Reviews

SPOILERS, interpretation:

This movie is a good example of how contrived Hollywood movies can get when they believe poetic justice to be an absolute necessity. With poetic justice, since both Williams and Pacino commit a sin, they must both be punished. Williams must be punished most because his crime was committed with clear intent. So in the end, Williams receives his punishment when he dies. Pacino dies as well, but there is a difference between his death: he repents before he dies. So what was intimated from the beginning is affirmed: though both men work together and both have committed a sin, Williams clearly represents evil while Pacino represents good. With his repentance, Pacino is assured his place in heaven, and William's punishment will continue in his hell-bound afterlife. This is further evinced when Pacino falls asleep because his conscience is now clear. The problem with this, which is nicely explained in Hermann Hesse's ‘Demian' is that a deathbed repentance is quite easy and convenient. Take the biblical story of the repentant thieve for example. Two thieves are crucified with Jesus. One insults Jesus and one repents to Jesus, and is thus granted entrance to heaven. But is it really so virtuous to live a life of sin and then repent when staring death in the eye? The repentance is not authentic, but fear based. Hence, both Williams and the non-repentant thief are the virtuous ones, for truly accepting their life and it's decisions and its consequences. A final scene in which Pacino isn't made to look heroic would have been much preferred, because 1) it's not so very trite and would possibly redeem some of the movie's slow and self-serious plot, and 2) it's more philosophically and religiously coherent.

Warning! Don't expect to like this movie if you liked Fincher's last three movies!

The best thing about this movie was the beginning credits and a few of the camera shots.

spoilers, interpretation:

So it appears that Fincher has taken the Kevin Smith route: in order to safeguard his directing career he is going to intersperse corny Hollywood mainstream movies with his innovative films. 'Aliens 3' and 'Panic Room' fall into the first category, with 'Se7en,' 'The Game,' and 'Fight Club' falling into the latter. I have no problem with Fincher's survival instinct, I just wish I would have known of it ahead of time. So take this as a warning.

What you have with 'Panic Room' is your typical Hollywood "thriller." It's not thrilling if you've seen a "thriller" before and remember any of it. A goal is made apparent within the first ten minutes of the movie, and the other two hours are used to frustrate this goal, over and over and over again. Even unrealistic aspects are accepted if they cause frustration. Also, anytime there is an uncomfortable moment, prolong it as long as possible. Use contrived undeveloped tension to add suspense (tension between Jody and daughter, Jody and husband, Jody and good robber - of course all three tensions are resolved nearly simultaneously in the end ). Make use of poetic justice because the good guys always win. Another hackneyed ploy: throw in an anti-materialistic moral into the mix (all three robbers, as well as Jody and daughter, are punished because of their greed) even if it hasn't been built up and has nothing to do with anything in the movie. Advice for film majors: suspense doesn't make corny humor funny, it just makes it annoying.

I'll give Fincher another chance of course. In my opinion, nobody has ever directed four must-sees in a row. So I don't resent him, I'm just a bit disappointed. This was not even close to a must-see. It really was ridiculous; I ended up laughing at many of the supposedly scary parts because they were so unbelievably trite. 4/10

Warning! Don't expect to like this movie if you liked Fincher's last three movies!

spoilers, interpretation:

So it appears that Fincher has taken the Kevin Smith route: in order to safeguard his directing career he is going to intersperse corny Hollywood mainstream movies with his innovative films. 'Aliens 3' and 'Panic Room' fall into the first category, with 'Se7en,' 'The Game,' and 'Fight Club' falling into the latter. I have no problem with Fincher's survival instinct, I just wish I would have known of it ahead of time. So take this as a warning.

What you have with 'Panic Room' is your typical Hollywood "thriller." It's not thrilling if you've seen a "thriller" before and remember any of it. A goal is made apparent within the first ten minutes of the movie, and the other two hours are used to frustrate this goal, over and over and over again. Even unrealistic aspects are accepted if they cause frustration. Also, anytime there is an uncomfortable moment, prolong it as long as possible. Use contrived undeveloped tension to add suspense (tension between Jody and daughter, Jody and husband, Jody and good robber - of course all three tensions are resolved nearly simultaneously in the end ). Make use of poetic justice because the good guys always win. Another hackneyed ploy: throw in an anti-materialistic moral into the mix (all three robbers, as well as Jody and daughter, are punished because of their greed) even if it hasn't been built up and has nothing to do with anything in the movie. Advice for film majors: suspense doesn't make corny humor funny, it just makes it annoying.

