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David Edelstein and Nell Minow

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from: David Edelstein

Slice and Dice

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 5, 1998, at 2:31 PM ET

Nell,

My quotation of a Cook's Illustrated writer attempting to deduce how to boil water was a parody, but I forgive you if--not being a cook but a pot-destroyer, like, incidentally, my wife--you took it straight. Actually, the type of vessel you boil water in probably does have an impact on the flavor. When I used to hang out with beer-brewers, they were always talking soberly about cooking materials, not to mention the mineral content of the water itself. God, they were boring.

Thank the Lord I don't have to finish reading Ulysses right away because I'm like the frog in the slippery well who can't go up one foot without falling back two. A week ago I was on page 41; now I've slipped all the way back to xxvi of the preface. Instead of curling up tonight with James Joyce, I'll go see The Parent Trap so that tomorrow you and I can actually get down to debating ideas.

List-making has always driven me nuts, although I get the appeal. It's easy and fun and it makes you feel important. When I was at the Village Voice, I envied Andrew Sarris that he got to spend so much time adding and deleting directors from his Pantheon instead of actually writing about movies. Year after year I used to rail against 10-Best lists on the grounds that they were onanistic--but then I'd turn around and make a list anyway because I'm nothing if not an onanist. Robert Brustein has pointed out that critics' opinions--"Loved him! Hated her!" as Danny Kaye said of the Himalayas--are highly perishable, whereas convictions might even outlive them. (That might be the only conviction of Brustein's that actually outlives him.)

That said, while working on my Halloween H20 review, I've been trying to come up with a list of the five greatest hack-'em-ups--a hack-'em-up being defined in this case as a film in which serial victims are gorily murdered, with each killing amounting to a big production number. This excludes the more free-form carnage of Night of the Living Dead but makes room for the serial disembowelments of Alien. Here's my tentative list:

1. Psycho

2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

3. Halloween

4. Twitch of the Death Nerve

5. 2000 Maniacs

Halloween H20, which opens today, is a pretty good time by the standards of most hack-'em-ups. It's really short, and the first 45 minutes are extremely annoying--full of false scares, the kind where the camera follows someone as they walk into someone else and the audience goes AAAARRRGGGGG!!! but it turns out to be a boyfriend. Yet, there are few things scarier than a blank mask, even (or especially) when the mask was originally borrowed from a William Shatner Halloween costume. When the white-masked Michael Myers and his sister, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, regard each other, and Myers cocks his head slightly, quizzically, seemingly in wonderment, the effect is--I swear, I'm not just using this word casually--poetic. So while I see The Parent Trap, do you want to brave Halloween H20?

the breakfast table
entries
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from: David Edelstein

Slice and Dice

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 5, 1998, at 2:31 PM ET
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David Edelstein is Slate's film critic. Nell Minow's reviews of movies and videos appear on her Movie Mom Web page. Her book The Movie Mom's Guide to Family Movies is forthcoming.
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