(A new feature. Looking for something to watch? Let this occasional movie blogger be your guide. Presenting "A Brief Unsolicited Enthusiastic Recommendation." First up: Tower from 2016.)
On August 1, 1966 a man with a sniper rifle went to the top of a tower on the campus of the University of Texas and opened fire. For a long time (but not long enough) it held the record for the most deadly school shooting. Tower is a documentary of the 96 minutes the shooter spent on his deadly perch. It is told in typical documentary fashion, with interviews, voiceovers, flashbacks and reenactments. But the reenactments and some interviews are portrayed using rotoscope animation. Rotoscope means that the animation is done overtop of real footage of the subjects. The technique creates a unique look that manages to be both lifelike and abstract.
Reenactments in documentaries can be distracting. The actors often look nothing like the people they portray and the scenes and effects are often cheaply made - like when survivors of a shipwreck are obviously floating in a small pool inside a studio, or when lost hikers survive the night in a cave clearly made out of plaster and foam. The animation in Tower is used brilliantly to avoid being distracting. It seems counterintuitive, but by not attempting to be lifelike re-creation, the animated scenes end up making the action seem more real, true, and vivid. It achieves this while still maintaining its own artistic beauty: the animation itself is just really cool.
The story of the shooting gets to the heart of tragedy and the beautiful things that almost always come out of it. Its focuses on the bravery, selflessness, and heroism of the first responders, classmates, faculty, and citizens who took action during the crisis. It also explores the healing and forgiveness that came after, highlighting the beautiful side of human nature and showing that that side is the dominant one or maybe the only one. There may not be an evil side. The movie doesn’t portray the the shooter as an evil monster or less than human, but as a severely ill individual. That doesn’t make anything he did acceptable or even understandable. But for at least one woman in the film, it helped her forgive and move on. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Tower is currently available on Netflix.
(Even if rotoscope-animated school shooting documentaries aren't your typical fare, give it a try. You won't be disappointed.)
It’s difficult in a small city to catch up with some of the more talked about movies from any given year. Some don’t get wide releases until early the next year. Some never do. Some end up in our theatres long after their release date after they have generated more buzz or have been nominated for Oscars. It seems that to see all the best movies of the year you have to be a professional critic in a big city. But even then it can be difficult. And so any top of 2016 list from the occasional movie blogger in Medicine Hat, Alberta will be lacking, at least until the first couple months of 2017. So I thought I would do it power rankings style, adjusting the list as I catch up with some of the better movies of the year.
Notably absent so far, and which I hope to catch up on as soon as possible, are: Hell or High Water (no real excuse here - it came to our theatres, and it’s available to stream on iTunes. I’ll get to it soon), Lion, Jackie, Fences, Moonlight, Paterson, Silence, Loving (and a few other one-word titles, I’m sure), and Nocturnal Animals. So I hope to be back regularly as I catch up with these.
Right now I have a top 12 for some reason. That’s just how it worked out. I don’t know if I’ll bump some as I add some or just draw out the list. Stay tuned.
Now, without further ado.
1. La La Land
I don’t think I have a particular fondness for musicals (and have downright hated some - I remember turning off the Phantom of the Opera halfway through, but then realized after 20 minutes that I had nothing else to do and so put it back on and finished it), and I was never a theatre person. But La La Land is such an exuberant joyride of fun, humor, happiness, lights and colour, song and dance, that it would melt the heart of the coldest Grinch. Director Damien Chazelle (of Whiplash fame - and I don’t know anyone who didn’t love Whiplash) did everything just right. It’s easy for certain elements of a musical to become overbearing - it can be too cheesy, too musical, even too joyful - but everything is here balanced perfectly and it’s a fun ride.
2. Manchester by the Sea
Manchester by the Sea is in many ways the opposite of La La Land. It’s about grief and sadness and how sometimes things just aren’t ok and never will be. That sounds like a depressing recipe, but the movie explores those issues with such empathy and true feeling - and a surprising amount of humor - that it makes you feel more alive and not less so. It’s a true exploration of human emotion and behavior in the face of unspeakable tragedy. And it is put together brilliantly. It’s affecting, real-life drama - haunting and sad in a way that feels true but not overbearing. It explores deep human emotion without drowning in it. And with emotions this deep, that is difficult to do.
Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams are spectacular in it. The movie will win many awards, and it’s as close to a masterpiece of human drama as anything I’ve seen for a long time.
3. The Witch
I wrote about The Witch, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Everybody Wants Some!!, and Krishahere. They survived from my (sort of) half-year list to be among my favorites of the year..
4. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
5. Moana
I guess I do like musicals. It’s hard not to when they’re done this well. Moana follows the typical Disney formula, but is richer and more textured than usual, with vibrant visuals, fully-developed characters, and music that rivals any of the Disney classics. The music in Moana was done by Lin-Manuel Miranda, of the broadway hit Hamilton and I guess there’s a reason anyone who follows pop culture in any way can’t escape Hamilton this year. I haven’t seen it or listened to its music, but it’s apparently spectacular. And you can tell in Moana. There usually comes a point in even the best animated movies where the movie loses me and I just want all the chaos to wrap up already. That didn’t happen in Moana. It’s more than a good animated movie - it’s a great movie on its own.
