3x3: double features that you have to explain

Movies
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This week’s 3x3 isn’t just a list you can drop and run. We’re looking for double features that don’t seem to make any sense until you’ve explained them. However, to get our explanations, you’ll have to listen to this week’s podcast. The 3x3 starts at the 47-minute mark.

Kelly Wand
3. Weekend at Bernie’s and Breakfast at Tiffany’s
2. Passion of the Christ and Zapt

  1. Wizard of Oz and Mannequin 2: On the Move

Dingus
3. Big Night and Goodfellas
2. Brick and Juno

  1. Sweet Smell of Success and Red River

Tom Chick
3. The Man Who Wasn’t There and Remains of the Day
2. Knowing and Photographing Fairies

  1. Orphan and Let the Right One In
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  1. The General and Raiders of the Lost Ark
    If you’ve seen both movies, it’s obvious. Buster Keaton’s The General isn’t really a comedy as it is an comedy-adventure film. It’s a clear predecessor to action-adventures of later decades, with a damsel in distress, a group of faceless villains to outwit, ingenious cliffhangers and resolutions, and a genuine sense of narrative tension.

  2. Margaret’s Museum and May
    MAJOR spoilers coming, so skip to #3 if you haven’t seen these. ESPECIALLY Margaret’s Museum! And PLEASE don’t read the Wikipedia summary either! Still here? Margaret’s Museum is a Cape Breton mining drama starring Helena Bonham Carter. May is an indie horror film. Both title characters are cute, quirky, mentally unstable women who cope with a third-act nervous breakdown by doing disturbing things with human body parts.

  3. The Fountain and Speed Racer
    Both are relatively recent science fiction movies that bombed, critically and commercially. While flawed, both are also (IMO) severely underrated. But I put them together more as a study in FX: In Speed Racer, if it was possible to do a shot in CG, it became CG. In The Fountain, if it was possible to do without CG, they did without – shots of nebulas were created with macrophotography. In both cases, those decisions made for a unique aesthetic unlike anything else at the time.

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I had these sitting around from last week, but I didn’t write down why they were connected. And I actually had to think about it for a second to remember my wording. These aren’t as good as Kelly Wand’s though, unfortunately, but how could they be?

3) Dazed and Confused and Wonder Boys
This is my weakest one. I think the connection is probably too obvious. But I didn’t pick both because they involve drugs, but more because both films give me the same feeling - kind of a meandering, relaxed feeling. One is about the after hours parties of high school kids, one is about campus life, but both are kind of about how people wander from place to place without a real destination in mind, but the journey is what matters. They both create a story out of very disconnected scenes, which I liked.

2) A Serious Man and Whale Rider
Both were movies which, at least for me, jumped to a whole new level when they both had a scene, roughly half-way through the movie, featuring a character weeping and pleading for the love of a father-figure / God-figure about their hopes and dreams. In the case of A Serious Man, it is Richard Kind sitting on the edge of the dried-up pool, crying and yelling at Hashem. And in Whale Rider, it is Keisha Castle-Hughes breaking down while reading a speech dedicated to her grandfather, who isn’t there.

I think A Serious Man is a far better movie, and in fact Whale Rider gets kind of boring near the end. But in both movies, I was absolutely floored by each moment. I had never seen anything from Richard Kind before that prepared me for what he did in that scene. And if you didn’t tear up a little during that scene in Whale Rider you have a heart of stone.

1) Magnolia and Children of Men
I may be the only one who had this interpretation of both of these movies, but I think both Magnolia and Children of Men are films about how characters react when put in a situation that is larger than themselves and over which they have no control. The movies are both: “okay, now you’re in this situation; what are you going to do?”

Many of my friends who saw Children of Men didn’t like it because they wish that there had been more explanation about why children weren’t being born, and wanted to know more about the world of the film. They also didn’t like it because of the way it left things unresolved - will Kee make it to the human project or not? For me, none of those things were the point - the movie was about how Theo dealt with being in this world, and the issue of having to protect this special individual. And once his story was over, the movie could end.

Likewise, in Magnolia, the opening scenes tell little vignettes of coincidence - like a scuba-diver who winds up in a treetop … how did he get up there? Then the movie jumps into a bunch of characters lives and we never really get any of those explanations for why these coincidences are happening again. I think the point was that the characters in Magnolia are like the people in those vignettes. They themselves can’t see the overall picture because they are inside their own life - they can’t see the hand of God controlling the coincidences, they just have to react and live their lives as best they can.

  • Nick
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Kelly’s #2 selection was a triumph.

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So how was your date, Tom?

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/DERAIL

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Uh, wait, what?

(runs to check that I didn’t accidentally post a bunch of post-podcast chatter…)

-Tom
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I like what you’re doing here, Nick, but I can’t quite wrap my head around it. It does, however, make me think of a Children of Men/Lord of the Rings double feature. Normal guys in fantastic worlds rising to the obligation to do extraordinary things. It’s not so much about the world as the character’s journey through it.

-Tom
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  1. Army of Darkness and Wizard of Oz.

The Alpha and the Omega of my DVD collection, literally sandwiching everything else that I own. Two favorites in which a reluctant and scared hero with a dead end job and life are thrust into a picaresque journey of undead, magic, and flying simians, and learn to stand up for themselves and find courage, both inside themselves and within their friends to defeat an evil. Despite their new friendships they feel compelled to return home but are changed by the journey.

I’ll think of a couple of more later.

