Challenge Complete: Watch the Same Movie 5 Nights in a Row

In Welcome to the Basement‘s episode on Miami Blues, Matt Sloan posited a challenge:

“You take a movie, any movie, and you watch that movie every night for a week.  I have a theory that it would sort of be like going into that Altered States sensory deprivation tank, where you would absorb this movie so completely that you would come out the other end with a clearer understanding of it than anyone who’s ever seen it.”

I worked at a movie theater when Titanic came out.  So, I’m very aware that there are some movies many people watched more than seven nights in a row.  The Princess Bride and the original Star Wars Trilogy spring to mind.  Indeed, when we talk about cult classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, we need to move the bar into the hundreds place.  Oh, heck, no matter what movie I chose to watch, there’s no way I could compete with the scores of Millennials who can recite The Lion King verbatim, thanks to that movie running regular rotation on their playroom VCRs.

I’m sure Matt was being facetious here, since it’s hard to imagine that seven viewings of any movie would give you more insight than, say, the director of said movie.  Or maybe it can?  Directors often stand too close to their own projects to see it in the same way the audience would see it.  That’s why test screenings exist, after all.

But, no, the point can’t be to understand the movie better than anyone else.  The goal must be a personal one: to appreciate any one movie in a way you don’t appreciate other movies.  To break a movie down scene by scene in a way that’s educational, but not a job.  At least, that’s the ideal.

And for this challenge to make sense, one can’t use it as an excuse to continue the religious watching of a movie you already love.  Or, for similar reasons, don’t watch any ‘cult classics’ that are known for their re-watchability by select groups.  No Pulp Fiction.  No Big Lebowski.  Is it really a challenge if other people do it all the time for fun?  The point is to watch a movie you expect to enjoy (but with no real guarantee) to get a more full understanding of the principles which shape that movie.  Or some other hooey.  To be honest, I don’t know what I’ll get from the experience, because I’m writing the introduction to the article before I watch the movie.

So what am I setting aside a week of movie-time in hopes of gleaning a better appreciation of whatever the heck I’m supposed to be appreciating?

Lost in Translation, starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, and directed by Sofia Coppola,   I somehow missed the movie when everyone was talking about it in 2003.  Now seems like a good time to pull the movie down from its shelf, blow the dust off the DVD jacket, sell the DVD on Amazon, and watch the movie on Netflix.

I certainly hedged the bets in my favor.  Lost in Translation won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and maintains a 95% freshness meter rating on Rottentomatoes.com.  Then there’s Bill Murray.  Even if I achieve no spiritual fullness after a couple screenings, I know I’m safe watching Bill work his magic.  His expressions speak volumes.  He’s one of the few actors I know who can be both the smartest, and the stupidest man in the room at the same time.  He’s both engaged, and disenfranchised.  There are many reasons why both Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day are great movies.  But without Bill Murray carrying otherwise ignorable scenes, they probably wouldn’t be great cult movies as well.

I’ll only be watching the movie for five days, not seven.  Maybe that’s a cheat, but I’m only only following Matt’s lead, when he amended his own challenge to sit through a five day work week of Bottle Rocket.  Five days is challenge enough for me, too.  Transcendence to a higher plane, I’m sure, would require many more days of finding oneself Lost in Translation than that.

First Impressions

Well, I chose a good movie.  In Lost in Translation, Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, an aging actor-celebrity with marital issues who finds himself filming commercials for the money, instead of performing in the theater like he knows he should.  Scarlett Johanssen plays Charlotte, a young wife whose workaholic husband-photographer is perpetually in a state of leaving or sleeping, while Charlotte struggles over what she’s supposed to do with her life.  Bob and Charlotte are insomniacs living out of the same Tokyo hotel, so they become friends.  Then their Facebook statuses change to “It’s Complicated.”

I definitely understand why this didn’t become a cult classic (if we make the assumption that every successful isn’t a ‘cult’ movie by default.) I doubt many people throw Lost in Translation parties.  The movie is pedantic, focuses on visuals and utilizes dialogue sparingly.  In fact, the movie often features people talking past each other instead of holding a conversation, which adds to the disconnect the central characters feel. So, in one sense, much of the dialogue is meaningless.  Individual word choices, or expressions people make when they’re saying a line, however, speaks volumes more than any dialogue Sofia Copolla could write.

Which makes this an odd movie to gift the ‘Best Screenplay’ award to, since the only part of the screenplay that seems to matter is the sequence of the scenes.  No one says anything meaningful, so they might as well be saying anything, really.  It seems to me the correct award would be ‘Best Director’, but I understand why it would be next to impossible to steal that statue away from Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings.  Alternatively, the other nominees for Best Screenplay in 2003 was a Pixar film (Finding Nemo) and three non-Hollywood films.  Lost in Translation was probably the only non-animated movie most voters recognized.

