Like most people, I tend to see movies more in the summertime. Not only because that’s when the majority of the most anticipated movies are released by the studios, but also because that’s when I have more time for extracurricular outings in general. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with everyone else, too. And the thing about everyone else is…well, they suck. Nowadays it’s a roll of the dice as to what kind of an audience you are going to have with you in a theater. Sometimes you end up with a disaster of texters, talkers and—worst of all—children. Other times, you can have a nice quiet screening with only a handful of old people and maybe some bored teenagers who know how to behave. I used to know how to predict these crowds and know what times of the day to avoid, but more and more this is becoming harder to calculate.

Just last year, I went to a midnight showing of Midnight in Paris at a dollar theater. As was predicted for a low budget Woody Allen comedy, late in its theater run and very late at night, there were not too many people watching with me. But what the crowd lacked in abundant attendance it made up for in audience mischievousness. There was me and three twenty-something bro-dudes who must have had no idea what kind of movie they were at. Perhaps because the film starred Owen Wilson they thought it would be something like the crass and bawdy styles of Wedding Crashers or Hall Pass. One of them had his flip phone open the entire time, while the other two were laughing at something that was definitely not happening on screen.

In an equally puzzling turn of events, last year I attended the midnight release of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1—not as a fan, per se, as I had never even seen any of the other movies, but rather to scientifically observe the social phenomena of Twilight fandom and the crazed screaming teenage pandemonium that it entails. “Bring on the Twihards!” I said. I wanted to see it all for what it was. What I got instead was what must have been the most tepid and docile Twilight premiere ever experienced on the planet of Earth. These tweens didn’t even cheer when the house lights dimmed and the opening credits started to roll. Could my auditorium have been full of Twi-curious Jane Goodall types like myself?

So yes, with this article I am going to add my strained voice to the glut of noise made by those who can’t take it anymore. This is yet another list of “what not to do” at the theater. Call this venting if you wish.

Talking:

This is the timeless classic of theater misbehavior. It never gets old, it never goes out of style, and it seems to only grow in popularity with every new generation. Some might ask how much talking is too much talking. How is it appropriate to respond to a movie when sharing the experience at the cineplex?

Last year around Christmas, I watched David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with some friends. Behind us sat a talker, and the worst kind of talker. She was a “responder.” She seemed to be having a personal conversation with the movie as it was going. There were the usual “oh my God”s and “don’t do that”s, as well as interjecting her predictions of the plot as it unfolded. “The cat’s gonna die,” she said, just before Daniel Craig’s character opened the screen door to reveal the horror that has now been stifled due of the unnecessary play-by-play commentary track behind us. Though we had shushed her throughout, at this point we all turned and shushed in unison, at which point she had the audacity to exclaim “What?  That time it was relevant!” No, it wasn’t, and talking never is.

Here is a good code to live by when it comes to talking during a projected movie with strangers: if you are making words, you are talking too much. You are allowed to gasp or squee if something is scary; you are allowed to laugh if something is funny; and I can even make an exception for exclamations of joy during the big actiony bits, as long as it’s during a louder scene. But unless you are at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, nobody wants to hear you talk. Don’t talk to your friends, don’t talk to the movie, and most of all do not talk on your phone. Which brings to mind…

(Cont.)

I have always been the type of person who requires many conditions to enjoy my media. For example, when discovering that a certain kind of music sounds a lot better when heartbroken, I will specifically wait to break out certain CDs until the day I am left in shambles. I can’t only watch one part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings without watching the whole trilogy, and I WILL NOT watch a Christmas movie unless it’s within the months of November or December—and, yes, that includes Die Hard (1986) and Batman Returns (1992).

These geeky types of obsessive nitpicks gives me something to look forward to from year to year. Every season has its favorite music or movie accompaniment with which to fulfill its optimal enjoyment. With my college year ended and my summer ahead, I can now begin to revisit some of my favorite summertime films. With this list I have collected and calibrated my top five summer flicks, and what is left is a strangely eclectic collection. In fact, with genres ranging from slasher-horror to heartwarming family pictures, the only thing that really connects these movies is their relationship to the summer months and the glorious freedom that they suggest for me.

5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

So, plenty of people probably watch this around the October/Halloween season, but for me the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is absolutely a summer movie. The dry Texas landscape, the sweaty and visibly uncomfortable actors and the fly-swarmed rotting meat all remind me of the countless car trips I was forced to endure whilst traveling on many summer family vacations. Besides, what says “summertime” more than barbeque?