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  1. A Face In The Crowd and Fail-Safe. First you have the Walter Matthau role of the smartypantser-than-thou. In both films he is not a main character but is central to spoiling everything. In Face he’s seduced by the coolness of television-inspired fame to keep a fraud in power. In Fail he’s seduced by the tweedy arrogance of the ivory tower to keep egging our military and political leaders into a nuclear showdown. Secondly, both movies have scenes that, when I saw them, made me say, “Oh, that’s where the Simpsons got that from.” Lastly, when viewed in sequence, you will be surprised we ever made it out of the middle of the 20th century. TV could lie to us? The United States could nuke us?

  2. The Fly (1986) and Harold and Maude. You’ve got a young attractive person who falls for a dynamic personality with many interesting insights into the workings of the universe. Love is brief and intense, but ultimately fails as the older one dabbles in self-destructive behaviors. After Brundlemaude dies, the survivor has to live on with the painful memories, but is stronger for their experiences. Love hurts, man.

  3. The Hudsucker Proxy and Ghostbusters. Both movies are about two New York City-based businesses (and the employees of same) risking an awful lot of capital on an untested product/service. Both movies have scenes where the 'Busters and the, er, dingus are as ready as they’ll ever be…and the plot stops dead until a reason arises for them to become popular. Proxy uses a montage that shows that the Daddy-O is rejected by the masses until some anonymous kid takes a shine to it and changes history. And the Ghostbusters are down to their last meal of Chinese takeout until the call from the hotel comes in. But it turns out that the fads are critically important to American culture and/or the survival of NYC. And in a certain light, Tim Robbins kind of looks like the non-Ernie Hudson ghostbusters. Also note the importance of the redhaired secretary to the success of the company in both movies. Sure, sure, I’m not afraid of no ghost!

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Superb!

-Tom
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Galaxy Quest and Behind the Mask: the Rise of Leslie Vernon - as another example of “Galaxy Quest Syndrome”. Starts off lampooning their genre, Star Trek for the one and unstoppable teen-slasher for the other (“Does the rolling help?” “Do you have any idea how much cardio I have to do?”) and ending as a love letter and embrace of it.

Being There and (any) Godzilla - a central figure who really is a very simple being exists in quiet isolation, until something acts as a catalyst to send him blindly into the outside world. Everyone who crosses his path projects depths and motivations and meanings onto him that simply aren’t there. Untold devastation inevitably follows, whether still waiting off camera or shown explicitly in cardboard cityscapes is a minor detail.

David Cronenberg’s Crash and Death Proof - a paired study of people who suffer with the paraphilia of being turned on by car crashes.

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what a shame that we never saw Peter Sellers playing Godzilla in his lifetime.

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  1. Ben Hur and Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace - They both have the same basic structure. Boring stuff, boring stuff, boring stuff, awesome race scene, boring stuff, boring stuff, lightsaber battle. The lightsaber battle in TPM is better than in Ben Hur, but the race in Ben Hur blows anything Lucas did away. And without CGI! The animatronics on Charlton Heston are amazing, too. He looks so lifelike.

  2. The Professional and Evita - Two films that would have been immensely improved if Madonna had never been born.

  3. UHF and Se7en - Both films feature a scene wherein someone would like to know the contents of a box.

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Miracle on 34th Street and The Wizard, as both are essentially feature-length adverts: One for Macy’s department store, the other for Nintendo.

Home Alone and Die Hard both center on lone protagonists in cavernous buildings, outnumbered and outmuscled, trying to protect their families from would-be thieves, on or around Christmas Eve. Both Kevin and John are nearly snuffed at the end – by Joe Pesci and Alexander Godunov, respectively – until someone representing a slightly different demographic (old dude with a shovel/Reginald VelJohnson with a gun) shows up in the nick of time to take out the bad guy(s). Why do I say slightly different demographic? Well, Kevin and Shovel Guy are both apparently from wealthy, white families from suburban Chicago, but they’re divided by age. John and Al Powell are both cops, but they’re divided by race and jurisdiction. Well, maybe divided’s not the right word. But by the end of the movie, both the hero and his unlikely savior have become fast friends.

Army of Darkness and Fantasia (specifically, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment) both demonstrate the dangers of unqualified individuals reading from mystic tomes. Both also feature one pesky antagonist – more a pest than a villain – becoming several, increasingly smaller ones, after being separated into tiny pieces. Witness the mirror version of Ash, and the mirror’s subsequent shattering, or Mickey’s chopping the broomstick up with an axe.

The second pairing may be rather obvious, and is subject to revision.

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Night of the Comet, Night of the Hunter - Both feature young people on their own, trying to find refuge in inhospitable territory, on the run for their lives.

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Dog Day Afternoon - the protagonists are the villains (how do you NOT want to side with the voluptuous Tura Satana?), the isolationism of the locations, both the ranch and the bank where they were trapped, and the quest for money which ultimately ends up fruitless makes these movies a lot more similar than you might think.

Goodfellas, Bad Girls - The life of crime is fun and pays off in spades, except when it doesn’t.

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Nice! And they both involve the hero’s female loved-one (mother, wife) being separated from the hero and unable to help him.

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My favorite unlikely double feature, which I did a while back, was Conan the Barbarian and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. In both, a man who doesn’t play by society’s rules goes on an epic quest. OK, that’s about where it ends, but it’s still a great pair of movies.

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Star Wars & Pineapple Express

Scarface & Kramer vs Kramer

Raging Bull & Moulin Rouge

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The Crying Game and Sleepaway Camp.

Not to spoil it, I’ll just say they both explore the same theme from wildly divergent angles.