Everything Else

Watch from around 4 minutes in.

Zaysen: After all, in the end what everyone really wants is peace.
Colonel Trautman: The Kremlin’s got a hell of a sense of humor.
Zaysen: Please explain.
Colonel Trautman: You talk peace and disarmament. And here you are wiping out a race of people!
Zaysen: We are wiping out no one. I think you are too intelligent to believe such propaganda. Now again. Where are the missiles?
Colonel Trautman: I don’t know anything about the missiles!
Zaysen: Of course you do. But you do not seem to realize I’m providing a way out for us both.
Colonel Trautman: You expect sympathy? You started this damn war, now you have to deal with it!
Zaysen: And we will. It is only a matter of time before we achieve a complete victory.
Colonel Trautman: You know there won’t be a victory. Everyday your war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed, poorly equipped freedom fighters. The fact is that you underestimated your competition. If you’ve studied your history, you’d know that these people have never given up to anyone. They’d rather DIE than be slaves to an invading army. You can’t defeat a people like that. We tried, we already HAD our Vietnam. Now you’re going to have yours.

(Oh dear, and there’s more just a little later)

This is Afghanistan… Alexander the Great try to conquer this country… then Genghis Khan, then the British. Now Russia. Afghan people fight hard. They never be defeated. Ancient enemy make prayers about these people. You wish to hear? Very good. May God deliver us from the venom of the cobra, teeth of the tiger and the vengeance of the Afghan.”

Reminds me of George W Bush’s one truly (if accidentally) great and revelatory quote: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us vs them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

Jesus Christ I’m sorry. On behalf of humanity we need to apologise for the 90s. You probably don’t need to watch Will Smith’s action films anymore, he usually has a huge tedious verse that explains the whole plot.

For example from Men In Black 2:

o it’s this chick right
Serlena, making me sick right
Earth is worthless to her she be tripping like
Threatening me and my mens
Trying to get the light
Thinking she’s superwoman
But black kryptonite finishing whatever you start son
The best looking crime fighter since myself in part one
Better act right and play nice and sing along
‘Cause K is back and he hype
What? Bring it on!
Uhh, Wanna brawl with me? Trying to brawl with me?
Uhh Uhh What What
Yo… what what… then… lemme… see you… just…
Come on… just come on and..

(BTW this post was prompted by getting 3 points with this in a game of SCATTERGORIES last night.)

This movie is really happening. If you happen to like M Night Shyamalan then you’ll find that news most happening.

Is this film actually about the lack of plots and movie titles left in the world? I mean, fucking hell, “The Happening?” I thought this was someone taking the piss out of Shyamalan when I first heard the title. What EXACTLY is this happening?

“Oh you know, some really bad shit! Sinister as hell! Just if we say what it is it’ll be quickly apparent how completely lame it is and nobody will go and see the film. That’s right, this entire film is about two things, a dumb trailer and a dumb twist. We save the revelation for the last 5 minutes when you realise it’s caused by the world losing their faith in God or a 5 year old child’s dead dog.

PS: “SWING AWAY!”

PPS: I’ll probably still go to see this.

Does any scene encapsulate that feeling of everything going wrong as well as this one? How good is Steve Martin in this? Also the German version is as hardcore as you’d imagine.

What should I say or think about “No Country For Old Men”?

After that abrupt ending and its blaring silence, I’m guessing a lot of people asked themselves that question. It’s not a film that’s direct or unambiguous in its messages, and indeed it’s one you could easily deem profound or mindblowing without ever bothering to wonder why, so effective are the tricks it employs.

For me, the film asked the question “what is the world coming to?”, but never seemed to give a satisfactory answer. Some people have criticised it for this, but I’m just not sure there are satisfactory answers to that question. I mean, if there are answers, who knows them? Not the old sheriff towards the end blaming kids with green hair, not Tommy Lee Jones wondering if finding God would provide some, not Josh Brolin who’s just obliviously caught in the middle, not even Chigurh with his deranged take on determinism.

The very question seems to imply that the world is something other than “No Country For Old Men’s” collection of colliding organisms and events. In the movie Chigurh’s coin toss seems to set the tone for this. There’s not always victory for justice, there’s no balance between good and evil, it’s just dumb luck. That’s the way the world works, even if most of us are lucky enough that we are never forced by circumstance to realise that. The final irony of Chigurh surviving the car crash when you may have thought it’d be nice and symmetrical for him to die just draws a line under that element of the film: there is no pattern to fate or destiny. Hell it’s not even fate or destiny at work, it’s just random sporadic events.

