A lot of romantic comedies open up the
story of the central romance to include numerous instances of complicated
farcical elements to make their films more broadly appealing. That is not to be taken in a derisive context;
a lot of classic and amazing films have been made utilizing this
technique. It is the rare beast,
on the other hand, where the central romance is dissected and analyzed with
excruciating detail yet still retaining the perspective to remain funny and
insightful. Modern Romance is exactly that kind of film. Albert Brooks and Kathryn Harrold play
the couple in question that fight, break up, reconcile, and fight again on a
seemingly endless continual loop. The
first thirty minutes of the film consist solely of Brooks, post break-up number
one, wandering around his apartment in a quaalude induced state of melancholic
euphoria. He can’t understand why
anybody would leave him considering the amazing record collection he possesses
yet that is exactly the situation in which he finds himself. After a night of this kind of
half-assed soul searching he makes a pledge with himself to turn everything
around and become a completely new man.
He vows to rid himself of all thoughts of his ex and move on to bigger
and greener pastures. It should be
obvious by now that none of these promises will retain their solidity and he
will eventually wind up buying apology presents in order to win back the love
of his life. The film presents
their subsequent reconciliations as akin to the process by which an addict
slowly comes to their moment of epiphany.
The only difference here is that the moment never comes and these two remain
stuck in this snake eating its tail cycle. Another interesting twist of the genre is the fact that the
filmmakers craft the lead character’s job as central to understanding the
actions of the character. Brooks’
Robert Cole is a film editor, a job whose very nature consists of endlessly
watching and re-watching footage in order to parse some form of larger meaning
from it. An editor may also tweak
and alter said footage in order to extract even different interpretations from
the presentation. There is a scene
late in the film that examines the Foley dubbing process for a science fiction
film with such detail that I first wondered why the scene was in there in the
first place. It then occurred to
me exactly why it is there. Thinking back to the first time Brooks and Harrold
reconcile and she says to him in a moment of post-coital honesty, “You think
this is a movie romance.” Albert
Brooks is a vision of masculinity driven not by the impulse to seek the love of
another, but rather the validation of his own self-worth. His jaw-dropping lack of empathy and
self-awareness produces a lot of cringe worthy moments but at the same time indicates
a type of neediness that very few actors are brave enough to portray on
screen. Robert Cole lives his life
by endlessly revising and analyzing his actions so much so that the end of the
film reduces him to voyeuristically staring at his girlfriend while she makes a
harmless phone call in a pay-phone across the street from the cabin where he
has secured a weekend getaway.
Free from all the distractions of the modern world, he still can’t help
but refuse to participate in his own life. He instead sits back and watches, creating his own version
of the movie in his head and not at all realizing how utterly creepy and
menacing he looks from the outside.
What inspires a director to take on a
project that he or she did not initiate will always fascinate and confound
me. For every Steven Soderbergh
directed all-star cast Vegas heist movie there is a Clive Owen/Naomi Watts
political conspiracy stinker by Tom Tywker lurking in the mists. While some directors blossom with a
larger scale and a more accommodating budget, others wilt into a shallow pool
of anonymity. Gus Van Sant is
certainly in the former character and if anybody needs proof, look no further
than To Die For. Nestled between the visionary triumph
of My Own Private Idaho and his crowd-pleasing, Oscar-winning Good Will Hunting,
To Die For stands now as a gateway drug to Gus Van Sant becoming a household
name. On second thought, I doubt
very highly that Gus Van Sant is a household name even to this day, but just
play along for the sake of argument.
I also realize that I have failed to mention the existence of 1993’s Tom
Robbins adaptation, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues but that film remains unseen by
me and from everything I’ve heard, it ought to remain that way. To Die For tells the story of an
ambitious wannabe TV personality who hatches a hare brained scheme to get some
incredibly stupid teenagers to kill her husband in order to further her
career. Where Idaho was
sympathetic and compassionate, To Die For is cynical and heartless. While that may sound as a put down, I
don’t mean it that way at all because this is the most entertaining and purely
enjoyable film Gus Van Sant has ever made. In re-watching it, I thought that it would make a perfect
double feature with last year’s Bernie in terms of its zesty and satirical take
on small town crime. Bernie even
apes a device from this film in the fake documentary style interviews with the
characters. To be fair, Bernie
also includes testimonials from some actual people from the town where the real
life story took place, but both take significant advantage of their colorful
cast of characters to flesh out the various perspectives at play here. Speaking of perspectives, the dexterity
with which Van Sant moves between the different mediums and shooting styles
inherent to cinema, reality TV, public access, and day time talk shows is truly
remarkable. Especially when
compared to an over-wrought visual assault like Natural Born Killers, Van Sant
proves his satirical hand is much more subtle and effective than the director
for hire label would have you believe.
