Nosy, Nosy Nicholson

CHINATOWN

Screenwriters, welcome to Heaven. Here's my pick for the best-written movie of all time. It's not as quotable as Gone With The Wind, nor is it as line-for-line stunning as Casablanca. But this gritty, shockingly nihilistic neo-noir, penned by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, takes the cake due to its skillful structure, keen attention to character, staggering intelligence, and, most of all, its extraordinary economy. There is not a second that could conceivably be cut from Chinatown. Each self-contained shot, each crackling exchange of hard-boiled bons mots, each action, big or small, desperate or cunningly mapped out, sends the story zooming forward like an out-of-control freight train, until at last we arrive at that bloodcurdling final revelation, a twist so unimaginable and unwieldy in its power that, to this day, it's still the iconic silver-screen whoah! moment.

Our hero is PI JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a detective with all the rapier wit and hard-won ingenuity of one of Bogie's famous shamuses, but none of the bitterness; no matter what's happened to him before-and we learn, ultimately, that quite a lot has happened-he's a courtly, businesslike guy. He's hired by Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray to tail her husband, water tycoon Hollis (Darrell Zwerling). She thinks he's fooling around, and Gittes uncovers evidence of just that. However, it turns out the Evelyn Mulwray he met with was, in fact, an impersonator. The real one (Faye Dunaway), is disgraced, furious, and ready to press charges. Things really get complicated when Hollis is found drowned, most likely murdered. Hired by the real Evelyn to investigate her husband's death, Gittes uncovers a city-wide political conspiracy, and finds himself up against not just a few evasive suspects, but instead an entire far-reaching system of merciless exploitation and utter corruption.

One man versus The Man-not an uncommon conceit. But most heroes bring down the baddies without breaking a nail or a real sweat. No matter what obstacles were thrown at Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe we never felt any they were in any real danger. Good would triumph. Gittes, by contrast, must stoop to jarring levels of hostility, almost sadism, in order to make headway in his quest for answers. In the film's first act, Gittes conducts a polite interrogation with Evelyn over dinner and cigarettes. By the final act, he's callously slapping her around, infuriated by her constant lack of forthrightness. He goes from covertly taking photos and digging through old record books to thrashing a man half to death against a gate. Watching this decent man snap under pressure gives the film its terrifying pull, reminding us of the reservoirs of evil that lie deep within the hearts of all good people, waiting to be tapped.


Nicholson plays brilliantly on his loose-cannon public image here, presenting us at first with the most restrained, relatable character he's ever created, only to drag him deeper and deeper into the depths of despairing mania. He may not display his psychosis in deranged babble or jittery tics, but we know from the look in his eyes in the film's morbid finale that he's just as broken inside as Randall Patrick McMurphy or The Joker. He's been lied to and manipulated and taken advantage of so much-as have so many of the people he's come to know whilst on the Mulwray case-that he's lost all his faith in the human race, and by extension, his ability to connect with the rest of its members.

Chinatown is an embarrassment of riches. Dunaway deserved an Oscar for making despondency repulsive and seductive all at once, and on the technical side of things, Jerry Goldsmith's score evokes the spare, spit-tobacco pseudo-beauty of the movie's setting, a bone-dry Los Angeles in its days of burning. However, for all its successes, I believe the essentials reasons for the film's considerable achievement are threefold. Two have already been mentioned-Towne's flawless script, Nicholson's knowing performance. The third is Polanski's superfluous direction. His methods are questionable (word is he physically abused Dunaway to draw out her darkest side). His results, however, are not. Having lost his wife to the Manson murders just before shooting began, Polanski truly understood the nature of the metaphysical, almost viral despair Towne was trying to document, and thus captured it perfectly. There is a fearlessness to this movie that floors you. It inspires true, bone-deep horror without a single jump scene or bloodbath. The true monsters, Polanski explains, are us, and isn't that the most terrifying thought of all?

