The Only Winning Move

For anyone worried that the annoying Avatar might actually be the highest-grossing film of all time, as is sometimes claimed, fear not - it’s not even in the top twenty. A least, not according to NC State Economics students’ homework research. As their professor neatly sums it up, the winners are “Disney and the 70s.”

Here’s Roger Ebert on Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, which I recently saw:

It’s just that a film of such big themes should be about more than the fate of a few people; while at the end I didn’t yearn for spectacular special effects, I did wish for spectacular information–something awesome, not just a fade to white.

As is often the case with Roger Ebert, I think he’s hit on the essence of the matter while still subtly missing the point. This is the right question to ask, but he’s expecting the wrong (kind of) answer.

For you who haven’t seen it - massive spoilers follow. But then, it’s the kind of movie that can’t really be spoiled, since it doesn’t really come to any conclusion or even hold any surprises. So feel free to read on - I think you can still enjoy the movie afterward.

Indeed, I think part of the point is that I was never once surprised, even though the movie itself plays like a noir mystery with a supernatural framework. It plays with its finger firmly mashing down on your Da Vinci Code Intrigue Button© the whole. damn. time. It opens with a guy methodically hanging himself in a library. Then there’s Johnny Depp in an identical library scamming some people out of some highly valuable books their newly-invalid uncle left them. And then he gets sent on a quest from an Eccentric Millionaire Book Collector (buzz!) who also owns a collection of Certifiably Old and Arcane Books (buzz!) which are All About the Devil (buzz!) that involves going to Europe (buzz!) and having Chance Encounters with Mysterious but Recurring Strangers on a Train (buzz!) and piecing together a mystery that involves Subtly Differing Woodcut Prints (buzz!) some of which are Possibly the Work of Satan Himself (buzz!) that are crucial to a Ritual (buzz!) that will - what else? - Raise The Devil (full circle double plus buzz!). By the end of the movie, you feel a bit like Alex DeLarge in the chair: I’ve had so much cliched spiritualist thriller mumbo-jumbo smashed through my eyeballs and into my cortex that I need a drug to tell me what to feel about it. The fact that Roger Ebert was expecting a movie like this to give him answers of ANY kind just shows he got off a few stations before Destination.

It just isn’t that kind of movie. It plays like that kind of movie. It certainly follows the script of that kind of movie. But from the very begining it’s clear that this is a movie holding back from full commitment. Johnny Depp’s shady bookdealer associate, for example, inahbits an antique bookstore that you enter through a basement entrance, but which is two stories high and has a spiral staircase leading up to the second story of bookshelves. Why not, We Would Wonder if we didn’t Get It, just have the entrance on the first floor? The bookdealer himself is so thoroughly unconvincing as a trader in rare books that we’re not at all surprised when he turns out to be a Redshirt. The guy who hires Johnny Depp to go on the quest to Europe actually uses “666″ as the supposedly top-secret code to open the sliding glass door that protects his collection of Arcane Books about the Devil. And. So. On.

A lot of times, we don’t give movies like The Da Vinci Code enough credit. It actually takes a certain amount of skill to pull this stuff off. They’re like magic tricks: it’s no great secret that the whole thing is an illusion; what separates a good magician from a bad one isn’t so much his technical ability but the way he sells his tricks. And of course, it takes absolutely no skill to lampoon a genre movie. You simply follow the normal plot, but don’t put any effort into making it look real, and voila! Satire! What takes an incredible amount of skill, though, is to do what Polanski’s done here - to take a genre movie and make it obviously artificial WITHOUT making it obvious that that’s what you’re doing or really even playing it for laughs.

The joke - because I think there is one - is ultimately on people like Roger Ebert. When you see Johnny Depp go through the Ninth Gate at the end of the film (hey, I DID say “massive spoilers”) and it “fades to white,” if you’re angry that there was no big payoff, the next question should be what kind of payoff you were honestly expecting? What do YOU think is on the other side of the Gate to Hell? And if YOU don’t know, why do you think Roman Polanski knows? More to the point, why in the Devil’s Name would you go to the cinema for the answer to this kind of question? Ineffible is IN-fucking-effible - as in NOT EFFIBLE. You chump.

The mistake that’s being made here is in assuming that “The Devil” is a “big theme” that “should be about more than the fate of a few people.” I suppose if you actually believe in religion, like Ebert does, then you might think something like that in general. But even if you’re a (more or less Christian-ish) believer, surely the specifics that make this genre tick don’t work for you? Even if you buy the whole idea of an ineffible entity who created and pulls the strings of the universe, surely you don’t honestly think, not even in the privacy of your own thoughts, that He set it up in such a way that some 17th century bozo could riddle out the secret of how to do something as chic as raise the Devil, write it down in a bunch of not-so-subtly-coded books which all helpfully have the Devil’s symbol on the front, have all of these copies burned by the appropriate authorities but by an amazing coincidence only the crucial ones survive, such that out there in the world somewhere is an actual extant recipe for raising the real goddamned Devil that can be assembled without all that much effort by a two-bit huckster working on a millionaire’s payroll? If the existence and purpose of the Devil is a Crucial Spiritual Question That Affects Us All, as Roger Ebert clearly believes, then surely it’s not the sort of thing that you get at by more or less puzzing out the appropriate wuzzles in the right order? Surely it’s not a Cleverness-and-Resources contest so much as a Content-of-Soul thing? So I repeat, WHY on God’s Green Earth would you go to the cinema expecting “spectacular information?” Church is where you go for “spectacular information,” if, I mean, you’re into that sort of thing. The cinema is for entertainment.

About that. This movie actually IS entertaining on a level beyond poking fun at the small-minded hobgoblins who want movies to blow their minds with the condensed spiritual truths of the universe. In addition to the wry humor, it’s one of those movies that’s just fun to watch on a cinematic level. A lot of attention has been paid to sound effects, how people move and interact, mannerisms, articulation, tone, color, etc. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys watching a skilled director and production staff at work, you could do a lot worse than this one. And then there’s dear ol’ Johnny Depp - who, even though rumor has it WASN’T Polanski’s first choice - is never better-cast than when he plays exactly this kind of role: the ever-so-slightly ironic serious guy. Just seeing his face and demenor in this role is enough for a good chuckle. He’s perfect.