I'll give Fincher another chance of course. In my opinion, nobody has ever directed four must-sees in a row. So I don't resent him, I'm just a bit disappointed. This was not even close to a must-see. It really was ridiculous; I ended up laughing at many of the supposedly scary parts because they were so unbelievably trite. 4/10

Spoilers, interpretation:

Presentation: Overall, I like the theoretical aspects of this movie – although there are certain problems – it's mostly the presentation that made this less than a must-see movie for me. The pace is incredibly slow to start and only picks up momentum later when it actually gives you something to think about. Yes the black and white is moderately interesting and there are some creative screenshots, but it's just not enough to keep me interested. The humor was also a different brand from that which I enjoyed in ‘The Big Lebowski' and ‘Fargo.' Mainly two types of humor are used: expectation and randomness humor. A line is uttered and you can already foretell the response and you're supposed to laugh because you're smart enough to see this. The problem with this type of humor is that for the audience to expect the next line the joke itself has to be cliched. An excellent example of how trivial this humor is is the fact that everyone laughed when the line from the trailer came up, `they put on their pants one leg at a time just like everyone else.' The Coen's did not mean for this to be funny, but it illustrates the point. When this gets old, random humor is used – the humor of unexpectation. For example, when Ed says he'd like to collect the hair and mix it with soil and the spaceships and the sudden attempt at fellatio. We later learn that these occurrences were not actually random, but they are randomness humor nonetheless. Personally I prefer less slapsticky humor such as irony and creative social analysis and such.

Theoretically: So Ed is the modern man? What does that mean? Ed is a barber. He is like Sisyphus who is condemned to eternally push a boulder up a hill. Ed must forever cut hair that just keeps growing back and even grows a bit after the body is dead. So spiritually is hinted at. Ed is not a completely a modern man because he admits the possibility of a future life both here symbolically and in the end directly.

Besides the agnosticism, Ed is more optimistic than the typical stereotypical modern man. He is bored with life but doesn't pass into renunciation; he tries to create meaning, or at least entertainment. Specifically, this occurs when Ed gets suckered into the dry cleaning scam and when he tries to get something by living through the piano player. So with Ed's lack of words, his boredom is symbolized. Also, his lack of language shows his impotence in dealing with his position as modern man. Yes, Ed narrates the movie and clearly has an excellent ability to describe, but he cannot get at his essence. This is shown when Ed cannot defend his faith in the piano player's talents. He knows that he feels passionate about the music, but cannot explain why, just like he can't explain why everything turned out the way it did.

Another anti-modern-man theme is the movie's poetic justice. Sure, Ed is convicted in an absurd way that clashes with the reality of what happened, but in the end he is justly punished for a crime he has committed. He could arguably be considered innocent of murder because of the self-defense defense, but he is clearly guilty of criminal negligence in this instance and of blackmail earlier. A more accurate portrayal of chaos would have done without the poetic justice since that requires some sort of metaphysical foundation which is clearly not acceptable here. The spaceships and Ed's wife's reappearance in the end are used to get us past these qualms, but they seem contrived and unconvincing.

An underlying problem with this movie is the misrepresentation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principal. It doesn't state that the closer you look at something the less you know about it, it states that when taking measurements of subatomic particles it is impossible to determine both the position and momentum of the particle at the same moment. This is far from the metaphor of chaos it is used as. An accurate representation would say that when looking closely at something you can only know part of it. And that is only at one time; it is possible to know more if given more observations. You can never know everything because the eye is limited to perceiving one thing at a time. So we have order, just no absolute order, at least from what we know. The idea of chaos could still be used, it should just be explained through the pseudo-philosophy of some character (probably the lawyer again), instead of being used under the guise of actual science.

