Film criticism is of course always a subjective exercise but, despite my informal and personal style, I usually try to write a review based not just on my personal feelings while watching a picture but on my knowledge of cinema technique and history as well. It’s hard for me to do that with Audition, because I think it’s probably not that bad but I very much didn’t like it. At the same time, I almost liked it, and can see how I could have.

The story is that of Mr. Aoyama, a widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who, when told by his son that he looks old and lonely, decides it’s time to remarry. But he is old—older, at least, than his first time around—and doesn’t know if he has what it takes to jump back into dating, a young man’s game. He wants to find his ideal woman, but on the other hand he doesn’t particularly want to work at it. What’s interesting here is that it’s never quite clear whether he actually worries that he no longer knows how to go about finding a wife or if he’s just not actually that interested in the process, only doing it because his son suggested it and it seems like the right thing to do.

When a friend suggests the idea of holding a phony audition for a nonexistent movie as a pretext for screening many wifely candidates Aoyama agrees—half-jokingly but, as always when something is half a joke, half not.

Scores of young women arrange for an audition, but through all the process only one catches Aoyama’s eye: A quiet yet charming girl named Asami (Eihi Shiina). Aoyama’s friend advises him that something about the girl doesn’t feel right, and besides they should really hold at least one round of callbacks; this is an audition for an important part, after all. Aoyama ignores his friend. Since first seeing her résumé, he’s had eyes only for Asami.

He calls her, meets her for dinner, is more enchanted by her all the time. Eventually he invites her to go away with him for a weekend, during the course of which he intends to propose. After Asami makes him promise that he’ll love only her, the two make love. By morning, she’s disappeared.

If it seems I’ve described a lot of movie without mentioning anything horrifying, it’s true. If you didn’t know going in that Audition was billed as a horror movie, it would be a long time before you’d ever guess. For most of its running time, the movie has no dealings at all with the trappings of the fright film. It’s deliberately slow-paced, showing Aoyama’s life as no different in its mundane details from anybody else’s and keeping firmly, almost defiantly, grounded in realism. This story of a man with an unorthodox plan to find a wife is the stuff of either romantic comedy or melodrama. As the movie goes on, the viewer decides it must be the latter and begins to bring his own notions to the proceedings; a lifetime of seeing movies means we know what to expect in this kind of movie.

And that’s why I almost liked this movie. Audition is essentially a long, slow buildup to the last 25 minutes or so, when the audience’s trust is violated and its expectations are thrown aside as the film does a quick about-face and becomes something else entirely. This could make for a wonderful horror movie experience. Audiences have seen a lot of movies; we’re pretty savvy and we have a good handle on the way things are done in different kinds of movies. I don’t know if it’s possible for a modern audience to be completely fooled like this—we remember what happened with Janet Leigh and so are wary of giving our trust 100% to any movie—but in Audition it’s done about as well as it can be. By gaining your trust before violating it so completely, the movie works for its scares, something so many horror movies are unwilling to do.

It’s what happens after this turnaround that made me not like the movie. Asami is revealed to be not so sweet and demure as she’s seemed but a violent maniac. So far, so good. But the events that follow, as she feeds a previously mutilated victim a bowl of barf (though it’s not 100% clear whether that part actually happened in the film’s reality or was merely a dream, you have to watch it either way) and tortures Aoyama with needles and piano wire, are so thoroughly unpleasant, so much more a test of endurance than anything else, that I couldn’t enjoy it.

It’s not that I had to look away and hide my eyes against somebody’s shoulder, like a girl in a cliched movie about kids on a date in the 1950s. It’s just that I wished I wasn’t watching it at all, and that a movie that had worked so hard at pulling me in for the last hour and a half would then try to scare me rather than just try to turn my stomach. And it is stomach turning. Those with weak constitutions and an even moderate aversion to gore should avoid the movie entirely. There’s none of the fun sort of splatter you can laugh and hoot at, as in a well-done zombie picture. There is only unrelieved awfulness.

