Category Archives: Movies

Dazed and Confused

August 30, New York: Let me start by saying this was not my experience of high school. Not really even close. I would have been Adam Goldberg if anybody. Certainly not Randy ‘Pink’ Floyd. And definitely not Matthew McConaughey. “All right, all right, all right.”

I watched this for the first time in college and we laughed at how people did it in the bad old days, and then my roommate Andy from Texas told us it was all still true. His senior year of high school he got grounded when he taped a naked freshman to a lightpole. He spent his punishment in his bedroom reading Das Kapital in protest. Andy was an awesome dude. Texas is a crazy place.

The best thing about this movie is you keep getting older and it stays the same age, yes it does. It so enjoyable to watch this film. Everyone is so authentic, the music is the best, the dialogue is so natural (and often improvised, apparently). And have I mentioned Matthew McConaughey? Holy crap, he’s so good.

All right, all right, all right. Watch it again.

Branded to Kill

August 27, New York: I’ve watched Branded to Kill twice before. This post will be two posts, one for each of those times. The first post we’ll call “Why Branded to Kill is Awesome.” Here’s the trailer to get you in the mood.

Japanese cinema apparently had a period in which cookie-cutter gangster films were all the rage. This movie was supposed to be one of those, but Seijun Suzuki got ahold of it and made it epic. We follow the Number 3 killer in Japan, a master assassin. He loves his work, hot sex, and boiled rice. The whole movie is scored with jazz and gunshots. The final third is spent in a surreal buddy thriller with No. 1. The movie is so weird and so awesome and when I first watched it, I knew I’d found something special. I took great pleasure in claiming my allegiance to this film and even buying the Criterion Collection “digital video disc”.

Then many years later I forced a viewing upon Jill and Robin. They hated it. This second post we’ll call “Why Branded to Kill is Terrible.” It’s too weird and too arty and the sex is gratuitous and violent and what does it ever matter that No. 3 likes the smell of boiled rice? The movie seems never-ending and is only exacerbated by the editing— which hops and jumps around and leaves the viewer often lost. And what’s with all that dissonant jazz? After my second viewing, I began to suspect that I just loved Branded to Kill because I loved having an allegiance to something weird and obscure. That I’d wanted to love an arty, weird film that was picked up by the Criterion Collection.

Which brings me to my third viewing, just this past weekend. The truth is, watched alone and without the expectations of others, this film is actually quite good. Weird and hard to get through at times, but awesome. That final third of the film, where No. 3 and No. 1 are locked in an epic standoff had my laughing out loud. And the final scene with its repetition of “This is the way No. 1 works.” is really powerfully tense.

Get into the smell of boiled rice and buy the Criterion Collection edition of this film. Then watch it alone and not with the expectations of your loved ones.

Wonder Boys

August 24, New York: There was a period in which I watched this film nearly a hundred times in the space of a few months. It was just always on in our college apartment. And it never got old. Still today, this movie fits like a perfect pair of jeans— so comfortable, so enjoyable. Such fantastic acting: Michael Douglas, Robert Downey, Jr., Frances McDormand, Tobey Maguire, even Katie Holmes is great in her red cowboy boots.

And Curtis Hanson, the director, is great, too. There’s nothing fancy about how Wonder Boys is directed, but everything about it works. Pittsburgh as a character. The Director’s commentary explains that every time Grady makes a decision, a bridge is featured. (If you watch a movie 100 times, eventually you watch it with the commentary on.) The weather as a character. The cold, wet rain is palpable. The crisp winter nights actually made Jill and I miss winter as we were watching it (which says a lot, because after last winter we are stridently pro-summer right now.)

I think Curtis Hanson is a masterful director. He gets out of the way of letting a film unfold. Wonder Boys, like LA Confidential and 8 Mile, begins with incredibly strong source material. And Hanson manages to enhance it. Let’s please give Curtis Hanson some more big movies to adapt.