The ending was slightly redeeming and made the lackluster beginning and middle worth sitting through, but it's definitely not my favorite Coen brothers film.

spoilers, interpretation:

I really like the ideas behind this movie. First of all there is the traditional view of virginity as sacred. When the guy is trying to have sex with this underage girl in the beginning, we're supposed to feel horrified that she is falling for his obvious lies. No! your virginity is too important! Don't do it! Personally I felt that a bit too much time was spent on this seduction because I'm more inclined towards the modern view that sex is just physical interaction. Luckily, fat girl realizes this. There is nothing sacred about sex itself, it's the emotional bonds related that are important. Hence fat girl realizes there is no substantial difference between anal sex and vaginal sex. Saving yourself, your virginity, by simply having anal sex is just absurd. So fat girl is not going to save her vagina for someone she loves, but her emotional attachment. Skinny girl's anal sex is equated to fat girl's "rape." Both are seen as pseudo-sexuality that must be gone through in order to reach true loving sexuality. Skinny girl may have reached this true sexuality in the future, but abstaining from vaginal sex does nothing to promote this. Fat girl has to lose her virginity in order to reach authentic sex because as a virgin guys cannot get past objectivitifying her as a thing to be conquered. Only after can she have true sex. Skinny girl thinks that anal sex "doesn't count" but really it's the first sexual encounter that doesn't count. So when fat girl embraces her raper and then denies that it was rape, she is personifying this idea. The rape fit in perfectly and was an excellent ending.

So the idea is great, it's just the presentation that gets in the way. The skinny/fat juxtaposition is nice. The literal comparison highlights the sexual differences: Skinny girl's religious views of sex and Fat girl's secular views. So it works when we see so much effort put into stealing Skinny's girls virginity. She is building up the purity of sex for Fat girl to destroy it in the end. Overall I think that the building up is just too drawn out. It takes three fourths of the movie and just gets old. Besides the scene when Fat girl kisses poles in the pool and singing her prophetic songs, there isn't much creativity. There's not much to give interest to the underlying ideas.

Another problem is the Hollywood murder ending. There is no real reason for killing off mother and sister. This was done to put Fat girl in the position to get raped. A more fitting ending would have been for her to sneak out when mother and sister are asleep in order to investigate this trucker. It works because prior when the truck drove by and she saw all the sex items in the window her curiosity was aroused. She should then have gone out and still gotten "raped." This way we stick to the main themes and discard the superfluous melodrama.

So besides a few problems in plot, this was a good movie thematically. It's just the lackluster presentation that made me give it a six. I don't plan on ever seeing this movie again, though I had fun interpreting it.

You can tell a great film by its ability to deflate egos. With a tarnished self-image people will, full of emotion, vigorously attack or praise the work in question. So full of emotion, we can't blame them for leaving reason and justification on the wayside.

interpretation, spoilers:

Scene one: dream is destiny. Dreams give you your destiny - fate, future, purpose. If dreams can be controlled, then so can your destiny. A lucid dream is a controlled dream. Thus lucidity is the goal sought throughout the entire movie.

Scene two: the musicians. Music is a metaphor for the idea of `living in the moment.' This idea is returned to many times throughout the film and is again accentuated in the end when the musicians return.

Scene three: the boat car. The most important part of this scene is the line, `I don't know either (where I'm dropping you off) but it's going to determine the rest of your life.' This is our first brush with determinism. It is not just any determinism, but a radical determinism: even trivial events determine who you are and how you act. This is an unpleasant thought – especially with regard to the existentialists who make up most of the remainder of the film. Determinism is summarized here and becomes the thesis to which the rest of the film will act as an antithesis towards.

Scene four: the first lecture. The professor is sympathetic to existentialism and disagrees with the post modernists. Essentially, this means that he believes in free will over determinism.

Scene five: the evolutionary theorist.

Scene six: the free will theorist. This scene gives us our theoretical attempt at destruction of the determinism already built up. However the destruction is far from complete. Instead of arguing for free will, he argues against determinism. A logical fallacy is used here: even if determinism is proven false, we still have no ground for believing that free will is true. The veracity of free will is pretty much assumed here. From this point on, the film attempts to argue for free will by describing it in a wide variety of existential situations.

The unifying free will argument employed is this: look at all these situations, look at all the great possibilities – there's so many that free will must be true. Again, this is not a logically rationalistic argument, it's inductive instead of deductive and hence any conclusions cannot be given certitude. Nevertheless, let's examine the film's possibility-based solutions to determinism.

Humans have expanded possibilities in these areas: political freedom (freedom from oppression); lack of barriers and consequent destruction (revenge, self-immolation, murder, nihilism); a collective unconscious (instinct); a collective unconscious (Jungian); a personal unconscious (dreams); creativity (music, art, writing, lucid dreaming); new biology (new evolution and neo-humanity); new technology (the linking of the analogue and digital, the organic with the machine); living in the moment/choosing eternity/the holy moment; immorality (dream time and dreaming from the land of the dead, the illusion of time); interpersonal connection (communication and understanding); submerse yourself in subjectivity; submerse yourself in objectivity; reach the One, the Mind, the subjective objectivity; the need for responsibility (by acting as if we're responsible we're acting as if we have free will); individualism (the need to create our Self); multiple selves (we're too complex and important); life affirmation/the mighty Yes; romanticism (choosing life, passion, the moment again); dreaming itself (anything is possible).

