ON WINGS OF SHOCK AND AWE
X Men 3: The Last Stand, which I saw last night, will never be confused (not be me, anyway) with being a great movie. Yes, great movies - generally speaking - are more fun to watch than bad ones, if for no other reason than that time is valuable (when I say great movies are more fun to watch than bad ones, I am not pointing out the obvious, by the way).
Fun can be derived from the cinema in other ways. One can walk into a movie that the reviews universally indicated is "OK," that the first ten minutes or so of which seem to confirm the reviewers' assessment - but - a scene can come along - once in a rare while - that is so damn good that it can sweep you off your feet - no matter how numb they may have become.
X3 (which I'd rate at about a B-) contains such a scene. What is almost as great as discovering such a diamond in the rough is to discover that a distinguished blowhard - and "tough" critic - has made the same discovery. Stephanie Zacharek of salon. com writes of an opening scene in X3, a scene that perhaps would have made E.M. Forster, who penned the line, "Only connect!" as the prologue to his nove Howards End, proud:
Very early in "X-Men: The Last Stand," a fair-haired, preteen mutant -- we don't yet know his name -- stands in front of his bathroom mirror in tears, struggling to complete some barbaric grooming ritual that we can't quite see. His father bangs on the bathroom door, knowing, as we do, that the boy is trying to hide something -- but what?
The camera (DRL: as the father's voice begins to reach a fever pitch, as the knocks grow louder, and as the music reaches a frenetic crescendo) gives us a few quick clues: First, a few household implements (DRL: we cannot discern quite what these implements are, although the camera lingers over them) streaked with blood, which the boy has thrown to the floor, frustrated by their uselessness; then a scatter of white feathers on the pristine tiles (the scene takes place in a well-appointed house or apartment).
But the frustration (DRL: it's worse than frustration. The child's face reveals a mixture of anguish, nerves, tears and shame that practically leaps off the screen) on the kid's tear-stained face is even more distressing than the suggestion of his self-mutilation. So we're not particularly surprised or shocked when the camera shows us (seconds after the father forces the door opens, after the boy has repeatedly screamed, "Just another minute!" as he tried to conceal and destroy all evidence of what he was doing), not directly but reflected in the bathroom mirror, the bony, bloody bumps on this kid's back: He's been trying to hack the feathered wings that sprout from both sides of his bony spine -- to literally clip the very wings that set him apart from everyone else he knows. (The father's - last name Worthington - only words to his son in this scene are, "Not you, too," spoken in a hushed tone of WASP resignation that says, "Well, I might as well resign myself to the fact that you've disgusted and shamed me. The only question now is, how can I shame and make life miserable for you?).
The brutal beauty of the image is a mini-encapsulation of the appeal of the "X-Men" comics, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby more than 40 years ago: For lots of kids, these stories of mutants who band together to fight evil have been a metaphorical salve for the way our bodies turns against us in adolescence -- or maybe more specifically for the way, during adolescence and even beyond, our sexual impulses sometimes seem to be fighting against us. But what's most surprising about this small, lovely sequence in "X-Men: The Last Stand" is that it's been given to us by perhaps the last director we'd think would be capable of such bluntly effective poetry: Brett Ratner.
****************************************************************************
No, I didn't choose to cut off Ms. Zacharek's review where I did because of the blurb about Ratner - I chose to cut it off where I did because it was only by the time she mentioned his name that she had fully described what made this scene so great. Yes, of course, Ratner deserves credit for making this scene turn out so well. The scene makes you stand up and take notice. Any scene that causes intolerant people to be shown unpleasant images which they must suffer having to view (and except for the truly rude intolerants, having to view without commentary) makes you stand up and take notice. The direction of the rest of the film was uninspired, and what happens to the father and son (and the relationship between the two) later on in the film made me want to shit on the screen.
But to point these latter things out - and knowing that they exist on the ledger - does not diminish the greatness of the earlier scene. Remember the terrific scene in "The Empire Strikes Back" where Leia says to Han, "You have your moments......"? Finding greatness in the mundane (especially when we take Sturgeon's Law - named after and invented by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon - "99 % of everything is crap" as a given) is what makes life tolerable.