Buy Wonder Boys. Watch it again and again. Fall in love with Pittsburgh, fall in love with Curtis Hanson.

Guns n’ Roses: Use Your Illusion 1 & 2

This post is in the theme “Constructing an identity through media”. Read the first.

August 18, New York: First off, spending a work day listening to Guns n’ Roses sure does make for an odd mood. This is a music that is so unlike what I listen to now— loud and energetic and adolescent. I was never a GNR superfan (or a concert attendee, even once), but I was a teenage connisseur of popular music. These two best-selling albums were the first that I bought to follow a trend, and it felt great. I bought them from BMG, as a part of my introductory eight albums. The songs on my new CDs were all over the radio. They were all over my MTV. I was a part of a movement! I’d bought a subscription to a movement!

It’s surreal to listen to Guns n’ Roses now— particularly the blatant adolescent shock value of the lyrics (I cringed all the way through “Back Off Bitch”). More surreal perhaps to watch the video for “Estranged”, in which Axl— who lacks a second vowel in his name and is ALSO TWENTY-NINE YEARS OLD AT THIS POINT— wears jeans shorts for the majority of the whole video.

Upon a re-listen, there are really two albums here. Not Use Your Illusion I & II, but rather Use Your Illusion: The Hits and Use Your Illusion: The Filler. Through the lens of time they are very, very different experiences, yet they are mixed and muddled together. And the hits hold up because holy crap there were so many hits off of this album! The Rock: “Civil War”, “Live and Let Die”, “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”. The Ballads: “Don’t Cry”, “Estranged”, “November Rain”. And each and every one these I found myself singing along to.

And then in the filler I was just lost. Half of it was entirely unfamiliar. The music sounds foreign today, this hard-rocking band in a studio where so many notes are punctuated with guttural exhalations and every drumbeat echoes like it was recorded in a silent and empty stadium. I bet for the actual Guns n’ Roses fans this album was a bit too polished. But hell, Slash sure can play a guitar. And Axl, for his faults, sure does have a vocal range.

For kids my age, Axl and Slash were quickly supplanted by Kurt and Eddie. But “November Rain” is the song that followed all of us dance to dance, through middle and high school. It was the super-long slow dance song. It was the song you had to make sure you were dancing to with the right person. With the right person, November Rain was the only song that came anywhere near to the eternity that you wanted to spend awkwardly circling with hands limply draped on shoulder and hips. With the wrong person, it was an endless prison. I spent every school dance both loving and dreading November Rain.

PS— How fucking cool of guitar player must Slash have been to get HELICOPTERS to shoot his solo? New thesis: Slash is the coolest thing about Guns n’ Roses/rock n’ roll.

If you find yourself compelled, go listen to them on Rdio.

Akira

This post is in the theme “A Long Waltz Through Nerddom”. Read the first.

August 14, New York: I never delved exceptionally deep into anime. I watched and appreciated most of the hits, but I rarely invested much in a series or repeatedly watched a film unless it was something really special. Usually it had to be something that explored consciousness, identity, or human evolution. (Get ready for the post on Evangelion.)

Akira is that in spades. A Gibsonian dystopia serves as the backdrop for the next evolution of the human race. But on top of that it is just so visually appealing. Akira is so beautiful, so mysterious, so dense. From that opening sequence with the motorcycles light trails and the different planes of skyscrapers, the movie keeps on being a visual masterpiece. Gorgeous to watch.

I truly am a sucker for any text about human evolution or the nature of the universe, a fictional exploration of epistemological questions. (In college I wrote a senior Philosophy thesis on consciousness.) Combine that with a beautiful work of film (my other college degree) and I am y.o.u.r.s.

You should have already seen Akira and you should see it again. If you’ve not seen Akira, this is an emergency and must be rectified immediately.

Casablanca

August 12, New York: I watched Casablanca with my wife and her family, relatively sober on a quiet Sunday night. This was not how I had intended to watch Casablanca. I’d intended to watch this film besotted as I always have been— drunk on red wine and slurring along with Victor Lazlo singing La Marseillaise. (I don’t speak French, but there are a few phrases of this song I know by heart, all thanks to Casablanca.)