Movies like Chinatown marked a sea change in the moral fabric of the American cinema. As the Golden Age of Hollywood slowly but surely dimmed, movies were shaken out of their Technicolor reverie by the plunge of an economy, the dissolution of a long-prevalent sub-culture, and the death of a president. It was post-Zapruder, post-Altamont, post-My Lai, and the climate of national malaise was so strong it infected even our escapism. We didn't go to our movies for dreams-we went for nightmares.
From the mid-1960's up until the watershed release of the first Star Wars in 1977, theaters were filled with a string of cinematic screeds that viewed a shifting (rotting?) America through a lense of Nietszchean abnegation, and Chinatown was the arguable apotheosis of the genre. Whereas Casablanca and Best Years of Our Lives inspire unchecked pride by showcasing the beauty of human sacrifice, this picture accomplishes the opposite, steeping us in the shameful foibles of our sinful nature and delivering a chilling message that grows more and more prophetic with every schoolyard shooting or suicide bomb, a message best summed up by Evelyn's father (John Huston); "You see...most people never have to face the fact that in the right time and the right place...they are capable of anything."

Show Me How You Taboo

So how do you celebrate getting accepted to a film studies program that allows for only 15 new freshmen a year? A. Drinking heavily B. Dancing heavily C. Drinking and dancing heavily D. Writing a MASSIVE essay on the virtues of Burlesque. Correct answer? D. It is written.

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The 68th Annual Golden Globes (or, as the stars call it, "a free dinner") took place last week, and it was indeed a kick watching Melissa Leo get her long-deserved due (though Helena Bonham Carter apparently didn't think so), and witnessing the in-the-big-leagues-now stupefaction that poured forth from the makers of the night's cinematic Secretariat, The Social Network. But, when all was said and done, my mind was dominated by one thought;Burlesque and Black Swan went home with the same number of awards! Finally, Cher and Darren Aronofsky can be mentioned in the same breath! My life is complete. Such was my priggish attitude until a few days ago, when I journeyed to the Inwood with some brave friends to check out the...erm...less prestigious of the two aforementioned pictures. As the credits rolled, I began to realize that Burlesque and Black Swan are connected by a lot more than the collective goodwill of the Hollywood Foreign Press. Indeed, in examining the surprising abundance of common ground between the two movies, I've come to discover yet another failing of commercial Hollywood. I try (in vain) not to bitch and moan about the State of Big Movies Today, but, seeing as this particular strain of showbiz STD encourages filmmakers to take the parts of a potentially good movie and assemble it into something monstrous, I feel as if said ailment is worth discussion, and said bitchery is justified.

There are two kinds of bad movie; that kind that compels you to stay and watch the train wreck, and the kind that compels you to embark on a search for the nearest vomit receptacle. Burlesque is of the latter category; it sets off a faint charge of glitzy guilty-pleasurability in its opening minutes, but before long that charge dissipates completely, and you feel as if you're watching some crazed experiment where a movie tries to see how many corpses of older, better movies it can resurrect while simultaneously shooting itself in the foot. I'll get to what makes the picture unwatchable in a minute; but first, the pissed-off elitist in me can't resist taking a moment to list just a few things that make it flat-out bad:

1. I never thought I'd see the day when movies would have the gall to outright steal scenes from other movies, verbatim and with the tongue nowhere near the cheek. The creators of Burlesque are like that person who repeats old jokes in hopes of coaxing out new laughs. They show us a postcoital chat in the rain intercut with Christina Aguilera belting out a solo in a nightclub, and expect that we'll smile and cream our pants because it's so reminiscent of that classic moment in Cabaret where Bob Fosse showed us a postcoital chat in the rain intercut with Liza Minelli belting out a solo in a nightclub. We also get not one but two faux-Chicago numbers where everyone seems to be doing their best (correction: worst) Renee Zelleweger impersonation. But nothing beats one of the early dances, a modernized "Diamond's Are A Girl's Best Friend", featuring Aguilera center stage donning a top hat and covered in period bling. If this sounds like Moulin Rouge, it sure looks like it too, so much so that I think Baz Luhrman is perfectly within his rights to sue.

2. Methinks that, when everyone heard about this movie, we all expected it to be pretty damn mediocre, but we were united in our excitement for one thing; XTina would be singing jazz again, returning to the territory she conquered so brilliantly on her Back to Basics double album. The film misses out on even this glaringly obvious opportunity. Aguilera gets a whopping seven solos, but, with the exception of her admittedly incendiary cover of Etta James's "Something's Got a Hold on Me", they are all blah excursions into the field of fizzless R&B lite. The lyrics are laughably generic, and the simple, silly melodies cave in under the weight of the diva's famous vocal exertions. For my money, they might as well have had her sing the same song six times.

