Coming Soon (2000)

In 1963, with Dr. Strangelove still a year away, film critic Andrew Sarris had already dismissed Stanley Kubrick: "He may wind up as the director of the best coming attractions in the industry."

Sarris couldn't have been any more prescient in summing up Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final project 36 years later. The theatrical trailer and TV ads for EWS were amazing: dreamlike, scary, mysterious. Those images are still vivid in the finished film--when Leelee Sobieski coyly beckons Cruise to come hither, I leave the film behind for a few seconds and flash back to  the trailer--but they're surrounded by two-plus hours of what can charitably be described as erratic overreach. Great foreplay, disappointing sex. The trailer for EWS was good enough to deserve its own trailer.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. Time and time again the past few years, I've spent months anticipating upcoming releases on the basis of knockout trailers, only to be left drained and puzzled by how ordinary (or worse) the real thing turns out to be. The Big Lebowski had a stunning trailer: Busby Berkeley-like split-screens, the First Edition's "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" (which I hadn't heard, or even thought about, for years; within weeks I owned a First Edition compilation), a wildly suggestive shot of John Turturro going down on a bowling ball. Six months later, a rather tame, genial mess, with Turturro getting about five minutes of screen time. I remember seeing the trailer for Casino and thinking that Scorsese was improbably about to outdo Goodfellas: whirling camera movements more elaborate than ever, the Rolling Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," Joe Pesci chewing out De Niro in the middle of the desert. Packed into 30 seconds, brilliant; at three hours, overkill times ten.

I've had similar experiences with Trainspotting, The Truman Show, Summer of Sam, Twister, She's So Lovely (on the shortlist for decade's-worst--but what a trailer!), Crash (ditto), and many others. On rare occasions, a great trailer will precede an even greater film: I was hyped for Boogie Nights and Rushmore, and both went above and beyond my already inflated expectations. Such exceptions notwithstanding, I'm starting to think that the more eye-opening the trailer, the clearer the signal to quit while you're ahead.

The reigning Kings of Letdown are Oliver Stone and Brian De Palma. If you put aside the exceptional Casualties of War, De Palma's been operating on borrowed goodwill that goes at least all the way back to Blow Out, maybe even to Carrie. I always come away from his invariably striking trailers with a sudden case of amnesia: "A new De Palma film! Finally, a return to form." As Santayana once said, those who cannot remember history are condemned to suffer through Raising Cane, Carlito's Way, and Snake Eyes.

(This piece is actually an advance preview of a much longer article I have coming out next spring on the art of merchandising movies. My advice: it doesn't get any better than what you're reading now.)

Nurse the Tooth (2000)

There's an eerie commercial for Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (still a couple of weeks from release as I write) that's been running on TV as of late: images of Tom Cruise and a visibly preoccupied Nicole Kidman about to have sex, their arrival at some kind of pagan costume ball intercut, a rolling blues (Chris Isaak?) about having done a "bad, bad thing" overtop. It's the best thing I've seen all year, leaving me as anxious as everyone else to see the final film of a director I've always regarded with ambivalence. If Eyes Wide Shut turns out to be as provocative as its trailer, for me Kubrick's filmography will finish with a symmetry that runs counter to most people's estimation of him: his greatest work at the beginning and end of his career, with the middle--the films for which he was all but elevated to sainthood-- given over to the obscure, arid fantasies of an imperious technocrat. Here's hoping.

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The Killing (1956): An obvious forerunner of Reservoir Dogs with its jumbled narrative and disparate gallery of petty criminals, brought together by Sterling Hayden to rob a racetrack during a big stakes race. Hayden is always great--Nick Nolte at his most bearish is the closest parallel today--and here he's matched by one of Elisha Cook Jr.'s withering patsies, Marie Windsor as the wife who messes with Cook's mind, and Tim Carey doing what must be some kind of bizarre Kirk Douglas parody. True to Kubrick's subsequent career path, the robbery is a success and everyone goes home rich....not quite: Hayden's "What's the difference?" is maybe the grimmest closing line ever.

Paths of Glory (1957): My favourite Kubrick film, my favourite Kirk Douglas film, my favourite war film. It's short (86 minutes), without cliche (except for an ironic but nonetheless awkward singalong at the end), and almost mathematical in the way it depicts bureaucracy closing in on three hapless soldiers who are handpicked to take the fall for a hopeless WWI military maneuver. The choreography of the Attack on Ant Hill is brutal but economical, highlighted by a series of claustrophobic tracking shots through the trenches, and the trial that follows is marked by a carefully reasoned illogic that anticipates Catch-22. As one of the accused soldiers, Tim Carey turns his closed-mouth seething from The Killing upside down and comes out even weirder: he always seems ready to fall asleep mid-sentence.

Spartacus (1960): I saw this in a swank Toronto theatre when it was rereleased to great fanfare a few years ago: orchestral overture, intermission, restored "Super Technirama 70" print, and the return of Laurence Olivier's infamous oysters-and-snails seduction of Tony Curtis. I've seen similar presentations of Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, and A Star Is Born over the years, and Spartacus was the one that most lived up to the promise of such projects--three hours-plus of lively, voluptuous biblical spectacle in which to lose yourself. Peter Ustinov's bumbling obsequiousness is hilarious, but my favourite performance is given by Nick Dennis, who gets to shout about nine words in various crowd scenes. Dennis was a cousin of my dad's who also had speaking parts in A Streetcar Named Desire and Kiss Me Deadly; I'm only three degrees of separation from Kubrick.

