Criterion #24. Now that's more like it.

Crime noir goes to Japan, blends in, disappears.

Here we go again:

天国 = "tengoku," meaning "heaven" (or "The Kingdom of Heaven")
と = "to," meaning "and"
地獄 = "jigoku," meaning "hell"

So Tengoku to Jigoku, meaning Heaven and Hell. Which, you'll notice, rhymes in Japanese, and makes me wish it did in English too. Like if the word for hell was "Bevin." That would be great.

(Actually this probably doesn't count as a rhyme in Japanese. They don't really do syllable stress the way we do. And, as I've just now read, if your standard for rhyme is that the final syllables share vowel sounds, nearly every Japanese sentence "rhymes" with every other because they all end with the verb and their verbs have standard endings. Which means that the concept of "rhyme" as we know it is almost meaningless in Japanese. Apparently none of their lyrics or poetry "rhymes." Maybe it's no surprise to you, but the idea that "rhyme" isn't a universal is new and shocking to me!)

The standard English name of this movie is not Heaven and Hell but High and Low. One wonders what anonymous person gets to casually come up with such things, and leave a mark on someone else's movie forever. Some guy in an American distribution office? The Criterion disc contains both the original Japanese trailer and the American trailer, and the differences are instructive, if unsurprising. The Japanese trailer basically resembles the movie in tone and rhythm, while the American one is cut much faster, incorporates some new Saul Bass-style graphics, and places an emphasis on movement, no matter how senseless. It's all-around pretty trashy. And I'm not ashamed to say that I found the misleading, mercenary, incoherent American trailer much more enticing than the Japanese one. In fact the American trailer almost got away with triggering a retrospective revision of my impression of the movie. "Hey, this movie looks pretty weird and exciting! I guess I have to admit that it was kind of weird and exciting!"

And I do! I do admit that. I enjoyed the movie. It has a patient, cared-for quality that I am starting to think might be the Kurosawa signature touch. I felt exactly the classic art-house satisfaction of having taken in something both genuinely nourishing and genuinely foreign. I think I even preferred it to Seven Samurai. Fewer samurai, for one thing.

The widescreen is used with intelligence and quality. The movie is attractive. (And I'll note that black and white widescreen movies are a rarity.)

What the American trailer suggests is a noir-ish crime drama, which is more or less accurate, though the impression of a lurid beatnik wildness is obviously false. What the American trailer intentionally obscures is the spirit of formalism that haunts the whole thing, for good and for odd. The movie is around 2 hours 20 minutes. Nearly the entire first hour is a one-room melodrama in a large modern living room, staged and performed like theater and shot with geometric vigor. It reminded me of the serious-minded teleplays of the same era; it has the same portentous spareness, the tense buzzing silences. As stage melodramas go, it is bold and effective: will the rich man pay a ruinous ransom to save someone else's son? I found it riveting and I was drawn into the ethical questions, boldface and unlikely though they were. I also found it very peculiar.

In the bonus materials we learn that Kurosawa's method was to rehearse and perform long scenes in their entirety, filming them with two cameras both at a good distance from the actors, and then make it cinematic by crosscutting in the editing room. He believed that the theatrical approach to shooting tended to give better, more fluid, more committed performances. We also hear from a number of the actors and crew that the atmosphere in the living room set was incredibly intense, with so much silence through so many very long takes (up to 10 minutes at a time). All of this is very clear in the finished product. The actors are operating on high-stakes theatrical time, but the director/editor — not to mention the audience — is on cinematic time, which is more compressible, more personal. Long passages of the tensely rehearsed, collaborative rhythms of the stage, subtly artificial, will be suddenly shot through with a burst of editorial rhythm: a single observing mind, free to bound through the action at the speed of thought. The movie has two very different sorts of heartbeat, coexisting. The effect makes up for what it lacks in dramatic efficacy with what it offers to the conscious mind — it's intriguingly strange! But I'm not sure this is a trade-off he meant to make.

After almost an hour of very, very slow build in this one room, there is suddenly a change of scenery to a moving train for a 5-minute Hitchcockian sequence of high impact that exploits and releases the accumulated tension. The effect is splendid; a very symphonic sort of thing to do, though on an even grander timescale. (No symphony has an hour-long first movement! No reputable symphony, anyway.)

Then, just after the one-hour mark, the movie goes around a corner and becomes a manhunt procedural that wanders freely around the city, the kind with occasional cutting to the as-yet-uncaught bad guy (you know, a la Silence of the Lambs). This is a structure with its own characteristic energy graph, and again Kurosawa's version is askew from the standard.

I've always thought the generic term "procedural" was a little silly, but here it seems right; Kurosawa's interest in procedure itself is quite pure. At one point we are treated to a ten-minute scene of the cops giving a status report on the various leads they've been investigating. This goes beyond even Law and Order, where such scenes are usually livened up by unlikely revelations in the course of the conversation. These status reports are really status reports! The guy on the commentary track says that Kurosawa may have been interested in the incremental, methodical nature of a police investigation because it resembled his work as a director. This jibes with the impression of Kurosawa I got from the other interviews, as well as from the work itself. Patience, always!

And his genuine interest comes through and is accessible to the viewer. I was never bored; my attention was always naturally drawn near to the place it was meant to go. On the other hand, a kind of specter of potential boredom was usually nearby to worry me. "What kind of a thing am I watching, exactly? Is this actually working properly, or am I only finding this interesting because I am addicted to paying attention to things no matter what?" That may just be my anxiety du jour, but it's related to longstanding art-house angst and I want to keep voicing it as long as it holds. The pretentious sorts would have it that the conventional practices of American movies are limiting and deadening. But conventions offer a stable context, and stability is necessary for grounding more elaborate experiences. Encountering the new and unusual is stimulating, sure, but stimulation pales next to communication. "Interpretation" is interesting work, but shallow.

Though actually, that sort of pretentiousness is probably on the outs, what with Vertigo being the new best movie of all time.

And in any case, High and Low is hardly the movie to have this discussion. All things considered, this is a very easy movie with a basically undistracting technique. It's based on American material and American models. And the extremely patient attitude doesn't deaden the standard suspense-value of the investigation; it simply prolongs it and encourages us to smell the flowers as we go. Imagine a single episode of Law and Order expanded to 2 1/2 hours, but without adding any new scenes or plotting. Probably some flower-smelling would start to happen.

The aforementioned American material is an undistinguished novel by the prolific pulpster Ed McBain. I coincidentally had my first encounter with Mr. McBain last year after being gifted a pile of arbitrarily selected Hard Case Crime paperbacks. Make no mistake: the book was junkola. (This one on the other hand was surprisingly good.) Based on its non-reputation within McBain's extensive output, I imagine that King's Ransom, from whence High and Low, is equally junky. But the premise that Kurosawa latched on to — that the wrong person is kidnapped but the kidnappers still demand a ransom — is exactly the kind of nugget of genuine inspiration that makes pulp fun to read. Plotting is its own sort of art, and one that is very seldom done at the highest level. Ambitious works tend to downgrade it and commercial works that keep it in the spotlight often tend to hold it to lower standards. Seeing a kernel of inspiration scooped out of the junkpile, where such inspiration is so often born, and then put straight to work in the art-house where plot is just skeleton, I feel a pang of frustration: will this idea never be given its place of honor in a full-fledged, fully artful plot? Probably not.

I could go on about plot and its neglect as an art, but this is all another entry for another time.

This is starting to drag on so let's move on to the other stuff on the disc. The commentary is a fine specimen of the academic sort. The guy seems mostly to be reading a script he wrote for himself, full of research into: Japanese kidnapping cases and police procedure, socio-economic trends in postwar Japan, Kurosawa's techniques, interests, and possible motivation, and a very few bits of behind-the-scenes trivia that are duplicated from the Japanese TV documentary on the second disc. He seems to have a pretty good attitude and nothing he says is forced or blatantly irrelevant. But it's still an academic commentary. Its tacit assumption is that we have "interpretation" to do.

I'll repeat: "Interpretation" is interesting work, but shallow. Can't everybody see, by now, that abstracting to the historical or the political is just a quickie device to get credit for "digging below the surface"? And that the very fact that this analytic pocketknife is universally applicable is exactly why its application should be viewed with intense skepticism? Just as the more applicable a molecule of humor is (Garfield's hatred for Mondays is applicable every Monday), the less likely it is to be funny.

I'm not saying that "historicism" is an error and that "aestheticism" needs to be opposed to it. I'm just saying maybe we should try to hold ourselves to a higher standard and not say things about art just because they can be said. Because it's very hard to unhear things. If someone made some arbitrary case to me about how High and Low is actually a coded allegory of the history of Japan — or the mind-body problem — or the story of Adam and Eve — I'd have a very hard time wiping the slate truly clean to watch it properly again. Interpretation in bad faith is a kind of mental vandalism. So what I'm saying is, Shut up everybody, unless you really mean it. It's the sense that they don't really mean it that frustrates me. And of course academics don't really mean it — their interests couldn't be more conflicted.

(I do believe them about global warming, though, just for the record.)

In addition to the Japanese TV documentary I mentioned, we get a new interview with Tsutomu Yamazaki, who plays the Norman Batesy kidnapper, and also a quirky 1981 appearance by Toshiro Mifune on "Tetsuko's Room," a daytime TV interview show with the same pastel mindset as, say, Regis and Kathie Lee, but Japanese. Mifune talks about his childhood and wartime experiences; doesn't mention High and Low once. Tetsuko asks Mifune why his pants are so short. He looks at them in surprise and says that they are old.

Something I learned from disc 2 is that it is standard for Japanese interviewers to constantly make breathy sounds of awed fascination while the other person is talking. Presumably this is to comfort the interviewees as they pass through the valley of the shadow of speaking aloud. I also had occasion to reflect on how differently the Japanese relate to fear generally. The stigma (as per my RoboCop entry) does not have the same sway over there, or at least didn't for the older generation. Nearly every one of the aging men reflecting on his High and Low experience talks wide-eyed about how scared he was about messing up. "I was so nervous! I was shaking!" It seems like one after another of them wants to pronounce his own frailty and chuckle — like it's great fun, or even just common courtesy, to make mention of one's own crippling timidity. Is a culture of false strength better or worse than a culture of false weakness? Trick question, I hope.

Okay, I'll be fair: I actually think the title High and Low is pretty good. The scheme of the movie is that heaven is a wealthy guy living in luxury on a hill, and hell is the poverty and resentment of the criminal in the city beneath him, so unlike "heaven and hell," "high and low" applies directly in terms of both geography and class. Plus it echoes the phrase "searched high and low," which suits the action, since the second half of the movie is a manhunt. And the religious overtones of "heaven and hell" are pretty much not to be found in the movie itself, whereas the abstraction of "high and low" feels suited to the slightly geometric, formalist style. And "heaven and hell" is simply more cliche.

Then again, Heaven and Hell sounds more like pulp noir. You decide: which title does this main title track sound more like? This is by the very prolific Masaru Sato, in the middle of a string of well-known Kurosawa movies. I don't know what it's doing exactly but it's something. From what I just sampled of his work on Youtube, it sounds like it all has the same spirit: West meets East meets conservatory meets TV; we'll be right back after these messages.

BROOM Our day of bad movies has begun correctly. The ways in which this was bad...

ADAM Were manifold.

BROOM ... and also surprising to me. I found myself thinking about how a project like this comes to fail, because I think this movie failed, and yet I don't think the initial impetus was doomed. I don't think that every element of it was incompetent. It just didn't work, and I found myself thinking managerially, imagining that I was working on it and knowing that it was going bad, and thinking, "What do I do? What is the key thing to do to try to make this better?"

ADAM Let's start by saying what was good about it. Because I thought it was really lovely to look at it. They just went out of their way to make it lovely.

BETH I think they were pretty proud of that, too.

BROOM I thought the coloring looked blatantly like it had been done on a computer. The flat way that it was colored, but especially the crappy rounding shadows that looked like they had been applied in Photoshop. And I thought the foreground lay against the background in a dead-looking way.

ADAM Well, maybe I don't have the technical competence to see that, but I thought that compared to, say, the way that Pocahontas thought it was lovely, this was actually much prettier to look at. There were a lot of satisfying touches, like the way they changed colors in the early morning light.

BETH I thought some of that was a little incompetent. But I thought their color palettes were very interesting and vibrant. They clearly cared about which colors they were choosing. And they were diverse, too; they really switched it up based on the locations. But their handling of light was a little strange and wrong. They were trying for accuracy and not hitting it, but being very overt about the attempt.

BROOM Are you talking about that mottled-light tree effect?

BETH Yes!

BROOM That was the first time I thought, "that's an animation special effect, and it's not entirely working."

ADAM What was this?

BETH Early on, they were walking through sort of a sun-dappled forest landscape, and they were, you know, all splotchy, and it didn't work. But it was interesting that they were trying.

BROOM I'm surprised that you thought the palettes were good. To me they were, like many aspects of the movie, a case of "I can see what you're trying to do, but it doesn't quite work."

ADAM Well, look at those fish [in the animated DVD menu still onscreen], for example.

BETH This particular palette is kind of awful, but...

BROOM Well, it seems characteristic to me. The colors were all sort of tasteless, cheesy. It's like you're at a Disneyworld hotel, and everything's some kind of souped-up salmon color.

BETH It's like one of those moving "paintings" at a Chinese restaurant. Of a waterfall.

BROOM On a video screen, you mean?

BETH Kind of, but it's not really on a video screen. It's like a "moving painting." Do you know what I'm talking about?

BROOM I think so. I'm not sure I'm picturing exactly what you are, but that kind of restaurant world of taste, and lack of taste, is how I felt about the way this looked. Someone's idea of beauty was being played out, sort of, but it didn't feel sharp.

ADAM The color palette was very unlike the color palette in your apartment.

BETH I just liked that they were being daring and diverse.

BROOM I agree for obvious reasons that it's appropriate to compare this movie to Pocahontas. And I actually thought the palette was the strongest thing Pocahontas had going for it. The bold illustration style of Pocahontas is much more appealing to me than this touchy-feely pastel world.

BETH But as a child, watching the colors in this movie, I would have been riveted, because every shot was different, had different colors, and that's enough to keep me watching.

ADAM As I child I was offended by when the Smurfs would go walking in the forest and it was just the same four trees rotated over and over. I think I would have been captivated by all the effort that went into this.

BROOM It has a kind of abundance, certainly. But especially with the presence of CGI elements — like that rippling water in the menu — my eye feels like there are actually too many colors there. There's a certain sense of artistic care that comes of things being really chosen, whereas here it felt like there was just a lot of stuff.

BETH I agree with you as a grown-up. But as a kid, I think I would be taken with it.

ADAM Before we get into the things that didn't work, was there anything else that worked?

BROOM Much as during The Fox and the Hound, which this resembled, I felt like the setup itself was promising. There were moments when I was sincerely thinking about the storyline and the substance. People from two different worlds; how are they going to relate? Being forced to empathize with your supposed enemies.

ADAM All that very grave multiculturalism at the beginning really felt like the first term of the Bush administration. I kept picturing Karen Hughes wearing a scarf and President Bush lecturing Muslim countries on the dignity of women. It sort of upset me, honestly.

BROOM Which was more politically offensive, this or Pocahontas?

ADAM It's interesting — maybe I'm just constructing this after the fact, but Pocahontas felt to me like a more naive, dippy, Maya Angelou-type multiculturalism, whereas this was just so studied and self-important that it kind of grossed me out.

BROOM I feel like we're in pretty much the same dimension here as there.

ADAM Yeah, we're talking about two "Great Spirit" movies. Maybe I'm teasing out distinctions that aren't there.

BETH Maybe it feels like they should have known better by now.

ADAM It felt like they had a lot of Native American consultants working on this movie. There was probably a lot of very studied attention to dignified detail about Native Americans' lives. Even though the characters were all named after cities in Alaska.

BROOM Pocahontas was more explicitly sanctimonious about multiculturalism. This was a movie about universal empathy. I felt like the construction of this movie had more to do with basic human issues than the construction of Pocahontas.

ADAM That was about the clash of two different cultures, yes.

BROOM This one is basically the same concept as in The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin turns him into animals so he can learn about life as an animal. So of their two "Indian" movies, this one felt less offensive to me as far as its Indianness.

ADAM Pocahontas just seemed a little daffier. It was less self-important, and thus easier to take.

BROOM Yes, its ridiculous musical sequences were at least a spectacle, unlike these.

ADAM "Did you ever hear the wolf cry to the blue corn moon?" I mean...!

BROOM The thing is, that's kind of a catchy song, by comparison... Pocahontas is one of the very worst movies in the entire sequence thus far, I would say, and this project resembled it somewhat, but it failed in different ways.

ADAM The main thing that bothered me in the first third of this was the three bro-y bros. But I guess you have to make them relatable somehow, and that's the chintziest way to do it.

BROOM Well, I think that's the dimension in which the movie failed most significantly: it's supposed to be all about character, and they didn't give us real character. Not even in the designs.

