Paul Blart: Mall Cop

The premise of Paul Blart: Mall Cop is hilarious by itself.  Here you’ve got a mall security guard, with no gun and no social authority, vying for respectability in an upper-class shopping mall, a place filled with women and elderly folk.  Like most rent-a-cops, Paul Blart is overweight and bumbling.  He’s at the lowest end of the hierarchy of police and security guards, and yet he takes his duty seriously.   That duty includes stopping senior citizens who are speeding through the mall in their electric carts.

There are of course a lot of ways to screw this premise up, and the movie producers did that plenty of times here.  But Paul Blart: Mall Cop isn’t all that bad. It’s not horrifically stupid or vulgar, which is 90% of making a decent movie comedy these days.

Blart himself probably represents the intended audience for this movie.  He’s a lower middle-class, middle-aged white guy with a sweettooth.  In the movie’s opening scenes, Blart tries out as a state trooper, only to be thwarted by his hypoglycemia.  Disappointed, Blart returns home to where his mother and daughter reside.  Blart’s daughter, whom he clearly loves, is the child of a love affair in which Blart was fooled by an illegal immigrant from Mexico into marrying the immigrant and thus granting her citizenship.   Blart then goes to his job, which he loves, even though no one takes him seriously.  And, finally, Blart pines for the love of a woman.

Inevitably there’s a love interest, a major problem, and a showdown.  It was right to have the major showdown take place in the mall, which is really an indoor carnival.   The main problem is that this showdown — which lasts half the movie — doesn’t exploit the possibilities of the premise, and it’s absurd without being all that funny.   With some tweaks — a better cast and improved writing — this movie could’ve been pretty darn good.

The best thing about Paul Blart is that it blows away all of the pretentious Cannes-Telluride-Oscar-winning nonsense  that’s so often marketed as “artistic greatness.”  Blart is the kind of guy we middle-class, middle Americans all know, and because we know him we enjoy watching him and laughing at him.  Someday some movie studio is going to figure this out.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 7

Bringing Up Baby

This is probably the classic screwball comedy.  It is perfect for a bad day, a recession, or whatever else might dampen  your mood.  Admittedly you have to be able to enjoy 1930s-1940s acting, writing, humor, etc., but once you clear that hurdle this movie is, like we said, perfect.

Entertainment: 10

Intelligence: 8

Morality: 9-10

Father of the Bride (1991)

Because Father of the Bride is so incredibly sappy, it’s important to recognize its implicit moral values.  In stories like this, sap drenches values.  People cry tears of happiness and say “awwww!” with their entertainment goggles on, but that means they miss what the story is teaching them.  This movie does not provide much depth, but it tells us something about what we value.

The “father” mentioned in the title is helpless and lacks familial control.  His daughter met a man while in Italy, and she gets engaged without immediately telling her parents.  She knows how to use a phone, but she asked no one about the prudence of this match.  Translation: children are completely independent from parents.  Especially when it comes to mating.

“Of course they are completely independent,” you say, but then you are obviously living in Western culture in the 21st century.  Go back a hundred years, or go to the different part of the world, and you will find fathers and mothers choosing mates for their sons and daughters.  Remember the story of Samson, who had to ask his parents to procure a wife for him:

“Samson went down to Timnah, and at Timnah he saw one of the daughters of the Philistines.  Then he came up and told his father and mother, “I saw one of the daughters of the Philistines at Timnah. Now get her for me as my wife.” But his father and mother said to him, “Is there not a woman among the daughters of your relatives, or among all our people, that you must go to take a wife from the uncircumcised Philistines?” But Samson said to his father, “Get her for me, for she is right in my eyes.” — Judges 14:1-3

This is not the world-historical norm — Samson is making the choice, and his parents are bothered by that — but it is closer to the norm than Steve Martin gets.

Throughout the movie, the father acts out anxiety over the minimal role he plays in this marriage.  How can he give his little girl to a man he barely knows?  But whatever makes her happy, he thinks, consoling himself.  This fatherly anxiety is amplified many times by the unnecessary voiceover narrator, who instructs us on what the father is thinking and feeling, which is mostly helplessness.  This is supposed to be funny.

Though the father of the bride has almost no authority in this situation, he is expected to provide everything.  He must pay for the wedding even though his future son-in-law’s parents are far richer than he is.  At $250 per person, for 500 people, this wedding requires serious cash.  The final total would nearly bankrupt the father, but nevermind that.  Whatever makes his little girl happy.  This father and his family values the present over the future — a one-day dreamworld over the credit card bills he will be paying for years.

