'Antidote' movies

Did you ever watch The Bicycle Thief? This 1948 Italian movie directed by Vittorio De Sica takes place in sprawling postwar Rome, where times are tough and jobless Antonio must get his bicycle out of hock in order to get work as a roving poster biller (those guys who ride around on bikes with ladders, pasting up movie posters on public walls).

Unfortunately, his bike gets stolen on his first day of work so he spends the rest of the movie dragging his young, plucky son Bruno around the city, trying to find the thief.

It’s a gripping little movie, a classic, with some beautiful cinematography of Rome’s wet, cobblestone streets and touching exchanges between father and son. The movie really puts you in Antonio’s shoes, so to speak, and you want nothing more than for him to find the thieves (there are two working in collusion) and get his job back. It’s also social criticism of sorts, and could be a pro-communist movie in disguise (Antonio’s bike is stolen because of capitalist impulses; he adopts the same wrongful impulses in the end).

But the thing that got me down was the ending. After nearly catching the thieves a couple of times, Antonio is desperate and decides to steal someone else’s bike. (Sorry if this is a spoiler.) He is caught, disgraced, and must plod home, empty-handed, with Bruno, who no doubt views the world a lot differently after the day’s events. “Fin.”

Huh? “Fin”? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Where’s the retribution? Where’s the payback? Granted, I’ve been conditioned by decades of vengeance flicks to expect some kind of reversal of fortune, hopefully with cool dialogue and artful violence. And on that score, The Bicycle Thief fails to deliver. I felt severely bummed by the ending. So bummed, in fact, that I had to pop in The Godfather immediately afterward, to remind myself how the Italians occasionally administer justice. Those bicycle thieves would have come clean if they woke up next to a horse’s head, I guarantee it.    

Yes. The Godfather was my antidote movie after watching The Bicycle Thief. (Actually, it’s my antidote movie after watching any unsatisfying movie. That’s right: The Godfather is a feel-good flick.)

I’ve begun to think there must be other antidote movies out there, necessary double bills for when you get stuck watching something that sends you straight to Bummersville or just fails to deliver that cinematic ending we’ve all come to expect. Here are some other examples:

Requiem for a Dream: Sure, it’s Darren Aronofsky’s greatest film, but it’s enough to make you want to suck on a shotgun lollipop by the time Jared Leto has to have his limb amputated (after trying to inject all of New Jersey into his vein) and Jennifer Connelly starts writhing around on a carpet with sex toys for a bunch of yuppies with thick wallets. Egad, with movies like this, no wonder people do drugs.

Antidote movie: Anything exploitative from Jennifer Connelly’s early career will do to cleanse the palate, preferably from the John Hughes collection; or maybe catch some old episodes of My So-Called Life for Leto’s early, pre-angst period. Judd Apatow movies also work.

Eyes Wide Shut: I’d been avoiding my copy of this DVD for some time, knowing how much I disliked Stanley Kubrick’s final film the first time I watched it, and afraid it would gain nothing on second viewing. Sadly, I was right. By this time, Kubrick had clearly lost it, though in some ways Eyes Wide Shut is well-structured and has some striking shots that stand up next to other great Kubrickian images. But the plot is crap, the acting by Tom Cruise is lifeless, and the music — oh, the music! — by Ligeti never fails to elicit hoots and howls of laughter (especially that pretentious, one-note piano theme that runs through the movie’s “intense” scenes). It’s not just that Cruise is a celebrity with limited acting chops — Ryan O’Neal’s WASP-y, waxy acting didn’t steer Barry Lyndon into the ditch; he was just one of the film’s set decorations.

Admittedly it’s kind of interesting to watch the Cruise-Kidman marriage train skidding off the rails onscreen, as they act out what would soon become a real-life split-up. But the fake New York sets, the “dream consciousness” of the film, its leaden pace (not helped by Cruise repeating everything each character says to him, kind of like Rain Man minus Dustin Hoffman) all add up to a pretentious film whose parts never add up to much of a sum.

Antidote movie: Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique or Red. Both starring French babe Irène Jacob, Kieslowski’s work was clearly an influence on Kubrick’s final crap-fest, but in a bad way. Striving for a European feel, yet setting his movie in New York (a New York Post headline laughably reads “Ex-Beauty Queen in Drugs Overdose at Hotel.” Americans say “drug overdose,” not “drugs”), even borrowing the sorrowful music that Kieslowski used so well in his films, the director of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange misses the boat. Hell, he even misses the pier. The whole “Is life but a dream?” question is handled much more memorably — and beautifully — by Kieslowski.

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Remakes are generally a bad, bad thing but what else can Hollywood do when it’s run out of ideas? Casting Keanu Reeves as the blank, cipher-like alien Klaatu must have sounded good on paper; onscreen, it’s like watching a peevish, aging surfer, trash-talking the human race. The special effects are worthless, the ending is lame, and Klaatu never makes the earth stand still! All the more reason to reach for…

Antidote movie: Robert Wise’s original The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Sure, the acting is stilted (no more than Keanu’s is today, by the way), the suits are comically outdated, the special effects are laughably crude and the pace is as thick as Klaatu’s hair gel. But somehow it works: the scenes of a massive spaceship landing in a Washington, D.C. park, the appearance of a smooth guardian robot named Gort whose job it is to lay waste to Earth — it’s Film Iconography 101, all laid out in horizontal compositions and cinematic black and white.

Boys Don’t Cry: Here we have a riveting, intense performance by Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena, a real-life woman trapped in a man’s body who was brutally raped and murdered in Texas, 1993. Her crime: acting like the man she really is inside, while possessing female genitalia. If that isn’t enough for you to eject the DVD, then push on. I recall my experience upon watching this bummer-fest when it first came out, thinking “That’s the best movie I’m never going to watch again for the rest of my life.” A sizeable downer in a decade of Prozac cinema (surely the work of Alejandro González Iñárritu, director of such feel-good flicks as 21 Grams and Amores perros and Babel, deserves special mention here), Boys Don’t Cry is a piece of art, but art definitely ain’t pretty sometimes. And sometimes you need to take the appropriate medicine afterward, such as:

Antidote movie: If you must see a drag movie, turn to Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959), a comedy that, we hope, will never get the Hollywood remake treatment. The firecracker dialogue, quicksilver chemistry between Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and ethereal charms of Marilyn Monroe just can’t be duplicated, even in the age of CGI and Angelina Jolie, so please, don’t attempt it. Just seek out the original, and smile at the running gags and the sublime message about fitting in, no matter what skin you’re born into. Lemmon’s admission to Joe E. Brown’s infatuated Osgood Fielding III on the speedboat at the end (“I’m a guy!”) is perfectly complemented by Fielding’s shrugging comeback (“Nobody’s perfect.”) Sure, it’s Hollywood. But it’s the good kind of Hollywood.