Scanners

Bad Waitress (Or, the Wit and Wisdom of Mr. Pink)

Jim Emerson

View image Mr. Pink, about to break out the world’s smallest violin.

“I don’t tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, that shit’s for the birds. As far as I’m concerned, they’re just doin’ their job…. The words ‘too busy’ shouldn’t be in a waitress’s vocabulary.”

— Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), from the opening scene of “Reservoir Dogs” (1992)

Sunday night I had dinner with some friends at an Italian joint called Mi Piace in Pasadena, where we encountered Bad Waitress. (Yes, you may use that as the name of your next band or movie if you like.) You’ve probably met her yourself: She knows nothing about the food — what’s in it, how it’s prepared — or the drinks (like what the bar scotch is), or what constitutes a martini (olives are the default; a lemon twist makes the drink into something else that is not a “martini,” and should be a special request). OK, that last one is really the bartender’s fault, but she was so clueless I didn’t even bother to say anything. I just drank the thing, and it was fine.

But, you see, that’s what passive-aggressive workers do to customers: They attempt to make us feel guilty for expecting the minimally acceptable service we’re supposedly paying for when we spend money in a public establishment. As is the habit these days, Bad Waitress made herself scarce for most of the evening, and was nowhere to be found when it was time — and long past time — to pay the bill. Perhaps because we were a party of eight (we’d made reservations), she figured she didn’t have to do anything because, as the fine print on the menu explained, her tip was automatically added to the check. But Bad Waitress didn’t deserve a gratuity — even though one was required. I guess we just have to chalk that up to the cost of eating in this mildly upscale joint. (I have an idea: How about if they put taxes and tip amounts alongside the prices of each dish on the menu, so you can see your total price for that particular item? Kind of like the tax and shipping calculators used on shopping sites like Pricegrabber.com?)

Anyway, that’s what got me to thinking about Mr. Pink…

With love, from Bay, to you…

Jim Emerson

Baywatch: A down-to-earth, nice guy.

A letter published in the Northwest Herald, Crystal Lake, Illinois:

To the Editor:

The Northwest Herald’s movie critic, Jeffrey Westhoff, seems to be woefully out of touch with pop culture.

The “Transformers” movie’s $155 million seven-day haul is the biggest non-sequel opening in box office history. Numbers like that usually mean positive word of mouth on the film is huge, and people are going back.

A friend of mine, Steven Spielberg – he’s pretty smart about film – said Westhoff’s review was idiotic. Westhoff’s a critic who actually reviewed his dislike for the director, rather then reviewing the movie, like his job description prescribes. Westhoff talks about the director being an “egomaniacal hack.” [“Michael Bay turns ‘Transformers’ into pile of scrap metal.”] Well I don’t believe I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting Westhoff, though it sounds like he knows me. If Westhoff actually did know me, he would find me to be a pretty down-to-earth, nice guy.

I implore the editor to give Westhoff a little relaxation and sunshine, clear his head, let him rediscover that movie-going is supposed to be a fun experience.

Maybe even help him get rid of his hatred.

Michael Bay

Director of “Transformers”

Los Angeles, Ca.

Old White Guy Lists

Jim Emerson

“Madame de…”

Movies are just a little more than 100 years old. Many of them (some say maybe even most of them) are lost or gone — discarded, intentionally junked or rotted away. Original nitrate stock is extremely volatile, and “safety film,” which wouldn’t decompose quite so easily, wasn’t widely adopted until the mid-1950s. Just look at the filmographies in any movie encyclopedia and you’ll be overwhelmed by how many movies, even by famous directors, that you’ve never seen, whether they still exist or not. (John Ford directed somewhere around 150 of ’em.)

