Pacific Rim and Learning to Appreciate Movies

I've accepted the fact that I can't convince a lot of people to adore movies the way I do. That's fine, let everyone have their own opinion of things. But I also spend a lot of time trying to convince people to accept movies on their own terms. A LOT. Whether it be trying to get people to watch Asian movies without expecting them to be like American, or just persuading people to give something a chance, I keep trying to get people to look at movies and appreciate them for what they are, what they are trying to do, and what they do well, without imposing a set of rules or expectations on them. And then, right after these conversations, someone will end up drilling me about how I could possibly dislike movies that are so generally popular.

Well, they are both symptoms of the same issue, and that issue is what I'd like to address: How to Appreciate Movies.

The Secret Ingredient
The funny thing is, I don't have a whole lot to say on the topic. There is one simple practice that everyone can do to appreciate film more. All you have to do is always assume that everything a film does is on purpose, and cost a whole lot of time and money to do. If you do that, this always begs the question: "Well, why did they do THAT then?" And that is the exact question you need to be asking yourself. That question will help you appreciate every single film on the planet on it's own terms - because you will be asking it from a place of inherent respect (because you assume it was on purpose), seeking understanding - instead of demanding a movie to justify its shortcomings when you have already decided it is terrible.

Pacific Rim

Let's give an example, just to make sure I'm being clear. A film I often talk with others about and am sad to find they don't appreciate the same way I do is Pacific Rim. So let's go through it real quick.

Why people don't like it:
Invariably, if you find someone who just LOVES Pacific Rim, you will find that they are fans of old Godzilla movies. Seriously. People who like Kaiju films, love Pacific Rim. That tells us something right there. It seems there is a barrier that people aren't getting over because they expect it to match other action or suspense genres, rather than accepting it within the genre it belongs to.

Pacific Rim is a Kaiju film - but people expected it to be a vanilla blockbuster action flick. So how can we appreciate it on it's own terms, within the (admittedly foreign) genre that it exists?

Assume everything was on purpose and ask why.

Pacific Rim is cheesy, and it operates on a scale of craziness and frivolous fun that a lot of people have a difficult time getting into. If we put realism on a scale, Pacific Rim (and Kaiju films in general) would be lounging in the deep end of insanity.

How we can appreciate it:
I love old Japanese Godzilla movies. My favorite featured Godzilla fighting a Monster that towered over the tallest skyscraper, had knives for hands, had a chainsaw apparatus on his belly (he wasn't even a robot, it was just there somehow), and was summoned by people you start the movie believing are aliens, but it turns out at the end they are just giant cockroaches come back from the future.

I promise I did not make any of that up.

Kaiju films promise a good time had by all, but require in return that you as the audience let them do with the story as they will. They openly ask you to actively and willingly suspend your disbelief, rather than seeking to prove themselves to the audience and trick them into believing that this universe actually exists by trying to ground it in something you can accept.

Pacific Rim does this blatantly in the first five minutes. In the opening sequence, Del Toro lays out the premise - giant monsters, giant robots, why they exist and what they do - and if you can just accept that opening sequence and buy into that one premise, the film is phenomenal. The film tells you (the audience) the rules it is going to play by, and then it does. It does not try to answer to the demands or expectations of the audience, nor is it ruled by current trends of story or cinematography. It is a Kaiju movie, and it lays that on the table for you to accept from the very beginning.

That was on purpose, and it cost a lot of time and money. Why would they do that?

Because Del Toro knows he is selling a Japanese genre to an American audience. He lays it out because he knows this is the ticket for admission - accept this premise and you'll love the film. If you went into that movie expecting Transformers, the fact that you hated it is your own fault because the movie told you upfront it was not like Transformers. If you can appreciate the movie on its own terms, you will love it.

Pacific Rim is now reigning king among Kaiju films - a remarkable feat from a Mexican guy who had to learn about and outdo 50 years of Japanese film tradition.

Anyway, this post isn't about Pacific Rim, or even to convince you to love it, I just thought it was a good example on appreciating films on their own terms, and I wanted to share my thoughts on how people can appreciate films more. Assume everything was on purpose, even when you hated something. Heck, especially when you hated something. No filmmaker wants to spend $200 million and 2 years making something you hate. So, take a moment and pretend they did it on purpose, and then ask why.

The Hipster Movie List

What is 'The List?'