I’ve seen this movie a ton of times. It’s easily one of my top five films if not my absolute favorite. I love it. And nearly every time I’ve watched it I’ve gotten hammered. It’s peak sentimentality for me. It’s the Andrew Fitzgerald version of the archetypal girl-who-loves-romantic-comedies. One of the best Thanksgivings I ever spent I was alone at college, drank a bunch of beer and watched Casablanca. I was in blubbering agreement with Sam when he tells Rick they’ll “take the car and drive all night”. “No one listens to Sam!” I moaned through a can of Pabst to my empty apartment.

Despite how many times I’ve seen Casablanca, I got something new from it this time, actually. I always thought I knew the ending inside and out: Rick pulls the old bait and switch on Ingrid Bergman out there on the tarmac, that German gets shot and Rick and Captain Renault saunter off into the fog together. Where to, exactly? Watching this time, sober, I finally saw the real ending. One in which Rick and the Captain decide to fight for freedom together. I had never really recalled the shot of Renault throwing away the “Vichy Water” or telling him they’d go to the Free France garrison. There you go, a totally different movie. Thanks, Thirty-Three Project.

As much as I love “As Time Goes By”, this is the real musical experience of the movie:

I want to be Victor Lazlo of course. Or do I want to be Rick? It’s like the light versus the dark romantic within me.

Buy Casablanca and treasure it forever.

Hackers

This post is in the theme “A Long Waltz Through Nerddom”. Read the first.

August 11, Scituate: I want to tell you that Hackers totally holds up. Now, you’re going to want to fight me on this one. You’re going to say “uh, rollerblading? techno music? progress bars? HACK THE PLANET?” Yes, I’m telling you, it holds up. It holds up as long as you expect all of this and you tack into it, fist up in the air yelling HACK THE PLANET with a half-grin plastered across your face. This movie totally captures a moment.

Let’s talk about the bad first. Johnny Lee Miller plays a terrible teenager and a worse American. The dialogue is cringe-worthy. The graphic representations of the Internet set the standard for a whole genre of god-awful CGI. The fashion is a mess— the cut-off shirts! And they do indeed do a lot of rollerblading.

Now let’s talk about what’s great about Hackers. This was a time in which Hollywood was digesting subcultures and spitting them back out as single movies. We’ve since shifted this work into documentary series on TV. But in the 1990s we did this with fiction— we gathered up all the clever dog whistle words and subculture totems and we presented the audience with a tame sample of your world, congratulations, you’ve made it. Hackers attempted to capture a whole mess of intertwined movements: proto-rave culture, computer hacking, 1990s NYC in general. And all the totems are there! The hacking part is what captured my imagination when I first saw the movie (well, the first of probably five theater viewings in about two weeks). It was amazing! This was a brief period of time in which having the simplest computer knowledge made you a wizard. A real wizard! Record a few tones emitted by a pay phone and suddenly you were making free long distance phone calls. Toss a few Unix commands at a Telnet command line and you were seeing all sorts of things you weren’t supposed to. Wizardry! And the best part was your parents literally didn’t know how to turn the computer on.

This is embarrassing, but Hackers totally changed my teenage life. My friend Chris and I started: a) rollerblading, b) listening to techno, c) hacking! We went from Andrew and Chris to “phritz” and “spam_i_am” and we became the terrors of a local dial-up freenet service. We got our hands on the rainbow books, we made a red box, and we listened to a ton of Lords of Acid and Prodigy and Orbital.

I can’t say I ever became a very accomplished hacker. The complexity of that sort of wizardry was increasing exponentially by the time we discovered it and I didn’t put the time in to keep up. Our computer science classes were taught in Pascal and C++, but HTML was fast becoming the language we’d need. And as with teenagers, our passions shifted. Like Johnny Lee Miller, we too discovered little Floridian Angelina Jolies and the countless hours spent in front of screens began to diminish. (You know they married, right? Weird.)