3. Honey, I shot the screenwriter. His name's Steve Antin (he also directs), and I don't doubt he's got talent, but he carefully conceals his abilities with his work here. Firstly, we get one of the great awful lines in the movies; "When you're putting on your makeup, it's like you're an artist. But instead of painting a canvas, you're painting your face." Wait, you put makeup on your face? Omgsh rlly? But Antin isn't content with so small a dose of infamy. He doesn't seem to understand the idea of structured subplots-he lets huge chunks of one story play out, then huge chunks of another. We get about 15 minutes of musical numbers and backstage ballyhooing, and then a half an hour of romantic dilly-dallying, and then ten minutes of "comic relief" that play like humorous oppression. Indeed, this movie is so poorly put together that, when Cher appears in the final act to wrap up her part of the story, I had legitimately forgotten the specifics of her character. When you're having to forcibly remind yourself that CHER is in the movie, perhaps something is wrong, yeah?

4. If the club Cher's character owns is about to go under, why is said club absolutely packed in every scene? Whoopsies.

Speaking of Cher, I suppose I should commend the so-called Goddess of Pop for what she does here. Marshaling her remaining vocal juices and seen-it-all gusto, she tears into her scenes like she's working a live crowd, exuding a get-offa-my-runway sort of fascination that stands above the detritus and allows her to emerge from this hot tranny mess relatively unscathed. She even makes her one big solo (?!) work. However, she can't make the movie function as a whole. No one could, because it makes one big, unforgivable mistake.

Cleopatra. Alien Vs. Predator. The Hangover. Showgirls. What do these movies all have in common? I love them. I honest-to-golly, 100% adore them, and will gladly commit to any one of them when they pop up during one of my channel surf-a-thons. Are they Truffaut? No. Are they filmic fugues or even enduring pieces of pop art? Time will tell, I guess. But I really admire what these movies do. They're so far-fetched, so utterly commercialized and silly, that they just can't stand for something. They will never be a metaphor for this or a dissemination on that. It won't produce a lasting emotional reaction. Hell, you might not even remember them the next morning. But they lift your spirits for two hours or so, get you drunk on the cheap but inarguable excitement of seeing a group of well-meaning artists aim low and hit their target spot-on. What makes a truly great popcorn film (and, make no mistake, popcorn films can be just as great as something by Bergman or Bunuel when done right) is a picture that, instead of attempting to turn outward and face the peculiarities of today's world, shields us from them by immersing itself in the specifics of its genre. In layman's terms, we go to a western for shoot-outs, witty banter, and ol' fashioned values. If you declare yourself a western, give us shoot-outs, witty banter, and ol' fashioned values.

I should take a minute and clarify the above paragraph, or I'm very much afraid I'll come off as a philistine. I'm not against innovation in film; I'm simply saying that, if you're going to build your movie on genre conventions, you'd better tweak the blueprint pretty carefully or the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. My issue is not with movies that mix genres, a la Ghost or No Country for Old Men. My problem comes when a movie sets out to entertain by delivering genre conventions, but then is too embarrassed to do it right.

Take Appaloosa. It's about two gruff gunslingers (is their any other kind?) played by Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris, who come riding into town to catch world-class criminal Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons). We get a lot of somewhat amusing back and forth between Mortensen and Harris. It's the kind of world-weary jocularity we miss from the old Singing Cowboy days, and our hearts leap up in ecstasy; that is, until Renee Zelleweger slinks onto the screen as a beautiful broad with a twisted, long-festering connection to Bragg. Now all of a sudden our heroes are immersed in serious moral quandaries, and the movie starts to ask us questions about the nature of justice that parallel our own troubled times. Question: if the movie's got such lofty material to explore, why are we wasting time with the jokes? And, if its a simple Western, why is there so much deep-dishing between the genre-based scenes?!?!?!

See what I mean? Ambition is great, but two ambitions running perpendicular to each other and shoehorned into the same concept just ruin everything. This leads me to the crux of this manifesto; modern movies are afraid to be "bad."

