This
week's question: What movie have you spent the most time arguing about?
Josh
Modell
I don't know how often I actually argue about it,
but I often try to convince people—sometimes in the comments section,
even—that Con Air is an incredibly entertaining movie on pretty
much every level. The person whom this argument most works into a lather is A.V.
Club film
editor Scott Tobias, who doesn't see what I see in the movie's glorious
stupidity. I see a director (Simon West) and producer (Jerry Bruckheimer, of
course) who took all the conventions of bad action movies and added a great
cast (Nicolas Cage in the role he was born to play, Steve Buscemi, John Cusack,
John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo, Dave Chappelle) and a sense of
hilarity to the whole thing. Con Air is an action movie that winks if you want it to
and plays it straight if that's what you're after. To me, it's hilarious on
purpose, and also just plain fun, in that blow-'em-up way. If you can defend Face/Off (as some
do), you should certainly give Con Air another shake. Or three.
Tasha
Robinson
For me it seems to be The Big Lebowski, which is odd, since it's
a movie I really don't feel that strongly about; I think it's only fitfully
funny and kind of unsatisfying in its lack of ending, but I don't hate it, I
just don't love it passionately and unconditionally. Which to some of my
friends and many people on the comment boards here, just isn't acceptable,
which puts me in the awkward position of having to strongly defend a lukewarm
position. Thing is, I love and respect the Coen brothers, I just think they've
made far better films on both ends of the comedy/drama spectrum. (Raising
Arizona remains
one of my favorite comedies of all time.) And while it seems like most of the
people I wind up arguing with about Lebowski agree with that statement,
they still can't understand how it is that I don't love it the way they do:
unreservedly, and with lots and lots of quoting.
Steven Hyden
Like Tasha, I've argued most about a movie I don't
particularly care about one way or the other: Brokeback Mountain. As an ardent supporter
of gay rights, I'm all for sympathetic portrayals of gays and lesbians in
mainstream pop culture, and obviously Brokeback Mountain was a landmark in that
regard. But I'd still argue that, as a film, it's a minor work that will be
remembered more fondly by historians than movie fans. It's an
"important" film, but not a great one, and while there's plenty of
smart people who would argue otherwise, I was incredibly annoyed by the
implication made by many of the film's most passionate supporters that if you
didn't love Brokeback Mountain, that meant you didn't like gay people. Actually, I
just don't care for Ang Lee (though my indifference to Hulk does reflect my dislike
of angry green meatheads). That doesn't mean I wanted Crash to win Best Picture in
2005, though I was also peeved by the argument that Brokeback Mountain's simplistic depiction of
homophobia was somehow more nuanced than Crash's "racism is
everywhere!" heavy-handedness. No, I was pulling for Steven Spielberg's Munich, a troubling, thrilling,
morally ambiguous masterpiece made with more pure moviemaking gusto than those
two rather drab movies put together.
Keith Phipps
The
most heated arguments I can recall involved a movie the person on the other end
of the argument had never seen: Basic Instinct. There was a lot of
hysteria around this movie when it came out, and like the Last Temptation Of
Christ protesters, she bought
into it without watching a frame. And that bugged me. Think what you like about
a movie you've actually seen, but don't just let hearsay and the opinions of
others make you take up arms against it. My own feelings about the movie have
changed over the years as I've gone from titillated enjoyment to "Jeez,
maybe it's kind of gross to have all the gay characters seem so monstrous"
to "Well, everyone's a monster in this movie, so what does it
matter?" to a kind of detached appreciation of how the movie fits into its
era. I now think of it as a moment-capturing trash masterpiece. I don't know if
I'm right, but at least I'm working from an informed opinion.
Scott Tobias
There are few modern movies as polarizing as
Michael Haneke's Funny Games, a clinical, relentless home-invasion story
packaged as a high-toned treatise on film violence. Some committed masochists
like myself were wowed by Haneke's provocative ideas and his complete command
over viewers' emotions. Others, shockingly, were none-too-pleased to indulge a
movie that scolded them for their supposed bloodlust by serving up the torture
and mayhem that they blithely accept from Hollywood escapism. Back in 1997, I
had many heated arguments with friends, several of whom were hatching revenge
plots against Haneke for his diabolical manipulations. But then someone had the
perverse idea to commission Haneke to make the exact same movie 10 years
later—true to his stellar form, the experience is no different in the
English language—and those old arguments were reprised again, 372
comments deep on the A.V. Club message boards. And most of those commentors had
never even seen Funny Games: Apparently, just the concept was revolting
enough.
