Filmic Measures: The Dinner Table Rule

The Dinner Table Rule came about many long years ago when I was writing a review for the forgettable Owen Wilson/Matt Dillon/Kate Hudson comedy You, Me & Dupree. In the closing paragraph of said review I noted that I thought in order for mainstream comedies to work they have to feature characters who you'd feel comfortable enough inviting into your home to sit at your dinner table. "I wouldn't invite Dupree to my table," I wrote. "I don't know if he'd make it or burn it down."

Then, yesterday, when writing about Bad Teacher, I remembered the dinner table rule again. I wouldn't invite Cameron Diaz's Elizabeth to my table either. She's too selfish and self centered. She'd simply take advantage. Now think of the comparison I made for that movie with Bad Santa. I'd be more than happy to have Billy Bob Thorton's Willy over for dinner. There's a lot of things I'd like to ask him about. There is, after all, something kind of morbidly sweet in the affection he feels for the kid who presents him with a wooden pickle covered in his own blood for Christmas.

You see the Dinner Table Rule doesn't necessarily mean that you like the person you'd invite over (although it helps). It means that there has to be enough human depth presented in a character to intrigue you to want to learn more. Thorton isn't a nice guy in Bad Santa, but he's not a bad guy either. He's just a bum who's never had an outlet to give a damn about anything before. He is, in his own special way, still capable of good. I'd like to talk to him about that.

But Dupree was a lose cannon and Matt Dillon's affection for him was inexplicable. He screwed up everything he touched. Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher simply exploited every situation she was faced with for her own personal gain. And if any of those old hags from Sex and the City ever come around my neighbourhood I'm putting the whole house on lock down.

But how fun would it be to sit down with Emma Stone in Easy A or just about every movie she's been in, or Ryan Gosling from Crazy Stupid Love, Steve Carell from Dan in Real Life or even Jason Biggs from American Pie? Would anyone reject the opportunity to sit down for a meal with any character from John Hughes' classic 80s teen comedies? And let me tell you, if Loyld Dobler from Say Anything ever swung by I'm not sure I'd ever let him leave.

The point is that a dinner is personal. It's to be shared with people we known and who interest us. We don't let any random stranger off the street into our house. We invite the people over who we want to share an intimate setting with where we can engage in fun banter as well as get to know each other better. The characters thus, that we would invite over, are the ones who have connected with something in us on the human level. We see some of ourselves in them and they've shared something personal with us through their respective films. We want to know more, maybe even be friends.

That's what mainstream comedy needs. It needs to feel like we are being invited into a world and sharing a comedic situation with someone we could see ourselves liking in real life. We want to see good things happening to good people because we're good people as well. We wouldn't invite over the hopeless cynics, the selfish morons or the guys just trying to get laid. Sure, Billy Bob might eat all the chocolate from the advent calender, try to find the hidden safe and take advantage of my kindness, but he would also not fail to get me the Christmas present that I want, even if it is covered in his own blood.

Filmic Measues: Gateway Movies

Filmic Measures is a glossery of critical terms and rules in which help us define the movies we watch.

I don't really follow so I'm not so sure if it's the case anymore but once upon a time one of the big arguments against the legalization of marijuana is that it is a gateway drug. Once you have become accustomed to the high that smoking pot comes with it opens the mind up to trying other, more stronger highs. Once you've driven 110 on the expressway, why not try 120 as well? And so forth.

In that sense, based on that argument, marijuana is an introduction to drug use: the first step on a path to other things (ed: I am not, of course, making any kind of comment on how much I agree or reject this argument).

There are certain movies that act in the same way: They are the first step into exploring greater, more sophisticated, deeper filmic experiences. Some of them are good in their own right, many of them have achieved a cult status, a couple are unjustly praised by those who are using them as their gateway because they don't know any better and so on. Quality hardly matters in such a case as long as they serve their specific purpose.

