This
week's question: What movie have you spent the most time arguing about?
Josh
Modell
I don't know how often I actually argue about it,
but I often try to convince people—sometimes in the comments section,
even—that Con Air is an incredibly entertaining movie on pretty
much every level. The person whom this argument most works into a lather is A.V.
Club film
editor Scott Tobias, who doesn't see what I see in the movie's glorious
stupidity. I see a director (Simon West) and producer (Jerry Bruckheimer, of
course) who took all the conventions of bad action movies and added a great
cast (Nicolas Cage in the role he was born to play, Steve Buscemi, John Cusack,
John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Danny Trejo, Dave Chappelle) and a sense of
hilarity to the whole thing. Con Air is an action movie that winks if you want it to
and plays it straight if that's what you're after. To me, it's hilarious on
purpose, and also just plain fun, in that blow-'em-up way. If you can defend Face/Off (as some
do), you should certainly give Con Air another shake. Or three.
Tasha
Robinson
For me it seems to be The Big Lebowski, which is odd, since it's
a movie I really don't feel that strongly about; I think it's only fitfully
funny and kind of unsatisfying in its lack of ending, but I don't hate it, I
just don't love it passionately and unconditionally. Which to some of my
friends and many people on the comment boards here, just isn't acceptable,
which puts me in the awkward position of having to strongly defend a lukewarm
position. Thing is, I love and respect the Coen brothers, I just think they've
made far better films on both ends of the comedy/drama spectrum. (Raising
Arizona remains
one of my favorite comedies of all time.) And while it seems like most of the
people I wind up arguing with about Lebowski agree with that statement,
they still can't understand how it is that I don't love it the way they do:
unreservedly, and with lots and lots of quoting.
Steven Hyden
Like Tasha, I've argued most about a movie I don't
particularly care about one way or the other: Brokeback Mountain. As an ardent supporter
of gay rights, I'm all for sympathetic portrayals of gays and lesbians in
mainstream pop culture, and obviously Brokeback Mountain was a landmark in that
regard. But I'd still argue that, as a film, it's a minor work that will be
remembered more fondly by historians than movie fans. It's an
"important" film, but not a great one, and while there's plenty of
smart people who would argue otherwise, I was incredibly annoyed by the
implication made by many of the film's most passionate supporters that if you
didn't love Brokeback Mountain, that meant you didn't like gay people. Actually, I
just don't care for Ang Lee (though my indifference to Hulk does reflect my dislike
of angry green meatheads). That doesn't mean I wanted Crash to win Best Picture in
2005, though I was also peeved by the argument that Brokeback Mountain's simplistic depiction of
homophobia was somehow more nuanced than Crash's "racism is
everywhere!" heavy-handedness. No, I was pulling for Steven Spielberg's Munich, a troubling, thrilling,
morally ambiguous masterpiece made with more pure moviemaking gusto than those
two rather drab movies put together.
Keith Phipps
The
most heated arguments I can recall involved a movie the person on the other end
of the argument had never seen: Basic Instinct. There was a lot of
hysteria around this movie when it came out, and like the Last Temptation Of
Christ protesters, she bought
into it without watching a frame. And that bugged me. Think what you like about
a movie you've actually seen, but don't just let hearsay and the opinions of
others make you take up arms against it. My own feelings about the movie have
changed over the years as I've gone from titillated enjoyment to "Jeez,
maybe it's kind of gross to have all the gay characters seem so monstrous"
to "Well, everyone's a monster in this movie, so what does it
matter?" to a kind of detached appreciation of how the movie fits into its
era. I now think of it as a moment-capturing trash masterpiece. I don't know if
I'm right, but at least I'm working from an informed opinion.
Scott Tobias
There are few modern movies as polarizing as
Michael Haneke's Funny Games, a clinical, relentless home-invasion story
packaged as a high-toned treatise on film violence. Some committed masochists
like myself were wowed by Haneke's provocative ideas and his complete command
over viewers' emotions. Others, shockingly, were none-too-pleased to indulge a
movie that scolded them for their supposed bloodlust by serving up the torture
and mayhem that they blithely accept from Hollywood escapism. Back in 1997, I
had many heated arguments with friends, several of whom were hatching revenge
plots against Haneke for his diabolical manipulations. But then someone had the
perverse idea to commission Haneke to make the exact same movie 10 years
later—true to his stellar form, the experience is no different in the
English language—and those old arguments were reprised again, 372
comments deep on the A.V. Club message boards. And most of those commentors had
never even seen Funny Games: Apparently, just the concept was revolting
enough.
