Hiatus

Sometime in the mid-to-late eighties, the inimitable Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha (who is herself a published author and poet, actually) were on a Concorde flight from New York to London, and during the flight, he dozed off. This is certainly beyond understandable, and also not particularly remarkable if you’ve ever had the mind-numbing experience of a transatlantic flight, but lucky for us, while King was sleeping, he had what was seemingly a very vivid dream about a psychotic nurse named Annie Wilkes and her pig Misery. When he awoke, he scribbled a surprising amount of details onto an American Airlines™ napkin, and after writing quite a bit more (the old-fashioned way, with a steno pad) at what happened to be Rudyard Kipling’s old desk at the Brown Hotel in London, what resulted was his 1987 novel Misery, which is in my opinion one of his better ones, and which also serves as the inspiration for a pretty great movie starring Kathy Bates – one that I’ve cited as being one of King’s scariest to me in another post on this very blog.

What every great writer needs to succeed –  an injury, a clinically insane caretaker, and a good typewriter. For the record, I currently have none of these.

My reason for mentioning any/all of this is that recently I had a dream – and no, before you scoff, I’m not remotely comparing the vividness of my dream to his, nor am I comparing myself, some guy, to a writer so prolific and consistently fascinating as Stephen King – but I did wake up and jot down some details about it much in the way that I imagine King did back on that fateful flight of his. I’ve had ideas for stories before – short stories, screenplays, novels, even video games – so that’s nothing new, but given that actually producing something fictional from all the time I spend writing has been my New Year’s Resolution for what I believe is the past three years, this recent idea for whatever reason (quarantine doldrums, maybe) has spurred me closer than ever towards the notion of actually putting the proverbial pen to the proverbial paper. After all, if Misery’s success as a story is to be believed (not sure why you wouldn’t believe it at this point), a dream is as good an inspiration as any, even if its writer had to sprinkle in a little zest in the form of his own struggles as an author (and especially with drugs) in the form of Paul Sheldon along the way.

Me ten minutes into plotting the story I want to write.

Anyways, this is all a very roundabout way of saying that I’m going to be putting Tuesdays with Cory on the backburner for a while – what I suspect will be at least a month, and if I’m able to attain any success in the dreaded field of writing something long-form, it could be a lengthier amount of time. Given my jam-packed schedule of playing Luigi’s Mansion 3 (it’s great) and procrastinating from, you know, actual work (also great – the procrastinating part, not the work part), I tend to only have time to write a thousand or so words a week, and thus far, save for a brief stint with weekly writing prompts that applied a bit more of my imagination than this does, those thousand words have been allocated to movie reviews. The pessimist in me says I’ll be back to doing exactly this – cranking out said thousand or so meaningless words about some piece of visual entertainment that I just so happened to clap my eyes on for a few hours on a weekly basis – in time for the beginning of the summer movie season (whenever that is – our good friend COVID would like a word with Hollywood’s best-laid plans, clearly). The optimist in me – surely a much, much more diminutive figure based on historical evidence – says it could be never.

Me looking at what I’ve accomplished one month from now.

Either way, as I try this out, I want to thank everyone who has read something here even once. I was never really doing this for clicks, and I’m still not, but there’s no denying the pleasure I get from people actually seeing it once in a while, if only because occasionally they’ll strike up a conversation with me about whatever harebrained thing I managed to spout off that go-round. So thanks, and if you’re feeling so inclined, wish me luck. While I’m engaging in this fantasy of mine, you’ll have to find someone else who’s as underqualified as me to get your cinematic hot or cold takes from, but I’m sure you’ll manage.

Finding the Brilliance in The Mummy

Let me say first that it’s an extremely important day for this blog, as I put the proverbial pen to paper to wax poetic about one of my favorite movies ever: The Mummy. The 1999 Stephen Sommers action-reinvention of the classic Boris Karloff film of 1932 found the ineffable Brendan Fraser nearing the height of his admittedly short stretch of box-office power, and scratched all of the right itches in terms of what 7-10 year old Cory was looking for in a movie, filled to the brim with corny romance, adventure flick setpieces featuring swordfights and gunfights, and a dash of humor. It was a giant in terms of sleepover DVDs, rivaled only by Rush Hour in the family movie collection, and yet in spite of that fact – and a pretty phenomenal box office run that resulted in two sequels, one amazing (The Mummy Returns) and one not-so-amazing (The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor) – its critical returns were minimal at best. Bearing that in mind, and also bearing in mind the fact that superstar Tom Cruise semi-recently proved that mummy movies don’t always work out, I can’t resist trying to identify just one of the many ways in which The Mummy is ultimately a success, and to do so, I’m going to get slightly esoteric a la my recent post on The Shawshank Redemption.

Brendan Fraser: not as good of a runner as Tom Cruise, but definitely the better frontman for a mummy movie.

