Category: Arts & Entertainment

I couldn’t tell you exactly why I never got around to seeing RoboCop until tonight.

I vaguely remember at the time being scared off by stories of how ultra-violent it was. Later, I just dismissed it as being another 80s action movie. After that, I put it in the same category as Total Recall — I was sure it’d be entertaining enough, but stupid. Even after seeing Starship Troopers and (after a month or two) finally realizing how brilliant that movie is, I still wasn’t that interested in RoboCop.

I think my crippling fear of Ronny Cox had something to do with it, too.

Whatever the case, I finally know what all the fuss was about. What a great, bizarre movie. I can’t even imagine the confidence it’d take to pull something like that off — there’s absolutely nothing subtle about it, and yet you spend the whole time knowing that they’re in on the joke and still wondering if they’re taking it all seriously. It’s kind of like a quantum movie: simultaneously a straightforward, sleazy, cheesy 80s action movie and a satire of those movies and the 80s in general. (The movie has a guy instantly mutated by toxic waste, and Miguel Ferrer snorting coke off a woman’s chest!)

I mentioned it took me a while to get what was going on with Starship Troopers, and that movie was even more obviously campy, plus it came ten years later, after the audience had plenty of time to get used to deconstructionism. I remember watching True Lies and thinking it was such a clever spoof of action movies, but it didn’t even survive two years before seeming clumsy, vapid and obvious. RoboCop feels like it has after-burners: ride the initial launch as a super-violent action movie that seems a little smarter than average; ride through the irony wave of the 90s as a part of pop culture, surviving references and attempts to make fun of it; then gain a new appreciation two decades later, when viewers can marvel at seeing Laura Palmer’s dad as a hip club-goer and Eric’s dad from “That 70s Show” dropping f-bombs and shooting off people’s hands with a shotgun. And even with the jerky stop-motion and the barrage of 80s hair and glasses, you still have to watch it and think, “that’s just cool.”

I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have understood RoboCop in 1987, since 99% of the movies and TV made in the 80s was exactly like that, with no sense of irony. At the time, “Moonlighting” was still a years-ahead-of-its-time masterpiece of self-awareness and post-modernism, and looking back at those episodes now is almost painful.

The genius of RoboCop (and Starship Troopers, to a lesser degree) is that it still works as an action movie, even if you’re not in the mood for satire on urban decay, the evil that corporations do, and the emptiness of the media. It’s pretty ballsy to make movies that unapologetically say “screw you” to everyone, including the movie’s main characters themselves; to do that and make it not angry and pointlessly cynical, but actually entertaining, takes a hell of a lot of talent. And it leaves you vulnerable to so much that can fail from concept to execution — as Basic Instinct and Showgirls both prove.

Best of all: I finally get another reference from an old episode of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” In “Catalina Capers,” there’s a scene where the bots are saying their bedtime prayers, and Crow says, “and God bless ED-209, although I don’t know why you’d make a robot who couldn’t walk down stairs.” I’ve made it my goal that by the time I die, I’ll have gotten every reference the MST3K guys ever made. There’s still only a few thousand left.

The way I see it, there’s two different groups of people who wouldn’t be completely bowled over by the movie Once:

1. Musicians living in Dublin, who wouldn’t see what the big deal is, and
2. Unholy creatures cursed to walk the earth for eternity after having their souls ripped from their rotting corpses.

I’d been hearing about the movie for what must be months, since it’s gotten nearly universal praise, an Oscar nomination for its song “Falling Slowly” (the second best song in the movie), and fairly frequent breathless write-ups in Entertainment Weekly claiming it was impossible not to like it.

So I had a combination of high expectations and the feeling I’d get around to watching it eventually. I expected a painfully earnest, small and sensitive indie film about two singer/songwriters who find each other against all odds. Two very different people, joined together by their music, their hearts would soar onto the screen, the strings of their acoustic guitars pulling the audience into the screen and casting a spell of heartfelt enchantment on young and old.

The funny thing is: that’s pretty much exactly what it is, and it totally works.

It’s filmed not like a musical, or even an indie-film Sundance-ready romance, but as a “behind the music”-style documentary. In a making-of documentary on the special features, the director says that he didn’t want actors who could half-sing, but singers who could half-act. He got better than that, because their performances are completely believable and their musical performances are astounding.

