Finding Nemo

365 Films

Entry #136

Finding Nemo (2003)

Directed by Andrew Stanton

One of my most distinct memories of Finding Nemo isn’t from the actual film itself but rather Roger Ebert’s unsurprisingly glowing appraisal of it.  In his review, he goes on at great length about he wanted to sit as close as he possibly could to the screen just to absorb the colors and the textures of the animation.  I had never heard anybody so eloquently describe a cartoon in such a way.  Then watching the film, I immediately grasped on to what he was seeing and experienced it in the exact same way.  In Nemo, the Pixar animators did something truly remarkable with the characters and environments in that they were able to blend the outlandish designs of the cartoon world with the radiant wonders of the real world.  The oceanic landscapes conjured up in Finding Nemo don’t look anything like the real world but rather we wish the real world looked more like it.  The best way to describe the advancement in animation that this film marked is to compare it to the previous film, Monsters, Inc.  In that film, while it is consistently beautiful, the truly eye popping sequence occurs late in the game when we venture into the door storage facility.  The sight almost becomes too much to take in and makes our eyeballs seem weak and feeble.  What I’d say about Finding Nemo is, that kind of eyeball deficiency occurs about every five minutes.  Each new sequence or transitional cut brings with it an image that makes one’s jaw drop to the floor.  Whether it is the fish tank in the dentist’s office or the quietly menacing clouds of jellyfish, the film seems to be reinventing animation grammar as it goes along.  Now all of that would be supremely meaningless without an actual movie underneath to support all of it.  If anybody else can come up with another film aimed at children with the Disney logo attached to it where the over-arching theme is that of accepting the random chaos of the universe, I would be mighty impressed.   In the meantime, we have Finding Nemo, a moving testament to the perils preciousness of parenthood and a rousing adventure to boot   One last thing, if we ever get around to awarding voice acting or making a special category for it, Ellen DeGeneres and Albert Brooks certainly deserve some sort of compensatory award for their efforts here.   

Smoke Signals

365 Films

Entry #135

Smoke Signals (1998)

Directed by Chris Eyre

             There was a time when I was not entirely distrustful of every hyped-up film that came out of Sundance and Smoke Signals continues to stand as a perfectly full-blooded example of all that the festival is capable of.  Touted as the first film ever written, produced, directed by and starring Native Americans, Smoke Signals held the promise for the arrival of several significant new voices on the independent film scene.  That several of those voices did not exactly flourish with their subsequent projects is more a testament to the harsh mistress that is the perpetual indie hype machine.  It’s a shame because more than being an announcement of new talent, Smoke Signals is an incredibly rich and giving film, the kind that seems to be welcoming you in for an afternoon visit.  That may strike some of you as the equivalent of a trip to blands-ville, but the fact of the matter is Smoke Signals is far from any such cynical accusations.  Richly steeped in Native American tradition but filtered through a modern and skeptical perspective, Smoke Signals invites you to laugh with and not mourn its characters.  From a narrative perspective, the tale is fairly straightforward and not unlike the typical indie projects that usually burst out onto the scene straight from Sundance.  You got your embittered father son relationship, a death in the family, and the subsequent road trip/last attempt at salvation, which is usually successful.     Where Smoke Signals succeeds and others have failed miserably is in its quiet commitment to capturing the pace and tempo of life in this particular part of the country.  A reservation where the rest of the United States is considered foreign territory, the Coeur D’Alene stands as a scrap of land populated by ghosts both living and those who have since passed.  As one character simply states in the film “you don’t need money on the reservation” and director Chris Eyre captures that knowing sense of isolation with a specificity that helps paint the individual story of a father and son on a much larger and more mythic Native American landscape.  The performances are all quietly heart-breaking in their own way, and Sherman Alexie’s screenplay, while a somewhat watered down version of his magnificent short stories, still captures the odd beats and humorous observations that occupy his best work.  I don’t think I’ll ever forget the line “12 years old, and he was like some kind of indigenous angel or something.' Cept maybe his wings were made out of TV dinner trays!” because it so elegantly encapsulates all that is special about Alexie’s writing.  Finally, I would be remiss to mention the cultural impact that Smoke Signals had not on the population at large but amongst my friends and I in high school.  Don’t ask me to explain it (other than the fact that we were a bunch of dorks, bear in mind I’m speaking only for myself here) but for some reason a film about Native Americans living on a reservation in Idaho some thousands of miles away really struck a chord with a bunch of dopey white kids living in Wilmington, Delaware.  We quoted it endlessly, I bought the screenplay and obsessively pored over every detail, and Thomas’ t-shirt even inspired a band by the name of Frybread Power.  I think that in and of itself is a testament to the lovely and generous spirit that pervades every frame of this film.  It’s full of heartache, loneliness, death, and alcoholism and but unlike every other Sundance brethren of its ilk, it never forgets to be about the people instead of their pain.  