In my continued quest to better understand what makes movies, or specifically movie scripts, bad or good, I’ve been periodically engaging in some light quarantine nonfiction reading in the form of The Anatomy of Story, by John Truby. It’s a book that one of my favorite screenwriting YouTube channels cites frequently in its video essays, and it’s one that I would (thus far, I’m only about halfway through) recommend to anyone who has a passing interest in this sort of thing. Recently, in his chapter on character, and specifically in the context of building conflict between characters, Truby talked about the concept of four-corner opposition, in which rather than simply pitting a hero against one opponent, he or she is also pitted against two secondary opponents. There’s a great video about the method here, presenting Batman Begins as an example, that probably explains it better than I ever could, but immediately after reading about it I thought about how the technique – which involves the multiple opponents attacking each other in addition to the hero – could be applied to some of my favorite movies. While I’m not here to claim that The Mummy is a stroke of screenwriting masterpiece (it is, but whatever), I think the four-corner opposition model has been reasonably applied within its structure, deepening a central conflict that at face value seems very pedestrian and further fleshing out the primary weakness, and weakness in values, of our hero.

This dynamite has the longest fuse of all time.

It’s not hard to establish two of the four corners in our box when we think about The Mummy. The hero is of course Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell, and his primary villain is Arnold Vosloo‘s Imhotep, the titular mummy. Establishing the other two corners is slightly less clear, but for one of them I’ll select Oded Fehr‘s Medjai Ardeth Bay (largely due to the strength of his conflict with both Rick and Imhotep) and for the other, Rachel Weisz‘ Evie. Mummy viewers reading this are probably at this point scratching their heads wondering why/how Beni and the Americans (who are the constant subject of derision by the hero and his friends, specifically Jonathan) fail to fit into this structure, but the conflict between those characters and Rick is too surface-level, and by the end of the movie they more or less serve as cannon fodder. Evie may seem like a comparatively counterintuitive choice in that she’s on Rick’s side for pretty much the whole movie, but it’s important to note both the fact that she’s Rick’s love interest (Truby mentions in this chapter that in romances or romantic comedies, the hero-opponent structure of a typical screenplay is actually relatively unchanged, with the love interests serving as hero and opponent) and that her values as a character directly come into conflict with Rick’s more rugged sensibilities pretty much constantly.

Rick O’Connell’s approach to every problem: shooting it.

Because in terms of drama, the main job of these opponents is not to take over the world, or stop someone from taking over the world, or even simply survive. Their job – at least according to Truby and many dramatic experts – is to attack the weakness of the hero, and in our case, Rick’s weakness is that he refuses to believe in mummies, or curses, or reanimation, or basically in a lot of what happens in The Mummy. It’s only a whole movie later, in The Mummy Returns, where he quite literally claims to be a believer in a spoken line, and so a lot of the work of the surrounding characters in The Mummy involves getting him to stop being the Han Solo of ancient Egypt, either via a profound knowledge of Egyptian history (in the case of Evie) or via a lifelong vow to keep Imhotep from being awakened (in the case of Ardeth Bay) or via opening your mouth four feet wide and shooting a swarm of flies out of it (OK, you probably know who I’m referring to there). As someone who has occasionally tried to write things, one massive problem that makes it hard to even get through a scene is realizing that your characters have nothing to do, and four-corner opposition is the antidote for that poison, giving all of your important characters numerous fronts on which to fight. Another way to put it: if Rick, Evie, and Ardeth Bay simply banded together to fight Imhotep without getting into any scuffles of their own, The Mummy would probably be a lot more boring to watch.

This is all making no mention whatsoever of Jonathan, whose primary purpose at times seems to be to slow the entire plot down.

I’m probably – almost definitely – overstating the brilliance of The Mummy from a dramatic theory perspective here. It’s extremely unlikely that Stephen Sommers was thinking about anything even close to four-corner opposition when writing the movie – it’s far more likely that he was just thinking about having a good time, and he succeeded there too – but I also think that most movies to which the model can be applied fit in that same category. It’s unlikely that Christopher Nolan flipped open Truby’s book when he went to write Batman Begins, which is arguably a better example of this theory, and unarguably a more acclaimed movie, but the point is that while things like four-corner opposition aren’t necessarily rules to be followed, they’re the things that can often be identified in movies that are good after the fact. Dramatic theorists from Truby to Aaron Sorkin will waste no time recommending reading Aristotle’s Poetics to any aspiring writer, essentially claiming that it forms a set of rules that all competent drama on stage or screen must follow, and while I’m certainly not that dogmatic about it (and while I’m certainly nothing of a dramatic theorist) there are plenty of great movies that do follow those rules, and do have something at least somewhat resembling four-corner opposition.

Tune in next week for my discussion of The Mummy Returns, which will somehow be even longer.

But look – it’s far more likely that I still enjoy The Mummy for reasons having nothing to do with anything of this sort, especially considering the fact that my age wasn’t in double digits the first time I watched it. There’s a nostalgia factor for sure, and the immeasurable and often inexplicable charm of late-nineties Brendan Fraser, and there’s also the special effects, which for the time were at least moderately impressive, and above all there’s a carefree sense of adventure that I think a lot of adventure movies don’t have. At the end of the day, it might also be more intangible – the way Roger Ebert put it in his initial review sounds about right (“There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.”). The Rotten Tomatoes consensus (60%) is somewhat harsher, claiming that it’s difficult to make any argument for The Mummy being a cinematic achievement, and while I’m not sure that that’s true, I do think it’s true that not every movie needs to be a “cinematic achievement” to be good, or to be enjoyed. There’s a term for that (popcorn movie) that’s not nearly as pejorative.

