Control Eye

Right when the credits started last night, the guy behind me who had been talking through most of movie anyway, booed and then walked out. It was pretty funny, and a bunch of people laughed when he did it. I think that's because a lot of them agreed with the boo. I didn't. I liked Cloverfield. Not my favorite movie by any stretch. Not in my top 20 or anything. But it totally fits into what I look for in a movie. And it annoyed me because I think he didn't give the movie a chance to be itself. Instead, he brought in his own precon idea of what it was supposed to be and got disappointed.

Last week Katie and Steve and Jake wanted to watch a movie, so they were sifting through our DVDs looking for something to borrow. At first, it looked they would grab Garden State, which is a solid and interesting movie with a great soundtrack as you know, and an ending that I think was a very bold choice on Zach Braff's part considering how most writers wouldn't have cared enough about their characters to make that choice. But then I discovered that none of them had seen The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, so I made them take that because it is one of my favorite movies, in the top 5 even. Steve hated it. Katie fell asleep. And Jake was meh. In retrospect, I think Garden State would have been a better choice for that group.

The funny thing is that I like Garden State and Life Aquatic for pretty much the same reasons. The same reasons I like Cloverfield, and Juno, and Naploeon Dynamite, and Stranger Than Fiction - movies that people I know don't care for, but I love.

Movies I love fall into two categories. In the first one, I find the broadest common ground with other people's tastes: movies with stories that resonate with deep parts of me, and I'm not sure exactly why. You might call these Mythic Movies. The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Star Wars, Stranger Than Fiction, even. Break down all the other aspects of those kinds of movies and what you get at the core is a good story. And I love good stories. Ones that feel like they grew out of the author's mind like a jungle, and you get to explore it with them and find the hidden temples with ancient runes inscribed on mysterious circular tablets.

Even though I have an English degree and I'm supposed to like the really artsy kinds of books with substantive vocabulary and complex themes, the books with stories you get lost exploring are the ones I like the most. I like the vocab and the themes and especially the complexity, but the story is what really gets me. Who's my favorite author? Conrad? Joyce? Stafford? Cather? Faulkner? McKay? Nope. Stephen King. You're not going to read a lot of him in college level English classes, I can tell you that from first hand experience. But I love his stories. Who cares if he's popular? The stories flow from that guy. Rolling and mythic.

Maybe it's that with my background of holycrapIreadalotofbooksgrowingup and my choice of degree, I feel like the best medium for telling a really good story is a book, or maybe it's that I feel like movies are over-commercial, something which annoys me because I think film is a potentially deep and expressive art form, but the second category of kinds of movies that I like drags me to a movie theatre a lot quicker a good story. It's hard for me to describe, but the first thing that comes to mind is "movies that are their own.' Or maybe 'Quirky Movies'.

What I think I mean by that is that I like movies that feel fresh, or look at things in new ways. Where the characters, like real people, feel unique and mysterious. I don't know any real people who I have all figured out. Even if I know them really well, I still get a sense of wonder when someone makes a straight-up decision about something. Even Jill. Her choice for swordfish for dinner, or who to invite to a party, or what to wear to impress someone startles me in the best kind of way. Specificity fascinates me. People are intriguing. So in a movie, I want to see characters that I don't already know, who will choose things that I would never choose. And that's also how I like the movies to be themselves. That is, I like movies that feel like real people, that make bold choices about things, that are each unique and quirky and odd in their own way. Movies with personality.

(I'm going to give some quick examples here, so if you haven't seen one of these example movies, you can skip to the next one so you don't get anything spoiled.)

Take Juno, for example. Here's the plot: a teenage girl gets pregnant and then gives the baby up for adoption. Also, she learns that she loves the baby's father and they together at the end. Not much of a plot when you get down to it. But the story is all about who this self-confident Juno girl is and the why she gives up the baby, and to whom, and why she gets together with the father, who looks like he is cool without trying but actually tries very hard. But even more so than the story (which I really like) is that I love who Juno is and the choices she makes and the whys of those choices. She feels unique. So do her parents and her friends. Juno does things unlike any other movie. It's got its own groove. And the actors nail the world to the wall; it's like they're really there.

