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Today, we let you in on another explosive concept that will unlock your minds to new levels of movie criticism: the benchmark movie.
A benchmark movie stands right on the border between two different classes of movies. Consider the blended genre of “dark comedy.” Serial Mom might be a good example of a benchmark movie for dark comedy. Anything darker than Serial Mom is an outright dark movie; anything funnier than Serial Mom is a straight-up comedy. Serial Mom is the benchmark of dark comedy: the signpost on the border.
You can also use benchmark movies as a standard for movie quality. Anything worse than your benchmark is “bad”; anything better than your benchmark is “good.” The benchmark movie is the perfect median.
A benchmark movie is inherently personal, however. Everyone has different tastes. So the Overthinkers will each contribute some benchmarks of their own. Once you’ve read through ours, post your own in the comments!
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – McNeil
There are two ways to go here. Either you choose a movie that’s pretty good all around or you choose a movie that has a perfect balance of good and bad. The former might be perfectly middling, but the latter’s the one you’re going to remember. To me, there’s one movie that is perfectly worthy of both our love and our hate, our respect and our disdain: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which owns a middling 58% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Writing: The film falls into a lot of traps. Writers Pen Desham and John Watson take the classic Robin Hood story, then toss in an unnecessary devil worship subplot that features a lot of egg cracking and cackling that doesn’t do much for the plot, the other characters, or the movie as a whole. The writers save themselves by a really interesting bit of character development. The “spoiled rich boy tempered in the crucible of war” theme gives the whole movie a weight that the classic tale lacks (and which Ebert hated) undercuts the usual inevitability in the relationship between Robin and Marian.
Acting: Costner’s accent is notoriously bad, distracting even from a few moments of solid emotional development and ass-kicking. Slater as the petulant brother is actually worse, but he’s on screen far less often. Most of the other characters are solid, but the whole thing is saved by one of the great ham-fisted performances of all time, Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. So very, very good.
Fire good. Costner bad.
Action: Some solid ambushes and an object lesson in the strategic weaknesses of treehouses make for some of exciting stuff, but the final swordfight is sort of routine.
Music: Score by Michael Kamen, soaring and exciting in a 1991 sort-of-way that’s been stuck in my head for 18 years. On the other hand, Academy Award nominated original song by Bryan Adams. (This predates YouTube by more than a decade, why is it still the first suggestion in the search bar when you type “everything”?)
Half awesome, half awful: the perfect rubric.
PS. Apparently, this 1991 movie about medieval England was able to predict the outcome of the 2004 1992 general election: “The popularity of over-scored, “let’s hug” bullshit like Robin Hood predicts the certainty of a one-term George H.W. presidency better than any number of Gallup polls,” says Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central.”
Gangs of New York – Stokes
For me, it’s got to be Gangs of New York. This is kind of a funny film to list as your ultimate definition of “… meh,” because nothing is “meh” about it. Everything is either fan-freaking-tastic (especially Daniel Day Lewis’s character) or deeply, deeply horrible (especially Cameron Diaz’s character). If I’m channel surfing and I find myself watching one of the bad scenes, I convulsively change the channel by pure motor reflex alone before I even realize what I’m watching, sort of the way that your hand pulls back from a hot stove a split second before you even feel the pain. If I happen to hit one of the great scenes (which make up less of the film by volume, but are somehow, uh, denser), I stop and settle in, because I know I’m going to watch it all the way through to the end. I have done this at least three times, once after randomly landing on the opening fight scene, once after landing on the scene where Daniel Day Lewis wraps himself with the American flag, and once after landing on the scene where he taps his eye with a knife. (Just thinking about that scene kind of gets me excited. His EYE! With a KNIFE! Even knowing it’s a prop knife, and a prop eye, that’s just all kinds of bad-ass.)
Somewhere between their noses lies the mathematical zero of all cinema.
