Utterly Offensive: Gran Torino

Gook. Zipperhead. Dragon lady. These are among the many – and I mean many – slurs that pop up in Gran Torino with the frequency that Asians eat dogs (another Gran Torino slur). They are delivered almost exclusively by Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski, who is one of the last Caucasians still living in a modest Michigan neighborhood that, as Walt might say it, has become overrun by the Hmong. A war veteran with a silver star locked away in his basement, Walt is a proud American with a not so proud past. He’s haunted by his memories of fighting in Korea, and in the faces of his neighbors he sees the dead Korean soldiers that he and his compatriots “stacked like sandbags.” Safe to say, Walt hates his neighbors for not being white. Then again, with his wife now dead, Walt hates just about everyone, including his kids and grandkids.

As Gran Torino begins, Walt is prepared to live out his final years in his perfectly tidy house, behind his perfectly swept front porch and his perfectly manicured lawn, with nothing but his hatred of others and his adeptness with racial slurs to entertain him. Over the course of the film, through an accidental bond with the Hmong kids next door, Walt’s xenophobia will subside, but his penchant for slurs will not. And so when I tell you that Gran Torino is one of the most offensive films this year, I’m of course referring to the saltiness of its dialogue. But only in part. Because as odious and indefensible as Walt’s vernacular is on its own, the most repulsive thing about Gran Torino is its structure, which is thin, repetitive, amateurish and, oh yeah, entirely hypocritical.

Let’s start with the last part first. Gran Torino, based on a screenplay by Nick Schenk, would have you believe that it preaches against racism and treats its minority subjects honorably, but that’s only half right. Yes, through Walt, xenophobia is portrayed as a dead-end existence. Yes, Walt learns, after spending about 30 minutes at his neighbors’ home, that “I have more in common with these gooks than with my own family.” But in the meantime Gran Torino teaches us some other things. It teaches us that slurs are okay, even if you mean them, so long as you’re charming. It teaches us that the Hmong might be good people, but that if they want to get anything done (fix appliances, clean up a yard, end a gang war) they need whitey to help. And it teaches us that Clint Eastwood can get away with bloody well anything.

The honorability of Eastwood the man is hard at work in Gran Torino. We want to like Walt because it’s impossible to dislike Clint. And so when Walt goes into one of his slur-filled rants, which is pretty much the entire film, it’s frighteningly tempting to give him a pass. Because the truth is that before we see Walt, we see Clint – the gentle sparkle in his eyes shining through that trademark squint. We know that Eastwood – whose Letters From Iwo Jima is one of the most respectful depictions of Asians, or of any wartime enemy, to ever come out of Hollywood – isn’t racist, and that takes some of the bite out of Walt’s bark. So does the fact that Walt’s bark is almost never the same. “Gook” and “zipperhead” are favorite terms, but Walt uses at least two dozen slurs in all. At one point, he pops off about five different Asian slurs in 10 seconds. After a while, it starts to feel as if Walt isn’t hateful so much as clever.

Or maybe he’s just colorful. Perhaps Walt uses “gook” the way a Martin Scorsese character would use the word “fuck.” Because “this is the way guys talk.” That’s what Walt says. And to make sure we don’t think Walt is one sick anti-Asian bigot, Gran Torino gives him a few scenes at the barbershop where the “Polack” Walt trades white-guy jabs with his son of a bitch “Wop” barber, played by John Carroll Lynch. The free-flowing exchange of racial epithets creates such a festival of good cheer that eventually Walt brings the impressionable Thao (Bee Vang) along for an education. Because Walt isn’t racist, understand. He’s just old-school. That’s why it’s a shame that Walt is a widower, because otherwise Thao’s next lesson could have been in wife-beating – that’s what guys do, right? Please. The real joke here is any suggestion whatsoever that Walt’s behavior is acceptable because his Hmong neighbors don’t take him seriously, or because he and his barber engage in name-calling as sport.