It’s not exactly groundbreaking, boundary pushing cinema, but it is
simply way too much fun to ignore.
To Die For proved that Gus Van Sant is a much trickier, more
surprisingly adaptive filmmaker than initially thought. Little did we know how many more
surprises he had yet to show us.
To steal an analogy from the Eels’ Mark
Oliver Everett, if Drugstore Cowboy was Gus Van Sant’s greeting card to the
world, then My Own Private Idaho was
the phone call at three am that nobody wanted to answer. Idaho is the conclusion of an unofficial
trilogy preceded by Cowboy and beginning with his first feature, Mala
Noche. The idea of an unofficial
trilogy would come back to Van Sant later in his career with the ultra
conceptual death trilogy consisting of Gerry, Elephant, and Last Days. Although, if you want to get really
technical with the whole thing, that second trilogy is really a quadrilogy when
you include 2007’s Paranoid Park.
The point of all this is to begin to examine Van Sant the storyteller in
relation to Van Sant the provocateur.
While he may not have been as outrageous as some of his contemporaries,
in his own quiet way, his films really helped changed the face of cinema. He took bigger and bolder visual risks
with Idaho and the narrative conceit of adapting Shakespeare for modern day
male hustlers in the Pacific Northwest is a gamble that threatens to throw the
film off-balance, but ultimately reveals its vital purpose at the end. In expanding the scope and ambition of
his two previous films, Van Sant created a unique calibration between the head
and the heart. What’s most
striking about it is how masterfully Van Sant re-creates the subjective
experience of the main character, Mike as played by River Phoenix. We feel the untethered and whimsical
nature of his thoughts and his bouts of narcolepsy give the story structure the
free-floating form of his own sub conscious. Van Sant has always been attracted to the idea of a group of
outsiders attempting to form their own community and if necessary traveling
somewhere completely new and different to do so. That being said, I am hard pressed to think of another film
he’s done that feels as much like a raw nerve as this one, or where that theme
has been applied as successfully. The
grumblings about this film complain of the overly accentuated construction of
the Shakespeare adaptation but in revisiting the film, it is my understanding
that without this subplot and Keanu Reeves’ performance, the film would lose
part of that necessary emotional element. The character of Scott is the wealthy scion of the
Mayor of Portland whose engagement with street hustling is merely a performance
designed to piss off the powers that be in his family. Inherent in the idea of performance is
that the façade may be dropped at a moment’s notice for it is not real. Mike does not understand this and comes
to see Scott as his personal and romantic savior. Thus, the devolution of their friendship is all the more
heartbreaking when we finally see, at the end, what completely different
universes these two inhabit. Scott
has the beautiful girlfriend and the limousine, while Mike is left to pass out
on the side of the road he’s seen thousands of times before in his life. The eerie maliciousness and cruelty of
Reeves’ final scene renders this division so palpable that the mind races to
wonder how these two would have ever wound up together in the first place, yet it
seemed to make such perfect sense at the time. My Own Private Idaho is the outsider Americana road trip at
its most tender and compassionate.
That sounds pretty revolutionary to me.
In trying to figure out the best point of
entry into the varied and beguiling filmography of Gus Van Sant, I initially thought
the place to start would be the film that introduced me to him. That film is decidedly not Drugstore Cowboy, but rather his Oscar-winning
mainstream success, Good Will Hunting.
