Newfoundland Boy

What Makes a Great Movie Anyway?

• Episode 32

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Wayne talks about the subjectivity of film and the common habit of not distinguishing the world of the of the movie from the real world

> Wayne's movie list:

https://www.waynejones.ca/movies/movies/

Speaker 1:

Hi, I'm Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, a podcast about me and the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 32. What makes a great movie anyway?

Speaker 1:

Taste and interpretation are notoriously difficult things to nail down, in the sense that by their very nature they're subjective and that's a kind of thing that's judged from one person to the next. Some people think that A is A and some people think that A is actually Z. For example, as an obvious example, a week ago a new president was elected in the United States and there are a lot of people who think that was a great choice and there are a lot of people who think that it was a not-so-great a choice. And unfortunately in the United States it's close to 50-50 on who gets chosen as candidates. But I use that just as a kind of a base example of how interpretation differs among people. It's sort of astounding, in a way, that opinions could be so diverse on that and on other topics, but perhaps that's the nature of what humans are like. The same thing applies in art the thing about interpretation and subjectivity, of course, at least equally so and perhaps even more so. Sometimes things are obvious and sometimes they're not so obvious, and different people will agree on different things. A lot of people will disagree on a lot of things.

Speaker 1:

As for movies, I saw my first movie. I'm 65 now and I saw my first movie probably in about the mid-1960s. I was living in Cornerbrook, newfoundland, canada, same province I'm living in now, though in a different city, and there was a Regent Theatre, which no longer exists, and what I remember is a I don't know if schlocky is the right word a low-quality horror movie from that era called Die, monster, die, and I'm not even sure whether I was allowed to be in that movie, but in any case I re-watched it several years ago and it's fairly I would describe lame, average, that kind of thing, but I certainly remember it. I remember scenes from it that even after all these years well over, well close to 60 years, certainly well over 50 years ago I remember, for example, one thing about a body that was against the window, some kind of monster or something trying to get in, and its face was sort of this rough texture and I remember blood forming at one point on the face, I don't know, because it hit the building or hit the window or whatever it might be, but I still remember those scenes and that's kind of. All I remember is little sort of snapshots from it like that, but that's the first movie or one of the first movies I've ever seen, and certainly the first one I remember having seen.

Speaker 1:

So I was on the only social media that I'm on is Instagram. The only social media that I'm on is Instagram and one of the things that I came up through whatever checking my feed, I suppose was that someone had posted a question about what are lines that characters have said in movies that are so good that they deserve an Oscar in themselves, and there was a very long, lots of comments on that and it reminded me that how different I suppose, my own subjective taste is compared to certainly a lot of the people that were posting there, certainly a lot of the people that were posting there. One of the ones that got posted a lot was this very it was from the movie Gladiator and the character was saying I am Maximus, someone or other, I've got a. He said something in very sort of I would call very written kind of way, where it was obviously a kind of a set speech in a very sort of I would call very written kind of way where it was obviously a kind of a set speech, and a lot of people commented on that as being one of the greatest lines or speeches or set lines that they'd ever heard in a movie and that would deserve its own Oscar. I found it difficult to believe. I remember one guy saying that he was so taken by it that he named one of his dogs Maximus, and it was very powerful and grandiose and admirable in life that someone would be a strong character like that, and I've always thought in cases like that that the idea is.

Speaker 1:

I really think it's a kind of a confusion that people would tend to lines like that. It's a confusion of the two worlds, because you have what's going on in art, in the piece of art, and you have the real world. And it might be true that someone like Maximus or someone who's a great leader may have a great speech and that's something that's quite admirable. But in film and in any piece of art, that's really irrelevant. It's very possible that in a film, for example, someone has something very sad happen to them, or someone is a character who's extremely weak and his reactions are shown in the movie, or anything like that.

Speaker 1:

I remember years and years ago it was a comment that someone made about a prison memoir that had come out, I think, in Canada, about this prisoner. And one of the things, as you probably know, as I know anyway, or I think I know as much as you can glean from anything you watch or believe in anything you watch is that there's a certain society that gets set up in prisons and certain men, in order to be protected, have to give oral sex to the, the leader of the gang sector group of men that are in one end of the, the cell block or whatever it might be. And the comment was you know, everyone sort of focuses on the bravery or the don't-care-edness of the person who says there's no way, I'm going to do that. I think it actually happens in what's that movie called? In? What's that movie called with the Shawshank Redemption, where he refuses and gets beat up, but after that it apparently is that determines the fact that he's not going to be the person that's giving oral sex to the leader.