This movie really drove home to me the idea that I think I’ve outgrown the horror gorefest. By outgrown I don’t mean to say it takes a childish mentality to enjoy that kind of movie. I know that isn’t true. But I think that I’ve come to a place in movie watching habits and that I’ve seen that kind of blood-spraying movie so many times that it no longer interests me. That combined with just how far Audition goes in its efforts to make you feel bad made it impossible for me to enjoy.

A certain kind of audience loves this movie just because it has such icky scenes. I’m sure there are others who are delighted by the way Audition plays with our expectations and turns what we think we know about movies upside down, and who also found that the nastiness of the film’s last half hour was just right for them. But I suspect there are a lot of viewers like me, who wish the end of the picture had been something else, something worthy of all the work done getting there.

It would be a standard trivia question type of game show, but with a little twist: the contestant puts his very testicles on the line.

Round one would consist of a set number of questions. Each question answered correctly is worth some cash. For each incorrect answer, the contestant has his nuts squeezed in a Christmas style nutcracker.

The second round is a little different: the contestant must correctly answer ten questions to move on to the next round. In the allotted time, the host will ask as many questions as necessary. But it isn’t just a ticking clock you have to worry about, no sir. At the start of the round, the contestant’s balls are placed in the mouth of the nutcracking soldier. When the timer starts, the nutcracker begins gradually squeezing tighter and tighter until:
A. The contestant gives ten correct answers
B. The contestant’s gonads explode
You’ve got to keep your wits about you in this fast paced round!

The third and final round is similar to the first in that each incorrect response yields a crunch from the nutcracker. The third-round twist is that the contestant must also answer the questions while holding a lit Roman candle in his ass; if the firework falls out, you get another nut squeeze, the round instantly ends, and the player forfeits all his winnings up to that point.

You’d watch a show like that, right? I know I would! And believe me, people would play it. Shows like Fear Factor proved that people will do just about anything if the prize is good enough. Heck, people will even compete fiercely when the only prize is the chance to be Bret Michaels’ girlfriend, which I’d say is more like a penalty than a reward.

So check your local listings for You Bet Your Balls.

Police sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) arrives unwanted on the Scottish island of Summerisle, famous for its one-of-a-kind produce. He’s investigating the disappearance, brought to his attention by an anonymous letter, of a young girl named Rowan Morrison. None of the island’s residents are at all helpful; at first they deny that any such person as Rowan ever existed, and when that is revealed as a lie they resort to other obfuscations or simple silence. A grave marked with Rowan Morrison’s name is found, but no death certificate is on file and nobody has anything to say about the circumstances of her death. Even the girl’s mother won’t go so far as to confirm she ever existed.

The people of Summerisle also practice an ancient pagan religion and make no secret about it, circumstances which don’t sit well with the priggish and rigidly Christian Sergeant Howie. He nearly has an infarction when he hears a classroom full of schoolgirls talking about phallic religious icons, and when he sees a group of  nubile young women dancing nude round a bonfire…well, it’s more than his delicate sensibilities can bear.

Howie eventually arranges a meeting with Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee), the island’s leading citizen, who grants him permission to exhume the mysterious grave, explains the island’s pagan ways, and suggests maybe Howie would like to leave Summerisle before the next day’s May Day festival. With his Jesus-heavy values set, Sergeant Howie would no doubt find the celebration distasteful.

Howie may be 100% unlikeable and have an odd understanding of how far police authority extends, but he’s no fool—he knows that pagan rites and missing girls must surely add up to human sacrifice.

To say any more about the plot would be to say too much. The movie works because it gradually builds, and even though Howie is surrounded by behavior we might consider outlandish, events nonetheless make an internal kind of sense as they progress inexorably toward their conclusion.

