Are you the one in your group of friends who is considered the knowledgeable film buff? Are you regularly asked by family members and friends what movies you recommend? If people continue to come to you for film viewing guidance, then you must be doing something right and are probably very astute at picking the types of films your friends will like. Yet, there always comes a time when you’re going to miss your mark by a mile and you’ll find yourself questioning your own opinion. Especially when a film recommendation becomes an imagined insult and someone is yelling in your face, “Are you out of your mind? You thought I would like THAT?”  It happens to all of us and here are a few of my more memorable lapses in judgment.     

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968)

Years ago the film curator at the High Museum, a friend I knew through my involvement with the Image Film & Video organization, asked me to recommend a Halloween film for an October screening. I picked this anthology film (released in Europe as  Histoires Extraordinaires) because, despite its uneven quality, it has a fantastically weird Fellini segment with Terence Stamp as a drugged out film star on location in Rome, the Louis Malle episode is creepy and atmospheric (Alain Delon appears in a dual role and Brigitte Bardot shows up as a cigar-smoking brunette), and the Roger Vadim episode with Jane and Peter Fonda as lovers is ridiculous but campy fun. I thought it had the right caché for a Halloween film at the museum. Unfortunately, the evening of the screening, the film curator came face to face with an irate museum member who walked out of the film during the opening Vadim episode. The woman was outraged that the High Museum would show such trash and thought it was in extreme bad taste. Of course, the scene that drove her from her seat was one of the most laughable moments in the film and occurs when Jane Fonda, riding a horse, gallops into the frame, surveys the stark landscape which includes a rotting corpse hanging from a post, and joyfully proclaims, “I love this place!”  The film curator, faced with a seething viewer who was threatening to complain to the board of trustees, didn’t see the humor in this at the time. She was more worried about her job – and rightly so considering the internal politics that exist at most high profile museums – and it was quite a while before she asked me for any more film recommendations.

PAYDAY (1973)

Overlooked and underrated at the time of its release, Payday features a tour-de-force performance by Rip Torn as Maury Dann, a hellraisin’, self-destructive country-western singer on a tour of backwater Southern towns, not realizing how close he is to the end of the line. I recommended this film to my friends Bev and Bubba, a couple who had lived and grown up in Alabama, and were more than familiar with the areas in which Payday was filmed (mostly in and around Selma). They also were big fans of country music from the golden age of Hank Williams, George Jones and Johnny Paycheck. I figured they would get a kick out of Torn’s boozing, horny, unrepentant hustler/musician. I never expected them to HATE it or ask me why I told them to watch it. For one thing, they found the whole movie aimless and boring and Torn was not only an annoying asshole but he couldn’t even sing! His songs were terrible. And the Alabama locations didn’t evoke nostalgia but mostly bad memories of the past such as the time Bubba’s high school football team stopped at one of the greasy spoon restaurants featured in the film. Ok, different strokes, I guess. For me, Payday was a rambling, episodic character study and part of the fun in this funky road trip was observing all of the rich details and quirky behavior along the way. But as far as Bev and Bubba are concerned, I owe them big time for the 103 minutes of their lives that they won’t get back.    

ROLLERCOASTER (1977)

When Rollercoaster opened theatrically, many theatres exhibited it in its highly touted “Sensurround” presentation. I saw it in Athens, Ga. at the Beechwood Cinema where theatre owner Sol Abrams had installed two monolithic speakers at the front of the auditorium with wires running all over tarnation, along the floor and sides of the theatre from the front to the back. It looked like a very scary, jerry-rigged affair and my witness to this “event” was my friend Christy who had a hilarious sense of humor and seemed like the sort of person who would enjoy a trashy, big-budget disaster epic like Rollercoaster. This was, after all, the era of The Poseidon Adventure (1977), Airport 1975 (1974), Earthquake (1974) and The Hindenburg (1975) – none of which would be mistaken for an art film or even a serious film drama. Rollercoaster had the expected all star cast (George Segal, Richard Widmark, Timothy Bottoms, Henry Fonda, Harry Guardino, Susan Strasberg, Dorothy Tristan and Helen Hunt in an early role) and an intriguing premise –  a mad bomber is sabotaging rollercoaster rides across the country in an effort to extort millions of dollars from theme park owners.      

