Quotes of the Day

The young couple had been married just five months when the crisis struck. He (we'll call him "Richard") took her (we'll say "Mary") to a new movie (for want of a better four-letter word, "MASH").

He had already seen the film and thought she might enjoy it. She did not. She thought it wantonly cruel to women, offensive in its blithe blind brutality. When Hot Lips Houlihan was revealed naked in a shower and the men sitting on folding chairs outside began to applaud, "Mary" got more steamed than Sally Kellerman. She thought that any man who could find the scene, the film, funny must be emotionally deficient. She wondered, in horror, what sort of insensitive cretin she had pledged to love, honor and...oh vey! That weekend "Mary" literally went home to mother. Reuniting the lovers required a bit of soul searching — that, and an essay "Richard" wrote for the New York Times titled "I Admit It, I Didn't Like 'MASH'."

Thirty-plus years later, they're still together, still watching films and judging them and, in the process, judging each other a little. In other words, "Mary" and "Richard" are like most people. For, you see, Hitchcock was wrong. It's never "only a movie, Ingrid." Films are litmus or acid tests we apply to strangers, friends and occasional loved ones. And though it's a mantra of mine that in a movie review there are things more important than the opinion (the grace and wit of the writing, the knowledge of films and the world brought to the review, the discovery of odd corners and angles no one else noticed), I admit it — opinion counts. Even if I don't agree with it.

In the book "Favorite Movies," a collection of essays in which critics chose and eulogized a film that meant a lot to them, Joseph McBride wrote something like this: "If you don't cry when Ingrid Bergman reveals she has tuberculosis in 'The Bells of St. Mary's,' then I don't want to know you." That sentence has struck me at being at the hidden core of movie criticism. It's not that I'm with McBride on the specifics. I don't cry at that scene; something in my lapsed-Catholic soul rebels at what seems to me a contrived emotional blackmail. But I respect McBride's assertion that there are parts of a movie's impact on the viewer that are beyond arguing about.

It's hard not to think that something that moved you is profound; harder still for critics, who believe that their familiarity with every form of movie manipulation makes them the only irrevocable arbiters of the deep, the true, the moment when sentiment magically morphs into sublimity. But McBride's testimony recognizes that behind every critic is a human being, or the remnant of one. McBride becomes human — naked, vulnerable, honest — when he confesses to loving "The Bells of St. Mary's." I suppose I feel a similar vulnerability at the climactic moment from another Leo McCarey sudser, "An Affair to Remember," when the crippled Deborah Kerr exclaims to playboy-but-true-love Cary Grant, "If you can paint, I can walk!" All right, our guilty secret is out: inside every staunch critical redwood there's a lot of sap. When the right buttons are pushed, we can devolve from stony oracles to tremulous schoolgirls.

THE "PARADISO" PERPLEX

So when Kevin Murphy, in his loving, splendidly contentious new book "A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey," discloses that his all-time favorite picture is "Cinema Paradiso," I reach for my devolver. Giuseppe Tornatore's 1990 memory movie won loads of awards: Oscar and Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, a Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, and at the French Césars it was cited for Best Poster. It is also a movie that most critics I respect have a special loathing for in the pit of their pruney hearts. Or they say they do, even if those hearts contain a soft center with a weakness for winsome Italian films about people who get winsome for Italian films.

Me, though, I really do dislike it. And as I was reading of Murphy's fondness for the film I wondered if I should be obliged to reassess (as "Mary" "Corliss" once did) all feelings of fondness for a person whose aesthetic criteria seem to verge so drastically from mine.

Renouncing Murphy would be difficult. To me, and hundreds of thousands of others, he is forever bathed in glory for his service as a writer-performer on "Mystery Science Theater 3000." For ten years, in a small studio in suburban Minneapolis, he lay on his back, his hand up the innards of the Tom Servo gumball puppet, and made derisory comments — fresh, perverse, acute comments — about failed movies. Murphy and his colleagues fulfilled the dream life of many a film critic: to be funny, gifted and killing. Click here to find a lovely portrait of Murphy, to the right of a bedragged Michael J. Nelson on the late, much-missed Satellite of Love set.

Murphy has also said nice things about me. In public, even. Why, in "A Year at the Movies" he describes me as "a brilliant, well-studied, thoughtful film lover" and "a real teddy bear of a man," and adds that meeting me at the Cannes Film Festival "will become a notch on my life's gun belt." He says he belongs to the First Church of Corliss of Latterday Saints. He claims my prose is so beautiful he wants to bear its children and buy it a second home in Sanibel. Murphy did not actually say all of this, but what he did say is reckless enough. It guarantees that (a) given the Caesar's-wife rules of book reviewing, I cannot write about "A Year at the Movies" in Time magazine and (b) I will have to pick a fight with him, just to prove that his flattery cannot vitiate my critical integrity.