But yeah - as for what’s behind the Ninth Gate, well, you don’t get to know. Because YOU’RE not the one who went to Europe and got shot at and nearly burned alive after gate-crashing a satanic ritual that you were only able to find in the first place because you’ve spent your entire friendless professional life steeped in arana, you nitwit. And even if you were, do you REALLY think it would open for YOU?

In a way, the point is the same as that of Inside UFO 54-40. For those of you not in the know, that’s a classic Edward Packard Choose Your Own Adventure book that I read as a kid.

It was an odd one because there was a random ending in there that wasn’t connected to the rest of the book by a choice. That is, there wasn’t a “If you open the yellow door, turn to page 101″ option anywhere. You just sort of noticed, flipping back and forth in the book in accordance with the instructions, that there were a couple of pages of really cool illustrations that you didn’t seem to ever get to. And characters in the book keep dropping hints that the way to Ultima isn’t through making a normal choice. Eventually you get frustrated and just turn there directly. And, well, whaddya know? That was the point all along. It takes you to the utopian planet Ultima, and it specifically says that you got there not by making a choice but by exercising your will. Either very Zen or very Nietzsche, depending on how you look at it, but it’s actually a really good life lesson. Or, rather, one of two really good life lessons, I suppose, depending on how you take it. One way to take it would be literally: Utopia means “nowhere,” and so under the rules of the Choose Your Own Adventure universe this place is actually a fantasy. If you didn’t get there by making a choice, then you just didn’t get there at all. The other, not necessarily incompatible, way of looking at it would be that you never get at enlightenment by following conventions. As long as you’re making choices, you’re just following in the treads that the author set up for you, and that’s no way to live your life! Certainly it’s not going to net you anything better than what people before you got! Whichever it is, it’s easily extended as a metaphor for religion - which is probably a total fantasy (my vote), but even if it’s real, it’s almost certainly NOT a recipe of legalese instructions that you either follow to the letter or don’t! If God made the world then it’s His to control - there isn’t any set script of things you can do to win His favor. Which is why, if I were ever to get a religion again, it would be Presbyterianism, the one I grew up with, as it happens. And that’s because it’s the only Chrisitan sect I know of that really takes seriously the idea that Man has no power over the Divine.

I’m CERTAIN that Roman Polanski has no power over the Divine. What’s fun about this movie is that he seems to know it too. Or rather, that he knows it and you know it, and you both know that there are a lot of douchebags out there who don’t.

It happened again. Sometimes you stumble across an idea, or even a particular way of phrasing something, that seems completely obvious in retrospect, and it seems like something you should’ve been hip to for a long time, but for whatever reason you just never got around to thinking of it yourself. That happened to me today with a neat explanation of why people are more forgiving of plot inconsistincies in movies than they are in novels.

It’s in the comments section of this post about Star Trek on Nancy Kress’ blog - this one by “Daniel” (who has his own blog, in which he does cool things like shoot up old C++ books). Kress wonders why film producers are so sure they can get away with the kind of chracter silliness that that movie apparently features, and more or less draws the standard conclusion that it’s anti-science ficiton prejudice (it’s not clear whether this is from the audience or the producers, actually). Thrillers and mysteries don’t indulge in the same kind of lame setups.

There’s a whole can of worms waiting to be opened here, so let’s just cut to the chase. Daniel has a different idea - and that idea is that people are more forgiving of movies in general because they don’t require much of a time commitment.

Wow.

I mean, it’s obvious, right? Which is why it’s sort of frustrating that I have to hear about it from random gun nut named Daniel on the internets (nothing against gun nuts, of course; I’d like to be one but lack the funds). But I think he’s on to something. Call it the Economist’s View of Movie Suckitude. Here it is in more techical terms.

If you want to appreciate a work of art or entertainment, there’s a kind of fixed-cost investment in terms of time and attention and, for lack of a better term, active world construction before you can get any benefit out of it. I’m fudging a bit here, of course, because you don’t necessarily have to watch a movie or read a book through to the end to start getting something out of it - but you do have to at least get immersed in it. Rarely do you enjoy a movie/book from frame/page one - and more rarely still do you enjoy a movie/book less the further into it you get. So there’s a payment: you gotta pay attention and get the world and story going in your head before you get to the toy surprise.

With movies, obviously, that fixed cost is much lower. The money price is about the same - but a movie is over in two hours, and a lot of the hard work of imagining the details is done for you. Since your cost is lower going in, your expectations are also lower, and you’re more apt to feel like the payoff was worth the payment. Note that this is contrary to the standard cognitive dissonance lines - in which a higher fixed cost will prejudice you in favor of voicing approval, because you don’t want to admit that you put a lot of effort into something that didn’t really pay off - which is why it’s the Economist’s View of Movie Suckitude and not the Psychologist’s. Probably also playing a role is the fact that the timeframe is fixed. Going to a movie involves a bit of planning: you have to clear your schedule for the two hours that you’re gonna sit there. Consequently, your opportunity cost is artificially low for watching movies. Not because there aren’t better things you could be doing, but because you’ve taken care to minimize the availability of viable substitutions. Getting up and walking out is an option, but you still have to shift mental gears and drive somewhere else, etc. The opportunity cost of reading a book is usually a bit higher - not just because of the greater time investment, but also because of the relatively friction-free transition to other activities. You just put it down, go over to the computer, and get back to programming … or whatever.

The end result is that movie makers can get away with a lot more than novel writers - just because they have a less demanding audience.

This is a satisfying explanation for me for a number of reasons - but the main one is that it lets us sidestep a lot of standard nonsense on the subject. I’ve never found the typical explanations for the shallowness of TV and movies from cultural critics very convincing. They tend to like to blame the medium itself - because this allows them to conclude that there’s some critical danger to society lurking in television and movies, either from our apparent diminished ability to separate fantasy from reality when presented with primarily visual input, or because it passivizes the audience, discouraging independent thought and transmitting condensed content. The first criticism may have been more true when written - but I think time has laid it to rest. The more realistic-looking movies get, the more ironic detachment audiences seem to approach them with. The second isn’t entirely incompatible with the Economist’s View of Movie Suckitude, actually - but I think it misses the point all the same in confusing the prevelance of mass-market entertainment in general with its particular instantiation in television and movies. The percentage of trash novels is probably roughly the same as the percentage of trash movies, actually (certainly it is if Sturgeon’s Law is to be believed). TV, sadly, still isn’t really an artist’s medium - but we’re getting intimations that it can be (by my book, Space: 1999’s first season is what established this - though most people would probably feel more comfortable with my tracing it to Twin Peaks 15 years later). In any case, what most cultural critics like to do is reach melodramatic conclusions to the effect that that visual media are actually *gasp* changing the way we approach the world. But probably the truth is as Daniel has it: we appraoch the world the way we always have. Homo Economicus isn’t the whole story on human nature, but it’s part of it, and the realtive shallowness of television and movies compared with books is just one example of it in action.