The scene where the two stars perform “Falling Slowly” in a music shop is pretty much the defining scene of the movie, but my favorite is “If You Want Me.” The girl (both characters are unnamed in the movie) walks back from a corner store in the middle of the night, in her pajamas, where she’d gone to buy batteries for a CD player so that she could listen to the guy’s music while she wrote the lyrics for it. It’s the closest the movie gets to a traditional movie musical, while still feeling so natural and so genuine that it fits in perfectly.

What finally completely won me over was a scene at a party, where all the guests are required to perform songs for each other. Now, any claim I could make to knowing what life in Dublin is really like, would be hopelessly false — I spent a total of four days in the city, visiting only the most tourist-laden places, and I was half-full of Guinness the entire time. But it’s what I want Dublin to be like — dark rooms packed with indiscriminately friendly people sharing drinks and some of the most incredible music you’ll ever hear.

In another part of the making-of documentary, Glen Hansard says that he and his costar, Marketa Irglova — who recorded an album in 2006 that provides several of the songs in the movie — were friends, so the most difficult parts were acting as if they’d just met. My favorite quote from the documentary is when he describes the casting; he says he recommended Irglova for the part because he knew she could act, only because she can do everything else so well.

You seldom get the chance to see the characters’ relationship as anything but genuine, since it’s so simple and straightforward. And there’s absolutely no question that their music is genuine — if I had just heard it, I might’ve dismissed it as overwrought Coldplay-style pseudo-folk pop. But when you see how music just seems to flow out of Irglova as if it were simply another language, and when you see the passion for these songs played out on Hansard’s face, it strips away any sense of artifice.

I have only two complaints about the whole thing: first, that they overused the song “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” when there are at least three other songs in the movie I would’ve preferred to hear more of. Second, there’s only one false moment in the entire movie, when the gruff recording engineer at a studio has dismissed our plucky band as talentless oddballs, but is quickly won over by the passion of their music. But both of these are nitpicks, brief and barely perceptible flaws that keep the movie just short of perfect.

It was a perfect time for me to watch this movie, because I’ve been getting more and more discouraged at the state of pop culture lately. The internet is a hateful place, and spending too much time on it has a corrupting cynical influence — to the point where you could even read a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a father’s relationship with his son and the nature of goodness, and just start picking out faults in it. I was starting to wonder if it’s even possible to make an earnest, sincere movie anymore, without its getting dismissed as schmaltz. As it turns out, it is possible, and the result is amazing.

Last night I went to see Cloverfield again. Surprisingly, it’s still as good the second time, and I highly recommend seeing it in Digital Projection if possible, because the clear picture and better sound system make it awesome. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in all the backstory and alternate-reality game stuff surrounding Cloverfield, there’s a wiki page summing all of it up).

When I got home, I watched the RiffTrax version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The casual observer would think these two incidents are completely unrelated, which is why the casual observer is lucky to have this blog to point out the similarities:

Raiders and Cloverfield both have the same basic inspiration at their core: filmmakers paying homage to a pulpy, shallow genre of movies they grew up loving. They’re not spoofs or parodies, or self-important “re-inventions” or “re-imaginings,” but sincere attempts to get the feel of the originals in a contemporary movie.

I’m not for one second saying that Cloverfield is going to become the classic that Raiders of the Lost Ark is. But watching them back-to-back does show what advances we’ve made in self-awareness in the past 26 years. Watching Raiders in 2007 is a little bit like visiting Tomorrowland before the well-intentioned but poorly-conceived rehabs: you’re struck with this weird sense of double nostalgia, seeing a dated homage to an even more dated source. For all the perfect set designs, costumes, props, etc., it feels more like 1981 than 1936. And not just 1981, but Steven Spielberg’s version of 1981.

The most obvious point to make here is that if you’re watching a movie while listening to a bunch of people make fun of it, of course you’re bound to notice flaws. I’ve heard a lot of people say they don’t get the point of RiffTrax for good movies, but for me, making fun of the movie was never the focus of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” or any of the side projects. The movie is just a straight man; it’s an excuse to give a bunch of people 2 hours worth of set-ups for jokes.

