Around the turn of the millennium I posted a list of my favorite movies; not long thereafter, I started up the Calendar section of my site, which was initially supposed to collect anecdotes but quickly transformed into, above all else, a media log.  I rewatched a few of the movies on my late-’99 list and wrote them up, but in the mid-2010s I found that there were still twenty-eight that I hadn’t seen since the years started with a one.  So, sixteen years to the day after my first movie writeup, I launched my twentieth century series to fill those gaps.  I completed it in July of this year.  Almost none of those movies stayed in my personal panthe­on.  So that got me thinking about the movies I had written up, and declared pantheon-level, in the early days of my Calendar page.  Did the scores I’d given in my twenties still reflect my opinions now that I’m in my fifties?  To find out, I’m starting up a new series, in which I revisit the movies I have given a score of fourteen or above and see what I’d give them today…

Jim Schutze, “Zachary Long”, Roger Pullis, and Larry Clark, 2001

Part of what prompted these revisitations was looking at my pantheon of favorite movies, which had been whittled down from fifty at the turn of the millennium to only twenty-five at the conclusion of the twentieth century series⁠—now twenty-six, with the subsequent addition of The Kid Detective⁠—and wondering, “Hunh, does Bully really belong in this company? I should watch that one again!”  So now I have.  And as the credits rolled, I was mystified.  I wouldn’t call it bad, but it was nowhere near pantheon level.  And then, mid­way through the first draft of this writeup, I figured it out.

Some background: Bully is a true crime story, apparently faithful to the facts of the real case in virtually every detail, about the murder of twenty-year-old Bobby Kent in Broward County, Flori­da.  Kent had been regularly beating up his supposed best friend, Marty Puccio, since the third grade, and had in recent years add­ed sexual exploitation to the mix, as Kent was an aspiring pro­ducer of gay porn.  Puccio stabbed Kent repeatedly and was sen­tenced to die in Florida’s electric chair, though his sentence was later reduced to life in prison.  Others convicted of various roles in the murder were:

• Lisa Connelly, Marty Puccio’s girlfriend; she was already upset at the way Kent treated Puccio, but after Kent raped her, she decided to murder him, and was the prime mover behind the scheme

• Ali Willis, Connelly’s friend, whom Kent also raped

• Donny Semenec, Willis’s boyfriend

• Heather Swallers, Willis’s friend

• Derek Dzvirko, Connelly’s cousin

• Derek Kaufman, a local self-proclaimed hitman

From what we see of these characters, their lives consist almost entirely of getting high and fucking, with breaks to drive around listening to rap music or to play video games.  Bully is actually the main movie I had in mind when I wrote Pattern 26, which states that movies shouldn’t be coy.  Critics accused the movie of being lurid, but if you’re trying to convey that your characters spend all their time getting high and fucking, well, you should probably show them getting high and fucking, no?  So we see their dead-end lives⁠—Marty Puccio is a high school dropout, Lisa Connelly works at a Pizza Hut, Ali Willis is already a single mom⁠—and we might think, well, sure, when you’re mired in pov­erty and can’t see a future for yourself, you might very well just chase short-term pleasure.  Except… these families are all fairly affluent!  This isn’t The Florida Project, whose characters lived in a seedy motel, one last stop on the way to homelessness.  This is an area where the standard life script is that you do well in school, get into a good college, find a fulfilling and lucrative job, and have kids of your own to raise in an even wealthier area.  Some of Lisa’s former classmates are probably taking the first steps along this journey at the very moment that she’s smoking weed and getting knocked up by an unemployed surfer.

