Pillow Pants: We’re No. 1!!!

For those of you who have read my Clerks II review, or seen the movie, I just wanted to point out that the number one search term for people finding my blog yesterday was “Pillow Pants.”

The Passion and the Story

My girflriend was watching Passion of the Christ last night, and I caught the tail end of it. I’d seen it before–actually three days before it came out, right at the white-hot center of the controversy over the movie–and I have thought about it a lot, especially since I’m Jewish and was writing for a Jewish magazine at the time. At some point in the future, I’d like to write a more comprehensive review, but for the time being, I wanted to address the question of why people cared about this movie.

I don’t say that to be flippant, or disrespectful of Jesus or Christianity, but it’s just very interesting: The Passion of the Christ is missing many of the components of what we usually expect from our movies. The protagonist, Jesus, is nearly devoid of personality. The villains are simplistic (with the exception of Pontius Pilate, which is a whole ‘nother discussion). And the most fundamental requirement of drama–that the protagonist change–is not met. Jesus’ conviction that he is the son of God does not waver from the beginning to the end of the movie; if anything, it gets stronger the further along he gets. And yet, millions of people–including many who were not religious–watched and appreciated this movie. Despite lacking some apparent necessities of a compelling drama, The Passion of the Christ became one of the most successful movies ever.

The first question I think we need to ask is: what makes a great story? Most people would agree that a great story is driven by the characters; if you care about the characters, you’re willing to follow the story whereever it goes. If you don’t care about the characters, you don’t care about the story. If you can think of a story you cared about where you didn’t care about the characters, let me know, because I’ve racked my brain for years on this and haven’t come up with a single one.

This leads to a second, much trickier, question: why do we care about certain characters and not others? No one’s answered this definitively–and if they have, they’re not sharing their lucrative secret with anyone else–but my college screenwriting teacher’s theory was that we care about characters who suffer. It’s a fascinating but simple theory. If you start thinking about it, it’s next to impossible to think of a character you cared about who didn’t suffer, in some way.

If suffering, then, is the key to empathy, it makes perfect sense why The Passion of the Christ was so popular. In the Passion, Jesus does nothing but suffer. In fact, the more Jesus suffers, the more we care about him. If the greater the suffering, the more empathetic the character, and the more empathetic the character, the greater the story, then it’s clear why Jesus’ story is often called the Greatest Story Ever Told.

When I first saw The Passion, I remember being disturbed by the fact that the only Jesus we see is Jesus in pain. What about the great teacher that Christians always speak about? What about the beautiful values, and brilliant lessons, he taught? It seemed a shame not to include this aspect of Jesus, especially at the time, because the movie’s high profile would have afforded Gibson a great opportunity to share what makes Jesus great with Jews and other uninformed viewers.

But as much as I may have wanted that from an educational perspective, it probably would have made a boring movie. Really, who wants to sit through a movie listening to Jesus lecture us why we’re such shits?

Watching Jesus be tortured and die, I started to understand why the idea of the Trinity holds such appeal for Christians. If Jesus is the son of God–which in effect makes him a god–then why does it matter if he’s tortured? Do gods feel pain? Can gods die? But if he is also human, then you identify with him because you can only imagine what the pain of his crucifixion must be like. So, for his story to matter, he must be God, but for you to care, he must be human. Hence the mystery of the Trinity.

I’d love to hear what some of you non-Jewish readers think about this…

Clerks II: Amusing Shit

Kevin Smith is a terrible filmmaker. He’s never composed an interesting shot, he doesn’t have a clue about pacing or rhythm, his casting decisions are usually poor and he has a knack for bringing out the worst in actors. Even his supposed strength–his screenwriting–is pretty bad; he seems incapable of juggling multiple voices in a scene. The best he can do is write an occasional hilarious rant on anal sex or Star Wars, but these monologues exist in a narrative vacuum. The foil is usually reduced to a dumbfounded stare or an exasperated “Jesus!” That’s not dialogue, that’s a mediocre stand-up comedy routine.