So, I got a kick out of some of the comments about Andrew Sarris’s Greatest Movies of All Time (below). Yes, no question, it’s an Old White Guy List. Mainly because Sarris is an old white guy, and does not pretend to be anything else (except, maybe, an old white Greek-American New Yorker auteurist guy and champion list-maker). Remember, Sarris built the original “American film pantheon” with what’s probably the most influential English-language book of film criticism, “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968.” So, is it a coincidence that “Belle de Jour” (1967) is the most recent film on his all-time greatest list? Maybe he just has a longer perspective. (He didn’t start writing for the Village Voice until about 1960.) Think of the thousands upon thousands of movies he’s seen in order to make up that list. We should all have such a broad film background to draw upon.

I think of it like this: When people decry the Western canon as being about dead white males, they’re (partially) right. But there are other canons that are even more exclusive, and most of the greats are… well, still great. We live in an age where we know there’s a lot more to art, and art history, than the Western canon, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value it as much as ever.

At the risk of betraying my Old White Guy roots (I’m sure I’ve been one since I was about 12), what cracks me up is the assertion, by some people whose idea of film history extends as far back as, say, “Fargo” or “Star Wars” or “The Godfather” or “The Wild Bunch” or “Psycho,” that Sarris must be misguided because nothing made in the last 40 years tops his list. (I’m not talking about any specific Scanners commenters here; this is just something I’ve heard from people for years — like the ones who accuse me of disingenuousness when I say “Citizen Kane” is about as much fun as I’ve ever had at the movies — and is demonstrably rich and profound, besides.)

Autopsy of a scene: The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes

Jim Emerson

View image Two doors, mirror images. Two sides of a coin that’s about to be tossed, and called, by Ed Tom Bell when returns to, and enters, room 114. The crime scene tape stretches across both, visually tying them together.

Because I brought this up in a larger context in “The Uncertainty Principle (or, The Easy Read), I figured I may as well follow through with it. (If you don’t want to read another post about that movie, here, just keep a movin’ right on through. You can’t stop what’s coming.)

So, let’s take a look at what’s here, and what’s not here. And by that I mean what’s in the movie, not what we might have seen if we’d been somehow been able to enter the picture as invisible ectoplasmic entities, free to wander back and forth at will between the membranes of those motel walls. We may draw different conclusions about what we see (and about how important it is), but let’s not invent extraneous fictions beyond what the movie shows us (like Chigurh hiding under the bed or slithering down the drain)….

Paul Newman x 3

Jim Emerson

Clips from the on-screen life of the late Paul Newman, actor and movie star:

Richard T. Jameson at MSN Movies:

Paul Newman’s entrance in “Hud” (1963) is actually an exit, emerging just past dawn from a nondescript house on the side street of a no-name Texas town that barely has one street to begin with. He’s the title character, of course, mid-30s, the lone surviving son of a local rancher, and he’s been spending the wee hours with a married woman whose husband is about two minutes away from arriving home. Hud’s nephew Lon (Brandon de Wilde) has been looking for him, found his big pink Cadillac brazenly parked in front of the house, and called him out.

So here comes Hud, snarling, tearing himself away from business left unfinished offscreen and lunging onto the small front porch. The shot is pretty straightforward but Hud’s an insouciant angle: his body canted so that one side of him is advancing before the other, his spine still in the reluctant process of drawing itself erect, his left arm lifted in anticipation of leaning on the porch post between him and the camera. “This had better be good,” he growls, into the lean now and letting his torso sag a little — signaling that he’s in charge here, but also allowing for the possibility, indeed the expectation, that maybe he can get out of whatever this is without raising a hand.

What does a movie mean?

Jim Emerson

View image This is this. You know what I mean, right?

“This is this!”

— Michael Vronsky (Robert De Niro), The Deer Hunter

Three little words (well, two, really) — each, individually and collectively, with flexible meanings. Yes, the significance of that short statement really does depend on what the definition of “is” is — and “this,” in both contexts, at the beginning and the end of the sentence. What does he mean when he says this? Well, to even begin to understand, you have to consider the moment in the movie and go from there.