6. Rams
This one is more obscure. There is some debate about whether Rams is a 2015 or a 2016 movie (it was released in Iceland in 2015 and the US and Canada in 2016), but since this list has absolutely no consequence whatsoever and I saw it in 2016, it’s making my list.
Rams would be a good introduction for anyone hesitant about foreign films. It’s an Icelandic film, in that language, and takes place in a remote sheep farming community in rural Iceland. The plot is as powerful and touching as it is unique (I don’t think there are many other movies about Icelandic sheep farming). It tells the story of a dying way of life and the dying love between brothers (starring everyone’s two favorite actors, Sigurður Sigurjónsson and Theódór Júlíusson, who are actually both excellent). The movie goes in unexpected places as the two hardheaded brothers clash while their way of life clashes with the inevitable. But it’s the love of that way of life that brings the only warmth to their frozen Icelandic wilderness. Give it a chance. It’s on Netflix.
7. Arrival
Arrival is intelligent, thinking-person’s sci-fi that shares elements of first-contact (benevolent) alien movies like Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the complex and imaginative plot of movies like Christopher Nolan’s Inception or Interstellar. It lacks the large-scale spectacle of those movies, but masters the intimate, scaled-down tension in a style that is all its own. Director Denis Villeneuve has been developing that style in his last few movies (especially in last year’s Sicario), and seeing it applied to a big-budget genre movie is exciting and promising for the prospects of non-franchise mainstream movies.
It’s more than just aliens and complicated ideas. There are genuine existential questions and real human emotions, as the immensity of the event of extraterrestrial visitation is brought down to the scale of one woman (played by Amy Adams) and her personal crisis.
8. Sully
Sully is simple and understated, like its hero. It’s a portrait of a solid man doing a solid job. There are few bells and whistles in the movie about a man who lived his life and did his job with few bells or whistles. It’s a movie about competence in the face of crisis. And it’s not just Tom Hanks as Chesley Sullenberger, but the whole crew. Their composure and their performance of their duties under pressure is impressive, if at times almost chilling (“Heads down, stay down!”). It’s a movie that shouldn’t be exciting, but it is. Its repeated computer simulations shouldn’t be thrilling, but they are. And he shouldn’t have been able to land that plane, but he did. It’s solid craftsmanship about solid craftsmanship.
9. Everybody Wants Some!!
10. 10 Cloverfield Lane
I wrote about 10 Cloverfield Lane here - and I still think John Goodman deserves Oscar attention.
11. Krisha
12. Hacksaw Ridge
Hacksaw Ridge is made of two movies. One is about integrity, commitment to personal beliefs and principles, passivism, charity, kindness, and the love for fellow man. The other involves gruesome, brutal, war violence, staged in as well-assembled and breathtaking a way as any action movie ever, and it is genuinely thrilling and downright cool. Combining the two movies, however, is problematic and borderline distasteful. But there is no denying that each is excellent. Desmond Doss’ story of heroism deserves to be told and is told in a touching and inspiring way. And the war action is spectacular. But the combination muddles the important message the movie could have been telling. As it is, it says that violence should be avoided at all costs, while also showing that it is downright awesome.
Sunrise is a silent film that was released at the end of the silent era when artistic film technique had reached its peak. It won the first and only Oscar for “Unique and Artistic Production” and that’s a good description of the movie. The story, which seems like it should be unbearably sappy – a woman from the city tempts a farmer away from his wife, he tries to murder the wife, but they rediscover their love for each other – is rendered in such surprisingly interesting visuals that it all works somehow. The story doesn’t say much in itself, except for early 20 th century ideals about how virtuous women should be meek and forgiving, sexual women are dangerous and conniving, and men will do anything for either type of woman (and that women fit into those types). But the movie uses its visuals as more than then-modern showcases of special effects and camerawork. The techniques fit to tell a simple and pure story of love and marriage and it all fits together. The ending is also genuinely powerful.
#81 – Spartacus (1960) – Stanley Kubrick
Spartacus raises a loyal army of slaves and leads a rebellion against the Roman Empire, solely on the strength of his integrity and his cleft chin. The two together – the good character and the rigid masculinity – combine in Spartacus to form a noble manliness. A real man, as shown by Spartacus and the dedicated army he inspired, is equal parts hard and soft, and knows when to use each.
Spartacus is one of the great characters of film, and Spartacus is the best epic I have ever seen.
#80 – The Apartment
If Spartacus was the right amount of hard and soft, “Buddy Boy” C.C. Baxter is only soft. He allows himself to get taken advantage of by men more powerful than he is, lending out the key to his apartment so his superiors can use it for illicit rendezvous with women who aren’t their wives. He is walked all over, over and over, until one day finally… Well, I’m not sure the day really comes.
#79 – The Wild Bunch
“If they move, kill ‘em,” William Holden tells his gang at the beginning, but the instruction seems to apply throughout the whole movie. Because a lot of people move. The “Wild Bunch Ending” became a screenwriting term, referring to the chaotic bloodbath that seems destined to come where lawlessness lives. Peckinpaw shows the senselessness and inevitability of violence, shot with disorienting cuts and zooms and a soundtrack of gunshots and the screams of the dying. Trains and cars are starting to arrive in the west and it signals the death of a way of life that was rough and pointless. Death to death and more death.
