Slaughterhouse-Five

Another movie I’ve been intending to write about and haven’t gotten to yet is Slaughterhouse-Five. This is another one directed by George Roy Hill. I think I watched this right around the same time as The Sting (maybe even the same day), but I wanted to wait and ponder the movie a bit before writing about it, and then I went out of town and was dealing with other life issues, and suddenly a few weeks had passed and I still hadn’t written about it.

I’m a bit reluctant to frame my thoughts of Slaughterhouse-Five in the old “book vs. movie” frame. That’s such a tired discussion, but it’s sometimes inevitable. I agree with the idea that the book is nearly always better than the movie. There a few instances where the movie is so incredibly good, it’s close to being a match for the book but still falls short (To Kill a Mockingbird and The Remains of the Day, for instance). There are a few where the movie actually surpasses the book (The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and maybe The Silence of the Lambs). But usually, that cliché that “the book is better” is true. I remember how disappointed I was when I watched the movie Atonement. I loved the book so much that I knew the movie wouldn’t equal it, and even though I feel fairly certain the movie was actually fine, I couldn’t help comparing the two and feeling incredibly let down.

When I found out that Slaughterhouse-Five had been made into a movie, I was surprised. I read the book a few years ago and loved it, but it struck me as the kind of book that would be nearly impossible to adapt into a movie. So I was curious and a bit reluctant to watch the movie. And, to my surprise, the movie struck me as a good adaptation.

The book centers on a character who is “unstuck in time,” meaning he travels back and forth throughout his life. One moment he is twenty, the next he is fifty. He doesn’t have any control over where he goes or when. He just slips around. This, of course, leads to all sorts of questions about free will, one’s ability to control the path of one’s own life. Billy Pilgrim has no real choice about how his life will unfold, even as he’s living it. He is merely a spectator observing his life as it happens to him. This structure of moving back and forth through time and space, and having a lack of grounding does not strike me as ideally suited for a movie, but it actually worked reasonably well. There is a certain amount of confusion trying to piece together how everything fits together, but the movie unfolds for an audience much like life itself unfolds for Billy Pilgrim: scenes out of sequence but with an inevitability to them.

One major difference between the book and the movie is that I don’t remember feeling a sense of ambiguity from the book about whether Billy Pilgrim was genuinely “unstuck in time” or whether he was suffering some delusions; but in the movie, I think one could reasonably argue that toward the end of his life, Billy has become mentally unstable and is simply suffering hallucinations and confusing memory with the present. The thing that works best for the movie, however, to tip the balance toward the view that Billy is actually suffering from some time travel phenomenon rather than mental illness is the performance of the lead actor, Michael Sacks. He plays the character throughout at every age, and although the character grows older, there is a constant innocence to Billy, a naiveté that shines through. It becomes easy to believe that he accepts his fate, that he understands he has no control over the passage of time around him, of where and when he’ll be next. Sometimes, he struggles with it, but ultimately, he seems to accept his lot and move forward and backward passively. That passivity is tough to keep engaging, but it works. Had Sacks tackled the role with more dynamism, the film might have failed. It strikes me as a performance that is perfect in its simplicity, but would be easy to ignore or dismiss. I looked up information on Michael Sacks after watching the film and was disappointed to discover that he made few movies and retired from acting nearly twenty years ago. I wonder if his performance was dismissed as too simple and not engaging and this lead role in a significant film actually scuttled his career rather than launching it. If so, that’s a shame because he is just right for this role.

There is another difference that stood out to me as well. One thing I particularly like about the book is the metafictional aspect of it. It begins with a discussion by the narrator, seemingly the author Kurt Vonnegut, about how he has wanted to write this book for a long time and has struggled. This sense of reality outside the book adds an extra layer to it, a recognition that the fiction is fiction, but a sense that there is a larger purpose being explored through fiction. Without that frame, the movie feels somewhat lacking in comparison.

One additional element that stands out to me about the movie is the occasional lapse in point-of-view. We follow Billy Pilgrim throughout his life, through World War II, through married life afterward, all the way to a distant planet when he is abducted by aliens, and even to the moment of his death. The story demands a close point-of-view limited to that character’s experience, yet that isn’t what the movie gives us. The movie begins with Billy’s daughter and son-in-law, and there is an extended comic sequence late in the movie that follows Billy’s wife. These shifts away from Billy’s consciousness feel out of place and become distracting flaws in the film’s coherence.

Although I hate to phrase my thoughts quite so simply, the bottom line is that the book is better than the movie. But the movie is worth checking out in its own right. I would be curious what somebody who had never read the book would make of the movie, whether they would appreciate it more since they wouldn’t be comparing it or if they might appreciate it less since they lacked going in the understanding of the unusual chronology. Although it falls short, it’s still a good attempt to adapt a book that was not written to be easily adaptable.

X-Men: First Class

It just occurred to me that I haven’t written about X-Men: First Class yet. I guess I wanted to wait a day or two and then it slipped my mind. I’m not sure if that’s a comment on the movie itself, but maybe it is. Maybe that’s a common characteristic of this type of big blockbuster summer movie. And actually, as I think back on the other X-Men movies (I’ve watched all the previous ones), I don’t have any strong impressions. I basically remember finding them enjoyable enough (except that Wolverine one, which was definitely below my basic expectations for comic book movies, and my expectations are not that high). I can picture the characters more or less, but I’m having trouble thinking of a single scene from the first few X-Men movies. I really couldn’t describe the plots at this point other than the simple version: the good guys fight the bad guys.

