Apocalyptic Nighttime: Taxi Driver (1976)

One of the most beautiful title cards in the history of cinema, Scorsese's Taxi Driver links us not only to the seedy grindhouse,
with its fading yellow-orange font, but also to the grand moviehouses of Hollywood's golden age, with its iconic Bernard Hermann score.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)
I can see the moment in Scorsese's career where he steps confidently into the role of a great director: the gun purchasing scene in Taxi Driver.  Seen through the singular point of view of Travis as he eyes each gun, with a particularly beautiful pan across the .44, the salesman talks and talks about the benefits of every gun and we stay on Travis as he feels the gun in his hand, following his sightline out the window, across the city, over the freeway and to a couple of pedestrians milling about on the sidewalk several stories below.  No click of an empty chamber.  No comment about the scum. We have no clue where this is going or how far, but we know everything in this world is wrong and it is frightening to imagine what Travis may end up doing.  When he points the gun out the window, the camera's lens is focused on the outside, not the gun.  We feel his mind, even though we do not know it through narration.  

Our hero, imagined: insulated with words, overlooking the city, violence brewing.  A prophet of rage seeks for his voice.

Choose Your Dream: The Bling Ring's (2013) Wasteland of Teenage Idolatry

The Bling Ring (Sophia Coppola, 2013)
It is such an unusual and shocking thing: bored teenagers of privilege sneaking into the homes of particular celebrities and stealing their clothes.  If it seems foolish and vapid and narcissistic, it is.  But such is the culture of celebrity idolatry America has manufactured, and such is the hope of wildest dream fulfillment bestowed upon it's children by well-meaning but misguided parents.  Sophia Coppola sees all of it.  And instead of building a tired, pointed and moralistic tirade against it, she has crafted a brilliant observational satire that exposes the complex sociological consequences that enable not only the existence of something like TMZ, but the ubiquity of it's tabloid interests.  She also finds a more frightening cause lurking below the surface.

October 2013 -- Letterboxd Capsules

Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992) [letterboxd capsule]
Gosh, Burton is easily the most overrated of the Hollywood auteurs still milling about the system, but this is just such a fun, beautiful, easily re-watchable movie that I have to say a few things about it. Before bailing on the franchise he reinvigorated, he gives us the apotheosis of the short-lived 90's comic book sub-genre and a brilliantly designed deconstruction of gender politics that masquerades as a rather obvious deconstruction of civil politics. 

Who knew Catwoman was going to be the embodiment of female rage and systematic marginalization (she literally shatters a glass ceiling, twice)? She is the true working class hero. Sure, Penguin may have started with nothing, but he has acquired enough loot over the course of his criminal life to afford to build cute little rocket packs to outfit his penguin militia; Selina Kyle hand weaves her own costume from stuff in her closet, for crying out loud! Plus, Penguin embraces the usual chauvinist triumverant of sex, money, power while Catwoman has just finally been pushed too far by a system of repression.

Batman's looseness with his true identity is finally justified by his isolation, insecurity and aching need for companionship. This goes unrequited because he has met a woman who needs no man and now has only one life left to live. In the end, all he gets is Alfred and the hopeful acquisition of her spirit animal. Such a weird, awesome movie that is so much better than the '89 Batman it's not even funny (though Nicholson will always be the crowning achievement of that film). This is a more fully satisfying narrative, goes deeper thematically with better design, better performances (I never even mentioned DeVito playing with whole-hearted abandon, the role he was, strangely, destined to play), a better ensemble and Burton even gets to throw in his carnival of doom without upsetting the balance. Borderline masterpiece of 90's pop art cinema.

Behind the Candelabra (Steven Soderbergh, 2013) [letterboxd capsule]
This is what happens when a fascinating historical figure, a complex dramatic situation and game performances by two star actors get co-opted by a particular political zeitgeist.  What begins promising enough as a revelation of show business excess and domineering control ends squarely in the territory of dime-a-dozen biopic.  If it wasn't so self-consciously trying to hold up a marriage equality platform, it might have been able to deal with the paradoxical realities of Liberace's relationship with Scott Thompson and the legal complications that it brought about.  It's not that there isn't enough interest in these characters.  I mean, there is a scene where Liberace insists Thompson get plastic surgery so that he can look more like a young Liberace.  There is more than enough interesting material to mine here but unfortunately it all seems very tritely headed toward a "if only they could have been married then Thompson could have gotten a fair deal in court" resolution.  Maybe that's the only way this movie could get financed but oh, what could have been...