Another is the idea that we can attain freedom by thinking beyond determinism. If our pre-reflective action would have been this, I'll do this! `Super profundito in the early eve of your day.' I.e., with super/extra profundity/knowledge you can outthink determinism. However thinking here simply becomes another determinant and nothing is solved.

We also get another pleasant life-affirming view when the computer explains how he'd rather be human. This emotionalism does not give us free will either.

The basic idea is that there are such a vast amount of intriguing and spiritual solutions/possibilities, we could never explain everything with a simple naturalistic deterministic theory. The main error in this thinking is the idea that our lack of knowing each determinant disproves determinism.

None of the `solutions' to determinism work. Each involves either irrationalism and/or denial. Luckily, the film agrees with this view: the main character in the end loses his lucidity (his freedom) and floats off into the abyssal sky.

There is an important point to note however. The point of the film is not to affirm free will, but to examine existential necessity of a free will - or atleast our bad faith in believing in our personal freedom.

Spoilers, interpretation:

I really liked this movie until the patronizing ending. The audience is treated like morons. The movie ends, and then for some reason the makers feel the need to tack on an extra forty-five minutes to explain the movie. Maybe they thought it'd make more money if it was dumbed down a bit? Possibly, but I think the biggest motivating factor was the need for a more romanticized ending. You can't very well let the audience leave in a gloomy mood because they think David will remain in his nightmare forever, can you?

I can tell you how to fix this movie: just don't add any unnecessary emotionalism. Don't lie to the audience and pretend that this a happy movie. To do this, there is a simple solution: end the movie when David takes his psychologist to L.E. Go all the way through with the little movie presentation, and then have the psychologist ask David once again, "Did you sign something with these people?" David looks on with a blank/confused/terrorized face, and the movie ends. This is the ideal ending because at this point, everything in the movie is explained. Instead we get forty-five minutes of re-explanation, patronization.

Yet there are two new sub-themes added in the extra time. They are new, unnecessary, and done for the sake of drama, melodrama really. First, David kills himself. There is absolutely no reason for this. He has a malady that cannot be fixed, therefore he could just as easily have himself frozen without the suicide. David's death is contrived pathos. It also works to consummate his relationship with Sofia. Aww, how nice, she still loves him, "she knew him better than anyone else" even though she only saw him once - more pathos. Second, there is the ending in which David decides that real life is better than dream, continuing along in that naive Matrixesque vein. Again, this is just pointless melodrama because tragedies don't sell. It's dishonest and denial and patronizing , but "the answer to 99 of 100 questions is money."

Two flagrant examples of patronization. First, the L.E. lady tells David that he can be forever in a dream and David asks, "Couldn't it be a nightmare?" Moments later he reaches an epiphany and shouts "This is a nightmare!" Second, standing on the roof, David asks, "I set up this whole scenario didn't I?" "Yes," the dream technician replies, "you had to face your fear of heights." These are examples of stating the obvious, spelling it out for you, treating you like children, that the ending is wrought with.

Technical problems. In cryonization, the brain is dead. Hence, no dreams are possible. A coma would have been the rational choice. Plus it would have added interest to have the entire movie last one moment ("You can change your life in a moment") than 150 years; not to mention the fact that it would have made Sofia's "Hello David" upon awakening realistic. Also, there is the problem that by definition, a lucid dream is one that the dreamer is aware he is having. The movie makes it seem that the entire dream is lucid, while only the ending, after he returns to L.E. is.

During the movie I was planning on giving it a 9, but after that ending I lowered my rating to a 7. The fact that I'm more of an interpreter than a reviewer probably plays a role.

Spoilers - This movie was made with the thought process, "what can I do to offend and how can I get my main characters into a scene which would allow that to happen." For example, two female killers are needed for whatever reason, and as a result we get that pathetic scene in which the future killers unite in friendship and share a heartfelt embrace. Another example is the sex bar. They have no reason to go there. In fact, it's the only murders that take place with no decipherable motive at all. The makers just thought it'd be cool and offensive to show a bunch of naked people get wasted. Note, I was not offended by the movie per say, just the moronic way in which it was done. Offense mixed with a good script could make for a nice important film. Instead we get this. It seriously is redundant pointless garbage. There is nothing new even. The movie just gets excessive with things already done. They could have at least got a sexier lead killer to give me something to watch. I mean, come on, I don't want to see the daughter from Roseanne naked.