The effects folks might have overdone it a little bit with the blue tint on Rick’s face here.

If you’ve read this far, good for you. You either have a lot of free time on your hands, or you love The Mummy (which based on conversations with people around my age might be a generational staple) as much as I do. It’s fitting to me, as I reflect in this last paragraph, that this is the longest post I’ve ever written for this silly blog, as The Mummy may well serve as the partner to one of my longest-running love affairs with a movie, and I’ve found it to be both a pleasure and a challenge to write about it in a way that involves some critical thinking rather than just heaping the praise it so abundantly deserves upon it. While this post is unlikely to generate remotely as much buzz as last week’s clickbait-y one did, I appreciate your showing up for it.

What is This Generation’s Star Wars?

Inasmuch as I’d like to write a diatribe about Tiger King this week (I finished it this past Sunday), it’s unlikely that I’d be able to say anything interesting about it that you didn’t already know, especially given that Joel McHale swooped in with some postgame analysis of his own on Easter Sunday. Instead, I’m again rotating away from current movies/shows here in the time of coronavirus and whiling away a few hundred (or thousand, we’ll see where this goes) words on another deep-divey, or dare I say clickbait-y question, in this case: what is this generation’s Star Wars?  When I talk about Star Wars, I’m really only referring to the original trilogy (Episodes 4, 5, and 6), mostly because those were the ones that were such a cultural event/game-changer in the world of cinema, and also because those are the films from a galaxy far, far away that took place at such a time that they could belong to a generation that’s not mine.  An initial subquestion that I feel is worth asking, though, is: does our generation even have a Star Wars? Can any future generation have one? At the end of the day, an eventual answer to this question may simply be that there’s only one Star Wars, and that its sheer incalculable effect on pop culture as we know it is unmatched and likely can never be matched. Let’s crack on anyhow.

Tfw you helped put away an insane gun-toting meth head exotic animals dealer for a myriad of crimes including attempted murder.

With all of this in mind, at first blush a lot of people could be inclined to cite the MCU as a cultural touchstone of similar magnitude, and there’s no doubt that decades from now there’s a good chance we’ll all be talking about Iron Man the way our parents and grandparents talk about A New Hope.  However, a critical difference – at least I think – between Star Wars and the comic book franchise that has essentially ruled the box office with an iron fist for over a decade is that Star Wars actually ended. Now, these days that statement is up for debate for sure, both because of the prequel trilogy of the oughts and the sequel trilogy that just wrapped up with The Rise of Skywalker, but what’s clear is that for 15 years or so, the story did end, and at this point I’m skeptical at best that the MCU, profit machine as it is, will ever experience such a hiatus. Endgame surely provided a climax and a conclusion to the so-called Infinity Saga that’s on par with that of Return of the Jedi and the Rebellion’s ultimate victory over the Empire, but I suspect that we’ll find in a year or less that it was also careful to set up another immediate 10-15 years worth of films in some subtle way, and in spite of the eventual release of The Force Awakens and the subsequent devaluation of the Battle of Endor, that’s something that Star Wars, at least initially, never did.

Without a doubt one of modern cinema’s greatest moments, but we need a chance for it to breathe before we can look back on it fondly, and there’s little hope of Marvel ever giving us that.

When we think back on films that changed the game, or better yet for the purposes of this discussion, franchises that changed the game, we often think of trilogies that had final destinations. The original Star Wars trilogy, The Godfather, even Back to the Future. And I’m not here primarily to lament the current situation in Hollywood, as I feel like I often do, which is that moneymaking franchises are being designed to never end, or even if they’re not designed to be that way, they end up that way anyways. But I do think it’s part of the equation here. Mega-players like Pirates of the Caribbean, which certainly isn’t on par with Star Wars and never was, started with charm and are souring with each additional installment.  The MCU, Transformers, The Fast and the Furious, X-Men, and many other such worlds aren’t being allowed to die, or at the very least aren’t being given hibernation periods (like the Bond franchise and Batman, both multi-generational properties no doubt, smartly do) to allow for any semblance of nostalgia. Even Jurassic Park is a bit of a fringe candidate here, as the first film was certainly a touch point in the art form, but subsequent installments were lackluster, even before the recent reboot. Assuming that some kind of finality is a component of this discussion that has any level of importance, then, we’re left with very little, but let’s plow ahead anyways and look at universes with some kind of terminus.

Indiana Jones: the latest franchise to be unearthed for monetary gain with little regard for the sanctity of the character.