On second thought — and Murphy has a lot of them in his book — I'll meet him halfway. I still don't like "Cinema Paradiso." But I like why he likes it. This dewy fable sings to him of movie-love, of the magic of dark places with giant screens that offer (in Andrew Sarris' eloquent definition) a window to the wide world beyond us and a mirror into the strange universe inside us. Despite Murphy's sensible suspicions about all kinds of movies, he is open to all kinds of movies, including movies he can't stand — an attitude I promise to explain later. And what opens his mind and pores is his feeling that the maker was intoxicated by the filmmaking process. He doesn't want to see the craft. He wants to feel the love.

Savoring the brio at a film festival in Positano, Murphy asks, "Hell, why are Italians good at any art form, from music to painting to sculpture to opera? Passion." (Actually, most of the finest Italian films of the past 40 years, from "L'Avventura" on, have been on the astringent side; and please don't tell me about Roberto Benigni.) He likes Derek Jarman's artsy AIDS film "Blue" because "Derek Jarman loved making films, it's obvious. And it's also obvious that he loved his audience. Loved us enough to challenge us to try something new, take an adventure." (How exactly is this obvious? And how does love of movies translate into good moviemaking? We know Ed Wood loved movies — there's a wonderful Rudolph Grey biography and a not-so Tim Burton bio-pic to prove it — and, heaven knows, his films certainly challenged the audience. Yet three Wood films were chosen for ragging on "MST3K." )

I'm suspicious of passion: not of the emotion itself but of the invoking of it to validate an opinion. And yet "A Year at the Movies" comes close to overwhelming my reservations, for it is brimful of intelligent passion about films and filmgoing.

How so? Read on.

TOM SERVO AT THE MOVIES

Unlike Mike Nelson's very funny published collections "Movie Megacheese" and "Mind Over Matters," "A Year at the Movies" is a real book: all-new essays on virtually every aspect of film (including several important ones that have eluded "real" critics), with built-in mysteries (what movie did he see on Sept. 11th?) and suspense (will he make it to Dec. 31st without cracking?).

Like a Phileas Fogg planning to go around the movie world in 365 days, Murphy mapped out a 52-week, 52-chapter itinerary that would take him to Sundance, Cannes and four other film festivals, to the world's smallest movie house (in Tenonee, New South Wales, Australia) and the only one made entirely of ice (in way-northern Quebec). He monitored the pulse of cinema past (silent films) and future (IMAX movies). He went on movie rides at theme parks. He attended, in black drag, the singalong "Sound of Music" show in London and copped the Best of Nun prize. One week he tried taking seven different women, including his wife, on dates to the same movie. He watched a bunch of big-screen movies from the front row. He lived for a week on nothing but movie-theater food. Murphy's idea was "to immerse myself in the moviegoing experience and report back that there's still hope and talent and energy out there."

This is a capacious, optimistic, essentially serious vision — the corollary to MST3K's canny cynicism. To make jokes for ten years about cheesy movies is to stare down grim reality and throw up on its hairshirt; to hope for good movies is to seek a Platonic ideal. Inside the mocking clown is the preacher who paints pictures of Hell to give parishioners a glimpse of Paradise, even if it's Paradise (or Paradiso) lost. When Murphy and the gang excoriate the awful, they are implicitly arguing for its reverse: something out there worth watching, worth falling in love with, worth getting passionate about.

But there are also a lot of movies worth making fun of. In "A Year at the Movies" the Tom Servo in Murphy surfaces frequently and funnily. Here's a taste of barbs directed at A-level targets: "'Pulp Fiction' tells us that life is a planet-sized copper kettle full of bubbling feces, in which we stand, knee-deep, until the coffee break's over and we all have to stand on our heads again." ... Merchant-Ivory films, in their suffocating stuporousness, "remind me of a dream I once had, of dying in my grandmother's house, being suffocated by her giant long-haired cat, and eventually rotting and decaying right into one of her doilies." ... Warren Beatty, in the universally reviled "Town & Country" (so no extra points to Murphy for getting het up about it) "looks like one of those old, tired, bewildered, golf-loving bastards who clog up the freeways with Range Rovers on the weekend and expect valet parking at the supermarket."

He's no gentler to the laff-riot comedies from "Saturday Night Live" refugees. Like a summer snoozer who wakes to find a cockroach on his leg, he flicks off "the excrementally offensive Rob Schneider delivery system ‘The Animal'" before spraying a vat of Raid at "Corky Romano": "Chris Kattan is no funnier than a televised colostomy." (What? Your cable provider doesn't carry the Colostomy Channel?) And Chris Penn has "gained at least eight hundred pounds, all of it in his head. He has become a Macy's balloon animal version of himself, straining the skin of his face to the point where it might burst, sending subcutaneous fat spraying over unwitting press members or premiere party guests." Seeing the movie in the company of his pal Nelson, Murphy observes that " 'Corky' is different, and the crowd knows it. I watch the kids look at each other, as if there is something wrong with the projector instead of the movie."