#78 – Modern Times (1936)
When the worker is literally a cog in a machine, the worker has no rights. Charlie Chaplin was accused of being a communist and a socialist (and eventually condemned for it?). Whatever he was, he had sympathy for the workers, the people at the bottom of the food chain, the scraps at the bottom of the barrel, the bottom rung of the ladder. His character gets swept up into union protests and labour rights disputes, he works on an assembly line, and ends up in jail for reasons unclear. The system seems to grind and grind: as long as there is production it doesn’t matter how it’s produced, or even what it is producing. Modern Times is a satire and a cutting critique, as it gently points out and calls out the absurdity of the modern state and its systems, and it does it without saying a word.
Most ‘best of the year so far’ lists are released halfway
through the year. I’m doing mine now. We just survived a real dud of a summer
blockbuster season, but there have been some great movies this year. They’ve
been sprouting up here and there – sometimes it just takes a little weeding to
find them.
5. The Lobster
At one point in The
Lobster a woman tries to kill herself by jumping out of a first-floor
window. As she lays bloodied on the sidewalk her screams of agony are played as
a joke. That’s the darkness of the humor in this movie. And it is funny – the
woman had much higher windows available to her. It’s also a critique of love
and dating, as she was driven to such foolish desperation by the fact that she
was on her last day to find a mate, and if she failed she would be turned into
an animal. The botched suicide also serves our hero’s (Collin Farrell)
purposes: as compatibility is taken dead-literally, the woman he’s interested
in watches the suffering jumper with casual indifference and so he does too (he
wins her over when she fakes choking to death in a hot tub and he just watches
her sink into the water). It’s absurd and weird and darkly funny (though there
is plenty of light humor as well – the dance scene in the forest is hilarious
and no one gets killed). It’s also full of insight that I think will take more
than one viewing to totally grasp.
4. Krisha
Krisha is director Trey Edward Shults’ feature debut. The
movie cost $14,000 to make and was shot using mostly Shults’ friends and
relatives as actors. I didn’t know this before I watched it and was amazed at
how well the movie captured the reality of family gatherings. Krisha takes
place over one Thanksgiving evening. The extended family is all together –
brothers and cousins in college, great grandma makes it home, there’s a new
baby, and Krisha has come back after having been away for years. People sit and
chat, play games, watch sports, horse around, play with dogs, and it all
happens exactly as those things happen in real life. The jokes are jokes real
people make and the conversations are real conversations. Shults’ casting
choice may have been forced by his small budget, but it’s also crucial to the
movie’s success. I’ve never had a family gathering fall apart like this one
does, but I’m sure it would happen the way it happens here. There is a lot of
discomfort and awkwardness, like when something doesn’t go quite right in
someone else’s house, or like watching your friend’s parents fight. You just
want to get out of there but you have to be polite. Krisha captures that tension and the complicated and sometimes
messy details of extended family life. Shults’ next film is set to be a horror
movie and you can see that interest in Krisha.
There’s nothing scary or disturbing, but Krisha’s return, like a ghost or
an intruder in a horror film, has the disruptive effect that troubled family
members often bring home with them.
3. Everybody Wants Some!!
This movie has been described as a spiritual sequel to
199_’s Dazed and Confused. But Everybody Wants Some!! is director
Richard Linklater’s follow-up to last year’s Boyhood, the 12-years-in-the-making exploration of, well, boyhood,
and this movie is more of a continuation of that one. It follows the adventures
and misadventures of college-aged guys, in a way, picking up where Boyhood left off. These college guys are
all baseball players at the end of their boyhood facing the excitement and
anxieties of stepping towards manhood.
It’s set in the 80s and it is funny so it could easily have
fallen into the stereotypes of 80s comedies like Revenge of the Nerds, Weird Science, or Animal House, where there are only jocks and geeks and babes and
everyone plays their role. But here the characters are unique and complicated.
Just when you expect one to be a certain kind of guy he’ll do something that
that type of guy doesn’t do. And yet it’s also realistic, as it shows the way
guys that age act – the jokes they make, the fun they have, and even the doubts
and fears they face as they go from being big fish in small ponds to just fish.
The movie also avoids turning the guys into a bunch of unlikable jocks.
Everyone here is fun to spend time with. It also avoids structural clichés –
where things work for a while, a roadblock is hit, then everyone learns a
lesson. Life doesn’t happen like that and the movie doesn’t go that way. Life
just begins happening.
1. The Witch
1. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
I have a tie. I thought Hunt for the Wilderpeople would be a clear number one since I had such a
great time watching it. But The Witch has
left me with so much more to chew on and I can’t shake it.
It’s hard to say The
Witch isn’t a horror movie. After all, Satan is in the movie and there is
at least one witch. But it was marketed as a scary movie and people who went to it expecting that thrill of
feeling terrified went home disappointed, and I think, missing the point of the
movie (I mentioned this problem when I wrote about the Sixth Sense). The Witch is scary, but it’s a lot more
than that.
Set in New England in the 1600s, the movie tells the tale
(and really, it is a tale – the subtitle is “A New England Folktale”) of a family
exiled from their Puritan establishment when the father refuses to compromise
his beliefs. Those beliefs are the family’s main crop and its sustenance as
their corn crop is failing and there’s nothing in the woods by their isolated
house. Except that there is.
