WTF?

WTF indeed! We stand for Films, Tunes, and Whatever else we feel like (not necessarily in order!) Professor Nonsense heads the 'Whatever' department, posting ramblings ranging from the decrepit, to the offbeat, to the just plain absurd! The mysterious Randor takes helm of the 'Tunes' front, detailing the various melodic messages he gets in earfuls. Weekly recommendations and various musings follow his shadows. Finally, our veteran movie critic, Lt Archie Hicox, commands the 'Film' battlefield, giving war-weathered reviews on flicks the way he sees them. Through the eyes of a well-versed renegade, he stands down for no man! Together we are (W)hatever(T)unes(F)ilms!

Feel free to comment with your ideas, qualms, and responses, or e-mail them to RandorWTF@Hotmail.com!

Oct 13, 2010

Easy Answers: Thoughts on Second Viewings and Cryptic Endings

 I’ve been told that a first impression is, oftentimes, a last impression. Perhaps that’s true. If you meet someone and they have, say, a sunny disposition, that person automatically becomes "the happy person". You come to expect at least some degree of jollity from then on and with justifiable reason. The girl who’s bitchy becomes "bitchy girl". The guy with a freakishly clean car becomes "freakishly clean car guy". Bad B.O.? Well, you get the idea. It’s not being shallow. Well….actually, I guess it kind of is…but as with the reason we create stereotypes, at bottom, it makes sense in a cold, Borg-like way.  We’re wired to respond like this because, let’s face it, first impressions are often the only ones we get to make.

Now that we’ve discussed that, I’d like to kindly take all of those arguments, toss them in the wastebasket by your desk, douse it with Wild Turkey and strike the matchbook because, with movies, all that reasoning amounts to nothing more than toilet paper for a wild bear in the woods.

Let me iterate. Would you only listen to a great song once? Would you grace the sands of a tropical beach for one mere afternoon and be done with it for good? Do you gaze up at the roof of the solar system one night and say, “Next”?

I didn’t think so.

But repeated viewings don’t just apply to the  experiences you love either. As with people, some things just deserve a second shot. Movies, as you should have guesstimated by now, are no exception to this. What may have seemed like a mediocre, even infuriating let-down of an experience the first time around might just need a new approach, a fresh perspective from which to view it.

Let me grace you with an anecdote.

There was once a Napoleonic little Asian mutt. For the sake of clarity we’ll call him "Andy" (I know, I know, it was the only thing we could think of at such short notice). Any who, this kid "Andy", he liked movies, right? It didn't usually matter what kind of movie it was. As long as he had a handful of heart-clogging goodies, a remote and a pair of sweatpants he was set. It rarely mattered if he had company or was alone. He just loved watching movies. If something looked even vaguely interesting then he’d have a go at it (no jokes please). And that was the same clean-slated rationale he used when he decided to re-watch the Coens’ “Barton Fink” this past weekend.

If you’re not familiar with the film, let's just say that it stirred a “bit” of critical chatter upon its release in 1991. Needless to say, it swept the Cannes film festival but (surprise, surprise) not the mainstream theaters. In fact, the film did so poor at the box office it didn’t even manage to recoup the costs it took to make it (a $6 million gross to $9 million budget). Go figure.

But then that outcome really shouldn’t be so odd, right? Aside from “Fargo” and other more user-friendly dishes like “The Big Lebowski” or “Intolerably Cruelty”, the Coens have often been labeled as inaccessible. Hell, if the Coens had a club-house they’d probably have a sign dripping in fresh red paint: “You must be this smart to enter”. With “Fink” you might even get the feeling the Coens are just tricking you into the theater so they can twist your intellectual arm 'round your back. 

The movie is about a writer who holes himself up in a resident hotel somewhere in Los Angeles to finish a project for his new studio masters at Capitol Pictures. Yet where the movie might seem bland or even sparse, it is uneasy with atmosphere, symbolism and sound.About midway through, as our 'hero' stumbles through Hollywood searching to shatter his writer's block, you might start to wonder why the movie decides to end with Barton receiving a few life lessons from a serial killer before he finally finishes his "fruity" script, then skittering off to a beach where he watches (rather creepily) a woman sunbathing on the beach. By the time the end credits roll over you, the movie has felt so surreal that it’s probably a little similar to the way you felt at the end of “Donnie Darko” the first time around.

You’re so sure that there’s got to be a deeper meaning to it all but you don’t know what it is!

But where Richard Kelly’s  one-hit-wonder is still as aggravatingly twisted upon a second viewing as it was the first time, movies like “Fink” are different. Somehow. It's taken me some time to notice this but it's definitely there.  Confusion, bewilderment and frustration are the initial reactions. Even then, however, those components are only a fraction of the overall equation. And the first step toward understanding that equation is the first impression. You’ve got to just grow up and get over them because the immediate sense you get from movies like “Fink” is that you hate it.  Admit it. I won't judge you. You flat out want to spit it back out like a burnt hulk of popcorn kernel that’s just cracked your crown.