BETH They hardly distinguished them. I didn't even know who the main character was until the other one died.

BROOM A time-honored technique for directing the audience's attention! Yeah, the dead one was the most charismatic of the three. And then the hero's journey of discovery is supposed to be about him being a teenager who thinks he has all the answers but doesn't, and has a lot to learn... but his progression just played as "Go away kid, I'm sullen and annoyed. Oh wait, there's fun in the world!" That was it, and that's why this was super-boring.

ADAM Did you like Tanana?

BROOM The grandmother? No.

ADAM She was only onscreen for about thirty seconds, which was weird. I thought she was going to come back in some way. I guess she comes back at the very very end.

BROOM Her design was gross. Her eyes were too big and her face was funny. I didn't like her.

BETH I didn't dislike her.

ADAM Did you like the little bro' bear? I must say I found him sort of appealing and cute.

BETH I found him annoying.

ADAM It was too much, but there were aspects of him that got me. I teared up a little at the end.

BROOM Is that true? You don't need to be ashamed about it.

ADAM I was embarrassed, but...

BETH No, it's good!

BROOM Which part of the end?

ADAM When he decided to stay a bear!

BROOM You teared up because of the emotion of that? I was truly shocked by it.

BETH I was too.

BROOM It seemed like the wrong ending.

ADAM Can we talk about that?

BROOM and BETH Yes!

ADAM It is really weird, first of all. But maybe it's just our human prejudice that makes us assume it's better to be a human than a bear.

BETH But this guy has lived all of his life, except for a couple weeks, as a human.

ADAM He did look better as a bear.

BROOM Everyone looked better as a bear. The humans were all unappealing.

ADAM And he did have to atone in some way for killing Koda's mother. It wouldn't have been right to just leave Koda to his own devices after having killed his mother.

BROOM Did you get the impression that becoming a bear was presented as a noble sacrifice?

BETH No. He preferred being a bear.

ADAM It was like what's-his-name staying on the Avatar planet at the end. Or like the Swiss family Robinson staying on the island.

BROOM But when I watch Close Encounters and he gets on that ship at the end, he's done with planet Earth, I think, "whoa! I don't know if that's gonna work out for you!" And here, there was that, plus above and beyond that... The whole movie is presented as a coming-of-age story; like in The Sword in the Stone, this is all his education. You become an animal to learn something about God's creation. But with this ending it seemed like they didn't understand that, so the moral becomes "it's good to be an animal." It stops being about learning anything.

BETH Were we supposed to think that he decided to be a bear because he discovered that he loved his little brother bear?

BROOM "He needs me," is what he said.

ADAM It would have been better if bear-to-human was a portal that they could slide through at will.

BETH It sounds like if you just go up to the top of that mountain you can switch.

BROOM It's possible that some of these questions are answered in Brother Bear 2.

ADAM I was pleased that there were no overt fart jokes in this movie.

BROOM You're right. The humor was terrible, but it was not infantile.

BETH But it was really bad.

ADAM The poster is a picture of Kenai and Koda in close-up, and the caption is "Nature Calls," so I was worried. But it turned out to be more dignified than that.

BROOM Their indulgence of Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis was way out of proportion. I mean, I've never thought those guys are funny.

BETH Those guys aren't funny, and kids, especially, have no reason to think those guys are funny.

ADAM Canadian kids might.

BROOM You did laugh when he said "I love dew."

BETH I did.

BROOM It was kind of funny. Anyway, I expected this movie to be bad because I expected it to be sanctimonious and grating, and it turned out to be bad because it was just boring. And thin. I felt like pretty much every element wasn't really at the level of execution they should have held it to.

ADAM It was a writing failure most of all. I mentioned Bongo earlier. What was the plot of Bongo?

BROOM Uh, he's a circus bear...

ADAM And then he has to go into the woods and be with wild bears, is that right?

BROOM Bears "say it with a slap!" That's what I remember.

ADAM And it was super-boring.

BROOM Bears are boring!

ADAM Well, I don't think we're going to have to encounter them again.

BROOM Talk about Phil Collins a little bit.

BETH Among the worst songs. They've been bad for a while, but these were worse.

ADAM They were also surprisingly intrusive. They were just suddenly some Phil Collins extravaganza coming at you, at the worst times. That song about how everything sucks!

BETH There was no subtlety to the lyrics at all.

BROOM My favorite part of watching this was that during Adam's favorite song he immediately started trying to learn the lyrics so that he could sing along with the choruses.

BETH "This is our festival... and best of all..."

ADAM When I saw that part, I thought, "I don't want to be in a family with these other weird bears." All of whom seemed self-absorbed or strange in a way that didn't really make me want to hang out with them.

BROOM There's something very odd about this discipline Disney has become dependent on, of having a series of original songs in a non-musical, where the songs have generic lyrics about the generic emotion of the moment — "The songs will not have lyrics alluding to bears, salmon, or fishing, because that would be embarrassing" —

ADAM It wouldn't be marketable on a CD.

BROOM I think of it as going back to Toy Story, with "You've Got a Friend in Me" but especially the song he sings when Buzz Lightyear is depressed, about "I won't go sailing again," which has to be kind of coy about how it relates to what's actually going on. Because there are to be no songs explicitly about toys. This movie had four songs in that category. I think they do it because they think it's less absurd than singing about bears, but it actually becomes more absurd. Here comes Tina Turner singing something — is she singing about this bear movie? Because that would be weird. But is she not singing about this bear movie? Because that's even weirder! That's how I felt, especially during that first song — the montage is "Welcome to our beautiful Inuit world," but the song really didn't directly support that at all.

ADAM Well, "My Heart Will Go On" isn't really about the Titanic. And it is not coincidental that "My Heart Will Go On" was an extremely successful radio single.

BROOM There was one song in that movie and you only heard it over the credits. That's standard.

ADAM You heard it throughout, you just only heard the lyrics over the credits. And, like, what was the song for Pearl Harbor?

BROOM Yeah, but that's how things have been forever. Since the 60s at least.

ADAM "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing." [ed.: Armageddon]

BROOM We're watching a scene where a man who killed a bear and then got turned into a bear is telling the son of the bear he killed that he used to be a man and that he killed his mother. That's a very weird scene, and it's the pivotal scene in this movie. And Phil Collins is singing a song as though it's something you might have heard already on the radio... but it's about that! When you listen to what he's saying, he's definitely singing about this bizarre scenario, but in code! There's something very strange about that. And those lyrics were really grim. The lyrics of "Theme from Brother Bear" are, like, "There's no way out of this dark place..."

ADAM Did this movie make you want to be a bear more than before? I would say "yes, a little."

BETH No.

ADAM But only in prehistoric Alaska. It seemed fun when they were fishing.

BROOM Yes, obviously, being part of their festival seemed like it would have been a good time.

BETH There was a waterslide.

ADAM You're right, all the landscapes did sort of look like Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

BETH Yeah. But I like that!

ADAM And they have the garish coloration of the line for Splash Mountain.

BROOM Yeah. It felt like a resort. And, I guess, who doesn't like a resort?

ADAM The color of those rocks in the menu is, like, Dusty Sedona.

BETH It looks almost like an early video game.

ADAM Like "Monkey Island."

BROOM Yeah, like one of those adventure games. An "I can't reach that from here" game.

BETH Where they only had thirty-two colors to work with, so they were all very extreme.

BROOM Well, this would be a two-hundred-fifty-six color game.

BETH Sorry!

ADAM VGA.

BROOM That's right.

ADAM I didn't detect anything gay in this movie.

BROOM There was no romance of any kind. There were no women.

ADAM There was a little bit of feminine panic at the beginning, when he was like "Love? What a stupid totem!" "Hey, loverboy!"

BROOM I actually thought that was promising! I thought the best thing in the script was that he gets told his totem is love and he's like, "Ugh, I don't want that." I was ready to get on board. I thought, "yeah, it's going to be about him learning that love is not something mushy to be embarrassed about, it's a spiritual and important thing." That seemed like a good theme for a movie. But no.

[the review is read]

ADAM You wanted to talk about the widescreen? [ed. The first 24 minutes are standard ratio; the image becomes widescreen after the character is transformed into a bear]

BROOM Strange gimmick! When there was that message before the movie warning us that it was going to happen, I thought, "This is critic bait, so that there'd be something to write about in the papers. They did this so they could PR it out there that they had done this." And yet Stephen Holden didn't even mention it. I feel like I've heard of maybe one other movie that changes the aspect ratio in the middle.

BETH I think I've seen a movie that does it but I can't remember what.

BROOM I thought it was going to happen as we watched, that the image would spread and get wider and wider. But no; it went black for five seconds, and then came back at the full ratio with a not-particularly-impressive first shot.

BETH It was a callback to The Wizard of Oz, kind of.

BROOM But I thought it would be like that, where a door opens and something is wonderful on the other side.

BETH Well, his eyes open and he's sort of blurrily looking around.

ADAM Meh. It was an underwhelming effect for being trumpeted the way it was.

BETH I wanted to mention that there were "handheld" shots during the killing of the bear, which we haven't seen before.

BROOM Yes, another technical idea that didn't work.

[as counterpoint we read the heartfelt five-star reader review from the New York Times review page]

ADAM The person who wrote that comment has a "BELIEVE" bumper sticker on the back of their car, with a mandala and a star of David...

BROOM "Recommended by zero Readers." Well, the point that there is no villain in the movie is well taken. And yet the movie fails, because they didn't do a good job.

ADAM I kept thinking about William Faulkner's "The Bear" while I watched this. And I thought, maybe Faulkner could have learned a thing or two. Imagine how that story would have been improved if there had been a bear's-eye-view chapter. I think I'm done now.

BROOM Yeah, because we have miles to go before we sleep.

The title above refers to this.

Criterion #23.

Yeah, that's right. This thing where I watch the Criterion Collection in order. Making great time so far!

I have postponed addressing RoboCop for many months because I'd fallen out of touch with some basics.

I knew after 10 minutes that I disliked the movie, but I was ashamed of the vulnerable, sensitive level on which I disliked it. Ashamed because the movie makes such a concerted appeal to insensitivity. To be merely disgusted by it is to miss its adult intentions, it seems to be saying, and appeals like this have a strong effect on me. I very very passionately don't want to miss the point of things.

Only recently has it begun to occur to me that this passion for getting the point is an exploitable weakness. Missing the point of things is actually vital to self-preservation.

It seems to me that all really true and valuable responses to art have their roots in pre-articulate childhood impressions. Nothing that can be really felt waits for adulthood to make itself known. A child is sensitive to everything; no child sets aside any amount of noticing for later. All the important observations are made early, and well.

This may be obvious but it bears stating because many of these early impressions contain some component of fear, and fear is stigmatized in adults. It takes considerable conviction to cling to one's timidity solely because it is authentic. But this is what is called for, I think, in artistic experience. (Not to mention generally.) So I could stand to keep saying it out loud: the childlike response is the one.

Anyway, of late I think I've straightened things out. So I'm ready to face RoboCop.

Emanating from RoboCop is a very strong, pure draft of sleaze. I could couch this in adult terms but it is not actually an adult impression; it is a warning signal from my child-antennae: Do not trust the people from whom this comes, or to whom it goes! This is the country of bad people, bad ideas, bad feelings, bad mojo. Leave the room, close your eyes. Beware.

This is the root truth, and I want to dignify and honor it, rather than just start looking beyond it. Looking beyond is very easy, and I'll get to that in a moment. But first a word on behalf of the innocence that cringes at blood squibs, recoils from existential roughhousing, feels menaced by the company of open prurience. These reactions are, I daresay, right and good. What is it to have "a moral sense" if not this? There is poison in the desensitization that generated this movie, and poison in the desensitization it engenders. My fear ultimately is not of the carnage but of the poison. My body rejects this.

And if one watches the whole movie, one inevitably begins to take in some of the poison. Yeah yeah, more squibs. Yeah yeah, that guy got a huge spike in his neck and a pint of blood sloshed onto the other guy. Yeah yeah, loveless coffin world, I can't go on pretending I don't know how not to mind you. It's actually easy. Yeah, maybe that was actually a fun flick, kinda dumb, I dunno, who cares.

No. That first raw nerve is the thing. The rest is a philosophical danger zone. It's only safe to venture there if you leave a trail of breadcrumbs. Movies like this are made by people who ran out of their own breadcrumbs long ago.

But that's just it: The fascinating thing about my experience with RoboCop was that as soon as I went back to the beginning and turned on the commentary, my moral clarity disintegrated. These were nice-sounding men, speaking genially. My childhood alert system quieted on its own terms. Sleaze is always only in the eye of the beholder; real people all have their reasons. Behind the curtain, as usual, are just some folks.

This is the psychological truth behind all shit. I enjoyed delving into it. By the end of my time with the creators I felt, to my great surprise, sympathy for the movie. It's a stimulating sort of dichotomy to at the same time be quite certain that it is repulsive and that I do not approve.

And ultimately my opinion ends up in the same place: these people may not be sleazes, but by not knowing better, by thinking they knew the difference between humane and inhumane but getting it quite wrong, they showed themselves to be unreliable.

During a movie, I am reliant on it. I need it to be reliable. Beware.

So what does RoboCop get wrong? It is in fact the Salo problem all over again: the medium is the message, so there's no such thing as an insincere movie.

Actually the principle is even more obvious than that: The content is the message. If you show cruelty as comedy, you endorse the showing of cruelty as comedy. There is no amount of satirical intention that can outdo what you actually do. That's simply how movies work.

The really grotesque thing about this one in particular is that not only does it have an untenable attitude, but it doesn't even have it consistently. It's genuinely not sure whether its worldview is Brazil or Superman or Dirty Harry or what, which pretty much spells philosophical doom, or at least sincerity schizophrenia. It has occasionally gotten credit (from the sort of people who enjoy giving too much credit) for a sophistication that is actually just heterogeneity born of confusion.

I know, there's a school of criticism that doesn't care why a movie is interesting just so long as it's interesting. And yeah, I guess I would agree that it's a particularly interesting specimen of what it is, which is a cruel, bad movie.

And I could talk about what makes it an interesting specimen, but that would feel dirty and would I believe be ultimately unenlightening. I'd prefer to be clear: they should all be destroyed.

Indulge me my hammering on this point once again:

The fear of awfulness cannot be exorcised by creating awfulness!

I read a profile of Michael Haneke recently in which Funny Games was explained, essentially, as what I already understood it to be: a sensitive soul responding angrily to the experience of being brutalized by trying to amp it up — so that even the insensitive masses will feel the horror he feels at ordinary movies, and comprehend the error of their ways. It is an all-stops-out attempt to elicit a shocked "Yo, man, that shit ain't funny" from the terrible hordes who always seem to think that kind of shit is funny.

I already knew this, and yet somehow seeing his research-librarian face next to the words really crystallized the fact for me: depictions of brutality are almost always the attempted revenge of the sensitive on the insensitive. The irony of course is that the "insensitive" they so resent (fine, we so resent) are usually just like them.

The early scene of "black comedy" in RoboCop, in which an executive in a boardroom is machine-gunned to death by a malfunctioning robot, depressed and alienated me on first viewing. Why is this so proud of its callousness? I thought. Who are these awful people who must flaunt their insensitivity? Revenge begins brewing in my sensitive heart. Turns out, when you listen to the commentary, that the amiable-sounding writer came up with the scene while working in a corporate environment and finding it alienating. The murderous robot is his revenge on the suits in his psyche. (And, he makes sure we understand, on the reported horrors of American tactics in Vietnam.) Well, sure, I hear all that. But why did I have to watch it and imagine the "Yo, man, that shit is wack!" target-audience guy breathing down my neck?

The director Paul Verhoeven — the Dutch PhD in mathematics who wants to direct a life of Jesus but instead directed RoboCop and Basic Instinct, a fascinating figure to contemplate — acknowledges his psychology outright in the commentary. He describes real horrors of his childhood in occupied Holland: "growing up in a completely violent atmosphere, where you were forced to walk among dead people by the Germans because they wanted to show that hostages would be killed if there was a problem... they forced you when you came home to walk among Dutch people that were killed a couple of hours earlier. And sitting at the table and suddenly the window was blowed onto your plate because there was a bomb falling on the three or four houses next to you. And in that atmosphere of violence it's probably quite natural that I'm really interested in violence in the movies, because for me it's like getting even with things that happened to me at a child that I still have problems probably to accept."

Good. You nailed it. And in that light, RoboCop and its ilk seem like a very impotent and childish form of coping indeed. I think I could find such things pitiable and sympathetic, if only they weren't movies, which are so utterly psychologically opaque and thus intimidating. Behold the great and powerful Oz! BLAM! When the blood gets spurting, you don't imagine a meek guy with a pen cowering next to you, snickering nervously.

(From now on I'm going to try to. But when I do, I'm just going to want to say to him, "Hey, if you don't like this either, why don't we just turn it off? Life doesn't have to be this way!")