But there was a great period of two teenaged wizards rollerblading around in oversized jeans listening to synthetic drum machine beats and this was all inspired by this one pretty terrible movie, a movie that *totally* holds up. HACK THE PLANET!

Yes, you can buy the movie Hackers. And you should.

Wet Hot American Summer

July 27, New York: There are a small handful of movies from which you know every single word of dialogue, every funny gesture, every use of an inappropriate sound effect. Wet Hot American Summer is one of those films for me. Its most innocuous and forgettable phrases have worked their way into my regular lexicon— when Coop follows a muttered “I want you inside me” with “You know, from before”, that latter is a phrase I still work in regularly. These uses began as inside jokes with friends and co-watchers, but now just lurk in my speaking RAM, unavoidably accessed.

This is confusing because Wet Hot American Summer is not the blockbuster cult classic it deserves to be. Where a catchphrase from The Big Lebowski can elicit a knowing chuckle (“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”), the same isn’t true here.

Let’s fix this.

Here are three great reasons to watch this movie:

  • This movie has an incredible cast (Hello Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Paul Rudd, Janeane Garofolo, Michael Ian Black, Elizabeth Banks, etc., etc.) and they seem to be having such fun together.
  • The montages are amazing (particularly the trip into Waterville).
  • Above every other reason I recommend seeing this movie, it is to see this one single scene with the most amazing performance you will ever see Paul Rudd give. It’s cinematic gold.

Buy the damn DVD, rent the damn digital copy, I don’t care how you do it, just get yourself and all your friends up to speed on all the incredible jokes that we can all share chuckles about.

Dune & Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

This post is in the theme “A Long Waltz Through Nerddom”. Read the first.

July 27, New York: This is a review in two parts. I set out to just read Dune, just as I did at 14. And just like that first time, the dizzying momentum of the first book sent me soaring into the second, Dune Messiah. They are very different books. We’re going to talk about Dune first.

Dune is one of those books that deserves every accolade ever thrown at it. It charts an incredibly detailed and imaginative world, tells you of a possible future rich with detail without getting bogged down in how we got there from here. It comes with Appendices like The Lord of the Rings— the mark of an author who really delved into creation.

When I read it at 14 and even reading it again now, I wanted to be Paul Maud-Dib Atreides. He is an incredible character and so powerful. In my youth, I wanted nothing more than to be touched with destiny and Paul’s story rang that chord for me. In my adulthood, I want to be powerfully mindful, and re-reading Dune made me want to spend more time working on that.

The book moves so fast, though. It almost feels over-edited. I recalled this in the film, but it’s here in the source text too. You leap into the story, zip past the first act in a blink and then you tear through this richly-imagined world with a breathtaking speed of plot. And at the end, when all of a sudden Paul is victorious, you are left wanting more, combing through the appendices for an extension of the narrative. And this leads you to buy Dune Messiah. I did it twice.

After the hectic pace of Dune, you want Dune Messiah to luxuriate in the world on Arrakis, to spread and explore deeper into the concepts breezed through in Paul’s ascent to power. This doesn’t happen. We skip over the dozen years of the great jihad Paul has been trying to avoid and all the growth and construction of his empire right to what feels like its end. Instead of delving deeper, Herbert introduces wholly new concepts, like he’s done with the first world and can’t wait to move on. To read the synopsis of the following books in the sextet, it seems like that happens every time. #3 (Children of Dune) takes place another nine years in the future; #4 (God Emperor of Dune) is 3500 years later! I remember in my first reading I’d planned to tear through all six, but lost steam in the third.

I thought this reading of Dune as The Godfather, the most award-winning book of its day. Dune Messiah also won the Hugo, much like Godfather II also won the Oscar, but we all know which of the Godfather movies is the landmark of American cinema. And we all know how disappointing Godfather III was. I didn’t try to read Children of Dune this time.