The family consists of the parents, a baby, two young twins,
a young boy, and an adolescent girl, and without spoiling anything, things
happen to each of them one by one and those things aren’t pleasant.
But the movie centers around belief. Here it is not the
charitable, all-loving Christianity, but the hard Christianity
of self-loathing, guilt, and the crushing weight of demanded perfectionism –
the gospel of inadequacy, desperate for grace and redemption. At one point the
boy recites, “My corrupt nature is empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto
sin, and that continually.” And the family’s isolated and fragile circumstances
magnify this severe, punishing belief until it becomes the obsessive and almost
fanatic devotion of believers who have nothing else but their belief. So when
the terrible things start happening we wonder if they are really happening, or
if it’s the imagined terrors of the desperately devout.
The terrors from the woods gradually mutate this desperate
belief until it infects the family and tears it apart. There are frightening
and disturbing scenes, the acting is wonderful, and the period setting,
complete with accurate dialogue (watch it with subtitles), is unique and adds
to the haunting atmosphere. “What went we out into this wilderness to find?”
the father asks at the beginning. If you haven’t seen The Witch, you should find out.
Hunt for the
Wilderpeople is in many ways the opposite of The Witch. It is bright, upbeat, and full of life and humor. It tells
the story of Ricky Baker, a 13-year-old boy who has bounced around foster homes
and the child welfare system because of his various crimes that include “kicking
stuff, knocking stuff over, and spitting.” The movie begins with his arrival at
Hec and Bella’s house way out in the New Zealand wilderness. Things look good
for a while for Ricky but they take a turn and he decides to run away. Hector
quickly finds him but injures himself and the two’s delayed return is
misinterpreted and leads to a national manhunt.
The gruff-old-guy-takes-a-youngster-under-his-wing formula
has been done before, but Wilderpeople manages
the perfect balance of everything and makes it fresh and fun. Every character
is likable – even the villains, who remain villainous despite their likability.
There’s wackiness, but it’s not over-the-top or slapstick. And there are
heartwarming moments, but they’re not sappy or predictable. And it’s hilarious.
It accomplishes something rare these days that the best jokes aren’t in the
trailer. And even rarer: the best jokes from the trailer are even funnier in
context. It’s a wonderful and positive movie and one of the best times I’ve had
at a movie this year.
I didn’t mean to pick these two as my co-favorites, but it
shows the power of movies that two very different films can be so affecting and
enjoyable for such vastly different reasons.
When Easy Rider was
released in 1969, its slogan said, “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t
find it anywhere.” and the movie is that serious.
It tells the story – if it can be called a story – of two bikers travelling
across the US. They run into some Mexican farmers, pick up a hitchhiker, spend
time at a hippie commune, end up in jail, make a friend in jail, find some
prostitutes, and take drugs. It’s all 1960s counterculture. The plot and
details are all sparse and vague, and yet dense and complicated.
The bikers, played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda, are
clearly anti-establishment. And yet they’re not hippies (though sometimes they
are far out, man) and they make money selling drugs to businessmen and they
want to retire in Florida. But they don’t have jobs or family or friends and
they go where the wind and the road takes them, sleeping in the woods when
motels reject them. And they are rejected often because they are different.
They’re a symbol of freedom but freedom doesn’t always go so well. It’s an interesting
contradiction – it’s both pro-rebellion and nihilistic and cynical about the
fruits of such rebellion.
The scenery is beautiful, the performances are wonderful,
and the drug trip scene is genuinely disturbing. It’s a difficult to movie to
grasp, but that makes it interesting. The contradictions it presents feel true
to life where things are never black and white. And the message may be a window
into how the counterculture movement viewed itself. By the late 60s the
free-spirited idealism had faded to a jaded and fatalistic cynicism. Easy Rider is in the middle of this
shift. Freedom only lasts so long, it says. It burns bright, but it burns out. You
can stick it to The Man, but sooner or later The Man will stick it right back.
I once watched this in a tent in a crawlspace - and a young
Mischa Barton showed up with vomit dripping out of her mouth. That didn’t
happen, but it was scary when it happened in the movie.
The Sixth Sense has some genuinely scary parts, but it isn’t
a horror movie. It pioneered a new breed of psychological thriller. It’s a
thriller at a slow pace, with its creeping, steady sense of dread, in place of
the more typical in-your-face scares or over-the-top terror. This genre has
persisted to this day, and it has proven difficult to market. Big scares sell
tickets, and so these scary but slow-paced psychological thrillers are billed
as typical horror movies, and it leads to misunderstanding and disappointment.
Movies like The Others, Shyamalan’s The Village, and this year’s The Witch all
suffered from this misleading marketing. They aren’t good horror movies, but
they were great at what they are (yes, even The Village).
I don’t think The Sixth Sense suffered from this misleading
advertising when it was released. But it was such a unique movie that marketers
and movie-goers still aren’t sure what to do with the genre it spawned.
#88 - Bringing up Baby (1938) - Howard Hawks
This was hard to sit through. Almost two hours of 1930s
screwball comedy requires a concerted effort in positive viewing. I think of
positive viewing as making an effort while watching. Most watching is passive
(though still engaged) and it’s usually obvious why things are good or bad,
exciting or boring, and so on - you don’t have to think about it. But watching
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant flail around, bonking each other on the head,
crashing into things, and chasing after a leopard with a case of mistaken
identity, required a lot of effort to appreciate why 1930s audiences would
enjoy such things. I realize screwball comedy is a genre and that it still
exists and that it can be funny, and that Bringing up Baby was a pioneer. But
the whole thing was so irritating. I think that was part of the point -
watching rich people be annoying was novel and entertaining. But maybe our
society offers more ways to be irritated than 1930s society did. We don’t watch
movies to be irritated - we watch them to escape irritation.
