This Blog Is About...

...movies, and it's the result of me watching the R-rated version of Eyes Wide Shut a few nights ago. There's these ridiculous CGI "people" standing in front of all the naughty bits when Tom Cruise¹ walks through the Da Vinci Code mansion, and so I paused the movie to figure out what the deal was.

In the process, I read a couple reviews of the movie that all did the same thing: they stated, in one sentence, what the entire movie was "about."

Here are a few of them:

"At its core, Eyes Wide Shut is about marriage and the challenges it represents."

"Eyes Wide Shut is about sex in the fact that it concerns the grave effects that sex has upon people."

One from an Amazon.com review: "Eyes Wide Shut is about the wealth and power of society - about the upper class."

One, that I unfortunately cannot find anymore, said that Eyes Wide Shut was about the lies men tell themselves about women and sex.

When I went back to the movie, I couldn't stop thinking about that last one. This movie is about the lies men tell themselves about women and sex. Every time Tom Cruise was in the room with a women, all I could think about was catching his lies and asking myself what they meant.

It became too much to handle. I had to stop watching the movie. (Also, I had a paper to write and it was very late.) But I didn't stop thinking about the effect those movies had on me, especially when they stated, completely and without question, what Kubrick was making a movie "about." I like that none of them are really the same (even though that lies one stuck in my head), but all of them are similar.

Also, they're all a bunch of pretentious babble.

Marriage and the challenges it presents? The wealth and power of society? Maybe, but I thought it was about this guy, Tom Cruise, who's married to this woman, Nicole Kidman (back when the two of them were married in real life!), who one night tells him a story about a man she once...

Well, I don't want to spoil it. But my point is is, any interpretation of what the movie is "about" that doesn't just tell you the plot synopsis is entirely the interpretation of the viewer. For example, the second Google result for "Lord of the Rings is about" contains this line: "At its core, The Lord of the Rings is about the sovereignty of God, whose love and power are so great that He is able to work all things together for good (Romans 8:28)."

Clearly, that's not in the movie or the book directly. I also love that apparently the quote is backed up by Romans 8:28, which is part of a larger Biblical chapter where God ruminates about movies that are in some way connected to Him. My favorite is Romans 8:40: "And also, The Bourne Supremacy totally stole a character from a script He wrote."

On the other hand, most of the results for "Beverly Hills Chihuahua is about" say something like "Beverly Hills Chihuahua is about a pampered Beverly Hills Chihuahua named Chloe, played by Drew Barrymore, who found herself accidentally lost in the mean streets of Mexico without a day spa or Rodeo Drive boutique anywhere in sight." I.E. something very specific and concrete. The quote particularly is from the first result for that search, a website about not movies, but the stock market. Nine out of the top ten results are straight-forward, factual descriptions of the movie's plot. That suggests to me that Beverly Hills Chihuahua is being talked about more by suits than by actual lovers of film.

Star Wars, on the other hand, tilts much more in the direction of Stanley Kubrick. Sure, the first result says "At its heart, Star Wars is about Luke's quest to join the battle against evil," and a story about someone named Luke joining the fight between good and evil could refer to Star Wars, but it could also refer to a filmed adaptation of the third Gospel.

Most of the other results say something like "Star Wars is about what every religion is about," a sentence which seems to imply that Star Wars is a religion, or "Star Wars is about being a kid again," which seems to capture the nature of the film without actually commenting on its plot. Another I liked was "Star Wars is about a family that's dysfunctional." Yeah, and so is The Godfather.

The Star Wars results, in contrast to the Beverly Hills Chihuahua ones, are about the movie's underlying meaning, fans' reactions to the film (such as the lament that "Star Wars is about to be milked, again"), and--tellingly--advertisements for upcoming installments in the saga, such as the Clone Wars CGI-movie. From this, one can gather that Star Wars has a very strong fan-base that seems to have rebelled against the original creators of the work, but that still come back to it time and time again like spice addicts.

There is something appealing to me in this measure of a film that goes beyond how good people thought the movie was, or how well it seemed to achieve its goals. It seems to reveal a lot more about the whole nature of the film.

So I've created this website. Each week, on Sunday (though this might change depending on my personal preferences and the such), I will search Google for the phrase "X is about," where I will substitute for X the name of each of the top ten highest grossing films of the weekend. I will then excerpt a few of them on the website and perhaps provide some sort of Google statistic on the data. Will I be objective? No. Will I impose rigorous standards on my interpretation of the results? No. I will, in fact, try to present the most entertaining and insightful recap of the ways in which said movie was written about online.

