crewless news and notes

I’m getting more annoyed the more I think about critics complaining that good movies must be about something, implying something “important.” Crash was about racism, and it sucked. Million Dollar Baby was about assisted suicide, and it sucked, too. The problem is, movies that are about something tend to get hung up on what they’re about and forget to be good movies.

I love that there’s some subtext to Star Trek II, that the movie, on one level, is about Captain Kirk getting older and how the various indiscretions of his youth are coming back to haunt him in various ways. But what I really love about Star Trek II is that it kicks ass with those movie things I talked about last time–acting, editing, cinematography, etc.

As I watch more movies and learn more about movies, I find myself less interested in story and more interested in the emotional effect a movie has on me. It’s like pop music. Unless lyrics are really great or really terrible, I usually don’t notice them. I listen for the singer’s melody and delivery. I mean, I love Radiohead, but I rarely know or care what Thom Yorke is going on about. But it makes me feel something every time, so I keep listening.

One problem with a lot of so-called “independent” films is their over-dependence on dialogue. The characters talk and talk, but the talk is not particularly clever, and it’s damn sure not particularly cinematic. Tarantino gets grief sometimes for too much talk, but there’s a lot of cool cinematography and music and acting and editing in his movies, and watching them makes me feel something.

Same thing with Lost in Translation. A lot of critics liked that one, and it got a screenplay Oscar. But I can’t imagine the screenplay, on the page, was all that great. That movie is all about the mood, and the mood has very little to do with the script in that case. Like John Carpenter says, let’s thread that screenplay up on the projector, and we’ll take a look at it.

I think if you look and theorize hard enough, you can probably create some subtext for any movie. And it’s fun to be an armchair film scholar and do that sometimes. But does it really matter? I can’t think of any subtext for The Empire Strikes Back or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I love both those movies. My favorite movie ever, Dr. Strangelove, is about guys who start a nuclear war because they’re having trouble functioning sexually. With text like that, is there even room for subtext?