Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977)
In the spring of 1977, I was 17, chafing with the usual suburban adolescent boredom that comes from being too old for hide and seek, but too young to get into bars. So when my boyfriend said a bunch of us were going to the drive-in for the opening of this really cool-looking space movie, I was pretty pumped.
I thought I was in for a wildly imaginative escape: something intelligent and inventive like 2001 – A Space Odyssey, but with snappy, eye-popping action and way less brooding obeliskity existentialism (not that there's anything wrong with that).
It was going to be a big night out – instead of sitting around somebody's basement getting high, we were going to sit in a car getting high, and have our minds blown away by a spectacular entertainment.
But the clever bit of eye candy I'd envisioned was a bust. The highly-touted special effects weren’t all that bedazzling, even though I was as stoned as Pete Doherty at a bail hearing. Worse, the story that I thought would be an enthralling and thought-provoking sci-fi narrative quickly revealed itself to be as tritely formulaic as a piece of Disney shlock.
A third of the way in, I could easily project exactly how the story was going to unspool. I was so bored, I might as well have stayed home and listened to Led Zeppelin IV. Again.
Betty Blue (aka 37.2 ° Le Matin) (Jean-Jacques Beineix, 1986)
Critics raved over the passionate intensity of this story of doomed love and the artist/muse dynamic, which, among other accolades, was up for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Zorg is a house painter who's working on a novel in his spare time. His nubile girlfriend Betty apparently has no interests or ambitions other than screwing like a mink, flying off into volatile fits of dramatic pique for no apparent reason, and fawning unbecomingly over Zorg's writerly genius.
Much swooning was made over Beatrice Dalle's sensual portrayal of that type of young woman who is supposedly irresistible in spite of being a hugely irritating, unemployed nut case who wastes a great deal of her man's time with pointlessly demanding and self-pitying arguments that inevitably involve her trashing something in an epic fashion while going for a world record in moody pouting.
Me, I couldn't see what made Dalle so supposedly hot. Aside from having a crudely wide, gap-toothed mouth, there was just something off-putting about her. I squirmed through the scene in which, during a pointless quarrel, Betty takes off down the street in her underwear, with the camera following her wobbling bottom for several horrific minutes. I had to irritatedly wonder how this drawn-out gratuitous display of cellulitic pulchritude was contributing anything to plot or character development. And like, come ON now… I don't care how uninhibited she is, no woman’s going to take off down the street practically naked unless there's an ax-murderer on her heels. Being pissed cause your boyfriend forgot to put the toilet seat down again doesn't constitute just cause for streaking.
With her baby-fat voluptuousness, pouty petulance, and appalling immaturity, Betty seemed more like a busty tween than a woman. Maybe that was the problem – it was the blatant ogling of a whiny girl-child who had zero going for her besides her fuckability that just made those droolingly smitten comments by (male) reviewers seem super creepy.
Betty's behaviour gets increasingly volatile and unpredictable. Just when the eternally impatient -- or shall we say doormattish -- Zorg starts to show signs of getting a tad fed up at having to save innocent bystanders from another of his ballistic girlfriend’s monumental meltdowns because somebody over-scorched her crème brulee, Betty suddenly becomes radiant and joyful on discovering that, in spite of being on the pill, she has become pregnant. But after a short interlude of non-crazy bliss, she goes to the doctor, finds out that she isn't knocked up, and becomes so distraught at being a “failure as a woman” that …wait for it… she stabs herself in the eye with a fork.
As Zorg tries to comfort a weeping, eye-patched Betty in her hospital bed, I failed to be moved by the tender heartbreak of the young lovers' tragedy. Au contraire… I was seriously annoyed that I was meant to swallow such a choking wallop of contrived melodramatic merditude. How can you hate yourself to the point of (self)blinding rage for not getting pregnant while on birth control? That's reeeally stretching it, drama queen. You're sitting around all day with nothing to do, yet you can't manufacture something more credible to pin a self-maiming hissy fit on? Plus, ok, so you're distraught: wander into traffic in your garter belt, try to o.d. on pouty-mouthed shots of absynthe, try to get fatally infected by sleeping with a consumptive mime, whatever... but a FORK IN THE EYE?!?!? (And also, what kind of name, seriously, is Zorg??)
I don't remember how it ends... whether Betty is institutionalized, spending her days throwing imaginary furniture around the looney bin in comely back-slit hospital pyjamas, or whether she goes home and fatally mangles herself with a Cuisinart, or what. I just remember feeling hugely annoyed at being lured out with the expectation of seeing a moving bit of intelligent cinema, only to be served up a daft and leering tribute to the cr-a-a-a-z-y sexpot stereotype that makes women cringe, but that apparently really appeals to a whole pile of idiot men, particularly those in the field of film criticism.
In a bit of life-imitating art, Dalle was prone to a bit of loopy behaviour of her own. Over the years, she was arrested for stealing jewelry in Paris; was fined for assaulting a traffic warden; and got busted for cocaine possession in Miami. In 2005, while shooting a film about prison life, Dalle met a guy who was serving a 12-year sentence for assaulting and raping his ex-girlfriend. She married him and helped get him early parole... and then guess what? She had to dump him a few weeks after his release, because he turned out to be a violent psychopath.