Why do the bride’s parents have to pay for the wedding?  Custom.  Once upon a time, the groom paid the bride’s family.  This was a form of insurance, a dowry, in case the groom died or left his wife.  The dowry is implied in the Old Testament law about bride-prices (see Exodus 22:16-17) and is mentioned in numerous passages in the Bible, not to mention all of ancient and medieval literature.  The father of the bride could also give something to the newly married couple, but it would not be $250 times 500 for a one-day event.   It was a long-term gift, like a big piece of land or a city (Judges 1:15 and 1 Kings 9:16).  Note the differences: a $10,000 wedding cake lasts two hours; a $50 blender is a gift that keeps on giving.

This movie sentimentalizes the valuing of the present over the future.  In other words, it’s the triumph of the most important of modern American values: consumption and instant gratification.   The movie also legitimizes the feelings of a compromised father, who has his daughter’s love but not her full trust.

Late in the movie, the groom-to-be tells us that the thing he loves most about his future bride is her “complete independence.”  In twenty-five years, he will be the next father of the bride.  If he has any children at all.

Entertainment: 5

Intelligence: 0

Morality: see above

Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is now nearly universally hailed as a masterpiece that exhibits exemplary spirituality and ethics.  Let’s unpack this claim a bit.

First, the ultimate goal for Bill Murray’s character is not explicit.  Murray is stuck in the same day, living it over and over again.  It is never clear why Murray is stuck in Groundhog Day, nor is it clear what he must do to get out of the day.  Unlike Clarence the angel and George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, Murray is never told what he must do.  The repeating day is an inscrutable mystery, and no higher power intervenes to reveal anything to Murray.  Heck, the movie contains no religious imagery.  Not a church, not a cross, not a Buddha statue. In that sense, we could call it functionally secular.

With no higher revelation available within the movie, we must infer what Murray’s goal is from the way he finally ends the repeating day.  Murray, it seems, must win the nice-looking (to him), intellectual woman who he otherwise cannot easily conquer.  To win this woman, he must avoid directly wooing her and instead must indirectly woo her by performing acts of kindness to strangers in Puxtatawney, Pennsylvania.  Murray’s acts of kindness win over many of the townsfolk, who boast about Murray’s character to the intellectual female, who eventually sleeps with Murray to end Groundhog Day.  Murray thus attains his goal by earning a sleepover without sex.  Here, we see what movie genre we are in.  The sleepover is the goal of most modern Hollywood date movies – of for example romantic comedies as different as Roxanne and Say Anything.  To Murray, Hollywood is saying “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Murray’s relative indifference, a state of being he attains by living through years of a repeating day, is Zen-like.  The inscrutable, repeating day is basically a koan that Murray has to live through.  He can’t figure out why Groundhog Day keeps repeating, it’s completely perplexing, and so he adopts a “why care?” attitude typical of the spiritual emptying that Zen Buddhists are supposed to achieve to attain enlightenment.  And that’s what Murray achieves in the end: enlightenment.

But Groundhog Day is more complicated than this.  Murray does achieve certain goals, such as piano-playing and ice sculpting.  One of the points of the repeating day is to show Murray what he can accomplish, given time, effort, and discipline.  Just look at the structure of Murray’s journey through the repeating day:

1) Relishes in hedonistic pleasures (e.g., junk food and loose women).

2) Despairs of his existence and tries to kill himself.

3) Attempts to directly woo his female and fails.

4) Actively seeks to be charitable, partly succeeding and partly failing.

5) Learns a kind of indifferent selflessness, woos the female, and ends the day.

From #1-5, we can easily see the hierarchy of most ethical systems.  Murray progresses from materialism, to can-do individualism, to selflessness.  Or, another way to view it, he goes through Kierkegaard’s three stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the spiritual.  Murray’s progression is general enough to be taken a number of ways, but specific enough to be appreciated by anyone who values selflessness over selfishness.  No wonder all the mushy religionists of the day love this movie.  And no wonder we can all get something out of the movie, even if we disagree with its positive portrayal of shack-ups.