And yet… most of his movies are pretty funny, for the same reasons that mediocre stand-up is usually funny: if you drizzle a few creative observations about pop culture among regular f-bombs and general offensiveness, you’ll get people to laugh. When the first Clerks came out, this formula was almost a revelation; we’d never before heard movie characters make moral philosophy out of the destruction of the Death Star. But four Quentin Tarantino movies and countless Josh Whedon and Kevin Williamson shows later, media-immersed humor has nearly reached its sell-by date. So what’s Smith’s solution in Clerks II? Ramp down the superhero-inspired soliloquies and ramp up the gross-out humor.

Clerks II begins where Clerks left–and started–off: at the Quick Stop. Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran), who’s now been working there the wrong side of a decade, arrives to open the store and finds it engulfed in flames. Turns out Randall Graves (Jeff Anderson) left the coffeemaker on.

When the action resumes a year later, Dante and Randall are working at Mooby’s, a run-down fast food joint with decor seemingly borrowed from the Garden State Parkway’s Vince Lombardi rest stop. Dante is engaged to a tall, thin, slightly crazed blonde (Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Kevin’s wife) and is a day away from leaving MooJobs–and New Jersey–forever to move to Florida to run one of his fiancé’s father’s carwashes. Once you see Dante flirting with his much younger, much hotter, much sweeter boss (Rosario Dawson), you’ll know where the rest of this is going.

But the plot’s obviously not the selling point, it’s the talk. The star, as always, is Randall, the gum-chewing gutter poet of caustic nihilism. The straight man is Dante, and O’Halloran has somehow become an even less convincing actor over the last 12 years. Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are back and while Silent Bob’s shtick–he doesn’t talk, get it?–is no longer funny, Mewes’ crazed horny stoner act is as engrossing as ever. He reenacts the Buffalo Bill “Will you fuck me? I’d fuck me.” scene from The Silence of the Lambs in successive stages of repulsive hilarity.

Perhaps because the bar is set so low by O’Halloran, the additions to the cast provide some of the most interesting, and funny, moments. Maybe because they’re, you know, professional actors. Trevor Fehrman is great as Elias, a squirmy Jesus- and LOTR-loving 19-year-old who gets dropped off at Mooby’s each day by his parents… only to endure relentless verbal abuse from Randall. And Rosario Dawson does everything she can with an impossible task: convince us that someone as fun and beautiful as her would fall for someone as boring and homely as Dante. She doesn’t quite pull it off, but I don’t blame her; O’Halloran’s not only a charmless actor, he’s playing a sheepish wet blanket of a character.

Like a mediocre stand-up act, there are some genuinely creative bits. When Randall asks Elias if he’s a virgin, he hems and haws, and then stutters that he wouldn’t be if it weren’t for Pillow Pants. Pillow Pants, he explains, is the troll that lives in his girlfriend’s vagina. He will be peed out when she turns 21. “Have you even kissed her?” Randall asks, gums smacking. Elias explains that he would have, if it weren’t for Listeraid. Listeraid is the troll that lives in her mouth.

But the biggest laughs come from the most offensive bits, like Randall’s campaign to reclaim “porch monkey” as a race-neutral insult. When an offended customer refuses free food after hearing Randall talk about porch monkeys, her husband pleads with her to take the food: “You can’t taste racism, baby!” The climax, which involves a visit from a traveling donkey show, Elias jerking off and Dante getting kicked in the balls, is hilarious, but those are ingredients that Merchant and Ivory couldn’t fuck up.

While the plot is threadbare, it’s not thin enough. One of the virtues of the original Clerks was that Smith never played the character’s pointlessness for pathos. But this Clerks is chock full of romantic confessions and emotional confrontations. Every time a character goes for an emotion deeper than ironic detachment, the dialogue sinks to Lifetime-level cliché. There’s a particularly painful, and poorly paced, scene near the end, when Randall reveals his loneliness and pleads for Dante to stay in New Jersey. “I love you,” he says, as Jay and Silent Bob cover their ears. I only wish I had done the same.

There’s certainly a place for a movie that revels in its own offensiveness. But the original Clerks did much the same thing, only sharper and without the sentimentality. And it’s telling: last summer Judd Apatow and Steve Carrell played with some similar motifs in The 40-Year-Old Virgin–pop culture commentary, musical non sequitirs, donkey shows–and the result was not only funny, it was touching, insightful and even uplifting. I walked away from Clerks II with the feeling you must have after watching a woman blow a donkey: I laughed–sometimes hysterically–but I had a nagging sense of guilt and regret that I paid to see this crap in the first place.