But Dune is an amazing book and you should buy it and read it and then restrain yourself at its conclusion!

Star Wars

This post is in the theme “A Long Waltz Through Nerddom”. Read the first.

July 27, New York: How does one rewatch Star Wars? Think about it, it’s a complicated question. You could watch them in release order (4,5,6,1,2,3) or you could watch them in chronological order (1,2,3,4,5,6). Imagine you were showing them to a child for the first time. What a conundrum! The good news is, the Internet has a lot of opinions about this. From these opinions, I chose “Machete Order” (4,5,2,3,6).

Why Machete Order? If you’re interested in the details please read the very long blog post explaining it. But here are the basics:

  1. Episode 4 is the best entrance into the universe, but Episode 6 is by far the best ending.
  2. Vader’s big reveal in Episode 5 does not get spoiled by Episode 3, and instead 2 and 3 serve as an extended flashback supporting Vader’s assertion. It’s possible to believe, ignoring the cultural weight that that reveal has garnered, that Vader is actually lying to Luke at the end of Episode 5 in order to further manipulate his emotions. Then, watching 6 after watching 2 and 3, you’re even more invested in Vader’s internal struggle.
  3. Episode 1 is wholly unnecessary. I watched the five films in this order and was not at all confused at any point. It literally makes no difference that it’s gone. Also, Episode 1 is a terrible film. And while 2 might not be great, 3 is actually pretty good.

The one suggestion in Machete Order that we did not follow was to get Harmy’s Despecialized Editions. Lord, I wish we had. The widescreen versions released in the 90s have all sorts of additional CGI shots (and whole scenes!) or worse, CGI elements plastered into existing scenes. And every single addition is painfully obvious and ridiculously distracting. It makes watching the originals so much less enjoyable.

Otherwise, though, rewatching Star Wars was a blast. It took Jill and I a weekend and change to get through the whole thing, but it was so. much. fun. Star Wars is so pervasive in our culture and so ever-present in reruns on television that you perpetually feel like you just saw the movies, like, last year. Sitting down and watching the whole thing you realize how untrue that feeling is. There was so much I didn’t fully remember, especially from 5 and 6. Rediscovering those scenes and reliving the favorites was awesome. And how cool is Han Solo? I mean, come on.

I would normally link here to an Amazon page to buy these films, but I went through a whole thing with these where I only wanted to digitally rent them and they were unavailable anywhere! So I am going to use this space to recommend you do what I did and borrow them. Special thanks to @hwilson and @suits from my office.

Lawrence of Arabia

July 19, New York: Every summer as a kid I would visit my family in Louisiana and spend a couple of days with my grandparents who had both a television AND a VCR. Now, at this time, we didn’t have a television at home, so this was very novel. I would plop down on their couch and feed VHS tapes into that VCR and just be thoroughly amazed and happy. There was a limited selection, and I’d almost always start with the NFL blooper reels my grandfather received from Sports Illustrated. But one trip, the days stretched long and the blooper reels ran out and there was one movie yet unwatched: Lawrence of Arabia. It was two (TWO!) VHS tapes long, but I sat down and I watched the whole damn thing.

I think the only thing I recall from that viewing was that the movie was long. Just unfathomably long. Particularly for a child.

Years later, I watched Lawrence of Arabia again as a film student and then I realized that this film was absolutely majestic. Those incredible shots! Beautiful, widescreen, location shooting.

This is painting with a film camera.

Clear out a whole evening (really, the whole thing) and sit down and watch this on the biggest flatscreen TV you can find.

The Big Lebowski

July 11, From a plane between San Francisco and New York: Every single frame of this film is so incredibly satisfying to watch. From the opening credits set to the “Man in Me” all the way through. It’s a masterpiece of enjoyability. The dream sequences! The Jesus introduction! The everything-that-comes-out-of-Walter’s-mouth! The way that if you watch closely you can see the Dude slowly collecting conversational tidbits from other characters and deploying them in later scenes (“The Chinaman is not the issue here, man!”; “She’s a strumptet, she kidnapped herself!”)

