Sometimes you bring more to a movie
than you intend to. Last night was one of those nights for me. The internet
told me that my local discount theater would be playing Mad Max, the
1979 original, on film. I was in. I love George Miller, I love Mad Max,
I love when movies are shown on film.
The theater is in a neighboring town,
Menasha, and it was a perfect night, 75 degrees, just a bit humid (so you know
its summer time), the sky was cloudless, and the moon was a perfect half and
bright. I drove with the windows down, my fingers drumming along on the door of
my car to The Reckoning, an album by Ethan Johns that I reviewed last
year and particularly enjoyed. And as I drove I thought, as I sometimes do, about
my brother. Maybe it was that I had spent some time playing with the neighbor
kids in the early evening, the way I used to play with my brother's kids, or
maybe it was that The Reckoning is about two a man trying to track down
his brother who has turned outlaw, I don't know. But I thought of my brother,
and how odd it is that we have been estranged for as long as we have, and how
there is not really an end to that estrangement in sight. How you can't just
undo some things, even if you want to, and how some words can take on a
material substance of their own once spoken so that they are as intractable and
implacable as the stone faces of the Dover cliffs which have turned back the
same sea through the full memory of our species.
The internet lied. There was no Mad
Max. There never had been. I thought about what an oddly targeted lie it
was. I was not in a big city. There couldn't have been more than five or ten
people within twenty miles of this theater who would be interested in seeing Mad
Max, on film, at 10pm. It was like they had specifically had me in mind. I
was...
So I checked what time the next show
playing was at the multiplex, and had just enough time to drive back across
town to catch a showing of Pixels, the new Adam Sandler movie directed
by Chris Columbus. Which was terrible, just so you know.
It's a movie about a certain kind of
white masculine crisis. Sandler plays Sam Brenner, a former arcade game
wunderkind, who washed out of the life he imagined for himself and now works as
a "nerd" installing video and sound equipment for a big box
electronics store. Early in the movie he explains that he has been cuckolded,
and in a moment of what passes for emotional honesty in the film tries to kiss
Michelle Monaghan, but gets shot down (he hasn't brushed his teeth, and also,
he is a loser). When aliens from outer space interpret images of video games
sent up in a space capsule as an act of overt aggression, and come prepared to
fight on the terms we stipulated, as if the images of the video games
constituted a challenge under some sort of galactic code duello, which I
guess would should teach us a lesson about what we beam into space, but
whatever. The larger point is that now, for the first time ever, Sam Brenner's
skill in old arcade games has a larger purpose. He has always been, as his best
friend (and President of the United States) Kevin James (which...huh?) points
out "meant for something bigger," and here it is.
If the film had just been called How
Sandler Got His Groove Back it would have been more accurate, though it
would then be besmirching the legacy of a better film. He realizes what he is
meant to do while blasting centipedes with an enormous light cannon which is
apparently designed to be aimed from the crotch like some priapic prosthetic,
while Sandler crows that this is "the best day of his life." I
believe him. The film is littered with the typical Sandler wisecracks, but they
fall totally flat, not even getting smiles from the other characters in the
world of the film. I was in a theater whose entire population consisted of me
and five bros on what looked like the saddest guy's night out ever. I didn't
hear one laugh in the theater, a poor sign. More than that, I am just not at
all sure that the sexual confidence of Adam Sandler is that important to the
movie-going public. One doesn't normally call out fare this light for its
failure to read the political moment (unless it is something as egregious as Let's
Be Cops), but frustrated white males trying to regain their power through
the recognition that their Donkey Kong skills were world class, seems
especially pathetic when put into contrast with how white males who fear for
their masculinity act out in real life.
The Sandler persona, such as it is, has
always reminded me of my brother. They have similar senses of humor, make
similar kinds of wisecracks, even sound the same (their voices bottoming out
into basso as they settled into their middle of life bodies), and maybe that is
why I left the movie feeling as melancholy as I did. The moon had dipped a
little during the two hours I was in the theater, and at this time of year, and
at this latitude, the moon skirts across the north western sky on its nightly
arc. It was still clear, but the brightness was gone, replaced with an orange
light that didn't seem to illuminate anything. Because I had finished The
Reckoning on my drive to the second theater, I put on a John Mulaney
stand-up album for the drive home. I needed something to cheer me up.
Rating: 1.5/4
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