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The Jazz Singer and a Few "Lofty" Questions

I just watched The Jazz Singer (1927) a few days ago. One of the first feature films to employ synchronous sound—and the first to be a success—it's actually mostly silent, save musical interludes and a few lines of dialogue. It's fascinating to watch: you can feel the excitement in the air at the time of its release, the buzz surrounding this novelty—sound. But what did that breakthrough really mean? Silent films had always been accompanied by music: the image had never been truly silent. Many filmmakers in the 20's were afraid that the advent of the talkie would destroy the art of cinema. Looking back on this fateful moment in movie history, I feel tempted to entertain a few lofty questions. . . Is film, in its essence, a visual art? Is the foundation of the cinema the image or the projection of sound onto the image? Proponents of silent movies focus on the image, whereas a theorist like Michel Chion claims that sound is just as important, whether it be the synchronized sounds of the sound era or the musical and live accompaniment of the silent era. Who's right? Or is there even an answer? Does cinema have an essence to speak of? Is it just a hodgepodge of different things? Is that its essence? Does it even make sense to speak of an art having an essence? Is cinema even an art? Should we even care?

Obviously, this kind of thing can go on for pages, for hours, and lead in many different directions. To avoid such tangents, let me just say that I highly recommend The Jazz Singer to anyone who hasn't seen it. Sure, it's dated in many ways, and its use of blackface is offensive, but it remains a crucial film. In it you can feel two eras and two camps, silent and sound film, facing off: the great divide is there, right before your eyes (or ears). Of course, many later films were also part silent, part talkie, but in The Jazz Singer you feel the novelty of the effect, as if it were still palpable. Indeed, it's hard to understand the issues of sound in film without understanding what that movie meant in its time—for better or for worse.

Keep 'Em Talking

Now that I've devoted a few days to strictly current cinema, I'd like to pull back for a moment. Recently, I rented the 1959 Billy Wilder flick, Some Like It Hot, which has long been one of my favorites. Starring Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe, and packed to the brim with hilarious one-liners, this screwball comedy gave me food for thought. Here're the thoughts:

1) They don't do closing lines the way they used to. And I'm not just talking about "Nobody's perfect," arguably the best closing line in movie history. Consider a few other memorable quips: "This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" (Casablanca), "The stuff dreams are made of" (The Maltese Falcon), "Shut up and deal" (The Apartment), and "Alright, Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my close-up" (Sunset Boulevard). All from movies released between 1941 and 1960. The one-liner itself seems to be in decline - that is, the truly memorable one-liner. Instead of "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night," what do we have today? "Run, Forrest, run!" Sure, Forrest Gump never aspired to be a movie of one-liners, but even in the straight comedies these days, the focus seems to have shifted from dialogue (with Woody Allen remaining a prominent exception here) to broader quid-pro-quo situations, or, far more regrettably, gross-out humor.

2) Then again, dialogue itself has changed dramatically. What I mean to say is that back-and-forth shooting of wickedly clever lines as if the conversation were a game of racquetball is no longer the norm. In the past decade, talk of great or particularly funny dialogue almost invariably turned to Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994). Here was the great post-Chandler master of hard-boiled talk, it seemed. And I in no way mean to argue with that. But by then the rules had dramatically changed. The dialogue in a movie like The Big Sleep (1946) is often quickly paced and full of verbal playfulness and loaded subtexts. To return to Some Like It Hot, almost every other exchange in that movie plays upon some pun or expression and subverts it. (Lemmon: "She called me 'Honey!' Curtis: "I want to make sure 'honey' stays in her hive, there'll be no buzzing around tonight"; or, after Curtis has deliberately tripped the lovelorn Monroe in order to grab her attention and begin his wooing of her: Lemmon: "If I were a girl - and I am - I'd watch my step with a guy like that!" Monroe: "If I had watched my step I wouldn't have met him!") The genius of Pulp Fiction is entirely different from that of these studio-era classics. Sure, the characters are clever, but never unrealistically so. In fact, what elevates their dialogue from that of ordinary movies is precisely its ordinariness. Maybe that's not quite true. Obviously, these aren't slice-of-life conversations, but they have that rhythm, which if not realist is at least an improvisation or play on realism. The characters talk about Big Macs, potbellies, and keyed cars, and they're never too clever. By comparison, the average Humphrey Bogart line in his classic noir films is so precise in its cleverness or catchiness as to be totally unbelievable. The prime difference seems to be that the humor of these earlier dialogue-based films (as well as those of Woody Allen) derives from a certain verbal virtuosity, if you will, a sort of locutory classiness to be showed off like a badge of honor, whereas Tarantino's humor is firmly and deliberately grounded in the mundane, the everyday: it's New Wave humor.