Awhile ago I started a list of movies, which I now refer to as the Hipster Movie List. I'm not a hipster, in fact I'm quite the opposite - but when I started to fall in love with film, I became a film hipster.

What in the world do I mean by hipster? Well,  at their core hipsters are anti-culturals. They are people who intentionally reject the norm and go against it - and usually are outspoken enough about it to piss off the people around them.

Example:

Normal person: Have you heard the new Katy Perry Album?

Hipster: I don't listen to mainstream music. It's just a bunch of soul-sucking, dumbed-down, and recycled sex fantasies set to a catchy beat so that they can squeeze a few more dollars out of stupid people without the sense to know better. 

Normal person: I think I'm going to go somewhere less...douchey.

Ironically, if you're looking at this situation with the right lens, you may realize we've all got a little hipster in us.

I became a film hipster when I decided I liked films, and I liked my films intelligent and well-executed. So much so that I began to refuse to watch things that didn't meet that bar. Then, on top of that, when movies were intelligent and well-executed, I would fawn over them and watch them again and again - dissecting every detail.

It made me quite insufferable at parties.

You see, the problem with being a film hipster is that EVERYONE likes movies. I learned early that if I was going to turn preachy every time the topic of movies came up, I would lose a lot of friends (I mean... more than I already had). So, I created the Hipster Movie List as an outlet for how I felt, and started shutting my mouth when people raved about how "The latest Transformers is actually really good!"

Okay, So What is The List?

The Hipster Movie List is a list of movies that are brilliantly executed - enough to make them a cut above other movies. Some of them were successful in the box office, and some weren't - but all of them are amazing. And that's not all. They have to be both amazing and underrated. This is where the hipster part comes in. Hipster movies are movies that had major portions of their executions go unnoticed or unrecognized by mainstream audiences. These are movies that I wish I could shake the modern everyday viewer until they realized they are gems, and that  this kind of film is neither common, nor easy. 

However, that's not to say that all of these movies aren't popular. The Dark Knight is on the list, and that film made over a billion dollars. But of all the people that loved it, they didn't recognize the flawless use of metaphor and the first perfect realization and writing of the Joker character in any film or television adaptation I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot). The Avengers, which also brought in over a billion dollars, however is not on the list because as amazing as the film was, I didn't think there was some part of it that was not being openly appreciated by the public. Everyone got how great it was, so there was no need for me to record it as an underappreciated film.

In a nutshell, it's a list of movies that everyone knows are good (or they should), but people don't seem to know just how good they are - and how rare a quality that is in cinema. 

So, having said all that (much more than I originally intended), I now give you The Hipster Movie List - a list of movies since the dawn of film history, that are both amazing and underappreciated in modern discussion:

See the Hipster Movie List

Subtext, Meta-Film Experiences, and Henry Poole is Here

This last week I revisited Henry Poole is Here, which for me was a seminal film in my personal road
as an artist, filmmaker, and person.

Let me just take a moment and let you know that I don't use that word (seminal) lightly.

Early on as a teenager and film student I found subtext in film and theater and fell in love. So enamored was I with this one aspect of works of education and entertainment that I began to eschew and ignore all other positive aspects of the medium.

Ultimately, it was how I became a film hipster.

I'll talk in a minute about what subtext is, but sufficeth to say that I was trying to find the secret or hidden messages within all of the films and plays I was seeing. I explained to friends that they thought Les Miserables (they play) was good, but they didn't understand how good it was; I clearly remember having a friend tell me they loved Phantom of the Opera (the movie had just come out) and I retorted, "You don't even know what it is really about." Then, as a capstone project in being a douche, I applied to the BYU film program by creating a video example of what I was capable of creating by submitting a convoluted and meta film that was so inaccessible to anyone who wasn't involved in its conception that there was no way the judges could have thought anything but that I was either crazy, incompetent, or both. My rhetoric was so wrapped in meta-jokes that it was completely incomprehensible - and everyone who saw it thought so. But of course, I just told myself they were uncultured and surely the film professors would understand my deep art.

They didn't. It was the Brazil of student short films.

It was a crazy time for me, as an artist and a person. Finally, because of movies like Henry Poole, I realized that I cared more about helping people than I did about film as an art form, and I gave up my dream of becoming a bigtime (and socially influential) director. I realized that I was trying to change the world for the better through my art, and there were people who just skipped the art and changed the world for the better - and I could easily break into that world and support my family, which is kind of difficult to do when you are trying to become a bigtime director. It was easier, and less selfish. That was seven years ago, and it's been about that long since I last watched Henry Poole.