Of course, as insightful as it is, Daniel’s speculation doesn’t really get at the heart of what Kress was complaining about - which isn’t so much why movies in general are dumbed down compared to books, but why science fiction films in particular are. Sadly - I think she’s right. There are plenty of truly complex movies - but I can think of few that are also science fiction. My own thought here is that it’s the same thing that killed Disco - namely why spend all that money on slick production and lush instrumentals when Punk sells just as well and can be made in some douchebag’s garage practically for free? It’s no big secret that the record comapnies - even if they didn’t exactly start the “Disco Sucks” movement - certainly weren’t about to stand in its way once it got started. Why bother finding ways to slash your fixed costs when an army of conformists, clueless to their own conformity and complicity, are happy to do it for you? Something like that probably goes on with science fiction films too. Movie production companies are happy to put up the kind of money that it takes to make a really convincing one in the case of things like Star Wars, which are blockbusters and make staggering amounts of money. But if you’re aiming at a more serious - and therefore smaller - audience, it gets harder to justify the budget. The record company rule holds here too: if you have two niche formats, prefer the one that’s less expensive. It’s good business, and you can hardly blame them.

Apparently there’s talk in Tinseltown of redoing Buffy without Joss. io9 has the scoop AND (*gasp*) even cautiously approves.

I was cocking my gun when I got to the bit about it being the original 1992 movie and NOT the TV show they were talking about. That’s good. That’s very good.

I’m a rabid fan of the TV show, but I have no real attachment to the original movie. I enjoyed it when it came out, don’t get me wrong - but it was forgettable, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the TV series they ended up making, so there’s that.

And … alright … it does seem a bit unfair that Joss Whedon doesn’t get a second crack at it, considering how much he felt he’d sold out to commercial and producer pressure in the making of the first one. In a more just universe, I guess he’d have been able to go back and fix his mistakes. But in other ways I think I’ll take io9’s side on this one: it’s probably a good thing if they make it without him. Here’s my thinking:

(1) How talented is he still? Buffy the TV series was brilliant - a one-of-a-kind gem. I’ve seen it (way too) many times, and I get something new out of it with each viewing. Hats off - absolutely - to the captain and creator. But the stuff he’s made since has been … well, a little on the mediocre side. Angel was just horrible - erm, the bits of it I could stomach, anyway - I admit I didn’t make it very far. I’ve heard nothing but bad news about Dollhouse. And Firefly … what to say? It was good, I enjoyed it, it had potential. But it also had a tendency to slide into corny and easy stories, and the worldbuilding just wasn’t all that convincing. Now - we only got the one season, and there was clearly potential for greatness there. Mr. Whedon doesn’t have the best of luck with his first seasons - let’s not beat about the bush here. That’s almost certainly because his stories are refreshingly character-driven, and it’s hard to write great stories with characters that are still embryonic, as season one characters on any show tend to be. So maybe Firefly would’ve gone on to great things. The final (Whedon-penned) episode - Objects in Space - was by far its best, after all. But there was also the movie Serenity - which was just terrible. Torture from beginning to end. I’m inclined to say any second season of Firefly would’ve been a failure. It’s not unusual for writers to burn out a bit once their opus magnum is complete. Having done Buffy and done it damn well, it may well be that Whedon doesn’t have anything special left.

(2) It keeps the movie separate. Buffy is a closed cannon as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I’m even pretty iffy about season seven, which in general I didn’t much like (despite some real brilliance at the begining), and I’ve never read the comic books. I like Buffy just as it is. TV shows are hard to get right, and when you get one this right, it’s best to leave well alone. If the intention is to keep the movie separate from the series - which I think is absolutely the right choice - then not having Joss Whedon on the project just makes that separation easier to maintain. The way there are some bands that were great in their day but just really shouldn’t get back together … well, you get the idea.

(3) This isn’t a genre he created anyway. One of the annoying things about Joss Whedon is that he has a creative formula: take any two seemingly incompatible genres, mix them, and then claim that you’ve invented something new. For example - I got really sick of hearing about how creative it supposedly was to take the western genre and mix it with the space opera genre and spit out something “unique” like Firefly. Truth be told, “unique” is not a word that applies to Firefly because people have been mixing westerns with space opera since the 30s. That you haven’t heard much about it only goes to show how unstable the solution is. Ditto the mixing of gothic horror and film noir for Angel. Those are two genres that work quite well together if you ask me - but again, we didn’t have to wait for Whedon’s auspicious birth to get there. Horror and mystery are well related to begin with - dealing, as each does, in slow buildup to a final, preferably shocking, revelation that plays on one’s sense of security - and it isn’t too much of a stretch to take a dark sensibiilty from one genre and make it work with a dark sensibility from another. “Teenage girl fights vampires” just seems … inevitable in this feminist age. This is a genre that belongs to the culture at large - it isn’t the sole preserve of one Mr. Joss Whedon. Poaching should be encouraged at this point.

(4) Whedon is bad at paying his intellectual debts. Call this one the “petty reason” - because it IS petty - but I take a certain satisfaction in seeing someone poach from Whedon in particular. OK, granted, it’s the Kuzuis doing the movie - and they worked on the TV show - so it’s not as blatant as it could be. I’m just saying. One of the more gratifying drive-by comments I’ve seen on the internet was one that said “I used to watch Firefly back when it was called Blakes 7.” I’m pretty sure I gave an audible cheer. Not to mention the bits of poaching from Twin Peaks (not just the admittedly excellent dream episode with the red drapes - look also in the background in the first episode and tell me if you don’t see a student dance across the hall in exactly the way it happened in the Twin Peaks pilot) that went on in Buffy and which Whedon denies to this day. Ideas are free for borrowing in genre fiction (well, unless you’re borrowing from His Royal Insecurity Complex Mr. Harlan Ellison, who invented everything let me tell you what), but you’re supposed to leave some hint where they came from. So nice of Joss, for example, to reference Forbidden Planet in Serenity (a ship C-57D has crashlanded on a planet called Miranda), but since he wasn’t imitating Forbidden Planet in any way it doesn’t count. Dropping some reference to “Liberator” or “Avon” or “Star One” or “Spike Spiegel” would’ve been a more honest choice.

