"Have you seen her? Tell me have you seen her?" (Chi-Lites, 1971)
Some movies evoke strong opinions and some leave barely a trace behind in your memory. When I glance back at the deadline reviews I've been filing for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com the past few weeks, I notice that most of the movies haven't made much of an impression on me. Ask me right now and I couldn't tell you what I reviewed two weeks ago, much less what's coming up two weeks from now, without calling up iCal. I'm always amazed at how Roger does what he does -- which is way more than I feel capable of doing.
If you want to judge by the obligatory "star ratings" (and I don't, but in this case I think they reflect something), just about everything in the last month (I know: February) feels like a 2.5 to me -- just short of "recommended" (which would be 3.0), but not unwatchable if you wanted to pay the money and kill the time it takes to watch it. Passable (B-/C+) for what it is, but not memorable -- especially when you consider that the scale tops out at 4.0, with no "A+" possible. So, "Chinatown": 4 stars. "Sansho the Bailiff": 4 stars. "The Bank Job": 2.5. "Cocktail": 0.0.
We all have a pretty good what kind of experience we had watching a movie (though it may take a while, maybe even another viewing, to process it), and what we saw and heard. But to paraphrase something a filmmaker recently said (or that I recently read, even though I can't recall who or where): If you put 300 people in a room and show them a movie, you'll get 300 different accounts of it. Even when I take notes (as I do when I know I'm going to write about a movie), I invariably misremember a word here, a shot there.
Don't scroll up, just write down what the last paragraph said, and you'll see what I mean. You got the gist of it, but probably didn't remember all the words in precisely the same order. (This is why I now refer to the Internet as my "extended memory." Search. Scan. Cut. Paste. That's the most reliable way to quote from books or reviews if you don't have the print version in your hand. For movies, you can't really trust those "Memorable Quotes" on IMDb because the people who submit them don't always remember them very well. Sometimes you'll find differently worded versions of the same "quote." Better to transcribe directly from a DVD, if you have the title handy. Meanwhile, I have to search Scanners back to 2005 to figure out which of my favorite anecdotes I've already told....)
Anyway, to cite another example: My notes for Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" included what I remembered as the first three images: a bridge, a hand writing the title in pencil in a lined notebook, and some dreamy slow-motion footage of skateboarders in a cement park underneath a bridge. When I double-checked a screener DVD I found that I hadn't noted down a few less memorable shots in between the second and third ones. That didn't change what I wanted to say about how the film introduced itself, but it affected the way I wrote the sentences. This, as I've mentioned many times, is why so much of film history has been misreported in reviews and books. Eyewitness memories are simply not reliable. So, some people believe that Humphrey Bogart said "Play it again, Sam" -- or that the first ten minutes of "There Will Be Blood" contain no spoken words. (I have some shot-sequence corrections to make in my piece on "No Country for Old Men," once the DVD comes out on Tuesday and I can be absolutely sure about them.)
But what interests me most is how certain we can be about what we saw and how we feel about it. Turns out, there's a good reason -- something neurologist Robert A. Burton, M.D., in his book "On Being Certain," calls "the feeling of knowing":
Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.The involuntary sensation of certainty, he writes
... is affected by everything from genetic predispositions to perceptual illusions common to all bodily sensations.... [T]his nonreasoned feeling of knowing is at the heart of many seemingly irresolvable modern dilemmas.To bring this back to my lead (I've never liked the archaic "lede"), what I find even more fascinating is how certain we can feel about our opinions -- to the point where we may either attribute them to others, or make ourselves incapable of accepting that anyone could possibly think/feel otherwise. True, those other people are just... wrong. But that doesn't mean they don't have their reasons, even if those reasons are bogus (along with the evidence on which they've based them).
This leads to insanity, like people insisting that a movie is 3 stars rather than 2.5. (You think it doesn't happen. It does.) That's a case of mistaken objectivity (movies don't actually have those kinds of stars), but you'll also find people who swear that they saw Michael Madsen cut off a guy's ear in "Reservoir Dogs." With a movie, at least, we can revisit it (even rewind it) to verify -- something I've been unable to accomplish with any of my remotes in real life. (And, no, I haven't seen that Adam Sandler movie.)
