You don’t want to see movies: this is understandable. You have to drive to the theater; find parking, wait in line. The food is overpriced, and even the sweet stuff is too salty. The crowds are bad, tend to talk, or worst tell you to shut up if you’re talking (who on earth wants to hear what they’re saying in The Day The Earth Stood Still?).
As any of my friends will tell you, I am a very shallow person. I like my girls pretty, my chips nacho, and I don’t like it when my bands become popular. When R.E.M. became a superband, they were the same band, but they went from cool to uncool overnight. They redeemed themselves somewhat when VH1 aired their story behind the music, and I found out Bill Berry left the band to be a farmer, but even that was not enough.
Actually, he did have a pretty nice doggy.
Early on in Valkyrie, the filmmakers detail one of the many plots to kill Hitler, this one involving a bomb disguised as a case of Cointreau. There’s much sweaty fingers and machinations, and, naturally, the inevitable failure. It doesn’t take long for me to suggest out loud, as my namesake Scotty Evil might, “Um, it’s called a gun. They had a lot of them in World War II.” As the movie unfolds it becomes clear that the murder of Hitler not only requires an elaborate plot, but an extensive number of plotters. As I was growing increasingly frustrated (as yes, I’m aware it’s what actually happened, but it was also a movie), my friend Nathan, who would be much better at this job than I am, said, “What is he, Batman?”
You can never know what you’re getting when you sit down to see a movie, but this simple fact doesn’t mean that I can’t predict what an entire year of film will be like. If lazy screenwriters can rely on the cheap tricks that prophecy provides, so can I. Thus: the first film that I see sets the tone for the rest of the year. The darks days of January, the dumping ground for the crap the studios have no other place to put, are the entrails from which I divine the year. I am surprisingly successful with this technique. The jaw-dropping In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Seige Tale correctly predicted 2007, the best year in cinema since 1990 just as Cabin Boy presaged 1994, a year with Quiz Show, Pulp Fiction, Speed, Léon, Ed Wood, Heavenly Creatures, The Usual Suspects, and Cabin Boy.
Christmas, the time of presents (and some guy who got born or something), is also the time of early morning film outings. Christmas is one of my favorite times to see a film, since the roads are clear, and you feel a bit like you shouldn’t be there. I am not alone on this, since the holiday is the biggest movie day of the year, so feeling like you shouldn’t be there may be one of the biggest draws to seeing a movie in the first place. That, and avoiding the uncomfortable silence between presents and eating.
But how to choose from the plethora? I this time was faced with Benjamin Button (three hours long), Marley & Me (it takes 13 years for a family to love their doggie, and then it dies), and Valkyrie (The tagline of ‘Many saw evil. They dared to stop it’ having been changed from the much longer: ‘They went along with evil for ten years or so, and then, for their own selfish reasons, decided to make a half-hearted and incompetent attempt to stop it, only to fail and then die’. The shorter version fits better on a poster).
I went with the Nazi one. The Spirit.