That’s not to say this isn’t a good script.  I do find the method of showing a flawed relationship through a backdrop of communication barriers to be interesting.  It’s also interesting to gauge how much of this relationship is built on mutual attraction, and how much is built on Bob and Charlotte’s dissatisfaction with their own lives.  The movie is one gigantic thematic apperception test, in which we can tell a lot more about the audience based on what they think the characters are thinking in individual scenes.  When Bob and Charlotte leave the hotel to party with a ragtag crew, are they enjoying themselves?  Or are they going through the motions of enjoying themselves because they want to spend time with each other, and this is one of the few social venues that makes sense?  When he leaves Charlotte at the end of the movie, Bob is smiling big.  But is that because he’s happy he got a chance to say goodbye on his terms, or is he relieved to move past this trial with grace, and is looking forward to going home and being a better husband and a father?  Or maybe he’s imagining Charlotte’s future, and he’s happy to realize that Charlotte will someday be the confident adult he wishes he could be?  Or does he feel terrible inside that he’s leaving, but he’s smiling for Charlotte’s sake?  I couldn’t say, really, but I’m happy to get a chance to guess at the characters’ feelings tomorrow.

Second Impressions

For such a slow movie, you would think I’d be bored the second time around.  But the slow, quiet segments don’t take as long when you’re aware of what’s coming next.  Funny how the mind works like that.  Scenes which dragged along in my first viewing, proved to only last a couple seconds in my second viewing.  I guess the problem with slow scenes is that you’re never quite certain if there’s going to be any relevant data in there.  Sometimes a slow scene tells you more about the world your characters live in, and sometimes it’s just twenty seconds of watching Bill Murray play golf.  The scene itself isn’t taking up a tremendous amount of time; it’s just hard to be an active viewer for any stretch with no reward.

I also noticed that quirky scenes don’t seem as weird this time.  The fax machine in everyone’s hotel room seems normal.  The shades open automatically in the morning.  The shower is too small.  It’s funny how fast these details lose their edge.

Speaking of which, I was shocked at how much of this movie focuses on ‘Japan Weird’.  It’s not that I didn’t recognize this theme and how it adds to Bob and Charlotte’s individual senses of disillusionment.  But so much of the movie builds toward Bob and Charlotte’s relationship, that that relationship feels like it’s the majority of the movie.  It isn’t.  Most of this movie is Japan being Japan.  By the time I reached the end of the movie for the second time, Bob and Charlotte’s relationship felt too quick for how emotional they become.  They only knew each other for four days.  They did other things in those four days, and spent the first half of the fourth day upset with each other.  But when Bob leaves, it’s heartbreaking?  I’m sure it happens all the time, but this cross-generational fairy tale is tougher to swallow when you do the math.

Which is fine; the math doesn’t bother me.  I get that we’re telling something resembling a love story in a compressed amount of time.  If the audience was forced to watch the relationship develop at a more common pace, we wouldn’t accept it because it was taking too long.  That’s what you get when multiple generations grow up watching movies, I guess, and it’s a credit to Sofia Coppola that she understands how to pace a movie about Japan to make it feel like it’s a movie about a romance.

Third Impressions

Lost in Translation includes a number of hushed conversations starting and stopping at odd intervals, and often in response to cues that were more prominent on the script, then coming out of actors’ mouths.  In the first viewing, I only picked up bits and pieces.  By this third viewing, my brain assembled all the loose pieces and fleshed them out as conversations.

I’m beginning to notice editing mistakes.  Or, maybe not so much mistakes as things Sofia Copolla noticed, but let slide because it was more important to keep the scene than worry about minor background inconsistencies.  Bottles of Crystal are presented as a surprise, even though they were sitting on the floor of the apartment for at least two days.  A movie playing on the television in the background doesn’t match the pacing of the scene.  Inconsistent sound effects are added to arcade games in post production.

I do wonder how much of Charlotte is a character that Sofia Copolla came up with, and how much of Charlotte is Sofia, herself.  If you look at her bibliography and do the math, there’s a large period where Sofia wasn’t creating anything, or, at least, she wasn’t creating anything in Hollywood.  As a teenager in the 80s, she acted in some of her father, Francis Ford Copolla‘s films, and the films of his friends.  By the 90s, though, she decided acting wasn’t for her, and she dropped off the radar.  Sofia then returned at 26 to make a music video with the Flaming Lips, and again at 28 to direct the short film Lick the Star.  Heck, there’s even a point in Lost in Translation when Charlotte says she was raised in New York City, then moved to Los Angeles.  Why would you write in details that parallel your own life, unless you’re intentionally connecting yourself to the character?

I know it’s dangerous to say “This character is the author” since all characters are, in some sense, a piece of their author.  That, and by claiming such and such a character is the author, you’re flattening the character’s potential to be different in some ways, and more in others. But, sometimes, seeing a character as an extension of the author offers insight into their motivations.  Seen through this lens, it’s easy to imagine Charlotte as all of Sofia’s insecurities in her mid-twenties acting out.  And it wouldn’t be a far leap to imagine Bob, not as a love interest, but as a vision of the person Sofia sees herself becoming when she gets older.  The entire movie, then, isn’t a love story, but a conversation between Sofia’s older and younger selves.  That would make Bob and Charlotte’s conversation in bed even more intimate than it already is.