3) Now, here I am talking and talking about dialogue and its evolution over history. A glaring fact remains to be recognized. Dialogue is American. Yes, that may sound ridiculous, but let me elaborate: the very notion of the great one-liner, of deriving humor purely through a conversation, has been, if not invented by, then exploited the most by American cinema. Be it the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Preston Sturges, Herman Mankiewicz, Billy Wilder . . . These are the folks who we are still quoting today. (Of course, Wilder was not by origin an American, but all his famous works were Hollywood studio productions.) You don't quote foreign films the same way. The obvious explanation is that most of them aren't in English: how can we Americans properly judge their dialogue? But the point is not a judgmental one; it's simply a matter of emphasis. Let's take a look at continental Europe. Most of its great films are great because of a look, a feel, a performance, or something intangible. Wim Wenders said that the goal of American cinema was traditionally to tell a story, whereas in Europe, the prime concern was more often to create a sense of place. (Certainly, his movies, especially Wings of Desire (1987), would testify to that). Tarantino elaborates on the same theme, explaining that, in the old studio days, Hollywood was the best at storytelling, and Europe told a feeling, an impression, a mood. I argue that "storytelling" in that sense involves, more often than not, a strong element of dialogue. Hence, on the American front we were given the films I listed above, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Vigo and Cocteau created dreams, Italian neorealism gave us slices of working-class life, stripped down of classy wordplay, and artistic movements such as surrealism, which had no need for dialogue, found their way into cinema. The same year Billy Wilder made Some Like It Hot, Truffaut made The Four Hundred Blows, perhaps my favorite film of all time—and it hardly has one line worth repeating, or even remembering. The point is dialogue was not the point for these filmmakers. A lot can be revealed by comparing the films of French director Jean-Pierre Melville with the American noirs he emulated. Bogart can never stop talking, but Alain Delon, in Melville's 1967 film Le Samourai (also a crime picture, and greatly influenced by its American counterparts) is often silent and always short in his words. The details in these French crime pictures were not words, but objects, images, little pieces of bric-à-brac that helped define a locale, a tone, a feel—and looks. Indeed, when I think of French cinema in general, I think of faces, of eyes, silent and staring: those of Martin LaSalle in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), those of Antoine Doinel at the end of The Four Hundred Blows, those of Delon in practically any film I've ever seen him in. I don't think of one-liners. I don't think of "Nobody's perfect."

4) Before I conclude this little rambling, let me concede that there are of course exceptions to what I perceive to be something of a rule. My pick for the greatest screenplay of all time is Jacques Prévert's Children of Paradise (1945), and I love it in large part for its ingenious, delightfully playful, pun-filled, rich and textured dialogue. It's one of the few French films I bother quoting. (Funny that the Cahiers du Cinéma and its critics, many of whom went on to become the directors of the New Wave, bashed the film so intensely. Was it the stylized dialogue, among other things, that turned them off?) French comedy, in general, is a far cry from Groucho Marx and Woody Allen. Louis Defunès, who made some of the funniest of all French films, was memorable not for what he said but the way he said it - his exaggerated gestures, his wildly gesticulating eyes and mouth, his bombastic pitch. To a certain extent—though, as I don't speak Italian, I'm no great expert—Roberto Benigni falls under the same category of comedians who express themselves primarily through their tone and mannerisms rather than the content of their speech. There does exist a genre of French comedy that is highly dialogue-based, though in a different way from its American counterpart. These situational comedies, many of them originally stage-plays, are, in a sense, just that, even on the screen: stage-plays. Words are all-important, but not so much one-liners as puns inverted and metaphors extended for effect. Double-entendre rules supreme. Maybe the most famous recent example of such a comedy is Le Dîner de Cons (1999), released in the U.S. as The Dinner Game (see the photo above).