For another example, I know a lot of people didn't like Napoleon Dynamite. Mostly because it was pop-culture popular before they saw it, and annoying kids totally overquoted it. But the number one complaint I hear is that it was stupid. I don't think it was. Most of the characters were immature (which you might mistake for stupidity), but that doesn't make the movie itself stupid. The movie wasn't about the jokes, although they were funny. It was about the story and the individuality of the place and the personality of the world. Now, I loved the story. I like seeing a guy who was self-absorbed and friendless learn how to not only have friends, but also care more about other people than himself. Great story, like I said. But what I loved even more was the way the directorwriters gave us a world of precise specificity. Where they have skitdances as part of the school president race and there's a suit like that in a thrift store and cheap steak's a dinner staple and where you think to sell boondoggle keychains or do basement glamour shots to earn money for college. Oh, and the specific characterization the actors brought to the table . . . genius. John Gries' arm and shoulder movements alone are worth the price of admission, slash, price of borrowing it from a friend.

It's pretty much the same story for The Life Aquatic. I like the story, how a self-absorbed guy learns how to care about someone other than himself. But the specificity of the world and the characters is why I keep coming back to it. Call it whimsy, call it what you will. I mean, it's a world in which marine life is stop-motion and David Bowie's been translated into Portuguese ,and where there is international film festival recognition for possibly-fabricated oceanic documentaries. Oh, and the interns share a Glock. And all of that against a backdrop of people who make group decisions without communicating. Where hurt runs deep, but nobody talks about it. And people love their own visions of people rather than the people themselves. That's interesting.

While I can't place it nearly as high on my mental spreadsheet of movies I love as the one above, Cloverfield goes so far in its individuality as to make it so I barely even care about the story. The characters aren't that interesting, per se, nothing out of the ordinary, and the plot itself isn't even that unique. But the movie tells the story in so its own way, that I can't help but like it. Harry Knowles says it best when he mentions that in the world of this movie, there's a general who's saying they need to nuke the monster, and a president saying they can't because it'll hurt people, and a press debating what they should do, and a reporter trying to get news out of the locked down areas, and a scientist with a theory of how to kill it. But you don't see any of that. It's a movie about the people running down the street pointing at Godzilla. I guess someone expecting to see something else would be disappointed. But that's pretty much why I see movies: to have my expectations foiled and delighted at the same time.

Heck, I would even count The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix and Star Wars in the list of quirky movies. I mean, of course they are much higher in the Story Quotient Index than Quirk's Table of Value, but they're all still telling their own stories it their own way, like nobody had done before.

(/spoil)

Not that I'm saying you have to like these movies because I think they're good. I don't know that I want to convince anyone to like anything they don't like. I've given up on objectivity. I mean, I used to be a hardcore objectivist. I thought that anything worth knowing could be known just by observation and by stepping further back. And that I could convince anyone of anything I believed by just logic-ing it all out for them. But now I've come to realize that an objective perspective (objective perspective, what's your function?) is impossible. And anyone who says otherwise is selling something. So like I said, my point isn't that you should like these movies if you don't. My point is, and I don't think this is as big a stretch as it seems, I want to quit treating people like notpeople. Because it's really easy to reduce people to concepts. To simmer them down into a stock of my own expectations. Walsh and Keesmaat say that greed is same as lust (and I might add gluttony) all the way down at the bottom because both of them are interested in just feeding an appetite for feeding, ignoring the substance of what you're interacting with and fakesatisfying the appetite. It fell in with my sense of objectivity from way back. The idea that I could see things best. That I had a lens on reality that I could take off. That the movie I came to see was the movie that I would see.

I think I've come a long way towards this. Learning to ride the wave of a relationship, rather than trying to stick to the known buoys that I laid down myself. Learning not to recommend movies that I love to people who wouldn't love them, too (fat chance). Learning to love people for who they are, not who I expected them to be on the way it the theatre. Learning that a pretty woman on a screen's more than a biological pleasure trigger. It's a long road. Take that guy talking and booing at Cloverfield last night. I'd like to just assume he's a jerk and blow him off. But I think he's got to be just as specific as I am. Just as faceted and worth knowing. Just as lonely and happy depending on the day.

I talk to realtors all day long. (Notice what this spelling is not capitalizing.) Most of them know nothing about computers, and less about the most basic tenets of problem solving. That's annoying. A pop-up is blocked and at the top of the screen there's a button that tells them to click there to allow the pop-up and they don't' think to click it. They ask me what a phrase means, and the very best explanation is to simply define the words in the phrase. Temporary means that it's ok to delete it since it wasn't supposed to be around for very long anyway. And that's the kind of person I'm talking about, the kind of person I want to see like I see Juno or Napoleon or SteveZ. Because even if the script I'm reading isn't showing the parts of them I like, the quirky and interesting parts, that doesn't mean they aren't there. And that I need to treat them like that's true.