We watched Attack of the 50 Foot Woman yesterday, which was one of those instances in which you watch something purely for its pop-cultural value. As a movie it left a lot to be desired, let’s say. Rampant sexism, unbelievably horrible plotting, and some really quite shitty acting.

And yet, it was definitely a great experience. Partly this was for the pop-culture experience it provided – the act of “seeing Attack of the 50 Foot Woman” has its own special life-semiotic value which made it worthwhile. Having only really encountered the classic poster, seeing the movie that brought the poster into existence was great – now we know what it’s like.

But it also did certain things really quite surprisingly well. Although the leading lady was kind of pathetic, I thought her representation of the 50 Foot Woman was quite great, in terms of the booming voice constantly crying out for her husband. Sure it’s dumb, but there was just a hint of something soulful in the image – largely imagined – of this big creature filled with so much anxiety.

Additionally, while a lot of the effects were horrible (the semi-transparent people in the composite shots were so bad I was kind of amazed they bothered), some of them were remarkable. The image for this post is a good example. It’s just a woman and a model of a power pole, obviously, but somehow it managed to look really quite brilliant. They did some similar stuff with the outside of a bar, and of her looking through a window into a hotel. Those moments really did capture the notion of a giant woman rummaging around a town in a way I hadn’t expected in such an old (1958) movie.

It could be that it was just a relief to see a moderately plausible effect in the midst of all the horrible composites and atrocious “big rubbery hand models” and so on, but I think that there was more to it than that. Some of it was perhaps in the expression of leading lady Allison Hayes – she tended to wear a strangely disassociated look that really seemed to fit the scale, even as she also boomed her voice, calling, “Harry! Harry!”

I don’t think I’d recommend you see this movie, but in amongst the shittiness, it does have some brilliant. Maybe it’s got a… 50 foot heart? Right? Am I right? Or am I right?

Ha ha.

We watched Escape from New York today, a kind of great, yet not so great movie from the 80s. 1981 to be precise about it. And, being an 80s action movie, it’s radically different from what we’re used to seeing these days. We also watched Crash of the Titans (2010) yesterday, so that’s an interesting comparison.

The main thing that struck me on finishing the movie was how they allow there to be futility. Notably, the character Maggie at the end (the snake lady from Carnivale looking so young!) tries to kill the Duke of New York by standing in the road and shooting away at his car with a handgun. She misses every shot (though one hits the windshield) and he runs her over with the car. She dies.

This sort of thing is, as far as I can think right now, deeply uncommon in most of the big movies we see these days. The idea of a character taking desperate action and then totally failing in such a way as to have achieved literally nothing before then being killed… well, it’s just not the done thing anymore.

Consider the character Io in Clash of the Titans. She’s as close as you tend to get to the “futile death” in that she just randomly gets stabbed by one of the bad dudes toward the end. Mostly to tug on our heartstrings and to enrage the hero, Australian Perseus. So, pretty futile on her end. But it’s not allowed to stand. At the end of the movie, daddy Zeus says he doesn’t want Perseus to be all alone and instead of bringing back his family (the only people Perseus ever showed any actual connection to), he brings back Io. Futility averted.

Perhaps the best distillation of the “80s futility moment” I’ve seen is in Blood Simple (1984). As he is being buried alive, one character managed to pull a gun and point it at his tormentor. They both freeze, then the guy pulls the trigger once, maybe twice – it doesn’t go off, though there are bullets in the gun. Then, in a beautifully shot moment, the other guy reaches out and oh so slowly takes the gun away. The shot is of just their two hands, both tentative, one trembling with the nearing of death. It’s super evocative – a truly awful image.

If art imitates life, then I guess I should be pumped that life is so much less futile these days… but I think I’d rather take the 80s aesthetic a lot of the time.

Just finished watching Adventureland this afternoon. It’s really quite a forgettable movie by and large, though with a few nice gags and comedy bits and pieces. It’s that kind of movie. Importantly, it’s the kind of movie that you watch and “know” the plot as it unfolds – perhaps not a split second before it happens, but in the way that you simply recognize each dramatic beat and say “ah, yes.”

It’s the “neurotic boy meets sullen girl, falls in love with her, she’s so cool, but she’s seeing someone else, then he sees someone else, then it all blows up, then she leaves, then he changes his life radically to go after her, then he convinces her he loves her, and they get it on” script. There’s utterly nothing new in this whatsoever, no surprises offered.

My initial reaction, then, is pretty snide. I think that it’s a shitty movie. But then I started thinking about the nature of comedy, and particular kinds of comedy requiring a context to work properly. That is, you can’t do gags about being a neurotic kid working at an amusement park unless you have some kind of plot that places you there. And you can’t just do the movie of “a kid working at an amusement park” because it has no narrative arc. So the comedy and the story, though essentially separate, are bound together – the shitty narrative gives a setting and some other context to the gags which would otherwise be free-floating and ineffective.

In this way I have pushed myself toward a grudging respect for such flimsy plots as Adventureland’s – they may suck, but they suck with a purpose.