Top 5 Hard-to-Recommend Good Movies

McBane here. Sorry this is late, I’ve been busy spending the day with Raptor; essentially, he recently won tickets (by his own admission: semi-marginal) to see a ballgame in a somewhat-but-not-really-nearby city. In the process of claiming his bounty he also managed to irritate two friends, blow upwards of sixty bucks on gas, and lose his credit card.

I know I had a good time. And needless to say, it warmed my heart to watch him enjoy his prize.

I will say this for the man, however: in all the years I’ve known him, he’s never outwardly demonstrated anything less than a complete, unwavering, oblivious, slack-jawed, dumbfounded indifference to problems. It really, really takes work for something to get under his skin, which has presented a constant challenge for me. Luckily, I have always been able to stay ahead of the curve (as I’m betting this post has done already).

Raptor, you’re welcome.

5) Mission: Impossible: III

A second sequel to two mediocre movies; always a tough sell. Plus it has Tom Cruise, post-Oprah meltdown. I certainly can’t be inclined to recommend that dude to anyone.

As a result, this movie receives understandably lukewarm interest. Yet it has maybe the most enjoyable first four minutes of any movie I’ve seen. The tone is established immediately: this is a movie that means business (it has what I call a “business time” opening), and it casts a welcome sense of dread over the rest of the flick.

This is extremely rare in big-budget action movies. Since these movies need a certain kind of ending to be greenlit, it’s very difficult to put the audience on edge for most of the run time. Yet this movie does so, while incorporating all the needed parts of the blockbuster: great action sequences (four of them, in fact), wonderfully unusual villain, plenty of eye candy. Check, check, and check.

4) The Terrorist

The title makes this one difficult to recommend. Immediately, you probably thought of one of two possibilities: this movie is a) some pinko lefty shit implicitly apologizing for the protagonist and showing that no one is accountable for what they do, or b) terrorist-as-antagonist in an unsophisticated suspense flick used in a way that ultimately makes you feel dirty for accepting terrorism as entertainment.

What this movie really is about is nothing so political. It’s simply a meditation on a young girl deciding whether she’s willing to die for reasons she doesn’t fully understand. This can seem surprising at first, since many people tend to associate terrorism with purity of evil, though such a conception is obviously limiting; many people likewise draw comfort in demonizing enemies. But enemies are not demons. They are just people. And if that is kept in mind, it can perhaps start to resonate that terrorism is, at the core, just a means to many different ends, carried out in many different ways, by many different actors, with many different motivations. And that it is always, always, always undertaken by people.

This is an important point to acknowledge. That it may be a messy reality to acknowledge does not mean it can be wished away by pretending it is not true. Understanding should not be unsettling; whether we condone a thing and whether we attempt to understand it are not inexorably linked. If, say, “you” are big on condemnation of understanding, it does not make you tough and pragmatic. Unfortunately it just makes you inflexible, and maybe even kind of a jerk.

I mean, look. You should not be mad or irritated that people think differently than you, or at least, you should not feel this way all the time; bad intentions can (and should) certainly make you mad, and bad actions can (and should) as well. But we’re all really (really) different. Usually that should just be okay, but even when circumstances dictate that you do have to do something about those differences, why should you be afraid of trying to understand something you fear? (And haven’t you ever heard of “know your enemy?”)

3) Elephant

A lot of people feel they don’t understand this movie. A lot of people don’t like it for that reason. Other people don’t like it for other reasons.

I’m not going to tell you what this movie is about. (Mainly because it’s hard to definitively say what it is about.) I do understand that there are many reasons why you might not like it. This is definitely a difficult movie to wrap your brain around, namely because when it’s over, more than any other movie I’ve ever seen, you are forced to think: why? Why the hell was this movie presented like this, in this context? What’s the fucking point?

It is to the credit of this movie that this is very hard to figure out. To some extent, it’s like an inkblot test, and I think that can be a useful way to conceive of it. Because all we can really know is this: there’s not a lot here that we can extrapolate from. We have insufficient data. We get to spend time with the people in this movie, briefly. We really don’t even begin to know them, though. We do see they are different, and we can kind of catch the vibes everyone is putting off. Some people lack resonance. Some radiate it. Some are alienated and asocial. Some seem to be connected with everybody. Everyone is like an island of loneliness, yet is somehow vibrantly human.

And that’s about it, I guess. That’s all we really know about any of these people. Yet we keep trying to look deeper (and deeper) because we want to understand things better.

And this raises the million dollar question, which fascinates me so much: if we don’t understand this movie (which is indeed so devoid of dramatization and subtext and glorification as to seem like a simple moment-in-time documentary), how can we claim to have all the answers to more complicated realities, such as the one that the movie represents?

2) Jackass Number Two

That’s right. The sequel, bitches.

This is not really even a “movie,” probably. It’s certainly not a movie you want to claim to identify with when discussing the redeeming qualities of American cinema. But I can say, with no hesitation, that I have never enjoyed myself more while watching a screen at a movie theatre.