A demonic insurance salesman? A bespectacled scrivener pushing a near-socialist obsession with “common men”? Mosquitoes, biblical references and nasty-ass wallpaper? Mousy hotel clerks and what may or may not be a severed head in a box? THE LIFE OF THE MIND!??!

You charge back up to the ticket counter, pull the clerk up over the register by his clip-on tie through that little plastic hole and demand of him, “What in the holy hell was all that artsy shit? IT WASN’T ENTERTAINING AT ALL!?!? I….I think….”

That last bit of temerity is exactly what I’m here to dissect.

“I think…”

I’m going to be honest with you ladies and germs, the first time I saw “Barton Fink”, I flat out wanted that hour and a half of my life back.

And it’s not like I was totally unprepared for the strange journey down the rabbit hole. I knew it was an art-house film and I’m not averse to the idea per se. It’s just that what happened was so…not what I was expecting that on a visceral level, my mind and body rejected the damn thing faster than a hippie runs from a hot pocket. In fact, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I couldn’t classify it.

I put the movie on the shelf for a while and didn’t come back to it for maybe a year or more. I was reading a collection of essays on auteurs when I stumbled upon the piece again. In it there were one or two articles detailing the movie’s production history (smack dab in the middle of their gangster romp “Miller’s Crossing”) and a few interviews with the filmmaker brothers themselves, to see if I could shed any more light on the matter just out of curiosity.

It just so happens that I watch enough movies that time really does tell when something is either good or bad. For me, while I may have hated “Fink”, I honestly couldn’t forget it. The moment I thought of that frizzy-haired goon in the hotel room tumbling through nightmare after nightmare, it dawned on me that the movie really did leave me with an impression. Obviously I couldn’t abide dismissing the Coens’ technical or professional mastery. So I decided for another go.

And just like that I'm struck by its mystique; its hauntingly benign allure. I started thinking about it again. I started analyzing what the movie had to say about Hollywood. What it had to say about creativity, about business, class struggle. Class divides. What it had to say about everyday people and art. What it had to say about dreams and the ivory tower: with all of its infernal blathering, much of which goes unheard as the ‘day’ draws to a close. Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to realize that maybe it wasn’t as bad as I remembered it to be.

This might not be the best (or common) example of this phenomenon but it certainly is a worthy one and works to demonstrate something I know you’ve all felt at least once.

Don’t believe me?

You remember the end of “Space Odyssey: 2001”?

That’s what I thought.
On the surface, many great films don’t really give us what we want. A ten-minute spinning tunnel of light? That might not be entertainment but it sure as hell ain’t something you can just dismiss either. To do that would rob you of something very special, something that can only be really understood as a process that each person has to discover for themselves.

And I suppose that’s why expectations play such a large part in the movie-going experience. Most of the time, we just hope to be thrilled, chilled and/or aroused. Sometimes we even like to be moved. But generally speaking the stimuli we search for after a hard day at the 9-to-5 is experienced at level of your guts. ‘I liked it’ versus ‘I didn’t like it’.

So when something deviates from what is the accepted form of 'good', we might blanch at the thought of something that goes so far in the other direction that we’re likely to reject it based on its executions or conclusions (or apparent lack thereof).

I felt the same way about the Coens’ “A Serious Man”. The same about “Mulholland Drive”. The same about “Ran” or “Full Metal Jacket”.  For John Hillcoat’s “The Proposition”, from its blistering opening you might come to expect a rollicking Western chock-full of gunfights, not the poetic (albeit gruesome) ode to the nature of family that it truly is. I even felt this way about “Blade Runner” the first time I saw it (I swear to the Buddha I’ve made penance for this).

Be honest with yourself. How many of you were a little pissed at the end of “No Country for Old Men”?

The underlying theme for many of these movies is that they never once cave to our basest desires, as much as we’d like them to. You know as well as I do that we want to see more vampire romances, car chases and blue humanoids. Those are the kinds of things that constitute the primal scene of the cinema’s magnetism. At least for most people. For average folks. Movies like “Fink” challenge us precisely because they seldom give us what we want but do provide us with something we may need. Like the stern father and cold mother, the apparent lack of comforts offered in these cerebral films pay off in the end; even if that end comes well after you’ve left the movie theater.


I think Kurosawa understood this concept. So did Kubrick. I won’t pretend to know what’s good for everybody nor will I insist that this method of viewing will work for everyone. I’m ashamed to say I’ve been somewhat desensitized to this patience but I’m proud to admit that anyone can learn it. And I will say that some things can only be appreciated only if you know what to look for. And why you’re looking for it. Otherwise you’re just stumbling around in the dark.

Think of it like this…Subtlety and nuance are like the wallflowers at a party. Though they might start scratching the pimples on their neck and smell like some weird foreign cheese, dammit, at bottom they can be damn good people if you let them! It just takes the time and training to tease those details out.

Now, I’m not saying you have to sit your ass down and watch “Transformers 2” again and again until you like it. Similarly I don’t expect you to do the same for “The Seventh Seal” either. Personal taste is just that. Personal. No one can dictate that but you. But as a rule of thumb, so that you don’t rob yourselves of some of that hidden richness, you might want to look back. Just for a little peek.

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