Under My Philistine Skin

Oh God, we watched the worst, most boring movie the other weekend: Under the Skin. It got good reviews but a lot of viewers sounded divided on it and I was firmly in the camp that the movie was no good. It starred Scarlett Johansson as an alien who drove around in a van picking up men, bringing them home and killing them, possibly as some sort of fuel. (You will thank me for offering spoilers because you do not want to watch this movie anyway.)

It was one of those movies that had no script and was just improvisation and I don’t care for that. Write some dialogue. Johansson was playing a character with no personality (by design) and I also don’t care for that. If I want to watch someone display zero emotion, I’ll stare at a doll’s empty eyes for two hours.

Some of the visuals were striking but the boredom was crushing. I kept falling asleep and when I woke up, I was disappointed that the movie was still on.

The problem with this movie was that it was all Big Themes and no plot or characterization. Ideally, I’d like both in a movie. Yeah, I got the themes in this movie. From the opening credits, I gathered Under the Skin was about an alien of some sort who was adjusting to pretend to be a human. “Who are we … under the skin?” if you will. My lack of enjoyment of this movie was not that I didn’t get it; I just thought it was not well done.

A lot of the reviews of movies like this can be condescending to people who don’t like them, as if you’re some kind of Philistine who doesn’t get it. Like you only watch movies with explosions. Read this review from IMDB with my remarks in bold:

“The film requires you to watch in a different way than you normally watch films. (Yeah, after downing a pot of coffee.) It requires you to experience strange and beautiful images without feeling guilty that there is no complex plot or detailed characterization. (The only people who should feel guilty about a lack of plot or characterization should be the creators.) Don't get me wrong, plots and characters are good, but they're not the be-all and end-all of everything. (Can’t we have plots, characters and themes? Is that so much to ask?) There are different KINDS of film, and to enjoy 'Under The Sin' (sic) you must tune your brain to a different wavelength and succumb to the pleasure of beauty, PURE beauty, 'the vast unknown' and an Alien perspective, unfettered by the banal conventions of everyday films. (Is having an actress master more than one facial expression really a banal convention?)

"Under The Skin is a (sic) absolutely unique movie experience. Those who miss out on it do so at the detriment of their own intellectual and imaginative capacities.” (If you miss this movie, the only thing that will suffer a detriment is naptime.)

You know what — I’ve watched every episode of Mad Men twice and studied the Big Themes there. I read every footnote of Infinite Jest. So I can handle complicated art, is what I’m saying.

The difference is that the two examples I cited had plot and characterization and written dialogue — you know, the things people actually come to the theater to see. You can’t hang a movie on Big Themes and have some woman wandering around with no expression and expect me to care.