With the exception of some horror films, like John Carpenter’s winter-only film The Thing (1982), scary movies go very well with the summer. I don’t know why, exactly—maybe something about remembering being a teenager and staying up on those late summer nights with a bloodfest blockbuster rental. Cabin-in-the-woods movies such as Evil Dead (1981) and Sleepaway Camp (1983) obviously have an outdoorsy getaway aesthetic (as in “get away from me, you crazy psycho killer!”)—but Texas Chainsaw is only appropriate to play in the hottest days of summer, when you don’t want to leave your air conditioning and you can’t eat your Otter Pops fast enough before they melt (which by the way, only makes them better).

4. Dazed and Confused

As a person who grew up in the ’90s, and who never got into too much trouble as a teen and never smoked a lot of pot, I was under the impression for a the longest time that Dazed and Confused (1993) was not only one of Richard Linklater’s most overrated movies, but one of the most overpraised films of all time. Then, a few years into college, I watched it again and I finally “got it.” It’s not about plot, it’s not about having a resolution, and it’s not even really about what it was like to grow up in the ’70s. It’s about the characters and just watching as they interact for a couple of hours. Also, for the sake of this list, it’s about the kinetic excitement of summertime freedom and teenage rebellion.

The movie spans the course of a day and night, into the next morning, and the way Linklater paces the episodic events between the different teenage cliques accumulates into a hypnotic real-time quality, where you feel like you’re there with them as they kick off the first day of summer vacation. He tried a similar technique in his debut film Slacker (1991), but with lesser results. All together, the rock and roll soundtrack, the night cruises in their cars, and the cute girls in hot pants reflect an idealistic haze of your best summer high school memories, or at least what you might have wished them to be.

3. The Sandlot

Sometimes when I am driving home from work at night, I pass a local baseball field with the lights shining down on a city league softball game. I see this and I feel a weird urge to pull over and watch, not because I like or know anything about softball, but because there is something so deliciously Americana about summertime night games that I can’t help but get sentimental. This inner conflict in me is exacted in the wonderful preteen sports comedy The Sandlot (1993), a staple of my youth.

Some older readers might look at The Sandlot and only see the off-brand version of Stand by Me (1986), but no other film that I can remember better captures what it is like to be a kid in small town America. (Also, it’s was a lot easier for me to relate to the dilemma of losing a baseball behind a fence than trekking miles from home to find a dead body.) I should reiterate that I was never really a sporty kid, but I did play a bit of tee-ball in my day (and sucked really bad at it). The scene in which the all-child cast stops their game and watches the Fourth of July fireworks while a gospel version of “America the Beautiful” plays in the background somehow chokes me up every time. That kind of bright-eyed earnestness, mixed with all the layers of nostalgia that the film encompasses, keeps this as one of my on-hand summer movie picks.

2. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

As a Coen brothers fanatic, many of their movies, even the ones some people hate, have a special place in my life. It becomes increasingly difficult to rank their films against one another, but I would have to say that O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2002) would rank pretty highly. The music, the color-corrected photography, the goofy slapstick between the three leads—everything in this movie works.

Set in the dustbowl 1930s, this semi-musical revisionist version of Homer’s Odyssey is one of the Coens’ most stylistically ambitious movies and carries with it a joyous exuberance that none of their other films really approach in the same way. This would be in large part because of the great soundtrack. Despite being from smalltown Idaho, I have never been too keen on country music. But the bluegrass plank-stoppers peppered throughout become the star of the movie, and made me really have to reconsider my position on overalls, banjos, and holding a long strand of grass in my teeth.

Like Fargo (1996), which for me can only be a winter movie watch, O Brother always has to wait until summer, and like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the hotter and dryer in the year it is, the better it seems to play. The implied heat in this southern gothic fairytale almost creates a sense of hallucinatory mirage that fits very well within the broad evocations of Biblical and classical themes in the narrative. Also, there’s a scene where the Soggy Bottom Boys steal a tasty-looking pie out of an open window , and a funny bit with a bullfrog.

1. Jaws

I always wanted to visit the island town of Amity, because this movie portrayed it as the ultimate friendly hot-spot for summer vacations…well, besides that whole man-eating aquatic leviathan thing going on.