Fun can be derived from the cinema in other ways. One can walk into a movie that the reviews universally indicated is "OK," that the first ten minutes or so of which seem to confirm the reviewers' assessment - but - a scene can come along - once in a rare while - that is so damn good that it can sweep you off your feet - no matter how numb they may have become.
X3 (which I'd rate at about a B-) contains such a scene. What is almost as great as discovering such a diamond in the rough is to discover that a distinguished blowhard - and "tough" critic - has made the same discovery. Stephanie Zacharek of salon. com writes of an opening scene in X3, a scene that perhaps would have made E.M. Forster, who penned the line, "Only connect!" as the prologue to his nove Howards End, proud:
Very early in "X-Men: The Last Stand," a fair-haired, preteen mutant -- we don't yet know his name -- stands in front of his bathroom mirror in tears, struggling to complete some barbaric grooming ritual that we can't quite see. His father bangs on the bathroom door, knowing, as we do, that the boy is trying to hide something -- but what?
The camera (DRL: as the father's voice begins to reach a fever pitch, as the knocks grow louder, and as the music reaches a frenetic crescendo) gives us a few quick clues: First, a few household implements (DRL: we cannot discern quite what these implements are, although the camera lingers over them) streaked with blood, which the boy has thrown to the floor, frustrated by their uselessness; then a scatter of white feathers on the pristine tiles (the scene takes place in a well-appointed house or apartment).
But the frustration (DRL: it's worse than frustration. The child's face reveals a mixture of anguish, nerves, tears and shame that practically leaps off the screen) on the kid's tear-stained face is even more distressing than the suggestion of his self-mutilation. So we're not particularly surprised or shocked when the camera shows us (seconds after the father forces the door opens, after the boy has repeatedly screamed, "Just another minute!" as he tried to conceal and destroy all evidence of what he was doing), not directly but reflected in the bathroom mirror, the bony, bloody bumps on this kid's back: He's been trying to hack the feathered wings that sprout from both sides of his bony spine -- to literally clip the very wings that set him apart from everyone else he knows. (The father's - last name Worthington - only words to his son in this scene are, "Not you, too," spoken in a hushed tone of WASP resignation that says, "Well, I might as well resign myself to the fact that you've disgusted and shamed me. The only question now is, how can I shame and make life miserable for you?).
The brutal beauty of the image is a mini-encapsulation of the appeal of the "X-Men" comics, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby more than 40 years ago: For lots of kids, these stories of mutants who band together to fight evil have been a metaphorical salve for the way our bodies turns against us in adolescence -- or maybe more specifically for the way, during adolescence and even beyond, our sexual impulses sometimes seem to be fighting against us. But what's most surprising about this small, lovely sequence in "X-Men: The Last Stand" is that it's been given to us by perhaps the last director we'd think would be capable of such bluntly effective poetry: Brett Ratner.
****************************************************************************
No, I didn't choose to cut off Ms. Zacharek's review where I did because of the blurb about Ratner - I chose to cut it off where I did because it was only by the time she mentioned his name that she had fully described what made this scene so great. Yes, of course, Ratner deserves credit for making this scene turn out so well. The scene makes you stand up and take notice. Any scene that causes intolerant people to be shown unpleasant images which they must suffer having to view (and except for the truly rude intolerants, having to view without commentary) makes you stand up and take notice. The direction of the rest of the film was uninspired, and what happens to the father and son (and the relationship between the two) later on in the film made me want to shit on the screen.
But to point these latter things out - and knowing that they exist on the ledger - does not diminish the greatness of the earlier scene. Remember the terrific scene in "The Empire Strikes Back" where Leia says to Han, "You have your moments......"? Finding greatness in the mundane (especially when we take Sturgeon's Law - named after and invented by the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon - "99 % of everything is crap" as a given) is what makes life tolerable.
posted by EnterCenter at 11:58 PM
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