Specifically focusing on trilogies for a second, two that would come to mind are The Matrix (definitely at least something of a game-changer in the action genre, especially in the sense of visual effects) and The Lord of the Rings, which was both a commercial and critical success, arguably a phenomenon, and debatably paved the way for later fantasy phenomenon like Game of Thrones by telling everyone that being at least a little bit of a nerd was just fine. While the former is marred by what was a lackluster conclusion, the latter in particular comes close to fitting the bill for sure, at least in my book, but I think to some extent that it could be argued that it lacked the originality that Star Wars had, which is another important factor here. Not only is The Lord of the Rings an adaptation of some admittedly great source material, but it’s also hardly the first fantasy epic ever attempted, and better yet it’s not even the first adaptation of said source material set to the screen.  There’s also the Twilight trilogy and The Hunger Games trilogy, both of which bring me closer to the eventual answer that’s now present in my head but lack the widespread appeal that I believe Star Wars possesses; after all, I haven’t seen the second and third films in the Twilight saga (I’m unfortunate enough to have seen the first), and in spite of the fact that I’m maybe as far as possible from their target audience, I also love movies more than a lot of folks, and so that seems like a black mark on its record.

Anyways, you need people of intelligence on this sort of mission…quest…thing.

We’re now at the point where we need to acknowledge what I think is the answer, or is as close to the answer as we’re going to get, and it’s Harry Potter.  While it does definitely have a bit of baggage in the originality department, and is these days dangerously close to upsetting its own self-contained nature, it’s probably the most significant phenomenon that I’ve mentioned here besides the MCU, and it undeniably flipped the script in various ways when it comes to film adaptations of novels, let alone young adult novels that were still in-progress when the cameras started rolling. The midnight premieres were bona fide events, the trailer hype was about as real as that of The Phantom Menace, and the institution of the silver screen quickly contributed further oomph to the addition of words like muggle and names like Voldemort to society’s everyday lexicon. It’s not remotely hard for me to imagine myself thirty years from now explaining the storytelling triumph that was the HP film saga (and also the book saga) to my kids, or better yet dusting off a DVD so I could watch it with them. Then again, at that point DVDs will probably be obsolete (they kind of already are) – we’ll probably be watching movies by directly injecting them into our brains or something, or via literal magic.

Mr. Potter…our…new…celebrity.

So there you have it. I’m sure at this point you either agree or you don’t, and I’m more than willing to hear you out in the comments of wherever I wind up posting this thing if you think you have a better answer (even if the better answer is that there’s nothing quite like Star Wars, the logic of which is hard to deny).  And before it’s mentioned, yes: I do know that the mention of both Rush Hour and The Mummy is glaringly omitted here, but I sort of think those belong in my personal pantheon rather than in everyone’s.

Christopher Nolan and The Art of Time

It’s no big secret – at least to those who know me – that I’m a fan of writer-director Christopher Nolan‘s, and I’m certainly not alone.  First making a splash way back in 2000 with the Best Original Screenplay-nominated Memento, Nolan is now known for a number of larger-scale blockbusters, including Inception, The Prestige, Interstellar, Dunkirk, and of course an excellent comic book trilogy comprised of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises.  Disregarding the Caped Crusader for a moment, and bearing in mind the seeming premise of Nolan’s upcoming film Tenet (due out July 17, 2020), I want to talk for a bit about one of the common themes present in Nolan’s other films, as well as a construct that he seems well-matched to grapple with in the wide world of filmmaking: I’m of course talking about time.  In the case of Tenet, Nolan appears to be concerning himself with the traversal, or perhaps the reversal of time, and while his existing filmography hasn’t exactly gone that far (okay, to an extent Memento has), it’s come about as close to that feat as possible in the way its stories are told.

This little maneuver’s gonna cost us 51 years!

Of course, in the case of Interstellar and Inception, we’re mostly talking about time dilation.  Here, Nolan seems most concerned with challenging the dramatic question of how people deal with vast changes in the way time passes, either in the context of a dreamscape or in deep space.  We’ve all had dreams that feel like they’re hours or even days long when in fact we’re only asleep for minutes, and we can all get a grip on the idea – perhaps with the help of a little exposition – that coming too close to a black hole can even cause years to pass in what only feels to the observer like hours.  A lot of the drama present in these films, then, comes from how said observer manages to cope with the fact that the world as they know it – and the people in it – has passed them by (in the case of Cooper in Interstellar), or simply from how the observer maintains sanity and a grip on reality in a story world where time is supremely malleable (in the case of Cobb in Inception).  In other words, it’s not just a cinematic party trick that allows the protagonist to be the same age as his children after only a few days, nor is it a means to an end for giving us a rotating hallway fight (OK, maybe it kind of is that, too) – it’s a story building block that ultimately gives us powerful scenes like this one that allow Matthew McConaughey the opportunity to display a surprising amount of acting prowess.

Me and my girlfriend finding creative ways to use our indoor space during quarantine.

