{"id":28842,"date":"2016-04-17T13:12:29","date_gmt":"2016-04-17T13:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/?page_id=28842"},"modified":"2016-04-17T22:52:09","modified_gmt":"2016-04-17T22:52:09","slug":"does-movies-matter-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/king-family\/columns-king-uit-entertainment-weekly\/does-movies-matter-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pop of King: Does Movies Matter? (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
\"kingcolumn\"It\u2019s said that in the \u201860s, when Francis Ford Coppola was but a lad, he found himself working on one of Roger Corman\u2019s pictures. According to legend, Coppola convinced Corman, a low-budget junkie, to let him make his own film on the side using Corman\u2019s equipment and crew. The film Coppola then made (in nine days) was Dementia 13. For mood, atmosphere, and plain old gut-churning horror, 13 makes Psycho and Night of the Living Dead look tame. Dementia 13 is a movie that matters.<\/p>\n

Many years later, Coppola spent at least a thousand times what he spent on Dementia 13 to make the last of the Godfather movies. The film is opulent, incoherent, and boring. The Godfather Part III is a movie that doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n

The difference? One has heart, soul, and the crazy enthusiasm of youth. The other is the work of a talented man who has either used all his talent up or is saving what\u2019s left for another day. For a long time, I lost the distinction between movies that matter and movies that don\u2019t, which suggested a scary possibility: that movies in general had ceased to matter, at least to me. The possibility was scary because I\u2019ve loved the cinema my whole life, and I hated the idea that I might be losing that love.<\/p>\n

Then, in the course of a single week, I saw one movie that definitely mattered\u2014maybe the best movie I\u2019ve seen in the last 30 years\u2014and one that didn\u2019t; one that was, in fact, pretty blah. The blah movie was Kill Bill. You probably saw some good reviews of it, possibly even in this magazine. Steve says don\u2019t you believe it. Steve says you should remember that movie critics see movies free. Also, they don\u2019t have to pay the babysitter or spring 10 bucks for the parking. They\u2019re thus apt to rhapsodize over narcissistic stuff like Kill Bill, which announces itself as Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Fourth Film, ain\u2019t we la-di-da.<\/p>\n

Kill Bill isn\u2019t a benchmark of awfulness like Mars Attacks! or Mommie Dearest; it\u2019s just dully full of itself. Uma Thurman tries hard, and she\u2019s the best thing in the movie, but in the end she\u2019s stuck playing a woman who\u2019s a label instead of a human being: She is, God save us, the Bride.
\nThe violence is choreographed like an Esther Williams swim routine. When the Bride dispatches at least 70 kung-fu goons in one scene, blood spurts from amputated limbs, often in pretty spirals. And the movie\u2019s litany of in-jokes is so tiresome.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not even an ending you can hang your hat on; we\u2019re just told to stay tuned for more\u2014more karate kicks and throws, more falsetto birdy-sounding battle cries. It\u2019s certainly well made, and the story garners some of our interest as it goes along, but dull is still dull, isn’t it? All I\u2019m doing here is trying to focus the feelings of vague dissatisfaction you\u2019re apt to experience leaving this movie, the sense that you came to be entertained and instead found yourself warming your hands at the bonfire of Quentin Tarantino\u2019s vanities.<\/p>\n

Mystic River, on the other hand, hones our interest the old-fashioned way: by building character and telling an actual story. It begins in the mid-\u201870s, when three boys (Sean, Dave, and Jimmy) are approached by two men pretending to be cops. Determining Dave to be the easiest to separate from his playmates, the \u201ccops\u201d put him in the back of their car and drive him away. For four days Dave is sexually abused by these human wolves. He finally escapes… except no one really escapes such treatment, and Clint Eastwood (who directed) and Dennis Lehane (who wrote the book) both know it.<\/p>\n

We jump ahead 25 years, to the day before Jimmy\u2019s teenage daughter is found murdered. What follows is a heart-wrenching tragedy culminating in the murder of an innocent man. With its razor-sharp script and strong performances (most of the kudos have gone to Sean Penn, but this is Kevin Bacon\u2019s best acting job), the movie is an absolute joy. You\u2019re never wondering if you should have gotten the small popcorn instead of the medium; you\u2019re never checking your watch. You\u2019re totally absorbed.<\/p>\n

In Mystic River there are three murders instead of hundreds, and Eastwood shoots the one we see so it\u2019s mostly in shadows. There are no kung-fu death dances; the violence is ugly rather than beautiful and romantic.
\nAgain, Kill Bill isn\u2019t a bad movie; it\u2019s just a tepid one. Ten years from now, you\u2019ll be hard put to remember what it was about or who was in it. Mystic River, on the other hand, will burn itself into your memory. Twenty years from now, you\u2019ll be able to recall Sean Penn\u2019s terrible cries of grief when he realizes his daughter is dead.<\/p>\n

Maybe the point is this: The movies that matter (and the books, and the music) call out to us in their own voices\u2014voices that are sometimes low but always compelling. Movies are the highest popular art of our times, and art has the ability to change lives. That means that some movies matter, and the best matter a lot. Every time I go, I go with the highest of high hopes, my ticket money in one hand and my heart in the other. Most times the movie turns out to be a stinker, but sometimes you find a real classic like The Way of the Gun, Billy Elliot, or Mystic River. When that happens, I can steal this year\u2019s World Series slogan and put it to even better use: I live for this.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s said that in the \u201860s, when Francis Ford Coppola was but a lad, he found himself working on one of Roger Corman\u2019s pictures. According to legend, Coppola convinced Corman, a low-budget junkie, to let him make his own film<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":4585,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-28842","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28842","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28842"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28893,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/28842\/revisions\/28893"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenking.nl\/skfnieuw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}