If this reading of Gran Torino seems too uptight for you, do me a favor: Imagine the same movie, except replace the Hmong neighbors with African-Americans. Now, instead of Walt chuckling while telling his Asian neighbors not to eat his dog, imagine him telling his black neighbors to take a break from eating fried chicken to bojangle for him. Or maybe Walt could refer to them as slave-ship cargo. Or maybe he could just call them “niggers” over and over. Would that be charming? How about this: Instead of being of Polish descent, let’s make Walt a German. His neighbors don’t have to be people of color, they can be Jews. And now Walt can grin while inviting his neighbors over to his place to take a shower. Are you laughing yet? I’m not.

See, the fact that there’s no long ugly history of unrest between whites and Hmong in this country doesn’t make Walt’s behavior good comedy. It makes it good comedy for now – until someone learns from it, emulates it and eventually creates the uncomfortable context that should already be obvious. Gran Torino doesn’t mean to be offensive, nor do the people who laugh at it. When I saw the movie in downtown Washington, DC, in a theater with a racially diverse audience, many howled at the film. But none of them, far as I could tell, was Hmong. It’s always easier to laugh when someone else takes the brunt. And the truth is that with a different cast of racial minorities, or with a different star at its center, Gran Torino would likely inspire picket lines.

But moral and sociological issues aside, Gran Torino is still a film to protest. Because movie fans should be appalled at dialogue that’s more on-the-nose than anything M Night Shyamalan or Paul Haggis has written. We should be annoyed that Sue (Ahney Her) is forced to explain her Hmong culture like she’s reading from Wikipedia. We should be outraged with the way the racially-charged climate of the neighborhood looks as if it was modeled off an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210. We should be upset that an experienced filmmaker like Eastwood couldn’t give better direction to Vang, who spends the whole film slump-shouldered, working so hard to be pathetic. We should be disappointed with the triteness of it all, with the way so many scenes feel like a 1980s “Just Say No” commercial. And then we should be honest enough to admit that if this movie were directed by and starring Mel Gibson, it would play a whole lot differently.

Nine Resolutions for Oh-Nine

As tagged by Fox of Tractor Facts, continuing the meme created at DVD Panache, here are nine movie-related resolutions for 2009:

(In no specific order.)

1. Quit teasing people and write at least one post about or related to Steve McQueen, for crying out loud.

2. Be more dedicated about watching items in my Netflix queue. (Finally seeing Raising Arizona in 2008 was fine and good, but I’m not sure it was worth the $30 or so that I paid to have that little red envelope sit untouched for months.)

3. Be more dedicated about watching DVDs from my own collection, which would happen more often if I could learn to stop worrying and not be so anal about needing to watch movies uninterrupted from start to finish. (Like most people, there are dozens of movies that I’ve seen dozens of times that I let play in the background as I’m doing things around the apartment. But if I purchase a movie after seeing it only once in the theater, I have a nasty habit of wanting that precious second-ever viewing to be entirely disruption-free. Which would explain, for example, why I still haven’t watched There Will Be Blood, despite excitedly buying the DVD within a week of its release.)

4. Find another movie poster that through a combination of its graphic artistry and subject matter is worthy of being professionally matted and framed for display alongside my current collection, which includes The Thin Red Line, The New World, Bullitt, The Great Escape, Amelie … Wait a minute. Maybe my resolution should be to find more wall space.

5. At least investigate the technology purchases that would be required in order for me to be able to create some video-based analyses and celebrations here at The Cooler from time to time. I’ve been writing about movies for more than a decade now. I need to write. Always will. But I’m interested in exploring new forms of criticism, too.

6. Let this be the year that I come to the terms with the fact that this actor ...

and this actor ...

are actually the same person.

7. Find one new-to-me engaging voice on film from around the blogosphere each month, and continue use the “Sharin’ the Love” feature to highlight interesting reads, so that there’s always something new to read at The Cooler (even when I don’t have a new post), and so that others can discover new, engaging voices, too. (On that note, I’d like to give a plug to FilmDr, who this week has provided some very entertaining dispatches from the frontlines of his two-week video production class for high schoolers. Check it out.)