Is there something you were certain you knew about a movie until you discovered otherwise?
I only saw the finale to The Sopranos after it came out on DVD, but after I saw it, I dredged up some old blog posts online to see what everyone thought about it at the time. I was amazed at some of the stuff that people believed they saw that they couldn't have - some went so far as to claim that the last seconds were re-edited between the premieres in the east and west coast time zones.
Unreliability of witness, end of Zodiac, etc.
I'm sure we've all had debates that start with "I know for a fact that so-and-so was in that movie!"
Or the less common: "Cocktail is not unwatchable!"
It's sort of related to what you're getting at, but I always find it interesting when I watch the extended edition of a movie I saw in theaters -- there are often scenes where I'm not quite sure whether they're new or not. You'd think I'd be able to know having seen the movie and liking it enough to want to watch it again, and yet there will usually be at least a couple of scenes that either result in me thinking either "I could have sworn that was in the theatrical release," or "Wait, that was in the theatrical release? No way... really?"
Happened just recently with the extended edition of American Gangster, which had me confused enough with the ending that I had to immediately re-watch the theatrical version's ending to make sure I remembered it right -- and immediately realize just how good a decision it was to chop off those last few scenes.
(Which, by the way, I also find to often be the case with extended editions; if a scene didn't make it into the final cut, there's usually a good reason for it. Except with the extended version of Live Free or Die Hard, where the only significant difference was about 95% more swearing. Kind of had to appreciate how blatant it was, really.)
I was having a conversation about American Gangster with a friend this morning during breakfast. She tells me that she loved the film, which is OK, because I enjoyed it too, though I didn't love it. I said my favourite scene was the one between Frank Lucas and his mother, who threatens to leave her son - a sublime repartee between Denzel Washington and Ruby Dee. She couldn't remember a scene in particular, but said her favourite moment was when a dark figure in the shadows of a dark cafe walks towards the camera, and shoots down, the momentary explosion from the barrel reveals Denzel Washington's face.
I said, yeah, that's great - but it's not in the movie. That was in the trailer, but not in the movie.
She was adamant that it was in the film, and could even recount where (just before Lucas makes his first trip to South-East Asia).
We all make stuff up when watching a movie - we fill in the blanks, and that is what we are supposed to do anyway. How does film tell a story? Through the juxtaposition of uninflected images. The juxtaposition helps, sure - the good director directs not just what's on the screen, but the audience, too. We are led down a path of understanding by the film, but we illuminate that path with our minds.
That might very well be the most pretentious, pseudo-intellectual thing I have ever written in my life.
This article reminded me of REM's video for 'Drive'. I was discussing it at work at the time, and 'remembered' that the crowd-surfing footage was unbroken, start to finish. Not even close!
I never understood how that happened, and you'll be amused to know I'm no closer to the truth :)
It's cool Ari. We are all guilty of it.
I'd never seen "Brokeback Mountain." Mid-February, my brother buys it without having seen it, and watches it that night. He tells me it is a masterpiece and I sigh and sneer and scoff. Then I watch it. It made me cry, the first time I'd cried at a film since I watched "The Proposition" stoned out of my mind back in 2006.
Anywho, we both agree that it is a wonderful, exceptional film, yet we almost came to blows over a slight, slight ambiguous moment. When Ennis gets word that Jack has died, he calls Jack's widow who informs him that he was pumping air into a tire on the side of the road and there was a fatal accident, and Ennis sees a vision of Jack being brutally beaten to death by a group of men. Based on earlier scenes where Ennis grows increasingly paranoid about someone looking at him cross-eyed "knowing something," I immediately surmised that this was Ennis's paranoid imagination running wild with grim speculation. It was just an accident.
The next day, my brother is pretty convinced that Jack was actually beaten to death and brought up how Jack's father mentioned he planned on moving in with another fella in a cabin and that word got around and also Ennis's memory of his father showing him the body of a man who lived with another man in a cabin and wound up dead.
I was absolutely convinced it was just Ennis's imagination. He said it wasn't. With veins protruding from our foreheads and the stink of ad hominem verbal assaults fresh in the air, we agreed it was uncertain whether either was true and that was the way Ang Lee intended it.