The Prestige is a bit more subtle with its treatment of time, not making any attempts to alter the passage of time itself, but instead making it a player in the story, and an element that further heightens the surrounding mystery.  Time jumps – most often accompanied by jumps in perspective or setting – don’t come with any kind of title cards, typically serving merely as a way to place the audience on less stable footing.  Another Nolan trademark – beginning at the middle, or better yet the end – is also executed here as well as in Inception and of course in Memento, and doing so plants a narrative seed in the audience’s mind that can then be given ample time to grow (with the assistance of little things like characterization and plot) until it can be returned to in its fuller fleshed-out glory.  While time isn’t exactly related to the theme of The Prestige –  a theme that I suspect more involves the trials of revenge, the cost of greatness, and at its deepest roots, the definition of humanity – it’s certainly a tool that’s used effectively to embolden it.  Out of all of the Nolan movies listed here, The Prestige is probably my favorite, and it’s the one I’d recommend from this de facto list if one is all you feel you can stomach.

Every magic trick consists of three parts.

Dunkirk takes the approach of splitting the film into three interleaved parts, each of which describes a critical part of the historical event: Land (which takes place over one week’s worth of time), Sea (one day), and Air (one hour).  This approach allows Nolan the freedom to cut between these three often independent – but also occasionally interdependent – storylines to build intensity without feeling the need to hold the audience’s hand through various continuity details. With this method, too, the climax is more easily recognizable as the triumphant moment in which all of the timelines meet.  Dunkirk is perhaps the least cerebral of all of Nolan’s movies, and certainly the least so of the ones I’ve mentioned here, and is instead more frenetic (much in the way that war itself is), so the use of time here is less as an implement of obstruction and more as an implement of tension-building.  All the while, Hans Zimmer’s score makes us all the more aware of the importance of time in the literal use of Nolan’s pocketwatch as a percussive refrain.  Indeed, I never would have guessed that there’d be a more on-the-nose embodiment of Nolan’s obsession with time in a soundtrack than in Inception‘s “Time,” and yet here we are.

Me in the toilet paper aisle of the grocery store.

This of course brings us to Memento, which pairs a complex narrative structure – one that alternates between chronological and nonlinear scenes – with a very singular treatment of the construct of memory.  On paper, and without the employment of such a designing principle, Memento would be I think a very unremarkable neo-noir, but with this time-bending technique, it’s a cerebral thriller.  Similar to The Prestige (which would come later), Nolan has more or less made time a character in the exercise that is this movie, and the effect of the unique traversal of time on what’s revealed about each character along the way – as well as the mountain of information kept from our amnesiac protagonist – is profound.  While I suspect that the temporal elements of the movies I’ve discussed in the above paragraphs have been utilized elsewhere, I’m fairly confident that there’s no other movie out there that does the things with time that Memento does, and for that matter, I can’t remotely imagine the process by which it was written. Remember Sammy Jenkis!

Me showing someone a picture of my dog for the 27547th time.

With all of this taken into account, it makes perfect sense that a movie like Tenet – a movie I’m almost certainly going to see in theaters, by the way – is Nolan’s next big project, and at this point, it seems far more common that a Nolan movie treats time creatively than linearly.  It’s only one way that Christopher Nolan is pushing the boundaries of filmmaking (another that comes to mind is stellar use of practical effects, but maybe that’s for another post), be it through a narrative structure that uses time uniquely or through actual alteration of time as a physical entity.  I can’t claim to know what the root cause of Nolan’s fascination with time is, but what seems clear is that it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon, and that’s fine, because what comes out of it is typically a damn good movie or two.

Dissecting the Flat Arc of The Shawshank Redemption

As is the case with countless institutions currently, these are strange times here at Tuesdays with Cory, and for lack of both theatergoing capability and streaming options that interest me, I suspect that I’ll spend the next few weeks (at least) doing deeper dives into some of my favorite movies and what I feel makes them good.  This week I’m starting with The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 gem from Frank Darabont that you’ve surely heard about already, if only because it’s the top rated movie on IMDb.  Ironically, the film – which is based on a Stephen King short story – was initially a box office failure, only ballooning in popularity during its rental phase in 1995. Nowadays, of course, it’s on USA or TNT just about once a month, and for good reason, but I want to talk about one particular aspect of The Shawshank Redemption that I think makes it dramatically interesting, and it’s an aspect that I think sets it apart from many of its contemporaries.  Based on the title, you can probably surmise at this point that I’m referring to its use of the flat character arc.

Hope is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies.

Character arc is something you hear about a lot if you’re even peripherally interested in drama and the theory behind it, with the basic idea of course being that the main character (protagonist, hero, etc.) experiences some kind of change throughout the story being told, with this change – gradual or otherwise – culminating in some kind of psychological or moral revelation at the end.  In more character-driven stories in particular, this revelation forms the climax of the story, as it reveals the truth behind the lie that the character believes and has made many mistakes while believing.  But what about a character like Andy Dufresne, a character who overall does very little changing throughout his time at Shawshank, instead affecting change in others and in his surroundings with his constant mantra of positivity?  As this excellent video essay describes it in the context of the wildly different Paddington 2, the main character in The Shawshank Redemption instead has a flat arc, not to be confused with a positive or negative one.  I shouldn’t characterize Shawshank as being incredibly unique in this regard, as there are plenty of other well-known movies and franchises (Back to the Future and The Hunger Games are two prominent examples), but it’s an aspect of these movies that I don’t think is typically thought of when trying to describe what makes them good, or better yet, which parts of them stick in your mind.