Noel
Murray
Sometimes
I think I'll never stop arguing in favor of A.I., a movie disliked by many
because of a looming distrust of director Steven Spielberg (especially in
contrast to the late Stanley Kubrick, who originated the project), and because
of an ending that many see as a cop-out. But I find A.I. to be Spielberg's most
challenging film: an exploration of the human selfishness revealed in our drive
to create monuments to ourselves, and in our tendency to assert our will with
little regard for the long-term consequences. This has actually been a
recurring idea in Spielberg's films, but in A.I., he and Kubrick extend
the theme of misguided self-absorption to the way we raise children,
programming them via kiddie stories to be cute love machines, ultimately unable
to cope with the real world. Spielberg even implicates himself, referencing
images from Close Encounters and E.T. in unsettling new contexts. As for the ending—which
seems to reward Spielberg's little robot boy by allowing him to spend eternity
with the mother who never wanted him—it strikes me as profoundly
disturbing, not hopeful. Whether Spielberg intended it that way, I couldn't
say. But when the long-neglected Teddy crawls onto the bed with two artificial
constructs who only love each other because they've been told to, it creeped me
the hell out, and struck me as the crowning touch on a masterpiece.
Andy
Battaglia
One movie I often myself arguing for
is Gummo, which was huge for me when it came out, and which holds up
totally still. The rap against that film (and director Harmony Korine in
general) is that it plays like a nihilistic romp in thrall to transgression, no
matter the kind or consequence. But I see a lot of tenderness in it, in the
genuinely loving and/or curious way that Korine photographed so many of his
characters (disabled, creepy, poor) and let them burn onscreen, unmediated.
Complaints about those scenes often make for interesting binds in which the
detractors reveal more about themselves than the scenes they take to task. If
that sounds like good wriggling bait for argument, well, it is.
Sean
O'Neal
I've
long been harassed (even by my own coworkers) for my love/hate relationship
with Oliver Stone, a director who has both inspired and frustrated me to no
end, ever since I first started taking a real interest in film and toying with
the dream of making them myself. I'm especially quick to defend Stone's
overzealous use of "dramatic license" (even when it makes for
dangerous inaccuracies, as with JFK) and his overstylized, glorious messes like Natural
Born Killers
on a purely cinematic level, because to me, an ambitious disaster is always
more interesting. But defending The Doors hews a bit more personal:
A lot of people (again, including my coworkers) fucking hate The Doors, the band, but
even more of them hate The Doors, the movie. "It's pretentious and stilted
and overblown and it makes Jim Morrison out to be this Dionysian demigod when
he was really just a drunken idiot who wrote junior-high-level poetry and
fucked around a lot," they whine, as if Morrison were the only rock star
in history whose myth had outpaced his actual persona or worthwhile artistic
output. But like Oliver Stone, I'm a subscriber to the "print the
legend" theory of history: I don't care that Jim Morrison didn't
actually spout poetic bon mots every time he opened his mouth, or that his
"shaman" faux-mysticism was just a distraction from the fact that the
dude had a serious drug and alcohol problem and that his lyrics didn't actually
mean anything. I like that the film paints him in those big, bold strokes: Nearly
every music biopic does that, you know, but few capture the essence of the
"agreed-upon lie" like The Doors—and with apologies to
Jamie Foxx, none of those feature actors who immerse themselves so completely
in their subject the way Val Kilmer did, to the point where Movie Jim Morrison
has become more real than the actual Jim Morrison. (Much like what Kevin Costner did
for Jim Garrison, come to think of it.) Maybe in 20 years, when somebody
finally makes Bono! and has the U2 singer personally
feeding starving Africans out of his cowboy hat, everybody will cut The
Doors some
slack, but in the meantime, I'm here to defend it to all you plastic soldiers
in a miniature dirt war.
