Monthly Archive for March, 2006

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Top Movies

Published on March 7, 2006 in ..The Dude, Films and The Ill-Literates. 5 Comments

The list is life.

[image:45:l] 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metaphysics without all the wordy words.

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The Godfather I & II. Oh Michael. You broke my heart. These are near perfect films. There is nothing in them-acting, lighting, cinematography, writing-that is not of a theme here. There’s a reason so many moments and lines stick in the minds of so many people.

Almost Famous. Sweet, fun, and charming flick about coming of age just a little bit outside of “the real world.” Highly recommend the Director’s cut which adds about 30 minutes and gives us alot more Jason Lee. If all these films were women this is the one I’d marry. [image:29:l]

[image:21:l] The Shawshank Redemption. This movie just symbolizes so many of our subconscious needs to escape, be redeemed and reborn. It does a perfect job of representing the seemingly never ending struggle for escape and freedom so many people feel. It’s surely one of the reasons it became the cult video hit it became.

[image:47:l] The Big Lebowski That’s interesting man. That’s fucking interesting. The king of slackers, the Dude is too cool while being mildly pathetic. And he was part of the Seattle 6 of which there were 5 other guys. Far out man.

[image:50:l] The Princess Bride. The Wizard Of Oz for cool modern people.

Field Of Dreams. [image:37:l] It’s all about playing catch man. Just a good catch. So much can be solved with just a good catch. If all these films were ways to spend eternity after death this is the one I’d live. A perfect baseball field in the middle of nowwhere peopled by everyone who matters to me.

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Fight Club. Modern generation X ennui with an attitude. Alienation and numbness are the thematic rails on which Ed Norton purposefullycrashes just to feel.

[image:52:l] Say Anything. Loyd Dobler speaks for a generation.

Wonder Boys. Great little-seen film starring Michael Douglas and Toby Maguire as 2 generations of writers at a liberal arts Pittsburgh college. Douglas is a professor who’s been working on his follow up novel for years pushing it to over 2000 pages in an effort to avoid endings and making choices. It takes place over one rainy weekend in the city of bridges as metaphorical bridges are crossed with humor, wit, and some cool Dylan tunes.

Barton Fink. Writers block taken to an extreme. The Coen brothers use Goodman and Turturro once again, as they did in Lebowski, and they are great as the blocked writer and the mysterious everyman next door to him in a hotel that’s more than a hotel.

[image:55:l] Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Who doesn’t wish they were Ferris or had him as a best friend in high school? This was John Hughes at his best even if Breakfast Club was his most iconic. Ferris was the Fonz for generation X.

A.I. It’s a flawed movie that nevertheless manages to be provocative for having 2 masters in Speilberg and Kubrick. I love android and robot themes done well. The idea that our machines are part of human evolution, and questions about consciousness and losing humanity to a mechanized future are particularly appealing to me. A.I. doesn’t do everything as well as perhaps Kubrick may have if he lived to complete it, but it tackles that and more, and manages to be very much worth thinking about.

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High Fidelity. Hornby’s novel moves to America, as Cusack once again manages to slip into a role that is all too easy to identify with. Plus there’s lists!

Taxi Driver. One of the early odes to modern ennui and disenfranchisement. Travis Bickle has become an icon of warped Americana as Scorcese started hitting his stride.

[image:48:l] Goodfellas. Scorcese’s best in my opinion. The way the music, images, and acting work together just makes this such a memorable mob movie. It’s even managed to co opt the coda of Clapton’s Layla, which now usually makes me think of Deniro’s vengeful montage and the pink cadillac.

Fast Times At Ridgemont High. Phoebe Cates in a bikini. Sean Penn as a burnout. Judge Reinhold is cool. The music, the horniness, the awkwardness. It’s all there.

[image:61:l] To Kill A Mockingbird. One of the few titles that work on my all time best book list as well as movie. It’s a story that at once makes you cry for humanity and feel some hope. Atticus Finch is the man and should be a role model for kids instead of growing up thinking Terrel Owens is a hero.

[image:36:l] [image:34:l] [image:35:l] [image:40:l] Requiem For A Dream. Great score that itself is a character in an operatic scared straight story about our personal monsters that consume us as we feed them more and more.

Pi. A paranoid conspiracy flick that acknowledges the empiricism of numbers without making me have to do math.