Then, of course, you’ve got Christopher Lee. His Lord Summerisle doesn’t actually appear until about the halfway point, but once he’s on screen you can’t help but be spellbound. Lee has appeared in movies of the highest and lowest quality and everywhere in between, but he’s always a joy to see, even when, as in this picture, his haircut is pretty out of control.

Out of control awesome, I mean

Another thing that’s none too unpleasant for the eyes is the innkeeper’s daughter, Willow, played by Britt Ekland (who would appear with Christopher Lee again the next year in The Man With the Golden Gun). Among other things, she spends a great deal of time prancing around her bedroom naked and pounding on the walls, which is something I endorse with no reservations.

BRITT EKLAND BREAK: You may also remember seeing Britt Ekland in Get Carter, back when it was a great movie with Michael Caine instead of a terrible movie with Sylvester Stallone.

BRITT EKLAND PHOTO BREAK:

Just call me the man with the golden boner

So you probably also know all about how Facebook wants you to “Like” everything by clicking on a little link, and then once you Like some things it will tell you about some other things you might like to Like, based on other people who Liked the same things that you like.

Here’s one it gave to me recently. The suggestion for something I might like was “action movies.” A little generic, perhaps, but okay, sure, I like some action movies.

Now here’s the justification it gave for suggesting that to me:

Many who like L’Avventura like action movies

That’s a head scratcher, I have to say. Yes, it’s true, I like L’Avventura and I like my fair share of action movies. But, starting with one, it’s something of a leap to reach the other.

If you’re not familiar with L’Avventura, allow me to explain. It’s a 1960 film from director Michelangelo Antonioni, and the first in a thematic “trilogy” that includes La Notte and L’Eclisse. I like all three films, though I think L’Avventura is the best of the lot.

What’s it about? Well, it’s sort of about this woman who, while on holiday with her lover and friends, goes missing. Except it isn’t about that at all, because once she disappears everyone basically forgets about her. This isn’t a movie about plot. What it’s really about is the emptiness in the lives of the idle rich, their inability to feel anything or to have meaningful relationships. There’s a scene where two characters—lovers, ostensibly, though the word is hardly accurate—kiss and embrace, but only as long as a bellboy is watching; once they don’t have an audience, what’s the point? They’re only going through the motions of passion because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

It’s a movie where nothing really happens, and that’s the point. Nothing “happens” on screen because nothing is happening in the characters’ lives. Not for nothing have critics referred to “Antoniennui.” The film is all about world-weariness, emotional emptiness, and loneliness in the midst of a crowd (if these people can be said to even feel enough to feel lonely).

It’s about as far removed as you can get from big bold action movies, and each time I see the suggestion on my Facebook page (it keeps coming up again and again) I laugh.

But I also see a glimmer of hope. After all, it did say that many who like action movies also like Antonioni’s deliberate, thoughtful meditation. Maybe there’s hope, after all, that inside every slackjawed audience member sitting breathlessly on the edge of his seat during Transformers, there’s a true lover of film waiting to break out, if only he could be exposed to something that would challenge and, most importantly, respect him as a viewer.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Now, I love this movie. But when I was a child, one of the movies I watched over and over and over again, as children do, was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is also an excellent picture. But because it was such an important part of my early life as a viewer, any time Kathleen Turner opens her mouth to speak, I can’t help but think: Jessica Rabbit!

With that in mind, the sex scenes in Body Heat take on a disturbing tone, don’t they? I mean, you kinda can’t help but think of Roger Rabbit taking the place of William Hurt during all those passionate encounters, and that’s just plain wrong. Roger Rabbit should not be doing that!

I was also watching the retrospective documentaries on the Body Heat DVD, where writer/director Kasdan talks about how he loved the film noir of the 40s.  He lists several titles, and the posters from those movies he lists and others appear on the screen. Noticeably absent from both the string of posters and Kasdan’s lists is Billy Wilder’s 1944 Double Indemnity. Because, you know, the plot of Body Heat definitely has no similarities to the plot of Double Indemnity, no sir. As different as night and day, those two!