That being said, Good Will Hunting doesn’t really represent the enormous
gifts that Mr. Van Sant often utilizes at his disposal. Plus I was really in the mood to watch
Drugstore Cowboy last night. I
first encountered Drugstore Cowboy in a high school class that had something to
do with acting and writing. I
really wish I could remember what the class was about but we wrote and
performed scenes, acted in previously published scripted scenes, and watched
the occasional film. For a bit of
high school Ethan Gus Van Sant interconnected trivia, one of my assignments was
to perform a scene from Good Will Hunting with a scene partner. If anybody reading this knows Gus Van
Sant, please inform of this so that he and I may become “pals.” Drugstore Cowboy immediately struck a
chord with me because it presents a potentially hectoring and salacious subject
matter with the utmost matter of factness. Bob, Diane, Rick, and Nadine aren’t horrible monsters
fiendishly kidnapping young innocents to score another fix for their deadly
addiction. Van Sant presents the
primary affliction of their lives to be boredom and hopelessness while drug
abuse and petty crime are the salvation rather than the root of their
troubles. Perhaps this is what
keyed me into Van Sant’s wavelength before I really knew what he was about as a
filmmaker. He is not the director
who stamps his capital T themes on your forehead with every shot; he is an
observer and much more interested in the lyrically mundane reality of every day
life. In re-watching Drugstore
Cowboy again I was very impressed with the way Van Sant presents not only the de-saturated
desolation of a rudderless existence, but also the moments of bliss that are
birthed from that. The particulars
of this story involve drugs but as Matt Dillon’s Bob points out late in the
film, it could really be anything just as long as it gets you high. A quick word about Matt Dillon in this
role this has got to be the best performance the guy has ever committed to
film. The way he maneuvers from pretending
to be the leader of an international drug ring to sounding like a frightened
child babbling on about curses and hexes is truly heartbreaking. The fact that he can do all this within
the breath of one scene is what makes the performance a stand out. He never resorts to the clichéd tics of
drug addiction and he never falls into the trap of making clean Bob the
ultimately superior version of addict Bob. A friend of mine said it best when
describing what he admired about the film; “Drugstore Cowboy understands
something about drugs that no other film claiming to be about the subject does:
you take drugs because it makes you feel good.” That sentiment sums up the film as a whole, for the
characters of Drugstore Cowboy are always going to be stuck with their lives. They can pretend to be criminals,
addicts, and cowboys all they want, but in the end, it’s just another damp and
gray day in Portland.
Miramax released Smoke in 1995, written by Paul Auster and directed by Wayne Wang. Interestingly enough, the possessive credit at the start of the movie reads: A Film By Wayne Wang and Paul Auster. It is definitely the product of two distinct personalities. Smoke was one of those Miramax Multiplex Art House movies that proliferated in the mid-90’s. I just coined that term so don’t bother looking it up, and if isn’t legit yet, try to spread it around. I’m referring to films made in the wake of Good Will Hunting and Pulp Fiction, the kinds of films Miramax hung their banner on for so many years. They were independent films, but they weren’t what you’d call provocative “art-house” movies. They had no intentions of rubbing your face in shit. At the same time, they weren’t glossed up the wazoo like big studio productions. There was a strong amount of integrity to these movies. They were singular visions, yet accessible at the same time. Smoke Signals, Chasing Amy, Brassed Off, Cop Land, and Rounders are the prime examples of how I was first introduced to “independent cinema.” A term, which seems fairly meaningless now, considering every single one of those, was actually released by the Walt Disney Company. I guess such distinctions escaped me at the time. I also remember yearning to one day have that Miramax logo in front of a film I had contributed to in some way. I thought that was the mountaintop and the rainbow behind it, the official sign that you’d made it.
I’ll give you all a minute to laugh at my inane naiveté. Yes, I had (and still have) a very dim grasp of the movie industry but I wasn’t even 14 yet, so lay off. Before this turns into a Miramax love-fest, I should explain that the reason for all this is to say; these movies introduced me to the idea that not everything had to have shoot-outs or ten explosions every five minutes to be worthy of my time. It could just be a movie about people…talking.
Talking, and all of its inherent glories, is precisely what Smoke has on its mind. The pleasures one takes from a conversation, the shared experiences, and that intangible connection are all created by the act of conversing. They are created and released into the atmosphere, only to disperse and evaporate instantly. It can be seen, heard and tasted, but the moment one tries to touch it, it’s gone. This all sounds a lot like…okay, I think I’ve laid it on pretty thick here.