Lolita (1962): James Mason has Humbert Humbert down cold: with only a minimum of interior voiceover to work with (thankfully), he conveys the intricacies of Humbert's criminal obsession through his eyes, an impatient stammer, and his special brand of urbane weaseliness. Shelly Winters and Sue Lyons are almost as good, while Peter Sellers is all over the place--I like his Clare Quilty best when he's dancing near the beginning. The languid pacing and cinematography are excellent. Everything's in place, except what can't be translated. Nabakov's Humbert, observing a kindred spirit: "There he was devoid of any talent whatsoever, a mediocre teacher, a worthless scholar, a glum repulsive fat old invert, highly contemptuous of the American way of life, triumphantly ignorant of the English language--there he was in priggish New England, crooned over by the old and caressed by the young--oh, having a grand time and fooling everybody; and here was I."

Dr. Strangelove (1964): Every few years that I go back to this, I'm more and more able to get into the spirit of it. It's schizophrenic enough (sometimes deadpan, sometimes wildly over-the-top) that it might throw you the first time, but recently I found myself laughing out loud at things like the look on George C. Scott's face after he's dressed down by Peter Sellers' President Muffley, or the way that Keenan Wynn vigilantly watches out for the interests of Coca-Cola Ltd. The Beatles were a more brazen release from the Cold War tensions of 1964, but you can see where Dr. Strangelove's talk of "deviated preverts" and "precious bodily fluids" helped shape the rest of the decade.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Voted the 10th-greatest film ever made in Sight and Sound's most recent historical poll (1992), with Kubrick's death probably ensuring it will rank even higher next time around. I've given it my best shot three or four times now, but I still feel much like James Mason in Lolita: given the choice between another go at 2001 or the opportunity to look after a toothache, I'd rather nurse the tooth.

A Clockwork Orange (1971): I saw this years ago and didn't care for it, so I rented it out for this piece and had the same reaction. Screen violence was a huge topic of conversation among film critics in the early '70s (the conversation still goes on, but it's been moved into the arena of presidential campaigns), as A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, and a litany of key titles were passionately championed or attacked by John Simon, Pauline Kael, and other critics of the day. I'm not sure what Kubrick is trying to say about violence here: if a film doesn't reach me in ways that register deeper than whatever message it might have--I'm definitely at the passive, against-interpretation end of the spectrum as a viewer--I'm too lazy to do the necessary thinking to figure things out. A Clockwork Orange doesn't. It does seem as if all the thought and creativity went into the set and costume design. For a truly sobering adaptation of a famous dystopian novel, I much prefer Michael Radford's version of 1984.

Barry Lyndon (1975): One of three Kubrick films I haven't seen--the others, 1953's Fear and Desire and 1955's Killer's Kiss, are hardly (if at all) ever screened. I take it that watching Barry Lyndon on video would be beside the point, so I'll hold off until it turns up at a local rep theatre.

The Shining (1980): Some people place this on the short-list of greatest horror films ever made, others think it barely deserves to be called a horror film. Stephen King, who thought so highly of it he felt compelled to direct a TV remake himself in 1997, once traced the film's fatal weakness to a late- night phone call during production wherein Kubrick confessed his atheism and then hung up; to render evil convincingly, reasoned King, you have to begin with a belief in God. Myself, I think it's garbled, overlong, a work of some condescension ("I'm here to prove that the genre can be elevated to the level of art"), and scary, most memorably in the Steadicam shots of Danny Lloyd careening through the halls of the Overlook on his bike. I still look warily down the corridor outside my parents' apartment for fear of encountering those Diane Arbus twins.

Full Metal Jacket (1987): Bad timing (which will happen when you take two or three presidential administrations between films) saw Kubrick's Viet Nam movie appear in the midst of Platoon, Casualties of War, Born on the Fourth of July, and a half-dozen others. Oliver Stone's films were bigger with audiences and Casualties a better film, so Full Metal Jacket came and went fairly quietly. The first third, where Lee Ermey's tightly-wound drill instructor zeroes in on Vincent D'Onofrio as his personal hand-puppet, is as pure as Paths of Glory, the balance a sometimes ponderous assemblage of moments. Good soundtrack, highlighted by "Surfin' Bird" and "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." Actually, Kubrick was two-for-two in the '80s when it came to inspiring pop music himself: The Shining was commemorated on a Husker Du B-side, "All Work and No Play," and Full Metal Jacket provided 2 Live Crew with the sample for "Me So Horny." Maybe Britney Spears or Ricky Martin will come away from Eyes Wide Shut with something.

(I wrote the above a couple of months ago for a friend in New Zealand. I've seen Eyes Wide Shut by now, but I'll leave what I wrote as is. I'm in-between on EWS, leaning toward the side of the more negative reviews that have appeared. I don't have anything really new or interesting to add to all that's been written already; good places to start are reviews by Stanley Kauffmann, Charles Taylor, and Andrew Sarris, and a series of shorter pieces by Greil Marcus and some other people in Salon.)