This reminds me of the time me and a good friend of mine stopped speaking for almost a year over a disagreement concerning Michael Haneke's "Funny Games."
Star Wars was very important to me as a kid. When the original was rereleased in '97 (or was it '96?) I was tripped out to see the Biggs character's scenes reinserted. This scene appeared in the Marvel comic book tie-in, but it still felt like a false memory come to life. Even stranger was seeing a YouTube clip called "missing Star Wars scenes" (or something) wherein there are very bootleg scenes with Luke and Biggs on the desert planet (Tattooine). It's a sensation of seeing something for the very first time that feels like you've seen it a hundred times before but haven't.
Also strange is my memory of the end of "There Will Be Blood,"
**Spoilers**
Daniel Plainview's last line is deliverd in a wide shot, but my memory of it is an extreme, red-faced close-up.
And finally, just like Mr. Blonde's (or was he Blue) ear carving, who remembers seeing a guy get chainsawed in the motel shower in "Scarface?" It happened completely off screen.
"No, the only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." - George Bush, talking about the detainees in Gitmo
[MINOR SPOILER WARNING ABOUT "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days"]
I remember how several critics claimed that the shot on the fetus lasts for a minute or longer. I was told it was a VERY LONG shot. In fact, it is just a 14 second shot. Now that's long-ish on the American scale of shot lengths, but probably one of the shorter shots in this film.
Ali,
We don't just fill in the gaps in the story of the movie; we also fill in the gaps in our story of the story. We make sense of the world through the use of various schema, pre-existing structures/patterns that we recognize exist in the world. Without these patterns to recognize, we wouldn't be able to make useful immediate sense of the chaotic data that comprises our environment. This is what causes people to "automatically" correct certain misspellings when they read a paragraph. But just as a schema helps us understand information, it also helps us to distort the actual data to fit that schema. We must process them in this manner, so even the initial moment of memory storage has already been altered. We're never remembering reality; we're just remembering our memories. If that makes sense.
Actually, Ali, the shot that your friend described is in the movie. But you are correct; she either did not know where it was, did not actually see it, or misremembered it.
The shot was used in the trailer, and it had to come from somewhere, and one could reasonably expect it to be used somewhere in the movie. I always stay through the credits, and I can attest that the shot in question was shown after the credits finished. So the shot is technically in the movie, but it's not in the narrative.
Since your article is about the vagaries of memory and visual/audio media, I will relate not a movie, but a skit from SNL. I remember seeing a skit on SNL involving Dana Carvey doing Tom Brokaw recording pre-news casts so he could go on vacation instead of reading the news. So, he had to prep all permutations of the death of Gerald Ford. Over the years, I have re-done this impression for my friends (not very well, but its still funny), and the linchpin of the impression was: "Gerald Ford, dead today, mauled by a bear." Well ... and this is the point of your article ... I recently re-watched this skit on YouTube and found that that quote was NOT in the skit. Again quoting from my now more-recent memory is goes: "Gerald Ford, dead today, eaten by wolves." And, just for fun, lets find that YouTube clip and see if NOW I am right .....
....Later.....
"Tragedy today as former president Gerlad Ford was eaten by wolves, he was delicions."
So, there you have it ...
PS My apologies to the memory of Gerald Ford.
Well I haven't seen On Golden Pond in a long time but whenever I tell people the only scene in the movie I like is when Henry Fonda has that showdown with the T-Rex at the volcano they look at me like I'm crazy. I haven't re-checked but I know it's there (it's right after he gets lost).
As for actual verifiable ones I remember things all the time that aren't there and oddly, the movie seems better to me the way I remember it and I'm disappointed upon re-viewing the movie to find that the scene didn't play out the way I remembered it.
By the way, why the picture of the old lady?
Never mind, I just looked again and see that you've now changed it to a picture of a young lady.
Wait a minute, you changed it again. Would you please make up your mind.
Ali,
I may be wrong about this (and isn't that the point of this whole thing anyway?), but I think that moment where Denzel Washington shoots a gun at the camera actually is in the movie. I think it is literally at the end of the film, after all the credits have rolled where the scene is played and then cut to black or studio logo or whatever.