Speaker 1:

But for this other book, this other Canadian book, what I heard a commentator read was that, yeah, sure, it's very interesting to read about the strong man who stands up to the bully, the leader, the despot, whatever it is. But what about the person who defers and the person who simply says I need to protect myself and even though I'm heterosexual, I will do this in order to protect my safety? How interesting that would be. And I think what sometimes happens is that people get mixed up with again with the real and the art. That would be in the real world. That would be sort of interesting, kind of factually, but in the world of art, in a book that you're doing, that would be something that can be interesting and it says nothing about you as a person to be interested in that. But that would be an interesting thing to observe and to see what the reactions were by the person. Would they get fairly inured to it and find that it's something that they can do quite easily, even though it's, I mean, completely against their nature if they're a heterosexual person?

Speaker 1:

And I've always remembered that after all these years and I thought the same thing when I was looking at this list of you know great lines from movies and you know, yeah, about the confusing of the two worlds, I thought that was really something that's happening there. I remember also this is again from several years ago, if not decades ago where some commentator I don't think it was anyone with a lot of qualifications, frankly, but was talking about the Vin Diesel character in the Fast and Furious franchise, as they call it, and there's one scene apparently where he's I don't know he's wearing a fur coat or some kind of big coat of some kind and he has a kind of a macho power about him and the person was admiring that scene and admiring that character. And I really think the commentator that is, and I really think that's getting things mixed up. That's, yeah, it might be good. It might be pretty cool if there was this character who was dressed in a funny way. It might be pretty cool if there was this character who was dressed in a funny way but it was still enough not to deny his macho-ness, and then he would sort of carry out and do what he wanted to do and that would be very sexy and people would admire his bravery. But again, I think that's getting things mixed up Again. I think that's getting things mixed up. That's not really. That's judging art by the standards of real life and not by the standards or the criteria that are used in art itself.

Speaker 1:

And another one I really remember, and this was from a I would interpret as being a very unqualified commentator on much music or something like that qualified commentator on much music or something like that. And she was saying something like there were these two characters on stage on a movie and you know they were lovers in the movie or a partner, you know, girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever it might be and she was more interested girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever it might be and she was more interested. She was also getting mixed up in or tending to be more interested in what the actors were at in real life. So I remember her saying something like oh, they had such chemistry on screen and I really don't think that's something you can fake. That's something you can fake. And that was, you know, what she was making. The comment was that now she could scoop us all with the information that those two characters on screen were actually having a love affair in real life. And that's not only silly to be doing that with what you see in a movie, but there's no truth in it, there's no necessary cause and effect in it. And it reminds me, as I said. She said you can't fake that and that again reminded me there's a lot of reminding me going on here of a line or an apparent incident.

Speaker 1:

That happened when Hitchcock was filming a movie with Sean Connery in it and one of the actors actresses, as they called them at the time came up to him and said that Sean Connery was so attractive that it would be. How was she to go about pretending that she didn't like him or that she was, you know, disgusted by his actions? And Hitchcock was said to have told her it's called acting my dear, and that's an understanding on Hitchcock's part of how things work. Basically, you have to set your mind in a different way so that you could look at a handsome man and be repulsed by him, or at least pretend to be. It's not as if, oh, handsome man, how can I possibly pretend to be as if, oh, handsome man? How can I possibly pretend to be taken aback by this person? It's really ridiculous when you think about it for more than five seconds. I also recently was looking at a description of a class that a teacher of fiction was putting on, and one of the things that she was saying that she considered the what was it?

Speaker 1:

The truest of truisms in fiction was that the writer has to make it so that the reader cares about the main character or cares about some character in the book or cares about the narrator, and those were the terms cares about, and I was struck by that because I have never felt that way and I think even in obvious terms. I mean, there's lots of great novels and short stories and movies, certainly that I've seen that have absolutely reprehensible characters and I don't care about them in the sense that in fact I don't care about, as it were, any characters in film. I mean, the whole idea is to see the thing as a total thing that's outside of life and caring about them is really irrelevant. But even to take her sort of premise like that, I've watched lots of movies where I don't care about the evil person, the evil main character. But I was suggesting that she use terminology, something like to be curious about or to be interested in. That's what you're interested, that's what the true thing is.

Speaker 1:

There's this very bad man, for example, and you don't care about him in the sense of, in her sense of. You know what happens to him and is he going to make it through, is he going to be reformed and things like that. You're interested in seeing what happens, you're curious about it, and what you're curious about may be pretty hardcore, negative, maybe how a serial killer works, maybe how a butchering serial killer works. It may be how just a man with no morals, a sociopath, works. You can be curious about that without caring about it, in the sense of saying, like, the problem is that if you insist that you care about it, then any movie that has a sociopath as the main character then you're never going to, I guess, like that movie because you can never care about that person, presumably unless you're a sociopath yourself. And I'm not, as far as I know, a sociopath.

Speaker 1:

But I've seen several movies that I could name with sociopaths as their main characters and I've cared about them and be curious about them and wanted to learn sort of how they operate, at least according to how the director could interpret them. So I mean, the criteria I have is that when I watch a movie or when I watch characters in a movie, is that I always call it and maybe this, I don't know I always call it that you should be able to watch a movie and the spell should never be broken, and what I mean by that is that you should never see the actor, you should never hear the writing of the writer, hear the writing of the writer and you should never feel and see what the director is doing. That should all be very, very invisible and what you should see is a kind of un, a depicted story with depicted characters, and all you see is that you don't see someone trying to be that character. That would be extremely poor acting. I've seen a lot of that and you don't see a director, for example, focusing on a certain thing.