One perceptive reviewer likened Dalle's smile to the front grill of a 1950s Pontiac. 
Titanic (James Cameron, 1997)
I was perhaps the only refusnik on the media-aware planet who defiantly stayed away from this film when it came out. I knew that it would have a paint-by-numbers plot that I would just find tiresome, yet it would still manage to manipulate me into getting all sniffly at the end, triggering some well-deserved self-loathing. I was also ardently determined to do whatever I could to avoid having to hear that God-bedamned Celine Dion song one more time.
A few years later, happening across it of a slow tv night, I figured: what the hell, millions of people loved this movie -- its got to be more edifying than watching Wife Swap reruns.
I only got as far as one of the early scenes where Kate Winslet sneaks down to the lower-class deck to cut loose drinking whiskey and kicking up her skirts with some folk dancing. I know its a fictional entertainment, but I can't abide when blockbuster movies completely give the finger to historical reality. In 1912, there's just no way that a young woman from the “proper” classes would act that way. She would have had all traces of free-spirited defiance of her role as corseted chattel bullied out of her long before she reached puberty.
To me, suggesting that young women of that time had any hope of escaping the confines of their societal roles for two seconds, let alone managing to sneak off and party like a serving wench in heat, was a bit of an insult to the long struggle that women went through to get equal rights. And I think its kind of irresponsible, given that the fan base for the movie was young girls who probably wouldn’t know that they were being served up a big stinking pile of historical revisionist fantasy, the end goal of which was to reward the men behind the film with a bajillion box-office-smashing dollars and enduring glory.
Ultimately though, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's maudlin and facile crap, and I could tell that's where this sinking ship was sailing to.
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
After spending two years as a very socially isolated stay-at-home mom, I was desperate to regain some semblance of my old life. Sitting in the dark getting lost in a film being hailed as a masterpiece seemed the perfect way to get a taste of the alone time and intellectual stimulation I was starved of.
About 45 minutes in, I was feeling something I’d never felt at the cinema before – a mightily powerful urge to walk out in disgust. Plot?* HELLS no... just a bunch of pointless and befuddling story lines featuring characters who were unilaterally annoying. Julianne Moore spends her screen time histrionically yowling like a cat in heat locked out in a rainstorm; Tom Cruise plays some freakily obnoxious game show host who struts around giving rambling and repetitive speeches about “penis power”; and a bunch of other characters wander in and out being at once irritatingly quirky and painfully bland. Although some of the characters are linked (or are they?), none of the story lines make any sense or goes anywhere.
The scene that really drove me nuts was when a cop answers a call at this woman's house, and it goes on and on with her babbling this neurotic nonsense with him being super awkward because he wants to ask her out but he’s too shy, and you're struggling to follow the dialog because they're being drowned out by this loud wheedling music that really had no point in being in the scene, other than to be distracting and obnoxious.
At that point, I wondered how many other people were also completely fed up, but didn't want to appear like philistines too crass to understand great art by getting up and leaving. I felt pretty confident I’d start a minor exodus if I stood up and shouted: “This movie SUCKS and I'm going to ask for my money back... anybody with me?” before stomping out. But I figured that after suffering past the halfway mark, I might as well stick it out to see how it ends. Cause its a MASTERPIECE, right, so surely there was going to be some kind of profoundly magnificent ending that was going to pull all this tedious and grating nonsense together.
And WHAT is this genius ending, which finally comes out of nowhere? Why, IT RAINS FROGS!!!! Really big ones, like cane toads have magically been sucked out of the Australian countryside and dropped in the American midwest. And then there are a few more pointless scenes in which nobody comments or acknowledges the fact that it just RAINED FROGS. And that's it.
Yeah, its a masterpiece all right... a masterpiece of CRAP!!
*(if you don't believe how dumb this film is, check out the plot summary, complete with complicated charts and diagrams that fail to impart any kind of sense or clarity @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnolia_(film)
Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)I thought Reservoir Dogs was a cool and original thriller. Pulp Fiction was ok, although some of its characters and plot lines seemed a little contrived and forced.
The critics were licking Tarantino’s feet, throwing around phrases like “wunderkind auteur”, but I was already wondering if he had the goods to live up to the hype. If by your second film, you’re resorting to rolling out a cavalcade of cussing freaks to catch people’s attention, how long before you end up like David Lynch, who had worn out his oddball welcome, but could still just toss together a mishmash of creepy nonsense, add the ol’ dwarf-in-a-curtained-chamber-talking-backwards trope, and have effete hipsters in black turtlenecks insist it was art, no matter how bad it smelled if you really poked at it with an objectively critical stick.