Nathan
Rabin
Oddly
enough, I don't generally get into many arguments with people over movies,
except for Josh, and that's only because his opinions are always wrong. When
relatives tell me how awesome Crash or Patch Adams were, I'm more inclined
to smile and nod politely than launch into a 10-minute monologue about why
they're wrong and those movies suck. Life's too short, to each his own, etc.
I'm generally a fairly conflict-averse person, though on my poorly rated,
mildly disreputable basic-cable movie-review program, Movie Club With John
Ridley, I
found myself getting into shouting matches with one of my fellow panelists on a
regular basis over whether, say, Shakespeare was boring and irrelevant and
Steve McQueen was plain-looking and devoid of charisma. You can probably guess
where I came down in those arguments. If I had to pick one incredibly divisive
film I've argued about extensively, it would be Eyes Wide Shut, which I liked
tremendously and my father, who found it boring, pretentious, and insufficiently
accessible, likes to bring up as evidence that pointy-headed film-criticky
types like myself are out of touch with common folk like himself. Of course, my
dad found the Rob Schneider vehicle The Animal hilarious, so you should
probably take his opinion with the proverbial grain of salt. And mine as well.
Editor's
note: This
question was inspired by comment-boarder "Leppo," who wrote in with this
AVQ&A; question suggestion: "A while back I listened to the NPR piece on The
Onion,
during which they discussed a huge fight which ensued over a piece called
'Ghost Drops In Just to Say Boo.' There were two factions, one for the using
the piece and one against, and evidently there was much philosophical rancor
arising out of the decision. So my question is: 'Is there a film or CD or TV
show or other pop-culture phenomenon that has created a similar note of discord
that shook the mighty walls of the AVC? If so, what was it?'"
We
e-mailed Leppo back with this: "Nothing really stands out, honestly, since we
argue all the time. In fact, so do the Onion guys—that was just
one example they pulled out of the hat to show the kinds of things they argue
about. It's really pretty common for us to disagree on things, and to talk it
out—so common that there's certainly nothing we still hold against each
other or bring up all the time. But this week's question will be a modified
version of yours, because I think some really colorful discussion could come
out of it."
Sure
enough, even answering this version of the question prompted that colorful
discussion, both via e-mail and in person. Here's what some of the above
entries prompted in e-mail:
Scott responds to Steven: "Ugh,
you are so wrong about Brokeback Mountain.
What is keeping you alive? Surely not that red, thumpy thing the rest of us
have."
Josh: "And you're both wrong about Munich, the most overblown piece
of hoo-ha I've ever seen. Cutting between scenes of fucking and stuff blowing
up? Yawn."
Scott: "No.
You're just talking about the very end of the movie. What about the greatness
of the 155 minutes preceding it?"
Steven: "'Cutting between scenes
of fucking and stuff blowing up is the definition of great cinema.' —Jean
Luc Godard"
Josh: "It was like that delicious casserole I once ate. Amazing the
whole way through, and then in the last couple of bites, I discovered bits of
cockroach and what was clearly human excrement. I threw the whole thing up, and vowed never
to eat casserole again. I don't have fond memories of any of that meal. (Which
happened only metaphorically anyway.)"
Scott: "Here's
the problem with that fake metaphor: What you've discovered with the casserole
is that you've been eating cockroach and excrement the whole time, not just at the end of
the meal. I don't know if you can watch Munich and say that everything
before the unfortunate fucking/blowing-stuff-up montage was, in retrospect, all
cockroach-y and excrement-y. A bum ending does not a terrible movie make."
Steven: "Here's an AVQA
question: Would Josh Modell have liked Con Air if Steven Spielberg had directed it?"
Josh: "Answer: Con Air would have been a shitty movie if Steven Spielberg had
directed it."
Steven: "And E.T. would have been ever better if Simon West had made it."
All this amid Josh arguing with Noel about A.I. (largely
over the "goopy" ending) and me arguing with Scott about Funny Games (not doubting Michael
Haneke's filmmaking chops, so much as not respecting his duplicitous,
judgmental intentions), and Scott and Josh and Nathan and I all arguing in
person in the Chicago office about Spielberg and Munich and A.I., even before Noel's
e-mail in favor of it came along. We blame you for getting us started, Leppo.
Can't we all just get along?