“A Strange World”: Thoughts on Blue Velvet and David Lynch

David Lynch is the Tom Waits of filmmaking. When you watch a movie by Lynch–or listen to a song by Waits–you can’t stop paying attention, but you’re not sure if it’s because it’s brilliant or because it’s crazy. Both artists clearly tap into something deep and unsettling, but it’s unclear whether either has a plan. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Perhaps Lynch is more like a musician than a filmmaker; using the camera and editing room as his instruments, he scrapes his psyche for powerful imagery and lets the viewer fill in the blanks of the narrative.

The most important point about watching a Lynch movie is understanding that no matter how hard you try, you’ll never get it. His movies are often called postmodern, but that’s just a fancy way of saying they make no sense. There is no secret symbolic story waiting to be uncovered. That’s not necessarily a fault, but it’s not always a virtue either.

Blue Velvet, which is commonly considered his masterpiece, is ostensibly about Jeff (Kyle MacLachlan), a college student who returns to Lumberton, USA, to care for his ailing father. On the way back from the hospital, he finds a severed human ear in a field. Determined to find the source of the body part, he becomes an amateur private detective with the help of Sandy Williams (Laura Dern), the daughter of a local police detective.

That setup may make Blue Velvet sound like a variation on Stand By Me, and I think that’s Lynch’s intention. When the story turns weird–very weird–we’re as shocked as Jeff. But before talking about that first memorable moment of ultra-weirdness, it’s worth talking about the opening scene, which is so captivating that it belongs in the pantheon of great opening sequences alongside The Godfather and Touch of Evil.

The first image after the opening credits is of five blood-red roses slightly swaying in front of a white picket fence and a cloudless blue sky. Then, a red firetruck passes by in slow motion while a fireman on the side of the truck grins and waves at the viewer. The camera tracks over to an old man watering his pristine suburban lawn. (We later learn it’s Jeff’s father.) He suddenly grabs his neck as if shot by a blowdart. After a moment of paralysis, he drops to the ground. The gardenhose tangles around his legs. A small dog, a Jack Russell terrier I think, comes over to sniff him and ends up playing with the hose, attempting to get a drink of water. Then things get odder as the camera zooms in on the man slowly, closer and closer to his body, until the camera is submerged in the blades of grass. As the camera slowly travels through the grass, our movie-going training in suspense conditions us to expect the answer to the mystery: a bullet shell perhaps. But there are no answers in the lawn; the camera plunges into the dirt, and we see hundreds of beetles climbing all over each other in the soil as the soundtrack amplifies the sound of beetle legs trampling beetle exoskeletons.

It’s tempting to say that the beetles represent the dark underworld of suburban American life, but that’s as misleading as it is glib. In Blue Velvet the characters who are shown in suburban settings–home, high school, the football field–are all innocent paragons of virtue. The twisted characters don’t live in track homes; they live in apartment buildings, old factory buildings and indeterminate bar-brothels.

Which brings us back to the first moment of ultra-weirdness. In an attempt to get more answers, Jeff sneaks into the apartment of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini), a torch song singer at a local club. While there, Dorothy unexpectedly comes home, so Jeff sneaks into a closet. He witnesses Dorothy talk frantically on the phone about a man named Don, and then prostrate herself on the floor. But that’s not the weird stuff. After Dorothy finds him, forces him to kiss her under knifepoint and hide him back in the closet, a black-clad man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) enters the apartment. As Jeff watches on, Frank verbally abuses Dorothy for not preparing his bourbon. He pulls a gasmask out of his coat and inhales lithium while commanding Dorothy not to look at him. When she does, he punches her. Frank gets down on his knees and sticks pieces of Dorothy’s blue velvet robe in his mouth while he calls her mommy and she calls him daddy. After dry humping Dorothy with his pants on, he punches her again, knocking her out.

The intention, I think, is to create the atmosphere of a waking nightmare, and I was plenty disturbed by a number of the scenes that follow. For example, later, when Frank finds Jeff visiting Dorothy, he takes him to a strange place that’s a cross between an opium den, brothel and home for the obese, run by a man named Ben (Dean Stockwell in light drag, with a permanent bemused smile). There, Ben and Frank go off to do some business, perhaps a drug deal, although it’s never clear, which brings me to another fascinating point about Blue Velvet. As much as you can kind of follow the story, everything is ultimately a mystery.

