{"id":278,"date":"2003-01-13T17:17:01","date_gmt":"2003-01-13T21:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=278"},"modified":"2007-10-07T12:14:40","modified_gmt":"2007-10-07T16:14:40","slug":"cinema-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/?p=278","title":{"rendered":"Cinema Notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kathy Shaidle<\/a>, Colby Cosh<\/a> and The Ambler, Kevin Michael Grace<\/a>, are having at each other about movies. I intrude on this intramural squabble only because they’re all wrong.<\/p>\n

Pulp Fiction<\/span>, to begin with, is the most overrated movie by the most overrated director of the last twenty years. About forty-five minutes into the movie, John Travolta traces a square with his hands, by way of telling Uma Thurman not to be so, or maybe it’s Thurman who makes the gesture to Travolta, I can’t remember. In any case Tarantino paints a square on the screen over it, in the manner of certain awful movies from the early 60s. With this, this ironic and allusive yet utterly obvious and stupid gesture, I lost hope. Royale<\/em> with cheese indeed. By far the best of Pulp Fiction<\/span>‘s three segments is Harvey Keitel’s cleaner, plagiarized in concept and many details from La Femme Nikita<\/span> and in any case easily separable from the rest of the movie. Plagiarism is Tarantino’s one extraordinary talent; the best bit in Reservoir Dogs<\/span>, the crooks naming themselves after colors, is lifted from the excellent little caper movie The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3<\/span>, which Kathy justly praises. Pulp Fiction’s<\/span> chronology is shuffled to disguise its conventional plot of boy gets girl, fixes enemies, and rides off into sunset. If the movie had been filmed in time it would be more immediately obvious what a banal exercise it really is. <\/p>\n

2001<\/span> is aptly described by its chief defender, Kevin Grace, as a tone poem, and by tone-poem standards it is watchable and snappily paced. Yes, the bone-throwing and lip-reading are cool, and given a choice to sit through one of Kubrick’s movies, I will take 2001<\/span> over Barry Lyndon<\/span>, and definitely over Eyes Wide Shut<\/span>.<\/p>\n

It baffles me that some critics list Some Like It Hot<\/span> as the funniest comedy ever made, and I suspect that its subject matter inflates its reputation. A far funnier Wilder-Monroe movie is The Seven-Year Itch<\/span>, which more than any other single movie made Monroe Monroe<\/em> and is remembered now only for the scene in which her dress blows up as she stands over the subway grate. Her combination of sex and ingenuousness is never better captured than here, when she looks directly into the camera and says, “He was like the Creature from the Black Lagoon!” The Seven-Year Itch<\/span> is a perfectly sunny and cheerful movie about adultery. Such movies, about anything, were rare then and are extinct now.<\/p>\n

Miracle from Morgan’s Creek<\/span> is the wrong relatively obscure Preston Sturges vehicle to revive; try Unfaithfully Yours<\/span> instead — especially the scene where Rex Harrison wrestles with a sort of 1940s equivalent of a CD burner, and loses. I laugh harder at this than anything else in the history of the movies.<\/p>\n

That scene in Manhattan<\/span> where Woody Allen (no, not his character; personally<\/em>) recites the things that make life worth living into a tape recorder: “Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, the lox at Zabar’s, Louis Armstrong’s ‘Potato Head Blues’…” — what’s not to hate? I mean, get a blog if you have to do that sort of thing. Like Kathy, I prefer Crimes and Misdemeanors<\/span>: the skewering of the Alan Alda character is even more delightful because one gets the distinct impression that Alan Alda, in life, is actually like that. But I would trade both movies, plus Annie Hall<\/span>, for the first half of Love and Death<\/span>, distinguished for, among other things, containing not only the best but the two best<\/em> village idiot jokes ever.<\/p>\n

Thumbs-up, thumbs-down, this is fun. Stay tuned for other thought-substitutes, coming soon!<\/p>\n

(Update:<\/b> AC Douglas<\/a> posts his top movies of 50 years hence. I have enough trouble just figuring out what I like.)<\/p>\n

(Another Update:<\/b> What I call plagiarism Colby Cosh calls research<\/a>. Here’s a guy who can refer to Rashomon<\/span> and write “acquaintance with the grammar of one’s art,” when the art is movie-making, in a single sentence, calling me<\/em> a snob. I like it.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kathy Shaidle, Colby Cosh and The Ambler, Kevin Michael Grace, are having at each other about movies. I intrude on this intramural squabble only because they’re all wrong. Pulp Fiction, to begin with, is the most overrated movie by the most overrated director of the last twenty years. About forty-five minutes into the movie, John […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-11-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godofthemachine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}