When a critic adopts the attitude of De Niro’s character, well, film criticism itself is automatically made superfluous. A bullet is a bullet, a killer is a killer, a zombie is a zombie, a gangster movie is about gangsterism, a kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and don’t even ask about the cigar. Lift and separate “content” from the movie and, once you’ve removed the context, what more needs to be said? In Keith Uhlich’s eloquent words, such an approach exemplifies “the dubious product of American literalism, of an inability to grapple with a film’s numerous layers of experience, falling back on easy prejudices and dichotomies as a way of stopping discussion and disagreement cold.” (That’s from a profile of Jonathan Demme at sensesofcinema that I recommend to literalists and non-literalists alike.)

We’re familiar with the ways politicians use this technique (invading Iraq = war on terrorism; questioning policy = siding with terrorists; smoking gun = mushroom cloud). Substituting dogma for evidence is an easy way to evade the possibility of meaningful debate, something that might challenge an assertion of monolithic authority. The same thing happens in film criticism all the time. The trick is simply to eliminate the subject (the film itself) from the equation. This way, opinions don’t have to be based on anything because there is no verifiable external reality with which to compare them.

Richard T. Jameson’s article, “Style vs. ‘Style'” (Film Comment, March/April, 1980), which I have recently re-read (and hence have been quoting a lot), ought to be as widely anthologized as any piece ever written about film, for the way it zeroes in on the heart of what a movie is:

“Content” is not content; “the meaning” is not a concrete certitude cunningly buried so that one may have the pleasure of a civilized, mental version of hide-and-seek, strip-mining through “the story” to get to “the themes.” “The meaning” is only one more piece of material, as deformable by the operation of the artistic sensibility as the sea is by the pull of the moon’s gravity. Content is what happens from moment to moment, and then in the suspended moment that is one’s life within the aesthetic life-system the artist has created. And content is at the beck of style.This would be a good opportunity to jump into a discussion of the confusion of “craft,” “technique” and “style” (all related; by no means equivalent) that riddle so much film criticism today, but I’d like to save that for a separate piece.

In a moving and illuminating 2005 article (that poetically invokes Jonathan Richman’s haunting “That Summer Feeling,” a favorite song of mine), Adrian Martin wrote that his view of film, and writing about film, is shaped by “a rigorous analytical sense, a demonstration of some form-to-content logic… often dazzlingly intuited and demonstrated.”

These days, film criticism — even the best-written — does little for me, finally, unless it can unearth, propose and in a way prove the existence of the logic that makes a film ‘tick’, as we say, that coheres it into some kind of whole work, whether classical-expressive or modernist-disjunctive. Godard, in fact, said it best in his challenge to Kael and, beyond her, all critics: “Bring in the evidence,” he demanded. Film analysis or criticism without that logic, that evidence, is just assertion, and assertion is something I can take or leave (perhaps depending on whether or not I agree with it!).Then again, assertion as a substitute for thought, as David Bordwell has written (citing specific examples), is “so glancing and elliptical that we can scarcely judge it as right or wrong.”

Rally ’round the Cruise, boys!

Jim Emerson

The Attitude in action. (photo: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)

At first I wasn’t going to write anything about last weekend’s “disappointing” domestic grosses for “M:I:III” (or, as Stephen Colbert pronounces it, “Miiii”), because, well, who really cares about the box-office numbers of movies like “Miiii” (or Celebs Who Act Out)? Especially when “24” gives you trickier plotting, more believable stunts, top-flight production values, first-class actors (Kiefer Sutherland, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Stephen Spinella, William Devane, Ray Wise, Jean Smart…) and characters for whom you can actually feel something besides an indefinable creepy revulsion (though some have that quality, too), week after week (and in digital surround and HDTV, no less) — making pre-packaged, pre-fab disposable summer action products like “Miiii” seem as dinosaurish and unnecessary as they truly are. (Note to self: How do I really feel?)

But then I saw this headline above a Reuters story Thursday: “Hollywood friends rally around Tom Cruise.” Yes, dear readers, Tom needs some friends just now (if only, evidently, to buy batches of opening-weekend tickets to “M:I:III” at the Scientology Celebrity-Center-adjacent ArcLight Theater in Hollywood). It was too absurd to pass up.

