emgasulla

I can understand that our average bong-smoking, jobless, couch (or rug) potato American doesn't see himself represented too often in the movies, at least not in a favorable light, so The Big Lebowski must be appealing to a sizable portion of our population. But, for the rest of us, this movie is painful to watch. Have you ever tried to listen to a gang of complete idiots chitchatting for ten minutes? Then go figure what it is to watch it for a full length movie. The worst thing is, the fact this movie was done by the Coen bros. and has a well known cast gives it an aura of respectability it does not deserve. Forget for a second the names in the credits and you're watching standard Cheech & chong material. And that's not a good thing.

I honestly don't think the movie is worth an 8, not in its released form. But since the cuts and additions from the suits are so painfully obvious, I'm willing to give a higher rating to the movie that could have been... and for now, only the original director Oliver something has seen.

So the original movie (which is still discernible somehow) was supposed to be a dark, slow take on isolation, pill overuse and boring modern life. With a twist: a mom so desperate to protect her child, she would silently watch other people being killed as long as she can find her kid. That's actually moving and seldom seen in a macho-dominated Hollywood. I won't say that ice cold Kidman is the right choice to depict a desperate mom, but given that her role is to often look emotionless (so she can pass as another "pod people") she doesn't do too badly.

Now, the suits didn't like that and called those soft-brained Wachowski bros to make it -supposedly- more mainstream. And what they did was to add car chases, crashes, helicopters, fires and senseless violence in general. Inserted into the original movie at close intervals to keep people amused (or so they thought). Now, there are a few good directors who can pull out a combination of slow burn and crazy action. But a patchwork movie made of two different directors' bits, guys with widely opposed instincts and goals, no wonder the result is a flop.

If anything is to be learned from this, it's how little do Hollywood executives know about what makes a good movie. Granted, a non-stop mishmash of violence and fifth-drink bar philosophy like The Matrix can earn the big bucks, but you can't expect Matrix-like bits to improve what was intended to be a slow paced, moody film. Which was probably condemned to be a box office failure, but also could have been pretty good.

I just happen to cross paths with this miniseries looking for something else, and I thought it would be amusing to read the reviews.

And amusing it was, but in the wrong sense: turns out that most people think of it as one of TV's greatest masterpieces!!! I remember it as an over-sized turd. Primitive idea, appealing to our worst fears and prejudices (aliens might look good from the outside but actually they are cruel, ugly lizards). Stone faced acting. You-got-to-be-kidding plot twists. True, the first scenes looked decent, but the very moment some green lizard skin was exposed it became just another crappy TV laughing stock.

Well, no wonder Hollywood suits can still pullout stinkers like Independence Day -if so many people think V was that great!

Of the many films by Peter Handke (either alone or with his partner Wim Wenders) this may be the most appealing. It is also not recommended for modern viewers accustomed to Hollywood's rhythm -it is long, slow paced and even difficult to follow sometimes. I strongly recommend viewers to read the book too, although they may not find too many additional clues there, for Handke's style is to reflect the character's actions rather than their thoughts (which, by the way, should be the perfect cinematic approach). Some people have wasted their time especulating about the woman's reasons to divorce her husband: the french essayist Gilles Lipovetsky even said that her "lack of good reasons" is a sign of modern life's emptiness. In fact, we can not say she does not have reasons: only we are not allowed to see them on the screen. One might even think that Handke himself did not care to build the woman's inner thoughts (and if he did, he sure did not share them with us). The movie, and the book, are about communication between us, or at least this is one of its possible readings. Do we really know what is on other people's mind, even people real close to us? The answer is no: we can only talk of what they tell us, or what we might hint, but how many times had we been completely wrong about somebody? The movie defies the usual assumption of an omniscient camera: the woman would not share her thoughts with the viewers, and this leaves us with a sense of discomfort. We feel compelled to find motivations that are just not there. Just the fact that the movie makes us think about it would be enough to qualify it as a masterpiece.

It is difficult to comment on such a brilliant movie without having read the book first, or even better, being familiar with Peter Handke's narrative works. While it may seem evident (to us, accustomed to Hollywood's conventional plots) that the main character of The Goalie... is a madman, it is not evident at all. Handke's approach to narrative is to reflect exterior signs, rather than enter the character's inner thoughts. See The Lefthanded Woman for example: while it may seem, on the surface, that the woman does not have a reason for divorce, in fact she might have a lot, only she does not reveal what is on her mind. Same applies to the goalie: he would not speak his mind, therefore we, and even Handke himself (or Wenders) can not enter his own intimate realm. Whatever his reasons are for what he does (and murder is only one of his unexplained acts) we can not know them. The film is about communication between people more than murder. It is funny that most of us would assume he is mad just because we can not find an account of his acts: if you think about it, in the real world outside the movie realm, most people -and even our closest friends- would not tell us why they do what they do. And it does not necessarily mean they are mad.