Casablanca. Poor Rick. He was going to chuck it all for her. Is it any wonder he’s such a hard and cynical fuck? I don’t agree with those that say its the one perfect film, it has flaws, but it’s also one of the few old black & white pics that every generation seems to see and like. Thre’s something modern and grunge about Rick. And how many great lines that have been part of the vocabulary for 69 years now? [image:51:l]

Heathers. Classic high school story of imperious cliques, homocidal boyfriends, and exploding schools. As over the top as it is, most people relate to it. [image:62:l]

Silence Of The Lambs. I get goose bumps everytime he spiritually dissects Jodie in the underground cell. [image:64:l]

Honorable mentions to the following with one of the prime reasons they fall a bit short. Lord Of The Rings series (Great movies just not all that deep, not that they need be, but sometimes it gets a bit too precious and I get bored with all the running in open fields), Dark City (storyline is a bit lacking in something), Forrest Gump (too anti-intellectual and superficial), Magnolia (The frogs), Waking Life (almost too intellectual), Chasing Amy (funny while not being funny enough), The Matrix (The sequels), A Knight’s Tale (It’s silly like Princess Bride but not as universal), Bull Durham (already have a Costner Baseball movie on the list), Rocky (created a monster), The Natural (too lazy to write more about it right now), A Clockwork Orange (kind of sick at times).

Crash

Published on March 5, 2006 in ..The Dude, Films, Reviews and The Ill-Literates. 2 Comments

[image:101:l] One of the five Best Picture nominees for Sunday’s Oscars along with Good Night, And Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, and Munich, Crash has probably ignited the most debate. While Brokeback may be seen as more controversial it really has managed to cross those gaps, perhaps through its two leads very Christian friendly choices to stay hetero family men and repress their truest selves as much as they could. But Crash ignited more social commentary and ran a gamut of opinion that’s made it one of the more interesting movies of the year. It’s also quite possibly the movie I am most ambivalent and indecisive about.

Many have denounced the film for offering racial caricatures and depicting life in L.A. as a cesspool of hateful ignorant people. Others have seen this as more of a parable that shouldn’t be taken so literally. I personally teeter on the fence with this one. I agree with the critics who felt the movie was unrealistic. The characters seem to exist on another planet where no other topics of discourse or attention exist beyond racial differences. There is also a surplus of implausible coincidences that take some faith to get through. But as one of the films chief supporters Roger Ebert wrote, one of my favorite authors, Charles Dickens was all about the emotionally manipulative art of coincidence.

If you can accept this the film does work on the level of a parable. It paints with broad strokes to create a mosaic of interconnectedness that shows a kind of reverse form of paying it forward. Crash tells a multitude of stories of the Robert Altman or Grand Canyon variety. It’s a day or so in the life of urban Los Angelinos of all different races who share more than coincidental run ins over that period of time. Haggis’s characters also share a common thread of hate and prejudice. Well except for the locksmith maybe. From the white cop played by Matt Dillon who’s expressing his impotence at his father’s declining health by hating on blacks, to a very humorous black car thieving duo hating on whites, to an Iranian hating on Arabs and Mexicans, to a white Lawyer’s wife doing the same, to a black cop played by Don Cheadle having an affair with a Latino cop despite some clear prejudices towards her and the whole Latin American population he can’t differentiate from each other, racism is everywhere and knows no boundries of race, color, or creed.

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I think Haggis tries to show how hate and the differences that keep us apart are also ironically part of what link us together. It’s all connected in a chain that gets extended link by link as everyone crosses each others paths and have these small moments of contact that nevertheless leave people demoralized and shattered as if crashing into each other on some level. Instead of love or other humanistic traits being paid forward it is prejudice and ignorance that get passed along forming a mosaic in which the absence of knowledge or what we don’t know, informs our choices, attitudes, and comments towards others who then take that seemingly innocuous moment and make it too large a part of themselves.

Being minimilized according to your race or nationality can do that. Though I did at times feel a bit manipulated and pulled into the realm of soap opera uni-dimensionality of character and far fetched coincidence, I was also moved and forced to think about those little comments I make here or there. For me it might be more of the anti-redneck small town kind of stereotyping that I don’t really believe is as across the board as I make it sound, but it’s part of the same mentality.