The movie is the opposite of this, I should say, It’s light, witty, and quick on it’s feet. The story revolves around Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) who runs a cigar store on the corner of 16th Street and Prospect Park West in Brooklyn. The store is frequented by Paul Benjamin, (William Hurt) a writer struggling with the still-fresh random shooting death of his wife. Paul and Auggie have a long-standing friendship. As the film transpires, certain events occur to take Auggie and Paul out of their comfort zone, as they are each confronted by lost children. I suppose it is a bit disingenuous to describe the plot in a beat-by-beat action. Besides, I’m supposed to be talking about music, right? The film has more of a hangout vibe as it is, situations occur and characters react, but it is all within the realm of naturalistic forward momentum. That’s not to say there aren’t certain contrivances, moments where you can feel the writer struggling to pull everything together into some sort of cohesive “what does it all mean” statement, but those are few and far between. As it is, the film likes to sit back and observe these characters and more importantly, hear them talk.
This takes us to the final two sequences in the film. One is a lengthy monologue delivered by Auggie to Paul in a diner somewhere in Brooklyn. Paul has informed Auggie that the New York Times has asked him for a Christmas story to be published on Christmas day. Paul claims to not know any stories, so in exchange for lunch, Auggie agrees to share one with him. He claims that every word of is true. The second scene is played out during the film’s credits. It is a black and white, slow motion visual interpretation of Auggie’s story. The shot that connects the two sequences is a type- writer banging out the words: “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story.” We hear the story, but we also see it re-constructed by Paul Benjamin for his piece in the times. (Note: Further wormhole inducing information, Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story was actually published in the New York Times on Christmas Day by Paul Auster). In the end, we are left with one story, but many different ways of telling it.
Over the black and white recreation of the story, the filmmakers used the song, “Innocent When You Dream” by Tom Waits. It was this exact scene; I remember it perfectly, when the film seared itself into my mind. From first viewing, this felt like the perfect ending to me. It doesn’t serve any story purpose, it doesn’t tie-up any of the still dangling threads we’ve just spent ninety minutes with, yet it ends on such grace that none of it matters anymore. I think a lot of that warmth has to do with the Waits song. There’s a lot of comfort to its accordion, merry-go-round melody and stumbling piano twinkles, and Waits’ voice is the perfect weapon to undercut any sneaky sentiment. What we have is, in effect, a time less song, one that very strongly indicates a yearning for the past, but in it’s lack of specificity in regards to catering to the popular music trends in which it was created, can be about a feeling we’ll always have. It’s the musical equivalent of smoke. Throw in the fact that Waits uses several of his own vocal tracks to make it sound like a drunken sing-a-long at a bar full of broken down losers and you have that ephemeral spirit of the film wrapped up in a perfect marriage of audio and visuals. As the song plays, the images are definitely the most stylized we’ve seen yet. Yet they never come across as flashy or meant to induce a music video by any stretch of the imagination. Neither do they ever plead with us to feel a certain way about the characters (this is, after all, a story of a man who steals a camera from an old blind woman). The images take their time, allowing the song to intermingle with the silent footage in ways that both compliment and enhance one another. The song gives this final sequence an almost fable-like quality. We quickly understand that it doesn’t really matter if it happened this way to the exact letter. What’s important is that Auggie gave Paul the story as a gift and now that story has taken on an identity of its own. The song is a punch-drunk, bleary-eyed howl of anguish. The visuals are more contemplative but we can see in Auggie’s fumbling attempt at making a connection with another human being that they are after the same thing. It is in that dichotomy, I believe, that the film achieves its true moment of grace. We can make a lot of noise about it, or we can sit down and share a meal with each other in silence. Either way, whatever it is we’re looking for and eventually find, will be gone by the time we realize it. That is why we keep looking, writing, smoking, talking, and dreaming.
One of the many pleasures of being a
young, enterprising moviegoer is that every tired cinematic trick feels like a
shot in the arm to you. Well-worn
tropes are like newly minted gems and the hoariest of clichés are presented as
though discovered for the first time.
Crimson Tide is a perfect
example of that because it traffics in pretty much every stylistic trope of the
submarine movie genre yet emphasizes the human suspense in a way that makes it
feel fresh and brand new. I can
literally remember my palms sweating while watching this film and yet I must
have known in my heart of hearts that the world was not going to be obliterated
in a nuclear hell storm at the end of it.