And this sort of thing is what the book I was working on at the time was about!  That was the piece of the puzzle that finally clicked into place: when I watched this movie, I was still trying to make progress on my follow-up to Ready, Okay!, shortly before I abandoned it when it became clear that to get the whole thing down would take over a thousand pages.  The central characters of the first big chapter lived very much like those in Bully, and I wanted to explore what it was that life in an exurban gated com­munity was failing to offer them that left Star and Jacob on track to spend their adulthood working as a receipt checker at a Guitar Center and a clerk at a 7‑Eleven, respectively.  More broadly, it was meant to explore the notion of a social palimpsest, people living wildly disparate lives in the same space.  In the past I’ve talked about the way I went to a fairly small high school, with not even 1200 students, yet I couldn’t have put names to even a quarter of those faces⁠—but that’s not even what I mean this time.  I mean more that even within the same honors class, you’d have people chatting away and cracking jokes, waiting for the bell to ring, and yet some would go on to become attorneys and physicists and cardiologists, and others would drop out before graduating and live like Lisa and Marty for a few years.  We were on all sorts of different trajectories!  Notably, a guy who was on the debate team with me has spent over thirty years locked up for double murder and will die in prison.

So, consciously or not, I probably put Bully in my pantheon be­cause, at the time I first watched it, I had recently written about 150 pages in a not entirely dissimilar vein.  I still liked it more than I didn’t, but I think I’m going to have to cut that score in half.  Rescore: 16 ➞ 8

Rudolph Grey, Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski, and Tim Burton, 1994

No mystery why I had this one rated so high: the first thing I ever posted to the Internet, back in 1995, was Mystery Science Theater 3000 fanfic, and one of my favorite episodes of MST3K was the one that riffed Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster, the mak­ing of which is the central action of this biopic.  The conceit of the film is that, like many such stories, it is about an artist over­coming obstacles to get his singular vision in front of an audi­ence… with the twist that, in this case, the artist in question doesn’t actually have any talent and his films, which do come out just as he had envisioned, are invariably awful.  But the idea is not just to point and laugh.  Ed Wood is an attempt to redeem the ludicrous (Pattern 12), not by revamping the bad material or using it as a springboard for more sophisticated follow-ups the way that comic book writers do, but by providing context that makes the original work meaningful in a different way.  I wrote about this in my ’03 article: the reason Ed Wood was able to make the jump from staging plays for audiences of half a dozen to actually making feature films, albeit terrible ones that played for a week at a couple of drive-ins in Alabama, was his chance encounter with Bela Lugosi, which led to a close friendship.  The Lugosi we meet in Ed Wood is far removed from his Dracula days: he’s broke, decrepit, addicted to morphine, and basically just waiting to die, dwelling on his vanished fame.  Working with Wood rejuvenates him, and lines from Bride of the Monster like “Now here in this forsaken jungle hell I have proven that I am all right!”, that previously I had just rolled my eyes at, took on new depth because of what they meant to Bela.

But even in ’03, I acknowledged that the movie has some faults, chief among which is that the central character doesn’t land for me.  Johnny Depp’s performance struck me as just as mannered and hollow as it did twenty-one and thirty years ago⁠—and what really is there to perform?  I guess the main thing is that he’s a boundless optimist, to the point that he has no standards⁠—every take is “Perfect!”⁠—but I don’t know that the film has much to say about that, other than that maybe it’s one of the factors that gets Lugosi out of his funk.  There’s his love of monster movies, but that’s an interest, not a trait.  And there’s his transvestism, which was one of the selling points back in ’94 (“It’s about a cross-dressing director from the ’50s!”), and again, I don’t know that that really speaks to character as such.  I guess the idea, apart from the simple fact that it’s part of his biography, is that movies are experience delivery systems (Pattern 25), and much of the experience on offer here is the chance to be vicariously included in the family of misfits that Wood gathers around him, and his transvestism is what most makes Wood himself feel like an out­sider.  And it helps those previously familiar with Glen or Glenda reinterpret it as a Wood’s cri de coeur.  I wasn’t, so this part didn’t mean nearly as much to me as the Bride of the Monster material.