 

(Originally published in Real Groove)

Three Singles (2000)

"We Like to Party!" Vengaboys: I remember a review a few years ago where somebody commended a record for its "puzzlement value." That's how they should have done it on American Bandstand: "It's got a good beat and it's got puzzlement value--I give it a 95." "We Like to Party!" has more puzzlement value anything I've heard this year. It took me about three months (until I finally saw the video) just to figure out why the Vengaboys pronounced their own name so oddly: because it's the Venga bus that's coming, the Vengaboys just happen to be inside. Bus songs are second only to car songs in pop music's transportation hierarchy: the Partridge Family and the Merry Pranksters rode busses, the Hollies waited for one, Kris Kross missed theirs, the Who hallucinated about them, the Guess Who wouldn't have anything to do with them, so on and so forth all the way back to Ralph "Big Poppa" Kramden back in the mid-50s. "We Like to Party!" also reminds me of the KLF and Tammy Wynette's "Justified and Ancient," winner of the puzzlement-value award for 1992 (where ice cream vans were the vehicle of choice), and Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" from the year before. I usually start dodging even the best radio novelties within a matter of weeks (e.g., Eminem), but the Vengaboys' mixture of humane reassurance ("happiness is just around the corner," "we'll be there for you"), Monkees-like defiance ("get ready 'cause we're comin' through"),  and roller-rink blip-blip-blip just gets weirder and more liberating all the time. They have a follow-up out now where they invite you back to their room, but the ride over's twice as interesting. (8.0)

"Beautiful Stranger," Madonna: "Haven't you heard?" is the perfect opening line for a Madonna single: reminiscent of how "Live to Tell" began with "I have a story to tell," but more suggestive, like an amazing bit of privileged gossip is about to be shared (being Madonna, the question is phrased in the negative--it may be a secret, but she still wants you to know you're the last person in the world to hear it). This sets up some rhetorical should-I-stay-or-should-I-go? musing that draws you in further still: the rise and fall in the way she sings "but I'm not, so I guess I'll stay" is resigned, dramatic, the promise of another great story. The rest of the song is addressed to the beautiful stranger himself. Much more than all that arty "Justify My Love"/"Erotica" silliness from the peak of her celebrity earlier in the decade, "Beautiful Stranger" is a fair match for Prince's "Erotic City" and Company B's "Fascinated" as an obsessive fuck-epic. I think it might be Madonna's best single ever, and as unexpected a turnaround as last year's "Ray of Light" was (after having pretty much bottomed out for a couple of years beforehand), "Beautiful Stranger" is a complete surprise, all the more so turning up as Austin Powers filler. The trippiness that serves "Beautiful Stranger"'s soundtrack obligations (my car turns into the Factory every time it comes on the radio, and for extra ambience I've even hired a pale blonde guy with sunglasses to sit in the backseat and stare) made me think at first that it was an effective but superfluous "Ray of Light" remake, but I've come to agree with a friend who says its hypnotic appeal owes more to the swampiness of Creedence Clearwater. Excellent. If Eyes Wide Shut goes even half as far, it'll have been worth the wait. (9.0)

"Livin' La Vida Loca," Ricky Martin: Speaking of obsession, here's a glimpse into all the desire, fear, glamour, mystery, danger, and erotic abandon that promises to be unleashed in the upcoming Al Gore-Bill Bradley showdown. (2.5)

Half the Men They Used to Be (2000)

For a few years now, my friend Peter and I have been keeping a running checklist of our favourite movie creep-specialists. Bruce Dern always heads the list, an automatic first-ballot hall-of-famer for his signature perversity in such '70s films as The King of Marvin Gardens, Coming Home, and Black Sunday.

Other honoured names follow in quick succession: Dennis Hopper (Blue Velvet, River's Edge), Brad Dourif (Wise Blood, Wild Palms), Eric Roberts (Star 80, The Pope of Greenwich Village), Gary Oldman (JFK, True Romance), M. Emmet Walsh (Blood Simple, Straight Time), Steve Buscemi (Reservoir Dogs, Fargo), Peter Boyle (Taxi Driver, Joe), Christopher Walken in just about anything. At their lowlife best, all of these actors wallow expertly in degeneracy, aberrant behaviour, and general unseemliness, stealing film after film no matter how small the role. If there are female equivalents, I can't think of who they are; Juliette Lewis, maybe, but she's more annoying than anything else. Mickey Rourke does double-duty as a real-life creep-specialist, so he's a category unto himself.

The creep-specialist credo was elegantly summed up in Boogie Nights by good-member-in-standing Philip Baker Hall: "I like simple pleasures, like butter in my ass, lollipops in my mouth. That's just me." You probably won't be hearing any of Tom Hanks's characters make a similar claim anytime soon.

When Peter and I last talked, I put forth the name of Philip Seymour Hoffman for consideration, the newest and best creep-specialist in movies today. Hoffman played the pathetic and very fleshy Scotty J. in Boogie Nights, where he somehow managed to seem morally unfit to be a hanger-on in the late-70s California pornography industry. (Not a fair statement, really, as Scotty's only weakness was an unrequited crush on Mark Wahlberg's Dirk Diggler, but that's how convincing a creep-specialist Hoffman is.) Last year, playing an obscene phone caller with (if the context even allows for such a thing) a penchant for premature ejaculation, he was the best reason to see Todd Solondz's overrated Happiness:

"Hello?"

"I want to fuck you, I want to fuck you so bad"--spurt, click.

Squirming and fidgeting and looking extremely uncomfortable through the whole ordeal, Hoffman brought to mind a line of Burt Lancaster's from Sweet Smell of Success: "I like Harry, but I can't deny he sweats a little."

Welcome to the club, Phil. May you continue to wallow and rot for years to come.

So Sad About Max (2000)

I'm disappointed that Rushmore didn't get a better reception. It did get a fair amount of attention, so that might seem like a strange thing to say, but to me it's the kind of film that should have galvanized movie audiences the way that The Godfather, Nashville, and Taxi Driver did 25 years ago. "Should have galvanized movie audiences"--that's my bad Pauline Kael imitation, and it's probably from having read so much Kael that I still root for my favorite films to make hundreds of millions of dollars and become big topics of conversation everywhere you turn. I don't feel the same way about my favorite music, where I'm more or less indifferent to whether it makes #1 on Billboard or has an audience of me and five others. (With me the range is more like #1 in Billboard to #93 in Billboard--me and 500,000 others.) With films, though, I turn evangelical, as I have recently with Rushmore.