That’s the joy of youth: you always suspect the worst possible outcome
for any given event. Crimson Tide
is so fascinating to me because it seems so quaint for a movie that’s not even
of legal drinking age yet. The
remarkably restrained direction of the late Tony Scott makes it look like an
Ozu film in comparison to his later work (seriously, have you seen
Domino?). I will give him full
credit for his depiction of the two leads played by Gene Hackmen and Denzel
Washington (with all due credit to the screenwriters too of course). As the two dueling protagonists who squabble
about the decision to fire nuclear weapons at Russia, neither one is right and
neither one is wrong. Both men are
seen as having legitimate points of view; it’s just that they differ in their
methods based on age and experience.
It should be noted that we are ultimately meant to side with the
Washington character only because his decision will not result in a nuclear
holocaust, but the Hackmen character is never presented as some sort of
kill-crazy-foaming-at-the-mouth villain.
He could have very easily turned into Tom Berenger from Platoon but the filmmakers
made a wise choice and one that considerably adds to the suspense. This film is also a marker of a time
when super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer actually made movies for every single
member of the audience as opposed to just children. Not that I’m asserting that he was ever a kind of creative
genius but he used to have an uncanny knack for assembling talent and
coordinating projects that at least had a college age level of maturity. The funny thing about all this is that
I’m sure there was another generation of filmgoers at the time of this film’s
release bemoaning the loss of quality films at the multiplex. They were probably making the exact
same complaints as I am now only they were doing it through fan zines and
primitive message boards as opposed to a swanky DIY blog. I’m just saying that things really do
never change. Luckily, Crimson
Tide came to me at the right age and at the right time and for whatever it’s
flaws it is about as tight a piece of claustrophobic action suspense filmmaking
that I can think of from the last twenty years. Add to that a faint level of
sophistication and believable, morally challenged characters and you’ve got
yourself a pretty damn good movie.
The idea of an action movie such as this being made without a villain
today seems wildly implausible to me and Bruckheimer certainly would not make
it. Yet, it is that ephemeral quality
that I believe has contributed to Crimson Tide’s lasting legacy. It may not be the flawlessly immaculate
piece of cinema I remember it being, but we most certainly don’t have anything
else like it today.
I don’t have too much to say about Bryan
Singer’s 1995 indie genre sensation, The
Usual Suspects. It is a film
that has gained a certain amount of esteem in some circles while also garnering
a very serious backlash in others.
I would say to those groups that you are both doing it wrong while
planting my feet firmly in the non-committal middle. Don’t get me wrong, it is ingeniously entertaining, the cast
is exemplary from top to bottom, and the famous twist at the end while more
satisfying in concept than it is in its schematic execution, does give the film
a nice needed jolt of daring. It
is in those final moments that the complete vision of the film emerges from the
smoky ruins and it is there that one might see more of a film school prank than
a coherent vision. As I said, you
can skate by very easily on a high entertainment quotient. What I will choose to focus on in this
entry is the experience of seeing the film for the first time at the tender age
of eleven. This will be a question
I pose to my beloved readers in that, do you think it’s necessarily shocking
that an eleven year old might have walked out of this film thoroughly confused
as to the meaning of the proceedings that just unspooled in front of him? I only ask for a friend of mine…ah, who
am I kidding, it was me. I
remember it so vividly, walking out of the theater and turning to a family
member and asking: “so…what happened?”
Again, being the age that I was and the fact that the entire structure
of the film seems to sort of beg this question to be asked makes this moment
all the more unremarkable. I only
bring it up because it would become a habit of mine at much more embarrassing ages
later in life when very obvious narrative twists would become diabolical moves
in a game of eleventh dimensional chess that I was entirely ill-equipped to
decipher. That and I got
distracted very easily sometimes during bad movies. I now want to wrap this up by sharing some hometown Delaware
lore with all of you. Considering
most of the people who read this blog are actually from Delaware, this may all be an exercise in futility but I will
trudge forth nonetheless. There
was a theater in the Concord Mall shopping center known simply as the Concord
Mall 2 and it is in this theater where we saw The Usual Suspects. We also saw Pulp Fiction, Smoke
Signals, Pecker, and Gremlins 2 for that matter, it was a theater that played
any and all kinds of films. To
this day I never really got a grasp on what the objective of the place was,
seeing as how it volleyed back and forth between the art house world and that
of mainstream Hollywood cinema.