#87 - 12 Angry Men (1957) - Sidney Lumet
12 Angry Men is a celebration of logic, reason, and
rationality, as it portrays an idealized version of American criminal justice -
the criminal justice system that, in recent years, has been seen as anything
but logical, reasoned, and rational. As that ideal, the movie remains timely,
despite being made in 1957. Over the course of their deliberations, the jurors
gradually reveal their personalities and prejudices - some more overtly than
others. And logic and reason gradually start to overcome those prejudices. It’s
very unrealistic, but it’s the ideal that matters, and it’s an ideal worth
depicting and striving towards.
The movie is excellent by itself as well. The action takes
place only in the jury room and only through the power of conversation. As the
details of the case are slowly revealed through careful deliberation, the movie
manages to be thrilling and exciting, despite the case playing out only in the
viewer’s imagination. All the characters and performances are also excellent.
For this last viewing we watched it on a hot summer’s night
with a storm brewing, and our storm lined up perfectly with the movie’s. That
added some pizazz.
#86 - Platoon (1986) - Oliver Stone
The message of Platoon was already heavy-handed even before
Charlie Sheen’s voiceover at the end spells it out in explicit detail. War is
hell - especially the Vietnam one - and we’re often fighting against the enemy
inside ourselves. The explanation wasn’t needed, as the film shows image after
image of the horrors of war - both the physical violence and the psychological
damage that goes along with it. But even if it is heavy-handed, that message is
still important, and it’s delivered here vividly and realistically - down in
the muddy jungles and up close with the morally ambiguous killing and brutality
- and without any style. It’s the stripped bare, grimy, uncomfortable truth of
it all. Two characters represent the good and evil inside all of us - the good
and evil that struggle against each other. The movie shows this struggle
festering in the muck of war, overcoming some one way and some the other. It’s
all horrible and very powerful.
Platoon is one of the better war movies I’ve seen, and it’s
one of the few to make it onto this list.
#85 - A Night at the Opera (1935) - Sam Wood
A Night at the Opera is more 1930s screwball and slapstick
comedy. This time it’s the Marx brothers and their schtick. The movie is little
more than a showcase of the brothers’ musical and comedic talents, with a plot
built around the jokes and gags instead of the other way around. Those talents,
though, are real and there are some impressive scenes and some actually funny
gags. The gags usually have little to do with what’s supposed to be going on -
and what’s going on usually isn’t clear - but they’re lighthearted and absurd
and everyone seems to be having a good time. But it does get to be annoying.
There’s a lot of head-bonking, chasing, and practical joking - the kind of
thing a goofy uncle would do: sometimes it’s fun, but sometimes you wish he
would just go away. There’s also a plot involving a love story, all dealt with
through opera singing that begs to be skipped over.
Overall, though, the legitimately funny parts and the sense
of enjoyment make up for most of the irritation and cheesiness.
“As far back as I remember, I always wanted to be a
gangster,” Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill tells us in a voiceover at the beginning of Goodfellas. This comes a few seconds
after we watch him and his fellow gangsters finish off a brutal murder, and in
that context he’s hard to believe – who grows up hoping to do something like
that? But in this case Henry doesn’t actually do any of the stabbing or
shooting himself, he’s just the driver. And the look on his face is one, not so
much of disgust or surprise, but of slight uneasiness and subtle discomfort,
like he’s seen such things before but doesn’t enjoy it or revel in it like his
associates seem to. That subtlety is the heart of the movie, as it follows
Hill’s rise through the ranks of the “family” of gangsters while exploring the
hallow grandiosity of their lifestyle and world.
The voiceover leads to the early years of Hill’s life when
he was dreaming of the gangster life. And from his teenage perspective it’s
easy to see why. It’s all money and power and freedom. As Hill ages and moves
up the organization, he is no less awestruck by the money and power and freedom
he wields himself. This freedom and power leads to plenty of unpunished
violence and crime, with the cool looks of the wiseguys always assuring
themselves that everything is under control. Hill enacts most of his “business”
at the side of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and James Conway (Robert De Niro). Both
are loose cannons – Conway more menacingly so, and DeVito more obviously as he
murders in petty fits of rage.
Eventually, the gangsters arrogantly try to control the
uncontrollable and things start to fall apart. And it is the look on Hill’s
face at the beginning that is most telling. He’s as wrapped up in the violence
and crime as anyone else, but he seems to recognize the truth of it all. He
knows DeVito is a lunatic and that Conway is ultimately incapable and that
plans are going to fall apart and that they’re not immune from law and
punishment. But he won’t admit it, as he desperately and pathetically tries to
keep the dream alive long after it is dead, as he can’t stand being an “average
nobody.”
Goodfellas is an
excellent, honest, and realistic portrait of the fast, but ultimately hollow
and short, lives of gangsters, and is well-deserving of its place in the
pantheon of gangster movies.
