MOVIE NOTES: Sean Collins’s case against “Grosse Pointe Blank,” which I think isn’t wrong so much as incomplete. I’m not sure I can be fully reasonable about this movie, since I think it’s about being lost and searching for meaning and I just so happened to see it several times when I was in that exact state. So I, like, related. But I’ll make three quick points:

1) I agree that you’re not asked to view Martin Blank as awful. You’re asked to view him as blank (not a subtle movie, you know?). Emptied. “You’re a handsome devil–what’s your name?” That sense of self-lessness, of lack of selfhood due to wrong actions, is reinforced throughout the movie. Evil actions alienate you from others and from yourself, and begin to erase you. You have to stop acting wrong before you are erased forever.

2) I’m OK with movies in which evil actions do not have obvious immediate punishments. I think there’s a theme in GPB that Blank is being punished for his crimes by being trapped in an absurd and isolated world–he’s in solitary–but I totally agree with Sean that everything’s resolved too neatly. I’m okay with that in part because I think real-life evil actions don’t have obvious immediate actions, and yet they are still wrong, just as GPB presents Blank’s hit-man career as wrong. I don’t want to demand either that every story show virtue rewarded, or that every story show vice triumphant in our bad world. I’m willing to say that sometimes the effects of sin are evident in the outside world and sometimes they’re just not.

3) I hadn’t seen “Say Anything” until a few years after I saw GPB. GPB was my second Cusack flick after “The Grifters.” So he wasn’t embedded in my mind as a Cute Actor–more of a Loser Sleazeball. I’m sure that influenced my reading of his GPB character as, well, a Loser Sleazeball rather than a Cute Actor.

Sean on “The Shining,” a movie I really don’t like–I want to see a movie about sin, not a movie about Calvinism. Sean has a far higher tolerance for random absurd evil than I do. [Edited to remove overly-quick jump from fiction to reality! I don’t like “TS” the movie in large part because I don’t think it’s as realistic as TS the book, but there are lots of amazing artworks that present worldviews I don’t think are true. So it’s not just that “TS”‘s Jack Torrance seems pre-damned, will-less, on the express train to Hell. But his character is one of the bigger problems with the movie, IMO. Anyway….]

All this notwithstanding, he really should see “Carnival of Souls.” I know I’m picky and we tend to have differing tastes in horror flicks, but I really do think he’d like this one.

Sean also has a post on “The Exorcist,” but I haven’t read it b/c I fear spoilers.