Four Rooms

The idea of Four Rooms is simple.  Take four short films and set them in the same hotel, and connect them with one twitchy bellhop character (Tim Roth) who runs through all of them, pulling the four shorts together as one full-length film about his first night on the job.

Then you let four different filmmakers make a short film each, and edit the four together, so you truly get the feel of four stories coming together as one full-length film.

Well, I don't think that's confusing.

This film reminds me of confidence and confidence lost.  This isn't the brightest spot in either Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino's oeuvre, but this is an interesting entry — one that points to a specific type of film made only in the '90s: the ballsy independent that spawned a thousand ripoffs and inspired a legion of posers.

(As far as the other two directors, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell, this film might be their career peaks.  I can't say for sure because I haven't seen any of their other work.)

Until recently, I did not own this on DVD.  For one, the only DVD release boasts such glorious "special features" as "Widescreen" and "Dolby Digital Surround Sound."  In the heyday of my DVD collecting, I refused (and mostly still refuse) to buy DVDs with piss-poor features.  I want more value for my money than "Chapter Selections" and "Interactive Menus" and "Talent Biographies."

However, Four Rooms seemed like a great film to own and revisit once I got to the letter F, so I tracked down a copy.  I've spent a lot of time writing about writing and how I got here.  Four Rooms is an example of the kind of experimental narrative that influenced how I look at storytelling.  I felt like owning this one, even if the DVD features are crap.

I've seen Four Rooms exactly one other time — the time I rented this one on glorious VHS.  Of course, like every other film geek, I rented for Tarantino and Rodriguez, and I wasn't disappointed because those two guys could do no wrong (and still can't — just one man's opinion there).

I idealize '90s independent cinema, but there's a reason — the films were great.  Even the minor films had the support of A-list Hollywood stars who were looking to do something different.  Bruce Willis shows up in Four Rooms.  So does Antonio Banderas.  So does Madonna.

For me, in my early twenties, seeing big timers putting their weight behind quirky little independent projects gave me a confidence boost.  People took chances then.

But Tarantino wasn't the only one getting to play.  Rodriguez, Linklater, Smith, Liman, Baumbach, and many others got a shot, and they made the most of their chances.  Most of them are still working.

I was just stupid enough to think that maybe weird-ass me had a shot, too.  I didn't want to direct or act.  I just wanted to write something, anything, hell I don't know what.  Didn't matter.  I just wanted to know that I could write what I wanted and not feel as if I had to write the next Die Hard or whatever.  If I wanted, I could ignore my teachers, who told me that maybe writing about my personal experiences wasn't enough.

A film like Four Rooms made me think some strange stuff. 

I never wrote anything like this film.  Mostly, I just needed the confidence boost, and still do (in a different way).

What I mean by a confidence boost isn't that I need to feel free to write what I want.  I got over that part.  Now I write what I want and if people don't want to read any of it, I'm okay with that.  Sometimes writing sits in a drawer or on a hard drive and nobody gives a shit.  You have to be okay with that.  You just have to keep writing.

No, my confidence is a little shaken because films like Four Rooms might not happen again.  There might not be another boom in independent cinema quite like the '90s.  There might not be another open window.

So yeah, there's a weird duality to consider.  On one hand, I'm confident, and I write what I want.  I can believe that someday, maybe the best of what I can do will get through somewhere.

On the other hand, what if the window is closed and someday never comes?  Late at night, the walls can start talking to you, and they can tell you some things you don't want to hear.  When you can hear every clock in your house ticking, you get a heightened sense of the passage of time.

I try to drown all of that out by clacking on a keyboard, but I can't quite type loudly enough.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Ordinarily, the films I discuss here prompt some sort of personal storytelling, but in this case, no, I am not going to tell you about how I lost my virginity.  That story is too short.

Instead, I'm going to admit another kind of folly: my own lack of command over the alphabet.  If 300 and 10 Items or Less are ahead of the letter "A," then why isn't this film?

I think back to the time when I started this project, all that time ago, and the person I was then.  Things were different in those days.  I didn't have as much experience with alphabetizing.

The night I started this project, I was so excited.  Finally, after all those years of waiting, I'd decided that particular night in January was going to be "the night."  I had everything planned out.  I even announced my plans to my friends.  They were supportive, even cheering me on.

The night was going to be perfect.

