The Talkies/Hit List

...Dracula, like Batman Returns, Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, and so many of the industry's top hits these days, is a good example of the post-modern style...

...ut bad films do not have to be B about right-wing villainy...

...You've got to admire the skill with which Batman and Miller's Crossing both make use of their pop culture conventions¡ªthe comic book and the gangster film respectively¡ªin order to help bring into focus what is really a very serious and humane view of the world...

...From Easy Rider to Capricorn One, which was one of a spate of paranoid films made in the wake of Watergate, to JFK, which tied up into a neat little package every wacko theory about how evil right-wingers started with the assassination of Kennedy and then went on to screw up the rest of the world, for twenty years it has been possible to make a little money, at any rate, out of pretending to find someone in power who is responsible for everything that goes wrong...

...Kramer vs...

...For at some point during those years, Hollywood discovered postmodernism¡ªthat self-conscious, self-referential, ironic style which now seems to have entrenched itself in the American film industry forever...

...You can thank post-modernism for that, too...

...The result is an almost balletic product that succeeds in amusing both as an homage to and as a send-up of the old-fashioned Hollywood- action film...

...Nothing since has done anything like it, and very little since has made itself so much a part of our national conscious ness in the way that movies used to do not infrequently...

...What all these films have in common is not that they are ill-made...

...It is among the award-winners, the prestige projects, and the box-office hits that we may find those gems of awful ness whose claim to public attention and esteem is based on fantasy or falsehood...

...Once that fact is established, anything is possible¡ªanything except the kind of artistic greatness that in retrospect seems to have been comparatively common in the 1970s...

...It is this framework that is the real hero of all three films...

...True, senti mentality has always been endemic in Hollywood, but the kind that seems to have come to the fore in recent years, especial ly in truly breathtakingly awful films like E.T., Field of Dreams, and Fried Green Tomatoes, seems to me to represent a particularly virulent strain of it¡ªone that is the corollary of post-modernism's detachment from reality in favor of the movie dream-world where anything can happen and so nothing of any interest does...

...This Dracula has given up trying to scare us, but still insists, "It's only a movie...

...Both films were added to the top ten because they were great of their kind¡ªthe kind that Hollywood has been producing for the past ten years or more...

...Proclaiming that "the hero is back," the Indiana Jones chronicles in fact replaced him for millions who didn't know he had been gone with a post-modernist simulacrum...

...That may be why, ultimately, if there are no more truly bad films than there used to be, there are so many fewer truly good ones...

...From that time onward, heroes¡ªat least heroes like Luke Skywalker rather than Batman¡ªdisappeared for good...

...They were selling the counterculture of the late sixties, and watching such puerile moral fables today is all that it takes to explain why Yippies eventually turned into yuppies...

...In other words, it is now impossible to make a movie about vampires without acknowledging that vampires exist only in the movies...

...7...

...Kramer, Apocalypse Now, E.T., Field of Dreams, Born on the Fourth of July, Fried Green Tomatoes, and JFK...

...He is in no way an ordinary guy but a kind of madman, obsessed with being a hero...

...Kramer sets up a debate between responsible behavior and the creed of self-realization as if they were equals, as if Meryl Streep's ridiculous cant about "self-esteem" and having left her hus band and child in order to "find" herself had to be taken seriously...

...The Godfather is perhaps as near as we shall ever get to the great American movie, a terrifying and beautiful image of the immigrant experience, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a particularly moving and updated version of that declaration of independence which so much of American art, culture, and politics reduces to...

...The "generation gap," both its myth and its reality, was never better symbolized than in The Graduate, and the eternal tension between American innocence and experience never found a better embodiment than in Midnight Cowboy...

...Smith...

...For this it would have been easy to choose obvious dogs like Ishtar or Hudson Hawk, but I found it more inter esting to focus on malicious, mendacious propaganda rather than mere incompetence...

...The world he lived in may have been unfamiliar, even fantastical, but as a character he was as familiar as Gary Cooper's Sergeant York or Jimmy Stewart's Mr...

...On the contrary, they were all more or less successful at the box office and convinced a lot of people that they were deeply meaningful, even great films...

...Oliver Stone, you will not be surprised to see, made two of them...