It's a film that brings together a number of things that at one time or another made a lasting impression on me: The Graduate (The Graduate specifically, but The Heartbreak Kid, The Sterile Cuckoo, Nobody Waved Goodbye, You're a Big Boy Now, and--I'm guessing, I haven't seen it—Harold and Maude are there too), The Catcher in the Rye (Rushmore is as much of a film version as you could ever hope for), and the handful of early Who songs I'm most in awe of ("Substitute," "I'm a Boy," "Circles," "Don't Look Away," "Pictures of Lily," "See My Way," "I Can't Reach You"). Especially "I Can't Reach You"--when Pete Townshend sings "You're so alive and I'm nearly dead," he could be Rushmore's Herman Blume standing at a distance and looking at Max Fischer, or Max looking at Rosemary Appleby, or Margaret Yang looking at Max, or Herman looking at Rosemary, or maybe even Rosemary looking at Max. In the end, as it should be, it's Max looking at Margaret. "You fly your plane right over my head/You're so alive and I'm nearly dead"--when Max opens his eyes and sees Margaret for what amounts to the first time, one of his three or four great moments of acceptance in the movie, she actually is flying her plane right over his head. I don't know if Wes Anderson had "I Can't Reach You" in mind when he envisioned the scene on the tarmac, but Rushmore is so steeped in the spirit and the fact of those early Who songs--"My name is Max and I'm a head case" would have worked as the film's opening line--he might have.

Rushmore's connection to The Graduate and The Catcher in the Rye is no  less overt, but Anderson plays around with them and, in many ways, makes them better. Besides its basic premise, Rushmore lifts specific images and effects from The Graduate: Herman disappearing into himself as he floats to the bottom of the family pool, Max lying in wait for Herman inside the car, Rosemary's "Goodbye, Max" perfectly echoing Mrs. Robinson's "Goodbye, Benjamin," the close parallel between the "I Am Waiting" and "April Come She Will" sequences. But outside of Max's shared weakness for half-baked ideas (where he goes Benjamin Braddock ten better), he couldn't be more unlike Ben. I can understand why some people have no patience for Ben's doddering around  in The Graduate, where Hoffman seems to be working out his Rain Man character 20 years before the fact; for me, it's all of a piece with everything I love about the film, but if I were seeing The Graduate for the first time today, I doubt I'd find Ben so endearing. Some of Ben's mannerisms linger on in Bill Murray's sad and rumpled Herman Blume, who is more a version of Ben 30 years later than Jason Schwartzman's Max is of Ben five years earlier--Ben gone on to the world of steel instead of plastics, but still hiding behind trees and still unable to put together a sentence when he stands before Rosemary in front of her house. Max, on the other hand, never dodders. He's on overdrive all the time, brilliant and emphatic and spinning off into 30 different directions at once. He's Holden Caulfield, not Benjamin Braddock--a creative whirlwind, a force.

But Max isn't really Holden, either. I last read The Catcher in the Rye over 10 years ago, and it's not a pleasant memory. The book's unrelenting sourness was hard to take; it is what it is, but the way that Salinger was so quick to close off every last chance for Holden to find his place in the world--for every Phoebe, there'd be a wall with "fuck you" scrawled over it--felt suffocating. Rushmore doesn't punish Max the way that Holden's punished in The Catcher in the Rye. Max shares Holden's misfit/outsider status, and he thrives on the same kind of healthy loathing for the Magnuses of Rushmore Academy, but Max is able to come out the other side of his breakdown in a way that I don't remember Holden doing. Taking Herman in to meet his father, understanding how mean he's been to Margaret, orchestrating Herman and Rosemary's reconciliation--these are profound moments, and they give Rushmore a sympathetic lift that's absent from The Catcher in the Rye. That's not something you need from Salinger's book when you're 15, but 20 years later, it's a difference that means a lot.

For me to love a film as much as I do Rushmore, there's a good chance that pop music's going to figure prominently. There's music all through Rushmore, a mid-60s mix of second-tier hits and semi-obscure album tracks from Britain, and as is true of all the best pop directors--Rule Number One--Wes Anderson puts the music front and center, sometimes for minutes at a time. Along with a spare-sounding Kinks song I'd never heard before (just right for the image of Herman tossing golf balls into the pool) and Cat Stevens' original "Here Comes My Baby" (also a discovery: it's always been a Tremeloes song to me), Rushmore has three musical detours that are epics unto themselves. There's the Who, of course, a couple of minutes from "A Quick One While He's Away." It's used as counterpoint--"You are forgiven" over and over again at the very moment when Max and Blume are ready to kill each other—but it's also an inspired match for the look on Max's face as he emerges, slow-motion, from the hotel elevator after funnelling honeybees into Herman's room: an expression of adolescent hate as fixed and as blank as the one worn by Pete Townshend on the My Generation LP cover. It's the look you hear in "I Can See for Miles," but that would have been too easy a choice. "A Quick One" functions as a more abstract backdrop to the same feelings.