Charlotte: I’m stuck. Does it get easier.

Bob: No. Yes. It gets easier.

Charlotte: Oh yeah? Look at you.

Bob: Thanks. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.

Charlotte: Yeah. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be, you know. I tried being a writer, but I hate what I write. I tried taking pictures, but they were so mediocre. You know, every girl goes through a photography phase. You know, horses… taking dumb pictures of your feet.

Bob: You’ll figure that out. I’m not worried about you. Keep writing.

 

Fourth Impressions

I’m looking back at my first impression, where I said much of the dialogue is meaningless, and I don’t think I was completely fair.  Now that I watched the movie four times, I recognize all the beats of the dialogue and can see when actors aren’t responding to each other’s cues, but to the path the dialogue takes… I don’t know.  It’s possible I feel that the dialogue as written in the script is important now only because I’m beginning to memorize the movie.  Everything feels unchangeable when you know it inside and out.  Despite all this, I’m well aware that Bill Murray is at his best when he’s making stuff up as he goes along.  But you can feel out which scenes Bill was allowed to be Bill, and when he needed to be Bob.  Most of the time, Bill is Bob.

I still don’t think the dialogue, as written in this particular script, is very important.  As long as the dialogue moves the scenes forward, that’s enough.  But I shouldn’t ignore how important the script is as a foundation for this movie.  The exact words aren’t important, but those words informed the scenes they stood for.

That said, did Sofia deserve to win the Oscar for best Screenplay of 2003?  Well, yeah, I guess she did.  I mean, any screenplay of this quality deserves to win an Oscar.  I suppose the real question is whether one of the other four nominated movies should have scooped it up.  I’d give you an answer, but it would require me watching four more movies after tomorrow’s final showing of Lost in Translation.  I guess you’ll need to do the homework yourself.

For what it’s worth, I did a little snooping and found the original screenplay for Lost in Translation online.  And as I skim through it, it’s obvious the script is only a skeleton of the movie Lost in Translation would become.  Some scenes, like the bedroom scene, are faithful to the script.  But in others, the lines are garbled.  One scene in particular features Bob Harris getting his picture taken.  In the script, Bob Harris says two lines.  In the movie, Bill Murray bounces off other actors for a total of forty-eight lines, lasting three minutes and thirty-three seconds.  And it’s pretty damn funny, too.

Fifth Impressions

I tried to sort Magic cards at the beginning of my fifth viewing, but I could feel myself not paying close attention to the movie.  So I stopped.  I mean, what’s the point of taking the challenge in the first place if I gain nothing from the final showing?  By this point, it felt natural to let the movie play in the background.  Pausing for bathroom breaks felt silly.  The movie was now a record I played on my turntable every day; I didn’t need to pay attention to the tracks to feel the beat.

So after watching the movie for a fifth time, did I learn anything new?  Kind of.  I learned Sofia Copolla has a thing for feet.  At least that’s the only way I can explain the nine times feet are either prominently displayed in a shot, talked about, or figure into the plot.  I once heard that the crux of a movie—the no turning back point—often jumps in right at the one hour mark.  I checked the hour mark and found Bill Murray talking about ‘Black Toe’.  Coincidence?  Yup.  I’ve been watching the movie so long that the few things I get to look forward to are conspiracy theories.

So, What’s the Big Takeaway?

Can you watch the same movie five nights in a row?  Sure.  It’s draining, but simple enough.  Should you?

Um…

I’ve always been of the opinion that movies are to be watched once.  Maybe twice if it would be socially awkward not to watch it (you’re at your friend’s house, and everyone wants play the Back to the Future drinking game), or it’s been at least ten years, and you forgot most of the content but remember enjoying the movie.  Or the movie is so flooded with details, that you couldn’t possibly absorb it all in one sitting.  Maybe.

In fact, the whole reason why this challenge intrigued me is because it is something I would never do without prompting.  Why?  Because every time I watch a movie I already watched, I miss a chance to watch a different movie.  The small amount I gain from a second viewing isn’t worth it compared to the value I get from watching another, equally good movie.

But the mere fact that I never do this… I think that’s what gives watching a movie a second or a third time a lot of value.  Usually, I don’t dive into a movie headlong and pick it apart at the seams.  When I did, though, I found all kinds of stuff I missed on my first pass.  By the fifth time, I didn’t find much, but I was still finding little nuggets.  For all its features and flaws, I walked away with a better understanding.

So, if you’re like me, and you only watch movies once and move on, then maybe it’s time you tried something different for the sake of doing something different.  Or not.  Admittedly, it was a lot of work.  I didn’t want it to be work, but that’s what it became.  But it’s possible that we can’t fully appreciate anything unless we work for it.

But do yourself a favor and skip day five.  I don’t think I’m a better man for spending two hours of my life discovering Sofia Copolla’s foot fetish.