Monsters, inc.

365 Films

Entry #134

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Directed by Pete Docter

I remember anticipating Monsters, Inc. with a certain amount of trepidation.  Sure, Toy Story 2 had proven that Pixar was the real deal but this was the first film not to be directed by Pixar stalwart, John Lasseter.  How could anybody else come even remotely close to matching the talent that Lasseter had proven to be.  Luckily, director Pete Docter and co-directors Lee Unkrich and David Silverman (of The Simpsons fame) were far more than capable in carrying the Pixar baton.  If anything, Monsters reminded us how much a filmmaking studio like Pixar could benefit from a little organizational shake-up such as this one.  Pushing the technological envelope as well as their own story telling limits, Monsters was the start of the Pixar revolution, the film that finally announced to the world what the studio was truly capable of accomplishing.  Furthering the world building ingenuity on display in the two Toy Story films and A Bug’s Life, one get the sense from Monsters that the filmmakers were truly pushing themselves.  Moving away from the nostalgic confines of the great outdoors or a child’s bedroom allowed the story a certain kind of freedom in which to develop what has become a thematic obsession for the studio: the perilous terrain of childhood.  In a genius stroke, the voice of Boo was recorded by simply capturing the natural sounds of a child at play (one who happened to be the daughter of a Pixar story artist).  The result is that Boo never comes off as precocious or obnoxious in the way that so many other animated children have the tendency to be.  The same goes for the entirety of the film itself, for when it was released the inevitable comparisons were made to DreamWorks’ enterprising Shrek franchise.  Shrek somehow beat out Monsters for the animated Oscar (that’s a stain that should have shamed some people into retirement) and the general vibe of the culture that year indicated that the cool-vibe was decidedly in Shrek’s court.  Time and an insufferable amount of sequels (we’ll see how the recently released Monsters University holds up) have not been kind to the Shrek franchise, while Monsters has been allowed to age gracefully.  The result is that now we can see Monsters’ incredibly personal proclamation about the childhood glories of hope and wonder in much better definition than before and perhaps most importantly, the film lives up to the sentiment.  Devoid of dated pop culture references scattered throughout and obnoxious celebrity voice over work that distracts more than it delights, Monsters, Inc. is a touching testament to the craft and grace required for a piece of art to truly engage the mind of a child.  That so many other pretenders of the medium claim to do the same thing is an insult at best and damaging to a young mind at worse.  The fact that it all culminates with one of the most satisfying final shots in all of cinema (let alone animation) speaks volumes to the care and integrity that ring loudly throughout Pixar’s best work, of which Monsters is most definitely a part.   