After Max concedes Rosemary to Herman, he turns away--from them, from Margaret, from school, from himself. He's George Minafer towards the end of The Magnificent Ambersons: he's gotten his comeuppance, ten times over. What follows, as the Rolling Stones' "I Am Waiting" plays (I've never owned Aftermath, so that was new to me too), is as affecting a snapshot of self-pity as I've ever seen in a film. I've always thought self-pity the most underrated of emotions--you don't want it to overtake your life, but every so often, it's not a bad thing. As much as anger or revenge or anything else, it's an emotion that cleanses. Anderson apotheosizes self-pity for the duration of "I Am Waiting": Max closing the drapes on Margaret is an image of tremendous purity.

Best of all, just as Rushmore's getting underway (so don't show up late, which I hope you wouldn't consider anyway), is the montage of Max's extra-curricular activities set to the Creation's "Making Time." Again, new to me; I'm not even sure if I'd ever come across the group's name before. You can find singular depictions of hate and self-pity in other movies, but I don't know that there's ever been anything like the "Making Time" sequence. The choreography is stunning--each tableau more intricate than the last, every- thing culminating in the shot of Max leading the "Bombardment Society." I can't give a name to whatever it is that this sequence gets at. It gets to the core of something.

My favorite student in my own class the past two years has been Ranger Buck Goyette (I had him as a 3 last year and asked to have him back in the 3/4 split I'm doing now). Ranger doesn't know he's my favorite student, because two or three times a day I'm yelling at him. He's exasperating. He reads about three grade levels ahead of the rest of the kids, and he's intensely interested whenever I'm talking about Richard Nixon or Aretha Franklin or Citizen Kane. Last year, as part of a newspaper unit, I had the class trying to write editorials on whether the younger grades should be allowed to attend school dances; yes, wrote Ranger, because all kids need to "feel the flow of freedom." Meanwhile, his marks are average or worse because he just doesn't care, and he's not much past the kindergarten level when it comes to the social graces--he's still eating snow and rifling around garbage cans for fun. I told his mom that she needed to see Rushmore, that it was about a kid who was Ranger in five years. (Quickly adding that I meant that only in a good way, that I wasn't saying that Ranger would be pulling down 40s and 50s in high school--the truth is, that's in part exactly what I meant.)

I hope Ranger sees Rushmore one day; I know he'll see himself up there, and if he catches it at the right moment, I'm sure it will affecthim like The Graduate and The Catcher in the Rye affected me. And if I were 15 myself right now, I'm guessing that Rushmore would have the capacity to permanently shape how I viewed the world, or at least how I viewed myself. I'm not, so that's already been taken care of by other films, books, and records. But Rushmore touches something inside me that comes from the same place.

Only Old Ones: The 20 Best Uses of Pop Music in a Martin Scorsese Film (2000)

1. "Then He Kissed Me," the Crystals, in GoodFellas: Henry leads Karen into the Copacabana through a backdoor network of corridors and kitchens, passing out twenties and greeting well-wishers the whole way. It's all one shot, lasting for the duration of the song and beyond; I'm sure it'll one day be as famous as Touch of Evil's opening shot, being just as elaborate but much more emotional. You experience everything through Karen's eyes--you find yourself as awestruck and as caught up in the passing swirl as she is--as Scorsese manages to visualize the storybook idyll of "Then He Kissed Me" from the inside, from the same place where Spector invented it. This is probably my favourite three minutes of film ever.

2. "Sunshine of Your Love," Cream, in GoodFellas: Jimmy standing at the bar, taking refuge from the flaky wig salesman Morrie, who's been pestering Jimmy for his share of the Lufthansa robbery. As played by Chuck Low, Morrie's patter is sprinkled with things like "unconscionable" and "cultivating"; he's my favourite character in the movie, an erudite lowlife. (Low also has a great bit in The King of Comedy as the guy in the restaurant who mimics Rupert.) De Niro's not doing anything except standing there thinking, but Scorsese shoots him in slow-motion anyway; combined with the song and De Niro's screwy expression--Jimmy's paranoia is starting to flip him out--it's a tremendously sinister moment.

3. "Be My Baby," the Ronettes, in Mean Streets: The synchronization of Hal Blaine's drums to the jump-cut of Charlie laying his head back on the pillow is undoubtedly what first attracted more people to Scorsese than anything else. It's an astounding shot the first time you see it, and has great resonance for as many times as you watch the film again.

4. "Life Is But a Dream," the Harptones, in GoodFellas: Henry and Karen's wedding reception, which I like to think of as the Peter, Paul & Marie scene. The mood is one of romantic exaltation similar to the Copa sequence above, culminating with Henry and Karen circulating the dancefloor as Willie Winfield hits and holds the song's final notes.

5. "Jumpin' Jack Flash," the Rolling Stones, in Mean Streets: Johnny Boy's slow-motion entrance into Tony's bar, Heather Weintraub on one arm and Sarah Klein on the other, what God sends through the door instead of the forgiveness Charlie asks for. This is the shot that best captures what Pauline Kael meant when she described Mean Streets as "hallucinatory," "operatic," and "dizzyingly sensual."

6. "Layla," Derek & the Dominoes, in GoodFellas: The fallout from Lufthansa, with dead bodies turning up in parked cars, garbage compactors, meat freezers, and elsewhere. The deaths themselves are far from tragic -bumblers like Johnny Roastbeef with his pink Coupe de Ville, or Carbone, the guy who thought that Joe Pesci really did want that coffee to go--but they feel that way thanks to the lyrical sweep of the music and Scorsese's artfully tracking camera. It's a sequence of genuine grandeur.

7. "Big Noise from Winnetka," Bob Crosby & the Bobcats, in Raging Bull: A few seconds of no particular consequence, but for me one of Scorsese's most striking shots. Jake has just followed Vickie out of a church-sponsored summer dance, and as he stands on the outside step amidst a throng of activity, he watches her pull away in a car with Salvy's crew--as always, in a state of disembodied slow-motion, punctuated by the strange whistling of the Krupa song overtop.