With only the movie, the main theme may be deciphered, but it's stated more vaguely than in the book.

SPOILERS, interpretation:

"A Clockwork Orange" is the title of the book Home Guy was writing. Alex reads the first page before he rapes the guy's wife. The book is about the negative consequences of imposing human law and order onto the natural self. Alex later, in the book, spouts off a similar rant.

The movie and book are an argument for man's inherent evilness. It's an argument against the popular liberal enlightenment idea that man is born inherently good, and evil only later results as an effect of corrupt governments.

Alex no longer can commit evil in the end - though he can still will it - but he also has a breakdown and random hallucinations - he is not "cured" according to Burgess. According to Burgess, humans cannot be cured of evilness because it is a part of their authentic self. Rid yourself of evil, and rid yourself of yourself.

SPOILERS END, point of interest: I was quite surprised when I learned that the girl Billyboy and his gang almost raped and the two girls Alex has sex with were all only ten years old! - in the book that is. Also, the latter two girls are not as willing as the movie makes it seem. Really, Alex rapes them. He leaves them "bruised" and fighting him off with "punchipunchies."

spoilers:

Should this movie be considered a cheap-thrill-ending movie because there is no real allusion to the ending through out the entire movie? It's definitely arguable, because any director could put the exact same ending on any movie and it would always be surprising that a complex story could be simply ad libbed. I disagree however, and think that the confusion results from an unwarranted comparison between other trick-ending movies like 'fight club' and the 'sixth sense.' In these movies, the viewer's understanding of a seemingly simple plot is destroyed at the end. The movie is actually quite complex and there is trail of evidence supporting the new ending. Only the end-perspective gained can explain everything. But in 'the usual suspects,' both perspectives (Spacey telling the truth or Spacey as Soza) explain everything in the movie. The only reason the latter explanation is chosen is to demonstrate this. Comparisons between 'usual' and 'fight/sixth' lacks the relevant similarity in movie structure.

Thought provoking, most moving sound track I've heard in a while, and you've got to love Spacey in everything he does.

Interpretation, spoilers:

Either (A) Prot is an alien or (B) he isn't. To determine which conclusion the movie makes, one need only look at the explanations within the movie (i.e. A will be more explained if that is the conclusion, and B will subsequently be left unexplained).

Take a few confusing aspects: If A is true, then Prot's random emergence in the beginning, his human bodily form, his extra-human eyesight, his vast astronomical knowledge, his ability to communicate with dogs, his disappearance, and Bess' disappearance are all explained. Basically, every single scene in the movie is accounted for under paradigm A.

If paradigm B is assumed correct, of the above list, nothing is explained except Prot's bodily form. Thus, option A is correct: Prot is an alien.

Foreseeing an objection, why would Prot have the memories of Robert if Prot were an alien? Go back to the first hypnotic scene. There is some tension in the audience because either Prot is an intelligent human or an average alien, and either way he would be beyond the susceptibility of hypnosis. And what is it that comes out of the hypnosis? A story about a family torn apart and the severe emotional distress resultingly inflicted.

The entire series of hypnotic episodes turns out to be a moral for Mark. Supposing A, we'd assume that Prot had some reason for choosing Robert's body over all other bodies. This reason turns out to be to keep Mark from ruining his relationship with his son. In order to fulfill this goal, Prot takes on the memories of Robert, and even actions which Robert would take (i.e. the sprinkler event and vegetarianism and hypnotic hysterics) in order to make his point more convincing.

So really then, now the only thing left unexplained is why Prot would go to such emotional and temporal lengths simply to teach Mark a valuable life lesson? And why even choose Mark out of all the problem-filled lives on planet Earth? There's only one solution: Prot is Mark's angel, his personal angel, his guardian angel.

Nurse: Why is this patient so important? Mark: Because he chose me.