For about a year, right around the time this film was at the height of its popularity, I lived around the corner from the Hollywood Star Lanes in LA where all of the bowling sequences were shot. It became my local bar— I’d buy bottles of Rolling Rock or Budweiser for two bucks apiece and sit in the back and wonder when Vince Vaughn was going to roll in and be super tall and loud. (Not that we ever spoke, Vince and I. But I noted his presence.) This picture (used in the 33 Project list) was taken by Jed Johnson in the back of the Hollywood Star Lanes bar.

23

It was heartbreaking when the city shut the bowling alley down. They argued imminent domain and took the land to build a middle school. There was a vigil in the parking lot that final night, where everyone felt the way you feel watching Donny falling down dead in the same parking lot in The Big Lebwoski. My buddy Dominic left with one of those classic “Holly Star balls” and has it to this day. A memento of a simpler time.

The argument for preserving the Hollywood Star Lanes was to designate it a cultural landmark. It seemed, on the one hand, very Angeleno to try to declare a one out of a site most people had discovered from a film released less than five years prior. On the other hand, ‘cult movie’ or not, it was clear The Big Lebowski was destined to be a cultural touchstone. I hope in thirty years time, the next time one of those AFI Top 100 movies of all time lists is released, that someone writes the post-humous essay equating the destruction of the Hollywood Star Lanes to the destruction of the original Penn Station in NYC. And that we all, at that time, recognize that The Big Lebowski might just be the greatest film ever made.

Buy this film, watch it, and walk around all the next day with “The Man in Me” in your head and a smile on your face.

Independence Day

July 4, New York: Independence Day was the first time a teaser trailer really worked on me. Remember that? When tucked into the previews before a film was one little fifteen second spot and that was the first time you’d ever heard of a new film? No stars, not too much detail, just a shot of the shadow creeping over the moon’s surface. I saw it with my best friend Chris and we could not wait for this movie to be released. We stood in line opening night. Then we saw it probably 3 more times that weekend.

Independence Day is the perfect summer blockbuster. Explosions, a too-tidy script, a menagerie of cliched characters, and of course, Will Smith.


“Welcome to Earth!”

Fifteen year old me cheered like crazy when Will Smith punched that alien in the head. This film has everything: it’s pro-American, reminds you to protect the environment, and also promotes diversity— what can bring Israelis and Palestinians together? Alien attack? WE’RE ALL ONE.

And this year it was the perfect rainy July 4th movie. Every single one-liner satisfies like a buttery handful of popcorn. All the nineties jokes still make me chuckle. (“We’re asking all Angelenos not to fire their weapons at the spaceship and inadvertently trigger an interstellar war.”) And what movie President can bring a tear to the eye like Bill Pullman? None. “Today is our Independence Day!”

One thing has changed in all my years of watching this movie. The older I get, the more disturbed I find myself by the sequence depicting the destruction of the major American cities. Death, never shown directly on camera, looms all around. Million upon millions of lives are ending in that short 90 second sequence.

And one other thing I noted as I was watching: how impressive is it that this never spawned a sequel? We can at least all thank Hollywood for that. Though rumors argue the contrary.

Happy Independence Day! You should start a holiday tradition of watching this movie, and you should start it today by renting or buying this film from the Amazon dot com.

Pulp Fiction

May 28, San Diego: I am consuming a lot of dated material in this project. TV shows and movies especially that are irretrievably of their time. I mean that in a negative way. Pulp Fiction, you might guess, would fall into that category. What could be more 1990s than the film that launched the indie movie revolution of that and the following decade? Surely the styles grate, the wanton violence seems immature in retrospect, the flagrant criminality shocks no longer?

You would be wrong to think these things.

For Pulp Fiction remains a timeless masterwork. It exists not in the decade that birthed it, but in its own universe, one in which conversations are cooler, the people are dressed better, the music is a touch louder. Sure some people drop some f-bombs and sure some people do some drugs. But hell if this is not an amazing film. I giggled with joy as each new scene unfolded and each familiar face was revealed.