For the most part, though, dialogue has historically been what distinguished American cinema from the others. Sure, we had our Westerns and our grand costume epics and our musicals, none of which relied so heavily on the spoken (though perhaps the sung) word. That said, although the U.S. did invent two of those genres, I'd claim that it's in the readily quotable noir films and screwball comedies that we can find cinema at its most quintessentially American. Dialogue is what the old Hollywood did best, and it did it better than anyone else. Perhaps for that reason its films were sometimes lacking in other aspects. Then again, nobody's perfect.

Addendum

In response to a recent comment concerning my last post, I'd like to clarify what Fog of War is actually about. Robert S. McNamara was the Secretary of State during the first part of the Vietnam War (he left office at the height of the conflict). To this day, he is largely blamed for getting the U.S. involved in Vietnam, and he never spoke out against the war once he had stepped down as Secretary, although he clearly had qualms with it. Hence, he is a highly controversial figure, and Morris, in his documentary, seeks to get some answers to questions that have long haunted post-Vietnam America: Why were we led into Vietnam? Was there a justifiable morality behind the war, despite its horrific outcome? Can there ever be a war that is free of moral dilemma? In the end, it doesn't take much to connect the dots between what McNamara talks about and the Bush Administration's war in Iraq (which, for the record, McNamara has publicly condemned).

The Case of the Missing Reels

Errol Morris's Fog of War is a superb documentary and one of the best films of the year. Its penetrating look at Robert S. McNamara does something that few movies succeed in doing: it prompts the audience to ask its own questions. We become part and parcel of the interview that is unfolding before our eyes: at times we feel sympathy toward McNamara, at times we are disgusted by him. The movie is not an apology, not a defense, and not an indictment. It is simply an endlessly thought-provoking inquiry that asks more questions than it answers, as the title has already implied.

Morris's documentary actively engages the audience in more ways than any film I've seen this year: it doesn't necessarily implicate us, the way Capturing the Friedmans, or Morris's earlier The Thin Blue Line (1988), do, but it does make us part of the process. Morris himself is never seen and rarely heard: when we do hear him intervene for the first time, it's jolting, as if some fabric has just been ruptured and the film's mode of perception has been drastically altered. What has actually happened, of course, is that we the audience have heard our own voices spoken for us, our own thoughts expressed. The effect of Morris's prolonged silence in the film's beginning is to create a palpable link between filmmaker and audience during the interview footage: after all, both parties are silently watching the same thing—the same framed shot of McNamara as he sits and talks. As in most movies, we the audience sit without saying a word (theoretically), but our thoughts race, and we voice questions in our mind. To hear such a question suddenly and unexpectedly voiced onscreen (though, of course, behind the camera) indicates a certain allegiance of roles, as if Morris has vicariously adopted the position of intervening audience member, or the audience, for its part, has become the filmmaker. I have never seen an interview filmed in such a surprising way. Obviously, interview footage always implies a certain connection between filmmaker and viewer, but none exploits this link the way Fog of War does. The whole point of Morris's film is that what McNamara says is not a full explanation, not an apology, and not a total confession: in the end, he only offers more questions in response to the questions Morris/we ask him. Parts of Fog of War may feel on the surface like an ordinary PBS special, with the same familiarly ambiguous tone, but I believe it to be one of the most groundbreaking nonfiction films in years.

Now that I've tried to explain why I loved this movie, it's time for me, in true Fog-of-War style, to ask my own question. Why are there so few copies of the film in circulation? The movie premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 11, and as of yet it has still not reached my hometown, despite a good number of arthouse and independent theaters in this area. One of these theaters informed me that there were a very limited number of Fog of War prints for cinemas to show in the country. Why? Morris's film stands a good chance of winning an Oscar for the year's Best Documentary; it has received rave reviews; Morris is already an established documentary filmmaker, with works like Gates of Heaven (1978), The Thin Blue Line, and A Brief History of Time (1992) to his credit. All this got me to wondering . . . Although Fog of War was mostly shot before September 11, its portrayal of the Vietnam War now conjures up all sorts of connections with our current situation in Iraq (see Ellen Goodman's article for a more in-depth description). I have heard, to no surprise, that prominent members of the Bush Administration do not care too much for the film. Could they have pressured distributors to keep Fog of War from being widely circulated? This is, after all, an election year, and similar things have happened: let's not forget CBS's decision to refuse to air the MoveOn.org anti-Bush ad during the Super Bowl. I could just be spouting conspiracy theories here (after all, this is a movie weblog, not a political one), but if anyone has any feedback or comments to offer, I'd love to hear them. All I can say for now is that the situation sure looks shady. . .