The moral is that conceptual revenge doesn't work. Someone must break the cycle of bullying!

I'm afraid I can't muster the grace of a Punky Brewster and love the evil spirit away, but I can set down my machine guns.

Here as a peace offering are some things I liked about RoboCop.

1. The lighting is effective and the colors are nice and warm. At the time, nobody would have called them warm, but that's because they hadn't yet seen the blown-out future. Movies today rarely have nice color anymore — directors have all been spoiled on the cold thrills of computer-controlled palettes. This looked like, you know, people, in, like, rooms. And that felt like a cozy throwback.

2. I think this is the only action movie I've ever seen where a ridiculous room-destroying gun battle is followed by a scene with a lot of people cleaning up, sweeping up debris with brooms.

3. I may be wrong but I suspect that a not-insignificant part of the reason that people like(d) this movie is that the end credits are cards in a really big bold font, there's booming hero music over them, and they slam in rhythmically after the last line. You go out tricked into thinking, "well, that was sure dumb, but it sort of had something!"

4. The future equivalent for a videotape is correctly depicted as a DVD. This is done so casually that on first viewing I just took it for granted. The commentary, recorded in 1995, the year the DVD was born, does not yet recognize this as the right choice; the screenwriter muses that a 3.5-inch floppy would have been a better choice than "a CD." Wrong!

5. I enjoyed the (out-of-print) disc itself. Like I said, the commentary was shockingly pleasant, and I also got a kick out of the long illustrated article on the special effects. Strange to consider the labor that went into pseudo-computer effects, like the robot's-eye-view where he sees picture-in-picture playback and text overlays. Nowadays this is a 20-year-old technological commonplace, so it's hard to remember that we were just imagining it first, back when it still meant painstaking hand-measurement and multiple passes through an optical printer.

On which note, I don't know how to wrap my mind entirely around the fact that tablet computers look exactly like — nay are — the magic-screen computer panels from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The daydreamy part of my mind that knows the latter has no idea what to do with the fact that the practical part that knows the former is willing to corroborate it. It's sort of like my old childhood thought-experiment: what would it be like if something impossible, like ghosts or aliens or time travel or whatever, really happened? Would it feel real or fake? How would people really respond? (Sadly I've since learned the answer: everything begins to go equally gray. I don't know if you guys have heard but apparently the polar ice caps are melting?)

Two free-floating bits that I couldn't fit into the structure above, such as it is.

1. These corrupt corporate towers of 80s movies have a tone of horror that seems extreme. Maybe it's just that I associate them with the reckless gore of the same era, but there's something potent in the power-claustrophobia itself. Well, not claustrophobia, some other -phobia. What's the word for "fear of night skylines and black lucite"? It was somewhat operative in Dead Ringers, too (and much moreso in other Cronenberg, I know). The idea that glistening architecture goes hand in hand with gore and nightmare has a very obvious cultural "meaning," but it really is its own aesthetic-conceptual package. I was aware of it and frightened of it long before I had any capacity to contemplate the actual anxieties of corporate life. Just like I encountered videogames teeming with post-Giger vagina dentata long before I encountered vaginas, and came to understand them on their own horrible terms. Damn 80s.

2. While we're watching our hero shot literally to bloody pieces, at great length, in the commentary Verhoeven first says that the scene is so horrific because it's supposed to be like hell and/or the crucifixion, and then adds that there's a second reason: that killing off the protagonist so early creates a problem of dramaturgy, since we haven't had enough time to care about him, so "that's why his death is so gruesome. So it has two - it's a crucifixion, but it also has the dramatic function... to implant this man forever in the brains of the audience."

That forever is right and it's a problem. I had never actually seen this scene before, but I already knew about it because I remember very clearly having had it described to me by my traumatized peers in 1988 or so. "He gets shot so much his arm comes off!"

Just like I vividly remember the moment when two friends gave this report: "Tell him about Indiana Jones and the heart!" "This guy pulled out a guy's heart with his hand!" "And his chest wasn't even open!" That is word-for-word accurate, 27 years later. Confusing, yes (when is anybody's chest ever open?), but unforgettable. That poor guy was implanted forever in the brains of the audience, and even, in my case, the non-audience. Is this a good use of the powers of cinema? It seems more like a kid recklessly waving a magic wand and accidentally turning people into frogs, or disintegrating them. Oops! Movies are that kind of power.

All right, and if you've been following along (= M, B, A, sometimes D and E, and, for sure, future me) you know that for each Criterion I am grabbing a track of music. This is your Criterion Collection track 23, a standard end credits suite. I editorially removed the words "super-stupid" and "plodding" from the mention of the theme music above, so that I could put them down here instead. This is by Basil Poledouris, who made a minor name for himself, for a while there, writing in this sort of primitivistic shadow of the Jerry Goldsmith school.

Good night, RoboCop. May you continue to age poorly.

ADAM I think the fact that that was surprisingly entertaining is a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, who totally carried this movie.

BROOM I don't know that it was carried. But I think you're right.

ADAM It was entirely faithful to the actual plot of Treasure Island, until the end, and surprisingly compelling. It wasn't Disney-stupid-plotted, the way they all are.

BETH So why isn't it more revered?

BROOM I would ask "Why isn't it more good?" Are you suggesting that this movie deserves a better reputation?

BETH Well...

ADAM It wasn't a world-class movie, but it was solid. I was entertained the entire time.

BETH I was entertained by it.

BROOM I found it so weird. Did you guys not have the experience I had that this was super super weird? I get that it was in outer space, but it was a weird outer space that didn't make sense to me. I didn't know what the rules were.

ADAM I stopped worrying about that halfway through, when I decided it was "steampunk," rather than just nonsensical. A steampunk Treasure Island is a great idea.

BROOM It wasn't really steampunk, though. It was just whatever they thought of. And the stuff they thought of was weird! All the aliens looked sort of like snails, or like globs of clay. And an all-farting slug. I didn't understand what flavor of imagination it was all supposed to be. I thought you guys were going to feel the same way!

BETH I just accepted it on its own terms. The thing that I couldn't get out of my head was that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character was just like my brother.

ADAM He was?

BETH He looked like my brother as a teenager. He had my brother's hair and some of his personality, and the song was like something my brother would have played on his guitar.

ADAM And it felt weird because you were crushing on him a little bit, right?

BETH No!

ADAM Hear her guilty laugh?

BROOM I think it's just an uncomfortable laugh.

BETH Unlike you, Adam, I don't get crushes on cartoon characters.

BROOM And you would tell us if you did.

BETH I would. I would admit it.

ADAM It did bother me at the beginning that there were no coherent rules of space and time.

BROOM There were no rules of anything. Like, what is normal and what isn't? When you go on an adventure within a fantasy world, there needs to be a sense of what is out of the ordinary for the characters. In Star Wars, when they go to the port city, they make very clear that "this is a sleazy and dangerous place," and when you see all kinds of aliens, you understand that in the characters' world, it's weird to them to be among all these lowlifes and foreigners, but it is not inherently weird to them that they are aliens, or that they are space travelers. Or when Darth Vader attacks, we understand that it's bad news, and an unexpected event, but that it's not weird that he travels in a spaceship or wears a helmet. But in this movie, there'd be a big fanfare and we'd see a vista, and I'd have no idea whether Jim is thinking "Oh my god, it's an amazing space station!" or if he's just thinking, "shrug, space station." And that's really disorienting.

ADAM Did it bother you that his mother was wearing a kerchief, but on a space station?

BROOM The mom looked like she was sixteen!

BETH Yeah, "twelve years later" she hadn't aged at all.

BROOM She looked like she was his girlfriend.

ADAM It was a little uncomfortable when they were dancing together.

BROOM The mom had no characterization at all. And in the opening scene when he's a little kid, other than having a magical talking book, he and his mom are basically in a modern suburban bedroom. But then you find out that she actually runs the Admiral Benbow Inn, and their world is actually 18th-century old-timey. Plus robots. The whole idea of that kind of mix-and-match is from a strain of high-concept sci-fi fantasy writing that started to go in that direction — I don't know when, the 70s and 80s maybe — but it shows up here without the kind of intellectual excitement that needs to motivate it. Steampunk was supposed to be this, like, stimulating mashup, but this just seemed like... a bizarre mix of things.

ADAM I was using the idea of steampunk as a way to get through the movie, and it made me feel better about it. Because then I didn't have to wonder things like "why are they steering with a big wheel?"

BROOM It wasn't really that I had a lot of explicit questions. I just felt ungrounded. And, to be honest, by the second half the movie I was having an easier time with it.

ADAM Partly because it isn't plotted like a traditional Disney movie, many of the hiccuppy Disney things we dislike weren't in this one. I mean, I guess there was a sort of an "I wanna know!" musical moment at the beginning, but not really.

BROOM But ultimately this wasn't the same as the story of Treasure Island. And they abused the Long John Silver relationship.

ADAM It was exactly the same!

BROOM In Treasure Island, Jim develops a sort of false father-relationship with Long John Silver— in a much more subtle way, not during a falling-in-love montage, which is basically what we had here — and then his trust is betrayed. And Long John Silver continues to manipulate the relationship even as there's something authentic about it, and this is a troubling source of poignancy. It's not just, like, "is he a good guy or a bad guy?" He's a mixed character, and Jim has to learn his independence from him. Rather than getting to a place where he's sniffling "Awright, y'old pirate, I got somethin' in my eye, goobye!" at the end.

ADAM I understand. The book's Long John Silver isn't a good guy, whereas this Long John Silver is a good guy.

BROOM Well, he wasn't a good guy either, even though they ended with this sentimental parting and then his face in a magic cloud. He didn't actually do anything that made him more of a good guy.

ADAM Yes he did! He let the treasure go to save Jim's life!

BROOM All right. But he also threatened to kill Jim several times before that.

ADAM Before that! That's because he too had some growing to do. Of course this is not as morally complex as a novel.

BROOM It was totally unbelievable that he would let the treasure go to save Jim's life. (Also, it's totally unbelievable that an entire planet is a machine full of space pirate treasure! Just kidding.) But really, when Long John Silver makes this momentous choice to give up all the treasure and save Jim instead, his line is just something like, "Ohhhhh fine I'll do it!" And then seconds later the movie itself is making fun of it, when he says "It's just a lifelong obsession; I'll get over it." That's the writers doing a lazy thing that's very popular these days, where a script says outright, "We know the story logic doesn't really work! Ha ha ha ha! Sarcasm!" The Simpsons does this all the time. But the point on The Simpsons is "you can't take this seriously!" A Disney movie shouldn't do that. And it did it several more times, too. "Oh, of course this doesn't make sense, but this is funny patter and it's clever and sly of us to acknowledge it!" But it really didn't make sense.

ADAM Well, obviously, it's not as good as the novel. But I thought the very idea of having moral complexity in the villain at all was significant. Admittedly he switched from all good guy to all bad guy to all good guy, but at least he switched from something to something. More than you can say for Uncle Scar.

BROOM Once I saw that the movie was going to go in that direction — they show us Jim losing his real father, and then gaining this new father figure — I thought, "wow, do they have the guts to actually go through with this? To go where the story goes?" Which is that Jim comes of age. He has to recognize that his father figure is flawed, and he has to choose to be without a father, to be independent. And that is not what happened in this movie.

ADAM Well, that would be more of a downer. I mean, come on.

BETH But he shows that he's independent when he...

BROOM Surfs.

BETH Exactly. When he surfs to save the ship.

BROOM Well, at least it was better than Atlantis.

ADAM I liked that this was a Disney movie where the father was gone and not the mother, for a change.

BROOM The mother was more or less gone. That character was nothing. Those opening scenes were the worst, because I wanted to get my bearings, and they were just giving me this mother who was like a half-baked non-character from a nineties sitcom. She didn't have anything at all to do with the milieu.

ADAM She was a little like the Malcolm in the Middle mother.

BROOM No, that character was sort of crazed and funny. This mother was, like, Courteney Cox. "Hi, I'm some lady. I guess I'm playing some lady!" She was nothing.

BETH She didn't have a lot to work with.

BROOM I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt did maybe too conscientious a job trying to "act" the "part." But it's strange to hear someone trying to find the truth in stuff like "by the solar flares of Arcturus, I don't know what I'm going to do." All these stupid lines.

ADAM I think the guy who did Long John Silver was very good.

BROOM Yeah, he did a pretty good job.

ADAM This was exactly how I think of Long John Silver. Is that because I've seen some other depiction of Treasure Island where he's just like this?

BROOM Well, the most famous one is the Disney one from the fifties, which is supposed to be good. I haven't seen that since elementary school. I'd watch that again.

ADAM I thought it was good that Scroop was scary, and a real villain, but that there was just a little of him, not too much.

BROOM There was a character like that in the book, right?

ADAM Yes. They fight in the rigging and he falls into the water and dies. It's all exactly like this. That's partly why I liked the movie, because I just read Treasure Island and every time something happened, I would think, "Oh! Now he's in the apple barrel!"

BROOM Except of course here it was a space-ple barrel. And as with everything in this movie, a space apple means some kind of gross squirting equivalent to an apple. Everything in the movie had been altered to look more like an avocado.

ADAM But nonetheless, it was satisfying that it was tracking so closely to this book that I very much enjoyed.

BROOM I'm glad you enjoyed the book. I agree that's a good time.

BETH It's a very good book.

ADAM The movie did have some frustrating "It's the nineties, mom!" sort of intrusions. But not that many, and they seemed to feel embarrassed about them. They put most of them in the mouth of the nerdy scholar character.

BROOM I hated him. He didn't contribute anything.

BETH And then there was that robot, too.

ADAM Ben Gunn?

BROOM I thought Ben Gunn was better than David Hyde Pierce's character. And why was Emma Thompson in this at all? Why did there have to be a half-baked love story?

ADAM Why not?

BROOM "We have a strong woman character! oh she got injured, she's going to lie down now."

ADAM That's what happens in the book!

BROOM The character's not a woman in the book. And she had to have these weird fetish stockings. And her weird cat-face wasn't...

BETH Attractive.

BROOM ... or comforting or anything. She looked alien.

ADAM She was an alien!

BROOM The aliens looked alien in a way that didn't make me feel at home.

ADAM You didn't look at Mr. Arrow and think, "now there's a stand-up guy"?

BROOM The rock-face guy?

ADAM The rhinoceros, yeah.

BROOM He was a rhinoceros? I thought he was a rock monster.

ADAM I thought he was a rhinoceros.

BETH I thought he was more like a rock monster.

ADAM Like a rhinoceros made of rocks.

BROOM Okay, I'll work with that.

ADAM Go back and look. You'll see.

BROOM Here's what I was thinking during the movie: "I don't want to be having critical 'Disney's gone downhill' thoughts. Those are adult thoughts that are irrelevant to the intended audience. So let me watch it the way I would have as a kid, which means opening myself to not caring, and not caring that I don't care." It also means opening yourself up to be disoriented. As an adult, I can generally work out the rationales behind things, but if I don't do that and just watch it, will I be disoriented? And I was. And I figured that when I was a kid, I would have just accepted that disorientation. And that maybe it's supposed to be part of the fun of fantasy that everything is so weird. But then I was like, "but I don't like this feeling! I prefer to know what's going on!"

ADAM I spent most of the time thinking things like "I wonder if they're going to put him in the apple barrel!" I was disappointed that the complex chess of their face-off on the island didn't come to pass. Or the part where he pretends to be a ghost and scares off the crew.

BROOM When the book gets to be military tactics about the siege of the fort, that's less interesting to me, and I appreciated them cutting that out. But you apparently like that part.

ADAM I didn't dislike that part. You don't like the way he sneaks on to the boat and pilots it to the north cove?

BROOM No, watching him sneaking around the island is good. But it does feel like a cheat to me — I think I wrote this on my site years ago — that in this book for kids about buried treasure, when they get to X marks the spot, it's not actually there anymore and you're denied the scene you've been looking forward to, where they'd dig up the hidden chest and open it and see a lot of sparkling gold. Ben Gunn already has it in his cave, right?

ADAM Yeah. But you get to go in the cave and see it there.

BROOM Yeah, but there's not a proper Howard Carter reveal moment. Here they had a moment like that, but it was pretty ridiculous.

ADAM That the treasure of a thousand worlds is mostly rings. Aliens don't even have fingers!

BROOM What's really ridiculous is that the booby trap destroys everything! It doesn't just kill the intruders, which would have made sense, but destroys the entire treasure. "Someone tried to get in and steal it? Well then, the time has come for all of it to be destroyed!"

ADAM But that's just because it turned into Indiana Jones at the end.

BETH Exactly. It was just like that.

BROOM But even in Indiana Jones, the traps are there to kill the people.

BETH And the treasure. Everything is destroyed.