So as long as it’s not TV’s Buffy they’re remaking, I have no particular objections to doing it without Joss.

Better is still not to make it at all, of course. I’m against remaking things that were got right the first time, or which don’t seem to suggest a second treatment - and Buffy is one of those things. The original film doesn’t need remaking because it wasn’t all that … erm, sorry … original to begin with. And the TV series is near-perfect as is. So while I don’t object to remaking the film, with or without Joss, neither do I see the point - and that alone is an argument against.

This weekend I saw the bookends of Steven Soderbergh’s career: 1989’s sex lies and videotape and this year’s The Girlfriend Experience. I wonder how long it will take mainstream critics who didn’t happen to see them back-to-back to notice how similar they are?

sex lies and videotape - the senstaional indie hit of 1989 - is good but massively overrated. It’s the definitive classic of my least-favorite genre - the “girls are deeper than guys because they don’t kid themselves” genre. I’m sure someone has thought of a clever name for it somewhere along the line - but you know what I’m talking about. Some girl manages to get out of a bad relationship that she was really committed to, and the guy only realizes when it’s too late just what a good thing he’d had. In sex lies and videotape the villain is John Millaney, who’s in a loveless relationship with the frigid Ann and is sleeping with her sister. A college roommate named Graham shows up who couldn’t be more different from the shallow John. You’d almost wonder they could’ve roomed together. Graham has no money, he’s an “artsy” type, and his pet art project at the moment turns out to be filming women giving confessionals about their sexual experiences - ostensibly as a way to cure his impotence. The sister who’s sleeping with John, incidentally, is only doing so to get back at her sister, of whom she’s always been jealous. Alright - so we get the leaden point. John’s bad because he loves money and has sex purely for physical pleasure. If Ann’s frigid with him it’s because she knows deep down inside - and we know and the director knows - that she deserves better. She needs somenone to “make love” to her - not just to fuck her. So John doesn’t measure up, but his deep “friend” will do. By the end of the movie, she’s divorced John and is with Graham. The sister feels appropriately guilty, they have a heart-to-heart and show signs of reconciling. Everything goes badly for John, who is apparently going to lose his job, and so we the audience can delight in his downfall.

This movie isn’t nearly as good as everyone thinks it is - mostly because it doesn’t really work. The only reason it’s gotten as much praise as it has is that the acting (espcially James Spader as Graham - I mean … just … wow) and direction are so good we don’t have time to notice that the plot doesn’t really work. And actually, if the plot were anything else we probably would have noticed - but since this movie is in the critics’ favorite genre and it reaches all the conclusions they like to see (wife good/deep, husband bad/childish), noone is really looking too hard.

The problem with this genre - let’s call it the “making love” genre - is always the same two things: (1) the woman is implausibly never to blame for her situation, circumstances freeing her from having to make any really hard choices, and (2) her devotion to Mr. Horrible is always overstated to the point of being just the other side of plausible. sex lies and videotape would’ve been a considerably more interesting movie if we didn’t have the easy out of John sleeping so much with Cynthia. Ann, being a Superior Woman with Superior Intuition, of course figures the whole thing out using her special Woman’s Spider Sense before she has any evidence - but since she has no evidence John’s silver tongue gets him technically off the hook. There follows a hugely implausible scene where she finds some hard evidence and is actually surprised and hurt. See - we’re expected to forget that she’d already figured it out emotionally. And since she only sleeps with Graham AFTER she has ironclad proof of all this, it’s all OK and NOT HER FAULT - crucial points for fans of the “making love” genre. It isn’t that any of this is all that implausible, mind you, it’s just that it gets rather tiresome there always being a trap door of this kind of the heroine. A weightier and more realistic story would show us a breakup where blame is more evenly distributed. And as for point (2), it’s - typically - a bit difficult to buy that she’s actually all that upset to find that John is cheating on her. It’s pretty clear that they don’t love each other, and it’s convenient that there doesn’t seem to be much to love about John at all. He’s a walking yuppie stereotype - handsome, selfish, materialistic, bragging to his friends that his wedding ring is a chick magnet. In the real world, Ann would surely have asked herself by this point why she married him at all, if they have anything in common, and whether she is really in love with him. But of course, that would tend to complicate things by making her more equally complicit in the situation, which would spoil things for our genre fans.

There are additional problems, of course. Graham is really shady, but no one seems to notice. It’s just the way “deep” people are? And then there’s embarassing dialogue here and there. Graham actually says - no really! - “this wasn’t supposed to happen” when he realizes (oh, but since this is a sophisticated film we’re meant to add here in the parentheses that we might not be able to trust him completely here) that he’s falling in love with Ann. And of course he’s only admitting this because Ann - being the emotionally clear-sighted woman of the story - has *gasp* turned his own camera on him and asked him to tell his own story! Shocker!

Yeah, it’s a pretty crappy story. But Soderbergh gets away with it because, as I said, the acting is really well above average, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s clearly a talented director.

What’s doubly pleasing about The Girlfriend Experience - compared with the aforementioned debut - is that it’s a more thoughtful entry in the same genre. It’s the same annoying “making love” genre alright - but the treatment is a bit more honest and mature. Our “emotionally clear” heroine in this movie is Christine - or maybe Chelsea, we’re never really sure - and she’s in the genre-typical relationship with the shallow guy that she’s more serious about than he is about her. As is proper for this genre, she ends up leaving him, and it’s all his fault. We get the obligatory “test scene” - where she confronts him that she’s leaving and things could’ve worked out for them if he’d given a more genuine reaction, but he doesn’t, and so they don’t, and that’s that. So far, so normal. What makes this one better than average are the following things. First, the guy, for once, isn’t all bad. He isn’t cheating on her (that we know), and he’s at least a little bit understanding to put up with her profession (she’s a call girl). The reason he’s nevertheless “in the wrong” is just because he’s shallow and acquisitive. He’s landed someone who’s just slightly out of his league, he knows it, and it’s for THIS reason that he doesn’t want to let her go (it probably also flatters his self-image to put on a show of not being jealous). By the time he realizes that he really likes her, it’s too late, and in any case he can’t get past his wounded pride. But at least, in contrast to more typical films of the genre, the decision to leave him isn’t made for the girl. She actually has to give something up. By the same token, we don’t have the typical problem of wondering what a wonderful girl like her was doing with the shallow sleaze in the first place. He’s shallow, but he’s not a sleaze that we can tell - they’re comfortable together, he doesn’t rib her about her job, etc. This setup is, for once, believable. She doesn’t love him, and he doesn’t love her, but it’s easy to see what they both get out of the relationship.