REVIEWING THE AUDIENCE

Murphy looks around a lot too. Like the late Pauline Kael, he reviews the audience as well as the movie. (At screenings, especially the all-media ones with big audiences, the other critics used to whisper, "Pauline, the movie's over there.") This is the populist in Murphy — the one who declares that Hollywood movies are so bad because "they are made by rich people who don't care about anything other than being rich and successful and being among other rich and successful people."

He hates film festivals that exclude the public, like Cannes and Sundance. Since Cannes has been the Lourdes of my moviegoing life for the past 30 years, I'll move right to Murphy's searingly acute remarks about the Utah festival (which I've never been to, so what do I care?): "For ten days in January, Park City becomes a freak show crammed with thousands of vain idiots who believe that their jobs are the most important things in the world. These aren't filmmakers, they're studio executives. Every other man I saw was short, balding, and looked either anxious or annoyed; it was like a city full of MBA's. Every other woman I saw looked like she wanted to beat me up, probably because she kept slipping on the snow in her ridiculously dysfunctional boots, causing her too-tight jeans to ride up so high in the crotch as to become a denim tampon."

Not for him the cinematic poseurs and Pharisees. Kevin prefers the "real people" at the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankyla, Lapland: "We had a grand old time, and as we passed into Lapland the bus had to stop for a herd of reindeer crossing the highway." In the Land of the Midnight Sun or the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Murphy will bond with the movie groundlings and thus get insights into his own moviegoing pleasures and prejudices. Like the Hollywood director in Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels" — hitting the road to see what real people like, and are like — Murphy figures that by spending part of every day with the consuming public, he can learn as much about moviegoers as about movies.

At least once, he has a Sullivan-like experience: joining an audience in the privileged moment of comic surrender. In Pomona, Queensland, Australia, he's at the Majestic Theatre, a room "hot as a wrestler's crotch," watching Laurel and Hardy in "Their Purple Moment." And, he says, "I don't think I've ever heard an audience laugh as hard." (I have: at Best Brains' riff on "This Island Earth" at the 1994 MST3K Conventio-Con Expo Fest-a-Rama in Minneapolis. But Kevin was working that night. Maybe he didn't hear the laughter, the way I did in the audience, or see invalid MSTies rolled up the aisles on gurneys, their sides literally split with mirth. Anyway, as he was saying:) "The laughter was in turns explosive, anticipatory, cathartic, joyous. It became part of the score as the organ lilted on at a quick pace. [I] left that day with cramped smile muscles."

But Murphy can be analytical as well as rhapsodic. At the Boston Faith in Film Festival, he's part of an audience that grows consecutively impatient, angry and giddy with aesthetic rebellion while watching Carl Dreyer's dauntingly austere "Ordet": "Remember these are theologians, Harvard folk, film scholars. And still we laughed and heckled what had been called one of the greatest films on faith ever made." (It may interest Murphy to hear that theirs was not a unique reaction to a Dreyer masterwork. At the end of a showing of "Gertrud" at the 1964 New York Film Festival, Dreyer stood up in the director's box and was pelted with a chorus of catcalls.)

As Murphy describes the rebellious giggle fits infecting his comrades, we hear Tom Servo's knowing mockery of pretentious sludge. Then, in a change of voice, the chagrined adult steps out from behind the puppet. "All this leads me to a thesis: We have outgrown classic cinema. But we are also too immature for it." At the "Ordet" screening, "We sat there, intelligent, sophisticated film lovers, and we squirmed like fourth-graders. And during a festival of faith in film, with God watching and everything. All because we were unused to a classic style of filmmaking, and too impatient to learn from it. In short, as a culture, with more movies available than ever before, we are becoming film illiterates. Shame on us." And bravo to Murphy for thinking that troubling second thought.

One difference between him and Kael, or any other professional reviewer, is that Murphy has earned the perspective of the average moviegoer. He paid for his ticket; he didn't have a publicist holding a "reserved" seat for him; he had to sit through a lot of crappy previews and commercials; he got his feet stomped on by yabbos on their way to the loo. He knows that, in real movie theaters, there often is something wrong with the projector. Or maybe with the print. As a Hollywood big shot recently confided to me, the quality of new movie prints varies widely, and the poorer prints go to smaller cities and second-run theaters.