It’s only been a few weeks since I saw the newest addition to the X-Men franchise, and I remember more about it than its predecessors, but my ultimate verdict is pretty much the same as for most of this type of movie: it’s fun and worth seeing but not especially memorable.

Here’s a bit more detail if you’re debating seeing it and for some reason you find my perspective influential.

The characters. There are too many characters to really get to know most of them in any detail, but they’re easy enough to keep straight because of their different mutant powers, unlike some movies where the mess of characters becomes impossible to untangle because they all look alike and act the same and have no particular distinguishing features.

The actors. I’ve read a lot of reviews that comment on how good Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are in this movie. James McAvoy is fine. In everything I’ve seen him in, he’s fine, but he’s never really stood out to me as particularly exceptional. Michael Fassbender, on the other hand, is phenomenal. He’s intense, with a complex potion of emotions that really make the character engaging. Ultimately, I felt like the transition the character makes to become the villainous Magneto was a bit abrupt and obligatory, but still the performance made the movie.

The Setting. I liked the 1960s setting. I wonder now, however, what they’ll do in future installments. Will they continue in the ‘60s or jump around in time a bit? Will they make movies in the modern setting alongside more prequels? Another thing I’ve read a few times in reviews is that this film had a 1960s James Bond vibe to it, which I agree with, and that was part of the fun (I am a fan of Bond flicks, which are a lot like this type of comic book movie in also being entertaining but highly forgettable). Going back to Michael Fassbender: he would make a heck of a James Bond. I know that franchise is currently in some trouble due to financial difficulties at the studio, so it may be a few years before another one comes along. If they decide Daniel Craig is too old by the time they’re ready for another, Michael Fassbender would be a good choice as the next Bond.

Pace. The movie felt a bit too long. It dragged in the middle and picked back up by the end. I read that the director had said he liked having so many characters because when one story thread began to drag, he could switch to another one. But it seems a sign of trouble if any story threads are dragging, and sure enough that was a problem here, but not a huge one. The movie could have been tighter. And if they release an extended director’s cut, I suspect it will be best avoided.

In the end, this is a movie I might not bother watching again, extended director’s cut or not. And actually, I don’t think I’ve seen any of the previous X-Men movies more than once, so it’s likely that this will be one timer for me as well. Thor felt the same way. But that’s fine. Sometimes I really enjoy just sitting back and watching something that distracts me from my life for a couple of hours, even if I soon forget quite what happened in the story.

The Sting

This past week has been a weird one for me. I broke up with my girlfriend and have been going through the emotions of dealing with that. Fortunately, I’m not slipping into something as serious as a major depressive episode, but I am certainly dealing with a down mood. And for me, dealing with a bad mood often means in part trying to distract myself from overanalyzing everything. Unlike when I was sick a couple weeks ago, I have also been doing a lot of reading this past week, which has helped, but movies are definitely a part of my recovery process too. I didn’t want to watch anything too relevant to my current woes, so no romances at the moment. Instead, I’ve been watching quite a few cheap horror movies. I think I’ll hold off on discussing those for the moment, however, and deal with all of them in one big post since I’m still in the process of going through them. But to supplement my desire for brainless horror fun, I also watched a classic I’ve never seen before: The Sting.

The Sting has been on my list of movies I need to watch for years. I enjoyed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and figured this Oscar-winning second team up of Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and director George Roy Hill was definitely worth checking out. But, as often happens, it took me years to bother getting around to watching it. Finally, yesterday, I was moping around, feeling down and tired and in the mood to watch something other than a cheesy horror movie, so I checked to see what movies were available On Demand (man, modern technology can be great sometimes!). The Sting was listed, and it seemed like just the type of fun movie to suit me.

In general, I like movies about con men. There’s just something fun about the twists and turns of double crosses and tricks involved in grifting. There is a weird issue, though, with such movies in that the protagonist con men are essentially bad guys, right? They are criminals swindling people out of their money and, therefore, should not have our sympathy. And unlike, say, gangster movies like The Godfather, where the protagonists are understood to be villains and the interesting thing is to watch how they descend into villainy despite being family men and having some redeeming qualities, con men don’t tend to feel so much like antiheroes. They feel like heroes. They win like heroes, right? Isn’t it kind of the same thrill to watch the con man’s scheme come to fruition as it is watching the hero of a sports movie win after training so hard? But con men shouldn’t be upheld as heroes. They are criminals, after all. So how to reconcile this is one of the big challenges of this type of movie.

I remember watching Matchstick Men several years ago and thinking about this issue then. (I’ll spoil the ending here since that movie wasn’t so great that you might care too much at this point). Matchstick Men’s method of dealing with this concern was to have the main character ultimately get conned himself and thus receive his comeuppance, which I think then makes it a bit more palatable that we’ve been enjoying his swindles earlier on. The Sting has a different way of dealing with this problem, however, and that is to have the victim of the big con be a worse villain than our heroes. If the guy getting swindled deserves to get swindled, then we have no real moral objection to our heroes being criminals too.

Anyway, the big con is complex, and there are twists and turns along the way. Paul Newman and Robert Redford are so likable that even if they were swindling little old ladies out of their retirement money, we’d probably still want to root for them. There’s humor and action and even some touching moments. Ultimately, it’s just a straight out fun movie. And if you’re ever feeling down and want to be distracted for a couple of hours with old fashioned, well put together entertainment, you could do a lot worse than The Sting.