Noel
Murray
Sometimes
I think I'll never stop arguing in favor of A.I., a movie disliked by many
because of a looming distrust of director Steven Spielberg (especially in
contrast to the late Stanley Kubrick, who originated the project), and because
of an ending that many see as a cop-out. But I find A.I. to be Spielberg's most
challenging film: an exploration of the human selfishness revealed in our drive
to create monuments to ourselves, and in our tendency to assert our will with
little regard for the long-term consequences. This has actually been a
recurring idea in Spielberg's films, but in A.I., he and Kubrick extend
the theme of misguided self-absorption to the way we raise children,
programming them via kiddie stories to be cute love machines, ultimately unable
to cope with the real world. Spielberg even implicates himself, referencing
images from Close Encounters and E.T. in unsettling new contexts. As for the ending—which
seems to reward Spielberg's little robot boy by allowing him to spend eternity
with the mother who never wanted him—it strikes me as profoundly
disturbing, not hopeful. Whether Spielberg intended it that way, I couldn't
say. But when the long-neglected Teddy crawls onto the bed with two artificial
constructs who only love each other because they've been told to, it creeped me
the hell out, and struck me as the crowning touch on a masterpiece.
Andy
Battaglia
One movie I often myself arguing for
is Gummo, which was huge for me when it came out, and which holds up
totally still. The rap against that film (and director Harmony Korine in
general) is that it plays like a nihilistic romp in thrall to transgression, no
matter the kind or consequence. But I see a lot of tenderness in it, in the
genuinely loving and/or curious way that Korine photographed so many of his
characters (disabled, creepy, poor) and let them burn onscreen, unmediated.
Complaints about those scenes often make for interesting binds in which the
detractors reveal more about themselves than the scenes they take to task. If
that sounds like good wriggling bait for argument, well, it is.
Sean
O'Neal
I've
long been harassed (even by my own coworkers) for my love/hate relationship
with Oliver Stone, a director who has both inspired and frustrated me to no
end, ever since I first started taking a real interest in film and toying with
the dream of making them myself. I'm especially quick to defend Stone's
overzealous use of "dramatic license" (even when it makes for
dangerous inaccuracies, as with JFK) and his overstylized, glorious messes like Natural
Born Killers
on a purely cinematic level, because to me, an ambitious disaster is always
more interesting. But defending The Doors hews a bit more personal:
A lot of people (again, including my coworkers) fucking hate The Doors, the band, but
even more of them hate The Doors, the movie. "It's pretentious and stilted
and overblown and it makes Jim Morrison out to be this Dionysian demigod when
he was really just a drunken idiot who wrote junior-high-level poetry and
fucked around a lot," they whine, as if Morrison were the only rock star
in history whose myth had outpaced his actual persona or worthwhile artistic
output. But like Oliver Stone, I'm a subscriber to the "print the
legend" theory of history: I don't care that Jim Morrison didn't
actually spout poetic bon mots every time he opened his mouth, or that his
"shaman" faux-mysticism was just a distraction from the fact that the
dude had a serious drug and alcohol problem and that his lyrics didn't actually
mean anything. I like that the film paints him in those big, bold strokes: Nearly
every music biopic does that, you know, but few capture the essence of the
"agreed-upon lie" like The Doors—and with apologies to
Jamie Foxx, none of those feature actors who immerse themselves so completely
in their subject the way Val Kilmer did, to the point where Movie Jim Morrison
has become more real than the actual Jim Morrison. (Much like what Kevin Costner did
for Jim Garrison, come to think of it.) Maybe in 20 years, when somebody
finally makes Bono! and has the U2 singer personally
feeding starving Africans out of his cowboy hat, everybody will cut The
Doors some
slack, but in the meantime, I'm here to defend it to all you plastic soldiers
in a miniature dirt war.