As per tradition, I always have to watch Jaws (1975) around the Fourth of July. The swimming, the beach, the adventure, the killer shark—every aspect of this movie has some sort of connection to summertime for me. Also, who doesn’t like going to the movies and watching a sensational spectacle during hot weather? Actually, you can thank Jaws for that, since its massive success in the ’70s set the precedent for what we now consider the “summer blockbuster.” Had there never been a Jaws, there may have never been The Avengers (2012).

At a young age, I caught this movie on TV with my parents, and ever since it has been an annual treat for me. Of course, it was also responsible for an unwarranted fear of being around any body of water for some time after I watched it. Even waterbeds were in the red-zone for possible shark attacks. Anyway, I shouldn’t have to convince you to see Jaws, since I am sure you already have. But what I can say is that there is no better way to appreciate your American independence than watching Robert Shaw get bit in half by a giant fish.

So, there you have it, the top five summer films that I must watch at least once every year. Now that I am rejoicing in the long daylight hours, outdoor concerts, and snow cone shacks all over my town, I am reminded as to why I always have to go into a state of emotional hibernation in the winter months. But with these movies to look forward to, I can at least store away enough reminders of warm-time sustenance to keep me optimistic when I have to scrape the ice from my windows every morning. I really hate the cold.

Feel free to comment below and give me your picks for the best summertime movies. I know that were plenty that could have made my list but didn’t. For instance, I very nearly included A Goofy Movie (1995) as well as Tiny Toons Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation (1992).

It doesn’t seem that long ago that James Cameron released his behemoth Titanic (1997) upon the unsuspecting public. I say unsuspecting not because he wasn’t well recognized—quite the contrary. At that time, Cameron was one of the world’s most popular genre directors, having a string of huge successes behind him. In gaining those successes, he reinvented the spectacle and bombast of the blockbuster. Films like Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2 (1991) set a new standard for special effects, and simultaneously set an expectation for achievement and personal competition within the mind of its creator.

It’s no secret that just before Titanic was released, it was projected to be a colossal failure. The word had gotten out about its massive budget, and the release date setbacks seemed to hint at a troubled production. But most of all, it was James Cameron, a director who had only done hyper-masculine science fiction-inflected action movies. And here he was trying his hat with a romantic historical epic? However, despite all the obvious red flags, it worked. It worked like gangbusters. In its opening weekend alone, Titanic made 120 million dollars, making the film itself an event. The movie stayed in theaters for almost a year and reportedly brought droves of devoted teenage girls into the theater that would spend entire days watching the film over and over. The soundtrack was also an enormous success. Celine Dion’s theme for the movie, “My Heart Will Go On,” dominated the pop charts. Its music video, peppered with clips from the movie, was repeatedly shown on MTV and VH1, creating a symbiotic relationship that only reinforced the fans spending more money on both the CD and additional tickets. Whether you loved it or hated it, 1998 was the year of Titanic.

What happens when a populist movie wins Best Picture (or hell, is even nominated)? Every Tom and Jill throws in their two cents about how good it truly isn’t. Titanic has always had always a strange relationship with the critics. It’s impossible not to appreciate the technical craft and meticulous detail in the film, and it definitely pushed the bounds of special effects at a time when the solution for every visual wasn’t always a computer button away. But it’s even harder to deny another kind of Kraft in Titanic…the kind that usually comes in a rectangular cardboard box filled with elbow shaped noodles. There’s a reason this movie did so well with the young teenage girls of America: it’s one big soap opera on a boat.

Rewind to almost 20 years before Titanic. James Cameron was a young Canadian upstart working as a visual effects supervisor and second unit man for Roger Corman’s exploitation productions. And as an oompa loompa toiling in the Corman Factory, he cut his teeth on such films as Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) and Galaxy of Terror (1981), a shameless B-movie rip-off of Riddley Scott’s Alien (1979). In 1981, he was famously fired from what was supposed to be his directorial debut in Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, a sequel to the Joe Dante-directed shameless B-movie rip-off of Jaws (1975). Apparently, overseeing producer Ovidio G. Assonitis was frustrated with Cameron’s slow progress on the film and took over principle shooting midway through the production, beginning the long-standing rumors of Cameron’s bossy perfectionism on set. Now, it’s only fair to say that plenty of prestige directors started their careers with Corman—most notably, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and Francis Ford Coppola—but it is also important to note that Cameron was specifically involved in the art direction and cinematography, a.k.a. the surfaces. In any case, while he may have graduated from Roger Corman’s University of Schlock, he never really took off his class ring.