Now I don't mean bad in the traditional sense of the word. I mean "bad" as it is perceived in the minds of those bombastic braggarts who spend their days reading Kracauer and jerking off to David Lynch documentaries. These folks think that the cinema is good only for illuminating the truths of our human experience, and movies made for pure entertainment aren't worth the cost of the celluloid. That's bullshit. We need The Seventh Seal and Umberto D and the like, but we also need movies that, using a certain amount of craft and more than a little gumption, rub our faces in violence, sex, profanity, films that allow us to experience the cathartic shock and awe of watching the elaborate realization of fantasies we think too base or flat-out silly to acknowledge and appraise ourselves. We need the movies to go further than we would ever even attempt, so we don't have to.

Not every movie has to be like this, but some of them should. They fill some small but pressing psychological need we have as a species. Showgirls takes us behind the scenes of a strip club without ever forcing us into a real one. The Hangover lets us watch the consequences of debauchery from the outside. And so on and so forth. From the eye-for-an-eye ideals of the western to the soaked-sheets curiosities of in-the-bedroom potboilers and beyond, the pulpy pleasure of these movies is that they rub our faces in their genre material, giving us what we want to see without forcing us to produce it ourselves. These films are often called guilty pleasures, but, to paraphrase Barbra, they got nothin' to be guilty of, a fact which brings us back around to what's wrong with Burlesque.

Done right, Burlesque should've been rated R. It should've reveled in the drama that takes place in a venue that features half-naked girls shaking their stuff to raunchy le jazz hot. But instead of seizing the chance for a bawdy melodrama, the picture is embarrassed of its dirty roots and tries to be about something. We get alot of Xtina crying, drinking, and shouting herself into oblivion as she finds herself torn between a strapping young bartender (Cam Gigandet) and a monied patron (Eric Dane). See, it's really about a woman trying to choose between consumerism and the beauty of true-blue, torn-curtain showbiz. It's about selling out vs. selling yourself short. It's about...fuck it, what would've been so bad if it were just about catfights, star turns, and scantily clad broads of beauty?! The actual dance scenes are so sanitized that they make Penelope Cruz's rope dance in Nine look like Jenna Jameson material by comparison; all boobs, butts, and even bare legs are carefully covered. It's a burlesque movie without the burlesque. Why not set the damn thing in a concert hall and call it a day? Here's a movie that should've been gleefully overdone, a 90-minute-or-so trashfest. Hell, the trailers market it as one. But it winds up as something PG-13wholesome. Gross. The film wants to smell like a Big Mac but taste like steak, so ultimately it tastes like shit. I was offended that it gave me nothing to be offended about.

FINALLY, Black Swan comes into play. Here's a movie trying to do the same thing Burlesque does, and I don't care what you say. But there's a key difference; like its lead character, this one actually gives in to its darker inclinations. It struggles with pretension and makes a few half-hearted stabs at "meaning", but by the end its simply an exceedingly well-done horror film, which is exactly what it should be. This is how genre film is done. It takes solid technique and crackling energy, and uses those assets to put us inside the mind of a woman on the edge without us having to stand on that precipice ourselves.

The worst moments of the movie come early on, when director Darren Aronofsky tries to force meaning, tries to pound home the dichotomy of his two main characters with all the subtlety of Glenn Beck. But once he lets Natalie Portman's Nina really take a grand plie on the wild side, we do too. From that infamous sex scene onward, Black Swan is a deluge lurid, luscious, unstintingly graphic imagery that causes our eyes to bulge in shock even as our minds register childlike astonishment. The film figures out new ways to present the old horror movie tricks-jump scenes, stabbings, "it's alive!" discoveries, and, in its final moments, it hits a home run as Natalie Portman succumbs to perfection, and her pipe dreams come crashing down to earth in a deluge of blood, feathers, and shattered glass. Those final five minutes approach the summit of the best Frankensteinian transformation scenes, no small feat for any motion picture. Black Swan dives headfirst into the depths of time-honored convention, and fearlessly accepts its genre conventions as its only meaning. It's been misinterpreted (or rather, over-interpreted) by those showering it with golden statues, but I'm certainly not denying that its an achievement. Buoyed by Portman's galvanizingly gutsy work, it sets out to do something deceptively simple, and does it pretty well. Burlesque, by comparison, claims it has the spells but doesn't even try to cast that ol' black magic.

