Did I like Rob Reiner? I never met him. I have no idea what kind of person he was. I met another Reiner once, great guy, very funny, didn’t look anything like Rob though so I doubt they were related. Also, they probably had different last names.

His career seems to have started with family connections, with father and grandfather in the business. Then he was famous as the character “Meathead” in “All in the Family.” He received a few writing credits in televion, but Rob Reiner’s best known films are as director.

I thought other directors who passed away recently were a little more significant. Robert Redford was instrumental in turning the Sundance Film Festival into an international phenomenon. He also produced films with meaning like Quiz Show. Probably the most underrated person in the independent film scene.

They had a link. They both worked with screenwriter William Goldman. Goldman wrote a few books about the business from a writer’s perspective, and he published his screenplays with interesting forwards. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid helped Redford cement his reputation as an actor, and not just a pretty face. And so, no surprise where we’ll start.

The Princess Bride

The Princess Bride is based on an eponymous book by William Goldman, full of dad jokes. (The jokes originated when Goldman was telling stories to his children, you can’t get more dad than that.)

An iconic moment in this film is when an assistant to the villain says, “you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” The meme has shortened that to, “You keep using that word, I don’t think you know what it means.” (Do you know which word he was refering to? Hint, it wasn’t eponymous.)

Then there is, “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die.”

And if you ever get sick of people rhyming, you might find fans of the film if you say, “Stop rhyming and I mean it.” To which your Andre the Giant will respond, “Anybody want a peanut?” (It works with the accent. Yes, it depends on how you pronounce peanut.)

William Goldman should get credit for those lines. We look at Goldman’s other films, and see that even in duds like Ghost and the Darkness, there are a few memorable lines. “We have an expression in prize fighting: ‘Everyone has a plan until they’ve been hit’. Well my friend, you’ve just been hit. The getting up is up to you.” and “You build bridges, John. You have to go where the rivers are.”

So, why didn’t Ghost and the Darkness work? Maybe the director had more of a TV style. There seems to be a flaw in the structure of the work, perhaps something was lost in the editing or some of the film was spoiled along the way. Could Rob Reiner have saved it? I doubt it, but we’ll never know.

A few Good Men

“You want answers?”

“I want the Truth.”

“You can’t handle the truth!”

That is like, my generation’s favorite quote. Taken out of context, that scene seems much more sympathetic to the old colonel played by Jack Nicholson than Tom Cruise’s lawyer looking for justice. If you see the rest of the film, however, you see the truth about Nicholson’s character, the struggle of Cruise and his team to bring justice, and perhaps the political view of the filmmakers.

It’s a great film though, it flows from the acting, the writing, and perhaps the directing. It’s hard to say where the best lines came from, but I would say the actors carried this one. Sorkin and Reiner worked together in another memorable film, The American President.

The American President

Sorkin is a great writer of dialogue, but he doesn’t always pick the best character names. Michael J Fox plays a character here who gives false statistics (but the film doesn’t question his statistics) and many lines are very politically oriented. (It defends Clinton’s arial attacks in the middle east, and other parts of domestic and foriegn policy in a way that ruins the pace and breaks the fourth wall.)

One of the characters has an unfortunately name. That is played by Fox. The name doesn’t seem to fit him.

A. J. MacInerney: [in the Oval Office] The President doesn’t answer to you, Lewis!
Lewis Rothschild: Oh, yes he does, A.J. I’m a citizen, this is my President. And in this country it is not only permissible to question our leaders, it’s our responsibility!

How much better would that exchange have been if the characters had names that better suited their personality?

Here, I think Reiner probably helped Sorkin.

Fans of this film might remember a Saturday Night Live sketch where Bill Clinton reviewed the film. They might also be confusing it with Dave, a film by Ivan Reitman which many feel was superior.

The Bucket List

What about using Jack Nicholson without Aaron Sorkin? Then you get The Bucket List, a film about two old men talking about what they are going to do before the end of their lives.

Sentimental to the core, while pretending not to be, there is the point where Nicolson’s character says goodbye to his granddaughter.