The Truman Show

365 Films

Entry #132

The Truman Show (1998)

Directed by Peter Weir

When The Truman Show was announced, the hype machine couldn’t help but relentlessly ponder what would result from Jim Carrey’s first dramatic performance.  To be fair, The Cable Guy, released two years prior was certainly an antecedent but that was more of an examination of the darker shades of Carrey’s comedic persona than an out and out dramatic performance.  The Truman Show’s concept of a single man literally born, raised and unwittingly living a manipulated life under the guise of a television show seemed prescient even in the year of its release.  Everybody seemed to know where our national fixations where headed but what’s almost quaint about the film from today’s perspective is the idea that the entire world, let alone the nation would unite around just ONE television personality.  Mindlessly flipping through today’s offerings of hyperactive, cut to shit, and obnoxiously loud reality TV shows almost makes me yearn for a show that had the quiet grace and patient pace of The Truman Show.  That being said, The Truman Show remains to this day a caustically funny and touchingly odd satire anchored by some truly profound performances.  Jim Carrey, wearing a smile that seems to pain him with every passing day doesn’t do anything too radically different from his regular type, he simply does less with it.  Like Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love, the casting of Carrey and the construction of the character indicate more an examination of the idea of a movie star than anything else.  Carrey handles the conceptual weight with considerable ease, proving at once to be both a savvy performer and humanely empathetic presence.  Laura Linney has to wear a similarly weary mask but she manages to inject her character with the subtlest hint of menace.  To watch the scenes where she transforms from fake-loving wife to almost authoritative security guard are a marvel to watch.  Perhaps the most standout of the performances, however, remains Ed Harris’ Christof character.  I know, I know the name is way too on the nose but Harris creepy blend of God-like tinkerer and loving father to the universe he has created is enough to make one forgive the offense.  Watching Harris caress the screen upon which his de facto son sleeps in that eerie green night vision is a master class in simultaneously repelling and moving one’s audience.  The Truman Show remains a stellar example of a high concept audaciously executed and shot with generous amounts of emotion and humanity.  It asks us to look beyond the screen into the real lives that so often populate them and provides us a profound reason to care.  

Run Lola Run

365 Films

Entry #131

Run Lola Run (1999)

Directed by Tom Tykwer

Run Lola Run is an unqualified success for me because of the plain and simple fact that I can’t exactly recall it.  It remains in my mind as fragments or pieces of an incredibly exhilarating and visceral cinematic experience.  I suppose this is by design seeing as how writer-director Tom Tykwer sets up a skeletal, choose your own adventure type only to populate it with all the intricacies of fate, chance, and choice.  Run Lola Run also made an icon (for a brief moment) out of Franka Potente and it is my understanding that such was her good standing in her native Germany that the look of the character became a national trend amongst the women.  All of these attributes add up to a movie that houses such outlandish stylistic tics that they, in effect, become the movie.  Which is not to say that this is another tired exercise in the video game, music video aesthetic but more a potent examination of mainstream Hollywood cinema made by a filmmaker firmly planted outside of the establishment.  The fact that Run Lola Run became the subject of loving homage/spoofing in later films only confirms this fact.  By stripping down the narrative of action cinema to its barest elements, Tykwer gives himself the freedom to explore movement and the inherent consequences that spring forth when movie characters cease to care about the world around them in the mad dash pursuit of their goals.  The result is a dynamic, involving, and gripping piece of suspense cinema peppered with moments that stop to pause the enormity of a life ruled by movement.     

  

Blade

365 Films

Entry #130

Blade (1998)