ADAM That's just what it was. They were like, "we're bored by Treasure Island so we're going to switch to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade"

BROOM But hold on. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there are traps to prevent people from getting to the treasure. And then at the end, there's a restriction on the Holy Grail that you can't take it out, and when they try to take it out, it triggers the entire structure to collapse on them rather than the Holy Grail leave the temple. That's not the same thing as...

ADAM They also did the "I can't save them both!" moment of reaching.

BROOM Yes. That was stolen directly. It was also stupid that with all of this incredible sci-fi magic going on, their presence is triggered by them walking through an ankle-height museum security red laser.

BETH It's the nineties!

ADAM They needed to show it somehow. What other way can you think of to economically signal "booby trap"? It's like Mission Impossible, where Tom Cruise is dangling from the ceiling with the beams around him.

BROOM Or the classic Entrapment with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. They could have just shown it like in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he thinks he's outwitted the hidden mechanism, but then you see it shift and start up.

BETH But that takes too long.

BROOM You're defending it? You just don't like my tone. You want me to stop complaining.

BETH I just don't have a problem with their stupid laser.

ADAM Broom, this is as good as it's gonna get for a while!

BROOM I know.

ADAM I don't have anything gay to say about this.

BROOM Joseph Gordon-Levitt?

ADAM He's not gay.

BROOM He's not?

ADAM No.

BROOM Let's look this up.

ADAM I'm sure there will be unscrupulous gossip. I'm sure the first search after his name will be "Joseph Gordon-Levitt GAY."

BROOM And you know that he's not?

BETH I've looked him up. I don't think he is.

ADAM I'm pretty well-informed about these sorts of things.

[He is looked up. He is probably not gay]

BROOM I've talked before about kids' movies in the 80s having nobody at the wheel, how they got really harsh and brutal and dirty. Feeling a little disoriented this time made me think, "Maybe that was actually just the time in my life when I was open and vulnerable enough to be affected by such things. Maybe if I let myself be affected by it now it's still there." Or maybe I was overplaying the sense that it was creepy to try to get that feeling back. But it was genuinely a strain for me to feel at home with this, and I don't think it's just because everyone was a snail. I think it's also because there's less warmth than I want. There's just less warmth in most movies most of the time. The big thing that surprised us about Lilo and Stitch is that it had a modicum of real warmth in it. Here, even the big "relationship," between him and Long John Silver, was just D.O.A. There was no real feeling there.

ADAM Everything they put it in it that was not in the original made it worse.

BROOM Going back to what it's like to watch movies as a kid: a kid has such a strong intuitive sense of who are the nice people, and where love is potentially going to come from; might it come from these people? And that's why people love The Wizard of Oz, because when she says "I'm gonna miss you most of all," you as a kid think, "yeah, because he's nice! He's a nice guy, that scarecrow!" In this movie, and most of these recent Disney movies, there's no-one in it that I as a kid would have trusted. And I don't think it has to be that way.

ADAM I think I would have thought the mom was nice, and that Jim was nice but cool, and that Long John Silver was nice ultimately. And I would have been relieved that Long John Silver turned out to be nice. And I would have known that the captain was nice but stern. And that the professor was nice but ineffectual.

BETH They're all nice, but the underlying emotion is not there. You know these characters are supposed to be nice, but you don't feel it.

BROOM And that distinction is something that kids definitely have access to. I remember being able to distinguish between movies that were obviously supposed to be one thing but kind of felt like something else, and the movies that actually felt the way they were supposed to. Like The Secret of Nimh, or The Last Unicorn... there were these animated movies that were a little bit less inviting than it seemed like they believed they were. And it was like that scary aspect to them was in part the sense that, like, no-one's going to give you a hug, here. Even when they hug each other, they wouldn't give you a hug. I don't quite know how to put it. But that's what I started to feel when I asked myself what this movie felt like.

ADAM "Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth."

BROOM Yeah, butter wouldn't melt in this studio's mouth. Like a bad babysitter. Someone who doesn't really know how to babysit who comes over and is like [gratingly] "all right, so what do you kids do?" That's the feeling I get off the recent Disney movies.

ADAM Let's read the review.

BETH I think the New York Times will basically like it.

ADAM I think they will appreciate the historicity.

BROOM They sometimes show up and say the cranky stuff that I say, like, "Look how Disney has fallen in this era."

[We read it. It is very negative.]

ADAM Oof.

BROOM I think he's right.

ADAM We're grading on a curve.

BROOM A problem I've been thinking about a lot, in my life, is how to hold to one's own opinions and standards in the face of a context that seems to imply a different set of standards. And that's how we're reacting to these movies. "Okay, so this is what this movie was; how good was it at being that?" And I think it's a useful to me when there's a review like this that holds its ground and says "That, the thing itself, sucks! The 'bad parts' are not the only thing that was bad about this." I feel like, "Right! That's what I need to learn to do all the time." So, then, you might well ask, why are we watching all the Disney movies? Seeing as we're well below sea level at this point? Uh... Well, I thought Lilo and Stitch was pretty entertaining and pretty sweet, and I didn't have a problem with that.

ADAM It certainly seemed more sincere than this. But this was better than that review. He only wrote it that way because he hasn't yet seen...

BROOM The next one.

BETH I don't know how to watch them if I have to think of my actual response.

ADAM Yeah, if she had to engage with it sincerely, she'd be like, "What are we doing??"

BROOM Yeah, I don't think you've said enough, Beth. Say more before we end this.

BETH I don't know how to watch Disney movies if I'm supposed to actually think about them for real.

BROOM You're allowed to be really angry and disgusted if that's where it takes you.

BETH I don't know. I would fall asleep in order to avoid watching that movie, if I was watching it for real. I considered it, while watching. I was thinking, "I feel kinda tired; maybe I'll just fall asleep." But then I thought, "No! I need to do this. I want to be present for this." And then I made it be okay! I changed whatever I was seeing into something that was okay.

ADAM She made her own context!

BROOM But that's scary. Does that not scare you?

BETH It didn't feel scary to be doing it.

BROOM So basically, I create this context, by being a weird OCD taskmaster who creates a context where you must stay awake during this movie and then you must talk about it as though it were a movie worth talking about. And so you construct whatever brain you need to make that happen, instead of going to sleep, which is your actual critical take on the movie.

BETH Essentially.

ADAM Oh man! I gotta go.

[he goes to get his things]

BETH So... I'm serious. I don't even know how to respond to this with my real brain. I don't have any criticism of it because I made it be okay, so I could watch it. And now I just accept it. I just accept what it was.

BROOM Right. So my question is — and this is hard for me too — if your real brain would go to sleep, do you have an option in between? Something like, "I'm not going to stop paying attention, but I'm allowed to get angrier and angrier about how my time is being wasted"?

BETH I probably do. There is probably some kind of middle ground. I'm just not sure how to access anything other than, like, what I really feel, which is "I don't want to watch this! I really don't think this is good!"

BROOM But you're on board with this project as being kind of fun in theory.

BETH Yes, yes, yes! I am.

BROOM So how does that part of you relate to the part of you whose real response is "I don't want to watch this"? Can it not say, "I'm going to be righteously pissed off at Disney at the end of this"? Because the choice to go to sleep is itself a kind of "making it okay," by zoning out. Are you afraid to be angry?

BETH No. I don't know.

BROOM Are you afraid to be a mean critic of an innocent little puppy like a Disney movie? Because it's not an innocent little puppy!

[Adam goes]

BROOM I'm going to transcribe at least everything up to this point. His discomfort with this part of the conversation is part of the conversation.

BETH I was trying to watch it openly, like a kid. Because that's something we've been talking about, and, like you were saying earlier about music, if you open yourself to things, you can pretty much like anything. You don't need to be critical about things, you can just accept them. And so I felt like that's where I got with this. I just accepted everything about it. So it started, and I thought, "Oh my god, this is really lame. This is really lame." And then I just switched into a mode where I thought, "Just let it wash over you; just let it be what it is." But from there I'm not thinking critically. I'm not thinking like a film student. I'm not thinking analytically about it. I'm just watching it.

BROOM All of the things I have to say afterward, it always takes me a little time to let them precipitate into words. And that's because, like I said, I'm trying to do that too. And this time, the genuine experience I was having was that I felt a little funny about it. Which is a totally legitimate response. The innocent, open part that a kid does is to watch something and at the end feel like, "I felt weird while I was watching that," or "I didn't feel anything while I was watching that." And analytical criticism is just to then say, "Well, I want more than that from movies. Why didn't that work? Let me try to figure out what just what on." That's what my family always used to do. We wouldn't go to the movies with a plan like "and then we're going to talk about it!!" We just went to the movies. But then afterward, the processing would always begin, where we'd all want to talk about what that thing was that just happened to us, which had been completely unspoken at the time.

BETH But you know, I feel a little bit numb, like nothing happened to me. And it's because I put myself into a place where I wasn't going to actually experience it, I was just going to "take it in," sort of removed.

BROOM Maybe there's different categories of these things. Because "just taking it in" feels very natural and complete to me. But your feeling like you didn't actually experience anything because you "just took it in" means something must have been blocked out. I was trying to "just take it in" in the sense of quieting my tendencies to analyze until afterward. But in the process I was experiencing things that made me feel mildly weird.

BETH I just wasn't feeling anything. I don't know.

BROOM Like watching a McDonald's commercial.

BETH I guess.

BROOM That was another thought I had. When I was a kid, there was just crap on TV all the time, which I would just watch as itself. I wouldn't constantly think "Is culture good? Is this a good commercial?"

BETH I feel like this is something I would see at my cousin's house, at someone else's house. At times like that I would think, "Okay, this is what's going to be happening for the next hour and a half; I'm just going to roll with it." And that's what this felt like. I kept looking at the clock. Which I always do when I'm watching one of these.

BROOM I remember in high school once being at someone's house with people who were being nostalgic for their earlier youth, as happens in high school, and they had the laserdisc of The Chipmunk Adventure — the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie — and the girl whose house it was was saying "Oh my god! This music!" And they watched the whole movie — "they" included me — which was a movie of no nostalgic significance to me and of no artistic significance to anyone. And it was just a case of "Well, now I have to sit and wait until this is over." And that thought was not me having a higher critical standard, it's just what the movie was. And yes, that is what this movie was too! And so the challenge here is that now we want to try to put that into words. So if that's what you have to say, go for it.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM That it was a nothing wasn't surprising to me, though it was a little surprising that it was sort of weird and gross.

BETH That you thought it was weird and gross is surprising to me, because I didn't have any thought like that, once. I didn't think "this is weird" even once. I just thought "This is it. This is what I'm watching." So then I feel like, "What did I do to myself to make it impossible to feel this?"

BROOM Maybe you're just not as oversensitive as I am to weirdnesses like that. I have always been very ready to feel, like, "uh-oh, that texture is weird, it makes me vaguely uneasy!" I don't think that's necessarily universal.

BETH I don't know.

BROOM I remember when I was a kid and He-Man would be on, I would think "I don't understand how anybody could like this; this is not my show," and occasionally I would also think, "It's so weird and boring and foreign that its foreignness is a little creepy."

BETH I felt that way about He-Man too. It was so dark — visually dark — that there was a sense of darkness in the cartoon.

[we go on at length about what was uninviting about He-Man]

BROOM And there was something in either just the aesthetic experience of contemplating that, or else in the attempt to get there, the experience of trying to be the kind of person it was for, or trying to understand who it was for and getting lost. "Where and what is this for?" This is, yes, what you would see at someone else's house. This matches someone else's world. This is someone else's horizon. And that would make me a little uncomfortable.

BETH Yeah, I experienced that kind of thing all the time, as a kid. And I know that probably, if I were a kid, this would also give me that feeling, but I didn't feel anything.

BROOM Was there anything in this movie that when you were a kid would have struck your fancy, even through a veil of total disinterest? Anything, like, "hey, that ball looks like it'd be fun to hold," or something like that?

BETH Well, I think I probably would have thought Morph was cute. I think that would be it.

BROOM Morph to me sums up what was creepy about this movie. Because some of it was cute, but then again... He was like a blop of spilled Pepto-Bismol, and, like, they hugged him. He had no motivation. He was capable of absolutely anything. He wasn't really on the side of good or bad. He was scary in the way that worms are scary to me, because, like, "they can move...but what are they??" And yet sometimes he was cute. And that's a weird razor's edge to be playing on.

BETH Yeah. It was unusual. You're right, it was a weird movie. It was weird that they did that to the story. Most of the characters were unlikable. Even the main character wasn't really likable.

BROOM He was a troubled kid, and you hoped one day he'd be untroubled. And then they say, "yeah, he's at military school now and everything's great," but you didn't get to actually feel like "I like him now!"

BETH He really just looked like my brother at seventeen, with his parted hair and dour, overly-sensitive demeanor.

BROOM But your father didn't walk out on your brother. It's God that walked out on your brother. He went off to sail the seas of space and never returned.

BETH Are you recording this?

BROOM I am. I may not transcribe all of it. But I may. You never know. I may transcribe it in a smaller font after Adam goes.

BETH I'm done.

I say:

Finnegans Wake is not unloved because of all the puns and convolutions; they're certainly overwhelming, but they're not what make it really hard. It's actually hard and unloved for the same reasons and in the same ways as the "Eumaeus" chapter from Ulysses, which seems to me to be a clear precursor to the style. Here's how "Eumaeus" begins:

Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed. His (Stephen's) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom, in view of the hour it was and there being no pumps of Vartry water available for their ablutions, let alone drinking purposes, hit upon an expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman's shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt Bridge, where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda or a mineral. But how to get there was the rub. For the nonce he was rather nonplussed but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him to take some measures on the subject he pondered suitable ways and means during which Stephen repeatedly yawned. So far as he could see he was rather pale in the face so that it occurred to him as highly advisable to get a conveyance of some description which would answer in their then condition, both of them being e.d. ed, particularly Stephen, always assuming that there was such a thing to be found.

It's one of the longer chapters and the whole thing is like that.

"Eumaeus" is sort of the black sheep chapter in the book, nobody's favorite, talked about relatively seldom. With all that textual oversharing there's not as much room for academics to insert themselves, so they tend not to. It is hard to read not because it is complicated but because it is blather, and blather is alienating. This is the real sense in which Finnegans Wake is hard, and would still be hard even if it were written in English.

For all that I say that I've read Ulysses, I have never actually made it all the way through "Eumaeus." It always pushed a button in my brain that said "skip," and pushed it hard. I think that's true for many people. One recognizes that Joyce is pushing that button intentionally, but that's exactly what makes it all seem to be some kind of big shaggy-dog joke. Possibly, like the parody of saccharine junk in the "Penelope" chapter, the joke is at someone's expense, or possibly it's just a kind of obnoxious playfulness. ("The language is tired just like the characters are tired" is a standard pat explanation for the chapter.) That's as far as I have generally gotten with it, and of the critical commentaries I've read, many don't get much farther.

But I've always kind of known that this was insufficient. In the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter Joyce flies through many much more rich and specific stylistic parodies at a much faster pace. He was too interested in his own skill and too dedicated to craftsmanship to simply set it aside in favor of willful asininity for an entire long chapter, just to prank the reader, or vent his disgust with bad writing, or to evoke the experience of having one's patience tried by a bore, or, god knows, to depict that "the characters are tired."

Clearly, he found this kind of blather somehow aesthetically rewarding in its own right. Variants of the style occur in other places in Ulysses. This language is impersonal almost to the point of being uncanny: Who is it coming from? Who could such language possibly ever come from? We associate blather with pomposity but Joycean blather is so pure, so untethered from any coherent ego or intention, that it doesn't even manage to be pompous. Its recurrent pretenses to being folksy or personable or clever are so transparently superficial that they aren't really even there; these impressions are just artifacts of the cliches themselves. This blather has no subconscious and no ulterior intention. It simply is.

It is, I think, meant to be the sound of language heard and not of language spoken. "Blah blah blah" is the way we indicate the same. "This is what it sounds like when you hear that talking sound in the world. You know, that weird and evocative blah-blah-blahing?" It is a kind of defamiliarized language, like the thing that words become after you say them too many times to hear their meanings intimately anymore ("milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk") - Joyce I think was fascinated by the thing that syntax and rhetoric would become on the other side of the same curtain of intimacy: clause upon clause, weirdly numb. Like the dancing of creatures under a microscope, simultaneously motivated and unmotivated, organic but soulless. There is no "thou" there for us to grab on to.

Why did this blather-transcendence fascinate him so utterly? I don't know, but some guesses are 1) because it approaches the condition of music; 2) because he was going blind, and was being gradually cut off from the mimetic - which is to say sensory, which is to say visual - aspect of art, and this focus on the autonomous life of language offered an escape from that depressing thought; 2b) because he was going blind and increasingly found himself hearing and processing the world this way; 3) because he felt like this was virgin artistic territory and that was appealing to his ego; 4) because it was an extension of his lifelong interest in art as the refinement of real-world materials.

