Category Archives: Movies As Common Literature

Something has to be our common literature–if we still have one. It should have something deep, something shallow, a degree of permanence, and a common mythology.

Speaking of The Incredible Hulk

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I love cameos, but they raise an interesting question.  When you suddenly see, and recognize, Lou Ferrigno, you are participating in the movie, not as pure story, but as part of a continuum with other movies on the same topic, as well as the genre as a whole.  When Stan Lee shows up, or when a pizza parlor is called “Stanley’s”, we are not immersed in the movie as movie, but watching it and enjoying it’s connection to the Marvel Universe.

The reality level of the movie is not set at the story level, but at an understanding of the movie in context of other tellings of the same tale.

The Incredible Hulk: Best Movie Line so Far this Summer

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I was ready for this one to fail. The premise is kind of dated, the raging Id as superhero has been done in many forms, plus there’s the stretchy pants problem. Also, I never made it through Ang Lee’s version, even on cable, for free. But it was Saturday afternoon and I needed a little something. I like action movies, and I can enjoy a bad movie for its badness. After all, “Hulk Smash” always works.

Surprisingly, this was really good. Among the things that worked:

  • No tortured origin story. Everybody knows it was gamma rays. (yes, it makes no sense, but what the heck)
  • Stretchy pants. Bruce Banner is always buying pants that can stretch way out. One scene, where he checks the size of a potential purchase against a nearby ass, is priceless.
  • The love story. Once again, no long intro, it’s just given. But Liv Tyler and Ed Norton produce more chemistry than you’d think. I generally don’t like love stories.
  • The action. Hulk is about unstoppable forces smashing into normally immovable objects. They move. It works. There’s a good escalation of conflict culminating in an all-out battle that delivers.
  • But the thing that works most, that starts off the move on the right foot, is the re-working of the most classic Hulk line: “Don’t make me angry, you won’t like me when I’m angry!” Except, there are translation problems. The result is hilarious.

Things We Shouldn’t Do. But We Do

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Plato (and/or Socrates) was the first person to describe a movie theater, yet he couldn’t wrap his mind around fictional stories.  Not only do they lie, they don’t hold up high standards for people to live up to.  Fortunately Aristotle came along and pointed out that we don’t just need role models, we need catharsis.  Stories take us through experiences that might be we’d rather not have in reality, but whose lessons and emotions help us grow into stronger, more complex creatures.

These thoughts run through my mind when I think about the debate over whether people should smoke in movies.  Or drink.  Few characters are presented as absolute icons of goodness anymore, and real people smoke and drink.  I do get tired when drinks are used as shorthand for relaxation, celebration, or moral decay, but there are so many other elements that are used as shorthand for this and that.  If you want to do real stories about real people, or even really fake stagey caricatures with real characteristics, you can’t rule out smoking.  Besides, even as an ex-smoker, I was pretty excited by the scene described by Rob Lowe in Thank You for Smoking.  You know the one.

But there are other things that are bad, things we shouldn’t do, but everyone absolutely does anyway.  Should we show people doing these things on film?  Would that be an acknowledgment that these things are done?  Possibly even an approval of sorts?  The top five things we shouldn’t do, but do, include:

  • Eating off the floor (5 seconds or not)
  • Sticking Q-tips in our ears
  • Spraying sunblock and bugspray out our faces, while holding our eyes closed
  • Picking or scratching at sunburns and bug-bites
  • Eating raw hotdogs

The Rundown

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Speaking of movies with action, guys with whips, and an ancient artifact, I watched The Rundown again the other night.  Originally, I told people that it wasn’t a great movie, but I liked it.  But after seeing Indiana Jones fall apart with a huge budget because of an utter lack of story, I appreciate more the simple focus of Beck (the Rock) trying to bring Travis (Seann William Scott) home to his father.  The story never forgets that that is Beck’s primary motivation, even though he keeps getting pulled into other struggles.  In Crystal Skull, on the other hand, we’re not sure why Indy is doing what he’s doing as he bounces from one action set-piece to the next.  Duane Johnson’s Beck is an interesting character who could be either self-serving or heroic and you’re never sure which way he’ll go.  Sort of like Han Solo.  Harrison Ford’s Indy, on the other hand, has been thoroughly defined and explained.  He’ll do the right thing, as soon as he thinks of it.  And he’s afraid of snakes.  We get that.  All of the character development was done in the first and third movies, the only thing left here is to have him walk through his paces. 
    Then there’s Christopher Walken.  In any role, he’s fun to watch.  Even Domino was fun when Christopher Walken was in it.  This time, he’s the bad guy, and he’s perfect.  Where Cate Blanchett played a generic, slightly threatening Ukrainian bitch, Walken is the ultimate plantation-style overseer.  He has charm, but he’s ruthless.  Inside, he thinks he’s doing the right thing.  Then there’s the sidekick.  Indiana Jones has to develop tension with a punk biker, played moderately by Shia LaBouf.  But the two are neither much alike, nor are they natural antagonists.  Really, LaBouf serves mostly as an audience for the greatness of Indiana Jones.  Seann William Scott is a perfect foil for the Rock.  He’s annoying, funny, and obviously in trouble.  The plot puts them at odds, and both play that very well.
    I had thought of The Rundown as one of those movies that I really like, but understand that they aren’t that good.  Like Hitman, Resident Evil, and Blade Trinity.  But now I’ve changed my mind.  This is a genuinely really good movie.

Indiana Jones

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Let’s start with Indiana Jones.

I love Indiana Jones, and the two good movies are among my all-time favorites.  Then there are the other two.  I have been arguing with my roommate over which is bad and which is worse.  She’s right about a lot of things, and claims to be right about everything. But but she is wrong about NASA, in general, and probably about Nuclear Power, and she is definitely wrong about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
It’s not very good, but she claims it is worse than Temple of Doom.  Empirically this can’t be the case, because Temple of Doom had:

  • An opening that consisted of a musical number
  • A hysterical female “romantic interest” who had no possible interest for any man, let alone a man as cool as Indiana Jones
  • An insipid twelve-year-old sidekick

She argues that Temple of Doom at least didn’t have stupid aliens who looked a bit like the ones in Close Encounters.  Which is true, but bad elements that start at the beginning of a movie outweigh bad elements that only pop to ruin the ending of a movie that actually had already ground to a halt.  So she’s wrong.

It may not be fair to look at Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as a movie.  It really isn’t.  It’s more like a Spielberg/Lucas tribute show, where they recreate scenes movies past.  We get a lot of Close Encounters, a hint of 1941, a touch of ET, and monkeys that act like Ewoks.  There’s even a shot that looks a lot like the T-Rex plowing through the jungle in Jurassic Park.  Some scenes appear more because Spielberg wanted to shoot them than because they had anything to do with the story, including a completely gratuitous take on The Day After.

Indiana Jones has always  teetered on the line between adventure and slapstick.  And when that balance holds, you get great scenes, such as the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or the mansion scene in The Last Crusade with Indy and his father tied in chairs, and his father dropping the lighter on the rug.  But if the balance slips, and anything goes, then nothing is funny and nothing is believable any more.  That balance fell apart from the first moment of Temple of Doom.  In Crystal Skull, the balance lasts up until Indy climbs into a refrigerator.