In 1981, Cameron took on The Terminator, a low budget science fiction thriller about a killer robot from the future, starring then-unknown Austrian body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger. The movie became something of a calling card for both Cameron and Arnold. It had the same appeal as a lot of those cheesy Corman drive-in movies, but it was slick, economically made, and genuinely scary. The movie also had very convincing special effects, showcasing a new look for traditional stop-motion animation.

In a grand stroke of irony, only a couple years after he had worked on Galaxy of Terror, Cameron was approached to take on Aliens, a high-budget Hollywood sequel to Alien. Not wanting to step on Ridley Scott’s toes, or tread the same thematic water, Cameron’s vision for this sequel would transform the procedural, slow-burning original into a hard and fast action movie, filled with guns, quick dialogue, and many new creative creature designs. Perhaps the moment in Aliens that best defines the film’s core interests and its fundamental differences from its predecessor is the showdown between the fifteen-foot alien queen and Sigourney Weaver powering an armored mech-suite. The queen has just captured Newt, the young helpless child for whom Ripley now feels a maternal bond. After a fruitless skirmish in which the large alien seems to have gained the upper hand, Ripley re-enters the fight in a construction-yellow robotic humanoid forklift. The camera zooms onto our hero’s face and the famous line is uttered: “Get away from her, you bitch!” At this point, the audience cheers in an uproar and another helping of popcorn is shoveled into their mouths, crunching with glee as this Saturday serial moment plays out. That’s what kind of movie this is, the kind with a quotable catchphrase. These are the kinds of movies James Cameron makes, and whether he thinks so or not, these are the kinds of movies he is still making.

While working on his nautical thriller The Abyss (1989), Cameron began a partnership with Industrial Lights and Magic, George Lucas’s special effects team that had just learned how to integrate computer generated images into live action scenes. This technology made possible a future with no more puppets, no more latex, and no more clunky stop-motion animation. The newly featured “CGI” is used sparingly in The Abyss, but this film, while one of Cameron’s most overlooked, bookmarks an important transitional moment for a director who is always craving the newest and most expensive toys in production.

(Cont.)

Year in and year out, whenever I am revising my worst-of list, I usually notice that the majority of the filth is made up of someone’s poor definition of comedy. Though I certainly have a standard for what I consider to be a good movie, I am open to watching a good-bad-movie every now and then. Cheesy science fiction and horror will always have a place for well-intentioned irony, as proven by years of the successful heckling of Mystery Science Theater 3000. But for me, a bad comedy is unbearable and unwatchable under any circumstance. What makes it worse is that a lot of the time these movies are not only tolerated, but genuinely enjoyed by less-than-discerning general audiences. Films like last year’s Jack and Jill or The Hangover 2 were box office successes and further proof of the end of civilization.

With this growing trend, I have wonder why this is happening. What makes people convinced that they like bad movies? Why do these terrible movies make money? And most of all, what are these movies doing wrong? What separates a bad comedy from a good one? With these questions in mind, I have put together a modest list of capital offenses that seem make for bad comedies.

First, let us define what a comedy is. You might think that a comedy is a movie that is supposed to make us laugh. Well sure, but that might be too reductive of a definition for a much broader genre. Triggering laughter is subjective, and what makes one person laugh is not same thing that will make someone else laugh. But humor, whether laugh-inducing or not, is not as subjective. Someone can appreciate satire, sarcasm, wit, and a good lampoon without shooting a beverage out of their nostrils. A comedy should be a movie that simply observes the humor within the context of its plot. Some of my favorite comedies get funnier as I watch them more and more. It can start with a tepid chuckle the first time I watch it and then eventually turn into guttural laughter years later upon its subsequent viewings. This isn’t to say that all comedies must be this subtle, but it sure wouldn’t hurt for more of them to give it a shot.

The First Offense: comedies should be films, not stand-up routines or sketches.