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t wanna know.

Because in my experience, when I think about Shawshank, or when others do, they don’t first think about Tim Robbins or Andy Dufresne.  They’re more likely to think about Morgan Freeman‘s Red – and sure, you might be able to chalk that up mostly to an excellent use of his legendary larynx in near-constant voiceover, but I think some small sliver of that is also owed to the fact that he’s the movie’s actual vehicle for change.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say The Shawshank Redemption is a movie primarily about him, nor would I say that he’s the “hero” or protagonist of the movie (I would argue that this is the case for the source material, though – in the novella, Red is the sole narrator), but the movie’s primary self-revelatory moment – in which Red basically tells a parole board to go screw themselves, only to be rewarded by his honesty and frankness with freedom – belongs pretty much solely to him.  Red begins playing his role in the events of The Shawshank Redemption as a man with little hope, or better yet as a man who finds hope dangerous within the slowly institutionalizing walls of the prison.  Meanwhile, old Andy – often surreptitiously so, to be fair – clings to the power of hope throughout, from his first night as the strong silent type to his slog through literal shit at the end, imparting it upon others like Red while grappling with it in only the most occasional of moments.  By the final act, especially when coupled with the perspective shift after Andy’s departure from Shawshank, Red certainly feels like the protagonist. Quite the switcheroo.

That feeling when you take a shower after your 20-minute workout and feel like the lord of all creation.

And sure, maybe the climax of the movie as far as you could define it still belongs to Andy, coming at the moment when he finally achieves his escape, holding out his hands to feel the rain on his bare skin as Thomas Newman’s score swells triumphantly, but it’s hard to characterize this as a particularly powerful change to Andy’s persona.  Overcoming a 20-year obstacle? Sure, and there’s certainly dramatic import in that. Changing? Not really. To put it a different way, and to couch my argument more firmly in the word “change,” The Shawshank Redemption is not about a change that takes place within Andy, even if the occasional doubt creeps into his psyche towards the end.  Instead of it being about what he learns, it’s about what others learn from him.  The Warden learns that his judgement cometh (and that right soon) when Andy outplays him, the entire prison system learns about the value of persistence when Andy sends constant letters in hopes of getting a prison library, and in perhaps the most on the nose learning moment, Tommy gets his GED, owing largely to the efforts of a patient and willing teacher in Andy.  The story focuses on Andy in that we the audience are anchored to the hope that Andy will never lose his way.  Our attention isn’t kept by the fear that he won’t change to overcome the obstacles laid before him; our fear is that he will.

I like to think the last thing that went through his head – other than that bullet – was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.

There are a lot of things to which you could ascribe The Shawshank Redemption‘s (eventual) success.  In fact, if you read Darabont’s novelization of the shooting script (and specifically the “Mutatis Mutandis” section featuring his closing remarks) you’ll find that the movie may have actually found its footing by rejecting a lot of the writing that was done before the cameras started rolling, flat arc or no.  But what The Shawshank Redemption (along with other aforementioned films) shows is that replacing the lie the character initially believes with a truth that they believe throughout can be an effective dramatic tool, especially when paired with a strong cast of malleable secondary characters, a predominantly negative setting, and a misdirection-laced third act.  What we get out of Andy’s struggle to teach others is the message that hope, as initially believed by the other inmates, isn’t a dangerous thing, but a good one, and it’s a message that it seems we need now more than ever.

What’s your favorite flat arc film?  Talk to me, folks. In the meantime, I’ll cook something up for next week.

Is This the End of Movie Theaters?

I know, I know – given the increased amount of free time at home we suddenly all have, it seems pretty inexcusable that I wasn’t able to put this post out yesterday as I usually do.  Equally inexcusable, you might add, is the fact that this post isn’t about my viewing of a new show or movie, but instead is at least indirectly about the coronavirus pandemic that we’re all probably tired of hearing about.  Nonetheless, here I am, unapologetically, and as an excuse for lack of better content all I can provide is this tweet.  The ever-looming shadow of COVID-19 has delayed a number of supposed box-office tentpoles, including John Krasinski‘s A Quiet Place Part II (initially set to be released on March 20th, this Friday), F9, No Time to Die, and most recently Black Widow, which wasn’t even originally due out until May 1st.  In the most extreme of these cases, international releases had already begun, but either way, summing them up shows that it’s a fairly unprecedented move from Hollywood, and furthermore, this is making no mention of the fact that a number of production schedules have probably been disrupted for films that are a long way away (hope you’re feeling better, Mr. Hanks).

I know this is fake, but I don’t care and I still love it.