Con Air (Simon West, 1997) [letterboxd capsule]
It's strange -- considering what this movie is -- that it features the most restrained Nicolas Cage performance of his career. Every movie needs a straight man, I guess, none more than this absolutely bonkers but fun as hell ensemble piece, complete with Bruckheimer co-opting of Veteran angst and never-leave-a-fallen-soldier-behind war movie heroism. The coup is that the war is the prison system and the hijacked plane is obviously America.

The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013) [letterboxd capsule]
Oh, I see.
Money breeds superficiality.
But it's okay because love.
#yawn

Luhrmann can't get over himself long enough to actually give a care about anything happening on screen besides making sure he looks like the most amazing visionary to ever tell this story, even though he clearly works against his own proud ends at every turn.  He is best when establishing big ideas like the era or the city, but the moment he has to hone in on an individual and show any amount of observation or subtlety, he loses it.  His biggest accomplishment here is finding a good art director who is clearly having a blast using a blank check to do whatever they want.  So, there's some decent scenery to look at but when it comes to narrative, character, and on-screen drama, we are given the most shallow of rudiments and expected to pretend this is the deepest ocean ever crossed.  

Hard Target (John Woo, 1993) [letterboxd capsule]
You may be cool, but you'll never be cajun Wilford Brimley  fleeing on horseback with his longbow in hand as his moonshine shack explodes behind him cool.

Reds (Warren Beatty, 1981) [letterboxd capsule]
The death of idealism and the failure of political ideology.  If institutions become machines the people behind them will always be marginalized, whether the institution is a national government or marriage itself.  Warren Beatty proves to be one of the few celebrity-turned-directors to have the vision to helm epics like this.

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) [letterboxd capsule]
Somewhere underneath all of this is a movie about a government accountant who has to add up how much all of the labor, helicopters, military ops, phone taps, office space, surveillance and travel cost the US government to capture and kill one person.

September 2013 -- Letterboxd Capsules

Panic Room (David Fincher, 2002) [letterboxd capsule]
Fincher is still feeling his way through the merging of digital flourish within a narrative/suspense framework.  There is plenty of tension/release ratcheting action, but in service of what exactly?  An allegory for how hard it is to apartment hunt in NYC?  Fincher finds some right notes for the isolation and dread of the city and Forest Whitaker is always worth watching.  Not wholly satisfying but plenty entertaining.

The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser, 1987) [letterboxd capsule]
Everything a sardonic 80's sci-fi satire should be, complete with main character accents that hint at future globalization within the framework of entertainment fascism.  The best aspects of Bartel's Death Race 2000 (1975) and Klein's Mr. Freedom (1969) are distilled into a deeply entertaining mixture headlined by golden era Schwarzenegger and peppered by Jesse Ventura's mustache.  "Mr. Reynolds, I am your court-appointed theatrical agent," has to be one of the best guffaw-inducing lines I've stumbled across from this era.

August 2013 -- Letterboxd Capsules

Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) [letterboxd capsule]
A wonderfully stylish but ultimately unfulfilling mystery that hints at themes of sexual manipulation, Hitchcockian obsession, human nature and self-reflexive storytelling without ever committing itself to follow any of those lines very thoroughly.  Paul Verhoeven has never left me completely satisfied with anything that he’s made, likely due to his embrace of genre artifice at the expense of genre deconstruction.  His subversion is more on the surface –- an embracing of highly sexualized or violent subject matter and depiction, while avoiding the conceptual apparatus of commenting on those things through his cinematic depiction.  His films are made up of some wonderful moments and pieces, but are generally unfulfilling as a whole.  

Basic Instinct features a frightening Sharon Stone performance and one amazing scene that demonstrates Verohoeven’s power as a manipulator, provocateur, stylist and storyteller: the infamous leg-crossing scene.  In that one scene Verohoeven has built a complex environment of sexism, objectification, sexual tension/frustration, rage, resentment, institutional manipulation, and narrative suspense that is unrivaled in everything else he has done.  The power shifts, the playful sensuality of Stone, the disarming move that gains her control of the whole room.  But, the narrative Joe Eszterhas and Verhoeven have woven around that essential scene is one of convolution, shallow thrills and easily spotted misdirection.  Also features one of the best film scores of the 1990’s.