The rest of it is typical, though. Chris goes on a trip to Vegas with some fellow shallow materialistic types after giving Christine/Chelsea an unsuccessful ultimatum. Naturally, the purpose of this trip is to put him through hell - because the dictates of the genre require that the guy realize just how horrible a mistake he’s made by ever letting that angel go. He has to listen to people just as shallow as him rationalize their ways out of real relationships, and of course in Vegas he gets to be one of the guys on the other end of the prostitution thing, presumably realizing just how special it was that one of these girls who knows all about men once saw something in him. Well, there ya go, buddy. That’s what you get for appearing as a character in one of these dressed-up chick flicks. There’s no point her leaving you if you don’t suffer for it!

As for Christine, she’s leaving him because - what else? - she’s met a guy and in a flash of Absolutely Correct instinct realized that she doesn’t really love Chris and she might be able to love this guy. He’s a client, so of course the whole thing is hugely irrational - but the vanity of this genre is that women are superior because they are unencumbered by rationality - rationality being a tool that incomplete people use for making excuses for base emotions. Naturally, her instinct is right on point. The guy is a good guy, and he really does care for her … even though he’s only just met her under hugely dubious circumstances, but that’s how Real Love works, right? Here’s the second twist that makes this one better than most. We KNOW he’s a good guy because he never consummates his relationship with the little prostitute because he video-calls his kids at the last minute and realizes that he has responsibilities. Yes, he was going to hire a prostitute, but he ends up not doing it, and for all the right reasons. In other words, the girl doesn’t end up either (a) alone but OK or (b) with Mr. Right after all as is par for the course in these films. She actually saw, and missed, a catch, and missed him because he was such a good catch. In the process she loses her stable relationship (though one doubts she will ultimately regret that) and has to ask herself tough questions about her job.

If The Girlfriend Experience were merely a genre-bender it would be above average - but I think it qualifies as great in spite of itself. Yes, it gets off to a pretty miserable start. At first, you think it’s just a political hack job. All of her clients are, of course, materialistic Republicans who are worried about their bottom lines and Obama. They all want her to vote for McCain. It’s hugely yawnworthy (though it hits a bit home, I have to say - I’m similarly unforgiving of political dissention from people I date, and I do think this is a personal flaw). But it picks up. We get to see a wide range of the kind of man that dates this kind of girl, and it’s pretty believable. We get to see the seedy underside of her profession in the form of an unscrupulous reviewer. And we ask ourselves more questions than we get answered about how a girl like her manages to take love seriously at all. It’s a credit to the film that we believe she does - though we’re really disappointed we can’t talk to her for 3 hours about all the stuff she knows about human relationships! Most of all - and I put a fine point on this because internet opinion seems squarely against me here - I think Sasha Gray is PERFECT for the role. It’s Soderbergh’s great strength: getting a performance from an actor that’s much, much better than he should be able to deliver, and so saving a movie that would otherwise be ridiculous. Like all of Soderbergh’s art movies, this one stands or falls on how well the central actor does his job, and Soderbergh works his typical magic here. Complaints are made that she’s too wooden - doesn’t have any real feeling - acts bored. But how would you honestly expect a prostitute to act around her clients and her sham of a boyfriend? Her impossible job is to seem interested in these people - but we all know that she can’t be. It’s an inhuman demand. The only reason any protitute meets it ever is because the client is desperate enough to hire her. If he weren’t kidding himself already, he wouldn’t be with a call girl to begin with, and so she really only has to meet minimum standards here. Where Gray shines is in her body language. Yes, she’s bored and feigning interest. Yes, she appears to be acting. And if all that were going on is that Soderbergh had cast a second-rate actress for the purpose of getting a fakey performance, I think the complainers would have a point. But watch again - she’s much better than all that. She does a great job exuding a zen-like guarded calm. She’s calm and comfortable, and her deliberate movements do a lot to soothe her clients - but they also betray a wariness that I find completely believable for someone in her profession. She’s ripe for exploitation, and she has to be ready for anything. Perhaps the only reason Gray pulls this off so well is that she’s a porn star in her day job. I don’t care - she pulled it off, and it’s fair to say that her having done so is what made this movie watchable.

So Soderbergh grows up. sex lies and videotape was huge amounts of talent without much in the way of maturity. In The Girlfriend Experience, we finally get the whole package.

One thing that I dislike intensely about Coen Brothers’ movies is the ethnic pornography angle. Every goram one has to take place in some Location with a Distinctive Culture, and half the goram movie has to be “about” the Place Itself. This is such an obvious sophomoric sop to critics that I get frustrated more people don’t see through it. It’s like watching one of those people who compulsively recycles dig through the trash to pick out the glass bottle you just threw out. They know damn well that one bottle isn’t going to change the fate of the universe - it’s just that it’s a compulsion for them. And in the same way, movie critics have GOT to be hip to this game by now. By the time we get to No Country for Old Men, for example, they’ve GOT to know that there’s nothing particularly difficult about making West Texas look empty and hiring dialect coaches to get the speech right - and yet any number of critics will have compulsively inserted some lines about the “sensitivity” with which the Coens take an alien place and make it their own - or some such tripe.

So the first thing that ingratiates a movie like Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead to me is that it’s “Fargo” without Minnesota. Just that.

Actually, it reminded me more of 25th Hour while I was watching it - for reasons I still can’t quite put my finger on. It was only later that I realized how many thematic similarities it has with Fargo.

Those similarities are everywhere. The basic plot is driven by two brothers who pull a criminal stunt on their family that goes terribly wrong. It goes wrong primarily because the weaker brother involved an outside party he didn’t really know in the heist. Attempts to patch the holes only end up making everything worse. And yet, we sense that holes could be patched in the hands of more decisive and confident people. But then, more decisive and confident people wouldn’t have accrued the shady debts that lead them to crime in the first place, so there you go. There are father issues too: the criminal mastermind in this movie seems primarily motivated by trying to one-up his father the same way that Jerry Lundegaard’s schemes are insinuated to have been born in trying to achieve financial independence from his father-in-law in Fargo. Honestly - it plots like Fargo but feels like 25th Hour. If that appeals to you - see this movie!