It’s just amazing to think there was a theater merely fifteen minutes
away from the house where I grew up that was playing the shit only in available
in the bigger, cooler cities. It
was all so accessible that I find it kind of mind boggling. I have to say this theater played a
large part in my growing appreciation for the medium. Were it not for the easy access afforded by the Concord Mall
2, I’m sure dozens of titles on my favorites of all time lists would have
easily slipped through the cracks.
To whoever owned and operated that theater for all those years, I offer
you my sincerest gratitude from the very bottom of my heart. I can’t remember the exact year it
closed but it was a very devastating development for me. The Best Buy that stands in its stead
now has discarded any traces of that grand old movie palace that once was. Where I was once making monumental
cinematic discoveries people can now buy Catwoman, Jeepers Creepers 2, and Without
a Paddle: Nature’s Calling at low, low, low prices.
Let me get one thing straight, I am by no
means implying that Broken Arrow is
John Woo’s best film. It’s not
even a very good film, largely devoid of the kind of personal thematic
obsessions that run rampant in his Hong Kong filmmaking. It’s an hour and forty-eight minute
long live action cartoon blatantly ignoring any due diligence to the rules of
logic or physics. I’m sure there
is a sub section of those reading this blog who would string me up just for the
thought of putting Broken Arrow on
here before Hard Boiled. The best
I can offer is I had never heard of director John Woo before this film and if
it weren’t for the dedicated efforts of the HBO First Look team, I probably
never would have. The promotional
material for the film, its trailers and whatnot did their best to hide Woo’s
name but any blossoming cinephile could sniff it out on HBO or in the pages of
Entertainment Weekly. The making
of showed clips from his earlier films where a man leapt into the air in slow
motion while firing a shotgun at a motorcycle that caught fire and exploded
from the impact. It was like
someone had scooped out the contents of my brain and run it through a projector
at twenty-four frames per second. I
knew that whatever this “John Woo” was selling, I ought to be buying. This was also back in the halcyon days
of John Travolta’s second career as an energized character actor/movie
star. Re-entering the scene with
Pulp Fiction, he had an indispensible amount of cache and funneled that into
some promising prospects (and some not so promising ones, White Man’s Burden
comes to mind). Add the cherry on
top in the form of screenwriter Graham Yost, (now of the great Justified-fame
then of Speed-fame) and all signs indicated that this film had the necessary
ingredients to be an unqualified success.
The key to most successful action films is pacing and the ingenuity of
the action set pieces. Following
the Speed blue print, Broken Arrow is another perpetual motion machine that
seems to be hurtling towards its finale and never takes itself too seriously.
The motivations and directives are simple and to the point, while Woo
wastes very little time with draggy scenes of exposition. It doesn’t hurt that a completely
bugged out Travolta very easily walks away with the entire picture. Where the film really shines is in the
action sequences that combine the Peckinpah-meets-Gene Kelly choreography
favored by Woo with a bright primary color palette that seems reminiscent of
early the Looney Tunes cartoons.
Think of Travolta as the Coyote and Christian Slater as the Road Runner
only with the Road Runner pursuing the Coyote and the Coyote in possession of a
handful of nuclear warheads. Okay,
maybe the analogy completely falls apart but the fact remains that Woo’s innate
skill with action and visual poetry blast Broken Arrow out of the realm of
direct to video time waster and into that of intoxicating spectacle. For me, the film is best remembered as
a gateway drug into the highly addictive cinematic universe of John Woo and for
that I will be forever grateful. As
ridiculous as it may sound, Broken Arrow heavily influenced the way I viewed
action films going forward. I
realized that they no longer needed to be relegated to the labels of “junk” or “trash”. Surely those labels will continue to
rightly apply, but in the meantime there will always be filmmakers like Woo who
aspire to do more, who aspire to make beauty out of the chaos.
My introduction to the music of Nick
Drake came through the most pedestrian of means: as musical accompaniment to a
Volkswagen commercial. In my auditory
ignorance, I remember mistaking Drake’s soulful baritone for that of Eddie
Vedder’s. When you’re young and
obsessed with one particular musical act, everything begins to sound exactly like
that, whether warranted or not. As
I was still not the least bit Internet savvy, I hesitated before properly
reckoning with the Nick Drake catalogue.