Speaker 1:

I've seen lots of very silly things in movies where I don't know someone leaves the car keys behind and then there'll be a three-second shot and perhaps ominous music about and a focus on the car keys, about dun-dun-dun kind of thing, and to remind the listener or to remind the viewer that this is an important thing and there are ways of doing that. That's a lot less, a lot more nuanced, a lot more subtle, a lot more intelligent, I would say as well. And the same thing about the writing. This is something that's very it gets back to what I was talking about earlier. It's the same thing in the writing where, yeah, of course Maximus may have had this, this really great speech, but when I heard it, it it had the, it had the feeling of writing about, it had the feeling of being written, had the feeling about something no one would ever say it had the feeling of being written, had the feeling about something no one would ever say, and perhaps, perhaps I'm just not understanding very possible or not appreciating the, the norms of fantasy, whatever you call it, those movies like that, uh, that you, you do have those norms where you have to sort of accept a certain kind of language or a certain way of saying things, and that's eminently possible. But that's not the way I see film, that's not the way, certainly, I watch it. I just want to give a quick couple of examples of what I'm talking about and then to wrap up and to point you to a list of my favorite movies that you could probably watch and see what, at least I think are the best of the best of movies.

Speaker 1:

There's a great movie that a lot of people maybe not have seen, called Glen Gary Glen Ross, directed by the great David Mamet, scene called glengarry glen ross, directed by the great david memet, and there's a certain scene in that where jack lemon not, frankly, an actor that I'd ever kind of admired in any way in his older stuff this is a glengarry glen ross is a fairly modern movie and you know the old jack lemon movies I could probably take or leave. But there's a scene in it where he gets caught doing a certain thing and, um, his, there's about a minute or two of him pretending to his boss that he has not been caught. And the facial expressions that he uses and the language where he's trying to fake his way out of it and not admit that he's done that is just exquisitely done, just amazing. It looks exactly how a person would do that and I've always been super impressed by that and for God's sake, just those bits in the movie is enough to make it worthwhile for me.

Speaker 1:

There's another movie very much on the opposite end, called man Bites Dog. I think it was made in Belgium and that is an extremely extreme movie, extremely extreme. That is an extremely unfettered movie. It's basically the premise is that there's a documentary crew making a documentary about, about, effectively, a serial killer. But this is not one of these skulking serial killers with a little black hat on. This is just this very obnoxious man who happens to kill people Like he'll kill the postman on a certain day because then he can collect all the checks and it basically reduces serial killing to a very prosaic level. He's crude, he goes out and gets drunk, for example, with the people, and then throws up on the table and completely caught up in himself. There's this short scene where he's trying to kill this older woman and he basically shouts at her loudly and the movie is just really excellent. It basically, you know it has this sort of if I can say it message in it about the crossover between real life and we're making a documentary. Like at what point do we stop doing this? Because here's the guy killing people. How much are we accomplices? And in fact I believe there are scenes where the cameraman is helping drag a body away for the guy. It's a very powerful and very, extremely well-made movie. When I first saw it in Ottawa at the National Library of Canada, there's a very extreme scene in it where people walked out. I remember in this Grand Auditorium at the National Library in Ottawa, people walking out of the movie because this was so bad.

Speaker 1:

And maybe one of the last movies I'll cite is a movie called Safe, and this is a movie that probably not a lot of people have seen. There's a lot of movies with that title, but this is the one with Julianne Moore where she develops this illness. She's the epitome of the middle class, proper woman and she develops this illness just from sort of living in the city. It's like she's sort of hypersensitive and it's a long story and it's worthwhile watching how all this develops. But it develops to the point where she feels she has to leave her family and live on this kind of commune in the desert where you know she's wearing a mask and things like that and eating only the best gruel or whatever it might be, and she can feel sort of safe from the world and you can take whatever message you want from that. I don't usually like to take messages from movies, but the whole thing is depicted in a way that's just extremely, extremely great.

Speaker 1:

You don't see movies that well made very often. Of course. According to my calculations you see them about one in every 100 movies. I've kept calculations since 1996 of ratings of movies and this is this is one of the few that's in the one out of 100. So it's not. I guess the main thing I would say, just sort of wrapping up, is that it's, it's the it's. These are two worlds. Art and real life are two worlds and it's something that you hate in the real world is something that you could something the depiction of which you could really appreciate it and be enthusiastically interested in in the real world, and that's no reflection on your character. You can go safely to the next happy movie and still feel that you're a good person. And that's all for this episode. Thanks for listening and please join me again next Tuesday.

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