Category: On Movies

Oy, I don’t want to talk about snow. Let’s talk about the opening of Saturday Night Fever!

And yes, I’m serious, because it’s one of the best movie openings ever, and not just because it has a few famous shots or it uses one of the greatest songs by The Bee Gees. It establishes the film’s setting and a key facet of the lead character’s personality, all in the space of just a couple of minutes as the opening credits roll.

Here’s that opening:

Now, most people remember this for John Travolta’s cocky, almost arrogant strut down that sidewalk. His hair is perfectly coifed, and his outfit–leather jacket with red open-collared shirt and matching shoes with perfect shine–combine to create that image, don’t they? This is a guy you don’t mess with. The song’s lyrics seem almost to be describing this specific man, don’t they?

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk
I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk

But digging a little deeper…the movie doesn’t open right on Travolta walking. No, we get a shot of Manhattan, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge…and then the camera pulls back. Manhattan recedes, as if to tell us no, we’re not going there, that place is a dream. There’s a fade and suddenly we’re seeing another bridge, the Varrazano Narrows. We’re still in NYC, but Manhattan is world’s away, we’re being told. The camera drops us into one of those neighborhoods all the way on the other side of the city, with all of Brooklyn between our movie’s setting and the place where NYC dreams come true. An elevated train stops, and then do we finally cut down to street level, where our man, Tony Manero, is walking.

But we don’t even see him walking, first! He’s stopped to check out the shoes in the front window of a shoe store. So before anybody has said a single word, we know that we’re far away from Manhattan, and our main character is serious about his appearance. Then we see him walking: first that famous shot of his feet, walking in step with the music playing, and then the camera pans up to show us Tony Manero.

And for all the confidence of his strut and it’s mirroring in the music, his face is anything but super confident. Travolta’s eyes dart back and forth, in the self-conscious way of someone who is wondering if people are looking or laughing at him. The expression Travolta wears here is not the expression of someone walking as if he owns the sidewalk. (There’s also the fact that he’s walking that way, dressed this way, while carrying a can of paint.)

Then we get the movie’s first dialogue: cut to a pizzeria where a worker is pulling a pie from the oven as Tony waits at the carry-out window. She doesn’t address him like he’s a big-wheeling hot-shot guy; she smiles and says a friendly, “Hiya, Tony, two or three?” Because he’s a regular. And when he orders, he doesn’t give a confident “Two!” or a silent holding-up of two fingers. Travolta gives the order quickly, but repeats himself: “Uh, two. Two, yeah, two. Two’s good.” Cut to Tony, walking again, paint can in one hand and his two slices, stacked together in the other.

So now we know that Tony’s world is just a few miles from Manhattan but might as well be worlds away, and that the outward appearance that Tony obviously cultivates very specifically and very carefully is something of an act, a veneer he has put on a more tender inner life. Both of these facts will become key thematic elements in the movie to come.

That, folks, is a great movie opening.

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The movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s one and only one novel, came out this month in 1997. Almost ten years ago I posted the following piece about the movie, a film that I’ve always liked and admired but not quite crossed over into loving. I’m not sure I totally agree anymore with what I write below, but thinking does shift and evolve, and I appreciate Contact more now than I used to; it remains one of the few major pop culture artifacts that endorses the Saganesque view that science should be our guiding philosophy as humans, and not spirituality. But I still think the movie hedges its bets too much, it drives its points home with too little subtlety (a fault often found in Robert Zemeckis films), and I think it undermines the feminist subplots by surrounding its main character with men without whose help and influence she would not succeed.

And yet…Contact is still a movie that says the right things about science and about the universe. It’s a movie that confirms that the proper response to this universe is curiosity and wonder, and my favorite moment is when Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is discussing the voyage into the Cosmos that is at the heart of the movie’s narrative and she describes the required quality as “a sense of adventure”.

(Oh, Contact‘s score, by Alan Silvestri, is really good–for all the film’s lack of subtlety, Silvestri brings the goods here. Here’s one cue, called “The Primer”, scoring a scene in which the secret of an alien transmission is revealed. This is really good stuff, excellent suspense music, and it shows why Silvestri ended up being the composer for the recent sequels to the original Cosmos series.)

Here is my old post:

As much as I love Carl Sagan, I have to admit that I never warmed to his one and only novel, a science-fiction first contact story he called Contact. I tried reading it a couple of times, and each time I only got about a hundred pages in before I stopped. I just don’t think that Sagan was really cut out for novel writing, no matter how great his gifts may have been for science writing. But in 1997, a movie adaptation of the book arrived in theaters, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConnaughey and directed by Robert Zemeckis. The movie was six months too late for Sagan to have seen it, alas.