One technicality we enjoy about this movie is its interesting use of closure.  Closure is the word for the way we movie viewers connect one shot with another.  If a movie jumps from an outside shot of a spaceship to an inside shot of a spaceship (like the opening to Star Wars), we viewers mentally make the assumption that the second shot is of the spaceship we just saw from the outside and not another spaceship at another point in space or time.  In Groundhog Day, there are a number of second takes that exemplify closure.  Murray walks into a bar, talks to a female, and then we see him walking into the bar again.   This second bar scene we all automatically assume is another day that Murray is living through.  There is no announcement that that’s what is happening, but we don’t need such an announcement.  The movie does a great job of establishing its own world and the premises of that world, which is why it’s worth studying for you future filmmakers out there.

Entertainment: 10

Intelligence: 5

Morality: 5

Being There

Just in time for another election extravaganza!  Being There is a devastating commentary on national politics in an era of television.  Those readers who gained much from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death will immediately recognize its artistic counterpart in this movie.  But while Postman argued that serious political issues are undermined by the medium of television — where everything is marketed for viewers to consume, and the serious tone of “Breaking News” collides with commercial jingles and cackling celebrities — Being There is less a critique of television itself and more a critique of the political, monied classes of Washington DC.

It all starts with Chance.  Chance is a gardener working for a wealthy Washingtonian, a simpleton who has never left the grounds he keeps.  Chance cannot read or write, but he loves to watch television at every opportunity.  Chance’s life, in fact, is shaped by TV and by the simple platitudes he has learned from decades of gardening.  One day, Chance’s employer dies and, with nowhere else to go, Chance must leave the house.

Chance’s journey takes him through the slums of DC into the wealthiest part of town, to a vast estate owned by the big businessman Benjamin Rand.  Two days after leaving his former home, Chance finds himself in the good graces of the Rand family and has the opportunity to meet the President.  Chance’s simple ways and folksy slogans earn him enormous respect, so much respect in fact that the President quotes Chance’s garden metaphors in a nationally televised speech: “This is the winter of our economy, but spring is sure to come.”  Or something like that.  Chance becomes an immediate celebrity, whose platitudes are taken as profundities by Russian ambassadors and book publishers who want to give him six-figure advances for his thoughts on politics.

(SPOILERS FOLLOW.)  As audience members, we’re required to willingly suspend our belief that Chance would immediately be seen for the dummy he is.  All of Washington is abuzz for days about this mysterious Chance (known as Chauncey Gardener to them), a man with no past but with now tremendous influence.

As a satire of a TV culture and of Washington’s good-old-boy politics, Being There is effective.  But those are just two aspects of a complex and contradictory work that jabs at laissez-faire conservatives throughout.   The President, for example, rubs noses with the uber-wealthy Rand, who has apparently helped elect the President and thus aids him in determining economic policy.  At Rand’s funeral, the President decides to read a selection of Rand’s quotes, the first of which bashes welfare recipients.  The movie tries to ironize Rand’s position, but it has already given Rand too much sympathy to bash his economic views — we watch him slowly and graciously die first, and then we are supposed to be shocked at his anti-welfare statements and his creepy, Masonic grave.  The irony doesn’t work.

The voice of reason in Being There is Chance’s former coworker, a black maid whom the movie inserts as a critique of the white elite of Washington.  She is one of only two people who are not duped by Chance’s appearance of genius, and she is quick to claim that if he weren’t white, he wouldn’t be treated as a great political thinker and a celebrity.  Being There, in two or three scenes, practically screams about the injustice of the racial divide in Washington DC.  Whatever you think of this, artwork that screams never lasts long, so Being There suffers as a result.

The movie’s final image is at once baffling and crude.  We didn’t think the movie earned the right to use it.  Even though he is being considered as a Presidential candidate, Chance is not a Christ-figure in any sense.  Readers who have a theory about why he walks on water should let us know; this is one image we cannot figure out.

Chance is like lots of people we know.  We don’t mean that in a bad way either.  They are simple folks, people who tend their personal affairs well and enjoy outdoor life.  Agrarians like Chance tend to have cultivated morals, but they also get duped by mass media.  It is rare that a Chance the Gardener has great influence on Washington and stuns the political classes there.  Being There, if it is serious, gets things backwards.  The Chances of the world are merely influenced by TV, and those who control the TV set influence (to an extent) the Chances of the world.   Propaganda is a one-way street, and the political manipulators of the world understand which way the traffic flows.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 7

Morality : 7 (one brief unnecessary scene; you’ll know)

Sherlock Jr.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to.  Sherlock Jr. utilizes mostly-dead film techniques that have to be revived eventually.  They’re too good.  Consider: Buster Keaton, chased by a gang of crooks, has no place to hide.  So his sidekick dresses up as an old woman, and in the moment when the crooks find him, Keaton jumps into the disguised sidekick.  Then the sidekick walks away.  It’s a cheap magic trick, but it’s absurdly hilarious.  A movieful of these gags today would cost $15 million and, done right, would earn ten times that much.  Some entrepreneur needs to wise up to this fact.  (Note: we won’t hold our breath until the “Christian” movie industry figures this out.)