In fact, Murphy would be the ideal face in the crowd, except for three movie connections: (1) He and the MST3K crew were sucked into a no-win deal with Universal on a big-screen version of the show. (2) He is sort-of related to Roger Ebert, since "Roger now looks exactly like my grandmother Grace Murphy would if you'd put her in a Land's End blazer and given her a more mannish haircut." And (3) Kevin's wife's maiden name is Jane Wagner. Didn't she used to be married to Lily Tomlin?

DINNER AND A MOVIE

You might wonder why I'm devoting a column called That Old Feeling to "one man's filmgoing odyssey" in the Kubrickian year 2001. Have I become nostalgic for 11 months ago? Not at all. But I do find it old-feeling that Murphy thought of building a book around the act of going to the movies — because, these days, movies come to you. Americans, everybody, see many more films on TV (either on broadcast and cable channels or through the VCR) than at theaters. Even the modest effort required to rent a film from a video store is being replaced by the lovely lassitude of renting movies through the mail (L.B. Mayer, meet L.L. Bean) or simply plugging an ultra-high-speed computer into a Napster-type movie download program. Soon we all can recline into the lard of our physical indolence and become the boy in the bubble, fed movies intravenously.

Murphy nicely atomizes the fall from grace of the cinematic experience: how audiences once made pilgrimages to movie palaces and cathedrals, but now drive to malls where films have no more sanctity than any other form of shopping. Theaters are warehouses in the K-marting of moviegoing. Visiting one of these "giant blockhouses stuffed with cushy, charmless high-tech screening tombs," Murphy writes, "I get the feeling I'm going into a sensory deprivation tank to take part in some sort of mass experiment."

And from the endless variety of filmed entertainment, what is offered to "us, the poor bleating ewes"? Precious little: 57 screens, nothing on. "Because of the Compulsory Films Act of 1975, known as the 'Jaws' Act, everybody must forsake variety and see the top three or four films as determined by the National Blockbuster Administration." Yet he realizes it's useless to resist the Hollywood pandemic as it spreads to the local googolplex (a word I think I coined, by the way). "I'll come here to see massive galaxy-wide blockbusters when they come out. If I'm going to be desensitized into a mindless stock animal, I may as well do it with ... ergonomic seats and magnificent THX-certified sound."

Still a resident of the Twin Cities area, Murphy visits the nearby Muller Family Theatres Lakeville 18, at the intersection of I-35 and County Road 70; doesn't quite have the romance of Hollywood and Vine, does it? Read this to be depressed (by the truth of his observation) and energized (by the snap of his writing): "From the highway the Lakeville 18 looks like a displaced airport terminal. Acres of sand-colored brick bereft of any style, with a parking lot I believe actually used to be Iowa. Inside it has eighteen theaters, one hundred yards of concession stands, and a lobby that could comfortably contain Cirque du Soleil."

We later learn that the lure of the Lakeville 18 for Murphy: it has exotic cuisine. "The buffalo jerky tastes like beef, the ostrich jerky tastes like a bland pork-tinged chicken, and the crocodile jerky tastes like your tongue." Devouring this and other carbohydraulics in a week in which he consumed only movie-theater food, Murphy felt his taste buds rebel, then shut down: "The whole of my mouth seemed coated with wood sealer."

And here we are at the book's thick-veined heart. Murphy believes that the movie consumer is someone who consumes at the movies. If movies be the love of food, he says, then on with the show. He devotes one chapter to his love of tater tots. He is enraptured to discover that, at one Australian movie house, he can take wine, in a wine glass, made of glass, to his seat (leading to a nice quote, possibly from Brecht: "A theater without beer is just a museum"). He believes in the illegal transport of popcorn across googolplex lines: "Your own smuggled food is always better, hand-picked, and enhanced by the flavor of defiance." The emotional climax of "A Year at the Movies" is his smuggling of an entire Thanksgiving dinner, with all the fixin's and a table, into a local theater. Cinephile? Gourmand? Neither word quite does Murphy justice. Go with cine-foodie.

But then Murphy is omnivorous. Here is a guy who sat in some auditorium or other every day for 12 grueling months, exposed to the whole range of movies (except for Bollywood musicals — how could he have missed that delirious treat?), from pretty good down to awful, in one of the lamest years in cinema history. And at the end he could still say: "The cinema is a miracle. Great drama, humor, sound, and spectacle, image and motion, all malleable, all portable, seen in a crowd, the world shown to the world, our modern circus, our timeless stage."

Anyone who can locate the wonder in movies after a year of watching them professionally deserves a pass on "Cinema Paradiso." If MST3K taught us anything, besides how to feel educated while laughing at stupid things, it's that one man's cheesy movie is another man's Saint Andre. What's "MASH" to "Mary" may be "Their Purple Moment" to Kevin. The important thing is to find someone, or something, to love. That's an odyssey worth taking.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on the year that Mystery Science Theater's Kevin Murphy's spent as a professional movie masochist