So (he said wearily), let’s recap:

His Cruiseness’s public “approval ratings” (says a USA Today opinion survey) are way down there with the likes of… George W. Bush:

The Small (But Equally Profane) Lebowski

Jim Emerson

All of the cuss words, none of the plot! Now that the courts have stopped companies like Clean Flicks and Family Flicks USA from releasing their own custom-sanitized DVD versions of other people’s movies (we used to just call this “bowdlerization”), perhaps it is time to celebrate with a different approach: a feature with all the f-words left in, but the rest of the movie taken out. That’s what somebody’s done with “The Big Lebowski” in this two-minute, fourteen-second “F*cking Short Version.” If you’re offended by profanity… well, then you’re out of your element, Donny!

Maybe Bill Maher was right…

Jim Emerson

… when he wrote that too many Americans are just plain stupid. How can we expect to have meaningful discussions, applying critical thinking skills to verifiable facts, when (as Barney Frank says above) we may as well be talking to pieces of furniture? Seriously: How many Americans are as dumb as this woman? I’ll give Maher some credit for compiling these stats (though I’ll elide some of the hacky jokes):

… a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. […]

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It’s actually less than 1%….

The stupidity and ignorance of the woman (a LaRouchie) in the clip above is demonstrated not only by her flagrant violation of the Rule of Nazi (basically that anyone who invokes a comparison to Nazis — almost always an invalid one — is not interested in reality), or her inability to acknowledge facts. Her question isn’t even a legitimate question, being of the “When did you stop beating your wife?” variety: “Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy?” (Would that there were some sort of time machine that could transport this woman back to, say, Germany in 1940 — briefly, just long enough so that she could learn something about what “Nazi policies” actually were…) But Frank offers the only logical response, answering a non-question with a non-question: “On what planet do you spend most of your time?”

From the NPR Health Blog:

When Nazi references surface in online comments, it’s a sign that any hope for civil conversation is lost. Seems like the same rule of thumb applies to town hall meetings.

Rescued, reposted: The story of a man and his hat

Jim Emerson

Another in a series of video essays that disappeared from the web earlier this year when iKlipz went under. I’m in the process of finding them in old backups, uploading and restoring them to their proper places on scanners. This one, an x-ray of the Coens’ “Miller’s Crossing,” was originally posted (with commentary, dialog, frame grabs) here.

What was YOUR favorite comedy of 2006?

Jim Emerson

Don’t ask me how I came up with these dozen options — that’s all the software allows, and these were the ones I thought of — either because they were popular, conspicuous, or got some year-end recognition. (So sorry to all you fans of “Benchwarmers,” “Failure to Launch,” “John Tucker Must Die,” “Little Man,” “Madea’s Family Reunion” and “You, Me & Dupree.”) Choices are limited to predominantly English-language, live-action pictures, which is why “Babel” isn’t listed. The box is a bit long. Just select the square next to the title of your choice, then scroll down and press the vote button at the bottom. The results will display automatically.

Final results (02/25/07):

‘Swing Vote’ remake: My bad

Jim Emerson

Make your own here.

What we think we think we know (about movies)

Jim Emerson

“Have you seen her? Tell me have you seen her?” (Chi-Lites, 1971)

Some movies evoke strong opinions and some leave barely a trace behind in your memory. When I glance back at the deadline reviews I’ve been filing for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com the past few weeks, I notice that most of the movies haven’t made much of an impression on me. Ask me right now and I couldn’t tell you what I reviewed two weeks ago, much less what’s coming up two weeks from now, without calling up iCal. I’m always amazed at how Roger does what he does — which is way more than I feel capable of doing.