What happened to Jeff’s father? Was it a stroke? A gunshot? Why is Jeff so intrigued by the ear? Why does he keep coming back to Dorothy’s apartment, after being threatened and nearly raped at knifepoint? What business is Frank in? What is the relationship between Sandy’s father and the corrupt cop who does business with Frank? Why does Frank fetishize blue velvet?

Lynch’s screenplay and filmmaking answer none of these questions, and while I’ve only seen the movie once, I suspect multiple viewings won’t help. Sure, maybe I could start putting together theories, but I’ve also stared at my childhood bedroom’s ceiling for so long that I’m sure I’ve seen the Korean peninsula and a man with a mustache. That doesn’t make me any wiser, does it?

But it’s precisely this impenetrability that makes Lynch movies such favorites of both pop critics and academic critics. For pop critics, the simple fact that Lynch’s narratives are unintelligible is enough for them to label it as art; since they condemn movies that they can figure out easily, they’re practically obliged to admire movies they can’t figure out at all. For academic critics, the flexibility of the narrative gives his movies that postmodern ambiguity they’re looking for. Because scenes and images are so random and bizarre, anyone with a Ph.D. in the humanities–be it a queer theorist, feminist critic, or classic deconstructionist–can come up with a reading that makes sense for their purposes. It’s like intellectural play-dough.

As Jeff becomes more involved in the mystery, his answers only beget more questions. He determines that Frank is holding Dorothy’s husband and son hostage and is keeping them alive in exchange for velvet sex. He learns that Sandy’s father’s partner, a detective who often wears a yellow coat, is in cahoots with Frank. Sandy asks him why he’s committed to this quest. “I’m seeing something that was always hidden,” he says. “I’m in the middle of a mystery and it’s all secret.”

Perhaps, between his conflicting desires to observe criminals and interact with them, Jeff’s experience is meant to mirror the experience of the moviegoer, who both observes, and projects himself onto, the events on-screen. But that doesn’t really add up either; at numerous other occasions, he speaks of ours being a “strange world” and wonders why people like Frank Booth have to exist. That kind of moral philosophizing seems to run counter to the typical moviegoer’s fascination with interesting villains.

Despite the movie’s inscrutability, despite its strangeness, I found it to be powerful and haunting. Lynch has a knack for identifying disturbing images–take an ant-covered human ear with mold, for one–and leering at it with the camera, the way you unconsciously stare at a burn victim. But he’s also masterful at creating suspense; somehow, despite the events being untethered to reality, I felt dread when Frank seeks out Jeff for a final showdown in Dorothy’s apartment.

But what really held Blue Velvet together for me was Dennis Hopper’s performance. Hopper’s always played crazy characters, but in some of his other roles–Hoosiers, for example–I got the sense that Hopper was actually weirder than his character, that it was a struggle for Hopper to keep his lunacy at a simmer rather than a boil. But in Blue Velvet, Lynch unleashed Hopper. Every bizarre choice that Hopper makes as an actor Lynch matches with cock-eyed dialogue or disturbing imagery. It’s as if the character had to be certifiably insane just to catch up to Hopper’s god-given looniness.

I accept, though, that most people find Blue Velvet to be just a whole bunch of weirdness with no point and no characters to care about. And they’re completely right. But whenever I’m unsure how much I liked a movie, I consider the film’s mental shelflife. And I fully expect to be thinking, talking and dreaming about this movie for a long time to come.

The People vs. Roger Ebert, E.O. Scott, et al.

In the wake of Pirates of the Caribbean II’s phenomenal box office, there have been a number of pieces (including my own) about the gulf between popular taste and critical preference. The best one I’ve read is this one from the New York Times. (Many thanks to avid MOWC reader Bill Musto for sending me the link.)

The irony is that as much as I know this movie will be trash, I’m going to spend $10 just so I can talk knowledgeably about its shittiness. Sort of like why I tried to read The DaVinci Code. To feed my hate.