Interpretation, spoilers:

At first, Big John is portrayed as a creepy old pervert. He goes out of his way to meet Howie, he tries to seduce Howie with a porn video and stories of his own oral sex prowess, and he sleeps with a young man living at his house. Soon, however, we learn that he is not such a predator after all. Both when Gary leaves and Howie's father is arrested, Big John is there to support Howie. Like a father, he even teaches Howie to shave. When John kicks out his previous youth lover, the audience gets the feeling that Howie is the new replacement and that now that the two are alone, the expected sex scene will occur. Instead, we learn that John is a true gentleman when he pushes away Howie's come-ons.

Thus, we have two mutually exclusive pictures of John. The first that stalks little boys and takes semi-nude pictures of them. This is the John that nearly defiled Howie before the propitious telephone call. Later, the second John emerges and when he and Howie are alone again, John inexplicably is no longer a boy-hungry pedophile.

The second John is still on the mind of the audience when he is shot, so we are supposed to feel sorry for him. `Aww, pedophiles are not so bad' we are supposed to think, when in actuality the writer had attempted to play us for a bunch of fools by putting two Johns into one body. From what the audience sees, the second John is not a pedophile, and hence, the theme of the movie is ruined.

This movie was supposed to be one that shocked us out of our beliefs about `the last taboo,' as the preview so confidently proclaimed. In actuality, this movie stops short of the desired goal. The movie should have attempted to make the audience feel for John at the same time that they are aware he is having sex with children. A sex scene with Howie is the only logical conclusion. Instead, we get the current anticlimactic end. As is, the first half of the movie is about pedophilism and the second is not; I doubt this is what the makers were going for. In the first half, John is disliked; in the second half, he is liked because dislike of pedophiles reigns supreme before and after the movie. With an idea like this, the movie creators should go all the way or not at all.

Interpretation, spoilers:

The movie starts with the separate stories of Sissi and Bodo. He is living with his brother and planning a robbery. She is working at a mental hospital and a letter seems to be the most exciting thing going on in her life. Then comes the intense collision between the two characters. Is it fate or coincidence?

At first, the growing together of the two seems foundationless. After all, he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of saving her life if he hadn't felt guilty that the accident was entirely his own fault. She wouldn't have become infatuated with him if it weren't for the intense emotional experience that resulted in an even more intense feeling of gratitude and debt.

Yet the two seem destined to unite. At first it is only her tenacity that brings them together. This is because he has suffered from a terrible tragedy and is `somehow still on the toilet' at the scene. The movie thus becomes an overcoming-your-past-and-triumphing sort of thing, how nice. He can't love her because he once entrusted his heart to another woman and has hence failed to recover from destruction of said heart.

This view, however, must be rejected in the end when we are informed that he wasn't actually in love with his wife. In actuality, they had quarreled more than they hadn't. He hadn't loved and lost, he had never loved; hence his suicidal melancholia. If he had loved he would have known that happiness exists. Instead, he came to a life philosophy that claimed `I don't believe in happiness' and `everything is meaningless.' `That's not true,' she replies. She is the polar opposite to his nihilistic side in this battle between hope and despair.

When she comes along, she isn't there to help him recover from the loss of his wife, she is there to act as a first love. After all these years of despair, she suddenly appears, it was fated. The idea that the merging was fated is evinced by the numerous numbers of coincidences. For example, the fact that Bodo buried her friend's mother and the fact that Sissi was there on the day of the robbery. I guess fate could be described as an uncanny amount of coincidences.

Back to the bank. This scene turns out to be a turning point in his and her relationship. It is only after this time that he ends his obstinacy and allows her to take him away. After his despair with woman began, he became unhealthily attached to his brother. The dream prior to his self-burning was of a woman telling him that his brother was dead. When he and she work together to save his brother, the benefits are twofold. First, her debt has now been payed; and second, he must suddenly overcome his disinclination towards women.

With this obstacle overcome, only one remains between love and happiness. He must return to the original gas station and free himself from the toilet – but only free himself of course, not become his old self. With this done, he is able to finally show affection and grasp his lover's hand. He smiles, for the first time in the entire movie.

In the end, they are both free to love, which is shown in their happiness and symbolically through their surroundings. He had been fed up with his local life for whatever reasons and desired to skip off to Australia. She had been born in the hospital and lived there her entire life. As a late revelation reveals that her mother was murdered purposely, she sees that her confinement in the hospital could actually kill her. Both escape to the boundless beach coast and escape their respective cages. Could it have been any other way?