#91 - Sophie’s Choice (1982) - Alan J. Pakula
Sophie’s Choice follows
an aspiring writer named Stingo (Peter MacNicol) to New York, where he rents a
room in the same building as Polish refugee Sophie (Meryl Streep). He quickly
becomes friends with her and her abusive and erratic boyfriend Nathan (Kevin
Kline). They gallivant around and dress and act like characters from The Great Gatsby while poor Stingo is
the third wheel but wishes he was the second. Nathan acts stranger and stranger
and Sophie seems to have something to get off her chest. Meryl Streep is
amazing as Sophie and she plays her desperate longing and private torment with
a powerful subtlety, and does it in multiple languages. I think it’s so
well-established that Streep is the world’s best actress that we get tired of
it and look for someone else. But no one else could do what she does in Sophie’s Choice.
The movie is two and a half hours long, and it’s a long two
and a half hours. At its heart Sophie’s
Choice is a Holocaust movie, but it only spends a fraction of its time on
the holocaust. The rest is spent on the three friends, their weird dynamic, and
Nathan’s psychosis. And that might be an interesting movie in itself. But the Holocaust
sectionsare so good and so powerful
that the trio of friends get tiresome and almost irrelevant.
The choice in Sophie’s
Choice is gut-wrenching and awful. It’s horrible to watch, but also
important. The scene manages to distill the terror and sickening evil of the Holocaust
down to one individual parent’s unimaginable nightmare. It brings the sometimes
unfathomable scale of the Holocaust down to a single relatable horror, making
it possible to begin to appreciate the awfulness of the whole thing. In doing
so it achieves what all entertainment dealing with the Holocaust should achieve
and does it without being exploitative.
#90 - Swing Time (1936) - George Stevens
Swing Time is a
romantic comedy musical, but it’s mostly a dance movie. Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers dance their way through the rom-com conventions their 1930s movies
helped establish – the zany coincidences, misunderstandings, and mistaken
identities – and do it with such skill and chemistry that is fun to watch. Movies
like Swing Time are what make this
project worthwhile. It’s not a movie I would have chosen to watch otherwise – I
don’t usually watch musicals, romantic comedies, or dance movies. But I really
enjoyed it.
And I don’t know much about dance, but I can tell when
someone is really good at something. And Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are
great dancers, and they seem to know it and to dance as though celebrating how
great they are and how well they do it together. But it’s confidence and not
arrogance and their enjoyment is contagious. The two also have amazing
chemistry that comes from working together on many different films. They bring
a classiness and charm that transcends all the cheesiness and leaves them just
plain likeable.
The plot is as goofy as most in the genre. Astaire forgets
to go to his wedding and has to go to New York to prove to his jilted fiancée that
he can make $25,000 in order to deserve a second chance. But while in New York
he accidentally becomes half of a famous dance partnership with Rogers. Sparks
fly and it’s obvious where things are headed. But it’s all good fun. All the
actors seem to know it’s ridiculous but have a great time anyway.
The French Connection is a movie of contrasts. The opening scenes
jump between Marseilles, France and New York City, highlighting the luxurious
French coast and the dingy, deserted, urban wastelands of 1970s New York. A hit
is carried out in France in the opening scene as the man behind it strolls his ocean-side
estate, casually fishes, and drinks wine with his beautiful young wife. And in
New York, two white cops patrol a black bar, rough up its patrons, chase one of
them to an abandoned industrial park and rough him up some more as one of them
tells his partner, “never trust a nigger.” The beauty and elegance of the life
of the criminal is contrasted with the gritty and grimy world of the New York
cops. This contrast strays from the traditional buddy-cop genre and sets us up
to root for the bigoted and sleazy cops in their world of dirt who are trying
to bring down the elegant and outwardly-respectable criminals.
The cops are Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy
Russo (Roy Scheider). They are narcotics detectives stuck with a dry spell of
drug activity, looking for leads and something to do. And without either, they
follow one of Popeye’s notorious hunches – notorious, we later learn, because
one of them led to the death of a cop, though we don’t learn why or how, but
Popeye will fight anyone who brings it up. That’s our hero. The chief relents
and allows the pair to follow and wiretap a suspicious-looking fella who wines
and dines with high society by night and slums it with his wig-wearing wife at
their small-time grocery store by day. After a few cold days and nights of
stalking, the hunch pays off as the two overhear their target Sal Boca (Tony Lo
Bianco) arrange to meet up with a Frenchman for some kind of drug deal.
The rest of the movie is Popeye and Buddy putting the pieces
together. The contrasts continue. We learn more of the details of the plan as
the Frenchman and his associates plot it out at their rendezvous on a seaside
castle in France, while the cops stand outside and wander around freezing in New
York, among petty drug dealers and users, litter, and burning garbage cans. The
French plan is sophisticated – it involves a famous French actor importing a
car (stashed with heroin) to use for a documentary in New York, various levels
of the mob, a chemist, a grocery store cover-up, and international
coordination. The cops, on the other hand, rely on a hunch and a lucky break
from a questionable wiretap. At one point the Frenchman makes it to New York
and Popeye tails him. In one scene the Frenchman is eating at a fancy
restaurant. It is shot so that he is in the foreground, in the warm light of
the restaurant, enjoying his multi-course meal, while through the window and
across the street, Popeye leans against a wall, warming his hands on a paper
cup of coffee and eating a greasy piece of pizza. The life of the criminal and
the life of the cop.