Then came the appearance of Fly in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums
and that seemed to all but clinch the deal for me. The gorgeous melody, haunting vocals, and evocative guitar
playing made the whole thing seem like a no brainer. Through the wisdom of my sister, Tess, who immediately
perceived a kinship between my musical tastes and Mr. Drakes music, I began
consuming his musical catalogue at a ravenous pace. Then came the painful moment for any Nick Drake fan when one
learns that there would be no more albums after Pink Moon and that his own life
was cut tragically short at the age of twenty-six. This is all a way of introduction to the fact that several
years later, my brother Nate and I were sitting in a tiny theater on east 12th
street in Greenwich Village about to watch A
Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, a documentary on the life of Nick
Drake. At forty-eight minutes, it
barely qualifies as a feature; in fact I’m not even sure what the precise
ruling is on this film. The
length, however, is perfect in its way in that the film reflects the compacted
nature of Mr. Drake’s life.
Everything seemed to happen to him all at once and he could feel the
entirety of living existence on a magnified scale and naturally, that state of
being can’t sustain itself for very long.
The film itself does a lovely job of putting the viewer inside the
headspace of its subject. There
are gorgeously rendered shots gliding and floating through Nick’s childhood
home and subsequent resting place married to early demos of his music where one
feels as though they are seeing the world, as Nick would have. He was a ghostly apparition examining
the world around him and expressing himself through the creations in his head,
the only way he knew how. Nick’s
collaborators also get a decent say in his story and in one miraculous sequence,
the demonstration of a track mix reveals the lengths to which Nick demonstrably
inspired those around him. So
we are sitting in the theater and as the forty-eight minutes unspool in front
of us, something remarkable occurs to me.
At the end of the film, Nick’s sister, Gabrielle (a woman who has worked
tirelessly to preserve the legacy of her brother and mother) comments upon the
cruel twist of fate that the source of Nick’s depression was that his music
didn’t reach anybody or help anybody in his time. I then realized that here we are, the group of us, sitting
in this tiny theater in New York, watching a film about a musician from the
other side of the world who was though to be long forgotten for over two
decades. Even the acclaim he has
received now wouldn’t even dare to aspire to the level of adulation today’s pop
stars. There was no marketing blitz
behind this movie, no million-dollar ad campaign, and nobody was here because
somebody told him or her to be (then again, I’m sure a few people were dragged
so take what I say with a grain of salt).
For the most part, everybody in that theater was there because they
genuinely loved and have been touched by Nick Drake’s music. His music accomplished exactly what he
set out to do. It’s a sad story
any way you spin it, the only solace being now it has the best possible ending
and it will continue for generations to come.
We are three weeks off from the April 12th
release date of writer-director Terrence Malick’s new film, To The Wonder. If you had told me fifteen years ago
that I would only have to wait two years between Malick pictures, I would have
punched you in the face and pushed you into oncoming traffic. To kick off the celebration here at
365Films, I will do an entry each week (I’ll actually have to fudge it somewhat
because I thought of this last minute) on every single title in Malick’s
filmography. Considering he
has only five thus far, I should be able to squeeze every one in the allotted
time. I saw Badlands right around the end of the 20th century. The very idea of filmmaking had been
revolutionized for me with 1998’s The Thin Red Line, Malick’s first film in
twenty years since Days of Heaven, and I wanted to see where it all began. At first blush, I wasn’t as knocked out
by Badlands as I was by Line. For
starters it’s a very odd movie, certain sequences have the most peculiar and
leisurely pace to them and it goes out of its way to avoid every possible
cliché of the lovers on the run genre.
Then I started to watch it again several years later in more public
arenas and I realized that the film is the closest Malick will ever come in his
directorial efforts to an out and out comedy. The disconnect between what the characters are actually doing
versus what they say and think they are doing leads to several hilarious
observations on Malick’s part. An
example of this is when Kit and Holly are driving away from Cato’s farm where
Kit shot and killed his friend and possibly killed a couple after forcing them
into a storm cellar. They drive by
a nearly over turned, beat up car on the side of the road and Kit points out:
“Hey, look. They’re probably gonna
blame that on me too.