Bad Education: An Unwatchable Masterpiece

When I started this blog in early April, I made a promise to myself that henceforth, I would write about every movie I saw. But I saw Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education more than two weeks ago, and only now am I getting around to write about it. And it’s not because of the July 4 break–I started working on a review a few days before vacation hit. What’s the problem? I need to watch the movie a second time–which also isn’t an issue because it’s on HBO On Demand–but I’m as likely to watch Bad Education again as I am to give myself a wedgie. It’s not that Bad Education is, um, bad. In fact, it’s probably a masterpiece.

Here’s the deal: I’ve come to realize there are two kinds of great films. There are those you never tire of, and there are those you watch once and find it a chore to watch again. In my mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Pulp Fiction, The Godfather, Goodfellas and Casablanca fall under this first category; Citizen Kane, Raging Bull, Schindler’s List, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now fall under this second category. Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education belongs in this second group.

As its reviews suggest, Bad Education is pretty much a flawless film. Almodovar has become as much a master of his medium as Hitchcock or Hemingway. The acting is fantastic across the board, including the children, a particularly difficult group of buggers to direct; the story is complex, sophisticated and character-driven; the themes are rich and challenging; the cinematography is simultaneously gorgeous and efficient. Much like Almodovar’s last two movies, All About My Mother and Talk To Her, there are few to no mistakes in casting, directing, acting or writing. So what makes the prospect of rewatching it so unappetizing? I don’t quite know how to put this, but it’s just too gay.

Here’s a short rollcall of some major events in Bad Education: two young boys jerk each other off in a dark movie theater; Gael Garcia Benal in drag essentially rapes a passed out man (after giving him a blowjob in a parking lot); a priest molests a young boy; Benal films himself having sex with a sketchy older man; a pre-op transsexual with great tits shoots up on heroine. There’s no question that Almodovar masterfully presents this subject matter. It’s just that I can’t relate.

It very well may be that if you placed Bad Education and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind under the microscope of intense critical rigor, you’d find that Almodovar’s film is a more spotless work than Gondry and Kauffman’s. But that doesn’t change the fact that I could relate to the emotions on display in Eternal Sunshine, I knew people like the characters, I lived through versions of some of the events in Eternal Sunshine. As long as I live, I’m pretty sure I will not meet a murderous child-molesting former priest.

The irony is, as much as I’m not inclined to rewatch Bad Education, it’s also one of those movies, like Vertigo or The Sixth Sense, that demands a second viewing. There’s a major plot twist in the third act that drastically changes the meaning of the first two acts, and the only way you could fully understand its ramifications is if you watch the movie more than once.

Two weeks later, I still marvel at the way the construction of the narrative opens up all sorts of fascinating questions about memory, identity and creative authority. A viewer doesn’t learn this until later in the movie, but the whole first section of the movie is actually a movie-within-a-movie. Gael is an actor named Angel. In the movie-within-a-movie, he’s playing his brother Juan, working off a script that he wrote about his brother’s tragic life. But the movie is directed by Enrique, who was in love with Angel’s brother when the two were boys at Catholic school. So the movie-within-the-movie we’re watching is a distortion of reality filtered through numerous creative, emotionally biased consciousnesses: there’s the subject of the story (Juan), the writer of the story (Angel), the director of the movie and rewriter of the screenplay (Enrique) and the actor playing the lead part (Angel again). Through the movie-within-the-movie’s development, the creative process is variously portrayed as cathartic, transformative, deceptive and destructive.

There’s a lot more to this disturbing masterpiece, but unless you’re a fan of beautifully produced gay porn, you probably won’t have the stomach to figure it all out. (Make it about lesbians next time, though, Pedro, and I’ll watch it as many times as you’d like…)

Feel the Power of My Ignorance!

I know I shouldn’t be bothered by the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (I’m not going to bother with an IMDB link; you know where to find it) now holds the box office record for the biggest opening weekend ever, but I am.

There was a time when the biggest box office hits of all-time were all classics: Gone with The Wind, The Godfather, E.T., Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But it all started going downhill with Home Alone. Since then, mediocre to OK movies like Jurassic Park, Shrek 2 and Spiderman have stomped their way into the list of the top 10 or so all-time box office champs (abetted by skyrocketing ticket prices). Unless word of mouth is dreadful–and there is no indication that it is–this new Pirates of the Caribbean movie will almost certainly make it into the top 15 and probably top 10 grossers of all time.