The action picks up from there as the Frenchman is fully
aware of being followed and cleverly evades Popeye in the subway in one of the
best scenes of the film. The Frenchmen then turn the tables and try to take out
Popeye with a sniper. This leads to another one of the best scenes and probably
the most well-known scene from the movie. Popeye chases the sniper to the
subway (or elevated train). The sniper gets on and Popeye has to confiscate a
car to chase down the train. The scene is spectacular and still genuinely
thrilling. The only soundtrack during the chase is the screech of tires, the
roar of the engine, and chaotic horn honking. And even here there is stark
contrast, as the scene cuts between the sniper calmly making his way through
the train to take the driver hostage, while below Popeye crashes the car a couple
times, honking and cursing like a madman, while narrowly avoiding traffic and
pedestrians. Apparently it was shot with real traffic and real pedestrians and
at one point the car has to avoid hitting a real woman pushing a carriage with
a real baby inside. The realness is what makes it thrilling.
The entire movie is filled with this sense of realness – it
feels like a realistic depiction of police work. Though Popeye is a loose
cannon, he’s not a rogue cop. He’s not likeable and he’s not much of a hero,
but he’s not a villain or an anti-hero either. This ambiguity feels
true-to-life as things are rarely black and white. His methods are questionable
and sometimes morally ambiguous, but he gets the job done. The movie is based
on the true story of one of the biggest drug busts in history, and was adapted
from a book detailing the real-life details. The French Connection preserves this authentic approach as the
ending manages to be clear and cinematically satisfying, while preserving the
ambiguity, and troubling aspects of real-life police work and the legal system.
And it shows that no matter how posh, polished, and elegant the criminals, they
can’t be caught without the cops getting their hands dirty.
The title of Pulp Fiction refers to the type of stories written in old-fashioned
novels and magazines printed on cheap paper (wood pulp paper) best known for
their lurid, sensational, and exploitative subject matter. With titles such as Dime Detective, Startling Stories, Weird
Tales, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Spicy
Detective, the stories dealt with the darker, seedier side of society, and
usually involved crime, criminals, and violence. Pulp Fiction deals with the dark and seedy side of society,
involves crime, criminals, and violence, and is often Startling, Weird,
Thrilling, and even a little Spicy. It pays homage to the pulp tradition and
revels in its messiness, rolling around in the muck like a pig – but a loveable
pig enjoying the muck for the muck’s sake.
And there
is plenty of muck. Hitmen, gangsters, drug dealers, petty criminals, and
rapists; overdoses, torture, robberies, murders, back stabbings, and actual
stabbings; sex, foul language, racism, and bloody, bloody violence. But it is
done in a tongue-in-cheek, ironic way that makes all the filth fun and often
very funny. Some of it is over-the-top, as it incorporates a comic, wacky style
of violence common in pulpy superhero stories and animation. But it also
includes the serious violence of gangster movies and crime stories. The movie
plays with the smut and grime using the full bag of tricks it inherited from
the variety of pulp genres. It’s funny but it’s not a comedy. It’s dark but it’s
not a noir. It transcends genres as it incorporates and pays tribute to the
variety in the pulp tradition, and it has generated tributes and copycats as
one of the most influential films of the 1990s.
One of the things Pulp Fiction is best known for its narrative
structure. The movie tells three interconnected stories deliberately out of
order, giving pieces of each story here in there, just a little at a time, cycling
back around and adding a little more until it all comes together. The first story
involves a hitman (John Travolta) escorting his boss’s wife (Uma Thurman) out
for a night out at a 1950s-style restaurant when she accidentally overdoses on
his potent stash of heroin. His frantic efforts to revive her with the help of
his drug dealer are darkly funny. The next story follows the efforts of two
hitmen (Travolta again, and Samuel L. Jackson, who is the highlight of an
excellent cast) stuck with a bloodied car when one of them accidentally shoots
an associate in the face while they’re driving in broad daylight. A cleanup man
is dispatched to Quentin Tarantino’s house and they frantically clean up the
car and the hitmen and leave before Mrs. Tarantino gets home from her graveyard
shift at the hospital. It’s absurd and darkly funny again. And the last story
involves a boxer (Bruce Willis) hired by the gangster boss (Marsellus Wallace,
played by Ving Rhames) to throw a fight. He double-crosses Wallace, bets on
himself, and tries to flee the country. But a watch handed down through
generations (explained in a flashback by an incredible Christopher Walken
cameo) that he left at his apartment brings him face to face with Wallace. The
two of them eventually end up in a dungeon of sadomasochistic redneck rapists.
Everything is episodic and
chronologically out of order. We are left in the dark for a long time about why
the movie starts with couple of lunatic robbers, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin,
planning a coffee shop robbery, or how dead characters show up alive later, or
why the hitmen show up in beach clothes after a hit. But Tarantino leaves no
strings loose and everything fits together in very satisfying ways.