The movie got off to a roaring start (the sound was so loud the theatre walls appeared to be vibrating) with a coaster full of jubilant fun-seekers screaming happily through each second of their wild ride. And then disaster struck, the moment we were waiting for, and an exploding bomb derailed the track and sent the rollercoaster into free fall with the riders screaming not so happily on their way to ground zero. The coaster landed upside down which meant all the passengers took the full impact on their heads and there was a brief shot to support this horrific fact. Yet even in that short scene I could see the dummy bodies and their rubber necks snapping and I burst out laughing (For a more in-depth look at dummies in the movies, visit Destructible Man, The Theory and Practice of Cinematic Prosthetic Demise [aka The Dummy-Death in Film], a fantastic blog at http://www.destructibleman.com/). Christy, who was taking the whole thing much too seriously, whipped around to look at me incredulously and said with great feeling, “I HATE YOU.” And she meant it too in that instant. For a while there, I was afraid she was going to walk but she eventually calmed down and began to realize I was laughing at the film’s general ineptitude, not at people dying horrible deaths. Still, the reason people flock to see disaster films is for the latter reason.  

By the end of Rollercoaster, Christy was even laughing at some of the inane dialogue and lame attempts at suspense – director James Goldstone was clearly no Hitchcock – and realizing that one could enjoy a bad movie as much as a good one if you had the right perspective. After Rollercoaster, Christy began to develop a fondness for good-bad cinema and I exposed her to Chrome and Hot Leather, William Castle’s Bug and other drive-in favorites. We still get together occasionally with friends to watch oddities like Killer Nun or The Manster. But there was a moment there during Rollercoaster when I thought I our friendship had gone off the rails.     

 A MAN LIKE EVA (1984)

     My wife and I have been Fassbinder fans ever since we saw Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) together at the Goethe Institute in Atlanta and then experienced The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978) and the serialization of the made-for-German-television Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) at the long gone Rhodes Theatre (in the Landmark chain) on Peachtree St. We were fascinated by the director’s intensely personal style which blended compassion, cruelty and sardonic humor in equal measure. His films, many of them stylized melodramas about outsiders trying to survive in an often hostile, post-war Germany, could be bitter and bleak with unmistakable political, social and sexual overtones. We knew Fassbinder was an acquired taste and rarely recommended his movies to friends who had little interest in art house or international cinema. But one weekend my brother Phil and Sarah, his fiancée at the time, came down from New York for a visit. It happened to coincide with a screening of A Man Like Eva that was showing at the High Museum that same weekend.

     Fassbinder had died in 1982 and this film, directed by Radu Gabrea, was a fictionalized drama based on the director’s life and featured a frequent Fassbinder actress, Eva Mattes, as a bearded, chain-smoking tyrant of a director who was a dead ringer for Fassbinder. Since the film was not available on VHS and this would be a rare opportunity to see it, we convinced Phil and Sarah to join us for the Saturday evening screening. They were game, even though they knew nothing about Fassbinder. I had no idea about Sarah’s taste in movies but I knew my brother had never been a film fan. Growing up he’d rather play baseball, listen to music, go bowling…almost anything rather than spend time in a dark theatre being manipulated by images on the big screen. I think the sheer emotional power of cinema he found hard to take and some of his earliest experiences left him angry, upset or disturbed (The witch in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was enough to put him off movies as a kid).

     A Man Like Eva turned out to be very similar to a Fassbinder film in tone and style with the added fascination of an actress playing the tormented, sexually conflicted director of the film. Most of the movie centered around a film crew who was holed up in a decaying mansion while shooting a remake of Alexander Dumas’ Lady of the Camelias and all the while the director, identified as Eva, bullied, insulted, praised, manipulated and played power games with his cast and crew, just as Fassbinder did in real life. It was a particularly claustrophobic film in a visual sense and the pacing was slow and deliberate. I could tell early on from the restless movements of my brother and Sarah that they were bored out of their minds. And as the film progressed I could hear Sarah whispering, imploring my brother to leave, but Phil decided to stick it out, mainly because he could tell Beth and I were caught up in the movie.

