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball. But hey, I’m delighted that those parents who drove their kids to their deaths could finally share chocolate ice cream under the night stars. No, I’m being sarcastic: I actually think the movie would have been better if they’d had sex and then put their heads in an oven. I find it amazing that someone who can complain about “thin padding” in In the Bedroom (and ridicule the critics who “gush” over Marisa Tomei) can find such substance in the longueurs of Monster’s Ball and respond to Ms. Berry’s Method 101 histrionics.
As for Ghost World, what Enid loathes isn’t so much “Me! Me!” as an “other-oriented” aesthetic that is basically synonymous with capitalism—and the idea of having to sell herself before she knows what it is she has to sell. I’m sorry that she gave you a headache. Maybe if she’d abused her child you’d have liked her better.
Fondly,
David
