End is the Beginning is the End

This post contains spoilers for Groundhog Day, Memento, Inception, Fight Club, The Dark Knight, and No Country for Old Men. You've been warned.

I'm holding out hope to one day see a sequel to Groundhog Day. I don't want to watch a movie that is essentially a cheap knockoff with B-list actors and a reworked plot. I also don't want to see a cash-grab by the original actors with a reworked plot. And I definitely don't want to see this.

If you will, for a moment, imagine this. 4 years have passed since the events of the film. Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is alone and jobless. After trying to tell Rita (Andie MacDowell) what really happened to him on that fateful Groundhog Day, she thinks he's crazy (or a liar, or both) and leaves. Phil starts to tell others about his ordeal, hoping for some kind of validation, but slowly just pushes his friends away and loses his job. Now, unemployed and alone, Phil is left to piece together the shattered remains of his life.

This is the movie I want to see.

Now, I know that film is probably too dark to ever get made, and would need some tweaking to ever see theaters. Maybe he goes to Japan and meets Black Widow. I'm not opposed to this sequel having a happy ending, provided it felt believable (at least in the universe the original movie created, where someone can live the same day over while learning life lessons), and it's the believability that matters to me.

I find that many of my favorite movies are ones that, even if they are successful or well-received (not always the same thing), tend to leave a lot of people lost or upset. In my mind, one of the best movies to come out in the past ten years is No Country for Old Men, a film that most people I talk to claim to either hate or not understand (It is worth noting that it won Best Picture, which would indicate some level of success and critical reception, but I remember it being very hard to find overly supportive reviews when it came out). Almost all of the problems people had with it stemmed from the ending. Lewellyn Moss, the man you spend most of the movie following, dies in a gunfight the audience never sees, and Anton Chigurh (an all-time great villain, with even greater hair) escapes into the sunset, albeit with the Joe Theismann of arm injuries. The movie ends with professional crotchety-old-man Tommy Lee Jones telling his wife about the dreams he had. It's not exactly dripping with closure, but that's what I love about it. It's closer to real life than any movie with a clear-cut ending.

(For anyone reading this who didn't like the movie, try watching it while thinking of it as a story about Tommy Lee Jones dealing with a changing world and his coming retirement.)

Not always, but more often than not, I don't want movies to be an exercise in escapism. This isn't a knock on people who seek that, or the films that they find it in, and there are times when that's exactly what I want. But, in addition to the Coen brothers, many of my favorite directors are ones who make films that depict a less polished view of life, and often have endings that can be taken more than one way, not all of them happy. Christopher Nolan has come close to perfecting the dichotomic ending. Inception either has a perfectly happy conclusion, or Leonardo DiCaprio has trapped himself in his own delusional dream world. Guy Pierce has exacted revenge for the murder of his wife, or needlessly killed multiple innocent men while tricking himself into believing he isn't the one who took her life, depending on how you want to view Memento. Even his characters aren't safe from this split-view of the world. By the end of The Dark Knight, Batman is more heroic than Gotham City can know, accepting the weight of a crime he didn't commit.

I realize that talking about the importance of believability, and then following that with a discussion of those particular movies seems a little contradictory, but not as much as you might think. If a director builds his universe well enough, the actions are never questioned. This is why jumping into dreams to plant ideas seems like a completely reasonable idea. What needs to be believable, for me, is how the characters act in that universe. If you told your friend that you aren't able to stop yourself from thinking about your wife committing suicide because of an idea you planted in her mind while in a decades long dream, causing her to to appear in dreams you enter while trying to destroy your plans, that friend would stop talking to you immediately. But in the world of Inception, this feels exactly like something that would happen in that particular situation.

If someone asks me my favorite movie, I give them a list of all possible candidates, and Fight Club is always near the top of that list. Fight Club was a box-office failure and critically panned, but has grown into a rather well respected film. Part of it's initial failure was the marketing for the film, in that no one knew what they were going to see. It was a movie about fighting, or perhaps soap. It might have been a film to see how much blood, dirt, and weird clothing it would take to make women turn on Brad Pitt. Now, it's seen as a film about rejecting consumer culture in a society that has no place in history (this message could have been lost post-9/11, and I imagine it changes how people react to the line about being a generation with no great war, but I wonder how many people feel their lives have been defined by the war on terrorism). It's a film (and a wonderful novel before that) about the emptiness modern life can have, and the dangers of letting that push us too far, and of unchecked rebellion against that life. Creating a completely new person that you slowly become friends with before trying to bring down contemporary society is probably not something any of us would ever do. But what if it did? What if life pushed you to the point that your mind created another person that allowed you to fight back against that push? How different would you be than Jack (Ed Norton)? Wouldn't you embrace this new friend who helped you let go of the possessions you lost, then start to retreat from when you realized he was the one who destroyed and stole those possesions? Would you be any less maniacal when you discovered that this person was actually you when you thought you were sleeping?

