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I love being able to go watch movies on the weekends again, guys. I've seen more movies in the past few weeks than I've seen since March.
I especially love actually knowing where all the arthouse theaters are, so I can go see all the tiny, obscure pictures that no one's ever heard of and summarily recommend them to you. It makes me feel sophisticated.
I went to see The Fall with my uncle and brother today, and woah. I haven't cried that hard at the movies in years. I needed to grab napkins from my brother and everything.
This is another movie that I really must insist that you see if you get the chance; aside from being bittersweet and painful in the best way, it's also visually breathtaking, all stunning sets and saturated colors and elaborate costumes and surreal vistas. It's about a very young girl in a 1920's hospital who strikes up a friendship, of sorts, with an injured stuntman who tells her stories every evening. But the girl's never seen a motion picture before, so she visualizes the stories in a unique and vivid way. It's heartbreaking and beautiful, and Lee Pace plays the stuntman absolutely pitch-perfect. He's also terribly cute but shh, I'm not supposed to think such thoughts about a Serious Film. Make sure to catch it when it comes out on DVD, but see it in theaters if you can; a movie this lush demands a big screen.
Speaking of movies, I get my first reviews every Friday from the Post, and this Friday's reviews included "Stuck" and "The Mother of Tears", two high-end horror films that I had no intention of seeing. But I like to read reviews, even if I've never seen and never will see the movies in question, so I read the two-part review anyway.
And I have to say: Bless you, Ann Hornaday.
"When you work as a movie critic, you learn very quickly which filmmakers are unassailable: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and anyone associated with the French New Wave are geniuses. Period. They're bulletproof, and to take a shot at them, whether by way of their body of work or an individual film, is to invite not just immediate derision but excommunication from the ranks of Approved Cinematic Authorities.
There's another version of this intellectual lockstep, one tier down from universally acknowledged great masters, having to do with cult films by directors that nobody has ever heard of, other than those benighted souls who have spent their every waking hour in a sticky-floored repertory house...
Two films that coincidentally open today at the E Street Cinema come from directors with creditable standing in the annals of film snobbery: Stuart Gordon, whose film "Stuck" stars Mena Suvari and Stephen Rea, and Dario Argento, whose "Mother of Tears" completes a trilogy he began in 1977...both filmmakers traffic in the kind of graphic horror made profitable by such franchises as "Saw" and "Hostel", but enjoy a place of pride, along with zombie auteur George A. Romero, as originators of the cult-horror form.
Both Gordon and especially Argento possess such cinematic cred, any self-respecting critic should greet the arrival of "Stuck" and "Mother of Tears" with the requisite phrases about dark humor, recurring visual tropes, and pulp sensibilities. The tone should be ironic and supremely knowing: If, dear reader, you can't hang with the kind of graphic gore, sadistic violence, protracted torure and perverse sexist subtext that run through these movies, you're obviously not in on the joke. You're a philistine. File under "Square, hopeless"...
So, dear readers, in front of you and the movie gods and everybody, I'm here to say: I don't get it. I don't get why, in "Mother of Tears", I'm supposed to find some kind of taboo thrill in watching a young woman being strangled by her own intestine. I don't get that Argento can write some of the most wooden dialogue and elicit some of the most risible performances to be seen in a movie (think "The Da Vinci Code" with an even more cockamamie mythology), but still get credit as some kind of auteur because of the ingenious weapon he creates to impale two eyeballs at once. I don't get why, in the course of a 40-year career, Argento can find anything new in a shot of a slit throat and rivulets of burbling, viscious blood. (To the inevitable defense that Argento's work is simply camp, I would say that anything this aggressively hateful forfeits the right to be called camp. As Susan Sontag rightly observed, even camp at its most outlandish reveals some truth about the human condition.)...
...There are things to value in "Stuck", including the lead and supporting performances and Gordon's taut thriller-like pacing. But, like "Mother of Tears", I don't get it...I don't get what's "ingeniously nasty" about watching people suffer and die. I don't get the "gonzo artistry" of murdering a woman by way of symbolic rape with a sword. I don't get why that's entertaining, edifying, endorsed by the cinematic canon or even remotely okay.
I guess there are some jokes you can never be in on. For now, look me up...under "Philistine", there I'll be. Cross-referenced with "Square, hopeless"."
Speaking as someone else who doesn't get it and never has, I thank you, Ms. Hornaday, for putting my objections with this whole genre of film into more articulate and informed words than I ever could. Thank you for speaking for those of us who don't care what "artistic geniuses" the cult-horror directors are because the movies they make are still repulsive. I'm happy to be a fellow philistine.
Sorry for the cut-and-paste; the Post page got wonky when I tried to just direct-link. But there's really not much I can add to that.
To bed.