To elaborate on that last idea - and this is the crux of the thought I am trying to record here - I have the strong impression that he did find it specifically and deeply appealing that this kind of transcendence could be gotten at by digging down through parody and out the bottom. That you can get dumber, and dumber, and dumber, and dumber, and dumber, until something becomes so dumb that it is transporting. That out beyond the most absurd parody is something so pure and strange that the essentially petty idea of "parody" falls away from us, along with much else, and we find ourselves open to stranger and more essential impressions than most art can manage.

Beth and I have been reading Harry Stephen Keeler lately and the other day I said that, in addition to reminding me of Raymond Roussel, Keeler reminds me of the stapled compendiums of student writing that my elementary school would distribute every few months, which my family used to devour with delight. We didn't know or care about most of the authors, so we were free to experience their absurdities as a natural phenomenon, and a wonderful one. I remember thinking, even then, "since we love this so much, why doesn't that make it good for real? Or does it?" I'm still not done with that question.

Anyway, I think Joyce, at a slightly different pitch, was addressing himself to the same thing. Anyone who actually began a sentence with "preparatory to anything else" because he thought it sounded smart would no doubt be a terrible bore and his sentence a terrible one. But if this person is anonymous or nonexistent, if there's no pyschology or intention, behind it, there starts to be a kind of ecstatic quality in the idiocy - when we discard the idea of "error," it becomes joyous. And yet the mode by which we've reached it is unmistakably derived from parody, and so that hint of superiority and disappointment lingers in the air. I think that was a part of his worldview and seemed right to him.

So: fans of Finnegans Wake often talk about it as though its message is "look at us dancing in the gloriously hallucinatory garden of language!" I think it might actually be saying something closer to "look at all this awful awful bullshit you hear people saying! Don't you love it and hate it?"

Here is a sentence from the beginning of Finnegans Wake book I, chapter 4:

It may be, we habben to upseek a bitty door our good township's courants want we knew't, that with his deepseeing insight (had not wishing oftebeen but good time wasted), petrified within his patriarchal shamanah, broadsteyne 'bove citie (Twillby! Twillby!) he conscious of enemies, a kingbilly whitehorsed in a Finglas mill, prayed, as he sat on anxious seat, (kunt ye neat gift mey toe bout a peer saft eyballds!) during that three and a hellof hours' agony of silence, ex profundis malorum, with unfeigned charity that his ouxtrador wordwounder (an engles to the teeth who, nomened Nash of Girahash, would go anyold where in the weeping world on his mottled belly (the rab, the kreeponskneed!) for milk, music or married missusses) might, mercy toprovidential benevolence's who hates prudencies' astuteness, unfold into the first of a distinguished dynasty of his posteriors, blackfaced connemaras not of the fold but elder children of his household, his most besetting of ideas (pace his twolve predamanant passions) being the formation, as in more favoured climes, where the Meadow of Honey is guestfriendly and the Mountain of Joy receives, of a truly criminal stratum, Ham's cribcracking yeggs, thereby at last eliminating from the oppidump much desultory delinquency from all classes and masses with directly derivative decasualisation sigarius (sic!) vindicat urbes terrorum (sicker!): and so, to mark a bank taal she arter, the obedience of the citizens elp the ealth of the ole.

But here is Joyce's first draft version of this sentence, from about 16 years earlier:

With deepseeing insight he may have prayed in silence that his wordwounder might become the first of a long dynasty, his cherished idea being the formation, as in more favoured climes, of a truly criminal class, thereby eliminating much general delinquency from all classes and masses.

Once the reader has been put on to the fact that the surface of the former is only so hideous because it has been subjected to a process of fractal growth, based on insertions and punning overlays, it becomes a fairly straightforward task to extricate an underlying English-language text like the latter. And, like I've been saying all along, the essentially hard thing about this sentence is its blather.

With this in mind, the "fractal growth" starts to seem more obviously like an extension of the same principles, a kind of endless buildup of the needless in the spirit of "preparatory to anything else." Similarly the dreamy vagueness of the actual meaning is kind of a conceptual equivalent: that someone would wish a curse on an enemy who wounded him is cliche, and that the curse might have to do with his offspring is also cliche, and that the offspring of a criminal would be more criminals is cliche, and that society is divided into criminal and non-criminal classes is cliche, but the loopy way these things link up in the sentence is governed by the dream-logic of the listening mind, not by the rational logic of the speaking mind.

The book is meant to be experienced as pure disembodied art, an escape "out the bottom" from all the foolish worldliness of which it is so elaborately and parodically derived. Its extravagance is meant to be fungal rather than virtuosic. Of course, in an esoteric sense, fungus is virtuosic. Joyce's great 17-year labor was to empathize with the virtuosity of fungus so that he could write it, but I don't think he expected the reader to try to follow him there. He seems to have expected only academics and twits ("puzzle hermits and know-it-alls," in Chabon's essay) to try to chase him down the rabbit hole of getting inside his authorial head, and liked the idea that they'd be stuck there forever, undone by their wrongheaded approach to literature. This perhaps was his mistake.

The genuine aesthetic difficulty of the work - the difficulty of crossing into and maintaining an awareness of language in its "milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk milk" defamiliarized state in order to experience art that lives and functions only on that far side of the curtain - is a difficulty for the irrational, observing mind, which is the only part of the self that can make the journey. Unfortunately, when the mind is confronted with a challenge, it applies its rational half. Joyce seems to be have believed that the more he distorted the language, the more he signaled the irrelevance of the task of unraveling it, and helped to guide the reader toward the mode of reception he had in mind. In this sense, Finnegans Wake attempts to be less difficult than "Eumaeus" because it doesn't leave as much room for the reader to think psychologically and come to the conclusion that he is in the company of a bore. Joyce wanted us to understand deeply that we are in no company at all so that we could have the transcendent experience of language without source. But that's the problem - he was alone with it, and so it worked for him, but he is the only one. For the rest of us, he is there. He has ostentatiously absented himself from every convoluted syllable, such that we can think of nothing but him and his peculiar intentions. This I think was a failure of his social imagination.

This thought is here recorded mostly because when I googled to see what other people had said in this direction (i.e. the style of the Wake being an extension of Eumaeus), I didn't find much (apart from a couple pages by Hugh Kenner here). But google has its limits, and I didn't dig too hard. If passers-by can direct me to critical writings that cover this ground, go for it.

I was real, real, real tired when I wrote this and wasn't trying very hard to rein myself in, so I might come back later and prune and edit. I know it goes on. This is how all my papers used to be back in the old minimum-page-count days.

Roll 28 was 1575: R.S. Thomas: Poems. This being R.S. Thomas's sole entry on the list.

The latter four of the five collections above were to be had at the local library and were pulled for me from deep, neglected storage. (They seemed to me a sufficient selection, seeing as the collected poems didn't seem to be available anywhere in my vicinity.) I read most of them. Then I chanced across the earliest collection at a bookstore, bought it, read it, realized it clarified the others, decided I needed to start again. But didn't. Then about a year passed (during which I renewed the four collections thirteen times - apparently the library has an unlimited renewal policy, at least for Welsh poetry). Then I read all of them over the course of about a week. Now a few more months have passed. Here we go.

Here's a photograph of R.S. Thomas from the National Portrait Gallery:

This is a great portrait because it captures the tone and substance of the work exactly. The only essential thing missing is what he's looking at with such apprehension. Though I suppose it's implied. Yes, of course he's looking at the cold Welsh landscape, the raw world and God's silence, but first and most immediately, what he's looking at are his weird rural parishioners.

The earliest work is basically the musings of a country priest who can't help but notice that the flock he's tending is made up of impenetrable, incurious, stunted people, people so ominously unlike him that his soul is troubled. The sequence of poems about the farmer "Iago Prytherch" essentially addresses the same question as American Gothic, but at its full weight: what are such opaque people thinking? Is it not terrifying to consider that they might be thinking nothing at all? Are they closer to the truth than we, or further from it?

(I feel like I should try to make a Western Canon callback to this work on a related theme but sadly, I hardly remember it. I guess there's also a callback to be made to this one but I don't want to.)

Thomas is haunted by the thought that his restless and philosophical mind ("the mind's acid" is a phrase that recurs) might bar him from the real source, the solidity of the man who day after day does the same silent thing, out in a field. But such a man surely is missing out on something. Isn't he? Isn't he?

This seems to me as good a linchpin as any for a spiritual poetry about the meaning of life, which is more or less what I found here.

TRUTH

He was in the fields, when I set out.
He was in the fields, when I came back.
In between, what long hours,
What centuries might have elapsed.
Did he look up? His arm half
Lifted was more to ward off
My foolishness. You will return,
He intimated; the heart's roots
Are here under this black soil
I labour at. A change of wind
Can bring the smooth town to a stop;
The grass whispers beneath the flags;
Every right word on your tongue
Has a green taste. It is the mind
Calling you, eager to paint
Its distances; but the truth's here,
Closer than the world will confess,
In this bare bone of life that I pick.

If you read up on R.S. Thomas, you will quickly learn that there is a Welsh nationalist reading to be had, and that for most scholars - as well as, quite possibly, for the poet himself - the political reading is the primary one. But as you can imagine, that was of little interest to me. Thomas's personal metaphysics are interwoven with the reality of Wales in a way that mine will never be; his politics are (like all politics) an arena for the expression of something else. So I tried to read for that something else. I feel pretty sure he was trying to write for it.

There were, admittedly, a whole series of poems that either tried to use Welsh myth overtly or else were explicitly political in their nationalism. I say "admittedly" because what I'm admitting is that I didn't care about those and didn't make much of an attempt. I felt like Thomas's career-long drift toward greater abstraction and universality vindicated me.

The spiritual bewilderment of confronting a silent farmer, a person who stubbornly insists on remaining an object, an "it" in your field of awareness, is really just a crisis of loneliness. And it is in fact Thomas's "mind's acid" that creates this loneliness, not the opacity of the farmer. And he understands this, in time. In the later collections he cuts out the middleman; the poems become very directly about Man and Nature, God and his Creation, the terrible Machine of modernity, and above all: he himself, the poet. All informed by an expansive loneliness. But a loneliness without vanity.

Vanity I think is the thing I detest most in literature, art, or people, and certainly in poetry. It's a kind of lie, and what are we here for if not honesty? Beauty, I know, but there's no comfort for me in beauty contrived in defiance of truth.

I realize only now that I have never liked the two famous William Carlos Williams miniatures. "So much depends upon" is either all the wrong words, or a phony sentiment. In a poem of sixteen words, they should be the right ones. There is vanity here: why must so much depend on this? Why would we pretend to believe that so much depends on it?

Thomas writes a similar poem but in his, crucially, the phrase is "It is a matter of." British, and without vanity. We can't say what "it" is, only that we feel it to be a matter. It is a something. What is Williams expressing but the same thing in vain, aggrandizing, false terms?

Likewise the plums. "This is just to say" is not in good faith. A real icebox note doesn't need to call itself "this," to name its own humility "this is just." "This" is to do more than just to say - it is to be something, a bit of unacknowledged self-regard. Vanity again.

Thomas is full of arrogance and self-regard, but it is all acknowledged. It is his subject and his burden. He does not derive real satisfaction from it, or believe in getting credit for it. Arrogance without vanity is entirely sympathetic to me; in fact it seems to me the correct and healthy state of mind.

"Arrogance without vanity." Maybe that should go on my tombstone. Or as motto for this site, my living tombstone on the world wide web.

As someone in the process of trying to nurture the spirit by having less mind-acid and less commerce with The Machine, I found the essential problem here quite familiar, and the work entirely admirable and frequently affecting. But I think back to how I felt about The Seventh Seal (and Rilke) and feel something similar once again: this is the art of one who did not know a way out of what he describes. It is the art of problem, not of solution. Even in its acknowledgement of grace, of the unearned that transcends earning, all is still cast in terms of strain, risk, fragility, fatalism.

The first poem I encountered (because someone pasted it into an Amazon review) and perhaps the one that felt most valuable:

THE BRIGHT FIELD

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Yes, real wisdom is there. Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. And this past year I have found this poem inspiring, thought its tone correct. But now, having gone a bit deeper into my own process of relief, and also being on the point of returning R.S. to the stacks, I find myself questioning even this poem. The revelation here is presented in a context of desperation and regret: don't get it wrong and pass it by like I keep doing! "I must give all that I have to possess it" is Christian but it is not enlightened even according to the poem itself. Or perhaps it is, but his religious faith and his work ethic are among the things he must give, and he isn't prepared to mean that at all.

Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. The real enlightenment would be for the poet to look up now, to turn aside like Moses not at some future moment of salvation, but now. But no, the poet R.S. must soldier on, ever straining for the answer, seeking the one true field. In his world, hope and fear are two sides of the same honorable coin. Neither joy nor despair have a proper place here; the only thing to do is keep the tightest possible grip on that coin.

Look what happened to this man:

The work is the record of the habits of thought that do this to you.

The gothic tragedy of the work is that it is quite obviously this business of poetizing that is killing him. Like in some Edgar Allan Poe story, it is the narration itself that is haunting the narrator. For God's sake put down the pen!

SELF-PORTRAIT

That resigned look! Here I am,
it says; fifty-nine,
balding, shirking the challenge
of the young girls. Time running out
now, and the soul
unfinished. And the heart knows
this is not the portrait
it posed for. Keep the lips
firm; too many disappointments
have turned the mouth down
at the corners. There is no surgery
can mend those lines; cruelly
the light fingers them and the mind
winces. All that skill,
life, on the carving
of the curved nostril and to no end
but disgust. The hurrying eyes
pause, waiting for an outdistanced
gladness to overtake them.

For good and bad, it is all set-jaw poetry. It is run through and through with an ethos of strain that I am trying to transcend.

I am quoting a lot of it here because, yes, I liked it. I just want to be smart about how I like it. If these years of Western Canon reading have taught me anything, it's that reading can be dangerous.

SONG

I choose white, but with
Red on it, like the snow
In winter with its few
Holly berries and the one

Robin, that is a fire
To warm by and like Christ
Comes to us in his weakness,
But with a sharp song.

He often drops the line breaks exactly where the thought most resists breaking, which I suppose can give a sense of momentum, emphasizing the magnetic pull that spans the gap. But again, even in rhythm, he aestheticizes resistance; even flow is an upstream battle.

To Thomas, even passivity is a form of strain. This one about sums it all up:

PETITION

And I standing in the shade
Have seen it a thousand times
Happen: first theft, then murder;
Rape; the rueful acts
Of the blind hand. I have said
New prayers, or said the old
In a new way. Seeking the poem
In the pain, I have learned
Silence is best, paying for it
With my conscience. I am eyes
Merely, witnessing virtue's
Defeat; seeing the young born
Fair, knowing the cancer
Awaits them. One thing I have asked
Of the disposer of the issues
Of life: that truth should defer
To beauty. It was not granted.

Look at this! The BBC did a 90 minute radio drama with Jonathan Pryce as Thomas in 2009. I'd listen to that if I could find it.

Okay, I don't need to renew these any more.

BETH Okay, I will start.

BROOM Yeah, you're the one who's never seen it before.

ADAM And who had no idea at all, when this started, what it was about.

BETH I had no idea. I thought it was so unusual for Disney to have a movie that looked and was like this. The script was so strange. The script was great and it had nothing to do with anything Disney had ever done before.

BROOM It had to do with The Ugly Duckling.

BETH Okay. I guess I'm just thinking superficially.

ADAM It was so sad! I teared up multiple times.

BROOM It was really sad.

ADAM Her parents died in a car accident! There was a lot of social realism that we've never seen before and will never see again. This is like All Dogs Go to Heaven territory.

BROOM I've never seen that so I don't know.

ADAM I'm kidding.

BETH It had more to do with the real world.

ADAM Yeah... except for the aliens.

BETH Of course it had aliens, but it had a social worker, it had Elvis... I mean, when have we ever acknowledged outside culture in a Disney movie? Never.

BROOM Is that true?

ADAM Well... What was that short? Set in old New York?

BROOM Alice Bluebonnet?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM But has there ever been a pop-culture reference like this? There were those weird Beatles vultures in The Jungle Book, but that was more like an inside joke. I don't know why we're talking about this. Yes.

BETH There's never been anything as overt as Elvis.

BROOM The tone and spirit of the script was completely different from the norm, but in being about real emotions in the way that it was - which I think is so great - it was tied into the original Disney tradition. Essentially, this is the movie that I've wanted them to make, for the last thirty years of movies. And they only did it once. I don't know why.

BETH Well, no, I think we can find examples.

BROOM But there's a kind of...

ADAM ... realism. And it's really effective. But it's effective in part because it's paired with the surrealism of the aliens. It would be actually really depressing to watch a movie about a little girl whose family is rent apart by uncaring social workers. But the fact that there are aliens in it saves it from being too depressing.

BETH It felt like it was more the story of one person than of a team. All of the 90s movies felt like a bunch of people working on a concept together, and this felt like a very personal story that they managed to tell very well, I thought.

ADAM The Descendants, but with aliens.

BROOM Yeah, a little bit.