With the interests of social distancing and flattening the curve in mind, these moves all make sense, but they do beg the question of where studios go next.  Enter Universal, who has in the past few days announced that some of their recent theater releases (Emma., The Hunt, Trolls World Tour, and The Invisible Man, to be specific) will be on demand starting this Friday to rent for $19.99 for 48 hours.  Given the average cost of a movie theater ticket these days, and given the fact that most people (for better or for worse) don’t go to the movies alone, this could in theory be a winning concept for Universal and for any other studios that decide to latch onto the idea: people can, for the same if not a lower price point, stay at home in their PJs, grab something from their quickly dwindling supply of quarantine munchies, and flop onto the couch to watch a new release. And sure, you probably aren’t going to get the same audiovisual experience quality-wise as you would at a theater, but with small-scale horror movies like The Invisible Man, does that even really matter?  On top of that, there’s no potentially uncomfortable chair (a real problem for my girlfriend, who often has back issues) to contend with, nor the possibility of people texting or being obnoxious while you’re trying to watch (in my estimate, this is a problem now more than ever). Plus, given the 48-hour rental time, you can pause to go to the bathroom, or for hours at a time, or better yet, you can rewatch a movie if you really love it the next day.  Twice as nice, in theory.  As for the theaters, they can’t really do anything to try to compete with this, given that most of them are currently shuttered.

Me in the toilet paper aisle two days ago.

But naturally, given that I write a blog that more often than not chronicles my trips to AMCs or Regals or Goodrichs, my relationship with the movie theater as a social institution is largely positive. Yes, it’s expensive, and yes, the concessions are absurdly overpriced – in fact, the popcorn is so outrageously marked up that one filmgoer tried (and failed) to sue a theater a while back – but it’s the reality of the business model.  I’ll also take this opportunity, hopefully among friends, to publicly admit that I (and I suspect many others) regularly sneak snacks and drinks into the theater.  Feel free to send me to the stocks, or at least to blame me in part for the suffering of theaters.  But with that fact aside, a brief dissection of the problems being encountered by not just the chains but the local theaters has me wondering whether the cinemas themselves are to blame or the studios are, but either way, I don’t really want them to go the way of the dodo.  That’s not to say that I don’t think major changes are coming for them, because they certainly are, but whether that means their complete demise or some middle ground is beyond my narrow field of knowledge.

Me after 25 minutes of self-quarantine.

There are a few things that that middle ground might look like; for one, it might turn into something that directorial giants Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have forebodingly predicted, where going to the movie theater becomes an experience that’s more like going to a Broadway show: higher ticket prices, and fewer, bigger theaters with a lot of bells and whistles.  To an extent, we’re already seeing that transformation with theaters adding food and alcohol service, not to mention the recliners, which to be clear are fantastic in my opinion.  Another thing this middle ground might look like is something like what has happened to drive-in movie theaters.  Once a ubiquitous cultural staple back in the American Graffiti days, they’re now far fewer and have a lengthy list of potential struggles nearly identical to that of the theaters, but there’s more nostalgia and novelty associated with them, and for that reason alone I suspect the ones that have been cagey enough to remain will always have at least some small slice of the entertainment market share.  That is, unless the continued crunch of climate change makes sitting in your car to stare at a giant screen in the great outdoors an infeasible proposition.

Maybe what we all need to take our minds off of these trying times is a dry Victorian social drama.

Our ongoing battle with the COVID-19 pandemic is doubtlessly going to stretch – and in certain cases rip into – various social and behavioral constructs that we’ve taken for granted, and maybe the movie theater industry is one of those things.  Time will tell if Universal’s gamble on an instant-on-demand distribution method will pay off, but even if it does, and even if other studios follow suit (that would be cool), there’s no telling whether it’s a system that would work effectively in a non-pandemic era.  However, with this virus-borne innovation coming somewhat hot on the heels of the theater subscription service craze (started, of course, by my darling Moviepass – gone but not forgotten), what’s clear is that the theater business is due a shakeup, if not a complete disaster.  This is only the latest threat to the communal pastime of ingesting media for the first time with a load of strangers, and as cynical as that description of filmgoing might be, I’d be sad to see it go.

Poor Black Widow. Even before this, she deserved better.

As for what I write about here next week, who knows. Maybe I’ll watch The Invisible Man, or maybe I’ll give self-quarantine binge recommendations that I’m sure none of you are really asking for.  Over the weekend I fell asleep while watching Mr. and Mrs. Smith, so there wasn’t much to write about there.

Old Men Shake Fists at Comic Book Clouds

This week, I don’t really have an actual movie review for you (though I did rewatch Interstellar with my girlfriend who had never seen it, and I feel like the experience taught me a fair bit more about that movie than I previously knew).  Instead, an attempt to watch The Irishman on Netflix (before realizing that this weekend was actually its limited theater release, with the Netflix release coming later this month) coupled with a stew of reactive thoughts to it in my head has stirred me to rant a bit about the recent comments of Martin Scorsese (The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas) and Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) on Marvel movies and why they apparently suck, or something.  If you haven’t read or heard about the comments, you can get a brief summary here, but suffice it to say neither of them are particularly impressed with what Kevin Feige has accomplished, and the main point that I want to make is I just don’t get that, and a number of people – Bob Iger, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Smith, and Damon Lindelof among them – are in the same corner as I am.