Cool World (Ralph Bakshi, 1992) [letterboxd capsule]
Bakshi wants so much to present an adult alternative to Disney that he forgets that simply subverting Disney without putting anything of substance in its place is a recipe in futility.  An utter mess of tone and content made only slightly watchable by Gabriel Byrne.

The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, 1992) [letterboxd review]
Daniel Day-Lewis is fine, the score is superb and there is a nice incorporation of Hudson River school-esque locations but overall there's not much to say about this solid but unspectacular film.  

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1997) [letterboxd capsule]
Spielberg still has the ability to create a few notable sequences (the raptors in the field and the glass window cracking over the cliff), but overall I have no idea what this movie is thinking.  Idiotic characters making bad decisions, a mishmash of tones and elements with a little corporate domination thrown in for good measure and the total loss of narrative stakes once they leave the island for the mainland.  Very disappointing considering there are dinosaurs, millions of dollars with Goldblum, Moore and Speilberg.

The Specialist (Luis Llosa, 1994) [letterboxd capsule]
A quiet, nearly poetic misdirection that feels so much like a Miami summer night the fact that it eventually remembers to be an explosive actioner by the end nearly comes as a surprise.  James Woods is in manic form, with merciless verbal abuse showered on every extra or day player in his path.  Stallone takes himself seriously enough to give the film a strange contemplative air but Sharon Stone never quite finds her footing as a woman in distress/independent woman/femme fatale/red herring/serious love interest.  The narrative twists left her character pretty flat by the end, despite some really wonderful moments early on.  Overall, The Specialist is too interesting to dismiss completely but not satisfying enough to praise as a unified film.

Street Fighter (Steven E. de Souza, 1994) [letterboxd capsule]
An awkward yet highly entertaining farce about the paradoxes of globalization and corporate fascism, wrapped in the superficial trappings of an adventure movie based on a martial arts video-game.  Raul Julia leaves this world with a bang, having the time of his life as General M. Bison, while Van Damme struggles with language (nevermind an American accent).

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (Oliver Stone, 2010) [letterboxd capsule]
Hey Oliver Stone: put down that metaphor before you hurt somebody.  Captivating at first before collapsing under its own weight.

Alex in Wonderland (1970) and the New Hollywood Paradox

Alex in Wonderland (Paul Mazursky, 1970)
Coming to audiences near the beginning of the New Hollywood era (1967-1979), Alex in Wonderland is both an appreciation of the artistic freedom afforded to directors by producers/studios during that time and a unique representation of the paradoxes and paralysis facing the New Hollywood filmmaker in light of that freedom.  It is bold and audacious and brilliant, written and directed by Paul Mazursky, one of the forgotten dual talents of that era.

The Refusal of Culpability in 'Flight' (2012)

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)
No one likes to take responsibility for the bad things that happen.  It is easiest to blame someone else.  We accept accolades for success but always shift the blame for the failures.  If that is true of individuals it is just as true of the institutions we build.  Families, governments, corporations, schools, even churches.  It is the root of social diseases ranging from extraneous litigation to alcoholism.  In that way, Flight is pertinent and hard-hitting.  Not just because it deals with alcohol addiction, but because it deals with the root of addiction: the refusal of culpability.  And, even though it paints a far-reaching societal portrait, it is also bold enough to admit that there is a way beyond it.  

The Death of Romanticism in 'Les Bonnes Femmes' (1960)

Les Bonnes Femmes (Claude Chabrol, 1960)
Swinging the pendulum deftly between various moods -- documentary-like observation, gender comedy, absurd comedy, tragedy and finally, quiet transcendence -- Chabrol's film shows a careful narrative structure and a formal beauty that really gripped me.  This is my first Chabrol film and I come to it already familiar, though not overly enamored, with the other early touchstones of the French New Wave: The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959) and Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960).  This is a really beautiful and unique film that is made so rich mostly because Chabrol's keen interest in human interaction, spoken and unspoken.