I remember fondly each movie that broke successive records for biggest opening weekend. I was ecstatic when Batman, the favorite movie of my youth, broke the record, happy that the torch was passed to such a worthy heir when T2 did it, a bit sad when Jurassic Park did it (but happy that a poor Jewish schlub like Spielberg finally caught a break), fairly dismayed–but unsurprised, and at peace with–when Star Wars: Phantom Menace did it, and a little numb by the time Spidey 2 did it. But Pirates of the Caribbean? I haven’t seen it–FEEL THE POWER OF MY IGNORANCE!!!–but the first movie would have been unwatchable if not for Johnny Depp’s phenomenal performance. And this movie is getting worse reviews than that one… which didn’t get particularly hot reviews in the first place. So I can only imagine how bad this one is.

My hunch is that the success of this new Pirates movie is really a triumph of calculated marketing. Unlike some of the movies that have broken the opening weekend B.O. records before, this movie hits every section of the market: kids want to see it because it’s Disney; teen boys want to see it because it’s a sequel and has cool special effects (plus Keira Knightley, perhaps the most perfect specimen of womanhood ever conceived. Thank you, God); teen girls want to see it because it has two hotties, Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom; adult men want to see it because it has Johnny Depp, who they think is cool; adult women want to see it because it has Johnny Depp, who they think is sexy. There’s not a demographic doesn’t cover (except maybe blind deaf-mutes and recovering pirates).

But it’s not just bragging rights. After this movie and the first one, all of a sudden Gore Verbinski, the director of both movies, will be afforded clout in Hollywood reserved only for a chosen few: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Lucas, Peter Jackson and pretty much no one else. He will be able to write his own ticket. But the difference between Verbinski and the golden four is that they have talent, while Verbinski hasn’t proven himself to be any better than the Michael Bays or McGs of the world–a video director masquerading as a filmmaker.

I shudder to think how bad the currently-shooting third installment of Pirates will be…

Monsters of Metal

The tagline for Some Kind of Monster is “The film that redefines group therapy.” It’s a play on the word group–rock group, get it?–but the emphasis should be on “redefines.” In the band gripe sessions that form the heart of this Metallica documentary, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and longtime producer Bob Rock are practically non-entities. All the dysfunction stems from the relationship between frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, the co-founders of the band. It’s couples therapy masquerading as group treatment.

And this couple certainly needs help. According to Ulrich, things between him and Hetfield haven’t been the same since Dave Mustaine joined the band–in 1981. Most couples wouldn’t have suffered through 21 years of pain and miscommunication, but then again, most couples don’t have the complementary talents to make the best metal music the world has ever known.

When we first meet Metallica in Some Kind of Monster, bassist Jason Newsted has just left the band after 16 years and the group has hired Phil Knowles, a counselor to professional sports teams, to help the members work out their problems. At first, Ulrich seems to be the primary instigator for Knowles’ weekly therapy sessions. A notorious blabbermouth, he revels in the chance to hear himself talk. Hetfield, who’s earned equal infamy as a disgruntled badass, seems uncomfortable with such emotional openness. But everything changes when Hetfield abruptly leaves for rehab for his alcohol abuse.

His absence sends the band deeper into a shit spiral; Bob Rock, who appeared to be Hetfield’s biggest supporter, quietly seethes when Hammett relates how Hetfield told him he wanted to escape from the “Bob Rocks” of the world. Ulrich, meanwhile, bathes in self-pity as he watches Newsted’s new band make its debut at a San Francisco club.

When the band gets back together almost a year later, it is Hetfield who now craves catharsis. He variously refers to Knowles as “an angel” and “father figure.”

Ulrich, however, rankles at the way Hetfield has forced Metallica into an involuntary hiatus in the middle of recording a new album. After returning from rehab, Hetfield implements a non-negotiable rule that he can only record from noon to 4 p.m. each day, with the rest of his time dedicated to his family; he even has the balls to bitch at the other members for working on the album after 4 p.m. Like most recovering addicts–and all rock stars–Hetfield assumes what’s good for him is good for all; he rationalizes his divaishness by saying that limiting the band to four hours a day will cut out the bullshit and focus everyone on their work.