When I started reviewing movies for the university (and later city) newspaper, I had seen Ebert remark that he hated having to give films a star rating, but at the time I didn't know what he was talking about. As the years went on, I constantly got readers who would complain that my review didn't "match" my rating, and before long I just started telling people to ignore the star rating if they had any plans of reading the 500-1000 words I actually wrote.
Jim - Question about the trade. You say you take notes while watching a film, and I suppose many reviewers do, too. How do you manage coherent penmanship in the dark of the cinema, or do you end up with a group of illegible scribblings that you and only you can decipher when you get back home?
I used to go to quite a few press screenings in London, and, either the Brits don't take notes, or I didn't take any notice...
Re: Ali's question about taking notes in the dark of the cinema. When I see a movie I avoid this problem by speaking my notes loudly and clearly into a tape recorder, then play them back at the highest volume to make sure I got it right. For reasons I've never figured out this bothers people in the theatre. Which I duly note in my recorder.
Christopher - Very good points. You are right that not only do we alter our memory (not necessarily false memory), but we alter our memory of the memory, and how we came by that information. Whereas I, a non-native speaker of English, for example, will instinctively look for certain patterns in language, you, as, I assume, a native speaker look for others. It's a related concept.
Fei and Jason - Thanks for that information. My local cinema rudely stops credits halfway through (they are great in other respects so I forgive 'em), and I never saw that shot. I always assumed it was a cut scene, even though I could not place it within the narrative.
Jonathan's comment about the different pictures really made me laugh. Heh.
Star ratings - I was at a DVD superstore, rummaging though the discount bin, a few weeks ago. I found a couple of movies I had not heard of - American independents with the Sundance seal on them. I got out my phone, did a Google serach for Ebert reviews, saw that they had receieved 2 stars each, and refrained from buying them. I'll watch them if they are on the telly (can't remember now what they were), but the star ratings were very helpful in that respect. Sometimes there are films with very low star ratings that pique my interest, but, other times, like this very example, they're helpful from a commercial point of view.
Harry Lime - Re: Brokeback
Doesn't Jack Twist have that subtle conversation with Anna Farris's character's husband? I always linked that with his eventual death, and his father's comments about his bringing another fellow back with him to his family ranch at one point. Not necessarily the same person, but that Twist, his proposal to live together shunned by Ennis, had started looking for love in all the wrong places ("Have you been to Mexico, Jack Twist?" "Hell yeah, I've been to Mexico" - and all that).
I can relate Miles - It's a habit amongst my family and friends to pepper daily conversation with relevant movie quotes. We do it so much that dozens of our favorites have become permanent conversational fixtures. It's always funny to actually see the source movies again and discover how badly we've been misquoting them every day.
What always gets me on this front is when I'm channel flipping and catch a bit of a familiar movie I haven't seen in a while, only to discover that I'd totally forgotten that it had some well-known actor in a minor supporting role. This seems to happen to me about once a month lately "but I'm 37, I'm not old"
Jonathan: I always seem to sit in the row in front of one of those "movie narrators," who feels the need to read aloud any print that appears onscreen (billboards, road signs), and to explain the story while it's in progress. Still, I might prefer the recorder to one of those pens with the light on the tip of it. At an LA critics screening I once sat next to somebody who used one of those. Once. I made sure to sit far away from this person after that.
Ali: I use vertical 4 x 8 reporter's notebooks and make one or two notations per page, just to avoid writing over previous notes in the dark. I draw a quick line across the page after every note, to separate it from the next one. And I don't usually have to take my eyes off the screen to know where I am. Still, my scribbles are often indecipherable. But I can usually figure out what the squishy words are from the context. Sometimes my deadlines are within a couple hours of seeing the movie -- in which case just the act of writing down a few notes helps burn them into short-term memory. What's bad is when you have to go back to notes you wrote last week for a movie that's opening next week, having seen six other movies in-between. Then it can sometimes be hard to remember what you were thinking when you wrote: "We bort to shawomdenace whathe cardo."