But Sherlock Jr., unlike most films (silent or talkie), is not juvenile.  In fact we’re sure that academics have praised it in some obscure academic journal for its complex depiction of the self’s obliteration by technopoly.  Or whatever.  Since this site gets more readers in one day than an obscure academic journal gets in a lifetime, we won’t go there.

But do look closely.  Buster’s character, a down-and-out film projectionist, splits in two.  This doppleganger then jumps into a movie, or really several movies, as he is manipulated by cinematic forces he can’t control.  Then Buster imagines himself in the upscale detective thriller that he is projecting, in which he becomes the star and the detective who must bust a criminal conspiracy.  This is not insignificant: Sherlock Jr. is one of the very few movies to have a movie inside of a movie.

And yet it’s still fun. It’s hard to imagine anyone not loving the movie’s final motorcycle chase.  Sherlock Jr. is better kids’ entertainment than you’ll find at the local library.

The Kino DVD of Sherlock Jr. has a special bonus, an original score by the Club Foot Orchestra.  We know nothing about the Club Foot Orchestra, but we’d guess that this group is one of those retro-big band acts that were popular in the late 1990s.  This score is playful, absurd, avant-garde, and fun, and it often fits the action. (For example, when the criminals are conspiring against Buster, the meter becomes complex and uncountable.)  We weren’t sure if we liked it — too many John Cage-like elements for us — but it does up the artistic ante of the original movie’s opening bid.

Entertainment: 8

Intelligence: 8

Morality: just fine

College (1927)

Buster Keaton’s The General is now widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made, but it flopped so badly at the box office that Keaton had to put out this rather lame feature as his next film venture.  College is filled with a lot of fish-out-of-water gags, but only the last five minutes are satisfying in any meaningful way.  Keaton plays a college scholar who wants to be an athlete.  The jokes all revolve around his attempts to become one, but these get old once you realize that Keaton is going to pretend to screw up at every track and field event.

Despite its silliness, College does prove that contemporary comedies do not do much better.  Same setup, same plot development, same random humor.  It is also nice to know that the nerd/jock dichtomy was flourishing in the 1920s as it does today.

The other shorts on this DVD are throwaways.  The Electric House has promise, but it ends up being too repetitive.  The print for Hard Luck is terrible because it was lost for sixty years.

If you haven’t seen a Keaton movie yet, start with The General (the DVD of which also has the fantastic short Cops) or Sherlock Jr.

Arsenic and Old Lace

Arsenic and Old Lace is a fine example of artists trying to make humorous something inherently disturbing. The results, in this case, are several funny jokes and a weird tone throughout.  An alien from outerspace, seeing this movie without cultural context, would have to admit that whatever mass audience enjoyed Arsenic obviously had very serious problems they weren’t admitting.

That’s because the content is very dark, even though it is played lightly.  Mortimer Brewer has just gotten married.  He is a drama critic who is publicly known for vilifying marriage, particularly in a book called “Marriage: A Fraud and a Failure.”  On Brewer’s wedding day, as he prepares to leave for his honeymoon, he discovers that his two sweet old aunts are practicing euthanasia on old men and burying them in their basement.  Shocked, Mortimer decides to place the blame for these murders on his insane cousin, who thinks that he’s Teddy Roosevelt.  The plot is further complicated by the return of Brewer’s estranged brother, who looks like Boris Karloff and, we learn, is eager to extend his murdering ways to other people.  The police should help with this mess, but they are too self-absorbed to notice crimes.  In the end, Brewer is proud to learn that he is not related to his insane and criminal relatives.  In the stage version he proclaims, “I’m not a Brewer! I’m a bastard!” though this line is modified in the movie.

The core of this movie is therefore the fact that two women in their sixties are euthanizing men.  No matter how lighthearted this is made to appear — and Cary Grant tries his hardest to do so — the wide divide between style and content makes for a bizarre tone.  The movie even spoofs depictions of the macabre, while at the same time being macabre, while at the same time incorporating slapstick.   Sometimes this made us laugh, but most of the time it just made us wonder why murder is even considered funny.