“You once said you’re not everyone. Well, that’s true. You’re certainly not everyone, but everyone is everyone.”

You can look up the entire “find the joy in life” speech. It’s one of the best in post Hayes Code American cinema.

Okay, so Morgan Freeman gets some of the best lines in that film. But, doesn’t he always? I wonder if Freeman deserves some ghostwriting credit here, or maybe just knowing he’ll be involved inspires writers (and directors) to do their best work. Maybe he creates some magic on the set that brings out the best in everybody.

Still, I’m considering checking out more of Justin Zackman’s work if I can find it. Whoever is responsible for The Bucket List, it’s great writing.

Stand By Me

The film about kids walking across the raillines, kind of like the Goonies or the Breakfast Club, it helped define an eighties genre that seemed to die in the eighties.

I think The Goonies was one of the films that destroyed that genre.

Some quotes look like they could have come from an inferior film, like the Goonies:

“Hey, at least now we know when the next train was due.”

Funny, but it does take us up a level.

Teddy: This is my age! I’m in the prime of my youth, and I’ll only be young once!
Chris: Yeah, but you’re gonna be stupid for the rest of your life.

Still, I think other films were a little more innocent, a little less crude. Yes, we all know twelve year olds who swear and talk like that.

Reinman was a good director. Perhaps not the best, but he was still working. It’s a shame that his life ended that way.

Misery

Goldman was probably Reiner’s greatest screenwriter (although as I said before, I am still looking for more films by Zackman, who may well be underrated. And even if his other films weren’t hits, maybe the scripts were better than the end result, who knows. Okay, back to Reiner and Goldman.) Princess Bride was a great collaboration. And, they worked together again.

This time, you might say some of the best lines belong to a third party, the best selling author Stephen King. But, they could have been, let’s say, adapted and even possibly improved for the big screen.

“I know that, Mr. Man! They also called them serials. I’m not stupid ya know… Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no breaks chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn’t cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn’t what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn’t fair! HE DID’NT GET OUT OF THE COCK – A – DOODIE CAR!”

Reiner had been working with great writers since his acting days. Those long speeches, those monologues that were allegedly too long for cinema, still had place in his films.

Even if he wasn’t known for his writing, Reiner understood writing well enough to not mess up a great line, a great speech, or a great exchange. He kept good stories intact.

conclusion

If you want to learn from Reiner, one thing you can do is start by being an actor. Actors read scripts carefully, they understand what works and what doesn’t. And great actors know why things work, how they work, and know how to find the line that can look flat on paper to the untrained eye and breathe life into it.

I can’t think of any techniques that Reiner is known for. It is kind of an invisible directing style, some might say naturalistic. I never worked with him, but I can guess his philosophy. He didn’t leave his mark, he simply didn’t get in the way.

Two recent artworks have called my attention to, well, why I liked the “originals” better. No, it is not what some of us call regression, and French critics the enmerdification, where things just get worse over time. It is possible to create better remakes, but people don’t do that as much as they used to.

The thing is, every copy of an artwork is a new artwork. When we speak of the film Wizard of Oz, we are probably talking about the 1939 film starring Judy Garland. We are not thinking about the version with Laurel and Hardy, or the cheaply made animation, or the other attempts. There is something special about that classic 1939 version. It was not the first adaptation of Frank Baum’s novel, nor the last, but it feels like the authentic one (even if it is pretty different from the novel).

In the same way, when I recently heard a remake of what I thought was my favorite song, I wondered why I disliked it. Did it disturb my sense of the past through change? No, I didn’t dislike it more than most songs. But, by changing the voices, by taking away the storyline of the video, by taking the lyrics out of context, it made me realise that, well, the lyrics mean very little on their own.

Which song am I talking about? Walk this way, by Run DMC and Aerosmith. The thing I liked about the song was the chemistry between Run DMC and Aerosmith, a chemistry that went beyond the song itself and steeped into the music video. The way they are both knocking on each other’s wall, complaining about two types of music that were considered on the edge of bad taste at the time, had a comic element. The mixture, the fusion, the competition between hip hop and heavy metal that somehow created a harmousious oneness was quite a feet.