I’ve had a somewhat uneasy relationship with Contact ever since it came out. On balance I like it a lot…but I don’t love it, and in truth, I never really have. I’ve never been entirely successful in putting my finger on what it is about Contact that vexes me, but after recently watching the film again on NetFlix, I think I have it: the movie is too unfocused. When the film is concentrated on telling its story and attending to that central story, it is a fine, fine piece of work. But too often I get the impression that Robert Zemeckis got distracted, often by something shiny, and there are way too many times in the movie that the story gets lost so we can follow something shiny.

Contact tells the story of Ellie Arroway, an astronomer whom we meet as a young child, operating her HAM radio under the guidance of her father. They have a wall map of the United States, on which she marks her radio contacts with push pins; after talking to someone in Pensacola, Dad comments that it’s her farthest contact yet. Ellie asks if a radio could talk to the Moon, or to Mars…or to her mother, who is apparently dead. Dad responds, “I don’t think they’ll ever make a radio that can reach that far.”

Grown-up Ellie (Jodie Foster) turns out to be an astronomer, as noted, who is using her research time at the Arecibo Radio Telescope to look for, as she says, “little green men”: she is dedicating her career and scientific energies to SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). This leads to her meeting a former priest (Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConnaughey), who despite being religious and spiritual where she is not, attracts her on a number of levels, and it also leads to run-ins with an older male scientist named David Drumlin (Tom Skeritt) who is snide and condescending to Ellie as he regards her chosen field of specialty as an utter waste of time. After a number of obstacles to her career – mostly owing to funding difficulties, as convincing people to part with money for something like SETI tends to be difficult – Ellie finally has a breakthrough when, while working at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, her radio telescopes detect an unmistakable alien signal. The rest of the film follows the implications of such a discovery.

Or, rather, the rest of the film should do that, and when it does, it’s incredibly effective and thought-provoking and loaded with the grand “sensawunda” of all the best science fiction. The problem with the movie is that it too often wanders into less interesting stuff, or its steps away from subtlety to drive its points home with a jackhammer, or it does things that forcibly eject me from the world of the film.

Taking the less interesting stuff first: Ellie Arroway is too often portrayed in the film as the feminine voice of reason in a crowd of over-bearing, pompous, or downright dim men. Science and engineering are male-dominated fields, and it’s a well-established fact that women in those fields tend to have a tougher going just to overcome gender biases. The problem with Contact‘s approach isn’t so much that it points this out, but that it’s about other things, and thus it can’t really delve too intelligently into those topics which really do deserve higher scrutiny. Thus we have Ellie being treated like an outsider on her own project, or Drumlin stepping up to claim ownership over a project he’s derided consistently up until the moment it proved fruitful. Ellie is constantly on the defensive in the movie, and I think it hurts the narrative because the film can’t just gear up and take us where it wants to go. Instead we have to keep talking about God.

And God is where subtlety just isn’t something that interests Robert Zemeckis. Contact is full of discussions of religion versus science, but the feeling is never that anything is really being debated; what happens is that opposite sides’ viewpoints are stated, and restated, and stated again. Ellie goes to a reception in Washington, where her first order of business upon approaching Palmer Joss is to immediately launch into a discussion on religion, without any preamble or preliminary; more than that, though, the script treats all such conversations – and many that aren’t on the topic of religion at all – as though Ellie has a sizable axe to grind, while everyone else (just about all of whom are male) is calm and collected in their disagreement. Coupling that with the several instances in the film where Ellie is betrayed by men – Drumlin’s taking of the credit, Joss’s posing of a question at the hearings when he knows that the answer is going to doom Ellie’s chances of being the one selected to go in ‘the machine’ – and the film seems to depict Ellie as someone who doesn’t so much achieve a lot but whom is given things, table-scrap like, by the men in her life. It’s an odd kind of feeling.

It also bothers me that the film ends right when it gets most interesting, and it feels to me like it takes the easy way out. To me, the most interesting thing is, What would human society be like once we know that we are not alone in this Universe? We may know next to nothing about who is out there, but surely knowing once and for all, without speculation, that there is someone or something living out there would be a staggering revelation for the human species. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do much with this notion – in fact, it backs away from it. We get lots of intrigue involving the contents of the message that is received from space, and then the construction of the transport “machine”, and so on. And this is all very compelling and entertaining…but at the end, the film gives us the old “Did it really happen?” gambit, reducing a momentous scientific discovery to something that will appeal to some people and not to others. Not unlike, say, the belief in God.

(Again, I don’t know to what degree the film’s story tracks that of the novel.)