The vulgarity of reducing people to a color or nationality often can leave them feeling worthless and wounded. And like wounded animals we lash out viciously against those around us. Hate feeds on itself and we’ve all got a reason for our worldview. Crash presents some of these reasons as well a link between each casual act of hate or reduction that is passed on and knows no racial boundries. Perhaps its all too human for us to concoct reasons why we are better than that tribe on the other side of the hill. I always recall an early scene from 2001 when one group of monkey-men come up over a hill and start trash talking another group of monkey-men on the other side. I can almost translate what they’re saying because the language and the impulse is all too famaliar and easily understood. It goes something like this, “Hey you guys fom over on that side of the hill. You’re not as good as us guys on this side of the hill. Our sides better and your shit stinks more because ours stinks pretty bad and we’ve got egos developing and we need to feel better about our shit stinking ways so we’re going to kick your asses.”

In Crash though sometimes these lessons feel not only contrived but like a primer on looking past stereotypes and seeing people for themselves. These are lessons most of us already absorbed and assimilated in after school specials back in the 70′s when the Jeffersons were moving on up and the Jackson’s were teaching us our A, B, C’s.

But I did feel emotion at times, as well as a mounting sense of tension. And I think there is more to the characters than the one dimensionality some have pointed to. Dillon’s cop is the perfect example of this. Though there will times in this film you will despise him, there are others when you’ll get those shades of grey that most people and things come in.

One of my initial complaints, and one I’ve heard others voice since seeing this film and becoming curious about the debate surrounding it when it was released earlier in 2005, was about the carjacking pair. They are the funniest part of the movie but it didn’t seem that their dialogue, as provoking and enjoyable as it was, was realistic. It just didn’t seem likely that carjackers would be so erudite. But there are two things to consider. [image:102:l]

One is the obvious possiblilty that I’m doing the same type of stereotyping the film is focusing on. Alot of rappers come from probably somewhat similar street backgrounds and yet show a tremendous wit and facility with the language. So who’s to say these, particularly the one driving force of the two, doesn’t have some of that element in him. And we really don’t know what these people were doing a day before the movie. Maybe they stole cars temporarily to put themselves through school.

The other thing to remember is the movie is a parable of sorts. Of course L.A. can’t be that filled with people who only think in racial terms and of course the level of coincidence that brings some of them together numerous times is pretty preposterous. Nor does it seem likely Cheadle’s cop wouldn’t know where the woman he’s sleeping with is from, or that the Ryan Phillipe cop character would see the other side of himself Matt Dillon warned him about, so quickly. But on the level of parable, the level that accepts a magic bullet which the film offers as some sort of redemption and hope, the two black thieves are speaking for the film and not litereally for themselves.

For me I’m not quite sure the film made that distinction between the world of heightened parable and the one of gritty slice of life drama clear enough. Haggis definitely makes some questionable decisions. But he has crafted a film worthy of debate and deserves credit for it. At times I like it and at others I feel like I shouldn’t.

One of the things that originally had me feeeling ambivalent was the lack of an ending worthy of the title. With a name like Crash you expect more and at first I was feeling a bit let down. I mentioned that mounting tension before, but ultimately I didn’t feel a pay off. But at the same time there was some relief in that. And that’s a testimony to the films ability to make me part of its subjective experience, or vica versa. I was expecting some bad stuff to go down that didn’t. Don’t get me wrong here. Some bad stuff happens. A main character dies. Others flirt with more tragic outcomes. That I felt relieved that some of them didn’t have the more final run-ins they could have had, must mean I cared about the characters, and something about the tension that was created felt real, palpable, and a bit like our lives when we just want it to be okay without the ultra-drama.

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But I also think there’s a point about how the outcomes and run-ins that seem to be innocuous still pay it forward it a bad way and damage us as much as a serious accident with our cars or getting shot does. To paraphrase Cheadle’s character, there are so many of us going through our lives with little contact, so isolated and alone it’s almost like we seize conflict headlong so as to feel something. This is part of Fight Club’s allure to me. It’s like we need these bigger crashes to somehow shake us out of the negativity and stagnancy of those smaller ones that leave us scarred and looking for someone to hate to elevate us beyond those that hate us.

As for the Oscars, I’ve reviewed 4of the 5 films on this site and if my reviews don’t tell you which i like the best, it’s Brokeback Mountain. I’m a huge Phillip Seymour Hoffman fan I’m even rooting against him to see Heath Ledger pull the upset.

I’m not sure I’d even include Capote or Crash in my top 5 of 05. I don’t think either is far off the mark. But their shortcoming may be enough to push them off in a decent year for movies. Good Night, And Good Luck is one I probably would include at this point but may push off after seeing some of the ones that got away in 05 when they’re released on DVD soon.

So my heart is with the gay cowboys and I don’t care who knows it.