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems in modern comedy screenplays is the “wouldn’t it be funny if” scenario being precedent before plot, characters, or a clear arc. Too many comedies these days are hodge-podged by scenes of funny ideas where the characters are forced to jump from scenario to scenario, leaving a breadcrumb trail back to whatever structure there was. This is just as offensive to me as a Michael Bay film that strings together a storyline through a series of meaningless action scenes. Films like Little Fockers (2010) and most anything starring Adam Sandler seem to live and die by this method. They get a table of writers and comedians together and come up with ridiculous sight gags and comedy set pieces and then they try to justify the scenes within the context of a contrived plot. This lazy and undisciplined style creates for flat or cartoonish characters and clunky, unsatisfying storytelling. Just because these comedies are trying to make you laugh does not mean they get a free pass from the basic rules of narrative. We can’t just settle for unjustified funny scenes or a series of jokes. We should demand a good story as well. Now, obviously there are some notable exceptions to this rule, like Airplane! (1980) or Wet Hot American Summer (2001), both of which are unabashedly episodic, but I only aim to list issues that can easily lead to bad filmmaking if not carefully handled. In short, if you don’t have a good story to tell, don’t bother coming up with jokes until you do.

The Second Offense: energy and mayhem do not equal comedy.

How many times have we seen a comedy run out steam by the third act and the stakes are raised to the point of asinine car chases, relentless screaming, pointless shoot-outs and explosions? This seems to happen when a comedy doesn’t have enough material in its characters and situations to fill the whole 90 minutes. All of the sudden they throw in some complicated set pieces and crank everything up to eleven in order to replace the humorless dead gaps with high energy. People will ignore the fact that the movie they paid to see is changing into a different creature before their very eyes, because even if they aren’t laughing, they’re not bored. Unfortunately for most bad filmmakers and most gullible filmgoers, this can be enough to keep them satisfied. Unless genres are being blended for a purpose, as was the case for Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007), then these kinds of time-wasting action scenes are akin to comedy tofu. Immediately I think of Paul (2011) and Pineapple Express (2008), two Seth Rogen comedies where I loved the first half—when it was based in character and dialogue—but became increasingly bored and annoyed as the movies devolved into campy action self-parody.

The Third Offense: simply making reference to something is not the same thing as a joke.

Now, this category can really be split into two camps. Camp one is occupied by the awful spoof movies by the likes of Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer, the Wayans brothers and others of their ilk. These hacks have been spewing forth their so-called “humor” for years and somehow always make money, despite the fact that their movies have no stars, no production value, and are devoid of anything approximating a real joke, as observed in such dreck as the Scary Movie franchise, Disaster Movie (2008) and Vampires Suck (2010). They feel that showing us something we recognize from another movie and then making said reference fart or get a piano dropped on it is a guaranteed chuckle-fest. Leslie Nielsen and Mel Brooks were the parents of this style, but what they understood intuitively is that this kind of parody is cheap and disposable. They always made it abundantly clear that if you are not also making fun of your own movie—somehow showing within the film that the writers are smarter than the material—then you will end up with something that is both unfunny and painfully self-aware.

The second camp within this third category belongs to the pop culture reference and its current overuse. This is a tricky one. Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino, as well as many of their gen-X contemporaries, invented this style of humor as a way of informing their characters and relating to their audience, and back then there was something kind of fresh about it. But as time has passed, it seems like less tasteful writers have mimicked this technique without its intended sarcasm. We should never be too aware of the writer, or his or her personal interests. When I am watching a movie and I feel like the writer/director wants me to think he is cool because he reads the same comic books, watches the same foreign films, or listens to the same indie rock bands, my eyes become strained from rolling. Not because my obscure interests are becoming more mainstream, but because it takes me out of the story when I feel like the writer’s geeky obsessions are being shoved down my throat for hipster appeal. I don’t appreciate being marketed to in a film. Sometimes this might be foolishly done with the best intentions, but oftentimes it’s done in a ham-fisted way, not unlike the worst of obvious product placement. Some people, like your Wes Andersons or Noah Baumbachs, are good enough writers that they can make this work. The others write for Gilmore Girls or the Shrek movies.

I hope that this list has been able to provide a reasonable cause for why a lot of the comedies of recent years have been less than memorable. However, I do want to reiterate that all of these rules can be and have been broken with successful results. These suggestions are certainly not a cure-all, and this list is only the tip of the iceberg. But I think if these simple things were avoided or at least more carefully observed when used, then we might have less cringe-inducing turkeys every year. Obviously I could have made a bigger list mentioning all kinds of other glaring offenses. I could have mentioned things such as don’t be sexist/racist/homophobic, don’t rely on body functions for laughs, or don’t cast Rob Schneider, but some comedies are without assistance and I wouldn’t want to risk futility.