If you want to judge by the obligatory “star ratings” (and I don’t, but in this case I think they reflect something), just about everything in the last month (I know: February) feels like a 2.5 to me — just short of “recommended” (which would be 3.0), but not unwatchable if you wanted to pay the money and kill the time it takes to watch it. Passable (B-/C+) for what it is, but not memorable — especially when you consider that the scale tops out at 4.0, with no “A+” possible. So, “Chinatown”: 4 stars. “Sansho the Bailiff”: 4 stars. “The Bank Job”: 2.5. “Cocktail”: 0.0.

We all have a pretty good what kind of experience we had watching a movie (though it may take a while, maybe even another viewing, to process it), and what we saw and heard. But to paraphrase something a filmmaker recently said (or that I recently read, even though I can’t recall who or where): If you put 300 people in a room and show them a movie, you’ll get 300 different accounts of it. Even when I take notes (as I do when I know I’m going to write about a movie), I invariably misremember a word here, a shot there.

Welcome Back, Edelstein

Jim Emerson

View image The inaugural edition of The Projectionist.

David Edelstein, one of my favorite early “movie bloggers” (when he was at Slate he hosted the annual Slate Movie Club, an e-mail conversation between critics) has returned to the, uh, “interactive” world. David Edelstein, now at New York Magazine, has launched a blog under its auspices (or, at least, root URL) called “The Projectionist.”

Oh, sure, I “disagree” with him plenty (and sometimes just his tone), but as anyone who visits Scanners knows, I read critics for their writing styles and insights, not for their opinions, and Edelstein’s is a valuable voice. I’m especially glad to see him returning to writing specifically for the web, and not just within the provincial confines of NYM (although the mag has a web site too, of course). But today, the World Wide Internets is the only forum that really matters, and if you’re not participating on that level you may as well be doing cave paintings — even if they’re in midtown Manhattan.

Edelstein outlines his reasons for blogging in one of his initial posts:

And so I welcome you to my occasional blog, the Projectionist, a place for second thoughts, third thoughts, musings both important and self-indulgent, and — I hope — a fluid exchange with readers.

I’ve missed that here at New York. In my nine and a half years at the online magazine Slate, I got thousands of e-mails from readers. That last one I got here was two months ago. It’s not, I’m convinced, that I’m that much less read. It’s that the distance, literal and existential, between a glossy weekly print mag and cyberspace is vast. I send e-mails to bloggers and online writers often but can’t remember the last time I mailed someone at a glossy, even when I’ve read an article online. My fingers aren’t poised over the keyboard in the same way.

Cyberspace being infinite, at Slate I had license to write between 250 and 2,500 words on a movie, and no digression was too digressive. Now, there’s the horror, the horror of eliminating whole paragraphs to fit the page — in addition to changing, for example, “did not” to “didn’t” to pick up a line and removing anything in parentheses. I do not always want to use contractions, and I like parentheses. You never know where they might lead.

Here’s to digressions, the spice of life! Follow more of Edelstein’s here — regarding the use of color in “The Valley of Elah” (or maybe one particular print of it), a cinematic sadism contest, and a look back at “Sideways.”

P.S. Please note my inability to use words such as “disagree” and “interactive” without some hesitation, above. Both have been overused beyond the point of meaninglessness — and the former so grossly that simply stating disagreement is now considered a logical counter-argument. “Oh, I disagree,” is no longer the beginning of a discussion but, for many, the substitute for a discussion.

OK, maybe ‘102 Movies…’

Jim Emerson

Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove. True, he’s no Jim Carrey, but…

My list of “101 Movies You Must See Before You Die” has generated some provocative e-mail. As I mentioned in my original posting, this was a list I came up with in 1999, providing what I’d consider to be the most important common cultural touchstones in films from the 20th century. It’s not a list of the best films (some I don’t even like much), or the most important films, or even my favorite films. (The latter list, circa 1998, is here — and it needs some updating.) I could easily have listed 202 titles (or, perhaps, even 1001, as a certain book with a similar title does), but I limited myself to a short list. That wasn’t enough for everybody, though…

The movies you don’t have to see

Jim Emerson

When people ask me why I don’t particularly feel obligated to keep up with, say, the new “Transformers” movie or the latest Hanna Montana installment (really, they’re the same thing aimed at slightly different constituencies), I don’t change the subject. I just reply with a counter-challenge: “Which animated Barbie movie do you think is better-directed: ‘Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus’ (2004), ‘Barbie Fairytopia: Mermaidia’ (2006) or ‘Barbie As the Island Princess’ (2007)?” Or: “How often do you play with your Chia Pet these days? Does it satisfy your imagination, engage your interest, and provide hours of amusement?” Watching infantilized movies can be almost as exciting as watching a Chia Pet grow.