Bastards.” The idea is that
Kit has just killed as many as seven people yet, in his mind, he has the
temerity to act as if this situation has been hoisted upon him and he is
blameless for his actions. On top
of that, he feels nothing but contempt for the authorities that are after him
when there is nothing but flat, empty, and wide-open space surrounding him and
Holly. That’s just a small example
of a beguilingly rich film abundant with moments just like that. Instances of cinematic life that
effortlessly glides between comedy, drama, and tragedy but even that sounds too
simplistic a summation. I tend to
get tongue tied when trying to break down what it is about Malick’s cinematic
universe that pulls me into it every time. He is, for me, the most indescribable of great American
directors. I know exactly what it
is that I’m watching but damned if I’d be able to articulate to someone why it
is that way. The best I can do I
say his technique here is an exacting method of wandering philosophical
observation combined with a genuine love of the natural world that is honest
enough to never dip into phony sentiment.
Badlands is a story about two children pretending to be outlaws in a
world where their violent actions are met with more of a puzzled indifference
than out and out disgust. It is,
at first glance, a scaled down version of Malick. The conflicting argument could also be made (not by me) that
this is perhaps the purest and most successful distillation of his gifts. That it is free from all the poetic
ruminations that have become more and more prevalent in his style since
then. However you look at it,
Badlands to this day is a film like no other. And if you are patient and cooperative with its rhythms, the
rewards will pay off exponentially every time you sit down to watch it. It is simply put, a masterpiece.
And now for the lighter side of things, which
is funny, because the Toy Story films
would only get substantially darker and bleaker as the series went on. However, the introductory film remains
one of the loveliest ever made.
Computer Graphics had already made their big splash several years prior
with The Abyss, T2, and Jurassic Park but something about Toy Story felt
special to me. I’m sure a real
film historian would slap me across the face for writing this but seeing the
film for the first time is as close as my generation will come to seeing color
film for the first time or sync sound.
It was like discovering a brand new medium and all the incredible
possibilities that dwelled within it.
It’s considerably telling that Toy Story’s main thematic concern is a
flashy, new tricked out toy replacing the tried and true faithful cowboy pull
string doll. Buzz is Pixar and
Woody is traditional hand drawn animation and in the films utopian view of
society they learn to co-exist and get equal attention as part of the
cornucopia of wonders that live in Andy’s room. At the same time there is a simplicity to the film that is
so damn refreshing when compared to today’s current crop of animated,
over-achieving crap piles. This
was six years before the Shrek revolution when Dreamworks heralded in the age
of ironic winking and pop culture grasping replacing actual story telling. Toy Story almost looks quaint by today’s
standards and to think that when it was released, it was considered
revolutionary. It definitely was
that, especially by the ever-decreasing standards of what passes for “kids
movies.” One might be
noticing a trend here in that I take the utmost offense at lousy films aimed at
children and young adults. Seriously,
that shit needs to stop. Where was
I? Oh right, taking a cue from Pixar’s guardian angel and inspiration, Hayao Miyazaki,
Toy Story luxuriates in its setting and feels no need to plow thoughtlessly into
its plot. It may not have Miyazaki’s
wonderful eccentricities, but they’ve definitely got his pace down cold. This is a film that could have very
easily turned into a seventy seven minute advertisement for all those
entertaining Mattel products (to use just one example) and the fact that the
filmmakers took those brands and created their own painfully unique and human
characters out of them is a testament to their talents. If you’ll jump ahead with me sixteen years
later as I’m sitting in a theater with Nate about to watch the slightly dull
but beautiful Cars 2 (it’s really not that bed, get over it everybody) when the
short film that precedes all Pixar films comes on screen. It’s a Toy Story short and as pathetic
as it sounds, I am so happy to see these characters again. Did I have any idea back in 1995 that I
would spend the next sixteen years growing up with these characters? And be utterly delighted just to see
them again no matter what the context? No. But I really, really hoped I would
be. Toy Story is the kind of film
that makes you want to have kids, if for no other reason than to pass films
like this onto them. Just to be clear,
I said that is the ONLY reason to ever have kids. I hope nobody misunderstood me on that one.