BETH It kinda was, kinda.

BROOM I mean, it was like E.T. but with Hawaii. And where the alien is the one learning things, instead of the kid.

ADAM It was really funny, though, in consequence. I thought all the jokes were really affecting. The interaction between the sisters was satisfyingly real but funny, in the way that the interaction between the family members in The Emperor's New Groove was just alluding to. Remember we talked about how they had that jokey interaction?

BROOM I'm not going to knock The Emperor's New Groove for not having been this; the tone there was different. But yes, this was - it's just so obvious, watching it, that the feeling behind it is in good faith, and is not some kind of concocted simulacrum according to a formula like every other Disney movie's sentiment in so long.

ADAM I thought it was great. I thought it looked really pretty but without being over-the-top beeeautiful.

BROOM It is beautiful. The backgrounds are all watercolor; I remember them being proud of that at the time, as they should be. And it's a reference to their Ugly Duckling short - not part of our series - but when they look in that picture book, it looks like the 1939 Ugly Duckling Silly Symphony, and the backgrounds are all in that style. They haven't used backgrounds like that since the 30s, and it gives it such a lush, human feeling.

BETH Also, the way the bodies were drawn was completely different from how they'd been treating women up until now.

BROOM Loving but not fetishized.

ADAM Huge legs.

BETH Yeah, but I feel like they were going for something realistic: very strong legs, unbalanced features, not completely proportionate.

BROOM There was a real spirit in all the designs. I thought it was particularly interesting when they had that Pamela Anderson lifeguard, and it was like they were saying "this is our version of a sexy body, within this worldview." It wasn't fetishistic. It was like the whole movie had a worldview, and nothing was going to break it.

ADAM I like that there's all this Hawaiian dancing, and it seems like it's going to be Disney orientalism, but actually they work at, like, a tourist resort. Which is satisfying, and felt legitimately what it would probably be like to live in the particular milieu of being working-class native Hawaiian.

BROOM Well, their house was pretty nice, until it got blown up.

BETH But it was small. I liked all the details of how the sister wasn't keeping it together. I thought it was great.

BROOM I was feeling like it was one of the very very best - I may still feel that way - but I was thinking that this was a five-star masterpiece for the first two-thirds of the movie, and then once the house blew up, I felt like the denouement had a lot less conviction behind it.

ADAM It gets a little mawkish when he learns to speak English.

BROOM I think you get this effect in a lot of animated movies where they're obligated to have the climax be climactic, and there's a sense of exhaustion. I think they tend to leave that stuff until the end of the production, and it's obligated to be hectic and to trump everything else, and it ends up feeling arbitrary. Here, so much attention had been lavished throughout on the little details, to allow the movie to be about little details, and then at the end it was like, "okay, we're going to do some movie stuff so you know it's an ending." And I felt like the care dropped out of it a little. On the Little Mermaid commentary track, Alan Menken says it stresses him out to watch the end of the movie where the boat's going around in the whirlpool, because he had to compose the cues in a crazy stressful rush.. and I think that's going on in a lot of the final sequences of these movies. When the witch gets really big, turns into a dragon, whatever - those sequences often have a kind of grudging quality to them. And that's what I felt here; some of the air came out at the end.

ADAM When the genie gets too big.

BROOM Actually, that's one of the very best of those types of endings, the ending of Aladdin. But here, when they were chasing each other around in the spaceships at the end, it felt like "let's just wrap this up, please." But up until there it was on a much higher level.

ADAM I liked the personalities of Stitch's alien pursuers.

BROOM I love that one of them is an obvious Dr. Seuss reference.

ADAM The skinny one?

BROOM Yeah, the little one, with the epaulettes for no reason and the little Dr. Seuss Adam's apple.

ADAM But the big one seemed like a Rocky and Bullwinkle reference. He seemed like Boris and Natasha.

BROOM The Russian accent.

ADAM I like that the aliens all look like animals, and that they're all horrified when they see Stitch revealed for the first time.

BROOM The whole setup is really good, and I was especially enjoying thinking of Beth watching it and having no idea where this movie was going or what the attitude of the movie was, as it was revealing itself.

BETH Yes.

BROOM And yes, as we said right before starting this recording, they really paid to get real Elvis songs.

BETH That had to be incredibly expensive.

BROOM It was built into the movie.

ADAM As a kid I loved the effect where you had animation but then you had a real photograph in it, which was an effect you got in both Tiny Toons and in Bloom County.

BROOM I don't think it's been done in one of these before, has it?

BETH It has not.

ADAM I loved it in both of those places and I was childishly tickled to see it here. Both when he watches the cartoon, and the photo of Elvis.

BROOM He in fact watches a non- cartoon. He watches the only thing that is not a cartoon.

ADAM Yes, he watches a disaster movie. Which is very much like a Tiny Toons joke. And maybe was an homage to that. So, thank you.

BROOM Just you wait for Chicken Little. So the character designs are thoughtful and interesting and satisfying, but the animation itself is some of the most fluid, loving animation we've seen in a long time. Especially coming after Atlantis.

BETH It seemed like an entirely different staff worked on this movie than worked on the past five. I mean, I liked The Emperor's New Groove.

BROOM You know I think The Emperor's New Groove is great.

ADAM But this is different.

BROOM This has real heart. This is something good for kids. Not that Emperor's New Groove isn't.

BETH But this is one that I feel like, "oh, I would want kids to watch this!"

BROOM I think the message is a really good one.

ADAM That's why I say it all the time!

BROOM In fact, by being more specific than something like Bambi that just has very general ideas about family, it makes itself valuable. Here they're saying, your family is a place where you understand each other, even though in the outside world...

ADAM I teared up when she said that she knew his parents must be dead because that's why he breaks things. Aw.

BROOM And then that they made it his story. They're struggling because they have a small family, but he's struggling because he's existentially abstract.

BETH He has no roots.

BROOM Which reminded me a little bit of this movie's contemporary, A.I.

BETH Which I have not seen.

BROOM It's very dark and it's nothing like this. But that they made Stitch be the protagonist, even though he can't be the protagonist by any normal rules. Because he's a joke character.

ADAM I like that this is a movie set in Hawaii but the protagonist is not a clownfish.

BROOM What other movie is set in Hawaii, besides The Descendants?

ADAM Uh, probably Blue Hawaii with Elvis.

BROOM Now, is it accurate that everyone on Hawaii would just be able to surf? That doesn't seem likely.

BETH No, they really do.

BROOM Even this ordinary teen girl would be able to surf like that?

BETH I think it's common, yes.

ADAM Barack Obama can surf.

BROOM Can he?

ADAM I believe he can.

BROOM Did anyone else think about the birth certificate when they showed the official State of Hawaii document?

BETH No.

ADAM Which played such a crucial role in the movie.

BROOM Right.

ADAM The movie is great.

BETH It is. I don't understand why your sister thinks it's boring.

BROOM She doesn't remember it. I think she might have been thinking of something else.

ADAM I actually did not remember any of the first twenty minutes, in space. I didn't remember that that happened.

BROOM I did. I remember being sort of tickled by how unusual the movie was, at the time, but I don't think I was as moved or as grateful as I was now. Maybe I just wasn't as invested in what was going to happen to Disney. Or maybe I just didn't realize that Disney was about to really lose it, yet again, so it didn't seem so significant. But now it seems significant. I don't know how they squeezed this one out; I don't know how the guy whose idea this was - based on an idea by, and then he was a co-director - got this to happen. I don't know how this movie happened, but it's cool that it did.

BETH I'm glad it did, too. What year is this?

BROOM 2002.

ADAM All I really remembered about it was "Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind."

BROOM You've said it like four times in the course of the project, and it always seemed funny to me that you remembered it at all, because I didn't remember that. But I do now.

ADAM And I remembered the hunky boyfriend and his fire-dancing routine. He was sort of a himbo, in a way that was endearing.

BETH He had fancy hair.

ADAM "She likes your butt and your fancy hair."

[we read the review]

ADAM How strange that I made a Ving Rhames joke right before we started watching this.

BROOM Did you not know he was actually in it?

ADAM No.

BROOM What did you say?

ADAM I said it starred Ving Rhames and Anne Hathaway.

BROOM Right before I restarted the recording, you said that that was a weirdly earnest review, but I think it was an earnest movie, in its private way.

ADAM There just weren't a lot of pyrotechnics in the wording of that review.

BROOM I think A.O. Scott's gotten bolder in recent years. His mean reviews now have some fire to them. Anyway, I think we agree that the review was right on.

ADAM I'd totally let my children watch it. It seems totally post-9/11.

BROOM Does it? What does that mean to you?

ADAM It has an emotional earnestness.

BETH But don't you think they were developing it prior to 9/11?

ADAM Yeah, I know, I'm being silly.

BETH No, I like that we bring it up every time.

BROOM Well, this is the one to say it about.

ADAM If you had to guess which came before, and which came after: this, and The Emperor's New Groove...

BROOM Guys, let's not forget Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

BETH Atlantis was nothing.

BROOM Now, Adam, it's been a couple weeks since we saw Atlantis. Do you still feel that we were too hard on it?

ADAM Yeah. I just remember it being exciting.

BROOM All right. I was just curious.

ADAM All I can remember is the exciting visuals.

BROOM This one was like a feast for the eyes.

ADAM This was better. Of course this was better.

BETH So much better.

ADAM This was probably the best one after the classic ten. It's the best non-classic one.

BETH I agree.

BROOM Honestly, while I was watching this, I was thinking...

BETH You think it might be "a classic"?

BROOM No, I think maybe I like it better than, like, Beauty and the Beast.

BETH So what are our top ten?

BROOM Thus far? Because let's save some room for Brother Bear!

[We then proceed to try to make a list of ten, but after some consideration, I am omitting this section of the conversation because I deem it to have been premature (see below) and, more importantly, under-prepared. Our fuzzy memories of our own opinions diverge, arbitrarily and sometimes drastically, from our actual opinions as documented on this site. We will return to this exercise as a future date.]

BROOM I like how we're doing a post-mortem because we feel like the true story is over and all that's left is to claw our way through the rubble.

BETH Who knows, maybe Bolt will belong on there.

ADAM I'm actually really excited for Frozen.

BROOM How do you feel about Drop Dead Fred, or whatever? Wreck-It Ralph?

ADAM The title didn't seem promising, but the previews and the posters that I saw looked pretty good.

BROOM I'm worried that it's going to be too tied to actual video game characters and will feel commercial in a way that will grate.

ADAM I think it's gonna be a lot like Toy Story.

BROOM Maybe, but Toy Story was... well, Mr. Potato Head was a real toy.

ADAM And Barbie. And the little green army men.

BROOM You're right. But those things are all each several decades older than Mario. Just the idea of Mario showing up in this movie kind of creeps me out.

ADAM He's probably too expensive.

BROOM Oh, no, he's gonna be in there.

ADAM He is?

BROOM I'm pretty sure they've got Nintendo characters in there. It's good business for everyone. Who doesn't want to be in a Disney movie?

ADAM I'm just saying I think Frozen will be good. And I think that The King of the Elves will be good.

BROOM I don't know enough about what those are.

ADAM I read the synopsis on Wikipedia of the story on which it's based.

BROOM Well I am not un-looking forward to Treasure Planet. It could be fun.

I made up some silly titles for this particular skitch (one notch less than a sketch). But then I realized that if I post it under some whimsical illustrative name, you'd all try to picture the ostensible subject-matter while you're listening. You won't be able to stop yourselves. The title would win, even though it was just a joke. Then I considered posting it under an impossibly inappropriate title ("The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance"), but after a moment's reflection it seemed to me that you'd all still try to apply the inapplicable title to your listening. How could you not?

Titles are just too powerful. No matter how big your work is and how small its title, the title will somehow become a big enough umbrella to cover it all. Y'all might claim that you're just using "Beethoven's Ninth" as a tag of convenience to help refer to an essentially title-less piece, but that wouldn't be honest. Fact is, every note of that piece sounds to you like "Beethoven's Ninth," which is about the dumbest possible title imaginable, a really worthless little clot of text to have strutting through your brain while you listen to that particular music.

For the record, "Ode to Joy" is a pretty inane title too (it always sounds to me a little like "Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence"). But so is "The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance," which is perhaps the kind of title that Beethoven's Ninth might have coming to it, if it had one coming to it, which thankfully it doesn't.

Even good titles aren't actually good enough to justify their overarching status. Doesn't it feel like that play suddenly opens up wide and needs to be completely reconsidered when you imagine that it isn't essentially called "Hamlet," but only circumstantially? Believe it or not, if it were called "The Dark Secret of Elsinore," it would be the same play! Or should be, anyway, but it probably wouldn't be because we can't help ourselves. Is watching "Hamlet" an identical experience to watching the Borgesian untitled play that has the same script?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, is I think what I'm getting at here.

But she's talking about things and people - naming them is fundamental to our system of communication. Artworks on the other hand are experiences. We don't give titles to dinner every night, or to trips to the bathroom. (In a pinch, a good trick is to put "The Dark Secret of" before the ordinary name of the thing.) Wouldn't knowing that you weren't just eating potatoes but were experiencing "The Dark Secret of Eating Potatoes" somehow distance you from the essential truth of the experience? Would you like me to repeat the question?

Or am I wrong in saying that in titling artworks we are titling the experiences? Is "The Mona Lisa" really just our fancy and dramatic way of referring to a certain framed rectangle of wood, the way we have fancy and dramatic names for famous jewels, or mountains, or other glamorized physical things? (A: No. It's a title.)

... Okay, artworks can have titles, fine, if you insist, but then I don't know how to make my experiences of them untitled, and that's important to me. I think I generally find music more moving when I don't know what it is, or at least when I'm not actively aware, in the moment, of what it is. One more form of zen to work on, I guess. Or to not-work on. ("To poop on," as the borrowed punchline goes.)

And calling things "Untitled" doesn't get us anywhere, because the next thing you know someone's making a placard for the museum that says "Untitled" in the same bold black font as any other title. Or worse, "Untitled 3," which is syntactically meaningless unless it's a title. It can't be anything but a title.

I feel strongly that museums should never print "Untitled" as a title; they should instead leave that part of the placard blank, and then at the bottom in small print say "This work is untitled." STRONGLY.

Has anyone written a history of artwork-titling? I would read that. (Okay, I see this, but it doesn't look that appealing. Is there anything better out there?)

That said... click on this hypertext "link" to hear a recording of some music I made up. Clearly the music must be, like, about titles, right? I dare you not to be thinking about titles while you listen.

No, it's really not.

ADAM Well. It's a lot more ambitious than The Fox and the Hound, that's for sure.

BETH I kept thinking about Ocean's Eleven, because it featured a ragtag team of quirky experts, as this tried to do, and made ninety minutes so much tighter and more enjoyable.

ADAM You're saying the quirky crew of characters made this more enjoyable?

BETH No no no no no. Ocean's Eleven has, like this movie, a ragtag team of experts that aids in an adventure. And it's a short, fast movie in which you get to know each of those characters and like them and root for them. And there's also a lot of action. I think this movie wanted to do exactly that and completely failed. I thought it was incredibly obtuse.

ADAM What are you talking about? Audrey was the tough Hispanic heroine who had a chip on her shoulder but secretly, you know, a conscience.

BROOM This movie managed to have not a single thing in it that I found interesting.

ADAM Now come on, that's not fair. It was riotously full of incident and full of invention, for a ninety-minute-long Disney movie.

BROOM What I mean by "managed" is that despite being full of stuff and visually very accomplished, there was not a single thing that genuinely caught my interest. It was all old and it was all done without feeling or sense.

ADAM I thought some of Vinny's dialogue was funny.

BROOM Yeah, Don Novello came out okay.

ADAM I also liked some of the scenes with the chain-smoking older woman who ran the switchboard.

BETH She was my favorite. You thought she was a cliche?

BROOM I think she was the same as the waitress from the previous movie. [ed.: No, different actresses.]

ADAM They tried not to make them cliches even though they were all stereotypes. If that makes sense. They were each doing a bit, but the bit was a little different from what you've seen before.

BROOM I really felt strongly that there was nothing here that the creators of this movie had come up with on their own.

ADAM Couldn't that have been comfortingly familiar?

BETH No!

BROOM No, because it was a bullshit blend. It didn't work. It would have been comfortingly familiar if they had aced it or done it with care. But like Beth said, somehow we didn't actually care about this ragtag bunch. And I know why we didn't care about them: because they were not introduced one by one, which is the way you do that, they were introduced in a scene where he arrayed a bunch of headshots and then named them very quickly. Then later, yes, they each had introduction scenes, but those scenes were grudging and forced.

ADAM This was a very short movie.

BROOM It was longer than the last one.

ADAM To put this much plot into.

BROOM I don't know what the plot was.

BETH I don't either.

ADAM The plot was... what was that movie?

BROOM Avatar?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH It was sort of like Avatar but it wasn't nearly as good.