8. "Atlantis," Donovan, in GoodFellas: The scene where Tommy beats the living hell out of Billy Batts, the first indication that he's not just volatile but psychotic. (Pesci gives the same actor, Frank Vincent, a severe beating in Raging Bull; maybe in some future Scorsese film, Vincent will get to beat up on Pesci.) It's not so surprising that Scorsese is able to make such evocative use of doo-wop in his films-- doo-wop is an underused and largely unknown genre, and its dreaminess is perfectly suited to movies. I am surprised when he creates unforgettable moments out of overplayed classic-rock standbys, as he does here and with #'s 2, 5, and 6, songs I thought I was immune to by now.

9. "Come Rain or Come Shine," Ray Charles, in The King of Comedy: As an image, this freeze-frame underneath the opening credits describes the film succinctly: Masha's hands in full grab, Rupert on the outside looking in, a garish blue camera flash for illumination, Jerry out of view. The lyrics of "Come Rain or Come Shine" also preview the story, as Masha will vividly demonstrate to Jerry later on. What's anomalous is the song's warmth, which has no connection to the sick corrosiveness of what follows.

10. "We Belong Together," Robert & Johnny, in After Hours: After Hours sits somewhere in the middle for Scorsese, but whenever I think back on it, certain moments like this one--a slow tracking shot in on Terri Garr, the ultimate accident-waiting-to-happen in a night filled with them--come back with great clarity.

11. "Beyond the Sea," Bobby Darin, in GoodFellas: Henry's description of wiseguys serving time recalls nothing so much as the scene in The Godfather where Clemenza instructs Michael on how to make spaghetti sauce--prison as an overeater's paradise, where the preparation of food is a precise ritual and dinner doesn't commence until there's red and white on the table.

12. "Tell Me," the Rolling Stones, in Mean Streets: Charlie's crowd-pleasing antics with Diane, the stripper whose overpowering allure gives him one more thing to hide from. "Be My Baby," "Tell Me," and "Jumpin' Jack Flash" ring out one after another within the first 10 minutes of Mean Streets--it takes a while to clear your head and get your bearings again.

13. "Lonely Nights," the Hearts, in Raging Bull: A beautifully framed shot of Jake, balancing full champagne glasses on top of one another, after-hours entertainment for a dwindling array of admirers and ambulance chasers. Doo-wop is used as woozy, early-morning drunk music here, a mixture of reverie and self-pity.

14. "Speedo," the Cadillacs, in GoodFellas: Our introduction to Jimmy Conway: a neighbourhood legend at 30 for his style, his passions, and his fluid wad of hundred-dollar bills, he's as close to a perfect match for the Cadillacs' Mr. Earl as you could hope for. Young Henry is dazzled; "It was a glorious time," he recalls in narration.

15. "Late For the Sky," Jackson Browne, in Taxi Driver: Scorsese's singer-songwriter film: Travis gives Betsy a copy of Kris Kristofferson's Silver Tongued Devil LP, the Jackson Browne song plays on American Bandstand (or maybe just in Travis's head, or in Scorsese's) when Travis absentmindedly kicks over his TV set, and the whole movie would seem to be based on Harry Chapin's "Taxi," especially in the coda they share.

16. "Mickey's Monkey," the Miracles, in Mean Streets: Johnny Boy is constantly short-circuiting in Mean Streets, doing the one thing he shouldn't be doing at any given moment, and this is his most inspired bit of foolishness: as he and Charlie flee from Michael, he takes time out for a little frug around their getaway car. Charlie is immobilized by these outbursts; they come from somewhere he doesn't understand.

17. "Werewolves of London," Warren Zevon, in The Color of Money: There's obviously a lot of Johnny Boy in Tom Cruise's Vincent, nowhere more evident than in his choreographed bravura here. And just like Charlie above, Paul Newman is left to look on uncomprehendingly--Vincent's ecstasy is outside his experience, or was at least lost to him somewhere back in The Hustler.

18. "Pretend You Don't See Her," Jerry Vale, in GoodFellas: "Friday night was for wives, but Saturday night was for girlfriends"--more slow motion, the real Jerry Vale on stage, and lyrics that identify Henry's betrayal of Karen for what it is.

19. "Shotgun," Jr. Walker & the All Stars, in Who's That Knocking at My Door?: I don't remember much from Who's That Knocking? beyond a sense that "Shotgun" provided the same kind of jolt it later would in Malcolm X. There was another song I loved that was used for something like a rooftop chase, but it wasn't anything I recognized--the Bellnotes' "I've Had It" or the Dubs' "Don't Ask Me" is my best guess from looking at the published credits.

20. "Pay to Cum," Bad Brains, in After Hours: Mohawk Night at Club Berlin, a spectacle far more terrifying than it is funny--especially Scorsese's cameo, where he can be seen operating the lights from above in a kind of robotic, Nazi trance.

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The biggest factor in compiling such a list is whether you prefer GoodFellas or Mean Streets, which taken together are going to dominate almost any configuration. I have eight songs from GoodFellas, four from Mean Streets; someone else might reverse the numbers. I think I could have even squeezed all 20 songs from GoodFellas, as there are many things I left off (Cleftones, Shangri-Las, Chantels, Drifters, the whole collage of the helicopter sequence) which I like just as much as what's there, but I tried to spread the list around a bit. GoodFellas is the best film of the decade by a wide margin, and for me it edges out Raging Bull as Scorsese's greatest achievement to date. 