Spoilers:

With the opening hodgepodge which condescendingly depicts clips of America's sweethearts, my appetite was whetted. "This may well prove to be more than I thought it would be; for satire is the greatest of all comedies." Yet sadly, the movie failed to transcend the satired, stereotypical, ordinary, mainstream movie. It should be subject to its own criticism. After all, if the beginning statement is indeed taken to be satiric, i.e.,"all Hollywood romantic comedies follow a specific, simplistic path, and can be easily replicated in a brief sample shot," then why does the movie itself take this overly-trodden-upon path?

Eddie, we are told, is in love with the conceited, cold, and calculating Gwen. After her infidelity, Eddie is so distraught that he has a mental break down, and both attempts and fantasizes murderous revenge. These serve as poignant reminders that although the Eddie/Gwen love did not develop on screen, it was indeed a powerful love. Soon, Eddie and Gwen are conveniently placed in close proximity and just as they near reunion, Eddie realizes that it is the quiet and comforting Kiki that he had loved all along. To remain consistent, the Eddie/Kiki love is as immediate and underdeveloped as the Eddie/Gwen love. The audience can't help but feel that it is more fickleness than attraction that draws Eddie to Kiki. Not only do the nice and desperately pitied characters unite in the end, but the evil Gwen receives her just deserts and is thoroughly humiliated in front of the international press. The idiocy of her adulterous beau is revealed to boot.

Have you ever seen the episode of the Simpsons where Homer gets a crayon dislodged from his brain and suddenly becomes a near genius? He goes into a movie theater and is bewildered by the zealous laughter over childish antics, catch phrases, and plot structure. Annoyed, he stands up and shoots,"We already know she is going to marry the polite and humble friend." To which someone non-sarcastically replies, "Really? I thought she was going to marry the rich snob." I don't know why I was just reminded of that...

Interpretation, spoilers:

Junuh, having spent many years as the local hero, becomes disillusioned when he discovers that his heroism does not cross over to the battle field. It takes Bagger Vance to teach Junuh that things such as heroic glory are of no importance compared to authenticity.

For those of you current on modern ideas, the term `authentic' should immediately be recognized as an earmark of existentialism. Basically, in a godless world completely devoid of any intrinsic meaning, meaning can only be found in living `true to oneself,' authentically. To live for external rewards such as glory in the sporting arena is futile, because both winning and losing amount to the same thing in a meaningless world. Meaning can only be found subjectively through one's personal experience, existentially. Thus, both life and golf `can only be played, not won.'

The movie is basically a look at Junuh's gradual attainment of authenticity. His early days of golf stardom serve as a gigantic obstacle, because Junuh mistakenly believes that his authentic life is the same as his life of fame. The war shatters this ill-founded illusion, and now Junuh must come to grips with reality.

Bagger has a sort of method in imparting authenticity onto Junuh. First, everything must be taken cheerfully calmly. Go with the flow and be yourself. There is no point frustrating yourself with the game of golf or the game of life. For Junuh, either his authentic self is a good golfer or it isn't, bellyaching will change absolutely nothing. Second, in order to be yourself, you must forget everyone else. This is symbolically shown when the crowd becomes imperceptible to Junuh, `it is just you and the ball.' This existential dictum is also demonstrated by Hardy's overcoming his shame of his father and his job. Hardy realizes that his father is living authentically by doing what he feels best, and the crowd reaction has no relevance whatsoever. Lastly, given the subjective nature of authenticity, it must be learned subjectively. Vance cannot just tell Junuh what to do. He can only prod and must let Junuh learn himself from his gains and mistakes.

This last point is illustrated by Junuh's misuse of the iron driver and by Vance's last hole vacancy. Vance cannot be around at the end, he needs Junuh to fully realize that he can only depend on himself to find his true self. When Vance allows Junuh to make the iron mistake, one of a few impediments to authenticity is shown. The three impediments in tension throughout the movie are: Junuh's heroism, Jones' perfectionism, and Hagen's womanization. Placing any one of these three dead ends over authenticity will leave one with a fake happiness. During the iron mistake, Junuh becomes infatuated with heroism, women, and the need for a perfect shot again. Thus the consequent fiasco.

Luckily, he overcomes, and the movie concludes that through authenticity one attains true happiness. Junuh attains his true love of golf, his love of his woman, and everything works out. But, to be consistent, these last two triumphs should be taken as symbolically representing happiness. Authenticity is the major objective given, and Junuh is not happy because he has a girl and his game, but because he has himself. `The game can only be played, not won.'