I always find that the film deflates in its last fifteen minutes or so, after Ellie returns from her journey only to learn that, so far as anyone here knows, she never went anywhere. This leads to a Congressional hearing (which really drives home the film’s theme of “one woman versus a whole bunch of mean men”), at the end of which one Representative says, “Are we supposed to take your story…on faith?” And yes, he really pauses and puts big emphasis on those last two words, just in case we missed the irony of a scientist committed to objective observation being forced to admit the necessity of faith. Again, subtle, this is not. The movie does try to have it both ways by showing two government folks discussion the fact that the machine’s video recorder recorded eighteen hours of static (had nothing happened at all, there would have been about two seconds’ worth). But this is to be kept secret, apparently. They might as well seal all this information in a crate and store it in the warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.

And the movie ends, on this state of affairs. What happens now, though? Does some kind of new religion start to accrete around Ellie and her scientific beliefs? Does Ellie somehow become an evangelist for a new blossoming of a scientific worldview? Does her experience have any effect on the human tension between science and religion? We never get any suggestions or speculations. All we get is the rolling of the credits. Contact tells a good story, but it stops just as its important story is just beginning.

Finally, I just have to note that all the cameos in the movie annoy the crap out of me. This was when Robert Zemeckis had just discovered that he could put people into lots of interesting situations, digitally; remember, he’d had Forrest Gump consorting with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. So here we get loads of real-life CNN personalities, and even President Bill Clinton, with the film taking quotes from actual Clinton newscasts and editing them so that it sounds like he’s discussing the events of the movie. It’s incredibly distracting. Instead of being drawn further into the story, I find myself trying to think of what event Clinton was actually discussing in the speeches that were repurposed for this movie. Things like having Rob Lowe play a Christian conservative leader named “Richard Rank” are incredibly distracting, because of course it makes me think of Ralph Reed. Shoehorning in mention of the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cult, which had happened just months before the movie came out, is another example. Zemeckis seems to want his movie to seem ‘real’ and relevant, but all this stuff has the exact opposite effect on me: it forces me to keep the story at arm’s length.

Ultimately, I want to love Contact, because of my love and admiration for Carl Sagan, for the subject matter of the story, and for the view of the Universe as a place of wonder and of science as humanity’s greatest achievement. And there really is a lot to love about Contact. But the movie spends so much time getting in its own way that I inevitably end up just admiring it a lot.

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Speaking of Bull Durham, here’s something I saw last week on The Athletic:

Bull Durham has been my favorite baseball movie for pretty much forever (receipts!), so this particular promotion just makes me incredibly happy. It refers to one of the movie’s many “real-life of a minor-leaguer” jokes, in which our hero, eternal minor-league catcher Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), having been demoted in the minors so he can tutor Nuke LaLoosh, a young hotshot pitcher with tremendous talent who is also a slovenly doofus (Tim Robbins), looks with disdain on Nuke’s shower shoes (flip-flops one wears in the locker room showers):

Your shower shoes have fungus growing on them. You’ll never make it to The Show if you’ve got fungus growing on your shower shoes. Think classy, you’ll be classy. When you win twenty in The Show, you can let the fungus grow back all over your shower shoes and the press will think you’re colorful. Until you win twenty in The Show, however, it means you’re a slob.

This scene comes in the first act:

In the film’s last act, Nuke gets his inevitable call-up to the Majors after a whole season of learning and getting his ass kicked by Crash. There’s one last scene between the two of them, where Crash is giving Nuke a few last lessons before Nuke goes off to the big leagues and probably out of Crash’s life for good. Unfortunately, I can’t find this scene on YouTube, but it really is one of the best scenes in the movie as it shows that Nuke has grown over the course of this one minor-league season. You can watch a part of it here.

What makes this so great is that this scene has a purely visual call-back to the shower-shoes speech that flashes by; you might not even notice it. I didn’t until something like my eighth or ninth time watching the movie. You’re listening to Crash and Nuke talk while Nuke finishes packing, and you might not even notice that at one point Nuke takes his shower shoes out of his locker and puts them in his bag. You might not even notice that they’re clean. I just love that writer-director Red Shelton had enough confidence in his story and his script and his actors that he didn’t feel the need to underline this in any way. He left it purely as an Easter egg to be found by people who are willing to pay close attention to his movie.

And now it’s a promotion for the real-life Durham Bulls!

I’m not gonna lie: I’m not a ballcap guy, I never have been. I only ever wear one at work when I’m in a department that requires it, and it’s the one with The Store’s logo on it. But I can’t say I haven’t thought about buying one of the gross-shower-shoe caps when they hit the market. That’s a degree of next-level geekiness that I can respect!

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