When you become an adult, sometimes you find that even products you loved as a child no longer provide the kind of stimulation they once did. You outgrow them, you move on to other toys. After all, these playthings were not designed with your adult self, your developed brain, in mind. Since most movies are made for the immature brain (inside the skulls of people with a maximum mental age of 14), there’s no shame in finding them less than engaging or entertaining if you should happen to be so lucky as to live beyond that age. Because the simple fact is, these products were never intended to be consumed by persons over 30. Frankly, I don’t play with Fisher-Price toys much anymore, either.

Movies too personal to share with an audience

Jim Emerson

View image Imprinted on/in your head…

In Steve Erickson’s novel “Zeroville,” a young man with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in “A Place in the Sun” imprinted on his shaved head arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969. Raised a strict Calvinist (not coincidentally like Paul Schrader, writer of “Taxi Driver”), his hunger for, and obsession with, movies has a religious fervor to it.

He develops protective feelings for a young girl in the Hollywood fast-lane (echoes of Travis Bickle and Iris). He takes her to the Fine Arts for a revival of “A Place in the Sun.” The audience laughs at some of the “dated” moments, and the girl (Isadora, who goes by Zazi — as in “… dans le métro” by Louis Malle, 1960?) thinks it’s silly. He is devastated. But one night she watches the movie, alone, on TV. It is a revelation to her.

“The thing is, that movie last night is a completely different movie when you watch it by yourself. Why is that? Movies are supposed to be watched with other people, aren’t they? Isn’t that part of the point of movies — you know, one of those social ritual things, with everyone watching? It never occurred to me a movie might be that different when you don’t watch it with anyone else. And that movie… […]

“That’s a movie you see alone and it gets into you. I’ve been up all night. I said it was silly when we saw it together, but that was way off. There’s nothing silly about that movie. Twisted and deeply f—ked up, yeah… but silly, no. Too twisted not to be private, you know?

“I mean, five hundred or a thousand people or however many it is in a theater — what are they going to do with a movie like that? There’s too much common sense floating around the room, and what you have to do with a movie like that is give up your common sense, which is easier to do when it’s just you alone. It just seems… radical, any movie that, like demands your privacy, because it’s, you know… a movie like that makes common sense completely beside the point, and you’re one on one with it, in the living room by yourself rather than the theater with all those people, and watching it is like being naked and you can’t be naked like that with strangers, you can’t even stand the idea of it, and you know that after you’re finished with it, much more with a movie like that than any stupid horror flick, some deep dark shit is going to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs… so I just couldn’t sleep. That movie’s like a ghost. Watch it and you become the thing or person that it haunts. Last night, the movie became mine and no one else’s.”

Opening Shots Quiz 2: Answers

Jim Emerson

“I am your host! Und sagen…”

Here they are, eleven of the most famous opening shots in movie history, plus a bonus that I threw in just because I like it. Prepare to smack your head and say, “D’oh! I knew that!” But don’t give up — keep sending in your nominations for great opening shots, along with your explanations for why they set up the movie so well, to: jim AT scannersblog dot com.

Congrats to Daniel Dietzel, who got all ten right, but did not hazard a guess about the two bonus shots — and to Jeremy Matthews, who got nine out of the top 10, but also correctly identified both the bonus/tiebreakers!

And come back Sunday for the answers to the original Opening Shots Pop Quiz.

Now, the answers to the Opening Shots Quiz 2: 10 Easy Pieces (+2):