I've already created them for Beverly Hills Chihuahua, The Secret Life of Bees, Max Payne, Eagle Eye, and W. More will be coming soon. I hope you find them enjoyable, and I hope they lead to interesting conversations about film and the way we perceive it.

So, welcome to the site! Have fun!

1: Regardless of the image I used, which has probably already been seen by everyone on the internet, and find funny, I do think he's gotten too bad a rap. Anyway, you should enjoy this, which I think only about half of the people on the internet have seen. Or heard, I guess, in this case.

The Secret Life of Bees (8:38 PM, Oct. 25, 2008)

1. As a document of Southern race relations in the early '60s, The Secret Life of Bees is about as useful as The Fairy Chronicles. [Slate]

2. Because it is set in the South against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Act, it would be easy to assume "The Secret Life of Bees" is about race relations, but Kidd and Prince-Bythewood are casting their net further than that. [ComingSoon.net]

3. "The Secret Life of Bees" is about finding healing and hope among friends who don't judge you, at a time when people were being judged for their sentiments as well as the color of their skin. [Tulsa World]

4. That's not what "The Secret Life of Bees" is about. [ScrippsNews]

5. Set in the 1960s American south, The Secret Life of Bees is about teen Lily Owens (the role undoubtedly going to Fanning) and her pal Rosaleen (Hudson). [FilmCrunch]

6. The Secret Life of Bees is about a 14 year old girl named Lily living in Sylvan, South Carolina with her father Terrance Ray, whom she refers to as T. Ray. [ChristopherParfitt, Note: this, as well as numbers 7,8, and 10, are about the novel on which the film was based]

7. The Secret Life of Bees is about a young adolescent girl named Lily Owens. [The Open Critic]

8. The Secret Life of Bees is about a girl named Lily Owens who lost her mother at the young age of four. [Wikispaces]

9. "The Secret Life of Bees" is about 14-year old Lily Owen who tries to cope with her mother's death during the summer of 1964. [MediaTakeOut.com]

10. A quirkly, bittersweet story, The Secret Lives of Bees is "about" a lot of things: a daughter's desperate attempt to understand her mother, her search for her own identity, race relations during the Civil Rights era, and how family can sometimes be found in the most unexpected places. [Paw Prints]

For one, The Movie is About Project has run into its first challenge: what about movies that are based on books of the same name?

To skip those results invalidates the directive that the site should list only the ten results comprising the first page of Google listings.

Also, it would skew the information, and would restrict a reader from examining the potential causes of such results. Why do reviews of the book, some from obscure blogs or the school reports of 8th graders, appear in the top ten results? Is it because reviews of the film are less likely to attempt to sum it up? Or are there just thousands of reviews of the book lying around on the internet, clogging up the results? It seems that the totals are largely similar. For "The Secret Life of Bees" novel review, there are 220,000 results. For "The Secret Life of Bees" movie review, there are 229,000. For what that's worth.

I think in the future I am only going to include the first ten results that directly reference the movie. In fact, I'm already starting to consider abandoning the "Top Ten Only" rule and replacing it with a "Whichever Results I Find Most Interesting/Entertaining" version, but we'll see what happens.

Regarding what the results tell us about the film itself, I would say that it appears to suggest that the movie focuses on broader issues than the characters themselves, or at least appears to film reviewers to focus on such.

Examining the results for "The Secret Life of Bees is" give us completely different, much more judgmental results. Some say things like "The Secret Life of Bees is a story about self discovery and the complicated nature of love," but a lot of them use the opportunity to make bee-related puns such as "The Secret Life of Bees is all honey, no sting" or "The Secret Life of Bees is not too sweet."

 

Max Payne is...

...an interesting movie.

...bogged down in the shadows. / ...so dark it looks as if the negative were dropped in a puddle of ink.

...an incredibly average action-oriented noir which tries to salvage some originality by going completely goofy at the end.

...a junkyard dog of a film that is true to its video-game roots even as it transcends them.

...surprisingly lacklustre.

...based on a video game - surprise, surprise - and everything in it looks shadowy and cavernous.

...devoid of novel life.

...just like the title suggests, ultimately painful.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua is...

...not that fantasy critique, as it places its hapless heroine in essence right back where she started at the end of the film, and poolside is poolside and emptiness is emptiness.

...a shallow cinematic shill at best.

...smartly structured with two parallel realities, allowing both the humans and the animals to interact within their own worlds.

... a kids' movie, after all / ...not a movie for anyone who's aged past the "Oh! Cute!" phase of moviegoing.

...a fair little movie for the entire clan.

...a lazy movie that bathes in the stink of inanity, using talking dogs as a way into the hearts of audiences.

...a dog.

...probably what you would expect.