For something like Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the Lord of the Rings movies for instance, it reminds me of when I was a teenager and looked forward to the Mad magazine parodies of my favorite blockbuster movie of the moment. It never “broke” the movie, but was just another exercise in fandom. And like those, the RiffTrax makes all the comments a fan would make during the movie anyway — he totally ate that fly! And how DID Indy hold his breath on top of that submarine for so long? (The one that Mad magazine got that the Riffers missed was: how come those snakes are crawling up the other side of the wall and pushing themselves through mortar?)

But there’s still a good bit of Raiders that seems jarring now, if you’re watching it with a fairly jaded, critical eye and not just letting yourself get caught up in the movie: The Spielbergian reaction shots to Alfred Molina when Indy’s grabbing the idol. The odd expository scene with the feds getting lectured on the history of the Ark. Pretty much all of the comic relief moments. And, as the Riffers are quick to point out, the fact that Indy spends 20 minutes smirking his way through a car chase, something that seemed so bad-ass at the time but now comes across as “Wow, Indiana Jones is kind of a douchebag.”

At the time, they all worked to make the movie feel contemporary; now, they just serve to lock it in a time when Spielberg, Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan ruled the Earth.

I say that Cloverfield is another very earnest action movie, without heavy-handed commentary or clumsy comic relief or pandering to the audience. But watching it after hearing other people talk about it, I’m struck with how high the bar has been raised for suspension of disbelief, how much self-awareness is just built into movies nowadays.

(Very minor spoilers for Cloverfield follow, in case you’re wanting to go into the movie knowing absolutely nothing about it).

It all relies on, and even takes advantage of, the knowledge that the audience is completely savvy to pop culture in general and how movies work in particular. The central gimmick of the handheld camera ostensibly lends an air of believability to the whole thing, but in fact it does the opposite: it distances the audience from what’s happening, keeping it in the realm of fun horror movie instead of just ghoulishly watching real death and destruction as entertainment. It works because we’re all so accustomed to the unreality of steadicam shots that that is now what we perceive as “realistic.”

The character of Hud — well for starters, there’s the fact that it’s the best-named movie character of the last decade, and the name depends on the audience’s familiarity with videogames. (In case you’re not a videogame fan, the “heads-up display” is your health/ammo/etc view in a first-person game, and at this point it’s become synonymous with the camera or the view screen). But making him into a character, instead of just an unseen narrator, was genius for several reasons: 1) It adds another layer of distance, because you know that the guy whose POV you’re seeing is not you, partly because he’s kind of an idiot. 2) The comic relief gets “baked in” to the movie, because you have the cameraman making the comments the audience would usually be making. 3) It adds a layer of “safety” to the movie, because you’re always reminded that somebody is still there with us, filming everything.

That’s not even mentioning the self-awareness implicit in basing your story around a bunch of good-looking, self-absorbed 20-year-olds, the type that call each other “bro” and have seemingly never known a world without video cameras, cell phones, and the internet. They’ve seen these stories, they know how they work, so there’s not a lot of staring in wonder while John Williams flares up in the background. Instead, they’re unrealistic people who react realistically — the characters are actually no more or less interesting than the plot and pacing warrants, a bunch of people who are just pretty enough to hold your interest for an hour and a half, but not so deep and complex that the movie grinds to a halt whenever one gets offed.

I have to wonder if a movie like Cloverfield could have been made 10 years ago, and how it would’ve been different. If we hadn’t had Scream come in and wallow in irony and self-reference for three movies, would we have gotten it all out of our system in time for 1-18-08? And is it really even out of our system, or has the bar been raised for how much postmodernism is required in a movie before we’ll allow it to be sincere?

I hope nobody else has used that title to talk about Cloverfield, because I’m inordinately proud of it.

This movie is definitely one that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in, so if you’re interested in it, I recommend seeing it soon and avoiding trailers and reviews. I’ll just say that it’s excellent, I was literally biting my nails and on the edge of my seat (seriously!) for most of it, and I’m already interested in seeing it again. And there is something at the end of the credits, but it’s not all that great, and probably not worth waiting for.

Now stop reading unless you’ve either already seen it, or are never going to.

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