I’ve seen some reviews which call the film conservative, or suggest it’s arguing that society has lost its values or morals, but I like to think that the Coens are just examining that view. Ultimately I think they show that we just don’t have an explanation for the shifts in emphasis which violence or perceived immorality have taken. On the face of it, society is far less violent or barbarous today than ever, yet extreme violence still occurs. The question you ask then is: have we made progress as a society? Are we moving slowly upwards on a scale of human morality, just as we seem to be advancing in science or medicine?

Again, it’s hard to say. Some have said “No Country For Old Men” chickens out of answering any of these questions despite posing them, that it hides behind this veil of nihilism. But when the questions are so mountainous, I’m not sure that that’s cowardice. Another take would be to say that “No Country For Old Men” argues that despite having notions of ourselves as an advanced society, we still have no worthwhile explanation for much of the violence that occurs, or no way of understanding the random death dealt by diseases like cancer.

And so the film itself is just a hodge podge of events, a collision of brutal acts, a meaningless conjunction of the ambitions of a group of people, perforated heavily with a whole lot of violent death. Perhaps this is why it feels so sparse, why the cinema is plunged into silence at the end, as the big questions are asked but not answered. I mean, at that moment, when the credits roll, isn’t everyone’s inner nihilist tapped a bit? And then we realise just how unsatisfactory our answers to these questions really are.

If you haven’t seen “No Country For Old Men”, I definitely recommend it.

Having stayed out quite late twice last weekend, the body clock is refusing to shut down at 11 or 12 at night, so I’ve been watching whatever films are on. Last night, there was “White Sands” starring Willem Dafoe, Samuel L Jackson, and a few less well known actors.

What started off a pretty good film noir had a stupid love interest element and a big splurge of plot twists at the end which were pretty much impossible to follow. Sometimes these modern noir films can be carried through crappy plots by good characters or evocative shooting (and it had these) but overall it was pretty disappointing. It had potential but never really delivered.

The night before I watched “The Hitcher”. This was much better, a really great horror movie with the ultimate omnipotent villain who manages to be everywhere at once. Basically the plot runs that a youngish guy named Jim Halsey (dressed in clothes that are pretty much exactly what you might see someone wearing today, despite the film being from 1986) picks up this hitchhiker, a creepy psycho played pretty amazingly by Rutger Hauer.

From the first 5 minutes there are knives pointed at eyeballs and it has that fantastic doom of horror set in rural areas, that sense that a dumb city slicker has got himself mixed up in a world that’s rugged and unrelenting in every sense. The kid constantly attempts to seek help from the police, but even they turn against him. I guess a lot of great horror keeps dangling the prospect of escape in front of the protagonist, only to dash their hopes again and again. In “The Hitcher”, everytime things seem like they’re about to go right, Rutger Hauer’s psychotic face appears, usually behind the wheel of his gigantic black pickup truck!

So this was quite cheesy in parts but I enjoyed it, you couldn’t really ask for more from a horror/thriller film shown at midnight. There was very little dialogue but it was well used, eg at one point, having been implicated in a few gruesome murders, including the deaths of several cops and a young family, Halsey staggers to a diner and orders a coffee. He rubs his eyes and when he opens them, Rutger Hauer, “the Hitcher” is suddenly sitting opposite him, and he just says “welcome to Shitsville!”

In another scene in the diner, the Hitcher places coins over Halsey’s eyes and under his tongue, which is a reference to Greek mythology whereby they would do this to someone after their death, to allow them to pay the ferryman. Not something you’d expect to see in a standard Hollywood film, and really creepily done.

Of course, so much is left unsaid in the movie, you don’t really know anything about the motivations of the Hitcher, that’s part of the charm. That and his utterly ridiculous omnipresence. If there’s a door, he’ll be behind it. If there’s a hill, he’ll be driving over it with a great 80s road movie electronic soundtrack blaring. If there’s a route of escape, he’ll be shutting it off. And there are a ton of scenes to make you jump out of the seat if you do that watching movies. Lots of fun.