Another picture I watched recently was The Ten Commandments, because who doesn’t love some Chuck Heston. A lot of discussion of this movie in today’s hip, detached atmosphere focuses on the film’s kitschy aspects, looking at it is as something of a guilty pleasure. (Edward G. Robinson doesn’t actually say “Where’s your Messiah now,” but he could.) And that’s sort of true, but it also has many genuine pleasures. If you can’t take genuine pleasure from Heston, Yul Brynner, Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price, Lily Munster and that lady who brings Spock back to life, then the hell with you.

The movie also, as you might expect from a Moses biopic, has a scene where the infant deliverer is placed in a basket and set to float among the reeds. The basket the baby is put into has a hinged top and is shaped oddly like a space pod. Watching the sequence I couldn’t help wishing for a shot of what Moses sees inside the basket as an image of his father Amram tells him all about the responsibilities he’ll have, as the last son of Krypton, when he finally arrives on Earth.

This would work especially well in light of the famous scene later in the movie when Moses flies through the air carrying Nefretiri and a helicopter.

“Prediction: memory enhancement.”

(P.S. I know that taking ginkgo biloba doesn’t actually do anything. But Ginkgo Balboa definitely would.)

Then, in 2002, came Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s last outing as 007 and one of the five worst movies I’ve ever paid money to see in a theater. I was absolutely repulsed by the movie’s oppressive badness. The experience of watching that movie was like when you’re a little kid and a bully pushes you down and farts on your head, except the bully was thirty feet tall and the fart was in deafening Dolby surround sound and lasted for 133 minutes.

Now, I’m usually of the opinion that the reboot of a series of long standing is a pointless and often lazy technique, but when it was announced that the next Bond movie, Casino Royale (2006), was going to be a back-to-basics restart of the Bond franchise, I thought perhaps it was the only thing that could redeem Agent 007. Still, the taste that Die Another Day left in my mouth was so foul that I didn’t see Casino Royale until two years later. Yes, Die Another Day was so bad it brought an immediate end to my years-long policy of rushing right out to see the next Bond movie. When I did get around to seeing it, I was pleasantly surprised by Casino Royale. I didn’t love it, but it was pretty good—an enjoyably average entry in the series, and a breath of fresh air after the previous one.

In 2008 came the ludicrously titled Quantum of Solace, and though Casino Royale had somewhat restored my faith I still didn’t bother to see the movie until about a week ago.

And, guess what, it sucked. It was such a waste of more than 100 minutes of my time that, coupled with the still festering bad feelings generated by Die Another Day, it pretty much turned me off of the whole James Bond series. While it couldn’t wrest the coveted title of Worst James Bond Movie of All Time away from Die Another Day, it was still asinine enough to make it so I truly don’t care if I ever see another 007 adventure.

In case you didn’t see Quantum of Solace (and if you didn’t, I envy you), let me tell you a little something about it. The main villain, in the tradition of Bond-film megalomaniacs, has a dastardly plan only Bond can stop. You don’t even find out what that plan is until about half an hour before the end of the picture, but when you do, hoo boy. Are you sitting down? You had better be sitting down and holding on to your testicles because I am about to tell you the details of the evil villain’s master plan, and it is a plan of such world-shattering import that you might pass out. What he’s planning to do, for reasons that are never entirely clear, is take control of some—but not all—of the water supply of Bolivia.

OH, NO!

Okay, in a Bond movie we expect the villain’s master plan to be ridiculous. Sure, Blofeld is smuggling diamonds because he is using them to build a giant laser gun in space. That’s crazy, but he’s doing it so he can take the entire world hostage for gobs and gobs of money. That’s what a supervillain does. He doesn’t take over part of the utilities contract for one South American nation. I mean, honestly: when’s the last time you heard anything about Bolivia? If a bad guy strapped the entire country to rockets and fired it into space, would you even know that it was gone? Outside of Bolivia itself, would anyone?

