Star Wars
For each entry I've written, I've had to look up the character names. I don't think movies lend themselves easily to memorable character names. I'll remember the star and I'll remember the role, but the name of the character seems subordinate and often looks a bit tinny when I do look it up. (C.C. Baxter ... who?) In literature, the name is the character's chief represenation (rather than her face). In television, we spend so much time with the characters, who are our hooks to return into the work.
Star Wars is the only movie I can think of where I can reliably come up with the name of every main character. I'm not counting that fishy-looking admiral guy.
Of course, if I grew up with a set of action figures from
The Apartment, I might feel differently.
Cronos
Guillermo del Toro is a film critic's horrormeister, ladling Ideas into his movies alongside his monsters. I've never been much of a horror fan, so I like his stuff well enough, but I can see where horror fans might take it or leave it.
I've seen three of his movies.
The Devil's Backbone seemed as if it could have used a little more schlock; it was likable but hasn't stuck with me too deeply.
Hellboy kicked ass, and had high enough stakes to be satisfying (although the ass-kicking might have been sufficient).
Cronos was a weird little movie: kindly grandfather Jesus Gris finds a clockwork scarab in an old statue that, wound up, releases hooks that pierce his flesh and turn him slowly into a vampire, prolonging his life, releasing a craving for blood-tasty-blood, and freaking out his 8-year-old granddaughter, although not so much that she stops hanging out with him once his skin falls off and he comes back from the dead.
The takeaway from the movie is the climactic moment, when Gris has killed two antagonists, and, having dined on their blood, stares at his granddaughter Aurora, who has stood by his side through his whole descent. His eyes chill, he hovers on the brink of choosing monstrousness and getting his snack on with poor morsel Aurora. She stares into his eyes long enough to awaken the human Jesus Gris (resurrected! but not in black and white moral clarity!), who smashes the clockwork and takes to bed, feeling immortality drain away.
Hellboy recapitulates this exact moment, as Ron Perlman's friendly neighborhood satan-spawn (a much better use than as Thuggish Nephew in Cronos) is faced with the option of unlimited power, and rejects it. For Del Toro, monstrousness is not an inflexible state of being, but a very stark moral choice. (Stephanie Zacharek brought out the moral universe of Hellboy in her
Salon review.) I'll have to ask Minky how this plays into Frankenstein, which she read. I like this gloss on horror better than that of
The Sixth Sense, which reduces horror to overflow from therapy: ghosts aren't trying to scare you, they just have unresolved issues.
The Days of Wine and Roses
Alcoholism is a deeply boring subject for a movie. It's not permitted to act as a metaphor, because its meaning must be militated: it is not a personal failing, it is a disease; it is not the effect of society's corruption, it is a disease. In
The Apartment, Jack Lemmon plays a similar character: C.C. Baxter is a decent guy who wants to get along in the gray-flannel business world, but his decency winds up monkey-wrenching the corrupt scheme in which he finds himself, namely allowing execs to use his apartment for assignations with Shirley MacLaine, disposable to them but bright light to Baxter. In
The Days of Wine and Roses, Lemmon's Joe Clay's decency is even further up front, but the conflicts that puts him in (he refuses to pander for a client) is easily resolved; he gets canned for drinking. Lee Remick dissolves into a boozy puddle fearlessly, and the movie has that crisp and sharply contrasted high-modern 60s cinematography, but there's no real story to tell except the AA narrative. (Jack Klugman is a very natty sponsor).
At first I thought that the movie was pre-AA, because no one mentions "getting help" to Joe until well into the second half of the movie, after he's gone through the D.T.'s in a straitjacket. But the AA story is the third act, and the movie is set neither before nor after AA (perhaps I should compare
28 Days?) but rather at the moment of its introduction. I have no idea how long AA had been around for, but the ideal audience seems to be one for whom AA would be new. Unfortunately, by giving itself the task of explaining AA, The Days of Wine and Roses becomes a glorified
health film.