A quick account of some omissions...Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore has Mott the Hoople's "All the Way From Memphis," and Neil Young's "Time Fades Away" is in American Boy--great songs both--but I don't have a strong recollection of either, so I guess they didn't make much of an impression on me at the time. There's lots to choose from in "Life Lessons" from New York Stories and (obviously) The Last Waltz, but I'm not a big fan of either, and The Last Waltz is something different anyway. Cape Fear has "Patience" and "Been Caught Stealing," and maybe if I didn't hate the film so much, I'd remember them a lot better than I do. Italianamerican, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Age of Innocence don't qualify--there might be a few seconds of Snoop Doggy Dogg in The Age of Innocence but I'm not quite sure--and I still haven't seen Boxcar Bertha or New York, New York.

 

(Originally published in Popped.)

How Perfectly Goddamn Delightful It All Was: Movies in the 1990s (2000)

If it seems premature for a best-films-of-the-90s list, don’t worry, it’s not: I phoned Hollywood and they assured me there would be no good films released in 1999. I don’t have any great theories about the course of film history over the past 10 years—no theories of any kind—but I am fairly certain it was a better time for movies than the ‘80s, at least in terms of a Top 10. My ‘80s list would include Raging Bull, Comfort and Joy, The Dead Zone, Lost in America, Heart Like a Wheel, My Life as a Dog, Broadcast News, Casualties of War, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Stranger Than Paradise...well, maybe it wasn’t such a barren decade after all. But my first three picks below would also top the ‘80s list. There, that’s my theory: the ‘90s was a great decade for a Top 3.

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1. Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997): I’m glad something finally came along to knock GoodFellas from my number-one spot, else the decade would have been a disappointing rerun of how Raging Bull set the standard for the ‘80s right out of the gate and then was never equalled the rest of the way. The music, the scope, and the overall swirl would be enough to put Boogie Nights near the top of this list, but where it gets better and deeper on subsequent viewings is how much goodwill is invested in the characters, how they continually surprise you and how attached you become to them. That’s what it has in common with Nashville--as Pauline Kael wrote in 1975 about Altman’s film, "the people here are too busy being alive to be locked in place. Frauds who are halfway honest, they’re true to their own characters." When Burt Reynolds glides through his house in the film’s final scene, his signature smugness transformed into a kind of wryly abiding love for everyone who passes before him, it’s elating; the reconciliation between Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg is more moving to me than kids getting killed in The Ice Storm and The Sweet Hereafter, a couple of films from the same year that I believe critics shortsightedly--well, I won’t hedge; foolishly--deemed more complex. I don’t know what to expect from Paul Thomas Anderson from here on in; I rented Hard Eight one night, his debut from a few months earlier, and found it mannered and drained of all life. Boogie Nights is greater than the sum of its parts, and many of those parts--the "Best of My Love" opening, Julianne Moore’s "Compared to What" cocaine binge, the "Sister Christian" pyrotechnics, and especially the "Spill the Wine" pool party--are stunning.

2. GoodFellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990): This joyous, knockabout distillation of all the themes and techniques that Scorsese has been pursuing since Who’s That Knocking at My Door was so far out there, I wouldn’t be surprised if he never catches up with himself; everything he does henceforth is either going to seem like a weak echo (Casino) or a self-consciously fussy departure (The Age of Innocence). The extended tracking shot through the back corridors of the Copa that highlights GoodFellas has already become as much of a reference point for younger filmmakers as Welles and Ford were for Scorsese and his contemporaries (cf. Boogie Nights, Swingers, Big Punisher’s "Still Not a Player" video, and I bet it’s turned up elsewhere), while Joe Pesci’s rapid-fire profanity will be imitated by aspiring wiseguys like me through the next millennium. I was even tempted last year when a grade 3 student told me I was good at the board game we were playing: "Wait a minute, let me get this straight--what do you mean I’m ‘good’? You mean ‘good’ like, uh, I’m here to amuse you?..."

3. Miller’s Crossing (Joel Coen, 1990): I’m not really much of a Coen brothers fan. I’ve seen all their films except The Hudsucker Proxy, and I can’t connect Miller’s Crossing to any of them. Except for Barton Fink, I more or less like them all, but there’s a seriousness to Miller’s Crossing, a grim texture, a substance, that I just don’t see in even the best parts of Blood Simple or Fargo. I think it’s more dreamlike than Barton Fink without being so ponderous about it--I’m willing to believe that the whole conception of Miller’s Crossing began with that one single image of a hat blowing through a forest. Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, John Turturro, they’re all amazing. (Turturro’s spinelessness is like a rough sketch of William Macy in Fargo, though they’re very different characters.) My favourite line from a perfect script is delivered by the terrifying Eddie the Dane, his explanation to a trapped hitman of why the hitman can be sure that Eddie won’t kill him if the guy tells Eddie what he wants to know: "Because if you told me and I killed you and I found out you were lyin’, I wouldn’t get to kill you again, would I?" The line comes at you so fast, I had to see the movie a few times before I could properly sort it out in my mind.

4. Crumb (Terry Zwigoff, 1994): A couple of years ago, I was one of about 50 people interviewed for a Canadian documentary on record collectors. The director wasn’t sure if he’d be able to secure enough financing to finish the film, and I remember him saying to me at the time that I’d do him a professional favour if I were to kill myself, a gallows-humour reference to the unique set of circumstances under which Crumb appeared. And indeed, it’s hard to say if this documentary about cartoonist Robert Crumb would have had quite the same impact that it did absent the presence of his brother Charles. I do know that my own favourite scene involves Robert thumbing through an old sketchbook of girls he had crushes on in high school. "Jesus...Where are they now?" he wonders, speaking for himself, for Charles, and for the rest of us.

5. Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1995): Not long before Smoke appeared, I watched The Music of Chance on video one night, also based on a Paul Auster novel. The name didn’t mean anything to me at the time, and in fact I can’t remember what prompted me to rent it out; I do recall, however, that I came away from The Music of Chance feeling that I’d just watched one of the oddest things I’d seen in a while. Smoke shares some of that strangeness--William’s Hurt’s anecdote about Sir Walter Raleigh says a lot about the film’s elliptical appeal--but it’s much more grounded in the commonplace, in quiet disappointments and small victories. Smoke is also the story of two different kinds of artists, and it manages to surprise you with the depth of one of them without in any way diminishing the other.

6. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992): Pulp Fiction will top many decade-end lists; I’ll stick with its predecessor, which has better highs and none of the meandering glibness that drags down PF. (Or almost none--while I enjoy the Madonna round-table that opens Reservoir Dogs, it’s an omen of things to come.) Steve Buscemi’s at his weasely best here, but my favourite performance comes from Chris Penn, whom I’d all but forgotten at the time after laughing at his Belushi-like antics in The Wild Life a decade earlier: his befuddled tantrum when everyone reconvenes at the warehouse cuts sharper even than the infamous Stealer’s Wheel scene. Tarantino has received much deserved credit for resurrecting the careers of Travolta, Pam Grier, and Robert Forster, but what he did for Chris Penn (who went on to other good performances in Short Cuts, True Romance, and the otherwise inept Mulholland Falls) was just as valuable.

7. Boyz n the Hood (John Singleton, 1991): I don’t begrudge Cuba Gooding Jr. any of his recent success, but I have to admit those Jerry Maguire clips used to make me wince a little when I thought back to Gooding’s guarded vulnerability in Boyz--I hope he doesn’t get slotted into flashy sidekick roles for the rest of his career, having proven himself capable of so much more. Boyz’ awful, inevitable resolution, the death of Ricky (Morris Chestnut), gets to me on a purely emotional level more than any moment on this list, and it’s punctuated by a closing shot of Ice Cube that articulates, in a very simple way, a level of despair not matched by any ‘90s rap I’m aware of.

8. The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991): The tawdry creepiness of this, along with the close proximity of the Jeffrey Dahmer case, must have spooked even Jonathan Demme judging from his subsequent output. Jodie Foster’s Agent Starling is appropriately grave and dogged, while Anthony Hopkins--basing the cadences of Hannibal Lecter’s speech on Katherine Hepburn, a great bit of acting lore--has a field day. One more thing: love the suit.

9. Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993): The Player was fine when it confined itself to the studio lot, but the romance and the murder mystery were clumsy, and television’s The Larry Sanders Show was much more withering (and funnier) in its treatment of show business lowlifes. Although Short Cuts didn’t garner as much attention, it was Altman’s real return to the offhanded intricacy of his early-70s heyday.

10. Clockers (Spike Lee, 1995): Almost all of Spike Lee’s films have sequences I love--the opening credits of Crooklyn, Mo’ Better Blues’ home-movie coda, "Erotic City" and "The Cross" in Girl 6--but in those three instances and others, Lee ends up undermining his best moments with grotesque caricatures and heavy-handed talkiness. The often compelling Jungle Fever is a perfect example, which is why I’ve relegated it to the runners-up list below: Sam Jackson’s crack odyssey is the scariest portrayal of drug addiction I’ve ever seen in a movie, but to get there you have to endure a women’s encounter group grappling with the subject of racial identity in a scene that cries out for an old Ellen Cleghorne Saturday Night Live parody. Working with Martin Scorsese (co-producer) and Richard Price (who wrote the source material) may have reined Lee in somewhat on Clockers, but in any event it’s a measured, absorbing, almost flawless case study of a neighborhood murder and its aftermath. Delroy Lindo should have won some kind of award for his work here.

Close: Big Night, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, JFK, Jungle Fever, Menace II Society, The Piano, Q & A, Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, Trees Lounge, Wild Palms. It’s been a while since I last saw Q & A, a forgotten Sidney Lumet film from early in the decade, so I may end up second-guessing myself on that one; I remember it as a terse, moody throwback to some of the great film noirs of the ‘70s, with the recently resurgent Nick Nolte giving his best performance since North Dallas Forty. Wild Palms was Oliver Stone’s shameless made-for-television attempt to outweird Twin Peaks: mumbo-jumbo philosophy, exciting visuals, knockout soundtrack. JFK and Bram Stoker’s Dracula are similarly over-the-top directorial showcases, spectacular in the best sense of the word--Dracula brought back some of the same feelings I used to have as a kid sitting in front of the TV mesmerized by The Ten Commandments--rather than the numbing, mechanical kind of spectacle that has dominated movies for some time. As for the many celebrated titles that I conspicuously haven’t mentioned yet--The Crying Game, To Die For, Hoop Dreams, Leaving Las Vegas, Safe, L.A. Confidential, Happiness, Schindler’s List, The Truman Show, and 101 others that will be regularly turning up on decade-end lists a year from now--I saw them, too, or at least most of them. Some I admired, most I thought overrated, and the supposed brilliance of a few escaped me entirely. I also saw Boxing Helena, the 1993 movie it cost Kim Basinger a few million dollars to back out of. Money well spent.

(Originally published in Popped)