I wish it were only the underwhelming plot that made Quantum of Solace a bad movie. But let’s consider the pre-credits car chase. Bond is in a black car, driving fast. He’s being chased by some people (who? why?) in another (or possibly more than one?) black car. A keen observer may have already spotted the problem here. For a hint, let’s consider the car chase through the streets of Las Vegas in 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever. On that occasion, Bond was pursued by standard black and white police cruisers, while he drove a bright red Mustang. Are you getting the picture now?

When your car chase involves heroes and villains driving what amounts to precisely the same car, you can’t tell what in the hell is going on! The problem is only compounded by the fact that the average shot length in this sequence is about .000000004 seconds, with the camera shaking the whole time. The cuts come so fast and furious you never get a chance to tell what or who you’re looking at or why. Maybe some exciting stunts are happening, but who can tell? Maybe they’re real, but they might as well be faked because you never get a good solid look at them.

Contrast that with this stunt from The Man With the Golden Gun (1974).

So, you’ve got incomprehensible action, you’ve got Judi Dench as the dignified M saying “I don’t give a shit,” and you’ve got nothing happening for 75 minutes until you find out that Bolivia’s water supply is sort of partly in danger, and then you’ve got nothing else happening for the next 30 minutes.

I’m not going to take that from you anymore, 007. That was your last chance and you blew it. I’m done with your movies forever.

The only part I had seen is the famous sequence where Gene Kelly dances with Jerry the Mouse. I rather suspect this is the only part most people have seen, and they probably couldn’t even name the movie it came from. That’s too bad, because it’s really pretty good.

It isn’t up there with your big-time classic musicals like My Fair Lady and Singin’ in the Rain, though it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, but it’s a hell of a good time. I personally liked it much better than the more critically lauded (at least nowadays) An American in Paris.  It’s got plenty of good songs, a charming though light-and-fluffy story (but that’s what we expect in an MGM Technicolor musical, right?), and Gene Kelly’s always wonderful dancing. A dance with Kelly and Sinatra, who ably keeps up, to the song “I Begged Her” is my personal favorite.

And then there’s the dance with Jerry Mouse. Though it’s unfair that the rest of the movie seems to have been forgotten, this scene deserves every bit of love audiences have for it, and more besides. The dancing’s great and the animation—from the team of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera before they became synonymous with cheap TV cartoons—is wonderful; look at Jerry’s reflection in the polished floor! That scene alone could be the most fun you’ll have watching a movie in a year’s worth of watching movies.

Fortunately, Anchors Aweigh, isn’t two hours of deadwood surrounding one highlight. It’s light, breezy fun, the kind of pleasant diversion they don’t make anymore in the era of $100 million explosion-fests. If you like good times and singin’ and dancin’, you owe it to yourself to watch Anchors Aweigh.

As an example, let’s take the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. It’s the true(ish) story of some British runners in the 1924 Olympic Games, it won a slew of awards (including the Oscar for Best Picture), and it’s beloved by critics and moviegoers everywhere.

Not by me, though.

It’s not a movie I’m prepared to come right out and say is bad. I think it’s probably just as good as people say. But, for whatever reason, I can’t get into it at all. I’m not sure exactly why I don’t like it, but there are a few possible reasons.

Most obviously, the movie’s about running. In terms of physicality, my lifestyle is more akin to Jabba the Hutt’s than Carl Lewis’s, so a celebration of the runner’s art isn’t exactly up my alley. Yet I don’t think this is the reason I don’t care for Chariots of Fire; the movie’s about running, sure, but it isn’t actually about running, any more than Rocky is actually about boxing, Breaking Away is about cycling, or The Deer Hunter is about hunting deer. Olympic races are just the pegs on which the characters’ stories hang, and I’ll take any such peg if the story on it is good enough.