Each time, though, as the stupid fadey-in-out skyline shot appeared, and the lame late-period U2 song faded up over the credits, I was left with a curiously vacant feeling. Had I enjoyed this movie? Had I hated it? All I could say with certainty is that time had passed. Gangs of New York is the eating-a-whole-giant-bag-of-olestra-potato-chips of movies. Theoretically, there’s enough “cinematic nourishment” there to feed a family of four for a week! But that fails to take into account the resultant “cinematic explosive diarrhea,” which makes the whole thing a zero sum game, and ultimately a waste of 167 minutes. If only it had been a little better! Or just a little worse! As it is, it’s simply nothing… a perfect benchmark.
p.s. Gosh, I’m sorry about that metaphor, guys. It’s gross… and also unfair, because as I’m sure some of you know, the intestinal distress caused by eating a whole giant bag of olestra potato chips lasts waaaaay longer than 167 minutes.
p.p.s. Also, now I feel kind of weird about using the phrase “all kinds of bad-ass” earlier in the post. Oh well, nothing to do about it now.
“National Treasure” is my benchmark movie for the action/adventure genre. It’s got a lot of appealing things about it, and overall is fairly enjoyable, but it’s also riddled with clichés and moments that stretch credulity. Pretty much every component of the movie has a good side and a bad side:
- The heist sequence is well-paced, taut, and thrilling, and yet…they’re stealing the freaking Declaration of Independence. Come on. I know our government is bad at a lot of things, but guarding invaluable national treasures is not one of them.
- Sean Bean. He’s great on-screen, but of course Sean Bean is going to double cross the protagonist! It’s freaking Sean Bean!
- The clue-unlocking game keeps the plot moving and sets up a series of enjoyable trips to iconic American history sites, yet it’s painfully and shamelessly derivative of “The Da Vinci Code.”
- Diane Kruger as Dr. Abigail Chase is quite lovely to look at, yet turns in a rather dull performance opposite…
Nic Cage. Nic Cage is what really makes “National Treasure” the ultimate benchmark movie, as he is a benchmark actor himself. He’s got a “Leaving Las Vegas” for every “Ghost Rider” on his resume. His performances range from emotive and touching to…well, “Ghost Rider.” Likewise, in “National Treasure,” he alternates between quirky-but-lovable cryptologist and utterly-phoning-it-in action hero.
“National Treasure” is the kind of movie you watch, enjoy, then wonder why you did, in spite of the clichés, the ridiculousness, and the Nic Cage.
"No suspense for me, thanks!"
Blade – Fenzel
Rather than follow the format strictly today, I’m going to go way over on length here and refine something I talked about in the podcast. I cited Blade as a benchmark movie – and I think it is. It’s not a benchmark movie for quality (I’d just call it “good”), but I consider it to be on the very external border of horror movies.
Once you get to Blade, you know you aren’t watching a horror movie anymore. Let’s talk about the Sorites paradox (“the paradox of the heap”). It usually works with sand, but I’ll try to use something a bit more identifiable.
This is a heap of Republican Beanie Babies:
This is not a heap of Republican Beanie Babies:
If you have fifty Republican Beanie Babies, and that’s a heap, and you take one away, you still have a heap of Republican Beanie Babies. But if you have only one Republican Beanie Baby, that isn’t a heap.
At what point does it cease to be a heap? Three GOP-eanie Babies? 5? Twenty? If you take enough Beanie Babies away so it isn’t a heap anymore, and you add one back, is it a heap now? Either you have to pick something arbitrary, or you have to change the way you use the words so that they don’t mean what they are generally accepted to mean.
The main of the paradox is about the vagueness of language, and how there are things that we understand intuitively that don’t work in logical terms. But it also provides a playground for a number of toys we can play with (intellectual toys, not Babies, Beanie or otherwise). One of those toys is histeresis, or “path-dependence.”
Histeresis says it isn’t enough to know where you are now, you also need to know where you started and how you got to you are – in systems that exhibit histeresis, the starting point affects what the endpoint means and how things function at the endpoint. See Exhibit 1, which compares “I was disappointed by this movie” I Am Legend to “I was disappointed this became a movie” Twilight, on the basis of whether each movie, in its final execution and end state, is a vampire movie or not.