Before I begin disparaging his remarks, let me just thank Martin Scorsese for giving us one of history’s best meme shots.

Sure, I’ve had my issues with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Don’t get me wrong, overall I’m as big a fan of it as anyone, but even its biggest fans will readily admit that most of its films – especially the solo outings – are formulaic to a fault, and a lot of the time it feels like the motions the films are going through amount to box-checking, unless of course the stakes are at the leviathan levels of Endgame (I talked about these problems a bit here, though I’ve also obviously reviewed a lot of MCU material positively on this blog).  But to call Marvel movies “despicable,” as Coppola does, or to minimize them in ways that include derisively calling them “not cinema” as though cinema isn’t already a nebulous enough term is selling them short in at least one way that I can think of: namely, I’d argue that Marvel movies, even in all of their commercialization and monopolization of the average cineplex (I’d have to imagine this fact may be at the core of these directors’ gripes – more on that later) are fundamentally well-meaning, and better yet, the reason that they’re so successful, not to mention what I think does make them “cinema”, is that they tap into a very relatable desire that many have, even if they don’t admit it to themselves.

If a movie scene gives you chills, I feel like it could be argued that it’s “cinema” in at least some sense.

One of the major themes of any given Marvel movie involves the discovery of a strength that the protagonist may initially not know they possess, and even more so, the movie typically pivots on how said protagonist uses that strength (spoiler: it’s for good).  The Avengers’ climactic moment revolves around our band of heroes putting aside their differences and working together to achieve an end goal.  Doctor Strange involves a man’s critical journey to the surrender of his own ego.  And of course, Peter Parker’s character teaches us that with great power comes great responsibility (sure, maybe this isn’t said in the MCU rendition, but you get my point).  In at least some small way, they all indulge the hope – or maybe the fear – that a lot of us have: that deep within us, there’s some great untapped power waiting to be discovered.  If they’re theme parks, as Scorsese claims they are, they’re more fun than most of the ones that I’ve been to, and they have better interest at heart – and sure, maybe they can’t deal in the hard and criminal truths the way a mafia movie can, but I think that’s more than fine, and they still deal in an understanding of human nature.  Even if they’re repetitive – a knock which definitely has ample evidence – they’re no more so than Scorsese’s works, which while good feel like repetitions of the same thing.  Organized crime, liberal drug use, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joe Pesci, repeat.  Better yet, they’re not as brooding, probably not as psychological, and certainly not as violent, and I get the feeling that Scorsese sees at least a couple of these qualities as necessary for creation of compelling “cinema” – his body of work bears this theory out some.

My favorite scene from Taxi Driver.

To empathize at least briefly with the “side” of this debate that Scorsese is championing, I think one his main concerns is that some quieter movies with far less fanfare that are also quality films – he specifically cites the work of Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach, and Paul Thomas Anderson in this plight, for whatever reason – are being elbowed out under the premise that there are only so many screens and Marvel is flooding box offices.  While I can sort of understand where he’s coming from here, I’m not sure I agree with his theory that movies like these are in trouble – Gerwig’s recent Lady Bird was without a doubt a well-deserved critical and commercial success, as was PTA’s Phantom Thread.  The markets for these movies certainly aren’t as large as Marvel’s, but even without Marvel’s presence, I’m just not sure how much larger they’d be.  Furthermore, this section of his remarks leads me at least slightly to believe that he feels that this is why The Irishman was shortchanged by various studios until Netflix swooped in to rescue it from development hell, when in fact I think it reached that point because it’s a movie from him that we’ve all already seen before.  Either way, his reference to these directors sets up a snobs-versus-comic-book-nerds battle that isn’t nearly as diametric as it’s framed to be.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also thank Marty for this gem of a scene.

Because Scorsese and Coppola’s comments – which I should mention they’ve both made attempts to walk back in spite of the fact that a number of other self-proclaimed auteurs have chimed in in support of their main point – signal a coming changing of the Hollywood guard in the same way that Steven Spielberg’s semi-recent eschewing of Netflix does, and it seems like the transition period may be full of bumpy stretches like this one, but all I know is I like Goodfellas, and I like Avengers: Endgame, and I like The Wolf of Wall Street, and I like Captain America: Civil War, and I like The Godfather, and I like The Departed.  To make any claim that there’s no place for either of these kinds of movies (a distinction that’s limiting in and of itself) in the umbrella term “cinema” seems both needless and wrong to me, and while guys like Scorsese and Coppola are of course entitled to their opinions on the state of the art form – they’ve earned that at the very least with their level of success – it’s hard not to see these as misplaced parting shots at an industry that they may feel has betrayed them in favor of larger stacks of money.  Maybe fifty years from now the Russos will be throwing shade at the next big silver-screen fad, or maybe they won’t, but I have a feeling that this sort of thing is cyclical, and we’re just hearing about it now because we tend to hear about just about everything.