Indeed, by the time Jackie Brown ran its unremarkable yet critically hailed course, I began to suspect that being crowned a genius right out of the gate had gone to Tarantino’s oddly-shaped head; and that after all that premature gushing about him being the second directorial coming of Christ, nobody dared to stand up and declare that the emperor had no clothes. It seemed implicit that he could just grind out a formulaic script that substituted the shock value of potty-mouthed violence for cleverness and originality, and he’d be sported off to Cannes in a gilded litter borne on the shoulders of sycophantic film-theory students from Portland.
I wrote him off as definitively overrated after seeing his contribution to the compilation film Four Rooms (1995). This study in moronic testosteronal one-upmanship could have been interesting if the characters weren't all one-dimensional rehashes of the personalities in Reservoir Dogs, and if he'd bothered to write dialog with some substance, instead of just trying to camoflage the laziness of the writing by having everyone throw out some variation on “fuck” every few seconds. Where’s the genius in revelling in juvenile machismo? Like come on Quentin... you're a smart guy, so have some self-respect and stop phoning in scripts that seem like they were written by a bratty suburban 15-yr-old who thinks that violent-jerk posturing is way cool. I get enough of that crap taking the metro home with the junior high kids.
So when the boyfriend chose Kill Bill as our video rental, I was resistant (especially since I knew it had a cheesy sounding comic-book ninja revenge theme), but decided to give Tarantino another chance, because once again, the reviews had rhapsodized at how incredible a piece of stylistic directing it was.
I didn't make it too far. In scene three, Uma Thurman, who plays a wronged assassin hell-bent on spandex-swathed revenge, ambushes a former colleague, played by the equally babe-alicious Vivica A. Fox, in her suburban kitchen. The dialog went pretty much like this:
Uma: “I'm back, you motherfuckin poopyhead, and i'm gonna kick your motherfuckin' ass.”
Vivica: “Oh yeah, well YOU'RE a motherfuckin poopyhead, bitch, and I'm gonna kick YOUR motherfuckin' ass!”
Uma: “Oh YEAH, MOTHERFUCKER?!?!”
Vivica: “Yeah, MU-THA-FUCKKA!!!”
And then they start a kung fu catfight.
Then Vivica's little girl walks in, and suddenly they're like two pals happily bonding over motherhood, as if two seconds ago, they weren't trying to kill each other, while Uma rattles off a long bit of stupidly complicated backstory exposition.
Maybe Tarantino was aiming for some kind of ironic campy take on martial arts comics cum soft porn ninja chick fantasy but, excuse me, it was just unconscionably dumb.
Two more hours of this ridiculously ham-fisted twaddle... and then there's the equally long wank of volume 2??
Fuck you, you fuckin' motherfucker. I'm going to bed.
Avatar (James Cameron, 2009)As with Titanic, I refused to give in to the hype about this movie, because I had a hunch that its lowest-common-denominator narrative would probably bother me. But I really like 3D movies, and somebody whose opinion I respected said it was stunning and I really needed to see it on the big screen. So off I went, already begruding the idea of putting another $15 in James Cameron's ego-lined pockets.
Indeed, in a visual sense, it was utterly gorgeous. But it was hard for me to get lost in the spectacle when I kept getting slapped in the brain by the sheer banality of the script.
It was as if they’d taken something a 5-yr-old boy thought up (“So, like, there’s these giant blue cat people? And they live in a ginormous tree? And they ride dinosaurs and they’re really nice to everything, even plants, but some bad men come to destroy their home and there’s this other guy who wants to help the princess and so there’s this big war and everybody is sad but then they win and the guy marries the princess the END”), then they turned it over to some hack writer, handed him a schmaltz shovel, and him told to load it on as thick as possible.
Come on boys... you’ve got a $250 million dollar budget to create this epic fantasy, but you can’t afford a scriptwriter with a smidge of imaginative originality? Like, the rare mineral they want to rape the planet for is called … “unobtainium”. Is that supposed to be a joke? Although I suppose it could have been worse -- they could have gone with "greedium."
Even if you're aiming for the widest-possible audience, it shouldn’t mean that the script has to be borderline retarded, with a strong overglaze of mawkish wankditude. Just for starters:
- You’ve got these Na’vi (and, scuse me, but what’s the apostrophe for? New-agey flair? Did Sting come up with that one?) who plug their TAILS into TREES for some kind of eco-orgasmic kick. Oh puh-leeze... Star Trek's Vulcan mind-meld; that was cool. This tail-plug business had dorkily cloying Oprah-atic spirituality written all over it.
- Was that really Sigourney Weaver, or a character robot pulling lines from a cliché database?
- Did anybody for one second actually worry that the hero was really going to die at the end? And the way it was edited, didn’t it seem like he went a good 20 minutes without breathing?
What a bunch of hoo'ey.
It was just sooo melodramatically belaboured that I found myself wishing that the forces of evil would triumph and the natives would be flattened into one big, blue patchouli-oil scented splotch. They're just a bunch of tediously smarmy space hippies anyway. Wipe out the tree-hugging fuckers before they invent some sinister otherworldly incarnation of zamphir music and hacky sackery, and shut the door on the threat of a sequel that is bound to be even less original.
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