It appeals to me. I’m not generally a fan of either Spike Lee or the Coen Brothers, but I must honestly admit that 25th Hour and Fargo were brilliant (I also liked No Country for Old Men quite a lot, actually - it’s all the other Coen movies that have rubbed me in some wrong way or another). And so I predictably really liked this one too. Like those other two - it positively lives from the performances of the actors. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, and Albert Finney all do standout jobs in their roles. It helps that they’re typecast - I don’t think casting them required a lot of headscratching - but it’s the end effect that matters.

Like Fargo, it’s not really a pleasant movie - and it hammers the unpleasantness home maybe just a little bit harder. There’s certainly a lot less comic relief. But it’s all worth it for the interesting study of motives. In particular - and in a clear difference from Fargo - it seems to have a lot to do with unresolved issues about dealing with women.

All told, I’m not as enamoured as Roger Ebert was. This is a good movie - it’s not so wonderful that you need to go out and see it immediately. 25th Hour was both more entertaining and more thought-provoking. But it’s highly recommended all the same - especially if you’re as sick of ethnic pornography as I am.

Today I finally got to see Pumpkinhead - a movie I’ve been wanting to watch for some time for nostalgia’s sake, but kinda unwilling to pay for. It showed up on Comcast’s free OnDemand, so … mission accomplished.

I say for “nostalgia’s sake,” but actually this is the first time I’ve seen it. The “nostalgia” is more for the late-80s/early-90s in general. It’s the kind of movie my friends in high school would’ve liked, it frequently gets high ratings on horrorfan websites, and it has Lance Henriksen in the main role, so it seemed like a good choice.

Unfortunately, it turns out to be somewhat overrated, even on those terms.

Don’t get me wrong - everything that’s generally praised about this movie is indeed praiseworthy. The cinematography is quite good, Henriksen does a good job with what he has to work with, and the makeup and monster effects (from the guy who worked on Alien) are indeed impressive - especially, in my opinion, the makeup job for the old woman Haggis. Another odd sign that a lot of thought went into this: the kid who gets killed looks like John Denver. You’ll know why that’s funny if you’ve seen the movie.

But taken as a whole this views like a lot of wasted talent on display. It’s sort of like they lined up all the best and worst people they could find for every relevant department, made them pair off, and required that input from each half of the pair make its way into the final production.

So - the Good Screenwriter tries to set up a complex story. A kid is killed completely by accident, and the teenagers who do the killing (they were racing dirtbikes) are conflicted about what to do. The guy responsible has had a beer or two, and he’s already got a drunk driving rap on his record. So what would be an innocent accident done by anyone else is gonna give the local authorities an excuse to pull out the stops. But it really wasn’t the beer’s fault - and so it seems unfair. Being teenagers, the less involved each was, the more willing he seems to be to do the Right Thing. Them that stand ready to get prosecuted are rightly frustrated by what seems like friends aping maturity at their expense. There’s endless potential for exploration of how people on the cusp of adulthood deal with collective responsibility for events just beyond their control … but of course the Evil Screenwriter gets to write half the script, so instead what happens is that the Stock Badass locks his good friends in a closet and hits a lot of people, thus completely destroying my ability to believe that these people are actually friends, or to care about what happens to them in any way.

The Good Cinematographer gives us some pretty amazing haunted forest lighting. But then the Evil Cinematographer makes sure we can’t enjoy it by really overdoing that religious lighting thing - you know, the one where someone is bathed in pale beams as though coming through a window every time they do something eeevviiil. Not to mention, the Evil Producer decided that this all takes place in California somewhere (rather than Appalachia, as was clearly the original intention), so there shouldn’t be haunted forests about in the first place.

The Good Costume Designer and the Good Makeup artist give us the completely convincing Old Woman - and Pumpkinhead himself. Not to mention - the final shot of Pumpkinhead, which would be a spoiler to reveal, but which is completely convincing. The Evil Costume Designer and the Evil Makeup Artists, however, give us families of people in dirty brown overalls, apparently meant to be convincing “locals.” Uh-huh.

And so it goes. Unfortunately, by the time it’s all over, the Evil Team has won. So you get what could’ve been a really good movie dragged completely through the mud by incompetent hangers-on. It’s almost as if they go out of their way to ensure that this is yet another genre flick - not in the clever ironic sense, but just in the banal “this is what the kids like” sense that’s ruined many a horror movie.

All-in-all, I’d say I saw this one in the only acceptable way: it just happened to be on TV at a time when I just happened to be in the mood to watch mindless schlock. Under any other circumstances, I would’ve been really Put Out.

I saw Memento again yesterday. It was the second time. The first time was in 2001.

It’s a well-made movie. In particular, Guy Pearce is well cast in the lead role. I read that he only got the job after Brad Pitt was forced to back out, and I can’t tell whether that makes me happy or not. That’s because I can’t really tell whether I want to like this movie or not. Part of me really does - because it’s such a good puzzle and has such potential as an atmospheric piece besides. And part of me really doesn’t - because the premise of the movie is a gimmick, and I’m in general suspicious of movies that are all-plot-no-character.

This is one of the - actually possibly the - best “puzzle movie” I’ve ever seen. Lots of attention is paid to minor details, so that the movie rewards multiple viewings: you pick up on more pieces of the story the more you watch. Not having time for this, I cheated and read though Andy Klein’s detailed analysis. Klein picked up on a lot more than I did - having invested several screen viewings, one VHS viewing, and some hours playing with the official website - and so saved me a lot of effort. But even Klein can’t make total sense of it - and by the end of the article he’s officially doubtful that full sense can be made of it at all (pace filmmaker Nolan, who insists there’s a “final Truth” that can be discovered on repeat viewings - a statement that is not in any way motivated by DVD royalties).