I excitedly saw this movie with my equally excited brother, which hopefully is not a reflection on my mother. None of my friends wanted to see it, and I’m still not sure why. My friends are generally amoral, mean-spirited heathens, after all; it seemed like this movie would be right up their alley. (Kidding, of course…except for you, Raptor. Kidding again, of course…I would never call you my friend.)

Perhaps the reluctance of people who might otherwise see this movie grows from thinking that these Jackass guys are jerkasses who go out of their way to make life miserable for normal people around them. This is not the case; these guys are, after all, not jerkasses, but jackasses. The difference, namely, is that they are more akin to clowns than pranksters; they understand that the joke needs to be on them, and they’re not afraid to suffer for it.

And suffer they do. In this age of deconstruction, it is strangely liberating to see people be so creatively stupid in the name of entertainment. There is a purity of laughter to be had from watching this movie; no snickers, giggles, or sniggles, but instead cathartic, direct-from-the belly guffaws that release us from our culturally instinctive desire to play the role of tastemaker. This is also a wonderful movie to see with an audience. There’s an immediate kinship formed, for as different as we all are, at least we have one thing that binds us: we may be weird, and we may be dumb, but at least we know we’re not as stupid as these fucking jackasses.

1) Fight Club

(This is going to sound overly pedantic. I apologize in advance. I am not a good enough writer to truthfully communicate what I have to say more effectively.)

Fight Club is perhaps the most misunderstood movie of all time. Even people who like it and think they get it, don’t. You know how Jurassic Park was really about math? Fight Club is really about clinical depression.

The reason that not many people pick up on this is because humans believe in the power of analogy; we think everything is kind of like something else. Yet the informed consensus among doctors and sufferers seems to be that clinical, hardcore, suicidal depression might be just about impossible to understand unless you have it (or have had it).

That’s because nothing is really like mental illness. It’s the dark side of the moon. Feeling mildly depressed/melancholy at times has just about absolutely nothing to do with clinical depression, which is, literally, physically and mentally disabling; in fact, I wish clinical depression had a different name, so people would stop associating the two as being similar. In any event, I suspect fully explaining it is probably a futile endeavor that wouldn’t do me a lot of good anyway, but the clinically depressed Jim Emerson tried to do so in his excellent, excellent review of Fight Club, in a way that at least kind of makes sense to clinically depressed people.

All I can say is that clinical depression is routinely physically/mentally overpowering for sufferers (again, literally…this is about your brain not functioning properly…no, unfortunately you can’t just tell your brain to suck it up and snap out of it and fix your brain because, again, the problem is your brain...no, you can’t necessarily tell if people have it if they can walk around and function to a general degree because they may have had a long, long time to practice acting to others like they don’t have it…yes, people who have it have already tried your off-the-cuff ideas to make things better along with about 300 others…that’s because they much, much, incredibly much better informed on this illness than you…yes, they are already very aware that many of you have absolutely no sympathy for suicide victims and that you believe they’re terrible, inhuman, weak cowards who are all going to hell, so there’s really no need to keep bringing it up).

Essentially, this disease is literally worse than anything you could ever physically imagine, and it leaves you with no hope of recovery. This sounds absurdly dramatic but is just simply, unfortunately true. And it makes sense when you think about it logically; why else would clinically depressed people kill themselves at rates so much higher than other diseased people? Indeed, the very act of staying alive to constantly suffer is completely illogical, but other people who have no concept of said suffering expect the clinically depressed to do it anyway. This is burdensome and anger-inducing at times, but the point of view of those without the illness is understandable; there is no real reason to want to ponder the illness if you do not have it. After all, this shit can (and does) happen to absolutely anyone, by definition you cannot be prepared to manage it when it strikes, and no one wants to think it can happen to them. (Least of all YOU.)

Fight Club is about a (nameless) man in this situation; this man is not merely disaffected, as so many people seem to think. The merely disaffected don’t suffer insomnia, intense depersonalization, and a compulsion to join every therapy group in the city. This is a man so unable to feel anything, that eventually his solution is just to try and find anything to feel at all. (I’ve never seen A Clockwork Orange, but I suspect this might be the point of that movie.) Fight Club is ultimately a satire of that kind of animalistic “cure,” attractive though it may seem. (This movie satirizes simple-minded fly-by-night treatments as well…I particularly liked the penguin-as-power animal.)

However, this point is generally lost on the audience, which tends to instead draw an analogy between the main character’s completely deviant behavior and sporadic moments of their own feelings of cultural alienation. As a result, for people who like it, the movie is often championed as a philosophical defense for nihilism as a kind of twisted, culturally-appropriate transcendentalism; sort of a Walden’s Pond for assholes. People who don’t like it tend to feel it is an irresponsible and ultimately unfulfilling endorsement of anarchy.

Truthfully, these are both understandable, reasonable viewpoints, but nonetheless they remain viewpoints that are (through absolutely no fault of their own) under-informed. So, maybe a look at this movie won’t do you a lot of good unless you’re clinically depressed. But if you are, you should take a gander…because finally, it’s a movie that you can really, really relate to.