What is in a look, a stare, or a knowing glance? What is an emotion? Ideally in film, emotions should be expressed in actions, since it’s a medium of moving pictures and all. However, over the decades directors have struggled to define the actor’s interior sense without words to do some of the heavy lifting. A long time ago, in the 1920s and before, sound and words were not taken for granted. The silent film era is still considered one of the most important, not only because they were the ones who were still making all the rules, but because they had to work within their limitations. Besides the obvious technological disadvantages, the actors had to come up with ways of showing emotion and moving a scene along with just their actions and expressions. Some of these now-silly acting techniques were acquired by overly melodramatic theater and have since been seen as a dated way to build a character. But perhaps there is something to be said for being able to get a scene from point A to point B without ever saying a word.

This fall we had what seems to be a resurgence in the interest for the silent era. Still in theaters we have two such throwbacks: The Artist (2011), a French-made black and white silent film, and Hugo (2011), an American movie about French-made black and white silent films. Both of these films have been critical favorites, and are now awards contenders. Though the demographics for these films may be very different, they do aim towards the same nostalgia for a time when things were simpler, less jaded, and perhaps a bit more pure in their naïvety.

The Artist in particular is a bold attempt at reintroducing the silent film style to a new audience—the music, the costumes, the title cards and all. It’s a self-aware earnest love story and it wears its conceit with a big dopey smile. Of course, because of the eccentric nature of this concept, its box office objectives are modest, mostly catering to the art house and niche audiences. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, however, is a film that wants to share its director’s love of silent film with a modern generation, but not the pseudo-intellectual cinefiles—rather, kids and their families. Not surprisingly, a 3D family film made by director of Goodfellas (1990) and Taxi Driver (1976), in which the main theme deals the importance of film preservation, did not take middle America by storm, despite it winning the hearts of the above-mentioned film geeks and critics.

But maybe this trend towards the evocation of actual silent films isn’t the only noticeable use of showing and not telling. In the last few years, creative directors have been approaching dialogue with a more reductive awareness. Back in 2007, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood opened with a ten-minute prologue where not a single word is spoken by Daniel Day-Lewis as you watch him discover the black combustible MacGuffin under the desolate desert ground. This of course set the tone over the whole piece, showcasing a career-defining performance, and in my opinion stands as a remarkable achievement in filmmaking, even outside of the context of the equally amazing feature. Shortly thereafter, we began to see many of these kinds of quiet movies with many wordless scenes pepper throughout the fringes of the mainstream, where the actors do more intrinsic performances and the loudest people on screen are the directors and cinematographers.

Some directors have recently seemed to start looking back, not necessarily into the silent era, but into the Italian and French works of the sixties and seventies. Though more than a few decades after the silent era, influential directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Pierre Melville, and Sergio Leone also had an appreciation for quietude, despite having the technology affording a concern for the full use of sound design. In 2010, ex-music video director Anton Corbijn released The American, an arty euro-thriller starring a nearly mute George Clooney. Drawing his stylistic influence from Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975), The American was thriller about the internal pathology of a criminal, with hardly any set pieces or dialogue. Like Clooney’s understated performance in The American, Ryan Gosling gives a comparable characterization as the nameless hero of the neo-noir thriller Drive (2011). It could be well argued that both of these actors were riffing or building their characters from the French assassin in Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) or Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name,” featured in Leone’s spaghetti western trilogy. In Somewere (2010), Sofia Coppola seems to share Corbijn’s  love for the filmmaking tones of Antonioni, as we are introduced to the main character, played by Stephen Dorff, by following his speechless actions for nearly fifteen minutes before a word of dialogue is uttered.

(Cont.)

The common misconception about our society is that now we have iPods and antibiotics we are a more progressive, forward-thinking culture. But if we only look back into our inconveniently well-recorded history, we can see that might not have always been the case. When Americans think of Germany in the early-to-mid 20^th century, we tend to only remember Hitler, goose stepping, and The Rocketeer fighting that guy with the weird face on top of a giant red swastika blimp. The truth is, before the Nazi regime, Germany was one of the most important homes for forward-thinking Jewish filmmakers of the silent era. What they gave us was the Expressionist movement; dark, thematic, adult fantasies with a visual interest in jarring lighting contrasts and a kind of disorienting angular production design. Of these filmmakers, the name Fritz Lang has become iconic, as he made many emblematic Expressionist films, most famously the dystopian science fiction film Metropolis (1927). But before fleeing Nazi-occupied Germany in the ’30s to make genre movies in Hollywood, he made one of the most prescient and fascinating thriller precursors with M (1931), his moody indictment of the mob mentality. Living in a post-Psycho (1960) world of exploitation serial killer entertainment, we can only look at M and take it for granted, but even with this water being so thoroughly tread-upon, one can still recognize the complicated themes and characterizations as being anything but stock pulp archetypes.

Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckart, a child murderer who has been stalking the streets, luring young girls to their doom with the promise of candy and balloons. Even as the German townspeople have no idea who is committing the murders, Hans has left a lasting impression upon the community, stirring the parents and politicians into a maniacal frenzied manhunt, leaving no judicial stone unturned in their search. Though the story introduces our central character through the implied violence of his child-hunting, Lang is much more concerned with the public’s reaction in a time of paranoia and how society can begin to crave blood and murder just as equally as the ones they are passing judgment on. Not unlike Metropolis, M is a projection of a dystopia—a cautionary tale in which the law becomes lawless and the line between those who are being protected and those who are being oppressed blurs.

To say that M is ahead of its time is an understatement. Obviously one can draw fair comparisons from M to basically every genre thriller after it. In the realms of American film noir, a sub-genre Lang would later contribute to, many directors would borrow a lot of its production design and high-contrast chiaroscuro lighting to emphasize the cold and dangerous tones of the cities in which their stories took place. The “homme fatal,” another noir trope, could easily be traced back to Lorre’s portrayal of the almost-sympathetic but ultimately psychopathic murderer. Even decades later in schlocky horror movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), we can see elements of Lorre’s child predator character, complete with a fedora and song of warning sung in unison by the children as they play their games outside.

But perhaps more interesting is the sociopolitical implications of the film. Where the serial killer character of TV’s Dexter has become for some an almost anti-hero or surrogate executioner of the wrongdoers of society, M does not ask its audience so politely to root for the killer. Beckert is a compulsive childkiller, but the film still bravely asks if it is right for a man who has no control over his actions to be condemned to death. Unlike the vigilant revenge seeking of Dexter or Jigsaw of the Saw franchise, who seem to tap into a borderline conservative blood-lust for their enemies (the 2009 Gerard Butler film Law Abiding Citizen comes to mind as well), M points the finger back and condemns that very convention. Unlike these modern killers who may as well be the symbolic mascots for the pro-death penalty lobbyists, Lang  is more interested in showing us how society will scramble to find the big scary “other” and use it as a go-ahead for witch hunting and the unjustified stretching of due process. Obviously we can see how this exact mentality would later turn Germany from a progressive art-friendly environment to a militant industry of persecution.

So even as we pat our own backs and talk about how far we have come, the political questions that Fritz Lang brings forward are still yet to be resolved. Instead, it would seem in our post 9/11 terror-phobia—an environment in which we can find relief in a weekly show about a conscientious morally self-righteous killer—M is still a challenging film. I can’t deny the entertainment value of films like Saw and TV shows like Dexter, but I can be somewhat disappointed in their bashful approach to their dark material. Both go to great lengths to justify the acts of their killers to make them more sympathetic, turning them into vigilantes on a Charles Bronson-like crusade. I find this to not only betray the point of the genre, but be morally reprehensible as well. So when I look back at the brilliance and craft of M, I am always much more interested in its central question: should we kill someone we find evil just because we think it will make us feel better?

In a darkened space below the deck of the Orca, a fishing boat that probably isn’t big enough, the Ahabesque character of Sam Quint relays a chilling tale about a mission to deliver an atomic bomb to Japan during World War II. While drunk and still laughing, Quint (played by Robert Shaw) begins to deliver this strange and haunting monologue to his two fellow crewmates, and while the music fades and the camera pushes in closer to his face, the tone of the movie makes an important shift. Carefully worded and with deep sincerity, Shaw explains in great detail about the night his character watched the other soldiers get picked off one by one by a swarm of tiger sharks while they waited in the Japanese waters to be saved by the US military. To anyone who has seen Jaws (1975) more than once, this scene quickly becomes their favorite. Steven Spielberg himself has admitted that this scene, consisting of only dialogue and a few reaction shots, is the moment from Jaws that he was most proud of. What this now-famous boat scene underlines is the dichotomy of its creator.