It’s all a little gross, but the
movie knows it’s gross and it’s having fun. And this fun is made obvious
through the film’s use of language. The Oscar-winning script is known for its
dialogue. At his best Tarantino can create nerve-wracking tension and suspense
entirely on the strength of his characters’ conversations (one of my favorite examples, from Inglorious
Basterds). And in Pulp Fiction
Tarantino is at his best. He’s able to create that tension through mundane
conversations about ordinary life that ordinary people would have. Putting those
ordinary conversations in unusual situations heightens the awareness of the
unusual situation and puts us on edge. As the hitmen drive to a building, get
their guns, ride the elevator, and walk down the hall, they discuss the
differences between the US and Europe (the well-known “Royale with cheese” –
Paris’s take on the Quarter Pounder) and whether a foot massage is on the same
romantic spectrum as certain other sex acts. The conversations are funny, but
they’re the kind most people have with friends over lunch or while hanging out.
You don’t expect such talk on the way to a hit. It continues even when they
reach their target and the tension rises with Jackson’s voice as talk of
burgers leads to a Biblical call-to-arms, pre-hit speech.
The dialogue is brilliant
throughout the movie, as it powers and provides the electricity behind it. It’s
like a new kind of action movie, with no need for high-octane stunts and
explosions, as all the action is done in the language. Such language makes the
characters and situations vibrant and memorable. It’s a big reason it became a
cult classic and the favorite of fanboys around the world.
Like the tradition that gave rise
to it, Pulp Fiction revels in the
seedy and the profane. What passes for uplifting or moral is covered in a layer
of dirt: redemption, resurrection, forgiveness, and honor happen among hitmen, addicts,
gangsters, and murderers. But it all fits, and in fitting it all together, Pulp Fiction pays tribute to the pulp
tradition, stacking up all its elements and splattering them all over the
place.
The Last Picture Show
takes place in a small town and begins and ends with talk of high school
football, just as life begins and ends with talk of high school football in
small towns across North America. The town in the movie is a fictional one called
Anarene, Texas, but it could be any real-life, wind-blown, dusty town anywhere.
It is dry and still drying up, shrivelling up and drying out its inhabitants. New
ones grow but they dry out too, usually towards the end of high school, and
some stay dry their whole lives, while a few escape to get swallowed in the big
city or killed in a war. The movie was released in 1971 but takes place in 1951
when kids got married or went to college or chose one of a few jobs or joined
the army. Stay or go, but in a small town even leaving isn’t leaving – when everyone
knows everyone they know where they’re going and it’s like not leaving at all.
The movie follows the adventures and misadventures of
friends Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (a young Jeff Bridges) as they
navigate their last year of high school and the pitfalls of graduation. There
isn’t much to do in Anarene except hang out at the pool hall, go to movies, and
chase the only eligible girl Jacy (Cybill Shepherd). Boredom seems to suck out
ambition and harsh realities of life blow through the town like tumbleweeds,
while the boys graduate and move on to nothing at all.
This nothingness is the reward for most high school
graduations, when the system spits out graduates and leaves them to their own
devices, but it seems to be exaggerated in small towns when there was little to
do in the first place. The boys do what teenage boys do with too much time on
their hands: they get into mischief, take impromptu road trips, get drunk, and
try to have sex with girls – or with older women if girls aren’t available.
Sonny has an affair with is coach’s wife, a sympathetic character whose life
was dried up years ago. Duane is in love with Jacy who is more concerned with
trying to have sex (for the first time) with boys – or with older men if boys
aren’t available. She’s naïve but her good looks make her powerful and she wields
that power like a sword too big to hold, tipping this way and that. Sonny takes
his turn with her when she gets bored. She seems like a way out, like her
beauty could take them both far and away, but word travels quickly and their foray
is rooted out and snapped off.
The moral center of the town is Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson),
who owns the diner, the pool hall, and the movie theatre. Sonny’s family
situation is never clear, but it is clear that it isn’t good, and Sam is a
father figure to Sonny and almost everyone else in town. He’s wise, kind, and
thoughtful and seems to know the secret to life. At one point he takes Sonny
and another boy out to a pond to fish, even though there’s nothing in the pond
but turtles and he doesn’t like to touch or eat fish anyway. Instead of fish,
he casts for memories, ruminating on the past, when he used to take a girl
there, skinny dipping, riding horses, and being in love. These memories seem to
be his secret to keeping alive in the dying town. But as we watch Sonny and
Duane fumbling around trying and failing to make such life-sustaining memories,
we have little hope for their prospects. And even Sam’s memories only power him
for so long as they seem to burn up in an emptying gas tank. Sam the Lion may
be successful in Anarene, but he’s still in Anarene.
The movie is shot in black and white as if to emphasize the
drabness of the town and life in it. There seems to be no buildings more than a
storey high and the whole town looks hunched and huddled against the cold and
heat and wind, or like it’s embarrassed to stand up straight and be something
more. The soundtrack is made up of radios and jukeboxes actually playing in the
scenes – characters change stations and put in money and make selections in the
diner. It is all old country music, mostly Hank Williams, twanging about love
when love is in the air and loss when sadness and disappointment resurface. The
music is another constant in the town where little changes.
Some things do eventually change in town but they’re not for
the better – the title gives one of these changes away. It’s not a hopeful
movie, but it’s not pessimistic or depressing either. It’s realistic and beautiful in its sadness.
Sometimes life loses its colour, not everyone succeeds, and boredom overcomes.
And in small towns AM radios continue to narrate life while disappointing high
school football teams and the dating lives of teenagers fill the gossip void
until the team turns over the next year or someone gets married or dies.
