Often times you’ll see a film and someone (possibly yourself) will ask you what you thought of it. For many, myself included, that can be a pretty difficult question. Even if you have some sort of feeling about the film, it’s often hard to turn that into a defensible opinion. Before you begin to try and understand a film, you have to answer for yourself: was it any good?
Sometimes it’s easy: The 400 Blows (1959, dir. Francois Truffaut) is good–you may not know or care to know why, but it’s pretty obvious that the film is good. The Life of David Gale (2003, dir. Alan Foster) is bad; very bad. Once again, though you may not want to know how bad it is (indeed the breadth and depth of its badness are quite disturbing) but it’s pretty obviously bad. But then you have all those other films. Films like Slumdog Millionaire
I found a partial answer for this, more or less on the spot, when I had to give an intelligent response to the new remake of Yoji Yamada’s Yellow Handkerchief (1977). I must confess that I have not seen the original and probably would not have seen the remake had I not been invited to a special screening of it. Yellow Handkerchief (2007, dir. Udayan Prasad) was exactly that sort of in-the-middle movie. It’s a sentimental but elegant story of a convict being released from prison and looking for his pre-prison wife. She is to signal that she wants him back by displaying a yellow handkerchief on the post by their old house. On his way he meets some misguided teenagers and together they travel through the countryside towards the film’s predictable, though well executed, climax. The film is proficiently constructed, the cinematography is appropriate, the acting believable (if not outstanding) and the various ingredients well mixed to pave the way for the climactic end. Everyone in the theater cried (myself included) and we went home.
The test that I developed in response to this film was as follows. A good estimate of a film’s quality can be assessed by when the emotional climax takes place. In Yellow Handkerchief, it was exactly at the end. It kept our interest until that point but when it ended it ended. The truly great films, on the other hand, continue to grow long after the lights in the theater go on.
Anyone who doesn’t believe that the emotional climax of a film can come long after the film ends simply has not watched enough good films. Batman: The Dark Knight
This test isn’t objective–Kurosawa’s Red Beard(1965) and Ikiru(1951) affected me for a very long time when I first saw them but no doubt they would affect me for far less time were I to see them again today. It isn’t wholly original either. Rather, it stitches together at least two time-honored principles: a great movie should not leave you when the lights come back on and a bad movie won’t keep your attention until the end. This test further fails in that it maligns the ability of a film to merely maintain its power. Plenty of excellent films build some sort of structure within the film that merely continues to exist in the viewers mind long after the film ends.
But next time you see a film, think about it. If you suspect the film may have been of exceptionally high caliber, wait a few days. And see if it waxes or wanes.
May 24, 2009 at 12:41 am
interesting test. i find that your idea actually empowers the problem more than it solves it, which is great.
you’ve mentioned dark knight.. any chance for a review soon?
May 24, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I think the test can only work for people who like movies as something more of a fun pastime. I have trouble remembering any movie that I kept thinking about for over than a few hours. Maybe it’s because I think of it a waste of time. For me, the movie experience usually ends when the credits start rolling.
How awful is it to write something like that on a blog intended for movie fanatics?
May 24, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Well, keep reading and we’ll see if we can’t convert you…
June 5, 2009 at 11:38 am
Well, I’m not sure that a film that keeps your mind after the watching is a good one. I think that any movie that is blurred enough, or leaves the plot open can make your thinking stuck with it.
June 5, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Dear Benjamin, There is an important distinction that I made and then played down (I think that’s called bad writing
): Namely, that this test is looking for a phenomenom of growing impact of the film. Not just that you think about the film afterward but that its effect continues to grow for some time.
But I would disagree with you, at least in part, about sticking in your mind not being at least a small sign of goodness. Just staying in your mind is a less demanding test, for sure. But think of the converse, you’ll often see a film that is blurred, has an open ending or what have you but that you just don’t care about after it ends. In order to get you to keep thinking about the film, it has to come to life, there has to be something more than just a lack of clarity.
I think, though, that you are making an important point (one that inevitably comes up with early Dylan). Is a lack of clarity synonymous with quality? It sounds obvious that the answer is no when you ask it like, to be sure. And we could easily bring examples of cases where artists (or worse, thinkers) have been heralded as visionaries for doing little more than muddying up the waters. But what if the lack of clarity itself is an expression of the fundamental lack of clarity in the world at large? Indeed, a common hallmark of bad art is that it explains everything, that it turns a rich and fundamentally mysterious world into a paper-thin facade of dramatic rationality. I think that this subject is rich and universal enough to deserve a full tidbit in the future. Thanks for bringing it up!
December 18, 2009 at 6:31 pm
wow! Dancing on thin ice on this one. I happen to agree with you, but i’m an Art totalitarian too!
ps what did u think of QT’s, “Inglorious Bastards”? have you seen the Italian original? I haven’t.
Despite the QT’s version’s amusing wish-fulfillment angle & it’s back-handed deconstruction of the war action genre, i’d call it so-so.
I did like the opening farmhouse scene very much though.