A delicate portrait of city women and a searing subversion of romanticism, Chabrol follows four Parisian girls in their early 20's over the course of a handful of days and nights, though it is the stories of Jane and Jacqueline that get the lion's share of the focus.  Both of these women are intensely romantic, though in opposite ways.  Jane embraces the romanticism of choice, freedom, being unencumbered, being her own woman; Jacqueline embraces the more conventional romanticism of being swept off her feet by a man who loves her deeply.  Over the course of the film, their romantic notions will be thwarted as the men who drift through their lives upend their dreams of freedom and love.

Jacqueline and Jane are walking home one evening when they are suddenly stalked very persistently by the ostentatiously lighthearted duo of Marcel and Albert.  They are nothing more than guys looking for a good time and though they seem charming and entertaining early on, over the course of the evening they become increasingly callous and demanding of Jane, who is far more accommodating than Jacqueline.  Eventually, she is in their apartment and expected to be sexually involved with both men.  Chabrol, though ultimately sympathetic to the women who are at the mercy of men in power, still sees a paradoxical conflict where Jane's own freedom of choice has brought her to this compromised state.  When Jane returns to her apartment early the next morning, we get the unfortunate feeling that she had to involuntarily give into at least some of the men's demands.  She is not in the mood to discuss with her roommate anything that happened. 

One of the key scenes is the night at the swimming pool, a scene where every major character (apart from Mr. Balin) is present.  It starts as a lighthearted jaunt that slowly turns into a aggressive assault of masculine dominance in its good and bad forms.  Marcel and Albert happen to be at the pool too, where Jane, Jacqueline and the rest are enjoying their evening.  The two men quickly start teasing Jane into introducing them to their party and find that she has become significantly less accommodating since the last time she was with them.  Quickly, things deviate into a prankish show of disapproval, where Marcel and Albert throw all the others into the pool and start dunking them all under water.  Jane and Jacqueline obviously get the brunt of the dunking in what has quickly shifted from good-natured prank into psychological torture.  Chabrol notes this shift in tone by shifting his camera angle, showing us underwater shots of Jacqueline being pushed under, matched with muffled underwater audio. Finally, we get our relief in the form of Andre, who dives in from the high dive to swim over and rescue Jacqueline from her peril.  The two men, now emasculated and embarrassed, back off as Andre becomes the hero of the scene and the wish fulfillment of Jacqueline, who has noticed him stalking her recently.  

At this point, it seems Chabrol has brought us full-circle into a traditional (though slightly unconventional) romantic film, as Andre and Jacqueline are quickly away into the countryside, sharing a meal together where Andre proves himself to be a jokester himself, full of little tricks that amuse the enamored girl.  He takes them on a walk in the woods that slowly becomes more and more uncomfortable, until finally we are given an ambiguous moment of consummation, as the two lay together in an isolated area as the birds around them call out rhythmically.  Chabrol finally lets us in on what is happening (having alluded to it so obviously earlier with Andre's own inquisition -- though as a hopeful optimistic, I disregarded it) as we see that Andre is strangling Jacqueline, whose squirms were not the happy writhing of passion but the desperate movements of anguish.  

Andre leaves the scene quite hurriedly and we are never afforded an answer to his mystery.  Why was he following her?  Why did he want to kill her?  Did he know anything about her at all?  Instead, Chabrol takes us into a dance hall where a young woman is being asked to dance by a young man.  We cannot see the man's face because we are left with the gaze of the young woman, who literally locks eyes with us and is intercut with the slowly changing angle of the glistening mirror ball above them.  The metaphorical fractured beauty of the ball is now a frustrated thing, not giving us narrative or sentimental satisfaction, but a vignetted series of dots that clutter the atmosphere and highlight how bright the light could be if it were just focused.  The romanticism that seemed so certain only ten minutes prior has now been unfairly shattered, and we are left with a moment to ponder the frustrating reversal as we experienced the fulfillment of our greatest fears rather than our greatest dreams.  It is a strange moment of transcendence.

Forrest Gump (1994) and the Subversion of American Exceptionalism

Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)
Forrest Gump is the story of a blank slate of a man who finds himself passing through many essential and non-essential moments in 1960’s and 70’s America.  I describe him as a blank slate because he is very simply motivated and a character that the audience will cast their own meaning upon because of his simplicity.  Though Forrest has a low IQ and is generally thought to be stupid, he is guileless and loyal, naïve and, in many ways, innocent.  His innocence is not born from his ignorance, however: it is born from his loyalty.  He takes people at their word. 