Which I guess brings me to the rescore.  I still think this movie is good, to be sure, but in 1994 I was still watching MST3K almost every night.  Now that I’m decades removed from the height of my MST3K fandom, this movie is not quite so relevant to my interests as it once was.  Rescore: 18 ➞ 13

Lars von Trier, 2003

Here’s one that, when I first wrote it up, I wasn’t sure I even liked.  In fact, I said that I didn’t foresee myself ever watching it again⁠—“Not anytime soon, anyway,” I wrote.  But if that article were a person, it could legally drink in the United States, so I think I have reached the threshold of not having watched it again anytime soon.  That box is hereby checked.  So what was this do­ing on my list of favorites if I didn’t really want to see it again?  The answer is that I was so blown away by the ending that I thought, whether I personally like it or not, I have to acknow­ledge this as one of the first great works of art of our shiny new century, so into the pantheon you go.  And as I headed into this rewatch, I wondered, how will I react to this movie when it’s lost the element of surprise?

spoilers start
       here

The big gimmick to this one had already been spoiled for me before I saw it the first time.  And that gimmick is that, while the film is notionally set in a small village in the Rocky Mountains during the Great Depression, the action actually unfolds on a big stage, about the size and color of an elementary school blacktop, with painted white lines representing the walls of houses much like the painted white lines on a blacktop set forth the handball and four square courts.  Labels such as “BEN’S GARAGE” and “THE OLD MINE” are stenciled onto the floor to indicate which rec­tangle is which, with one or two physical objects placed in each to serve as additional identifying tags: an organ in the church, a desk at the writer’s house.  People turn imaginary keys in imagi­nary locks to open imaginary doors, and we even hear the appro­priate sound effects, but as I said in the original article, the film takes advantage of the fact that we can see everything that’s happening at once, both inside and outside every structure in town, while the inhabitants can’t.

And what we see happening is more than a little disturbing.  This was the first Lars Von Trier movie I had ever seen, so I didn’t know that his calling card is trotting out a female protagonist and then torturing her for however long the film runs⁠—in this case, three hours that feel even longer.  The young woman at the heart of this movie, Grace, is on the run from some gangsters and the police they have in their pockets; when she passes through Dogville, the residents vote to shelter her if she can earn her keep.  At first this means helping the locals with their chores.  By the end she’s a literal slave with an iron collar around her neck, chained to a heavy weight, and spending her nights getting raped by every man in town.  In 2003, I took this as a sign of artistic bravery.  Wow, so uncompromising!  This guy’s pulling no punches in showing the evil that lurks within those who think themselves good!  I also saw this before any of the Quentin Tar­antino films that represented his turn to amygdalar cinema, so when Grace turns the tables on the residents of Dogville, slaugh­tering them all in an orgy of righteous revenge, it was like noth­ing I’d ever seen before⁠—like I mentioned in my ’03 article, I was shouting “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD” to an empty room.  But while Tarantino’s massacres seem intended to be cathartic, that in Dogville is clearly not⁠—call me naive, but I have to think that at least a few whoo-hoos from the Tarantino crowd may have been cut short when Grace has a baby machine-gunned onscreen in front of the baby’s mother.

But when it didn’t come as a shock, the ending just left me feel­ing sick and empty.  And so did Grace’s travails leading up to it.  This was a slog.  It doesn’t help that the dialogue and acting are so artificial, or that the set is so ugly⁠—daylight is represented by a harsh white glow along the horizon that had me taking back everything I’d ever said badmouthing the sun.  I can still tip the cap that I no longer wear to the idea behind the project⁠—again, it’s intended to be cerebral rather than somatic, and I’m con­vinced by the argument that Dogville should be interpreted as a meditation on ethics, and specifically, a rejection of New Testa­ment mercy in favor of Old Testament chastening.  But, I mean, the last twenty-one years have been hard, man.  I’ve had it better than most, but still, the whips and scorns of time add up.  And the next four years are likely to offer up more misery than the previous twenty-one put together.  So what at twenty-nine may have felt like a bracing artistic state­ment felt at fifty like little more than a beating.  Rescore: 16 ➞ 6

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