I went home from work and I had a nice dinner.  I believe I had a glass of wine to relax.  But the anticipation was killing me.  I couldn't really wait.

Unfortunately, that was the problem.  I was so excited, I jumped the gun.

Looking back, yeah, I didn't know what I was doing.  I fumbled around and started this project and ended up getting stuff all out of order, and there was some awkwardness, some instant regret.  When I clicked "Publish," I knew I couldn't go back.

You can't have two "first entries."

I wish I could go back to that night and do things in the right order, to prove to myself and to others that I got better at alphabetizing.  But you can't go back and get a do-over.  What's done is done.  Oh, I could back-date this entry, but you can't turn back time.  And I would still know the truth about my own dubious skills.

Sometimes, a guy just has to keep on moving forward and hope that nobody ever brings up your mistake, your awkwardness, and maybe no one will ever find any writing you may have done about that awkward event on the World Wide Web.

Foreign Correspondent

Far from Alfred Hitchcock's best film, Foreign Correspondent is just okay. They can't all be zingers. However, you do get Joel McCrea here. If McCrea isn't one of the best "everyman" leading men of all time, then I'll eat my hat.

You might know McCrea from perhaps his best film, Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels. That's a film I watched for the first time in grad school. At the time, I wasn't sure what to expect, but Sturges' film combined just the right amount of humor and pathos without being too maudlin.

McCrea worked with Hitchcock on Foreign Correspondent a year earlier. The plot is pretty convoluted; for an older film, I had trouble keeping up with what was going on, and really only remember a few pivotal scenes. The film seemed a bit unnecessarily long, and I found myself not invested at all here.

Of course, that's not really much of an indicator. I've had trouble focusing on films lately, often sitting in front of the TV with my laptop out, surfing away. I find myself answering my own questions with quick Google searches. When did Joel McCrea die? Which film came first, this one or Sullivan's Travels? Did Hitchcock do other films with McCrea in the lead role? What in the world is this film about, anyway?

I sit and type and don't really watch as intently as I should — and I'm not just doing this with older films, or DVDs that I own, but with movies I rent. Last night, the wife and I rented the Liam Neeson flick Unknown, which couldn't hold my interest and left me unimpressed.

Then I re-watched Errol Morris' Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, which was considerably better and got me thinking like a film scholar again, what with all that Eisenstein-y montage-y stuff going on. Still, I had my laptop out. I even took notes!

When Apple introduced the iPad, Steve Jobs talked about how our computer use has changed in recent years. Now that wireless routers are ubiquitous, we use laptops (often with extended battery lives) in front of the television. We seem to watch with one eye on the TV, one eye on the computer screen, one eye on our smart phone, and one eye on the rest. Wait, how many eyes do we have?

My wife isn't a movie person. Her viewing habits are quite similar; she watches television with her laptop out, frequently checking Facebook or her e-mail, or surfing any number of Web sites that catch her interest. If a question occurs to me and I don't have my laptop handy, I ask her to look something up. Within seconds, I have my answer.

That's when we watch television. When I watch movies, especially ones for this project, I tend to have my laptop out, clacking away. This maximizes my time, you see. If I watch my movies and then type an entry like this, I'm looking at as much as twice the running time of the film. If I write while I watch, I get done quicker. I can move on to other things.

As my viewing habits have changed considerably, so too have my DVD buying habits.  I continue to shift toward Blu-Ray instead of downloaded media (a whole other argument).  I haven't bought a plain old DVD since the Great Hitchcock Binge of 2011, which resulted in my adding 50+ films to my collection, many of which I've never seen.

Because I find no real personal attachment to some of the films I'm watching, making time for them has gotten less and less interesting. I suppose this raises the question, why collect all these Hitchcock films if you don't want to watch them?

Put simply, I got started. I had to see that through. I had to see what else he had done, even if his minor works pale in comparison to his masterpieces. Hitch's oeuvre was a blind spot and I needed to fix that in a big way.

Also, you can't very well develop a personal attachment to a film unless you watch the film. (Okay, maybe you can with imagery or a soundtrack or something, but still.  Watching is better.)

Foreign Correspondent, although nominated for several Academy Awards, is a minor film by Hitchcockian standards, but in my twisted, completist view, is still a film worth owning, because even minor Hitchcock is still Hitchcock.

I treat three great directors with such reverence: Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Stanley Kubrick.  Even watching their worst films, I find the time well spent.