Field of Dreams was shit right? Well, as far as I remember. A man builds a baseball field in his garden to attract the ghosts of dead baseball players. Repeat that to yourself. That was the plot. Now I can’t tell if, isolated from the film, that sounds like it should be great or absolutely woeful. Nor can I remember if it was a particularly big hit, Wikipedia tells me it was nominated for a few Oscars though, and it grossed 64 million at the box office (whatever that means, film buffs, help me).

But after using the phrase “if you build it, they will come” at the weekend quite automatically I then was forced to contemplate what a recurrent movie line it is. Of course, plenty of lines from films are repeated ad nauseam, but few in so many different contexts so divorced from the films themselves.

If you’re dubious, just take a look at the different ways in which “Field of Dreams” most famous line has been used and re-used, taken from 372,000 Google search results for the term.

If You Build It, They Will Come: “What Teddy Roosevelt knew a hundred years ago still holds true in today’s Panama.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Building learning communities through threaded discussions.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Google sees big boost in Mobile traffic.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Need to attract overseas students to boost the coffers? An international student centre may be just the thing.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “Rumsfeld’s baby nukes and the War on Terror.”

If You Build It, They Will Come: “An article about “Jews In Green”, a site for Jewish soldiers.”

Then there are the wiseguys who decide they must screw with the classic formula of “if you build it, they will come”:

If You Build It They Will Come…But How Will They Use It (A not so exciting piece on Multimedia Learning Environments

If You Build It, They Will Come…In Their Cars (New York City parking policy)

If You Build It, They Will Come…and Spam (Online marketing)

And so on, and so on, until all you can hear is that voice whispering from the cornfield, except it’s wearing a suit and working for a web design company, or writing for the Guardian, or talking about the US presidential election 3 years ago.

What’s interesting is that in the film, the line was, as far as I can tell, supposed to mean something akin to “carpe diem”, to suggest you should follow your dreams and simply trust your instinct and your gut to lead you to them. And this meaning seems to be, loosely, the one that has survived in a lot of the above links. But given the breadth of the types of argument or article that employ it, it seems clear that the phrase also fits a variety of purposes. Is its popularity proportionate with the popularity of the film? I suggest not. Why then is it so popular?

In trying to answer that it’s interesting to wonder whether it’s a triumph of language or a triumph of meaning (or indeed, whether it’s a triumph at all for a phrase from a film to reappear in new contexts in such a weird way, and not just dumb luck). That is to say, is it used because it is a nicely rhythmic phrase in itself, or is it used because it is in fact perfectly vague and evocative? It’s almost a less is more thing, in this case, less substance results in more usage!

Can anyone reading think of another way to say “if you build it, they will come”? A way to communicate the idea of the phrase as simply and nicely? I can’t really, and this is what’s interesting about it, it’s like the movies pre-empted business with this useful cliché. It’s not unusual for movie quotes to become hugely popular or memorable, but the versatility through blandness of “if you build it, they will come” certainly is a little unusual. I mean, judging by the Google search results, almost every time people use the phrase, they AREN’T talking about the film.

To illustrate, search for Scarface’s “Say hello to my little friend”. You get just 250,000 results, and most are movie sites or t-shirt merchants. With “if you build it, they will come”, as shown above, there are a variety of articles, reports, blog posts, business advice sites, and arguments. Okay, so there’s a common thread of sorts, a whole heap of internet marketing and business/entrepreneurial sites come up, but even these are nothing to do with the movie. It’s weird. Like the Ronseal ad, whoever wrote the film must laugh everytime they see their monster rear its head.

In conclusion perhaps I should add in the following warning from the Sydney Morning Herald. Just in case some of you decide to build a baseball field in your back yard that is. It’s obviously not the world’s most optimistic paper, as this dreary caveat shows: “You can’t work on the assumption that if you build it, they will come”. I can’t?? I can’t rely on the most famous line from a Kevin Costner film to steer my livelihood? But 350,000 other websites told me I could! Then the sucker punch: “In fact, if you don’t do the right thing, THEY might stay away in droves”.

“If you build it…..they might stay away in droves” is not the moneyshot in “Field of Dreams”, it’s that of “Field of Misguided Assumptions” or “Field of Repressed Failures” or “Overgrown Ditch of Procrastination”. None of these would have been very successful, would they?

PS: Before anyone points it out, I should mention that yes, I realise I am smoking the crack pipe in a big way on this blog.