Real life doesn't happen in acts. Relationships end, loved ones die, friends move away, but none of that happens in a vacuum. These events impact each other, and the effects last long after the actual moments in which they occurred. Movies end and leave you with a feeling that all is right in the world, or at least the world you've been watching for the last two hours. This is my problem with most films, and with one like Groundhog Day (I do like Groundhog Day, a lot, but I can't help but think about these things when I watch most movies, and this is no exception).

I know people get different things from art, and movies are no different. So maybe it's just me, but I want to be able to find myself somewhere in the characters of the film. I have a hard time letting things go, major events last longer in my mind, drifting into one another, and the past ends up feeling like a bigger part of the present than it actually is. I might be in the minority, but I don't think I am. Even if some may not think about it as much as others, or to the borderline obsessive levels that I think about it, we are all shaped by our past.

I know a film can't go on forever. At some point, all movies have to end, I just want more that acknowledge that the story doesn't.

Remembering What You Didn't Forget

I have watched very little footage of Joe Frazier. I know that he was one of the greatest boxers of all time, but only because it's something I generally know as sports fan, not because of any exhaustive research or personal opinions. He was the first man to defeat Ali, but I remember them more in their later years, taking jabs at each other through the press. My most vivid memory of him in the ring is when he was introduced at the start of the first Rocky-Creed fight. This is why it might seem weird when I tell you that Joe Frazier is my favorite boxer of all time, and that his passing left me saddened and feeling somehow different.

The thing that I will remember most about him was his nickname, Smokin' Joe Frazier. When I was about 5 years old, I heard his introduction to the ring, and I honestly don't remember anything else about that moment. Logically, I'm assuming my father was watching some sort of boxing match that was showing highlights of general boxing history or specifically from Joe Frazier's career. It didn't matter. "Smokin' Joe Frazier" latched itself into my still developing mind, and just like that I was shouting it in every room of my house daily. When I saw pictures or him wearing green (my favorite color) trunks in The Fight of the Century, it was settled then and there. No boxer would ever dethrone Joe as the greatest in my mind.

I've followed boxing somewhat half-heartedly since I was a kid, watching Tyson demolish opponents who were never actually that good, before ruining his own career and eventually revealing that he was never that good of a boxer in the first place. The most exciting fight in my lifetime was seeing George Foreman, a man I knew for being a goofy, friendly guy with his own grill and starring in muffler commercials, suddenly remind everyone that he was once a brutal and punishing man while becoming the oldest champion the sport has ever seen. Since then, (and possibly before), the sport has been in decline, particularly in the heavyweight division. There has been a lack of true superstars, and the titleholders have mostly been whoever happened to be there at the time. (The exception right now, of course, is the ongoing non-fight between Mayweather and Pacquiao, a fight that would most likely shatter ratings records. You know, if it ever happened.) This, combined with the rise of UFC and mixed martial arts, has pushed boxing to the back of the national sports consciousness.

Even in my own quasi-disinterested sort of way, I've always preferred boxing to MMA. I know I'm wrong about this, and that any fan of MMA would shout at me for hours with the reasons I am wrong, but MMA fights lack any real excitement and technique to me. Sure, this guy trained with this master of whatever, and that guy lived with a guru in the art of that other thing, and one punches a bit more while the other kicks a bit more, but 9 times out of 10, they just end up rolling around on the mat trying to bend their opponent's limbs in ways they aren't supposed to until the other taps out. Boxing can be equally mindless, but there is something about it that can (but doesn't always) transcend that savage brutality. Sometimes, it's not about the training or the skill of the two boxers, but it's about their will, something that made the Ali-Frazier fights so incredible. It's about two men who want to destroy each other, knowing that they have to give everything they have to bring his opponent down, while dealing with the same coming back. It's the ultimate test of perseverance and strength, both mentally and physically.

I wish there were more boxers that could push the sport to those levels, but not just for that reason. I miss sitting with my father and grandfather, watching two men trying to punch there way through one another, and then talking about the grace and intricacy of such an act. I want to see two men bring the absolute best out of one another, which is really one of the greatest things sports can allow us to witness. I suspect over the next couple of days, I'll watch clips of Joe Frazier's fights, and I'll sit through the entire third battle with Ali, and even though I'll know it's coming, I'll be crushed when Frazier's corner throws in the towel before the final round, his trainer realizing that Frazier couldn't see out of his eyes because his face was too swollen. And then I'll think about his green trunks, and his cool nickname, and I'll feel like I'm 5 years old again. And that will make me happy. And then I'll remember that he's gone.