Two thoughts:
First - In reference to 300 people having 300 impressions of the same film, I saw the film "The Golden Compass" in Barcelona the first week of January in English with Spanish subtitles. Besides the subtitles, it is clear to me that the film that I experienced was not the same one seen by Roger Ebert; I clocked the film at 8 minutes shorter than the time listed on RogerEbert.com. It was, for several other reasons, really lousy: bulb in projector not bright enough (compared to the trailer that I had seen several times in the local theater where I live in Germany), choppy, almost unprofessional, editing, and weird 'narrations' over streches of the film as if the final cut was not yet finished when the version I saw had to be sent out to add the subtitles/do the dubbing. I had already read the books and the Ebert review, my friends hadn't; we all came out of the theater very underwhelmed and I was truly flabbergasted as to how this could be considered to be a 4-star film. Far and away the widest divergence from an Ebert review that I have had to date.
Second, in terms of misremembering, I saw "Contact" for the second time two years ago on television, and was shocked to have the film end unexpectedly showing the 'constellation' in the palm of her hand and than the night sky shot with the real constellation. I had remembered this last shot 'pulling back' until you saw the galaxy and then this galaxy being housed inside a glass orb and then (as the shot continues to pull back even further) this orb becomes one of several marbles being played with by alien children who then pick them up and run out of the shot. I had been remembering the ending of "Contact" like that for years and thought what a cool way it was for Sagan/ the screenplay authors to have the film end. It was only several months later, as I saw the film that really had this ending that I realized the reason for my mistake. As it happens, I have sat near the front of the theatre (first eight rows) for virtually every movie I have seen since '2001' back in '68 as a six year old. When I saw "Men in Black" and "Contact" only days apart in July '97 in very large cinemas in NYC, I sat, coincidentally, due to almost sold out houses, in the back of the theatres. I had simply melded the endings based on my unique, for me, perceptual experience. I'm still sorry that "Contact" doesn't end like I remembered; it would make a cool ending.
""We bort to shawomdenace whathe cardo."
I now have a new blog motto. Thanks!
Ali, that shot IS in the movie, just not where your friend thought it was. That shot appears after the credits (and more prominently, in the trailer).
I see that's been addressed. I opened the page a while ago and just got to it now and didn't refresh to update the comments.
When Prizzi's Honor was in theaters, one friend of mine I think liked it, but took exception to the climactic mutual ambush in the bedroom, complaining about how the shot depicting the knife going into Kathleen Turner's neck was held too long, and was too bloody. In fact, the shot is held just long enough to register what happened, then fades quickly. Also, very little, if any blood.
But it's funny how we all do this; I can recall an Ebert review or two where he describes a scene or portion thereof that simply doesn't exist. But maybe I'm not remembering it just right.
Just wanted to say how much I appreciated:
"We bort to shawomdenace whathe cardo."
I think I laughed at that way longer than is appropriate.
I was certain that Elliot's Dad comes back to the family in the end of E.T. Then I saw it 15 years later. Turns out Elliot's dad was in Mexico with Sally and that guy at the end was just a random scientist. Bummer!
I know the accompanying image is supposed to equally represent a hideous old crone or a lovely young maiden but I have to say the young maiden has one ugly damn ear. It's like she was listening to the ocean and there was still a crab in the shell and it grabbed a hold of her brain and started pulling it out. Or something...Maybe it's a David Lynch ear.
In regard to the American Gangster cafe scene: It was in the trailer, but not in the theatrical release. On the DVD it's in the outtakes as an alternate begining (instead of the man who's burned and shot).
A good example for me is the shower scene from Psycho. Of course the first thing Mrs. Bates does in that scene is pull open the shower curtain. But a lot of homages, references, and parodies I've seen of that scene has the shower curtain drawn, and uses it as a theatrical scrim so you can see the silhouette of the body and red blood splashing against the side. The poster for the remake of Psycho has that very image. Roger even describes the scene in his review of Frenzy as "[imagine] PSYCHO without the shower curtain"
As far as I can tell, the shower curtain is only used as a scrim for two shots: one of Marion standing upright in the shower and bending over to reach the soap, and the shot over Marion's shoulder of Mrs. Bates entering the bathroom.