The Freedom of Capital: Milos Forman's Portrait of Larry Flynt

The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman, 1996)
It is easy to embrace The People vs. Larry Flynt as a cinematic defense of freedom of speech or deride it as a botched biopic, but I think Milos Forman is smarter than both of those readings.  The skeleton key for my understanding of Forman is in the obscure Soviet-era aesthetic stiob, which is a form of absurd humor that requires such an over-identification with the object of its parody that it is difficult to tell whether there is sincere support for the object, subtle ridicule or some strange mix of the two.  The clearest practitioner of the form is Paul Verhoeven, though his is lived out in sci-fi movie structure (Total Recall) and genre gaudiness (Starship Troopers) that openly embraces the absurdity of its aesthetic (RoboCop).  Forman, on the other hand, is a smuggler, embracing the more conventional structure of Hollywood pictures (Amadeus) and subverting them slyly through his depiction of off-kilter subjects (Man on the Moon).  This has led to more universal acclaim for Forman among mainstream critics and an apathetic disinterest in Forman by many serious critics and cinephiles. 

Films are about emotions...

Roger Ebert speaks to an audience in Savannah, GA in 2004, during his 3-part scene-by-scene
analysis of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).  I am in attendance (though not pictured).

Roger Ebert (1942-2013)
I'm flipping back through The Great Movies after hearing about the passing of Roger Ebert.  It was a book that introduced me to a bunch of (now obvious) classics/favorites -- Aguirre the Wrath of God, McCabe & Mrs Miller, A Hard Day's Night, A Woman Under the Influence, Manhattan, Sweet Smell of Success -- while also letting me know it was okay to love Oliver Stone's JFK, to seek out a copy of Hoop Dreams, and to immerse myself in the generally held canon of world film classics while not feeling beholden to it.

In his essay on JFK, Ebert recounts an argument Walter Cronkite had with him after Ebert had praised the film: "I am a film critic and my assignment is different than his.  He wants facts.  I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares.  As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for facts.  Facts belong in print.  Films are about emotions."

I have gone back and forth on my opinion of JFK over the years, just as I have on Roger Ebert.  The Great Movies seems so obvious to me now, so canonical.  Yet, I do remember a time when I didn't know there was a film director named Werner Herzog who was making extraordinary films and I didn't know Robert Altman wasn't the obvious answer for best American filmmaker of the 1970's.  Ebert was an essential voice.  I read his reviews and would be pushed to think more deeply about the films he rated favorably if they left me more cold, challenged to defend (to myself) the movies I liked that left him cold.  When I was reading him regularly in the late 90's, his top 10 lists often championed films that were not being championed by other critics (Eve's Bayou, Dark City) and pushed me to branch out and see what unchampioned works I could find on the fringe.  

As cynical as I could be, it is obvious to me that he really did love the movies he wrote about in The Great Movies.  There are plenty of canonical classics he left out, several "unsuspecting" films he brought in.  And ultimately he did what a great film writer or critic should do: he made me want to watch films.  He helped me engage with and understand some difficult works, helped me articulate what I responded to and strongly disliked in movies and helped fuel a passion to take in and enjoy the diversity of the medium fro mall over the world.  So, I could dismiss him as populist (as I have done in the past).  He worked for a major newspaper.  So what?  I would take one Ebert essay over a thousand Armond Whites and their forced contrarianism.  I could dismiss him as sometimes having shallow observations.  So what?  He was engaging a broader audience and has written about hundreds of movies over the course of his life.  

But I come back to that quote.  "Films are about emotions."  I didn't understand that much when I read it then, I'm sure.  But it is where I live now.  It is why I loved JFK when I couldn't reconcile all that JFK said or seemed to say.  It is why I still love JFK.  And Herzog.  And Altman.  And McElwee.

At the end of the day, Roger Ebert helped me love film more.  Beyond me, he was a formidable voice to a generation of film viewers who were given a video store full of cinema history and didn't know what to do with it all.   I can only hope there is someone who, in an age of irony and cynicism, can stand in his place and passionately entice future generations to seek out the old paths and to love the medium for what it is, not what it symbolizes.  

Goodbye, old friend.  

PS: I still need to see Last Year at Marienbad, Lawrence of Arabia, Pandora's Box and The "Up" Series.  After that, I will have seen all The Great Movies.