8. Somehow come to terms with the fact that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do as much reading (not skimming, reading) and commenting at other blogs as I’d like. Alas, I’m going to miss some great commentary. I need to be OK with that.

9. Seize the opportunity created by a thriving newspaper industry and a booming economy to quit my day job and begin a long, lucrative career writing about film. (OK, so it’s eight resolutions and one Dumbo-esque hallucination.)

Happy 2009, everybody! What are your movie-related resolutions?

Bigger Screen, Smaller Suspense: Frost/Nixon

Ron Howard’s best film, Apollo 13, is a reminder that suspense isn’t beholden to surprise. Prior to seeing the film upon its release in 1995, I was familiar enough with the real-life details of the titular 1970 Moon mission gone awry to know that the movie would end more or less happily, but I’ll be damned if that blunted the impact. And so it’s been ever since. No matter how many times I watch Apollo 13 – and it’s probably been a half-dozen by now – it never fails to hook me: the gut-wrenching radio silence that marks the spacecraft’s reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere seems to grow longer and more perilous upon each viewing. How exactly Howard achieves this magical effect, I’m still not quite sure, but I do know that the voodoo of Apollo 13 is sorely lacking in Howard’s latest picture, Frost/Nixon.

Whereas Apollo 13 transcends history, Frost/Nixon is undone by it. Written by Peter Morgan, based on his own stage play, Frost/Nixon requires its audience to be both educated and unaware. For the film to have its most profound impact, the audience must be fully familiar with the contempt many Americans held for Richard M Nixon by the end of his presidency, while remaining ignorant of the places David Frost took Nixon in their famous interview turned quasi-confessional of 1977. Without this balance, Frost/Nixon can entertain, certainly, but it would be difficult for it to enthrall. By moving from stage to screen, Frost/Nixon must play by different rules, the most significant of which is that its dramatization must be more compelling than the real-life footage. And in this respect, Howard’s film comes up just short.

The chief error of Frost/Nixon is that its principle drama hangs on the proceedings of the interviews themselves, which in this day and age are just a YouTube visit or a DVD rental away. Expectedly, the screenplay looks to broaden the story by giving us the behind-the-scenes tale of Frost’s Herculean efforts just to make the interviews happen. But the unfortunate side-effect is that Frost/Nixon is rendered a personal battle between interviewer and subject, thus undermining the notion that their battle royale was in fact something more: America vs. Nixon. This would all be fine and good if the movie cast Frost in the role of Rocky Balboa. But when Frost should be doing the interviewer’s equivalent of punching slabs of meat with the determination of the underdog, he’s instead seen gallivanting about with the overconfidence of Apollo Creed. The obviously manufactured device in which Frost rallies at the 11th hour to knuckle down and do his homework doesn’t provide the adrenaline rush that’s intended. Instead it inspires the question: What took him so long?

With Frost seemingly disinterested, the stakes of Howard’s drama are made small – unless, of course, you know your history and understand how enormous the stakes really were. Of course, if you know that, you most likely also know how the Frost-Nixon interview went down. There’s the rub. Michael Sheen and Frank Langella reprise their stage roles and bring vibrancy to their respective portrayals of the interviewer and the stonewaller, but the cinematic format is working against them. On stage, the audience feeds on the visceral sensation of being there, while also getting to self-edit the action by determining where to place one’s focus. (When the questions get tough, do you watch the prosecutor or the defendant?) But in film form, Frost/Nixon’s dramatizations of the interviews provide no change in the viewing experience from the readily available archival footage, making comparisons inevitable. Why study the sweaty face of Langella’s Nixon as he buckles under pressure when one could just as easily watch the real thing?

Though not as confined as Doubt, Frost/Nixon suffers similar problems in its liberation (or lack thereof) from the stage. The primary disappointment is that Howard finds no way to illustrate America’s discontentment with Nixon other than filtering it through the remarks of a single character, Sam Rockwell’s James Reston Jr, one of Frost’s researchers. Even worse, most of the anti-Nixon sentiment is delivered via lazy talking-head interviews – not with the real Reston, let’s be clear, but with Rockwell’s Reston. It’s a violation of the show-don’t-tell rule of screenwriting to the nth degree, and Howard’s adaptation is dominated by the device. Likewise, the only way Howard finds to portray the shifting position of advantage in the Frost-Nixon interview is to cut to melodramatic reaction shots from members of each man’s support team – groans when points are lost, nods of approval when points are won.