As a Metallica fan, I have to admit, I’ve always found Ulrich to be a bit of a pretentious blowhard. The doc does nothing to alter that perception, but at least we learn his pretension isn’t an act–he’s truly an aesthetic perfectionist, obsessed with not repeating himself, consumed with crafting the perfect song. You get the sense he’d go insane if he had to give up his drumset. And we learn his drive comes from his father, a little Danish man with a long white beard and flatcap who’s like a cross between an adorable gnome and an evil wizard. Papa Ulrich is a relentless critic and perfectionist, and Lars admits he dreads playing a new album for his father because he knows “he’ll see right through” its weaknesses.

Hetfield, on the other hand, has always seemed the most legitimately badass member of the band, and the movie does little to alter that image either. But hardcore plays a lot better in soundbites and song lyrics than it does in a documentary; over the course of Some Kind of Monster, his bullying behavior and grumpy self-absorption wore awfully thin. I know that you can’t be a true rock star if you haven’t halted your social and emotional development at adolescence, but post-rehab, Hetfield is more like a toddler than a teenager.

Between these two dominating personalities, there is little space for Hammett, which is just the way he likes it. He acknowledges his role as a peacemaker and says he wants to serve as “an example of egolessness” to the other guys. He’s an absolutely fascinating personality–is there any other rock star who takes pride in his ability to make himself “small”?

Despite following a typical rock n’ roll story arc of rancor, rehab and redemption, Some Kind of Monster is no Behind the Music. Because the nature of therapy is to open up old wounds–like the departure of Mustaine in 1983 and the death of original bassist Cliff Burton in 1986–directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky can tell the history of the band without resorting to the stock doc device of omniscient narration. Further, there are almost no talking head moments in the movie; the members of the band don’t have to explain their feelings to the camera because they’re explaining their feelings to each other on a weekly basis. This allows the story to flow organically, and also creates the illusion that Some Kind of Monster is an utterly objective portrait of the band. (Ideologically I have my issues with that, but I can’t deny its persuasive power.)

There are also some great moments that have nothing to do with therapy. When Ulrich argues that the band should get away from extended solos because they’re “stock,” Hammett makes the insightful point that not having extended solos is as much a cliché of modern rock as having solos was a cliché of classic rock. We also learn a bit about the big business of being Metallica. After deciding on Robert Trujillo Jr. (formerly of Corrosion of Conformity) as their new bassist, they sit him down and offer him a million dollars as a good will gesture. Later, a guy from their management company explains that as far as creative decisions go, he gets five voting shares and each of the other three members get 32, with the management company casting a vote in case of a tie (and yes, that does add up to 102 voting shares).

Things get really interesting towards the end of the movie, as the band wraps up the album St. Anger and prepares to go on tour. After nearly two years of continuous therapy, the band tells Knowles they’d like to ramp down the therapy. But Knowles–who’s making $40,000 a month for his work–pooh-poohs the idea. Between his suggestions of song lyrics and his whispers of possibly moving to the band’s hometown of San Francisco, Knowles starts seeming less interested in helping the band overcome its problems and more interested in keeping his gravy train afloat. Hetfield’s “angel” just may be the devil in disguise.

The ending, unfortunately, leaves a few too many loose ends. We never learn if the band was able to rid itself of Knowles. And the final montage of scenes from their 2003 world tour is as deceptive as it is clichéd; the band wants to seduce us into thinking that a little bit of world traveling and fan adulation will cure years of dysfunction and destructiveness. Moreover, it may have been easy for Hetfield to stay off the booze in San Fran, where he could go home to his family everyday–how’s he going to be on the road, when groupies are throwing coke and tits in his face?

But the greatest irony of Some Kind of Monster is that as much as therapy may have made Hetfield and Ulrich better people, it seems to have turned Metallica into a shittier band. Compromise and equality were the themes of the new Metallica when they recorded St. Anger, but the end result was some of their most forgettable music ever. Between turning Hetfield from a depressive drunk bully to the only thing worse, a depressive sober bully, and Knowles’ attempts to weasel his way into a lucrative co-dependency with the band, Some Kind of Monster does redefine group therapy. And the new definition is “really bad shit.”