    Afterwards, we left the auditorium in silence and hardly a word was spoken between us as we drove home. I could tell from Sarah’s tense expression that she was suppressing her anger from the whole ordeal. And later, in private with my brother, she vented her hatred of the film, thought it was a pretentious pile of rubbish, couldn’t believe that we actually liked it, and was particularly miffed that we had made the movie a priority over spending real time with them during their brief visit. She was certainly right on the latter count. I should have know A Man Like Eva was not something they would enjoy. And realizing their discomfort and annoyance during the screening, I should have suggested we leave. Selfishly, I chose to stay and it had a negative effect on the remainder of Phil and Sarah’s visit. Not long after this, Phil and Sarah split up – I hope A Man Like Eva wasn’t to blame! – and I later heard Sarah found religion and a new boyfriend. Meanwhile, my brother fell in love, got married, had two children and has become much more open to film, often seeking and enjoying my recommendations of such diverse movies as Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Ship of Fools, Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light.      

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974)

This would be my biggest faux pas. The time I convinced Phyllis, my wife at the time, and a couple we were just getting to know – Barbara and Jim – to attend a midnight screening of this not-yet-notorious classic. I knew from newspaper ads, the trailer and word of mouth from fellow horror fans that this wasn’t a satire though the title is so proudly exploitive it’s hard to take it seriously. At least, Barbara and Jim, who were not horror fans, treated it as a joke and I encouraged that attitude as we had coffee and dessert before rushing out to the late-night screening of Tobe Hopper’s film. The theatre was packed with a predominantly male audience, many of them drunk or stoned fraternity boys from UGA, and it had all the makings of a wild movie party. As the lights went down and the movie began, one yahoo screamed out “Tobeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyy” in homage to the director. But the festive atmosphere quickly faded to a tense silence that would soon begin erupting in screams and gasps from audience members as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre tightened the screws and orchestrated one shock after another until the rampaging fadeout. Throughout the screening at the most violent moments, Barbara and Jim would cock their heads in my direction and mouth the word WHAT? in silent outrage. Phyllis, however, took it all in stride, having been subjected to countless horror films by me. Barbara and Jim hated the film, of course, and wanted to know why I felt I had to stay till the bitter end (I was the designated driver that night). I really couldn’t defend my decision. Either you’re a horror fan or you’re not. But The Texas Chainsaw Massacre evening became a standing joke with Barbara and Jim and ruined my credibility for recommending movies to them for awhile. I later managed to redeem myself by insisting that we all watch Joan Micklin Silver’s Head Over Heels (1979, aka Chilly Scenes of Winter) on cable television, an experience that was much more to everyone’s liking than our memorable Chainsaw date.    

SCARECROW (1973)

Everyone has their own criteria of what they will and won’t tolerate in a movie. Some people will veto any movie with animal cruelty in it (that would be me). Or makes fun of fat people. Or is about Devil worship. Or has the word WONDERFUL in the title because it probably isn’t. But Larry, a friend of mine in college, had a special hang-up that I didn’t realize until we went to see Scarecrow, although he had displayed similar weird behavior during previous films; in other words, getting up abruptly during a dramatic scene and leaving in disgust, saying “I’m outta here.” It wasn’t any dramatic scene that set him off. It was a very specific kind of dramatic scene. So when, on my recommendation, we went to see Scarecrow, a road movie about two sad-sack losers (Al Pacino and Gene Hackman) on a journey to find themselves, I figured there would be a minimum of histronics. I was wrong. Scarecrow is the buddy movie from hell, a much more contrived and artificial film than Midnight Cowboy but somehow compelling due to Vilmos Zsigmond’s stunning cinematography and Pacino and Hackman, even when the script rings one false note after another. But the scene that sent Larry bolting from the theatre was the one toward the end of the film when Pacino’s character finally returns home to face his abandoned wife and she gives him a verbal tongue lashing that puts him in a catatonic state. But before this happened, Larry was already rushing up the aisle, muttering, “I can’t stand that sh*t.” For some reason, Larry couldn’t tolerate any scenes that dealt with women venting feelings of rage, frustration and disappointment toward men. It was as if he took it as a personal attack and I had no idea where this was coming from but it was this projection of emotional emasculation that had previously driven him out of theatres at key scenes in Paper Moon and Blume in Love. The power of film to evoke such strong reactions from viewers never ceases to amaze me and the above examples illustrate how polarized we can be in our communal film watching.