Howard is a better director than this, but he very rarely shows it here. His best decision is to shoot much of the non-interview footage at Nixon’s actual ocean-view estate in San Clemente, California. In numerous exterior shots, Nixon is the sole obstacle between the audience and the Pacific, illustrating just how far the president has gone from his preferred place on the East Coast, in the middle of it all, in the action. His shame-inspired exile took him literally to the end of the earth, where he gazes into the nothingness, wondering where everything went. These shots, more than any concoction of the screenplay, best demonstrate how Nixon arrived at his interview with Frost knowing that he’d have to overcome his pride and assume some sort of repentant position if he was ever to rejoin society.

Along those lines, Frost/Nixon paints a mostly sympathetic picture of Nixon while still confronting some of his less attractive qualities, including a fabricated drunk-dial of Frost’s hotel room. Morgan and Howard suggest that Nixon was ready to suffer a knockout blow from Frost, but that he wanted to go down to a heavyweight’s hook and perhaps antagonized his interviewer until the softball-tosser (more Larry King than Mike Wallace) rose to the occasion. It’s an interesting interpretation, but it takes a backseat to the excitement of the interviews themselves. Which makes it all the more curious that Howard fails to capitalize on the broadcast’s allure: According to Reston, Frost’s victory wasn’t obvious until he watched the footage on TV and realized that the close-up provided an even deeper confession than Nixon ever managed in words. How strange it is then that rather than reserving his close-ups for Nixon’s reaction shots, Howard frames the majority of his film so tightly that I often felt like I was sitting in the front row. Frost/Nixon may put us close to the entertainment, but we’re farther away from the historical drama.

Staged Drama: Doubt

The role of the cold, intimidating Sister Aloysius Beauvier, who if she worshipped fashion instead of God might have been the villain of The Devil Wears Prada, went to Meryl Streep. The role of the twinkly and naive Sister James, who is a mere pregnancy away from starring in Junebug, went to Amy Adams. For the role of the potentially pedophilic, or maybe just misunderstood, Father Flynn, a call went out to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won his Oscar playing the equally loved and loathed Truman Capote. And so when it came time to select a director for Doubt, the film adaptation of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize winning stage drama, the pragmatic producers picked none other than Shanley himself, presumably on the hunch that practice makes perfect.

The bad news is, it doesn't. Doubt might be one of the finest acted films of 2008, but it’s undone by a mediocre directorial effort that suggests Shanley doesn’t fully appreciate the differences between stage and screen. Here’s a case of a director knowing his material too well, and in all the wrong ways. On stage, the enigmatic tug-of-war between Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn thrives on the shadowy distance between the actors and the audience. On screen, however, that sense of mystery is obliterated. Here, Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn are less ambiguous than they are contradictory: Their dialogue suggests one thing, their expressions suggest something else. The result isn’t doubt or even vagueness. Instead it’s the sense that this two-way interrogation is in fact nothing more than a game, an exercise among the captains of the debate team.

The crux of the problem is the camera that never lies. Oh, sure, it misleads. Films ranging from The Conversation to The Sixth Sense have cashed in on the deceptive nature of the straightforward image. But as an audience we are defaulted to assign meaning to everything that we see, and Doubt reveals too much too plainly. To look into Father Flynn’s eyes – something the stage doesn’t allow – is to have an opinion that renders his testimony moot. That makes Doubt, which in stage form was called Doubt, A Parable, a primer on the power of the close-up that aligns Shanley’s film more closely with Frost/Nixon than A Few Good Men, to name two other stage-to-screen adaptations. Just like Richard Nixon’s facial expressions provided the full confession he never quite articulated to interviewer David Frost, Father Flynn’s countenance reveals that there isn’t much mysterious about Doubt after all.