Here, I consider the “starting point” to be the a combination of the core premise on which the movie is built, the expectations that surround the movie, its marketing, the tradition it belongs to, and its initial impressions. By this qualification, Twilight starts as a vampire movie, and I Am Legend start’s out as not a vampire movie (the original book had vampires in it, but the movie definitely doesn’t, which is one reason it makes for good comparison – it has leftover qualities that are easy to find. But the movie definitely doesn’t start out as a vampire movie.).
You’ll see in its execution from its initial core point, Twilight’s trajectory takes it away from other vampire movies. Sunlight doesn’t burn them (I got some “sparkle” for ya right here!), garlic doesn’t faze them, they aren’t gothic monsters, a bunch of them aren’t even really bad and don’t even really have to eat people, and by the way it is a love story for children with no sex in it.
I Am Legend has a trajectory that takes it toward being a vampire movie. There are sort of spooky dark buildings full of these monsters that used to be people, but now they sleep during the day and come out at night to hunt living humans. There’s this doctor who studies arcane diseases who is set up as their adversary and hunts them back, mostly by finding the places they sleep and killing them when they are vulnerable. There are lots of light horror elements, like things that jump out at you and yell “Boo!” There’s some ponderous, grinding existential psychodrama. All of these things are characteristic of vampire movies.
In fact, I Am Legend is more characteristic of vampire movies than Twilight is. However, I Am Legend is not a vampire movie, and Twilight is.
Why? Histeresis.
This system has “path dependence.” Whether you start matters. A vampire movie that becomes a dumb love story can stay a vampire movie until it has lost a great many vampire movie characteristics, but a sci-fi disaster/zombie thriller that moves toward being more of a vampire movie has to hew to almost every single convention in the book in order to become a vampire movie. I think the monsters in I Am Legend could show up with widows’ peaks and Romanian accents and it still wouldn’t quite qualify.
This may seem wrong or invalid, and we can argue the merits of this specific example, but histeresis is still a useful concept that is demonstrable in a lot of cases – the most common among them being the operation of thermostats.
"I don't sparkle."
So, back to Blade. First off, Blade is definitely a vampire movie – no doubt about it, that isn’t even in question. But is it a horror movie?
Well, it’s a movie about a small group of plucky survivors facing down an army of the undead lead by an unholy blood god. It has traditional gothic monsters, a hero with a twisted, haunting past, and lots of “Boo!” moments.
But when I say Blade is a benchmark movie for horror, I mean that, in the sense of histeresis, it demonstrates how far you have to go from an initial core premise and expectation of making a horror movie so that what you end up with is not a horror movie anymore.
If you start with a horror movie, and you make something less horror-movie-ish than Blade, it isn’t a horror movie anymore. If you start with a horror movie, and you make something more horror-movie-ish than Blade, it probably is still a horror movie (you could argue that Blade 2 is closer to a horror movie than Blade is, but that’s debatable).
If you start with a movie that is not a horror movie at all, and you make it more like a horror movie, you can get to the point where it’s quite a bit more characteristic of a horror movie than Blade is, and it still doesn’t quite feel like a horror movie (this is how I would classify Se7en). And if you start looking to pinpoint the exact middle – make a hybrid horror/action movie – you end up with something like Evil Dead 2, which is a lot more of a horror movie than Blade, but a milestone on the border of horror in its own right – just a milestone on a different road.
Now, how extremely far away from the expectations of a horror movie do you have to go before it isn’t a horror movie anymore? The answer: Pretty far, but it gets there.
How many Republican Beanie Babies do you have to take out of the heap before you don’t have a heap anymore?
Watch this scene – it starts with Detective Curtis Lemansky from The Shield lured into a vampire den and soaked in a shower of blood. Sounds like a horror movie, right? Well, what comes next might surprise you . . . (this is a strong rated R for blood, violence and language. Might not want to watch it at work.)
I wonder what it would be like if, in the very first scene of a Friday the 13th movie, a hero showed up at a summer camp with an automatic shotgun, a samurai sword, a bunch of incendiary grenades and a crazy boomerang – killed a hundred hockey-masked serial killers and saved the little girl they were about to kill before delivering her safely to the authorities – all inside the first ten minutes.