Cocktail could not possibly be a 0.0 under Ebert's rating system, which reserves the dreaded "no stars" rating for only those films that are morally offensive. (In fact, Ebert gave Cocktail 2 stars.)
JE: Yes. I'm not speaking for Roger. I'm saying that when I have to award the stars, this is the way I look at it. I do find "Cocktail" morally offensive (but not as much as "Mississippi Burning" or "Crash") -- mainly because, as an audience member, I felt it was insulting the very idea of entertainment. So, the stars may be numerical, but they reflect a subjective evaluation.
Just one questions - I saw There Will Be Blood after reading about there being no dialogue in the first 15 minutes, and was actively checking that, and I certainly never noticed any dialogue. What did I miss?
JE: Plainview talks to himself while he's in the mine. It's not much, mind you, but he speaks. He very clearly says "No!" And he makes some kind of remark when he hits paydirt, but I don't recall the exact words he uses.
I completely missed or blocked the line in "There Will be Blood" after the baptism, "That's a pipeline." Missing that has probably completely skewed my perception of the last 40 minutes of the film. I felt cheated because the logic of the film stopped. It may have come down to this line, which I still don't quite believe he said, but he must have, it's been confirmed twice. I tend to miss little when watching movies.
There's a psych 101 term and I'm trying to remember it...transfer maybe...when we infer our own feelings onto someone else...I'll probably wake up in the middle of the night and remember. My brain really hurts right now.
Ebert has pretty much killed the logic of the star system over the years. I think what it's come down to is the stars are the initial reaction to the movie...oh God I enjoyed it, 3 stars! Then he goes ahead and describes how it's not a great movie at all.
I've witnessed so many mediocre films recently that I haven't felt like writing anything at my blog. Normally I force myself to just write anyway.
"10,000 BC" was boring. "Vantage Point" was insulting. The only two I'd recommend at all is "Semi-Pro", which isn't a great movie but I laughed hard like 4 times, and "Spiderwick Chronicles" which reminded me of all the great fantasy movies from the 80's like "Labyrinth" and "Gremlins".
Ali,
Yes, I had assumed that was the man whom Jack's father was referring to when he said his son was going to move in with a man. If not that man, then that scene where Anna Faris's husband oh so gently propositions Jack when they are sitting on the bench outside the restaurant was significant because perhaps it caused Jack to consider that he had other options than Ennis. Then again, maybe he didn't, considering his desperation in Mexico.
Mr. Lapper,
Recall, if you will, the scene in "Mary Poppins" when Mary Poppins, in a fit of explosive diarrhea, loses the heroin capsule she had been storing like precious cargo in the bowels of her...bowels, and it plops in the toilet and she must plunge into the toilet to retrieve it.
Dr. Burton's book is on my list of to-read. I have also seen reports of research that shows that people with a strong inclination for certainty tend to become conservatives and those with a higher level of mental flexibility tend to become librals.
But I assume there is evolutionary advantage (as well as detriment) to our neurological process of certainty -- to quickly size up a complex situation (eg, grumbling of tigers behind the bush), make decisions (fight or flight), and act without delay.
I saw There Will Be Blood a second time and saw something that completely changed the film for me. It was the scene were Daniel leaves his son on the train. While he is sitting with H.W., he leans over and you say a single tear fall from his face. This completely changed how I thought about the character of Daniel. After that, I felt like he was more of a person than a force of nature and it definitely humanized him and made him much more sympathetic in my mind. Now I'm questioning whether I missed it or added it in my mind. I hope it's actually there.
The Mary Poppins explosive diarrhea scene - I knew I wasn't the only one! Although I confess I often confuse it with the scene in Trainspotting where Ewan McGregor sings while Spud, Sickboy and Begbie put all their toys away.
Do you feel lucky, punk?
People love to say this, thought it's totally misquoted. Drives me nuts.
In the excellent The Station Agent, a little girl asks Peter Dinklage's character if he is a midget. He replies simply, "No."
In Ebert's review, he remembers the reply as "No. A dwarf."
What's funny is, when I saw the film, and he replied simply "No," it created tension in my mind, because I wanted him to explain it further, but he didn't. Ebert's mind filled in the blank. We all do that.