I would have a comment on that if I cared - but I don’t, really. The trouble with puzzle movies is essentially the same problem philosophical novels have. They’re fun to tinker with, but after tinkering a bit you get bored and wonder why the filmmakers didn’t just print the thing out as a logic puzzle. They could’ve issued it as a deck of cards where each card has a scene on it, and you shuffle the deck and put the scenes in random order and try to figure out from there what’s going on. Maybe the answer could’ve been sold separately or something. The point being that there is a vehicle for selling logic puzzles, and when I want a logic puzzle I’ll sit down and work a logic puzzle. Going to to the trouble to make a logic puzzle in the form of a movie is overkill, and it’s deceptive besides. At least when you have a logic puzzle in front of you you know that there’s a solution that you can get to if you pay enough attention. Here I have no such guarantee, so I’m disinclined to try.

I’m also not really interested in the speculation on the crucial role memory plays in our lives and how horribly unreliable memory actually is if I can’t relate to the main character. And let’s face it - I can’t. I don’t “wake up” every 15 minutes with no idea where I am or how I got there, nor is anything in my life even remotely analogous to this. For me, like for everyone else, memory plays the crucial role in who I am and how I function in the world, and yes I’ve on occasion been disturbed by how unreliable it can be. But this is the kind of thing I’ve been meditating on since elementary school, and no two-hour gimmick movie has anything new to say to me about it, so I sort of wonder why it tries? The pat observation that memory is unreliable isn’t enough to carry a movie, and anything deeper than that would have to be confined or simplified to cram it into a movie, and so this really doesn’t seem like a fruitful thematic basis for a filmmaker. Doing the theme justice take a lot more effort.

So Memento remains a kind of grey area for me. I’m impressed with it - because it’s very well made. But I’m also disappointed in it, because it’s not really about anything. Or, to the extent that it’s about something, it’s picked the wrong medium for expression. If it wants to be a puzzle, it should be a puzzle. And if it wants to be philosophy, it should be philosophy. It’s not exactly what you’d call a movie.

If Brad Pitt had been cast in the main role, as originally planned, I would have been less confused. Brad Pitt is a convenient warning label: his presence in a film is a red sticker that says “warning: this product consists entirely of CHEAP GIMMICKS and contains no actual substance.” The film has the potential to be fun (think Fight Club), but there’s no chance it will be great. So if they’d cast Brad Pitt, I would’ve just skipped it, and that would have been that. Since they didn’t, I saw it, was impressed with it, and now I’m left in that bizarre empty zone where I’ve seen the film and enjoyed it but feel like I wasted my time all the same. Wunderbar.

I know that Vertigo is a great film because I appreciate it more having seen it than I did seeing it.

That’s always the way. I rarely love the films I love after the first sitting. Usually the first time through is entertaining enough, if a bit of a chore, but the film seems vaguely flawed in some way. Then, over the sequence of weeks that follow, I find myself thinking more and more about it. It just kind of gnaws at me as I make connections, notice more and more things in memory that passed over my head while watching, and finally I sit down to watch it again and am in love.

I’m going to watch Vertigo - which I saw two days ago - again this weekend - because I can’t stop thinking about it.

Before now, Vertigo was the best film I remember sleeping through. I went through a mild Hitchcock phase when I was in late elementary school (my parents took me to see Rear Window upon its re-release) - and I saw Vertigo on VHS about this time. Naturally I was way too young to appreciate it - and I think I slept through most of it. I’m one of those people who’s essentially a narcoleptic in front of TV screens. If I’m the least bit tired, TV puts me to sleep instantly. Something has to really get my attention to keep me awake in front of a television, and at that age Vertigo just wasn’t that thing.

But I saw it again on Wednesday and really enjoyed it. Of course, I had my complaints. It seemed too slow. The mystery was solved too quickly. The colors looked fake. The bluescreens were too obvious. The romance was melodramatic. I don’t like seeing Jimmy Stewart in love scenes anyway.

As time passes, though, I realize that most of these “flaws” are in fact intentional, integral parts of the storytelling. Jimmy Stewart is perfect for the role because you don’t see him as a great lover. If he were, he wouldn’t be convincing as the romantically insecure Scotty. When to solve the mystery is actually quite a tricky business - it needs to be there long enough to keep the audience interested, but the real plot can’t proceed until we know the secret. The bluescreens are the fault of technology and not the director - but they help anyway by lending an aura of artifice to scenes that are meant to be artificial. (For example - it draws our attention to the breaking waves that weren’t there before when Scotty and Madeleine first kiss.) And the colors…

Well, that’s one of the reasons that I want to see the film again. There are two things that keep bugging me.

One - what’s up with the hotel scene? Scotty follows Madeleine there and gets stalled by the hotel clerk, who claims Madeleine (whom she knows as Carlotta) never came in. And indeed, when they go to check she’s not there, and her car is gone. And yet, she was there! Is the hotel clerk in on the game? It doesn’t seem like she’s meant to be - and yet she must be, right? That little twist was never really explained.

Two - what’s with red and green? Particularly jarring was the fact that the neon lights outside Judy’s room are only green. They immediately remind one of Rope - in which the outside lights flash red and green - most notably there at the end. Here they’re only green, and it seems wrong. In second place would be the restaurant Ernie’s - which was a little too red even for me, and I LOVE red. The place is so red it’s hard to believe any such restaurant could ever exist in reality. But if these were the two points where Hitchcock really hits you over the head with it, the color theme wasn’t exactly subtle in the rest of the movie either. Judy’s dress is VERY green. And it’s hard not to notice Madeleine’s red robe. We feel like too much attention is paid to the green lawn outside the art museum. There’s something not quite real about the red leaves on the ground in the forest scene. Indeed - it being a forest, it feels like it should be green, and yet it’s red. Madeleine’s car is green; she parks it in front of the red door to Scotty’s apartment. Midge’s apartment is, interestingly, yellow (as is Midge in general), and in case you missed the point we get several scenes of Scotty going through traffic lights turning yellow (get it? green to yellow/amber to red?), it always seeming like he should miss the signal and have to stop, but he never does.

The color theme is so blatant it’s gratuitious - like a joke that Hitchcock was playing on film students (were there film students in the 50s?). A visual MacGuffin? I can’t tell, and so I want to see it again.

I remember reading somewhere in Japan that Buddhism was “wisdom for the unwise, knowledge for the stupid, culture for the vulgar.” Yes, well, I don’t know about Buddhism, but that’s definitely what Hitchcock is to cinema: art for the artless.

When is politics not allowed in literary criticism? When it acts like a filter, that’s when. If, upon encountering so much as a hint of a political theme you dislike, you instantly shut down and refuse to look further, then you have a little homunculus censor living in your brain who is interfering with your ability to fully appreciate life.