"It's like they ground up a tub of multivitamins and dumped them in some Wheaties!"
I tell you what you wouldn’t be watching – a very scary movie. And Blade is not scary at all, because the hero is so physically, technologically and emotionally equipped for the task at hand that you never once doubt that he and his people are more than a match for the vampires.
In Friday the 13th movies, they’ve made more than a dozen of them, and they still can’t finally get rid of one guy! Comparing the Friday the 13th movies to Blade is like making a Total commerical.
Did you know it would take 50,000 Friday the 13th movies to kill as many bad guys as are killed in one movie of Blade? That’s like watching Friday the 13th movies constantly, with no breaks, for ten and a half years!
That’s definitely a signpost that says “Now leaving horror country! Come back soon!”
The Last Boy Scout – Perich
The Last Boy Scout teeters so precariously on the fence between Awesome and Terrible that I’m amazed the DVD doesn’t actually fall out of my player and shatter.
This is as friendly as they get.
The writer (Shane Black) goes for the standard action movie trope of raising the stakes by simply painting them in bolder strokes. So Bruce Willis isn’t merely a private investigator – he’s a former Secret Service agent who used to guard the Vice President. Damon Wayans isn’t merely a football player – he’s one of the best quarterbacks ever to play the game! But he had to quit, because he got hooked on painkillers! But this was only after his wife miscarried! And it just so happens Bruce Willis’s daughter was a huge fan of his!
So why does it work at all? Because the movie itself acknowledges the ridiculousness of the situation. “You’re trying to the save the life of the man who ruined your career,” Wayans observes to Willis, “and avenge the death of the guy that fucked your wife.”
The Last Boy Scout is so dark of a movie that it borders on ghoulish. Nobody’s happy to see anyone. Nobody has a healthy mindset. Everybody’s corrupt, vicious or seedy. And yet, when the dialogue and pacing work, they keep the movie light and peppy.
The Last Boy Scout is my benchmark movie for action movies only because it works on luck alone. Were it any darker, it’d be too depressing to watch. Any zanier and it couldn’t be believed. And were the script any tighter, it’d be Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Shane Black’s 2005 directorial debut).
And here to offer us a few closing words on the nature of the benchmark is the Actor who occupies the Exact Median in Hollywood: William Fichtner!
Mr. Fichtner, your thoughts?
We may safely assert that the virtue or excellence of a thing causes that thing both to be itself in good condition and to perform its function well. The excellence of the eye, for instance, makes both the eye and its work good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we see well. So the proper excellence of the horse makes a horse what it should be, and makes it good at running, and carrying his rider, and standing a charge.
If, then, this holds good in all cases, the proper excellence or virtue of man will be the habit or trained faculty that makes a man good and makes him perform his function well.
Now, if we have any quantity, whether continuous or discrete, it is possible to take either a larger (or too large), or a smaller (or too small), or an equal (or fair) amount, and that either absolutely or relatively to our own needs. By an equal or fair amount I understand a mean amount, or one that lies between excess and deficiency. By the absolute mean, or mean relative to the thing itself, I understand that which is equidistant from both extremes, and this is one and the same for all. By the mean relative to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and this is not one and the same for all.
For instance, if ten be too large, and two be too small, if we take six we take the mean relative to the thing itself [or the arithmetical mean]; for it exceeds one extreme by the same amount by which it is exceeded by the other extreme: and this is the mean in arithmetical proportion.
But the mean relative to us cannot be found in this way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him six pounds: for that also may perhaps be too much for the man in question, or too little; too little for Milo, 1 too much for the beginner. The same holds true in running and wrestling.
And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it—not the absolute but the relative mean.
An adequate quantity of wisdom, Mr. Fichtner. We thank you.
And now we turn to you, our Overthinking Audience! What are your benchmarks? What movies draw the line between “good” and “bad” for you? What are the averages against which all others are judged? Sound off in the comments!