I feel perhaps a little too strongly about this subject, a fact that really hits home when I consider that I intended this article to be roughly a page long. But, as I think of the number of films this applies to, the mind boggles; look at the forced political analogies in Revenge of the Sith, the ridiculous allusions to 9/11 in Remember Me, and on and on. These movies are opportunities for us to willfully submerge ourselves in the absurd, but Hollywood would have us watch these fantasy worlds through a glass case of topicality instead of letting us play around in them. Break taboos, Hollywood. Live a little. Sometimes, people go to the cinema to indulge some of their simpler instincts. Don't shoot for the moon when you know you can really do wonders with a star. Stop sneaking "relevance" into our escapism and assuming that one rotten ingredient couldn't possibly ruin the entire recipe. Don't sanitize what you sell as raunchy. Grow up by dumbing down a little every now and then. Einstein once said "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one", and, while the movies are all about smoke and mirrors, I think reality is one illusion that the genre picture can do without.

Let's Misbehave!

Happy New Year, kids! Good news? Barbra Streisand's made it yet another 365 days. Bad news? So have I. Anywho.......ready for a think piece on one of the most underrated movies of all time? I'll take your submissive silence as a "yes".

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN

This is Fred Astaire's least favorite movie. He was reportedly livid that he couldn't prevent the homage to him that serves as the film's finale; "They don't realize the thirties was a very innocent age....it just makes you cry, its so distasteful", he griped. I wasn't alive back then, and thus can't fault the his comments, but I do think the man approached the picture incorrectly. It is not attempting to comment on an era. It's a film full of music and, at the core of its sad, sad soul,about music. With the utmost care and reverence, it performs a daring act of cinematic surgery, taking the sweet, spirited, piquantly hopeful heart of the best MGM song-and-dance stunners and using it to power a story replete with the icy blood of post-modern skepticism. It pits overblown optimism against burnt-out cynicism and forces us to consider the horrifying question; in certain circumstances, could the former actually be worse than the latter?

Told through lip-synced renditions of the Jolson-era music he peddles, this is the story of down-on-his luck song salesman Arthur (Steve Martin). Desperate to maintain his glass-half-full view of a world that seems to take peculiar interest in speedily disassembling even his smallest hopes and dreams, he begins cheating on his doormat wife Joan (Jessica Harper) with lustrously vulnerable schoolteacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters), setting off an intricate ballet of suspicion, jealousy, and sexual insecurity that climaxes with the two new lovers escaping to the Big City, a spur-of-the-moment excursion that they will pay for dearly; indeed before the curtain falls, the random unfairness of life and the subtle internal damages caused by deeply human failings will shatter all three characters' image of the ever-elusive American dream. Here is a movie that begins with a kick-line of chorines and ends with a midnight hanging.

Interestingly enough, much of the film's success can be attributed to those occupying two of the more obscure behind the scenes jobs. Let's start with the music researchers. When you're making a period picture, they're helpful. When you're making a picture about period music they are essential. Writer/director Dennis Hopper had a grand idea here, one that brilliantly bursts the confines of the typical movie musical and explodes the boundaries of what the form can do. InSingin' in the Rain or Bells Are Ringing or a hundred other mu-see-kal feelms, the characters sing jazzy little ditties when happy, weepy, string-soaked ballads when sad. Here, the characters use songs to comment sarcastically on their troubled existence. When Arthur is denied a loan, he launches into a frenzied rendition of "My Baby Said Yes!". As all three main characters hit their all-time low, they don sailor suits and strum guitars to the carefree tune of "Life's A Bowl of Cherries". Introducing irony into the most straight-faced of art forms is not easy. One misplaced song could've upset the dangerously delicate tone of the piece, and this bold experiment would have collapsed. Instead, Potter and his magnificent research team have plumbed the back catalog of Depression era music, unpacking forgotten curiosities ("It's A Sin to Tell A Lie") and refurbishing brassy classics ("Let's Misbehave"). In every song, the lyrics, rhythm, even orchestration (props to Marvin Hamlisch) all serve to comment on what our anti-heroes are going through. Note-perfect, indeed.