Roger Ebert has this problem. I think he’s a good movie critic for the most part. As a general rule, I can read his reviews and know whether I will enjoy a movie. Sometimes, I even come to reconsider how I feel about movies I’ve already seen by reading what he thinks about them. And then there are those other times when I can read a four-star review of his and know for certain I’ll hate the film. Or, as was the case this weekend, a one-star review that tells me without a doubt I’ll love it.

The movie is 3 O’Clock High, a cult 80s high school film (no, not one of those 80s high school films) that I’d caught scenes from over the years but never sat down and watched all the way through. It’s not a great film. But it is entertaining, a brilliant nostalgia vehicle (for those of us who were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s), and even if it’s not a stand-out classic, it’s at least one of the better examples of its genre.

Ebert gave it one star. Why? Because it’s “fascist.” Because the story involves a kid shitting his shorts all day scrambling around trying everything he can think of to get out of a confrontation with the school bully that goes down at 3 o’clock and - horror of horrors - the bully doesn’t have a “human side.”

If there is a pathological bully in the student body, no attempt is made to understand him, sympathize with him or encourage the audience in the difficult process of empathy.

It’s too tough on today’s teenage moviegoers, I guess, to ask them to hold two ideas in their mind at once: that a kid could be a bully and that he could also have some big problems and be in need of understanding.

Yeah, nice try, but I call bullshit, and here’s why:

The Thompson character, for example, is not just a distant, unattainable symbol, but a young woman with feelings. The tomboy doesn’t just pine from afar, but helps Keith in his campaign to win a date with this girl of his dreams. And in the final sequence, in which the tomboy acts as chauffeur on the dream date, the dialogue isn’t about sex; it’s about learning to be true to yourself and not fall for the way people are packaged. By the movie’s end, everybody has learned something about themselves.

That’s from his review of Some Kind of Wonderful, the actual John Hughes installment from the same year. Anyone who’s seen it will have noticed a glaring omission. Yes, that’s right, Some Kind of Wonderful has a class bully too - or at least an unreasonable bad guy. And no, this bad guy in Some Kind of Wonderful hasn’t “learned anything about himself” by the end of the film either. Mostly he just gets egg on his face - which is what stock bully characters show up in movies to do.

So what’s the difference? Why is it OK for the bad guy in Some Kind of Wonderful to be a stock plot device, but not in 3 O’Clock High? I think it’s the leather jacket. You see, in Some Kind of Wonderful, the bad guy is a Rich Snob, but in 3 O’Clock High he’s working class. And one-dimensional bad guys are only ever allowed in Roger Ebert’s world if they’re making an Acceptable Political Point^tm.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, it isn’t that Some Kind of Wonderful is the more thoughtful film. It certainly takes itself more seriously, but the plot contrivances in it are every bit as transparent as those of every other movie of the genre. There’s the working class kid who wants to be an artist, he’s in love with the popular girl who won’t give him the time of day and is in turn loved by his tomboy working class friend. He has a shot with the popular girl, but only because her jerk of a boyfriend is every fratboy child-of-privilege stereotype in the book turned up to 11. If Ebert rates this one higher than other study hall ’sploitation movies, it’s only because he never took the time to ask himself why this or any girl considers this guy serious relationship material in the first place. Trophy date, sure, but no girls I know would be in love with him for “who he is.” No, Some Kind of Wonderful is entertaining, but it’s a comic book, right up to the last scene where our hero makes The Right Choice in what has got to be one of the more implausible Moments of Realization in 80s cinema. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

My axe to grind here is that people who think Some Kind of Wonderful is deep don’t get to diss 3 O’Clock High - not if they really paid attention. Yeah, sure, our resident bully is a stock plot device, but then, that’s rather the point. The movie isn’t about the fight, and it isn’t about giving the bully his comeuppance. It’s just a nice, light-hearted exaggeration of having “one of those days.” You know - “those days” … of the kind we all have in high school. In college, for that matter. At work. In the nursing home. With the difference being that when you’re in high school everything always seems so much more important than it really is. 3 O’Clock High has the same basic message that every high school movie has: that you’ve got more in you than you think, but sometimes it takes a little pressure to bring it out. I liked this one better than most because the comical exaggeration is better than most. The bully isn’t really even a character. He’s an implausible force of nature - ridiculous by design, because the whole point is that it be ridiculous. What the movie is trying to capture is that feeling we all had in high school of being under huge amounts of pressure but unable to complain about it because we know that “it’s just high school” and the Real World is gonna be so much worse, all the while unable to ignore the reality that it actually is hard - sensing a disconnect in there somewhere. 3 O’Clock High nails that feeling and manages to be really entertaining in the process. I give it 3 stars at least.

The take-home message is that “stodgy” is a common word because it’s a common concept. I get that it’s impossible to turn off your moral radar when watching movies. Movies are about people and values and all that good stuff, and I can see how it would be impossible to like a movie that’s cheering for something you think is evil. But I think you don’t get to trash a movie based on the costumes alone. If you’re going to write about a movie’s values, you need to at least make an effort to understand what they are. Not all bit characters need to be real people - but if you’re going to be so silly as to insist that they always do, you don’t get to make special exceptions for those vaunted caricatures you happen to approve of.

Politics are bad in criticism when they get in the way of seeing what’s on the screen in front of you.

There are a million ways to get out of a fight, but not in the Hollywood of Rambo. Even a dumb teen movie such as this has to end with one of those fist fights where every blow sounds like the special effects guys are whacking bicycle seats with Ping-Pong paddles. Is that all life is? The vicious define the terms? They say we will fight them, and so we have to? And we win because someone slips us some brass knuckles so we can coldcock the guy? Come on.

Well, yes, actually. What would Ebert suggest instead? Isn’t it sometimes the case that the vicious say we have to fight them, and so we do? Did he sleep through history class or something? There are those fights you can avoid, and there are those you can’t. There are those that only make things worse if you avoid them. And if your enemy brings brass knuckles to the fight intending to coldcock you, even though he’s naturally stronger and taller than you, then yes, I think it’s OK to pick them up off the ground and use them to fight back. So, for that matter, does everyone else. And so, for that matter, does Roger Ebert - when the movie is called Some Kind of Wonderful and the protagonist shows up to an easily avoidable fight with a gang of ruffians for backup. Feh.