It’s not for lack of effort. Within this drawn-out affair, the framework of what I’m sure was a knockout play is evident. Early in the film, for example, Shanley toys with our preconceptions about sexually predatory priests, giving us a moment alone between Father Flynn and Donald (Joseph Foster) when the priest gives the altar boy a gift. Later, Shanley gives us a moment in the gym when Father Flynn gives basketball instructions to knobby-kneed boys in shorts who in his presence manage to seem half undressed. In those scenes, we rush to the same judgment of Sister Aloysius, because, like her, we’ve seen things. The cloud of the Catholic Church’s abuse scandals hovers ominously above the screen, and so we sit expectant of the moment when Father Flynn will touch one of the boys improperly. When such a moment never comes, we’re left with only our suspicions. And so later, when Sister Aloysius makes an extremely serious allegation based on equally flimsy evidence, Shanley’s drama makes us allies in her witch hunt, because her gut feeling is ours too.

In that moment, we’re hooked. But then things fall apart. Streep brings appropriate heft to her part – though if you want to see a chilling nun, check out Geraldine McEwan in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters – but Hoffman’s dance isn’t with Father Flynn’s accuser but with the doubt the film’s title demands. In his fiery confrontation with Sister Aloysius, Flynn acts neither like a criminal caught in the act nor like someone wrongfully accused. (Mild spoiler warning: There is perhaps a third option, that Flynn was guilty in the past but not in this case. Nonetheless …) The result is that Doubt’s big dramatic moments feel like just that: drama. When Streep rips the crucifix from around her neck, the gesture is as unnecessarily oversized as Shanley’s all-too-numerous (and gag-me silly) God-in-the-weather metaphors. And thus Doubt reduces itself to a stage play, stuck under glass, caught on film.

It’s as if Shanley, whose only other movie is Joe Versus The Volcano, couldn’t think beyond the walls of his de facto courtroom drama. The director’s attempts to make his film cinematic range from the lazy (tilting his camera to suggest moral tumult) to the curious (cutting away from Father Flynn’s parable on lies for an unnecessary feathers-to-the-wind reenactment). Viola Davis, as Donald’s mother, briefly liberates Doubt from its drab little cage in a walk-and-talk outside St. Nicholas school in which Sister Aloysius voices her suspicions about Father Flynn. But even that scene manages to make Doubt’s dramatic landscape diminish, as the unexpected response of Mrs. Miller presents the audience with a moral dilemma more challenging than the one surrounding Father Flynn. And thus the main event seems almost superfluous.

That doesn’t mean it’s a drag, necessarily. Movies like Doubt, with their multiple opportunities for highlight-reel grandstanding, are built for awards season, and it’s frequently enjoyable to watch Streep, Adams and Hoffman trade punches like heavyweights. (Streep, it won’t surprise you, has a thick accent to match the 1964 Bronx setting; of course, that raises the question of why no one else is so afflicted.) Still, it’s startling – and disappointing – to reach the end of the exercise and feel that Shanley has put numerous weighty issues on the table without forcing us to bite into any of them. This film’s form of doubt doesn’t gnaw at us, it removes us. And so no matter the intent, the lesson to be learned from Shanley’s adaptation isn’t one of ethics, religion or morality. It’s one of entertainment: When it comes to doubt, creating it and dramatizing it are two different things.

Bests of 2008

Happy New Year, everybody. As I work to catch up on film viewing and writing after the holiday break (while also trying to finally kick this energy-sapping bug I’ve been carrying around for a week), here’s a look back at the 2008 year in film, based on what I’ve seen so far.