BROOM It had the girl from Avatar in it, and it had the waterfall from Avatar in it, but it did not have a plot.

ADAM It had the "everything we thought was right is wrong!" feel of Avatar.

BROOM Because they're all mercenaries and then they have to be good guys at the end?

ADAM Except in Avatar he's the only one who's a good guy. And his mom. Or, not his mom, but...

BROOM Sigourney Weaver?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM She's not his mom, but you got it more or less. You got to the psychological core, there.

ADAM Here, everyone is a good guy except for the two bad guys. I didn't see coming that Rourke was a bad guy. He had a very mellifluous voice and charming character.

BETH Are you serious?

ADAM Yeah. What?

BROOM Well, if you didn't see that coming, you probably had more fun with this movie than I did.

ADAM I did have some fun with this movie. I thought Kida's mom was going to come back at the end, but she didn't.

BETH I did too. I thought she was being stored in a netherworld and would be released. I cannot imagine what it's like for a kid to watch this movie, because it was really hard to follow, I thought.

ADAM If this was your first introduction to the ragtag team of caperers movie, what an awesome movie this would be. You'd be like, "how'd they think of all that?"

BROOM I felt like this was tried-and-true crap being dished up again but not right.

ADAM But you've never seen this crap as a Disney movie before. I mean, look, would you rather have seen another [singing] "Somewhere out there..." ... I know that's not Disney...

BROOM I would like to have seen this movie, but good. Beth kept saying she thought she was going to love it; that was because she knew what all the elements were, and she thought they were going to be cool.

BETH I thought the tropes would provide. And they really let me down.

BROOM I entirely blame the writing and directing. It's not because the concept didn't work.

BETH It's the script. I think it's mostly the script's fault.

ADAM Michael J. Fox did not help.

BROOM There was twice as much dialogue as there should have been, so everyone was talking really fast the whole time. It was directed really fast. There were no moments that were real; there was no time that you got to feel that you were really somewhere.

BETH Except in the camp. At night, when they were camping out, that was the one time that I felt briefly, like, "okay, I can do this, this is like a real moment here." For two minutes. I was okay with that.

BROOM Even that scene, maybe I was just in a sour mood, but I felt like, "oh, sure, they each have to have a backstory." And again it was handled like that array of faces: "okay, what's your backstory? okay what's your backstory? okay we love you all, good night."

BETH Because the director didn't know how to do it. Or the writers. Someone.

ADAM Um, everyone: Audrey was a tough-talking Hispanic mechanic.

BROOM She is the worst-animated character...

BETH ...in any Disney movie we've seen.

ADAM She had a sarcastic catchphrase that became a touching catchphrase when she parted from him! Hel-lo?

BROOM "Two for flinching"?

BETH Her face was not consistent.

BROOM She had no expressions in her face. She didn't look right. Whenever she was given emotion to convey, she couldn't do it. I felt embarrassed for her lead animator the first time I saw it, and this time I felt confirmed. Yes. Horrible.

ADAM "Who told you that?" "A man by the name of Thaddeus Thatch."

BROOM Why didn't the grandfather...

ADAM Why didn't he come back, like Frodo?

BROOM No, why didn't Rourke reveal that he had killed the grandfather?

ADAM You think that happened?

BETH It would have added.

BROOM That's a standard part of the shit they were doing!

ADAM I thought it was gonna be like when Frodo comes out of the shadows in Rivendell, and he's been there the whole time.

BROOM Bilbo! Bilbo. Please.

ADAM That's what I meant to say. Correct that in the transcript.

BROOM Yeah. I won't subject you to the humiliation. [ed.: untrue]

ADAM Once I've seen the three-part movie of The Hobbit, I'll remember.

BETH It just seems like the script was fixable and workable, and no one stepped up.

BROOM I have a tip for screenwriters: never have your screenplay revolve around a magic crystal. Never. That is the lowest He-Man choice. "What is the power source? What makes everything work?" It could have been anything they wanted. A magic crystal is so lame. And then the whole second act of the movie is about the magic crystal, and what is it going to do? It can do whatever it wants; it's that magical. And what does it ultimately do? It makes robots clap their hands and make a shield.

BETH It made some cars go. Can we talk about the illustration style? It's pretty different from everything else we've seen. You liked it, Broom, you thought it was good? You said "accomplished" before.

BROOM Well, I often talk about whether it seems like the animators cared about what they were doing. I thought this movie was horseshit and yet I also thought they did seem to care. They seemed excited about the way it looked and the stuff they were doing visually.

ADAM It had a lot of crescendo animations. The city was a little disappointing, but things like the columns, and the volcano, and even Washington D.C. in 1914, I thought, looked kind of cool.

BETH Yeah, but didn't you think the characters looked a little Adult Swim-y? From the early 2000s?

BROOM I think they wanted to, I think they were going for "comic book edginess." The Netflix envelope says something about it being a "rare foray into PG animation." I'm not sure that corresponds so much to the content as it does to the attitude.

BETH Yeah, the attitude. The evil woman's face had a very grown-up animation look.

ADAM Like, the Nazi? Helga?

BROOM But it doesn't add up to anything. She just has a smirk. It's just like a comic book, it's like a terrible comic book.

BETH She had no nose. Her face was mostly white space with a very little squiggle for her nose, which is so not Disney. And I was impressed with that.

ADAM And all the blue glowing looked really blue. And glowing.

BROOM It was a showcase for the special effects team, and I thought it all looked good. But the guy turns into a crystal monster at the end, and then blows up? Come come!

BETH I thought it sucked. I was so disappointed. I really really thought I would like it based on the trailer.

ADAM I liked it better than you guys did, obviously.

BROOM If I were a kid and I didn't know this stuff, as Adam just said, if this was my first time to it all, I think I would be able to have an experience that I'm not able to have with this movie. I would be able to imagine being under the earth, thinking about how crazy that would be. But some of it would also be genuinely scary. When she gets drawn into the crystal and it turns into her? That's incredibly creepy, and it reminds me of the 80s, like I said about The Black Cauldron: this stuff just got into the water and became standard, and I'm not sure the effect on kids is healthy. The crystal person is creepy. And that the guy turns into a crystal because he gets a cut?

BETH That is creepy.

ADAM Why were the Atlanteans Polynesian? Was this supposed to be in the Pacific somewhere? Or was this just some weird misplaced Orientalism?

BETH I think it was that. They didn't know what to do so they just made them look kind of exotic.

ADAM Just ooga-booga.

BROOM Something borrowed, something blue. The whole thing was just stuff. And the music was so over-the-top.

BETH And yet there were no songs, which was refreshing.

BROOM Thank god. That would have been unbearable. But they kept breaking the mood with the jokes, which were totally scattershot, had nothing in common with each other or with the mood of the story.

BETH Really inconsistent, yeah.

BROOM "Oh my god, this incredible portal is opening up!..." [vaudeville sting] "wah-wah-wah!" It had no agenda to be anything in particular to us.

BETH What are we supposed to feel at the end?

ADAM It's supposed to feel like the end of Swiss Family Robinson, where they all go back to the world but he stays behind. It's supposed to feel poignant, but at the same time so right. You didn't want him to go back to the boiler!

BROOM He had nothing. His books are in storage.

ADAM His cat...

BROOM I don't know what happened to the cat! I hope the cat was visible in that scene where the old man was by the fire, at the end.

BETH I don't think it was.

BROOM Another missed opportunity!

ADAM The cat may have been killed in the shipwreck. [ed: confirmed that the cat is present at the fireside in the final scene]

BETH All right.

ADAM I mean, whatever, guys, whatever. Aren't you at least glad they tried something different?

BETH Yes, I am.

BROOM I am, but this is still the kind of thing that depresses me, because it feels like the urge to create a movie is no longer quite based on having anything to say. It's just "let's do the routine," and the routine is not even something they have any particular access to.

ADAM When we went to see the Madonna concert last week, I described it to Mike afterwards as being a "frantic pastiche," which I'll tell you about offline. But this had that element. There were at least ten movies that this reminded me of.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM Yes. And ten episodes of Duck Tales.

BETH The sad thing is, I thought this was terrible, and I think very much worse things are to come. Right? It's gonna get worse.

ADAM I don't know.

BROOM I can't imagine feeling less connected to what's going on than I did during this. I might feel that something is really wrong, though. Yes, there might be worse things.

ADAM Do you guys remember The Rescuers Down Under? Apparently not.

BETH But there was a charm...

BROOM It wasn't very good. But it had that scene where the guy kept moving the eggs around and his lizard was trying to eat them. That was pretty good. You guys don't remember nothin'.

BETH I don't remember. Okay, I think we're done.

ADAM All right. Yeah. Does anyone want to talk about what this has to do with September 11th?

BETH Obviously nothing. I thought we might be able to tie it in; we can't.

BROOM We're going to do the thing we always do.

BETH Read the review.

[we read it]

BROOM You felt vindicated by that? You thought it was as good as he thought it was?

ADAM Yeah. I am pleased to note that Vinny was played by the guy who plays Father Guido Sarducci. Of whose letters I had a book when I was a kid.

BROOM Well, he wrote that book of letters but it's not in the character of Father Guido Sarducci. It's as Lazlo Toth.

ADAM I know. Which I loved as a kid, by the way.

BROOM I didn't discover those until late. It was too political for me as a little kid.

BETH Not for Adam.

ADAM No. Although it was all about Richard Nixon.

BROOM Although there was a sequel where he wrote to George Bush.

ADAM "Citizen Lazlo." I had that also.

BETH So you liked it; that's okay, that's fine!

ADAM I mean, whatever, you won't remember it, but... I don't know, as I was watching it I was like, "well, that went down easy."

BETH I agree with that. It went faster than I expected. Well, no. It didn't go faster than I expected, but it went fast once I realized how much I thought it sucked.

BROOM Once you knew what to expect!

ADAM It was not in the top half, or even in the top two-thirds, but it was not in the bottom ten.

BROOM This was quite low for me, because I felt unable to root for it, because it was so content with what it was trying for and what it wasn't going to try for at all.

ADAM Well, fine!

BETH How many have we seen?

BROOM This was forty-one.

BETH It might be in my bottom ten.

ADAM You guys will get all the character-driven homeliness you desire in the next one.

BROOM You think these characters were especially attractive?

ADAM I don't mean physical homeliness, but the plot of the next one is a lot more "Dear Mr. Henshaw" and a lot less... I don't know...

BROOM "Atlantis: The Lost Empire."

POP A TOMATO, TED

'TIS A SLIT

A TAN TEEN RESEEDS A SAD TENT

SLENDER BEN NEEDS BELLS

ADAM I was gonna say it was like a "Looney Tunes," but it's actually like a "Tiny Toons."

BETH It was strikingly unambitious in terms of what it wanted to be, but it was completely successful. I think of Disney movies as all trying to be greater than what this was. It was really silly, and the time went so much more quickly than it had for maybe the past ten. It was really entertaining the entire time.

ADAM As a kid, I would have been in stitches at the "Wait a minute, what you just said doesn't make sense!" jokes. "Wait a minute, I'm going to spell out a convention here!"

BROOM I am in stitches.

BETH You were smiling the entire movie! Every time I looked at you you had a big smile on your face.

BROOM It makes me smile! And I liked it so much I would even take issue with the idea that this is unambitious. I think it's ambitious in a totally different direction.

BETH But it will never be a classic. It can't be a classic, because... it reminded me of watching a cartoon episode of Friends. The types of jokes are the types of jokes that — most of them are not the way people joke now. It was very of its time. And I think if September 11th hadn't happened, this could have turned into something else. I think that this type of joking ended with September 11th.

ADAM The "Wait a minute, buster!"

BETH The sort of David Spade quality of everything, that the late nineties had. It just ended. There's something else that took its place.

BROOM I feel like this movie is actually a really interesting landmark on the path of comedy; I don't think it's the end of a path, I think it's transitional. You see David Spade being used as David Spade: "uh-bye-bye," "no touchee," and all of that, but there's also stuff in there that I think is if anything ahead of its time, or at least very astute of them.

BETH There's some stuff that is still in the landscape of comedy now, but...

BROOM I think there's a goofball thing here that's not a Friends thing and not a David Spade thing. I remember when I first saw this, the "I'll turn him into a flea and then I'll put that flea in a box and then I'll put that box in another box and then I'll mail it to myself..." bit —

BETH That was my favorite joke in the movie.

BROOM It was my favorite joke in the movie too. But watching it now, I feel like that joke looks forward to what the next ten years' sense of comedy was going to be. And that some of the more Monty Python-style stuff — like where he sticks his head into frame and says "This is about me. Not him." — the spelling it out, like you're saying Adam, the meta- "we're going to joke about the joke," "Why do we even have that lever?" I think is a later kind of irony. In the nineties, they wouldn't ordinarily have made the "why do we even have that lever" joke. Whereas now, ten years after this, it feels like, "yeah, we've really had that out by now." I think this was at the point where David Spade and that were both happening. I don't have a clear sense of how to define that, but I do think there's another element in this movie.

ADAM When we were in college we had a fake TV show premise called "It's the Nineties, Mom!"

BETH I've heard about "It's the Nineties, Mom!"

ADAM Actually the humor and the style remind me eerily of "Monkey Island."

BROOM This is funnier than "Monkey Island."

ADAM "Monkey Island" has funny bits. Like the waitress in the movie, at the Bob's Big Boy restaurant. "Oh, we get that all the time, hon." That's like a "Monkey Island" joke.

BROOM "Bless you for coming out in public" I thought was pretty funny.

ADAM And the Bob's Big Boy sign as rendered in, like, South American glyphs was like a "Monkey Island" joke, I thought.

BROOM I think that this needs to be seen as a significant accomplishment, if only because everything that it tries to be is something that so many movies have tried, and continue to try to be, and they rarely get even close to working. It's usually incredibly tedious. When you asked if you were going to like it, Beth, and I said, "maybe, but I don't want to get your hopes up," I really thought that maybe, watching it now — I haven't seen it in eight years or so — I would feel like it's just grating, I've been Shrekked out and I can't go back here, it's not funny. But there's something real fluid and natural and joyful about this movie that I am very impressed by. It's exactly what Disney usually sucks at! There's rarely a joke that I don't cringe at in other Disney movies.

BETH Yeah, it's edgier than almost any Disney product ever.

BROOM Because Hercules, it just wanted to be this. What else did it want to be but this, a movie that we thought was charming and silly the whole way through? But Hercules for us was like, "okay, we're really trying to work with you, please please just don't be too embarrassing." This was never embarrassing to me.

ADAM Well...

BROOM Yeah, go ahead, tell us what was embarrassing to you.

ADAM This was the first time in a Disney movie where they had, like, a "no homo" joke. And they had multiple ones.

BROOM How do you feel about that?

ADAM Well, I don't know. It's sort of like fart jokes. I'm used to it, certainly.

BROOM You take fart jokes just as personally? Because I know I do. That's why I don't go to Chick-Fil-A.

ADAM It was basically the same joke as in Planes, Trains and Automobiles. You know, the "those aren't pillows" joke. I mean, I don't know — you didn't wince at all at the hyper-knowingness? You don't think that's, like, a blind alley? You don't feel like there was no... well, I was going to say there's no emotional sentiment here, but I guess the kids and the mom were supposed to seem genuinely warm in a kooky way.

BROOM I think they had taken some care to make it clear that joking is a warm family thing in that setting. The joking is going to continue, but here it's going to signify that this is a happy home. It seemed not meaningless, to me.

ADAM I liked that Yzma wore that cloche hat and that flapper-skeleton outfit.

BETH She was a good villain.

BROOM She was great.

ADAM It would have been lacking without her. Kronk is also a pretty funny character, for being the stupid sidekick.

BETH I liked that he was a foodie. Ten years ahead of his time.

BROOM That, again, is I think a joke that was... to come. The absurd specificity of the spinach puffs. And that he can talk to squirrels.

ADAM Didn't you think it was ugly to look at?

BETH Yeah, but it didn't bother me that much.

BROOM I didn't, I thought it was pretty to look at. What didn't you like?

BETH I thought some of the backgrounds were nice.

BROOM I thought the designs were all good.

BETH It felt Saturday-morning-esque, a little bit.

ADAM Yeah, it felt Hanna Barbera.

BROOM To me, the fluidity and the style of the animation was really top-notch.

BETH It's true, the animation is good, but I feel like the character design had a sort of lumpier look.

ADAM It just didn't look like anything Disney.

BETH It felt the least Disney of all of them. But that was a fine thing!

ADAM Well, they disagree with you, because they're never doing this again.

BROOM They made an Emperor's New Groove 2: Kronk's New Groove, or whatever.

BETH What was the reception to this?

BROOM I think it was well-received because I think that was why I sought it out to watch it. I didn't see it in the theater, I saw it on video. And for some reason I think I watched it, like, five times in one month in college. It seemed very familiar now, even though I haven't seen it in many years. I just think it's well designed and well executed.

BETH It's a good script all-around. It's really tight.