Snaps also to whoever had the cajones to sit down at a roundtable of battle-hardened, pea-brained studio execs and propose the following: "I want Steve Martin to play a calloused, deranged, adulterous loser!" At the time there existed a whole army of actors who drew huge crowds by playing calloused, deranged, adulterous losers-Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, hell, even Christopher Walken, who steals this movie in a spit-spot cameo as a raunchy young pimp. But Steve Martin? Fresh off The Jerk, the Iliad of slapstick pictures? Who would shill out the sheckels to see him as the very definition of a douchebag?

I'm sad to report the answer is hardly anyone. Pennies from Heaven was a stone-cold flop upon its release. Still, on DVD (where it's acquired a deserved cult following), it floors you just how wrong anyone else would've been for the part. Arthur's great flaw is his hopelessly inept vision of existence as musical comedy. He believes life, like the movies, guarantees a happy ending, no matter the missteps taken along the way-this is optimism as weaponry. Martin played similar characters for laughs in his previous features, but here, the primitive buffoonery is tamped down and tragically real. In Nicholson or Hopper's hand, the guy would've simply been an asshole-these actors are the dictionary definition of hard-boiled. Martin's manic energy-plus our knowledge of his career up to this point-transforms Arthur into such a crippled man-child that, even as he dallies with abortion, adultery and murder, we're damned if we don't feel genuine affection for the guy. There's a deeply unsettling scene where Arthur, deep in the ditches of social insecurity, lecherously persuades Joan to commit a sexual act of heinous perversity. Any other actor would bite down on this showboat moment like a ravenous bulldog. Martin tiptoes delicately around the obvious, playing it with the pathetic yearning of an attention-starved labrador.

Martin may power the movie, but he doesn't carry the whole thing on his shoulders; if we didn't believe the two women who serve as Arthur's main motivations, we wouldn't be sold on his actions. In a film where both female leads grapple with thoughts of depression, suspicion, insecurity, and even murder, Harper and Peters resist the urge to make their suffering glamorous; they recognize that, despite the Old Hollywood genes that compose a large part of the picture's DNA, these characters are not something out of a 30's matinee marvel. Peters in particular astounds; the cutesy mannerisms that permeated her early work are stripped away here, and her trademark sing-songy speaking voice, which has ruined many a role for her, actually works for the part, adding much-needed comic relief during the school scenes and compounding her already powerful sex appeal. You watch her in Pennies from Heaven and think to yourself that, with a little luck and a lot of direction, she could've been a much bigger screen star.

It's a shame this movie really bit it at the box office, but not a surprise. If you look closely at the specifics of the plot, you'll realize that the two big draws that would put asses in theater seats sort of cancel each other out. Those looking for a return to pre-WWII escapist cinema scoffed at the idea that elements of psychodrama and Greek tragedy could be introduced into that purest of movie genres. (See Astaire quote at the beginning of this piece.) And those out for insight into the minds of flawed, fascinatingly complex characters probably figured it wasn't worth sitting through those intolerably jazz-hand orgies to get to the tidbits of analytical insight. It's a damn shame, because for either group to miss out on this masterpiece is just about unthinkable.

Musical buffs; in addition to some impressively accurate imitations of Busby Berkeley's camera-friendly, shifting-shapes choreography, we also get a wholly original staging of the title number that's jaw-plungingly stunning enough to be mentioned in the same breath as Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain dance or Audrey Hepburn's gonzo ballet in Funny Face. Let's just say it involves a sizzling soft-shoe, a tricked-out diner, and hundreds and hundreds of cascading gold coins-so many that some of them remain scattered about the studio lot even today!

As for the psyched-for-psychology crowd, think of this movie as a brilliant mind game. It convincingly re-creates the Technicolor, studio-backlot musical milieu, then populates it not with gleaming glitterati but with the kind of embittered, quietly lost people who went to those old-fashioned movies-the kind who needed escape. It takes people who fill their heads with fantasies and places them in those very fantasies, where they realize that, when lived instead of simply imagined, their self-sustained Utopias collapse under the weight of their painfully acute humanity. Pessimistic, but not nihilistic. Hell, even a little hopeful in a way. Burlesque this ain't.

Indulge this weird comparison; when I listen to David Bowie's "Life on Mars", this movie always comes to mind. The song is about a little girl lost in the world of the movies, and the questions that form in her head as she loses herself in silver-screen bliss. "Is there life on mars?", she ponders. This movie has an implicit answer; "maybe we're better off not knowing, sweetheart."