It’s so quotable— right from the first scene— “Everybody be cool, this is a robbery!” The dialogue, the storytelling, the visual language, it’s all genius. But I think my absolute favorite part is just the on-going shop talk between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Talking about Europe, talking about Marsellus Wallace. Filling up time in their days in which they go about their business of yelling and shooting and etc.

Some enterprising young lady or fella put together a compilation of great bits!

Go and buy and then re-watch this movie and be so incredibly happy that you did.

Hoop Dreams

April 17, San Francisco: There was a point in my life where I began to realize that documentary filmmaking could reflect our world back to us in a much more powerful way than what we call “news” or “journalism”. Hoop Dreams was key touchstone along that path. It tells the stories of two Chicago kids, Arthur Agee and William Gates, with raw basketball talent and a dream to play pro. We meet Arthur and William on their way into freshman year of high school and we follow them through to college. There are many stories about race and privilege in America, many stories about promise and disappointment, but the two plus hours of Hoop Dreams manages to weave all of this together through two characters who are completely real and completely flawed and completely relatable.

It sounds silly to me at this age to be making such a strong point for the importance of documentaries as a journalistic format. But there was a time, prior to watching movies like this one, that I didn’t understand that. I didn’t get how deeply textured a story you could tell without ever directly dealing with any of the underlying issues. There is no expert who appears on camera in Hoop Dreams to describe the economic plight of working class African American families in Chicago. But the filmmakers are there the night that the power gets turned off in the Agees’ house. There’s no deep debate on teenage fatherhood, but William and his girlfriend have a baby before he graduates and that is just a part of the story from that point on.

And through it all, you love these kids. You root for them like crazy (even me, rooting, and I don’t watch any of the sportball). It’s documentary as complex, emotional journalism and as a truly honest story that’s reflective of a whole swath of the American experience.

(None of that is captured in this totally weird trailer.)

Buy, watch, and love this movie.

Do the Right Thing

April 8, Las Vegas: Let me begin this post with two caveats. One: I actually watched this movie a month ago and I’m only now getting around to posting about it. Two: If you’ve not seen this movie or forgotten it as I had, STOP reading because I’m about to drop a big spoiler. For your safety, I’ll put it after this clip of my favorite character in the film, Radio Raheem.

I forgot that Radio Raheem dies! I watched this movie once, forever ago, and I remembered Sal’s and Jon Turturro(!) and even that there was the riot at the end, but I forgot the inciting incident. And so as Radio Raheem was walking around the neighborhood, I’m sitting here watching it just loving him. Not even believing he’s at mortal risk when the cops have him in the chokehold and then HE DIES. I watched the movie on an airplane and I was suddenly softly sobbing into the seatback in front of me.

What a powerful fucking movie. It’s campy and rough around the edges at times, but that fun and looseness only better sets you up for the end. I wish we could still have national conversations this powerful about race. But for our world today, I’m glad we had this conversation when we did.

You know there is a version of this movie available for your purchase in the Bezos-mega-plex, right?

Sherman’s March

April 5, New York: I struggled to explain to Jill why I thought she wouldn’t like this movie, but that I love it. It is not because it’s a brutal depiction of William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea. There is no visual representation of the first instance of “total war” in the modern era. If anything, it’s hard to recommend Sherman’s March because it’s slow, perhaps indulgent, plodding even. So much film is burned on introspection, on meandering interviews, on the barley-visible moon deep in the black of night. But I think this is exactly what I love so much about this movie. All the burned film!

I started making documentaries in the era of digital video. Tape was cheap and plentiful (heck, you could get a halfway decent DV tape in most convenience stores when I was in college). I shot a lot of tape in this same fashion that McElway uses— the camera up at my eye, off to my shoulder, or often down at my hip with a piece of gaff tape over the record light. I picked this up in a series of classes in college, taught by Allen Rucker, called “Guerrilla Television”. It was that one thing I learned in college that defined my career; through that class I met my first professional mentor and set myself on a path as a documentary journalist with a sloppy camera hand.