Enough of about why Henry Poole (and movies like it) matters to me, let's get to the movie analysis and how to analyze. Real quick, let's get on the same page about movie subtext and meta-film experience analysis.

Subtext
Analyzing subtext in a film is usually an exercise in boiling various aspects of a film (form, writing, narrative content, etc.) down to its most simple expression and looking for patterns. That sounds complex, but it's not. Here are some examples:

• There are only two camera angles used throughout Rear Window, this matches the main character who is on bedrest and confined to his room, and is used to make you feel detached, distrust what you see, and feel his claustrophobia and feeling of powerlessness. 
• Every time the evil mother addresses Rapunzel warmly in Tangled, she calls her a "flower" or touches her hair. Every time Flynn addresses her warmly he brushes her hair away from her face and looks her in the eye. This shows which qualities of hers the two characters really care about. 

It's easy. The biggest thing to watch out for (and the practice I don't agree with) is trying to insert meaning in places where it wasn't intended. Like saying that Star Wars has an anarchist agenda because the main characters are trying to bring down the prominent government in the story. That sounds like a stretch...

Meta-Film Experiences

Meta-Film experiences understand that you are watching a film rather than actually living the experience you are viewing. They require you to break your suspension of disbelief and analyze what you are seeing from an emotional distance. Modern comedy does this A LOT, because it targets audiences that have been watching comedy their entire life, and so one way to get to them in an original way is for the comedy to play completely deadpan, dramatic, or even horrific. This only becomes funny when the audience realizes they are watching a comedy and it is completely absurd to be seeing this type of behavior within a comedy - and all of a sudden it's hilarious. 

Henry Poole, despite being labeled a comedy, is NOT hilarious

Henry Poole is Here

The reason I wanted to be clear on subtext and meta-film analysis before talking about Henry Poole is because it really is a terrible movie on the surface, and beautiful in the subtext. And the reason I wanted to talk about why it is important to me as a person is because relating it to yourself and empathizing seems to be the only way to really enjoy it, and when I did so I began to think about larger issues that would ultimately change my life. This movie didn't change my life, but it had the guts to grapple with issues that really matter to me. 

Henry Poole is interesting as a movie is because Henry is not a person in the story, he is an embodiment of an emotional state that humans get into - he hates the world because it is unfair. Dawn is an embodiment of empathetic pain, Milly is childhood trauma, and Patience is faithful and patient, but still broken. All of them are healed by a wall miracle in Henry's backyard. But here's where Henry Poole says something less common in films touching on religion and faith. Henry is healed, even though he doesn't believe. 

The common religious or faith trope for movies is the "Just Believe" platitude, which seems to say that it doesn't matter what you believe in, it is only the degree to which you believe in something that affects how much it can change (or in this case, heal) you. Check out the trailer for Little Boy to see exactly what I mean.  Contrastingly, Henry Poole shows three characters that believe, and are healed when they touch the wall, but Henry goes out of his way to not touch the wall. We are specifically shown 4 different close ups of his hands close to the wall, but he doesn't touch it. 

Then, he does touch it. He smashes it with an ax/sledgehammer, and just as he is about to pass out, he leans back and we get an extreme close up of him grabbing the wall to maintain balance. Then, within a couple of minutes we learn he is healed. We have been told the entire film that he has the worst ailment of anyone there, it is visibly apparent to everyone, and he is healed when he touches the wall without believing that touching the wall will help him. 

This movie mattered to me when I first saw it, and even moreso on this most recent viewing, because when I saw it I related every character, and the emotional state they represented, to me and I empathized strongly with how they feel. I love this movie because it speaks about things that are important to me. 

It's easy in life to say, "Just Believe." But my life has followed more closely the topics discussed in Henry Poole, I have been healed when I believed in something more than myself; I have witnessed those who are close to me healed and been healed by the experience (as do Dawn and Milly); and I have reacted out of anger or hatred and found myself running into spiritual realities that are bigger than I am; and I have received healing, even when I didn't deserve it. 

Believe me when I say, I can understand if you don't like Henry Poole is Here, but I love it because when I turn it on, the story it's telling falls away and I am left considering and grappling with the emotions of trying (and sometimes failing) to believe in a higher power. It's not the movie that I love, it is the experiences that it opens up to me.