Steven Spielberg has become perhaps America’s most beloved and successful filmmaker. Through his career he has made popcorn friendly adventure movies, truly suspenseful creature features, and grounded dramatic efforts dealing with war, poverty, and social injustices. There seems to be two different kinds of filmmakers within the mind of the one director, but what separates him from the legions of other directors in Hollywood who also jump from genre to genre is the love and craft that he gives to both of his creative sides. Whether it’s a movie about a cave-dwelling adventurer out to find an ancient treasure or a sullen family man out to find vengeance through political assassination, it is always clear that the man behind the camera is working towards a certain kind of harmony to resolve the contrast of his cinematic interests.

This holiday season Spielberg has not only one movie competing for box office, but two: the motion-capture comic book adaptation The Adventures of Tintin (2011) and War Horse (2011), a sprawling WWI epic based on a popular novel and stage play. But to those of us who follow his career, we know that this of course is not the first time he has done this. Throughout his career we can see a lot of strange couplings where we can observe both Spielbergs at work, the wonder-filled crowdpleaser and the so-called serious filmmaker. Some people seem to prefer one over the other and believe that Spielberg the entertainer can oftentimes get in the way of his more socially conscious side. Brazil (1985) director Terry Gilliam has been very vocal about his disapproval over the Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List (1993), stating that Spielberg sought out to make a movie about a victory, in a situation where in reality nobody actually won.

With a string of smash hits like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Spielberg established himself early in his career as the premiere entertainer of the new Hollywood movement in the ’70s and early ’80s, and along with the George Lucas’s success with Star Wars (1977), he practically invented the summer blockbuster. Having accomplished this before he was even 35 years old, you’d think breaking box office records would be enough to satisfy a creative entertainer, but the very things that made his genre movies so captivating would end up being the same thing that drove him to start make different kinds of films.

Unlike most summer tent-pole releases today, Spielberg has always been able to balance the monsters and mayhem with the meaningful. Within the films of his “classic era” there were always plenty of exciting action scenes and groundbreaking special effects, but never without true character development and important subtext dealing with things such as masculinity, fatherhood, and the search for a greater truth. 1982 saw the release of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. The story of a cute brown alien who’s abandoned with a broken family on Earth, Spielberg sought out to tackle the difficult subject of divorce and in doing so created a decade-defining film. Though still very much aiming at a younger, family-friendly demographic, E.T was the moment where Spielberg can be seen reaching for something a little more serious or, at the very least, a lot less suspense driven or as riddled with complex set pieces. Though breaking his own box office record yet again, he was not rewarded by the Academy, perhaps prompting him to move into a more dramatic and less fictional world, and through the remainder of the ’80s he did exactly that.

The Color Purple (1985), a film about a poor black girl who was raised in abuse during the time of the early 1900s, was Spielberg’s first attempt at a “serious” film, perhaps more geared in the direction of the awards his blockbusters didn’t previously win. Though at the time it was seen as a progressive move for his career, with a few decades now passed, I can see a young director still struggling with his sentimental and sensational sensibilities. In truth, it isn’t a bad movie per se, but it isn’t a great movie either. The problem is with the tone and balance of the picture. The bouncy/swelling score by longtime collaborator John Williams and the unnecessary physical comedy seems very out of sync with the heavy subject matter. Moreover, the movie is much too long, a continuing problem with the “serious” Spielberg. It was an ambitious effort, and at its time it probably seemed like he hit it out of the ballpark because he was still known for movies about aliens and sharks. But looking back, the movie dates pretty badly and the ambition doesn’t really match its reward. However, there are individual moments, strong performances (Whoopi Goldberg is great), and impressive cinematography that makes it very much worth seeing.

Though he managed to fit a couple of Indiana Jones movies in his schedule—Temple of Doom (1985) and The Last Crusade (1989)—Spielberg spent most of the ’80s trying his hat at this new more serious approach. With his hands now too busy, he began to produce, creating a “Spielbergian” brand quality under his Amblin Entertainment production company, giving his lighter amusement to up-and-coming directors. Based on the model of his earlier successful films, Spielberg’s style became almost a type of genre in the ’80s, as seen in Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1983), Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), and Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985). Many other Spielberg clones began to pop up to coattail this movement as well, some of which he had no creative input on—à la Flight of the Navigator (1986) and Mac and Me (1988).

(Cont.)