Weird Factor: 10

The Thin Man

Watching The Thin Man should humble those quick to embrace movie fads.  Here we are, one week after the highest grossing movie weekend yet, because of the seventh installment of Batman in twenty years.  Everybody still wants to go see Batman take on the Joker, even though we saw that in 1988, or whenever the first Tim Burton flick came out.  The kids in church were pumping themselves up to see The Dark Knight thirty-five times.   It is supposedly the coolest movie ever.

Well, The Thin Man was the first of a long-running series of detectives stories featuring a husband-and-wife team, whose names we have already forgotten.  People apparently flocked to watch this series of movies back in the 1930s.   According to those who have mah-vellously broad tastes in cinema, this movie has Style.  Whenever the main attraction to see a movie is “style,” run away.  Very fast.  Do not stop to think about it.

The two main characters encounter a whole slew of people involved with a man who has supposedly killed three people.  Their job is to locate the killer, if he is the killer, and if he’s not, then they must find the real killer.  Pretty basic plot, so pizazz must be added.  That pizazz includes witty repartee, innuendo, and lots of booze.  These two characters drink and party their way through the movie as if they hadn’t drank in years.  Actually, they hadn’t.  Prohibition ended the year before this movie was made.

The whole experience of watching The Thin Man does offer some possibilities for reconstructing an early movie audience’s taste.  It gives a sense of what audiences wanted during the early years of the Depression, or at least of what studios might’ve thought audiences wanted.   The detective characters are newly rich members of the leisure class, which lets them enjoy the high life without consequences.  It is obvious that whatever audience is watching is to vicariously enjoy the rich experiences these characters have.

Yet there is no move in this movie, ala Frank Capra, to include characters of other economic classes for the sake of contrast.  The rich detectives party all night, help the police, capture a killer who is known nationwide (thanks to the media), and end the movie with a night of drinking and pleasure, as they head to San Francisco to vacation.  The movie thus equates the fantasy of the leisure class with stylishness, which is transformed into a means to promote the movie.  Obviously The Thin Man succeeds wildly in making this fantasy desirable, since it is still praised for what it’s like to experience it, not what it’s fundamentally about.  Which is basically nothing.

Entertainment: 5-7

Intelligence: 3 (admittedly, some nice compositions)

Morality: 2

The Simpsons Movie

Since there is no plot that the Simpsons TV show hasn’t partaken in, The Simpsons Movie is a TV episode with 50 extra minutes. For regular viewers, you’ve seen it all before. For those who’ve never seen it before, the movie is all you need.

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, social standards of crudity bypassed the Simpsons. We can remember when the show first came out. Much parental spleen was vented at Bart and Homer Simpson, both of whom displayed vulgarity that some people at the time didn’t want their children to emulate. The Simpsons, then, was primarily about a dysfunctional nuclear family in a dysfunctional town. Nowadays the Simpsons are praised as upholding the values of the nuclear family and small-town America. This change in standards illustrates how low standards have sunk. Homer is still a self-centered blowhard who repeatedly alienates his wife and children, while Bart (in the movie) is encouraged by Homer to skateboard naked around Springfield and get drunk.

There are possible good messages in the movie, underneath all of its crude cleverness, but those are ultimately undermined by its farcical tone. It is not “nuanced” as others have claimed. Nothing is sacred in the town of Springfield, and so everything can be turned into a raucous joke. We weren’t sure how to take the moment when, in an emergency situation, Homer hurriedly flips through the Bible and screams “This book doesn’t have any answers!” This moment is left alone, and it undoes the reasonable portrayals of Ned Flanders (the stereotyped evangelical) and Springfield’s church.

The movie’s willingness to turn everything into farce is too bad, because it satirizes the authoritative powers of the Environmental Protection Agency. After Homer pollutes Springfield’s lake, a pig-headed Washington bureaucrat decides to seal the town of Springfield inside a dome. There are a few excellent scenes in which this bureaucrat persuades President Schwarzenegger to seal off Springfield, and then destroy the town altogether. This portrayal suggests the unjust tyranny of a central authority against the dysfunctional but pleasant, small American town.  It’s too bad that we didn’t care in the end.  We felt as if we were to act like Nelson, pointing at everything and giving off a loud “HA HA!”

Entertainment:6

Intelligence:6

Morality: 1