...James Bowman, TAS's movie critic, is the American editor of the Times Literary Supplement All of them are filled with striking images and witty dialogue and clever ideas, but all of them are dramatically incomprehensible apart from the cinematic tradition to which they make continual reference...

...The ten worst films of the last twenty-five years, then, are Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point, Capricorn One, Kramer vs...

...Indiana Jones, on the other hand, knows nothing but his own heroism...

...One illustration of the way in which less changes among the bad than among the good is the constancy of the left-wing conspiracy movie...

...My top ten, in roughly chronological order, were: The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Patton, Five Easy Pieces, The Godfather (Parts I and II counted as one but not Part III), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Star Wars (but not the sequels), The Deer Hunter, Batman (but not the sequel), and Miller's Crossing...

...What worries me most about the last twenty-five years is the apparent degradation of the critical faculty by which audiences should be able to recognize such political, psychological, or sentimental claptrap...

...As Dr...

...They can also adopt the fashionable language of pop psychology to sell the bogus creed of self-fulfillment...

...These men symbolize those base human instincts which, but for the civilizing influence of progressive movie-makers, might drive all men to be conservatives...

...The first two seem almost too easy a mark now...

...Vietnam, as the most convenient sym bol for things going wrong, has thus provided the natural setting for right-wing bad-guys like the evil Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now or the evil Sergeant Barnes in Platoon...

...And if Star Wars forges the classic American alliance between idealism and initiative, teens and technology, and redefines for us optimism and success, The Deer Hunter comes closer than any other film I know to an unusual but unflinching American stare into the black maw of defeat and failure...

...Luke, for all his futuristic accoutrements, was an old-fashioned hero in an old-fashioned situation...

...And it is more interesting to expose such meretricious trash, so often cried up by the cultural elite, than to pile on with the rest when some lame inanity like Bonfire of the Vanities is gang-tackled...

...It is one of those films that is more about other films than it is about the real world...

...It will be noticed that not only is there a gap of more than a decade in this listing between The Deer Hunter (1978) and Batman (1989), but there is also a huge gap in style...

...W e can date the post-modernist revolution in Hollywood to the success of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones series...

...S uch films appeal to universal experience and, where they have a "message" beyond sympathy for their characters, it is at least a true one¡ªwhich is what sets them apart from those on the ten worst list...

...Spielberg cares nothing for Indy himself but, with a nodand a wink to the audience, dearly loves the heroic cinema that utterly defines him...

...For while egregiously bad movies were fairly evenly distributed throughout the period, the really great ones seemed to be concentrated in the earlier part of it...

...But I am not altogether sure that they deserve their place at the expense of such great pre-post-modernist films of the seventies as A Clockwork Orange, Deliverance, or Taxi Driver...

...Beyond the political badness, beyond even the psychobabbling badness, there is the sentimental badness, which is the worst bad ness of all because it is not just based on falseness but is false all the way through...

...But they all had something to sell, and what they were selling was completely bogus...

...As I scratched my head over this, along came Francis Ford Coppola's version of the movies' most famous vampire to remind me of the reason for it...

...Johnson said with characteristic brutality, "the woman's a whore and there's an end on't...

...Spielberg runs him through his hair-raising adventures and impossibly close shaves at such speed that he has no time to establish an existence independent of the self-consciously Hollywood-heroic framework set up to contain him...

...He may have been a simple kind of guy, as heroes often are, but he was recognizably human...

...You can see what I mean if you compare Indy with Luke Skywalker of Star Wars...

...To amuse myself, I made a very personal choice of the ten best and the ten worst general-release American films of the past twenty-five years, and I found a curious asymmetry...

...The trouble is that such a technique is inevitably tainted with the mockery out of which it rises...

...Just as poetry gives us the language by which we define and bring into intellectual order the chaos of experience, so films at their best give us the images...

...Above all, he didn't know he was a hero...

...A similar ten sion, between the elite and the popular, finds expression in both Patton and Five Easy Pieces and both in their very different ways will be long remembered for their images of the more or less unsatisfactory compromises that Americans have always been forced to make between these two opposites...

...W hat those films have in common with the first eight on the list is that they entered into the folk consciousness...

...Likewise, Born on the Fourth of July is what comes of taking self-pity seriously and indulging it, for both political and psychological reasons, instead of calling it by its right name...