Best Face: Freida Pinto as the eldest Latika in Slumdog Millionaire

Best Blue-Balls-Face: Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) in Twilight

Best Reason to Avoid HGH: Sylvester Stallone in Rambo

Best Reason to Avoid Botox: Mia Farrow in Be Kind Rewind

Best Beard: Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) in Iron Man

Best Ponytail: Barry (Steve Martin) in Baby Mama

Best Ponytail Reference: JCVD (Jean-Claude Van Damme) on Steven Seagal in JCVD

Best Use Of Dessert As Sex Metaphor: My Blueberry Nights

Best Example Of How George Lucas Has Hurt Cinema As Much As Helped It: Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

Best Performance By Someone You’ve Never Heard Of And Might Never See Again: Catinca Untaru as Alexandria in The Fall

Best Reason To Never Want To See Renee Zellweger Again: Appaloosa

Best Argument In Favor Of Adding Real-Life Cattle To The Screen Actors Guild: Australia

Best Boob Flashing By An Actress In Her Sixties: Charlotte Rampling in Deception

Best Boobs: Penelope Cruz in Elegy

Best Boob: Josh Brolin’s George W Bush in W.

Best Impression Of A Jason Bourne Movie: Quantum Of Solace

Best Pronunciation Of A Word: “Memoirs” (“Mem-wahhs”) by Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) in Burn After Reading

Best Swearing: Harry Waters (Ralph Fiennes) in In Bruges

Best Rambo(w) : Son Of Rambow

Best Stuntwork By Cell Phones (That’s Not A Compliment) : Sex And The City

Best Performance By A Whistle: Milk

Best Use Of A Windshield: Pineapple Express

Best Reason To Never, Ever Let M Night Shyamalan Write So Much As A Christmas Card: The Happening

Best Totally Pointless Jump Over A Metal Barrel: Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) in Tropic Thunder

Best Employment Of A Sound Effect: The recognizable computer-powering-up tone in WALL-E

Best Evidence That Norman Bates Didn’t Have Such A Bad Mother After All: Barbara Baekeland (Julianne Moore) in Savage Grace

Best For-The-Greater-Good Defense Of The Policies/Tactics Of The George W Bush Administration: The Dark Knight

Best Covert Operation In A Documentary: Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center tightrope walk in Man On Wire

Best Covert Operation In A Comedy: The basement project of Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) in Burn After Reading

Best Role If You’re Not Good At Memorization: Christine “He’s not my son” Collins (Angelina Jolie) in Changeling

Best Evidence That Kathy Griffin Might Not Be The Most Obnoxious Person Ever: Poppy (Sally Hawkins) in Happy-Go-Lucky

Best Use Of A Neil Young Song: “Unknown Legend” as sung by Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) in Rachel Getting Married

Best Use Of A U2 Song: “With Or Without You” in Tell No One

Best Use Of A Song: “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” in WALL-E

Best Use Of A Song To Drive An Audience Insane: “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” in Australia

Best Sign That Some People Take Movies WAY Too Seriously: The comments section at Keith Uhlich’s review of The Dark Knight at The House Next Door.

So, what did I miss? Any “bests” you’d like to add?

At The Movies

Watching WALL-E in Blu-ray on a 42-inch HDTV is enough to make me consider giving up seeing movies at the theater. But only momentarily. Sure, the modern home-theater experience provides a lavishness of detail that goes beyond the local multiplex, but there’s still something to be cherished from the communal experience of the theater. Comedies are made funnier by laughter, thrillers are made scarier by screams, adventures are made more exhilarating by cheers and dramas, almost invariably, are intensified by silence. Had I waited to see WALL-E on DVD, I suppose I might have been even more wonderstruck at the apocalyptic beauty of that little trash-compacting robot’s dusty tread-prints. But in the process I would have missed out on the thrill of feeling a packed theater struck still with angst over the fate of the main character.

That brings me here: We often pretend that the movie-going experience is universal, but the truth is otherwise. The first 2008 movie I attended was Rambo on a Sunday at 10 am – the movie, day and time selected precisely because I was curious to see what kind of person goes to see Rambo on a Sunday at 10 am. The answer, it turned out, was this kind of person; I was the only one in the theater. Had I seen Rambo amidst a packed opening-night crowd, I doubt that Sylvester Stallone’s ignominious victory lap (what do you call an encore that no one wanted?) would have been elevated to high art. But it might have been made rousing thanks to a chorus of cheers or jeers. Instead, playing merely for little old me, the movie seemed as unnaturally large and limp as Stallone’s HGH-mangled face. Believe me: unless you saw Rambo on the big screen in a theater populated only by you, we didn’t see the same movie.