Now that I've laid out the foundations let me lead with some examples: The Usual Suspects is a gateway to the classic noir of Double Indemnity or Out of the Past; Pulp Fiction is the gateway to the highly stylised and homage friendly cultural hipness of early Godard like Breathless and Band of Outsiders; Fight Club is the gateway to experimental film-as-state-of-mind works like After Hours, Goodfellas is the gateway to more under appreciated Scorsese classics; Donnie Darko is the gateway to more obscure movies that actually know what they are about; Inception is the gateway to great science fiction like 2001: A Space Odyssey and even the films of David Lynch are a cross between the surrealism of Luis Bunuel mixed with the Hollywood cynicism of Billy Wilder. And so on down the line.

Is it ironic that they are all American movies? Maybe it is. Whenever, after all, we see a bland European movie it feels too "Americanized." But that's not the point I don't think. The vast majority of film goers learn the trade off of American movies. They strike a nice balance between trying to be (sometimes at least) hip and original while also trying to be popular and profitable (Scorcese, Tarantino, Forester, Soderberg and so on all fall into this category).

Some people, of course, will never get beyond this stage. Some are content not pushing the horizons, not being introduced to new forms of expression, culture, history or society. Fair enough. But if they ever choose, there's a whole new arena of things to experience after the baby steps.

Other Filmic Measures:

Chocolate Bar Movies
Where's the Airship Movies
Monday Movies  
The Documentary Rule

Cinematic Measures: Monday Movies

Monday movies are those that don't live up to the prestige of those who made them. They're the minor films by major directors, writers, even actors if you want to think of certain actors as the driving force that makes good movies into great ones. It refers to those movies in an artist's oeuvre that just kind of coast by when we're used to the work of said person brimming with emotion and/or intelligence. They are not the kind of movies that make the world better for existing and make us better for seeing them. Every director or star takes these kinds of days off. Now there's a name for them. The term Monday Movie in general refers to the world famous New York Times crossword puzzle and came into fruition after watching the documentary Wordplay, which, because I am not a New Yorker or a cross word puzzler, informed me that the Times crossword get's harder and harder as the week progresses. Monday being the easiest and the weekend being the hardest. Therefore, a Monday movie is, just as it's name implies, a little too easy, too phoned in, or too narrow to be considered a really great work. It's a film from someone we expect more from. Scoop is a Monday Movie for Woody Allen, The Color of Money from Scorsese, Death Proof for Tarantino and so on. They aren't necessarily bad movies, they just don't give us what we want from a star or filmmaker who usually delivers most of their work on Friday if you see what I mean.

Other Filmic Measures:

The Documentary Rule

Where's The Airship Movies

The Chocolate Bar Movie

Filmic Measures-The Documentary Rule

When Gene Siskel said that a movie needed to be better than having lunch with its stars he, in a way, unconsciously, if not changed film criticism, than changed the way films are consumed. Although the statement was, I assume, meant merely as a means to have a quotable critical tagline for which to evaluate movies, the buried implications are worth unearthing. To think about films this way is to uncover their relationship to the world or art, society, etc, for a film, in order to succeed, must always be better than something else. Is there another art that bears such a burden? Theatre is comparable to other theatre, music is judged based on it's worth next to other music and the success of the writer depends on their ability to convey meaningful thoughts through words. But film is at once art, culture, politics, philosophy, psychology anthropology, history, sociology, what have you on top of all the physical tradesmen it employs simple to make it happen. And although all art is, in some way, influenced by these things, does any but film ever truly embody them? Most arts, after all, usually have something that keeps art separated, for lack of better phrasing, from politics. The play has the luxury of unfolding in real time in front of a crowd in which, if one desired, could be reached out and touched, but it is, aesthetically speaking, built upon the suspension of disbelief. The writer is not so much responsible for the events they depict as they are their interpretation of such, which are only as real as the writer's negotiation of them. The writer has poetry on their side. But, because of this disconnection, to come full circle, theater must only be better than other theatre, the novel only better than other novels, etc. But film, despite the "lie" of editing as Godard would have it, is captured with sound, movement, colour. It's a literal embodiment of whatever has been placed before the camera, no matter how artificial it's construction may have been. Film must not only be art, politics, philosophy, etc., it must be better than art, politics, philosophy, etc. That's why we're always judging film based not only on reality, believability, aesthetic invention and so on, but also the depth of it's thoughts, it's moral centre, it's ability to speak something, anything, be it the banal or the humorous. To paraphrase what Ossie Davis once said: art is a form of power; it has the ability to move us and make us move. Is there, looking back on history, a more powerful art form, in this sense, than film? That's why we create these sayings, these filmic measures because, as Siskel pointed to us, all film must be better than something else. So here's one: A film must be better than a documentary made on the same subject. The difference between fiction and documentary is simple: documentary is fact, fiction is being there (note-I am using fact in an abstract way, not in a literal way as if to suggest that documentaries are not subjective). A fiction film should take you to the heart of it's subject, take you along for its journey, let you understand its hero and their cause, morals, beliefs, whatever it is that makes the experience as personal and intimate as possible. A documentary on the other hand should be, as it's name suggests, a document of something; a chronicling of a belief, a movement, a moment in time. Fiction is built from emotions. Documentary is, in one way or another, built from thesis. That's why a fiction film needs to be better. It needs to, in a sense be more real, because it needs to immerse the viewer. Documentaries impart knowledge and feelings. Fiction does this too, but also takes you for the whole ride. Take a real example: Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is based on the story of Dieter Dengler, the subject of Herzog's documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Although Little Dieter is a special and informative documentary, Rescue Dawn shows us what Little Dieter can only leave in the crevices of our imagination. It makes the story more real by putting us alongside Dengler in that moment. It may not be an exact representation of his story as it actually happened, but when the finished product is as good as Rescue Dawn, who's complaining?  Some films are so boring and so dramatically uninspired that to see a documentary on the same subject would be so much more enlightening, entertaining, informative, whatever. The September Issue must certainly be of more worth than The Devil Wears Prada, no? That's because the documentary tells us something about high class, sophistication, fashion, and so on, where the film simply uses that world in order to fulfill it's own superficial fantasies and fairy tales. You see the difference? Other Filmic Measures: The Chocolate Bar Movie, Where's The Airship Movies

Filmic Measures-Where's the Airship Movies

Back in January, before many people were reading this site, I did a post in preparation of seeing Leap Year about what I deemed Chocolate Bar Movies. I think all critics do this to some extent: make up definitions of critical measures in which to judge movies of a certain genre. Gene Siskel used to fondly quote Howard Hawkes who, when asked what a good movie was, replied "Three great scenes and no bad ones." These little tidbits always come out when thinking about certain films of certain genres and are generally quite helpful in both defining and gauging the success of like-films. Needless to say, from the couple of people who read the Chocolate Bar Movie post, they seemed to like it, so not only am I going to do it again, but I've even given it a name so that it can be like a new series around here, although, as regular readers know, my series' happen, not so much on a regular basis as whenever I feel like I have something to add to them. No matter, let's get to it.

The logic behind Where's The Airship Movies comes from The Incredible Hulk. Let me pull a quote from me original review

Around the midway point of the Incredible Hulk, the not-quite sequel to and not-quite remake of the 2003 Ang Lee Hulk film, General Thaddeus Ross (William Hurt) looks off into the sky after watching the Hulk take out a barrage of foot soldiers, hummers and two high powered cannons, and in close-up asks, “Where’s that airship?” That’s basically the question at the heart of the entire new Hulk adventure: when the soldiers don’t stop him, and the hummers don’t stop him, and the tanks don’t stop him, well, where’s that airship?

And so the term was born. Where's the Airship Movies describe a not new trend in recent action films in which the focus is on throwing as much fire power on the screen as possible to basically no avail. It describes the useless endeavours of the human characters in the Transformers movies, who throw everything they have at the big robots without ever leaving so much as a dent. It refers to metal crashing against metal; rock against rock; bullet against wall; and so on. If the handgun doesn't work let's get out the shotgun, the machine gun, the bazooka, the cannon and so on. It talks about films in which the bad guys throw millions of rounds of ammunition the hero's way and never so much as even come close to hitting him. In all simplicity, it describes films that have no more in mind than blowing up as much real estate as possible. There's nothing to care about in these films in terms of character or story because, their narrative ark always comes down to the same thing in the end: just where the hell is that airship already?