Recently I have come into combat with bad films. After a string of articles dishing out the merits of films of a lesser importance, I decided to become a combatant against lousy cinema for a time. This did not mean delving into the stereotypical pool of "classics" that, as my Uncle would put it, "high-minded cineasts" would put forth. I went in to my own backlog of films I had never watched. Impulse buys, thefts, and gifts were all piled up, numbering at least fifty, and I needed to make a dent. So I pulled out a few, and watched.
I started with "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," a meditation on "snitching" amongst criminals, ranging from low to higher ranking. The film followed, arguably more than its title rat, a team of bank robbers, an amateur gun-runner aiming for the big time, and an old, low-level gun broker. The gun broker is the titular Eddie Coyle, who is looking at 3 to five up north (In New Hampshire, Coyle is located in Boston.) Eddie, and most of the film's other criminals, all have a relationship of information-trading with a cop, Foley, and it is this cop Coyle goes to in order to try and get his sentence reduced, for being friends with "Uncle." We meet and see more of Coyle's potential targets for giving up than Coyle himself. Coyle's problems are shown to us in single scenes; one scene at home with the wife and kids, a few with the small-time gun runner, a few with Foley, and a few with fellow rat Dillon, played by Peter Boyle. This makes viewers feel as though they know Coyle intimately, we know him well with only a few scenes. The film is fun to watch, understated in story, with very good visuals. It is a rewarding world of thieves to get sucked into for an hour and forty minutes.
Next was "The Conversation," Frances Ford Coppala's 1974 film starring Gene Hackman. It is a simple-seeming story of a wiretapper, a professional, detached, bugger, Harry Caul, who gets involved in a conversation he tapes, embarking on a hazy, trippy dangerous journey to the truth. A couple may be hurt if Harry hands over his recordings, and this possibility unnerves him to the breaking point. The film is like a horror movie, with garbled audio serving to scare, and dehumanize characters. Hackman plays the main character, who has about 90% screen time, as a private man who carries nothing personal with him. Harry Caul is awakened from this life when he realizes the impact of the consequences of his personal involvement; audio turns to human voices for him. The film that follows this sudden change plummets Harry into a feverish nightmare of truth-seeking, and the result he found blew his mind, and mine as well.
Next in line was "The Road," in theatres. This film was reasonably mind-blowing. The vision of apocalypse unleashed on viewers should scare anyone; this is where we are headed and what we will become when we get there. The fact that the story, of father and son struggling to reach the coast in false hopes of life being easier there, moves relatively slow serves the film's purpose: one should be distracted by observing every inch of the screen, which is packed with the grim, pathetic, whispering decay of the world. The father and son are secondary, functioning as human diving bells for the viewer, entry into this world of cold and gray and lifelessness. The film wrapped me up completely, and didn't let go once.
Combat against unworthy cinema is a necessary precaution, but bad cinema must be tolerated. It is often humorous to watch, humorous to write about, and humorous to read about. It is humorous to discuss. For any of those humorous things to occur, bad cinema must also be tolerated. Besides, "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" will always be seen by an audience manyfold larger than that of "The Road," way of the world. But as long as bad cinema has an intangible way of upping the quality of my own life, I will continue to, and be happy to, wage an endless war against it, forever going back and forth between non-combatant and combatant.
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