negative criterion: dishonesty.
Of course, fraudulence abounded across cinema. Anyone who had ever been privy to a relationship between truly opposite personalities, for instance, had to be aware that most romantic comedies were utter horseshit; and if you’d ever spent more than a layover in Europe, you recognized that behind every “prestige” picture set in the golden French countryside or on the verdant Italian coast was hidden the actuality of rank plumbing, apathetic service, ambient anti-Semitism, and very few nonsmoking oases.
B movies, however, were the worst. These beacons of untruth—not only the stock and trade of Booth Dolan but also the breeding ground for Spielberg, Lucas, and other brokers of the meretricious—were composed of everything that Sam abhorred: characters who are absolutely good; characters who are mindlessly evil; otherwise retiring femalecharacters who turn into unstoppable killing machines whenever children are endangered; black characters whose sole attribute is nobility; characters who say funny things while being held at knifepoint or gunpoint or facing some other existential threat; characters who are wholly defined by their sexual traits—like horny females deserving of death and impotent venal males; brilliant preadolescents; brilliant serial killers; attractive streetwalkers; tanned scientists; God and heaven; the devil and hell; people with magic powers—“superheroes”—who dress up in costumes and fight crime but never use their magic in a sexual context, which would be the first thing that a normal person would do (and definitely the first thing Sam would do); spaceship control panels of unlabeled, colored lights; canted—“dutched”—shots used to suggest the presence of the supernatural; extreme wide-angle lenses—“fish-eyes”—to suggest first-person intoxication or disorientation; shots that dive, swoop, tornado, or otherwise behave as though the viewer is a fussy toddler in a high chair who needs distracting, and the camera is a spoonful of mashed peas coming in for a landing; and (excluding a handful of special cases) sequels.
By the opposite token, the movies that Sam considered exceptional were varied, artful, and—centrally—true. There was the icily beautiful and terrible childhood of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; there was Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and the meticulous hearing it gives to the existence of a resoundingly unspecial boy; there was Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, a tragedy about two hopeless men—the first hopeless in love, the second hopeless in his loyalty to the first—that was disguised as a bank robbery caper.
The single take in all of cinema that Sam loved best was in Dog Day Afternoon, when Al Pacino’s Sonny asks John Cazale’s Sal if there’s a country where he wants to escape. Sal replies, “Wyoming.” It’s a simple two-shot: Sal to the left, Sonny to the right. Lumet doesn’t try to highlight the moment with a cutaway to a close-up. The line should be a gut-buster, but the laughter never slips past your lips. Because, as the two men look at each other, as the viewer sees that Sonny sees that Sal doesn’t understand, we realize that these criminals threatening murder are basically children, and there’s nothing amusing about that, it’s heartrending and awful. Sam could remember, at age fourteen, watching a rented DVD of Dog Day Afternoon, alone in the house—Allie out,Booth far away—the pitch black of a northeastern winter night pulled over the living room window, the pulsing, weeping bullet hole of a zit on his neck forgotten in the rapture of the film. When Sal said “Wyoming,” Sam—all by himself—cried out to the empty house, “Oh, God! Will you guys please just give up? They’re going to kill you!”
And it was just a two-shot. The director hadn’t intruded, the actors hadn’t seemed like actors, and it was so authentic, so recognizable; the exchange was the sum of every dismayed realization ever
Of course, fraudulence abounded across cinema. Anyone who had ever been privy to a relationship between truly opposite personalities, for instance, had to be aware that most romantic comedies were utter horseshit; and if you’d ever spent more than a layover in Europe, you recognized that behind every “prestige” picture set in the golden French countryside or on the verdant Italian coast was hidden the actuality of rank plumbing, apathetic service, ambient anti-Semitism, and very few nonsmoking oases.
B movies, however, were the worst. These beacons of untruth—not only the stock and trade of Booth Dolan but also the breeding ground for Spielberg, Lucas, and other brokers of the meretricious—were composed of everything that Sam abhorred: characters who are absolutely good; characters who are mindlessly evil; otherwise retiring femalecharacters who turn into unstoppable killing machines whenever children are endangered; black characters whose sole attribute is nobility; characters who say funny things while being held at knifepoint or gunpoint or facing some other existential threat; characters who are wholly defined by their sexual traits—like horny females deserving of death and impotent venal males; brilliant preadolescents; brilliant serial killers; attractive streetwalkers; tanned scientists; God and heaven; the devil and hell; people with magic powers—“superheroes”—who dress up in costumes and fight crime but never use their magic in a sexual context, which would be the first thing that a normal person would do (and definitely the first thing Sam would do); spaceship control panels of unlabeled, colored lights; canted—“dutched”—shots used to suggest the presence of the supernatural; extreme wide-angle lenses—“fish-eyes”—to suggest first-person intoxication or disorientation; shots that dive, swoop, tornado, or otherwise behave as though the viewer is a fussy toddler in a high chair who needs distracting, and the camera is a spoonful of mashed peas coming in for a landing; and (excluding a handful of special cases) sequels.
By the opposite token, the movies that Sam considered exceptional were varied, artful, and—centrally—true. There was the icily beautiful and terrible childhood of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander; there was Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and the meticulous hearing it gives to the existence of a resoundingly unspecial boy; there was Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, a tragedy about two hopeless men—the first hopeless in love, the second hopeless in his loyalty to the first—that was disguised as a bank robbery caper.
The single take in all of cinema that Sam loved best was in Dog Day Afternoon, when Al Pacino’s Sonny asks John Cazale’s Sal if there’s a country where he wants to escape. Sal replies, “Wyoming.” It’s a simple two-shot: Sal to the left, Sonny to the right. Lumet doesn’t try to highlight the moment with a cutaway to a close-up. The line should be a gut-buster, but the laughter never slips past your lips. Because, as the two men look at each other, as the viewer sees that Sonny sees that Sal doesn’t understand, we realize that these criminals threatening murder are basically children, and there’s nothing amusing about that, it’s heartrending and awful. Sam could remember, at age fourteen, watching a rented DVD of Dog Day Afternoon, alone in the house—Allie out,Booth far away—the pitch black of a northeastern winter night pulled over the living room window, the pulsing, weeping bullet hole of a zit on his neck forgotten in the rapture of the film. When Sal said “Wyoming,” Sam—all by himself—cried out to the empty house, “Oh, God! Will you guys please just give up? They’re going to kill you!”
And it was just a two-shot. The director hadn’t intruded, the actors hadn’t seemed like actors, and it was so authentic, so recognizable; the exchange was the sum of every dismayed realization ever
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