At the Movies, 12/21/08

Ben Lyons, get off my show!
On last week's At the Movies, Ben Mankiewicz and Ben Lyons gave a "See it" and "Rent it" rating, respectively, to the excellent movie Doubt, then proceeded to talk about what is so wrong with it. The discussion was clearly shaped by Lyons's vacillating "Rent it" rather than Mank's relatively hearty (although a bit too critical) "See it". Mank didn't question Lyons's absurd rating--how can he really not recommend this movie?--or defend the movie, either of which could have produced an interesting discussion. Unfortunately, the same dynamic occurred this week in their review of the nearly universally panned Seven Pounds. Here is Lyons on the movie:

The film took so long to get going. The first 2/3 to 3/4 of it is really over-bearingly slow to the point when the plot comes together and there's a really cool twist at the end I just didn't care anymore . . . [The director] asks a lot of the audience without really getting anything for their hard work in return . . . The music in the movie was just an afterthought, completely distracting and awful. So I'm going to have to say "Rent it."

What?! So that's 3/4 of a boring movie, a twist at the end you don't care about and a really bad soundtrack, and somehow that doesn't deserve a "Skip it" rating? Mank did little better here, saying "See it," nodding in agreement when Lyons said it was mostly boring but then saying it got interesting just when he was about to check out, although the key points at the end do not really hold up after you think about them at all. So "See it"!

Suffice it to say, while I try not to be too influenced by the reviews on this show I think these guys have convinced me to skip it.

On The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Lyons said, "As much as I was watching the romance on screen, I was thinking about my own life and where I am at in my life's journey and timeline, it's a very introspective experience." This is the second time in recent memory (the other was the Frost/Nixon review) that he has talked about how a movie's deeper message somehow caused him to reflect on his life.

This certainly isn't a terrible comment to make about a movie. When Ebert talks about seeing the Third Man as a young romantic at a flea box theater in Europe, or how he has watched La Dolce Vita through various points in his life and seen himself in it, it really reflects the richness of the movies and how they become a part of our lives and personalities as we grow older. Coming out of Ben's mouth, though, comments like these just seem silly. Sorry Ben, but you just don't carry the same kind of weight to provide these insights--they simply come off as trite and pretentious.

Finally, Mank's 3 to See once again leaves us confused. He recommends The Wrestler, Gran Torino, and Seven Pounds. The first is his favorite movie of the year, the second he clearly liked but had some criticisms, but the last he basically said sucked and gave very few reasons to like it--other than it gets good in the last 3/4 although even that doesn't hold up. That means leaving off recently released movies like Doubt--which he said was a great movie except for the very last line--and Frost/Nixon. Has Mank forgotten these films already (I certainly haven't) or is 3 to See just being shaped to appear more "relevant" to the youth of today with their supposedly short-term memories? "Dude, Doubt came out like last week, why would I want to see old stuff? Let's go see that Will Smith movie instead--maybe he'll beat up some aliens."

Criticwatch - A full hour of At the Movies

Erik Childress from Criticwatch found that avoiding At the Movies has unintended consequences--you just have to watch a full hour of the show later. I can definitely sympathize--I try to avoid taping the show out of fear that I'll waste my life away watching it multiple times just to get the quotes right.

First, Erik catches another name-drop that I missed. On Cadillac Records, Ben says, "I thought Columbus Short was very authentic as the harmonica player, Little Walter, in a really breakout performance . . .”

Would you believe that Ben and Columbus are buddies in real life! Of course you would . . .


Erik continues:

Another new regular to watch out on the show is breaking bad on the trailers they hyped weeks earlier. This may never happen again considering all the criticism they’ve received for the Twilight “3 to see” debacle. But this week they came down hard on Oscilloscope’s Wendy and Lucy.

That's correct--after recommending we watch the trailer for Twilight, they actually showed the trailer for Wendy and Lucy, only to tell us later that the movie sucked. Thanks guys, way to make good use of the time on your show.

Finally, Erik quotes Ben on Doubt:

“You know what’s frustrating in the film though, Mank? You don’t get to hear the little boy’s side of the story at all and I felt like he was kinda pushed to the side and was almost an afterthought even though he’s the subject of the film.”

Erik responds:

We don’t get to hear the little boy’s side of the story? The subject of the film? . . . Did you feel cheated when JFK didn’t tell you who the killer was? I don’t believe the movie’s title was Spelled Out. The whole point of the film is that we don’t know what happened. If we heard it from the boy’s mouth, then the film has no point . . . This may go down in 2008 as the dumbest specific thing you have ever said about a singular film.

I have to say, I think it is hard to beat saying that Goldeneye is his favorite Bond movie because he liked the video game. But it's a good point--it sounds to me more like a bad excuse to dislike the movie than anything else. And on that point--we don't need it spelled out for us! The boy's feelings are written all over his face and it still doesn't tell us what really happened. That is what is so deceptive and painful about the whole thing.

Read the full article here

At the Movies, 12/14/08

Ben Lyons, report to Sister Aloysius regarding you review of Doubt. Now!

For weeks, Ben Lyons has wielded the "Rent it" rating like the blunt object that it is--using it far too often and unnecessarily when a more efficient tool would do the job better. But his latest "Rent it" is simply unconscionable. Sometimes what he says is just foolish, but when Ben disses one of my favorite movies of this year, I take it personally.

Ben tells us that Doubt was probably good as a play but there is no reason why it needed to be filmed or, for that matter, why we need to see it in the theater, so "Rent it." Lyons doesn't seem to realize the utter lack of logic of this statement--if it works better in live theater than film, then it will certainly work better in a movie theater with an audience than watching it at home by yourself on a TV screen (or on an iPod or in a plane). But that is hardly the point--I can think of five great reasons to recommend Doubt: Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, and writer John Patrick Shanley. Of those four great performances, Ben says he was only impressed by one (Davis)!

This is a film that defies expectations, showing us how Catholic priests got away with child molestation for decades (or did they?), not in a didactic way but in a subtle, character driven drama. No, this is not a terribly "cinematic" film--the story is told through dialogue and not pictures, although the scenery of a working-class Catholic school in the Bronx is perfect--but there is such a keen sense of drama and mystery in this story that makes it incredibly riveting. Really, more screenplays should have this sense of questioning and curiosity about their characters, continually catching us by surprise and showing us how complicated such an open-and-shut case really is.

Unfortunately, Mank's "See it" helped very little, saying that it was a great movie "Until the final line which absolutely made me wince," which made it merely a very good movie. Incredible! The ending is stirring and encourages you to rethink the entire subject of the film. If this made Mank wince, he must have rolled his eyes at "Jack, I swear."

But only to prove the silliness of encouraging us to "rent" Doubt is Lyons's 3 to See recommendation. Because there was not enough time for DVD recommendations (which in recent weeks have included just telling us DVD's that are out, regardless of whether they are even worth seeing), he decided to include the new DVD for Horton Hears a Who in his 3 to See (the other two were Frost/Nixon and The Reader). That means that not only was Slumdog Millionaire kicked off the 3 to See, but we are encouraged to rent Horton instead of seeing Doubt.

Finally, we cannot forget another tongue-lashing by Mank regarding Nothing Like the Holidays, against Lyons's "Rent it" (again?) rating. Mank, citing Lyons, says "'Harmless. Predictable. Contrived.' If that's the best thing you can say, you got to say 'Skip it.'"