Sunday, November 26, 2006

WHAT I CAN’T STAND

Recently somebody wrote into the “Ask a Critic” feature in Entertainment Weekly with the question “What subject matter can’t you stand in movies?” – in other words, what makes a great movie so incredibly painful to sit through that you don’t want to watch the movie again? The EW critic answered “anything with needles.” That would rule out any junkie movies. I have no problem with needles, as you all know.

For me, there is a triumvirate of painful scenarios. Here they are, in no particular order:



ANIMAL CRUELTY
This is an obvious one. I have to avert my eyes anytime an animal is hurt or killed onscreen – it makes me panic. I’m not talking about fake animal violence, where I’m able to keep repeating, “the ASPCA was supervising, no one was hurt, that’s a fake doggie!” One example of that is American Psycho.
However, some of my favorite movies contain scenes of animals being slaughtered: Apocalypse Now and Cyclo both come to mind. I can’t handle this, and still look away every time I know the throat-slashing is about to occur.



FINGER-MANGLING
I hate watching people’s fingers being cut off. It sends a chill to the very core of my being. I would rather watch someone’s leg being crushed with a sledgehammer than someone getting a paper cut underneath their fingernail. The other night I had this bizarre image of razorblades under my fingernails; I couldn’t get it out of my head and it tortured me for hours. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s just how it is. To me, a leg stump is less gross than someone who’s missing the tip of one finger. This general category also includes fingernails getting pulled off. Some great movies which fall into this category are The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Machinist, and the grand-prize winner: The Piano.



WHEN PEOPLE ARE ABOUT TO DIE AND TOTALLY LOSE THEIR SHIT
In a lot of movies, a person is about to be executed, or murdered, or whatever, and they stand there stoically, being brave and noble before the end. I find it pretty easy to sit through scenes like this. In a lot of other (probably more believable) movies, a person is about to be killed, and totally flips out. This is my cue to panic. Plenty of great movies contain these delightful scenes, including The Wind That Shakes the Barley (again), and the mother of all such movies, Dancer in the Dark.

I’ll add others as I remember them. There are so many other movies that fall into these categories, but I honestly feel like I’ve mentally blocked most of them out.

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Lessons from Season One of the X-Files



Well, it’s taken me a little longer than I thought it would to watch and dissect the X-Files season by season. That might be due to the fact that I once again have to work for a living… talk about cramping my style… Anyway, here is what I learned from season one when I watched with a critical eye (at least, as critical as I can be).

1. Scully is not a bitch (yet). Don’t get me wrong, I almost always love Scully, but I forgot that in the first season she was actually pretty flexible and open-minded. She goes along with Mulder’s conspiracy theories almost all the time and rarely butts heads with him. She smiles at least 15 times (not counting smirks and insincere smiles, by the way). She only doubts Mulder’s conclusions outright on five occasions.
2. Scully and Mulder are due for some major worker’s comp already – Scully is knocked down and/or unconscious on five occasions and gets to stay in a quarantined hospital ward once. Mulder requires medical attention on three occasions (including the aforementioned quarantine and one gunshot wound), gets beaten up once, and is taken hostage and fried by the gas escaping the body of an alien-human hybrid.
3. No one is too trigger-happy yet. Mulder and Scully each kill only one person (Mulder kills two, if you count Tooms as a person). At least 12 people have been killed for “The Truth” by others at this point.

4. On the fashion front, Scully suffers egregiously while Mulder escapes relatively unscathed. Yeah, the early 90s were basically still the 80s, and this season proves that fact over and over again. Scully is forced to trudge around in clothes at least two sizes too large for her; she swims in shapeless trenchcoats with linebacker-style shoulderpads. The color palette of her clothing ranges from bad to worse – some examples:
A mud brown skirt suit paired with white tights
A lacy Victorian schoolmarm shirt, worn on a “date”
A pink collarless tee under a trenchcoat, with accompanying duckbutt hairstyle
Another mud brown ensemble with diagonal navy stripes
It goes on and on…
Mulder looks snazzy, even in his not-exactly-fitted suits. His hair sometimes teeters dangerously close to being feathered, but mainly looks like a cute ‘do in the style of Chris Isaak. Time has been much kinder to men’s early 90s fashion, apparently.
5. In case you care, aliens and/or spacecraft are seen a total of 7 times, and Mulder and Scully commit a total of 7 illegal break-and-enters. Evidence is also lost forever a total of 7 times. Wait a second… I think this is a case for Mulder and Scully…
6. The X-Files are shut down forever (but not really) twice.
I think that’s about all the insight I have at this moment. Yet to come: Season Two – the plot thickens. If my memory serves me, Scully’s clothes improve slightly and Mulder’s hair worsens.