The characters in Chariots of Fire do have stories, with their own personal motivations and triumphs and all that, but they never move me. I don’t care which of them wins any of the races, or if any of them win at all. If none of the main characters had participated in any of the film’s climactic for-the-gold races, I wouldn’t have minded or even necessarily noticed.

This isn’t a fault of the characterization, or the script, or the direction, or any of the things you can usually look to when you don’t like a movie. I’m pretty sure it’s just me.

It could be that I’m not British. This movie is British, and it loves being British, and it wants you to know just how great it is to be British and love being British. It revels in English and Scottish traditions and life. It gives you Gilbert and Sullvian’s “Carefully on Tiptoe Stealing,” with its lines about remaining an Englishman, as though it were the most stirring, awe inspiring thing in the history of man. I, alas, do not hail from the United Kingdom, and what’s more I find this kind of intense pride in accidents of birth to be rather silly. So it’s possible the disconnect between me and the picture comes from my lack of understanding of English nationalism.

Granted, lots of people who loved the movie aren’t British, either. So that’s probably not it.

What am I saying here? I guess I’m saying that I don’t like Chariots of Fire at all, but the odds are you will, so why not watch it.

BONUS NOTE: One thing I do like about the picture, and like a lot, is the music by Greek composer Vangelis. You’ve heard it a million times since in other things, but it’s great, so jam on it:

Attention, the makers of laser-encrusted picture wheels! You should be listening! It’s not just I who demands the following changes.

1. That shit at the beginning—FBI warnings and such—should always be skippable. DVDs from some studios will let you and those from others won’t, but all of them should. Home video is not exactly a cutting edge idea; we’ve all seen the warning a billion times, we all know what it says. We should be able to skip gaily past it because we fucking know already, leave us alone! It gets even worse when you can’t skip all the other legal disclaimers (Paramount, I’m looking at you right now). You know, the message about how “the opinions expressed in the interviews and commentary” yadda yadda yadda. We’ve seen that so often we all know it just as well as the FBI warning. Throwing it up on the screen in multiple languages, each as unskippable as the last, is just pissing us all off.

2. DVD menus should be as quiet as the grave. We don’t need a repeating fifteen seconds of music, we don’t need loud-ass clips from every episode of whatever show is on the disc (this means you, Family Guy), and we for damn sure don’t need the eternal screaming that comes with the menu for Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. We just need a quiet, unmoving screen with easily differentiated choices: “Play Movie,” “Scene Selection,” “Special Features,” “Setup.” BAM! You’re done.

3. If your DVD package includes two discs, and all the special features are on disc two, don’t give the menu on disc one a “Special Features” button that only yields the message “Insert Disc Two to Access Special Features.” What is that shit? If there aren’t any special features on disc one, just don’t put it on the menu at all.

4. Nobody is buying a DVD because they can’t wait to be entertained by the menu screens. They don’t need to move around and perform all kinds of tricks every time you select something. The Star Wars movies are particularly egregious examples of this. Any time you select anything, the menu has to swoop around and show you something fancy. WHO CARES? If I want to see moving cameras and exciting spaceships, I’ll watch the goddamn movie, and your damned menus are only postponing that activity. God help you if you want to use the scene selection on a Star Wars movie. There are a certain number of chapters on each screen (four, I think), and each time you move to a different set of four you’re treated to some bullshit where the background picture moves around. I don’t need this! Granted, in this case each movement only takes about three seconds, but considering it should take exactly zero seconds it’s very annoying.

5. If you’re watching a black-and-white movie with subtitles—Wild Strawberries, for instance—and the subtitles are white, it turns out you can’t fucking see them. Yellow subtitles on a black and white movie, guys. Common sense!

6. Finally, it goes without saying that the makers of those DVDs where, if you try to skip any of the million unnecessary legalese screens it goes all the way back to the first and makes you sit through them all again, should be executed.