The Horror, The Horror

...This is a problem...

...Once again on the silver screen, therapy provides an easy catharsis: A shrink challenges, his patient breaks down and sobs, and everything is all better...

...That's the good Coppola...

...We see a shot of him reading a book simply by turning the pages...

...This is the sort of crowd where people stand alone, reading Gabriel Garcia Mar-quez's Love in the Time of Cholera or Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, while others rattle at each other in Italian...

...Actors can certainly portray genius without being on the winning end of the bell curve, but no author can write about brilliance without brilliance...

...Let a zombie munch on a guy's arm or a madman hang his enemies on a meathook—it no longer frightens me, for I've achieved a clinical detachment: This week's zombie arm-munching looks far more realistic than last week's...

...By the end of the movie the two are hugging and weeping...

...Perhaps you remember it: full of pompous existential angst about what it means to be a killer and the horror of war...

...A postprandial Thanksgiving walk leads my family to The Rainmaker, Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of John Grisham's bestseller...

...Miniver, pops up again fifty-five years later as a not-so-dotty old Southern belle and does a stylish job...

...Saturday, December 6. Three hundred of the most chic moviegoers in America are crowding into the lobby at the Angelika Film Center, on the border between Greenwich Village and Soho, where you can't get popcorn but you can get an arugula sandwich on a baguette and a cappuccino for $8.50...

...Gruesome imagery became such standard issue that The Silence of the Lambs could win an Oscar for Best Picture in 1992 with several scenes straight out of a gore movie (like the one in which Anthony Hopkins slices off a policeman's face, places it over his own, and escapes from custody...

...Or Shoah...

...This time, she plays a clone who looks like Ripley, her old character, but is actually part Ripley, part alien...

...A working-class genius named Will Hunting has the greatest mind for mathematics in the world, but he prefers to work construction, get into fist-fights, and live a lowdown life in the South End of Boston...

...The unknown Matt Damon turns in a star performance as the young lawyer, and Jon Voight reinvigorates his career as a killer corporate lawyer with a molasses-sweet arrogance...

...I would have enjoyed it more if Robin Williams had turned into a zombie and taken a nice, big chunk out of Matt Damon's arm...

...So the old gross-out just doesn't work that well anymore...

...Not to worry...

...The motto certainly wasn't accurate for Alien...

...This too is a doozy of a character: another math genius from South Boston, who went off to Vietnam, decided to become a therapist, had a happy marriage but an unsuccessful career owing to the fact that his beloved wife seems to have spent most of the last forty years on her death bed...

...Herr (whose only notable credit is Dispatches, an appallingly anti-American book about the Vietnam War) also wrote the narration for Coppola's Apocalypse Now...

...Last year's Scream, now out on video, begins with a powerful five-minute scene in which Drew Barrymore is stalked around her own house as she talks to the stalker on a cordless phone...

...Is it, perhaps, a revival of The Seventh Seal...

...I was so terrified that I could not stay in my seat...

...As Damon plays him, Will just seems to have memorized a lot of stuff, which he can recite back really fast without taking a breath...

...The Rainmaker is a shaggy-dog story about a kid graduating from an unimpressive law school with few prospects...

...That's nothing these days...

...Alien: A contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz edits the editorial pages of the New York Post...

...Damon and Affleck seem to have confused idiot savantry with genius...

...And even though the special effects are astounding (particularly a scene in which the aliens do a kind of Esther Williams water ballet), there isn't a moment in Alien: Resurrection with a tenth of the power of that original chest-bursting scene...

...She isn't very talented, she isn't a big star, and yet she got $11 million to appear in Alien: Resurrection...

...shrieks and cries of terror rang through Chicago's State Lake Theater, where I saw it in 1979...

...The shrink tries to strangle Will Hunting at one point, which is probably a good idea, but doesn't really seem therapeutic...

...I was humiliated by my cowardice and resolved that I would see every horror movie that came through Chicago until I was no longer controlled by my fear...

...By the 1990s, you could see the chest-burster from Alien do its thing on any basic cable channel...