The remake, on the other hand, only keeps the words. That fusion of styles, that conflict, that competition and resolution, is completely gone. It becomes too serious, too literal, and it loses all of its fun.

Walk this way is not a song that says, “dress as you like.” Rather, it is a comment on a moment of time, when subcultures seemed to clash. It is like the roughest Presidential debate ending in a “I hear you man.” It is like Darth Vader finally helping Luke at the end and saying, “tell your sister, you were right.” No, not as sentimental as that. It is more like, well, maybe a war film, where those guys who fight each other unite under a common cause.

Anyway, Vader’s admission only works because he was fighting against Luke, or trying to turn Luke to the Dark Side, for three films. All that energy we expended in seeing him as an enemy makes his admission more powerful. In the same way, the energy of seeing rap and metal and new, noisy, competing narratives made the power of the two styles coming together so impactful in the 1980s, in a way that cannot easily be reproduced today.

Yes, the lyrics exist, but it is a song with a music video, not simply a poem.

The other thing that got me was the new Trailer for Minions 4. There are a lot of songs that we can listen to in the gym, because they have that energetic kind of rhythm that works for working out. Because of that, they are terrible for sitting around and watching a cartoon. The songs sound like overkill, placed in the wrong place, and actually make the action seem weak.

Context is important. Not just context of the actual song or scene itself within a larger work, but the cultural movement behind the artwork, the place you listen to the song, and so many other things.

Sometimes context turns clowns into demons, or peaceful music into war songs. Quentin Tarantino played with that in Resevoir Dogs, using classical music for violence. He probably stole that from Stanley Kubrik and others, who mastered the technique long before.

Horror is cheaper and easier to make than art, and almost any hack can make banal things scary. But the true masters use context to do the exact opposite, and make us less afraid of what once frightened us.

Walk This Way (Run DMC and Aerosmith version) is not just a nice poem that can be adapted by anyone. It is a testament to the power of artistic fusion, one that links two supposedly irreconsilable artforms into a mix that, well, is fun to listen to. Beyond the song itself, and the weaving of the two styles, there is a video with a narrative. It takes many bad things and makes something great, like taking sour vegetables and making a delicious soup.

The new Minions movie seems to do the opposite. It takes our favorite characters and songs, and makes something that isn’t as good as any of them. There are a couple of funny jokes, but it doesn’t look like it is worth watching. It feels flat, artificially constructed.

Even before I found Rick Beato’s Youtube channel, I had a theory that technology was making many arts worse, (not just music, but especially music.)

However, unlike Beato, I think the downward slide began over 100 years ago, perhaps 200. And I do not think that technology is the only culprit.

Let’s summarize Beato’s theory. He seems to see the high point of music as some time around the 1970s. Still in the 60s, automation was making music easier to make. People no longer had to experiment, they no longer needed mastery of the instrument.

We can see something similar in painting. With the invention of the photograph, artists no longer had to know how to paint. Even if they wanted to paint realistically, they could merely take a photograph and project it onto a canvas (camera obscura existed for hundreds of years, but that did not necessarily create a timeless piece of art.)

However, artists reacted to photography by going in new directions. Some of these directions were worse, we no longer have true masters, paintings might be blobs of just empty canvases, and sculptures might just be hunks of metal.

Movies also have a lot of the same problems as music. Films can be corrected in post (post-production), and many films are a mess without a screenplay and without rehearsals, designed to be fixed in post-production.

Economics leads to a lack of imagination. The more we have people from outside the industry pulling the strings, the more short-sighted decision making it. People who do not know how long it takes to make a masterwork are more likely to look for the quick buck, for a short term solution, than invest what is needed to create and promote the kind of films, songs, or works of art that last.

However, another possible problem is leadership. Many labels are no longer led by people who care about music. We look at the name of the companies, and they are merely subsidies of huge conglomerates.

That said, many of the CEOs have worked in the music industry for a time. But, they have bounced around companies. They seem to lack loyalty, to not have the same kind of stake in the individual business that most great leaders have.