The Ones That Got Away

This last year at the movies was, at times, buzzing with critical acclaim, as one film after another opened to a frenzy of "hurrahs!". A few of these pictures, however, left me cold. Here's a list of five 2003 movies that, given my high expectations for them, in one way or another disappointed me:

Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola): I enjoyed it, and it had some beautiful moments, but it could have been so much more. Its premise had potential, but it never went beyond the standard Japan-101 portrayal of Tokyo. You had the arcade rooms, the karaoke, the dutiful hotel clerks, the neon lights, the silly game shows . . . everything you'd expect, without any surprises. I felt that the movie wanted to create a deep sense of place and failed: all we were offered was a stereotypical, cartoonish Tokyo, as opposed to the mysterious, multifaceted Tokyo of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1982), or, for that matter, the Berlin of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987). Those movies created a real sense of place by exploring the contradictions of their locales; Lost in Translation did not. As a result, I found Sofia Coppola's film somewhat on the xenophobic side: it lazily settled for the standard crazy-Japanese-not-being-able-to-speak-English jokes. Anyway, that's all on the setting front. As for the storyline itself, it reminded me a bit of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), but without any of Allen's wit. I grant that some of the film was genuinely funny, some of it genuinely touching (like the final scene), but the whole enterprise never really got off its feet.

21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu): What almost made this movie work was the acting, which was terrific. Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro were both excellent, and Naomi Watts delivered the performance of her career. Otherwise, I felt that the film pretended to have a lot more to say than it actually did. If it wanted to be a meditation on the bleakness of American life, it never grounded its tragedy in a sense of place, a sense of what American life really is, complete with the little things: the dialects, the humor, the colloquialisms (see David Denby's review of House of Sand and Fog, which is similarly flawed), the mundane topics of conversation that helped situate and heighten the sense of "reality" in a film like Mystic River. (A. O. Scott discusses this quality of Mystic River in his review of the movie.) Its non-linear structure seemed like more of a gimmick than a necessary feature: it didn't reveal anything new, and the story might have packed more punch if it were told in a straightforward fashion. None of the characters really surprised or moved me: after all, we've all seen the deeply religious criminal and the outwardly happy but inwardly tortured housewife before. In the end, even with its fine performances, the movie never seemed to truly care about its characters: it merely used them to make a point. And what was the point? That life sucks? I felt manipulated, to a certain extent, by 21 Grams. For all its stylistic virtuosity, it remained, at its foundation, shallow.

Big Fish (Tim Burton): The whole time I was watching this, I couldn't help but think: this is Tim Burton's response to the critics. I had the feeling that the movie was self-consciously flaunting itself as "Burton's masterpiece." All I can say is it backfired. Burton never disappoints when it comes to visuals, and his recreation of a storyland world was inspired and perfectly conceived. The problem was the narrative. Now, something like Edward Scissorhands (1990) works, in my opinion, because it knows exactly what it wants to be: a fairy tale. As a result, it feels assured: it always knows exactly what note to hit. Big Fish, on the other hand, flip-flopped between fairy tale content and an earnest domestic drama, and the switches in narrative always felt clumsy, as if Burton wasn't sure what he should aim for: farce, fantasy, character drama? The jumbling of moods and tones might have worked if one commented on the other—for example, if we felt a real connection between the story of the old Edward Bloom and Bloom's tales of his youth. Instead, these two realms seemed to belong to different movies. As an ardent Burton fan, I expected great things, but Big Fish was limp, and my pick for Burton's "masterpiece" remains Ed Wood (1994).