And so it’s not until I have a college degree in filmmaking, not until I’m being paid to bring some aspect of this documentary work to an employer, that I finally see Sherman’s March and it boggles my mind. Everything about this film resonates with me and my work. How many projects have I begun that started with one topic and drifted into another? Plenty. That’s why you never turn the camera off. But with 16mm film? All that time is so much money! It’s incredible!

I love this film as a filmmaker. I love wondering through the early scenes about when McElway’s focus shifts. Was it his secret intention to make a film about loves lost and revisited when he filed for the grant? Does it progress slowly over time? There are so many great early scenes he captures that astonish me when I think about the cost of physical film. He’s a filmmaker on a grant grasping around for the thread of a story at hundreds of dollars a reel. At one point he says in the voice-over: “I really don’t have any idea what to do with this film, but I’ll stay here ’til I figure it out.” I love that.

Buy this movie from the Internet, and be better for it.

The Usual Suspects

March 21, San Francisco, CA: I first watched The Usual Suspects at the behest of my high school buddy Nick Castaneda, with whom I left Florida to go to film school. This is the perfect movie for first year undergraduate film students: all of the formalistic (and perhaps heavy-handed) expressions of the craft. Each transition in time marked with a visual device: the cave mouth to the coffee cup, the matched jib shots rising above the San Pedro docks, the rag thrown into the camera to black. Nick and I totally borrowed that last one for a movie we made in high school. (Nick borrowed it, I should say; he was the director.)

The movie is a lot of fun. Great actors and a wonderful screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie— the sort of intricate plotting that makes a heist movie REALLY good. And he pulls it off. That first Kayser Soze reveal, the first time you ever see the movie, holy crap it’s good!

And Bryan Singer, the man who brings us that heavy-handed formalism, well Nick and I just thought he was the high king of shit mountain (“shit mountain” being of course the popular name for the heap upon which American filmmakers are placed and ranked— AFI runs the program). The Usual Suspects seemed to be a movie that a director of note has left his mark upon! As I matured though, I soured on Singer. I rushed out to see Apt Pupil and left it very unsatisfied. X-Men? One solid “Hmph” from this longtime reader of the comics. He’s a talented filmmaker, but he’s no auteur. The Usual Suspects, like the men it depicts, was a happy accident of a confluence of talent.

 

Guess who has this movie in their giant warehouses? Amazon, duh!

Rushmore

March 8, London: I saw Rushmore for the first time as a film student and I can’t imagine a more pleasurable way of being in which to first see this movie. It is so satisfyingly the work of an auteur, a word I probably learned the year I saw this movie. The music, the mise-en-scene, the script, it’s all perfect. Every frame is a perfect composition, a tableau of quirk. Even the editing inspires envy and emulation; I think every film student my year at some point has delivered their version of that montage of Max’s clubs set to “Making Time”.

The script is perfect. The over-formal dialogue that dominates, that fits Fisher and the boarding school setting to a tee. But yet, when Wes Anderson (and Owen Wilson!) breaks that setting he does it with flair. In all of his early scenes with Herman Blume (Bill Murray), Max Fisher is incredibly formal and deferential. But then when they’re talking about Vietnam, that formality slips suddenly for a surprising couplet:

Max: Were you in the shit?
Herman: Yeah, I was in the shit.

Murray’s delivery here is perfect. The blunt, unsurprised response to an absolutely surprising delivery from Schwartzman. That brings me to Bill Murray, whose journey into despair holds this film together. I love him so deeply in this film, I couldn’t help but think to myself the entire time how incredibly lucky Anderson was to snag him for Rushmore. The film wouldn’t have been possible without him.

Watch this movie on the Amazons. But if you’re going to buy a physical copy of it, go ahead and spring for the Criteron Collection version.