I mention this today because of James Joseph Cialella, the 29-year-old Philadelphia man reported to have shot a fellow moviegoer for talking during a Christmas Day showing of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. I hope I needn’t make it clear that Cialella’s actions are indefensible at least, and possibly also genuinely deranged. But I’d be lying if I said that the headline “Man shoots talker at movies” didn’t tickle me. Year after year, audience misbehavior and inconsiderateness seems to increase so that now I almost exclusively attend movies at times unlikely to draw a crowd. Most often, the strategy works. The downside is that in a sparsely attended screening, it only takes one asshole to ruin the entire experience, and there are fewer people in the audience to hush the person into respectfulness. Alas, some people seem to confuse an empty seat next to them with a sound barrier.

Before I go on sounding all uptight, I should mention that two of my all-time favorite movie-going experiences involved college-town audiences that were positively raucous. In 1995, it was seeing Four Rooms and feeling the audience’s initial fidgety boredom shift into full-throated cheers by the end – a heroic effort by an audience that was determined to be entertained. In 1997, it was seeing Scream 2 at a free on-campus screening during finals week and hearing cheers of approval over the opening scene (two friends heading to see a scary movie, with one of them complaining that he’s supposed to be home studying), which inspired participatory yelling the rest of the way (“Don’t go upstairs!”). In these instances, the crowd got so loud that I often couldn’t hear myself laughing, never mind the movie. But that was the point.

Other times, not so much. There’s no reason anyone should ever get shot at the movies, sure. But there’s also no reason anyone should ever talk on the phone, even if it’s to answer a phone that should have been turned off in the first place by saying: “I can’t talk! I’m at a movie!” There’s no reason anyone should ever send or read a text message. There’s no reason anyone should ever tear open a box of candy during the opening credits when there have been 30 minutes of noisy ads and trailers beforehand. There’s no reason why anyone who misses one line of dialogue should cause his or her neighbors to miss five lines more by loudly asking: “What did he say?” There’s no reason why anyone should attempt to show off by announcing who the killer is five seconds before the detective is about to tell us (guess what: we all figured it out 10 minutes ago … shut up!). There’s no reason why anyone seeing a classic movie at a revival house should recite the dialogue along with the main character. And if any of these things happen, there’s no reason I should have to tell you to shut up once. And there’s certainly no reason I should have to tell you to shut up twice.

Poor movie behavior is sometimes as memorable as the film itself. I still haven’t forgotten the dolts behind me at Forrest Gump who talked through the movie as if it required footnotes (“It’s the Watergate break-in!” “Those are the letters from Jenny!”). Nor have I forgotten the disruption caused by a woman at Schindler’s List who got up from her middle-of-the-row seat halfway through the film to go get her popcorn bucket filled. If a Holocaust movie can’t make you lose your appetite, what can? Then again, Schindler’s List also provided me with my most cherished movie-going moment: watching perfect strangers hug one another after the credits. Over the years, I’ve sat with countless audiences that have been reduced to tears, but that’s the one and only time I’ve seen a movie inspire immediate acts of compassion. It was touching.

I know all movie-going experiences can’t be special. (This year my favorite, beyond the aforementioned WALL-E, was the supercharged atmosphere of two opening-weekend showings of The Dark Knight.) But I’d settle for uneventful. So if you’re an obnoxious movie-goer, please stop. And if you’re not sure whether you’re an obnoxious movie-goer, consider what The Office creator Ricky Gervais said about Michael Scott, the tragically self-unaware boss played by Steve Carell: “Everyone has known a Michael Scott. If you haven’t known a Michael Scott, it means you are Michael Scott.” Indeed.

Put in movie-going terms: If you’ve been to the movies lately and haven’t been entirely appalled at the behavior of someone nearby, you might very well be part of the problem. Or else you’re just far more patient than I am. And I think I’m pretty damn patient. Still, it’s probably a good idea that I don’t start carrying a gun, for everyone’s sake.

Best Movie Posters of 2008