...Resurrection has so many gross-out scenes—it's easily the most violent movie I've ever seen—that it's hard to sort them out, what with the holes in people's heads and the deformed clones of Sigourney Weaver and an alien birth and God knows what else...

...He finds work with a lawyer who runs a strip club when he is not chasing ambulances, and teams up with an older schlub who has failed the bar exam six times...

...I fled across Randolph Street to wait, trembling, for my companions to emerge...

...Good Will Hunting is a movie about a genius written by two men who are not geniuses: the actors Matt Damon (the same one from The Rainmaker) and Ben Affleck...

...No, it's Good Will Hunting, which turns out to be a heartwarming TV movie from the 1970s updated with profanity and a dedication at the end to William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg...

...When it's good, it's wonderful, and that's because of Coppola's remarkable talent...

...And Teresa Wright, who won an Oscar in 1943 as a young war bride in Mrs...

...when it's bad, it's embarrassing, and that's because of Coppola's remarkable lack of judgment...

...in this way as in many others, he less resembles Einstein than Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man...

...An unrecognizable Mickey Rourke is hilarious as the redneck attorney who hires Damon...

...She goes through the movie with an evil smirk on her face, and why not...

...The bad Coppola joined Grisham in stacking the deck against the insurance company so thoroughly that the case itself isn't very interesting...

...Just as the social scientists warn us what happens to children who are exposed to violence on film, I grew "desensitized...

...I saw low-rent slasher movie after low-rent slasher movie (many of them given holiday titles like New Year's Day and April Fool's Day and Mother's Day to remind one of the hit Halloween), zombie epic after zombie epic (my favorite was Dawn of the Dead, in which zombies take over a Philadelphia shopping mall and take rides on the little horsie outside Woolworth's...

...But in New York in 1997, all I heard was a little nervous laughter and no screams at all...

...Coppola shows yet again what an amazing eye for casting he has (that is, when he's not casting his daughter Sofia in Godfather III or his nephew Nicolas Cage in Peggy Sue Got Married...

...And what is the film that has drawn this formidable crowd to this cocktail-party lobby...

...On top of which, he hired Michael Herr to write a voice-over narration for Damon to read throughout the movie...

...Back in 1979, Alien featured a special effect more graphic, horrifying, and disgusting than anything previously attempted: A tiny alien literally bursting through the chest of a man who is screaming in pain...

...It worked...

...And from there it's off to the races, the Frank Capraesque little guy against the corporate big guys...

...hmm, they must have improved the prosthet-ics...

...Thursday, November 27...

...Alien: Resurrection is actually rather clever in its way, especially in its handling of Sigourney Weaver, the robotic actress who has starred in all four of the Alien films...

...The movie is a lot of fun...

...In space," said the famous advertisement for the original film, "no one can hear you scream...

...The audience doesn't for a minute believe Will Hunting is one of the most intelligent people on this earth...

...And what an eighteen years it's been...

...But suggestion, tension, threat—these do work, and always will, if they are handled well...

...Eighteen years after the original Alien comes a third sequel, this one called Alien: Resurrection...

...There's so much black clothing on display, both men's and women's, that I feel like a popsicle in my yellowish winter jacket...

...I'd smile too...

...Nothing happens for a long time, but the scene gets more and more frightening and will be one of those sequences that people remember for the rest of their lives...

...But it's a sweet little movie—too sweet for my tastes, especially given the overdose of saccharin provided by Robin Williams, who plays Will Hunting's shrink...

...Well, the narration here is full of pompous existential angst about what it means to be a lawyer and the horror of litigation, and it's completely out of keeping with the jaunty tone Coppola uses for the rest of the movie...

...That evening at the State Lake Theater changed my life...

...But our hero somehow comes upon a case of a poor young man being shafted by an insurance company, which refuses to authorize a new treatment for his leukemia...

...Through movie magazines dedicated to the horror genre—the most pretentious was called Cinefantas-tique, the most adolescent was called Fangoria—I became familiar with the names of special-effects guys and their innovations: Tom Savini is the one whose zombies spill red Karo syrup out of their mouths to simulate blood, while Rick Baker figured out how to transform a man into a werewolf before your very eyes...

...As I grew desensitized, so did the rest of the country...