BROOM It's just so rare that in these things the jokes are funny. I'm willing to say that this is a very special thing, because I can't think of another cartoon I feel that way about.

BETH I had two or three full laughs.

BROOM And it's funny in an animation-y way, which usually runs the risk of being, like, just animation nerds getting off on their little moments. But those moments were made to land, when they were the point. Like at the end when she's a kitten and she's being evil, and the person animating that kitten clearly enjoyed it, it actually gets a laugh because it's actually fun to watch!

BETH It was self-aware in that nineties way, but... there's nothing wrong with that.

BROOM It makes me happy to see that this has actually aged well. I don't think you need to go into retro mode to understand this.

BETH Yet.

BROOM I don't think it's necessarily going to make it another ten years.

BETH Yeah, I think that soon it will feel dated, and we just happen to be —

BROOM But, you know, old fast-talk movies, The Philadelphia Story or whatever, they're "dated," and yet they explain to you how the comedy works by being so confident about how the comedy works. I could imagine this being a movie that becomes more and more, like, "they sure don't make 'em like this anymore!" but while you're watching it, it works. The Marx Brothers is both dated and not dated at all. For them to be going down a river and he says "We're about to go over a big waterfall, aren't we? Bring it on." — I don't think that'll ever seem less relevant, because a scene where people go over a big waterfall is perennial. It'll always be there. It's not like we can snark our way out of the reference point even existing for future generations.

ADAM I don't know. He has a sort of bro-y snarkiness that is very of its time. I hope.

BROOM But the whole point of the movie is that this is a terrible way to be. The moral of the movie is, "Do not be David Spade."

BETH It is anti-David Spade.

BROOM Which is why it's so bearable.

ADAM John Goodman was a little earnest for me. It was hard to take watching him save the llama so many times.

BETH I was fine with that.

BROOM They're trying to balance these elements, like, David Spade has to be totally unlikable, but we have to like him, and, you know, the movie has to be a total joke, but it has to have a serious thing in it.

BETH Isn't that David Spade's thing? You hate him but you think it's cute?

BROOM But on SNL when he would do the same thing, you know, "uh... Dan Rather... you're an asshole... anal rape..." I would find it unwatchable because I didn't sympathize with his perspective, and the context was not "this is an asshole talking." But here it was introduced as "this is what a horrible person sounds like." We can laugh at that. His attitude was the subject, not the point of sympathy. So I was going to say, it's one of these balancing acts that people never pull off — and yes, maybe there was one too many rescues or one too many betrayals — but they basically pull it off!

BETH Yeah.

[we read the New York Times review]

ADAM That came down a little heavier on the mindlessness than you are. But I liked it. Will you remember any of those jokes three days from now?

BETH I'll remember the atmosphere.

BROOM I remember quite a bit of it.

BETH Because you watched it five times.

BROOM It's just very inviting, to me. I find it delightful.

ADAM The joke of having characters in a non-Jewish setting playing Jews is also a very "Tiny Toons" joke.

BROOM You'll have to tell me when that happened.

ADAM The waitress!

BROOM Saying "mazel tov"?

ADAM Yeah, and being like an old Jew. That would have struck me as hysterically funny, when I was ten.

BETH And that's how "Tiny Toons" was?

ADAM It was exactly like this. They were like cute bunny rabbits, and they would always lapse into vaudeville jokes. Or sort of Billy Crystal stuff. I just thought that was super-funny when I was a kid. I'm sure if I had seen this when I was ten, I would have been transported.

BROOM There's so much more to it than that! When it pulls back and back dramatically and then pulls back further to a bug on a branch, that's my thing.

ADAM Yes, knowingness was really funny to me when I was a kid!

BROOM It can still be funny.

ADAM I'm just saying, it was particularly funny to me when I was ten. That's all I got.

BETH I'm debating giving it four stars on Netflix, which is a big deal for me.

BROOM Congratulations.

BETH Thanks. When most things get twos, Disney-wise...

BROOM Yeah, I think this may be their best film of the past fifteen years. That's how I feel.

ADAM Tangled is pretty good.

BROOM All right. I look forward to the ones I haven't seen. Coming up next, however: Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

BETH It looks great to me from the preview.

BROOM Atlantis starts out and you feel like it might be comic book fun, but then it has to take its own story seriously, and you think, "this story doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. I no longer care about this."

BETH Well, that's the problem with most Disney, and that's why this one succeeded. It did not take itself seriously.

BROOM Exactly.

BETH The end.

ADAM The end.

[we turn off the recording but then:]

ADAM We just noticed from looking at the Wikipedia entry that there is no love story in this movie. And that is very satisfying because it avoids a lot of stupid treacliness. Also no songs.

BETH I was going to say, the lack of songs was great.

BROOM There was the opening and closing number. Which is lively and pleasant. But it doesn't happen during the story.

BETH It's not a musical.

BROOM Right.

[we turn it off again but then:]

BROOM Say it again.

BETH This was a precursor to the "bro-mance," about ten years ahead of its time.

BROOM Uh-huh. Except it was called the "buddy movie" prior to being called the "bro-mance."

BETH But it felt like a "bro-mance" because it had the homophobic rescue kiss scene.

BROOM That's true.

BETH The end again.

[this time it really is]

This is a problem in no small part because this site is running on very old software that hasn't been upgraded since 2004 and that nobody uses anymore. I am accordingly looking into the possibility of upgrading it or transferring the site to other software.

But that all sounds like a pain in the neck, so for the time being I am doing the simplest thing, which is to make all comments subject to my approval. Where you used to get to see your comment appear immediately — except when for some reason the browser screwed up — now you will probably see something like "your comment is being reviewed" or whatever.

Know that it is being reviewed solely in the sense that if it is SPAM it will not go up, and if it is not, it will. I do not have editorial principles beyond that. As should be clear.

Sorry to do this; I know from my own experience that the instant gratification of the comment immediately appearing is important to making commenting seem worthwhile. Please do it exactly as much or as little as you did before. Knowing me, the "review" and approval will probably happen almost immediately since I seem to check my email once every 15 seconds or so.

I'll post something if a bigger and better backend change comes to pass.

ADAM Wow. They sort of head-faked us into thinking this was gonna be another Jungle Book, but it was actually like The Poseidon Adventure.

BROOM I don't know what it was. It was like The Road, some kind of post-apocalyptic movie. Except then it wasn't.

BETH But for most of it, it was. For seventy-five percent of it, it was really dark.

ADAM You were surprisingly gripped.

BETH I was. By the time they were in the cave, I was responding to it. I was talking back.

ADAM I'm not so sure that this was a failure, the way it seemed like it was going to be at the beginning, when it was all that swoopy CGI and that Kevin Costner music.

BETH There was no character development early on — or I was not paying attention —

BROOM So you felt like the "character development" — and I'm going to put that in quotes when I type it up — that existed later in the movie was... meaningful?

BETH No. Well, I don't know.

BROOM You guys understand that the backgrounds were real film, and the credits just now listed all the places they went to shoot them?

ADAM That was cool. There were like eight different places that they filmed it.

BETH I felt like it had to be live, because the water looked way too good.

ADAM There wasn't character development, but there was strong characterization.

BETH Yes, but I felt like I didn't really see it until the middle of the movie. Early on — maybe it's just because I was so turned off by the beginning — no one seemed appealing to me or worth caring about.

BROOM Tell me more about what you were turned off by at the beginning, because I, like I said, was surprised by how early and with what conviction you guys were groaning. It seemed like all we'd seen was sort of —

BETH Incredibly slow —

BROOM — sweeping, beginning-of-a-movie scenery.

ADAM It was the hackneyed sort of establishing shots, and then it was that sort of Rube Goldberg routine with the egg, which was kind of a turn-off, and then the "Mom, can we keep it?" routine, which we've seen literally like four times. And I was just, like, "oh, god. This is just gonna be CGI, and they have not thought at all about the story. It's just gonna be the worst bits of every Disney story just mashed together as an excuse for this rickety CGI."

BROOM And somehow we think it wasn't that? I don't think the movie really changed course.

ADAM No, then it turned into, like, Schindler's List.

BETH It was just that it subverted expectations.

BROOM By having the apocalypse in it?

BETH Yeah.

ADAM By having the half-hour of just death.

BROOM It was grim.

BETH Survival.

ADAM The trail of tears.

BROOM Which exactly appeared in Fantasia already. The dinosaurs trudging across the desert.

ADAM So yeah, let's talk about that music.

BROOM The "Africa" music?

ADAM The whole thing. I called it "Kevin Costner music" because it sounds to me like the music in Dances With Wolves and in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It felt maybe a little antiquated for 2000.

BROOM Sweep. Spectacle. I found the atmosphere of the movie strange, and I didn't know if the music was trying to compensate for that, or trying to be a part of that. I think the music ended up contributing to my sense of a strange atmosphere. It felt unearthly. I'm surprised you say that the "character development" was something that gripped you, because I felt like the characters were kind of at arm's length, compared to most Disney movies. I mean, I recognized them, but it was like through a window.

ADAM She was just like Meg from Hercules. Cynical, allied with evil because she has no energy to fight back.

BROOM She wasn't cynical. She didn't really have a character. She was the sister to the tough guy, and she said "I don't know what to think; things are so different now." That was her whole character.

BETH I didn't care about her.

BROOM There were the terrible one-liners that —

BETH — all Disney movies have.

BROOM Well, that the worst ones have. That a lot of movies now have. It's the sound of a room of scriptwriters.

BETH "My blisters have blisters!"

BROOM Your blisters do have blisters. And then there were plot events that fit into this formula. And there wasn't, for me, a sense of character in between. It sort of made the movie feel like it was happening in a strange other space.

ADAM There was the woman with the strong British accent and the woman with the strong African-American accent!

BROOM Yes. "Shame, shame on you!" She talked like an old lady, but she was in fact the strongest one of them. And that was sort of the revelation of that, the "hitting a rock until it breaks" scene.

ADAM I mean, this movie wasn't good. It just wasn't quite the nadir that I was anticipating.

BROOM Yeah, I agree. But this atmosphere; I'm trying to find the word for it. It had... like science fiction sometimes does, it hasn't been fully realized and that's part of what makes it unearthly or...

BETH Well, compelling, really. I think it's part of what was gripping about it, that it had this otherworldly quality.

BROOM Yeah, exactly.

ADAM And pretend dinosaurs that did not have the characteristics of real dinosaurs.

BROOM Well, I think they actually were just lesser-known dinosaurs. They intentionally didn't pick, like, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex.

BETH Like, not popular dinosaurs.

BROOM Well, I'm not sure about "Carnotaur" — but the black lady was a Styracosaur, and their dog was an Ankylosaur.

ADAM I know that. And he was like an Apatosaur?

BROOM I'm not sure what he was. We can find out. [begins looking it up on Wikipedia] But you know that movie, The Dark Crystal? It's a quest movie in a fantasy land, but the fantasy is so strange and otherworldly that your investment in the quest is sort of — you look at it in wonder and think "what am I looking at?" This seemed like it might be almost aiming at that.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM A better ending would have been if they all evolved into birds.

BROOM Well that little voice-over at the very end — I was saying cynical stuff the whole time about how they're all going to die, and then the voice-over said, "Yes, I'm not sure what to tell you."

BETH "Let's just remember this moment."

BROOM Here it is: Aladar is an Iguanodon. Neera, Kron, and Bruton are all Iguanodons as well.

ADAM Yeah, I got that.

BETH Bruton looked a different type of Iguanodon. I guess he was just harder-edged, weathered.

BROOM Baylene was a Brachiosaurus, and Eema was a Styracosaurus. And the pet Ankylosaur was named Url.

ADAM Did you know those off the top of your head? I would have known Ankylosaur as a kid, but not now.

BROOM I said it before I looked it up. And look: "Carnotaurus, meaning 'meat-eating bull.' Only one species has been described so far." It lived in Patagonia. The article does not have a "Carnotaurus in popular culture" section. But we could add it.

ADAM The movie Ice Age plays on the whole mammals versus dinosaurs thing. But that didn't really get played up here.

BROOM This is very much like The Land Before Time, if we remember that, from 1987 or so [ed: 1988]. A Don Bluth movie, very tacky 80s kind of thing. Oh look at this: "The film was originally supposed to have no dialogue at all, in part to differentiate the film from The Land Before Time, with which Dinosaur shares plot similarities."

BETH Thank goodness it didn't.

BROOM I'm surprised at you two for saying "thank goodness!"

BETH It would have been intolerable!

ADAM Because the first six minutes was the worst.

BROOM I'm so surprised! To me, it's the wisecracking that's embarrassing.

ADAM But at least it goes down easy.

BETH Yeah, it just makes the time pass more quickly. The CGI just wasn't that good. It was very noticeable.

ADAM Yeah, the CGI at the beginning looked like a USA television network extravaganza.

BROOM I would say the CGI was inconsistent. Because sometimes it was very good, I thought.

BETH Yeah, sometimes it was good.

BROOM When he got wet, I thought that was really well done. And I thought the live-action-beautiful-backgrounds idea was occasionally effective. I agree that it looked like ten-years-ago CGI, and that we've gotten used to a slightly slicker standard. But it's mostly just that CGI is itself kind of distancing. You don't really feel like you're there.

BETH So you would have been okay with a ninety-minute silent dinosaur movie?

BROOM Well, they'd have had to construct it differently, obviously. All the more otherworldly, I would have thought.

BETH Yeah, okay.

ADAM What was the cartoon short we saw about how the seal leads the other seals into the protected cove? It was from one of the forties shorts, I think. There's one where the seals go through this magical passageway under an island, and they end up in this cove inside an island, where they're free from predators and it's very beautiful.

BROOM Really? Are you sure that didn't happen to the Smurfs?

ADAM Come on, guys.

[Google efforts along the lines of ("seals" "Disney" "island") turn up nothing]

ADAM I don't want to get distracted here, but this really happened.

BROOM You're going to have to dig into it, because I don't believe you.

ADAM Okay.

BROOM So... this is just like that? Is that what you're going to say?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH Find the review; I think we're done.

ADAM Yeah, I don't have a lot more to say about this other than, you know, if you're composing the list of the five DIsney movies you absolutely never want to see, this is probably not one of them.

BROOM Really?! Compose it. Which are the five worst?

ADAM I don't know. It's too early to say.

BROOM Yeah, I think several of them are yet to come.

[we begin reading the New York Times review, but are interrupted:]

BROOM Okay, it's been discovered that The White Seal, 1973, by Chuck Jones, is the film Adam had in mind. Good call; the ending is exactly the same.

ADAM That's what it reminds me of.

[we finish the review]

ADAM That was a weirdly superficial review from A. O. Scott.

BROOM I don't know, I think he took the time to give it what it deserved, and I'm not sure it deserved different from that.

ADAM I don't know. "It had so many credits!"

BROOM I think that the over-emphasis on the credits in his review sort of matches the nature of the movie; it's like, "technically something was done here, but I'm not sure what was done movie-wise." Do we feel that this is really a Disney feature, that this follows in the footsteps of the tradition in any way?

ADAM Well, I'm glad that it was strange. It was a strangeness that was more interesting than — what was the worst one, The Fox and the Hound?

BROOM That was my least favorite. But, I mean, Mulan was pretty bad. What was the other one there? Oh, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, but, no, that was better than this.

ADAM Also redeemingly strange.

BROOM That had a lot more spirit and eccentricity. I would pick that any day to watch over this. My recollection of this was that it was totally run-of-the-mill forgettable, and it turned out to be not, quite, it was a little more than that. But I think it will disappear very quickly, because the strangeness we're talking about is in subtle tonal things, but what's really going on is very run-of-the-mill, standard stuff, with stupid jokes. It's kind of an insult to us. Right?

ADAM In the grand scheme of things, yes.

BROOM Would you show it to children that you cared for?

BETH No.

ADAM I might. It depends what else was on.

BROOM I wouldn't really care. But I would be disappointed in them if they came to love it. I really made an attempt to watch it as a child would. I tried to be open to —

BETH — emotions that you would feel?

BROOM To the feeling of the space, which seemed to be its main thing. "Now they're in the white-feeling desert, and now they're in the blue nighttime."

BETH Like how you watched Star Wars.

BROOM That's right. And... I don't think there was enough there that I would have liked the movie, as a kid. But there was something going for it on that level.

ADAM Do you think this captures the innocence of the pre-9/11 world, or eerily presages the destruction of the post-9/11 world?

BROOM I think the destruction in the movie was more disturbing to us because we are watching it in the post-9/11 world.

ADAM Oh, I'm sorry, I was thinking this movie came out in 2001, because all the DVD previews were from 2001. I was going to say it would be weird if The Emperor's New Groove was the first post-9/11 one.

BROOM The first post-9/11 movie is Lilo and Stitch.

ADAM Which actually does make sense.

BROOM It was clearly in production before that. But yes, it's sort of suitably humanist.

ADAM Earnest.