House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman): Vadim Perelman's directorial debut was ambitious: it wanted to create sympathy for two characters who ostensibly had no sympathy for one another (at least for most of the film). The movie aimed high but fell flat, because it seemed to truly care about only one of these characters. Given the previews I had seen of the movie, I went in expecting Ben Kingsley's Colonel Behrani to be painted as something of a villain, though a sympathetic one. The reverse wound up happening. I cared a lot more about Kingsley, due in no small part to his wonderful performance (as well as that of Shohreh Aghdashloo, as his wife), than I did about Jennifer Connelly and her character's troubles. The film became one-sided. Connelly is a good actress, but she didn't have anything to work with: all her character did was whine, cry, look angry and then helpless, and attempt suicide. Matters were made a whole lot worse by her love interest, the policeman played by Ron Eldard. Whatever sympathy I may have had for this cop was blown to the wind when he threatened deportation to the immigrant family. And maybe that was intended. All of these characters were obviously weak in one way or another. But the film ended up being only halfway successful: I cared deeply about the Colonel and his family, and nothing else. As a result, the tragedy that arose felt like less of an organic manifestation of these characters' wills and flaws than a contrived setup manufactured to make the audience cry. It didn't seem inevitable, as great tragedy should. It seemed implausible.

American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini): This one's probably my favorite of the five "disappointments": brilliantly acted and at times hilarious, it took an "ordinary" narrative about "ordinary" people and did some wonderful things with it. However, I think it could have gone further, explored more. Like Lost in Translation, American Splendor was full of promise and never delivered. Near the beginning was a great introductory shot of Harvey Pekar, as played by Paul Giamatti, looking sullen and bitter, walking down the street on a cold, gray day. Giamatti did a terrific job in this movie, but the development of his character, who turned out to be anything but ordinary, basically stopped at the "this-guy's-a-weirdo" mark. Did we ever really get past that opening expression on Giamatti's face? Through the ups and downs of the narrative, the film never really plumbed the depths of the character; instead, it settled on his wacky eccentricities. The same can be said of all the major characters: in the end, they were strange, and not much more. Sure, they may have been endearing, but that doesn't mean they were complex. So what did American Splendor really say, other than: "Look at these people, they're delightfully weird"? Don't get me wrong, this movie had its moments, and a lot more sheer humanity in it than most films. But, again, I would say it missed its shot at greatness.

My Top Ten

Before I cut to the chase, let me just clarify one thing, in light of a recent comment: when I mentioned Star Wars in my LOTR post, I only meant the original three films, and NOT The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones, both of which, I agree, were terrible. That said, as much pandering as the first three movies may have done, I still consider them light years ahead of LOTR in quality.

Now that I've got that cleared up, here's my list of the ten best films of 2003 (in no particular order):

• Winged Migration (Jacques Perrin)

• The Fog of War (Errol Morris)

• Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee)

• Mystic River (Clint Eastwood)

• Love Actually (Richard Curtis)

• School of Rock (Richard Linklater)

• Triplets of Belleville (Sylvain Chomet)

• Raising Victor Vargas (Peter Sollett)

• Spider (David Cronenburg)

• Irreversible (Gaspar Noe)

Almost made it: Nowhere in Africa, Capturing the Friedmans, Spellbound, and Kill Bill, Vol. 1.
Movies that I missed but that can be found on a lot of other top ten lists: Bus 174, City of God, In America, and Elephant.
Movie that probably would have made it had I seen the second half: Shattered Glass (the power went out halfway through in the theater, but I loved what I had seen so far: I'll pick up where I left off when it's released on video).

Lord of the Rings: WHY???

Well, it's pretty certain who's going to win the Oscar for Best Picture, but what I find a little less certain is why. Yes, I'm talking about Return of the King, the most nauseatingly overrated entry in the most nauseatingly overrated trilogy in film history. Now don't get me wrong: I concede that these movies were terribly difficult to make, and what wound up on the screen is a feast for the eyes. But so's Jurassic Park. After all, those dinosaurs looked realistic, didn't they? If I told critics I thought Jurassic Park was the best film of its year, most of them would decide I had no more discernment in me than the T-rex so ably incarnated in that movie. And yet, I hear the Lord of the Rings trilogy being hailed by them as the greatest cinematic achievement of our time, and Peter Jackson being called the new Eisenstein. This comes as a bit of a shock to me, for the following modest reasons:

1) In a total of nearly 12 hours, with countless characters and extras running about, and some pretty stupefying special effects, the LOTR trilogy fails to do one simple thing: tell a story. Let's compare to another equally grand fantasy epic: Star Wars. Sure, I wouldn't call that trilogy an amazing work of moviemaking, but at least it offered constant developments, twists and turns (e.g. "I am your father"), and each of the three films had an arc that made it a complete entity unto itself. LOTR is so empty, that each four-hour entry just makes more obvious that painful fact: the result is like some shrieking vacuum, piled over with glittering visuals and elf ears.

2) But, you may protest, how can LOTR be expected to surprise us when we already know the books? Well, I answer, here's the problem. The books were as much an academic venture as a storytelling one, if not more so. Tolkien, a scholar of literature, particularly of Old English epics such as Beowulf, wanted to create an epic mythology for his English homeland, a pre-Norman invasion England of magic and warriors. Hence: Middle Earth. Hence also the incredible amount of detail Tolkien bestowed on the novels, the languages he created, the ways in which he adopted historical and literary traditions to inform his epic. All that is, of course, pretty much lost in Jackson's LOTR, which is essentially one huge action movie. You see, there's an inherent problem with adapting something like LOTR, which in the end relies less on story than on details, many of them academically inspired, to the big screen. What was Jackson's solution? Turn it into a bunch of really cool-looking battles and monsters. Oh, and have it go on forever.

3) But, you may protest, there is a lot of color and detail in these movies. Yes, I agree, the sets are nice. And so are the costumes. But the characters . . . well, then again, there ARE no characters. Gee-wiz, in 12 hours, you think you could have a little character development. Everyone's a completely one-dimensional caricature. Only Gollum comes anywhere near a hint of complexity, and I have no complaints with him. That little creature is pretty much the only non-technical feature LOTR gets right.

4) Which brings me to my penultimate point. Other than Gollum, who's brilliantly done, let's come out and face it: the acting is pretty pathetic. Oh, of course, Return of the King is winning all these best ensemble awards, but I don't buy it for a second. The supposed "lead," Frodo, as played by Elijah Wood, of whom I'm otherwise quite a fan, does absolutely NOTHING but look wide-eyed and scared. The little hobbit overwhelmed by the enormity of his mission works for about half an hour, but, when he still looks the exact same way at the end of 12 hours, except with some dirt on his face to pass as some sort of cheap "hardening" of the soul, I call it a pretty poor performance. None of the other actors, not even the great Ian McKellen, do much better. Of course, there's not much they can do at all with the dialogue they're given.

5) But, you may finally protest, who cares about the finer points of acting or character complexity or a story that surprises or moves us, or dialogue (let's never forget: "A red sky. [pause; breath] Blood has been spilt tonight. [cue ominous music]"), or any of that nonsense? These movies kick ass. And, I answer, well they might. I personally was bored half to death, but I understand why so many people dig them. The problem I have is, once again, the Jurassic Park conundrum: I have no problem with movies like JP, as long as they don't flaunt themselves as much more than they are. I wouldn't be ranting and raving if LOTR were widely considered what it actually is: a well-done, very very big-budget, action blockbuster, and not some sublime artistic masterpiece that in any way breaks boundaries or moves cinema forward. LOTR has no more brains or innovation or punch in it than Die Hard or Speed. That's the bottom line. What's really amazing about these movies is NOT the movies themselves, but the extent to which the critical world has bought into them, as if they subscribed to the mentality: "Well, if it's big enough, and has enough special effects, and costs enough, and, by golly, is LONG enough, it's gotta be good enough!"

Roger Ebert, in a review of Lawrence of Arabia for his Great Movies column, wrote: "The word 'epic' in recent years has become synonymous with 'big-budget B picture.' What you realize watching Lawrence of Arabia is that the word 'epic' refers not to the cost or the elaborate production, but to the size of the ideas and vision." Size of ideas. Hmm......... Let's just say, as a conclusion to my first post here, that I'm still waiting for someone to convince me that Return of the King, and all of LOTR for that matter, do not belong in the "big-budget B picture" category.