What’s a movie that you really love that was pretty widely abhorred?
One of mine is The Fourth Kind with Milla Jovovich.
The objections seem to be that it’s in a documentary-ish style and that it goes full meta right at the beginning. However, I loved that at the commencement there’s a bit of narration where Milla herself tells us that’s she’s portraying another character — but then it claims to be a documentary recording “true” events as well.
It’s a huge wink at the audience and it rips up the barrier between cinema, documentary and life as it’s lived, just as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell does so in a different but extremely related way.
What’s miraculous that after this the movie still works so well even with its narrative suspended in this framework of de-contextualized artificiality.
The movie is also a tragedy. People these days do not like tragedies. And like all great tragedies, it’s clear at the beginning that it will be one, too.
Also, it was marketed as some alien abduction snoozefest and it’s so much more than that. That was also a strike against it as people who saw it weren’t expecting what they got.
There’s just so much cleverness in this film — more than I can write about. And it is also truly creepy, as few films manage to be.
If I had to state the message of the film, it’d be that things we think that happen to us are just the same as things that actually do happen to us. Post hoc, it’s like an algorithm that can’t be reversed. There’s just no way to travel back to distinguish the difference.
Finally! Someone else who likes this movie. I also thought it was one of the most genuinely frightening* movies I’d ever seen (along with the Mothman Prophecies of all things)
The whole layered narrative structure
actress (Jovovich speaking to audience)
role (Jovovich in character)
real person (footage of the ‘real’ dcotor with patients)
works surprisingly well at getting past the suspension of disbelief.
*maybe unnerving is a better word, the scene where she leaves off her dictation to be transcribed without realizing what had been captured on the tape really got under my skin in a way that’s hard to describe (the phone scene in Mothman Prophecies did too).
Have you seen Videodrome? I just saw it again for the first time in a long time and was surprised at how well the basic ideas hold up and how far ahead of its time it seems.
Yes, completely agree how unnerving the film is. That’s a better word than what I chose and it’s one of the few films that achieves that effect with no false notes. I need to re-watch it as it has been years and I didn’t re-watch for my mini-review.
I have seen Videodrome, but a long time ago (in the 80s), so my memories of it are fuzzy but positive. Need to give that another viewing.
About The Fourth Kind, it worked doubly well for me as I barely knew anything about the movie when I first watched it. I didn’t make this point very clearly, but I think the layered narrative actually helped the story a great deal (as you allude to) and gave it something that in its admission of artificiality made it seem all the more authentic and present.