Digitial technology makes it easier to fix mistakes. It also creates a lot of creative leeway. But, instead of being used to create new things, it is being used to try to create artificial duplications for the real world, and fix mistakes.

Now, just a warning to fans of The Chosen show, I hate it. It is because of films like this that I temporarily quit the film industry, the people I was around actually like this gargage, so i thought, “Oh no, if I make more films, it will be like this boring #$%^&.”

Yes, this show is so bad, it makes me swear in my thoughts, and I swear so loudly, I don’t even know what swear word it is, just a bunch of random characters. But why exactly do I hate, “The Chosen,” if I do not hate the people it is based on?

Theory 1. “Thou shalt not bear false witness…”

It must because I do not hate the people it is based on, that’s why. That series bears false witness against apostles, calling the Apostle Matthew a Roman collaborator, a snitch, a traitor, a corrupt sabbath breaker, and lots of other things in the very first episode. If I made a film like that about Martin Luther, Joseph Smith, or your favorite Pope, you’d probably go nuts. (Maybe I will.)

Back when Oscar Wilde wrote Salame, that play was banned in the UK for blasphemy, even though John The Baptist is a minor character and it does not even slander anyone. I was able to enjoy Salome, perhaps because the characters imagined are not distorted. And because it doesn’t slander important characters like apostles, it just tries to understand a character. Who was Salome, the one who danced for Herod? How did she react?

Theory 2: “Thou shalt not add to the word which I command you…”

“The Chosen” makes light of demon posession and it replaces scriptures with modern philosophy. And it choses the dumbest philosophies, too.

But, do I really hate all religious movies? I liked Charton Heston in The Ten Commandments. I remember watching Samson and Delilah as a child, and thinking, maybe the Bible is not so bad after all. I even remember laughing at History of the World, Part I. (Or was it Part II?) I loved Veggie Tales’ Jonah. So, I am not like the people who banned Salome. If it is done well, I actually enjoy religious movies. The problem is, it is usually done terribly, so I generally refuse to work on anything religious.

Theory 3: It takes you away from real religion

Sadhguru warns people against fake yoga, in that it takes you away from real enlightenment. I think of The Chosen as fake scriptures. The time you waste watching that garbage, could be spent reading real scriptures, or at least movies like “Veggie Tales Jonah” that have real Bible stories in them.

If the Apostles were around today, I bet they would rather you do fake yoga than watch that fake “Chosen.” At least fake yoga doesn’t slander Bible characters. (I can imagine them now, “Call us veggies, make fun of us in parody, just don’t throw us in some half baked script that turns us into a third-rate soap opera. Now excuse me, while I practice my sun salutations.”)

I enjoy films that distort other religions. Keanu Reeves was entertaining as Siddhartha in “Little Buddha.” I liked Ray Harryhausen’s puppets in “Jason and The Argonauts.” So, what is the real reason that I dislike the app “film” so much?

Real reason: It is boring and stupid

The real reason I dislike The Chosen so much is not only does it insult some people I respect from the Bible, it also insults the audience. I hate it for the same reason that I hate the new Star Treks, where you have Spock dancing like a Kung Fu master from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Propaganda.

But at least the new Spock dances! The new bible characters, well, they just stand around and talk. The camera work is boring, the screenwriting is terrible, and the acting is okay for a school play but nothing special.

Oh, but the camera work is great, you say. It has great production values, you say. I don’t really care. That is like complementing a self-published book because there are no typos in it and the writer knew how to align-justify. The fact that someone can film the actors and control the focus dial is not a reason to watch a film.

No, I did not get past episode one or two, and the only reason I even attempted to watch an entire episode of “The Chosen” is because nice people kept recommending it. I do not hate you for recommending that garbage, because as Saint Augustine once said, “love the Sinners, hate their apps.” I just lost any respect for your taste in movies. Especially if you recommend an app while recommending the show.

The Chosen is my least favorite TV show of all time. If I were a Hollywood moghul and that script landed on my desk, it would be “The Rejected.” It may have a few famous faces involved, but I give it zero stars.