Directed by Stephen Norrington

Combining two genres that are seemingly indestructible at the box-office these days, Blade release in the waning days of August 1998 seems more prophetic today than it ever could have seemed back then.  For one thing, vampire films were often relegated to the B-Movie horror bin from which, the likes of later John Carpetner and earlier Robert Rodriguez often found refuge.  For another, comic book films had just been dealt a debilitating set back only one year prior with the release of Batman and Robin, a film that possesses the dubious distinction of simultaneously killing that Batman series and big time comic book adaptations for the next couple of years.  Seen from that perspective, Blade seems like Marvel’s attempt to quietly dip their toe in the cinematic waters to check the popular temperature.  For one thing, Blade is certainly not a marquee character in the Marvel universe by any stretch of the imagination and casting Wesley Snipes, whose career was already on the downslide (to be somewhat resuscitated by the Blade films, only to be subsequently terminated by his legal troubles) was definitely a bit of a gamble.  The chronology of events that followed led to the release of X-Men two years later and the rest as they say, is history.  I’m not enough of a film, comic book, or comic book film historian to present a coherent thesis naming Blade as the grandfather of ALL modern day comic-book adaptations, but it certainly played a part.  What Blade lacks in popularity and hype it certainly makes up for in its freedom from the rules of comic book films, to which every other seems to be slavishly devoted.  It’s R-rated; it’s violent and bloody (albeit cartoonishly so) yet re-created on a scale that is almost endearingly modest.  Blade also represents an interesting crossroads in American action cinema at that point in time, coming only a few months after Dark City and a few months prior to The Matrix.  The full-on influence of Hong-Kong cinema and Japanese animation into mainstream Hollywood was about to reach its boiling point with Blade.  I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far into this particular entry without mentioning the presence of Blade himself, Wesley Snipes.  While tamping down his natural charisma for the part, Snipes reigns supreme as a physical presence.  I remember so vividly, the emotional experience of watching the first fight scene in the film between Blade and the hoard of clubbing vampires, that experience went something like: “holy shit, Snipes is back and kicking supreme ass.”  While he definitely chooses to make Blade something of a cipher, it’s still a cipher intriguing enough to never come across as the chiseled statues we get nowadays passing as superheroes.  Blade is always human, he just chooses not to tell us how he’s feeling every ten seconds, he also clearly enjoys what he does and that goes a long way.  Plus, who would have thought one of the best buddy duos to emerge from comic book cinema would have been Kris Kristofferson and Wesley Snipes?  I’m just happy to even write those two names in the same sentence.  Blade is emblematic of a time when film adaptations of comic books (or graphic novels) were relegated to a select group of audience members and not the mass movie-going audience as a whole.  It’s not for me to say whether or not that’s a sound financial strategy in the long run, but I will hold films like Blade and The Crow more near and dear to my heart than anything that’s been released since the great Marvel deluge of ’08.  Stripped down and small scale while retaining the stylistic richness of comic books, Blade represents to confluence of the two mediums at their best.            

Face/Off

    365 Films

Entry #129

Face/Off (1997)

Directed by John Woo

With the ascension of Nicolas Cage in the internet laughing stock portion of his career, Face/Off has unfortunately devolved into the realm of camp for some.  Don’t get me wrong; I can’t argue that some of the most preposterous things about this movie aren’t inherently funny but I will stand by the eerily committed performances of John Travolta and Mr. Cage in this film.  They invest what could have been an actor’s goof with equal parts demented glee and tortured melancholy.  As the years have passed my favorite moments in the film have tended to drift from the action sequences towards the scenes each actor has with Joan Allen (who really deserved some kind of year end recognition for her work).  Just watch her work as she comes to grips with the idea that the men now claiming to be her husband is now wearing the skin of the man who murdered her son, she’s astonishing.  In the annals of Face/Off lore it has been related that the original screenplay for Face/Off was in a much more science fiction register.  If memory serves, it originally took place in the future and the ground breaking surgical procedure at the heart of the film took center stage.  When director John Woo came on board, he wisely discarded those genre elements and decided to pursue a vision that is about as close to a character driven action film as we are ever likely to get.  If you think about it, the “plot” of Face/Off, the reason for which Archer initially goes undercover as is solved about an hour into the picture, and by the villainous Troy no less!  The rest of the film essentially consists of a what-if scenario posing the mind-boggling question of what would your worst enemy attempt with your body?  Face/Off is Woo’s best American film by a walk and the integral reason for that is because it carries over a lot of the philosophical thematic obsessions that marked his great Hong Kong films like The Killer and Hard Boiled.  Woo has always been a director who traffics in big, bold, and underlined melodrama.  He has never kept his love of old Hollywood musicals a big secret by any stretch of the imagination.  Sometimes these tendencies get the better of him with the overblown World War II weepie Windtalkers (a film that’s not entirely without merit by the way) and the ugly cousin of Face/Off known as Paycheck (a perfect example of a Sci-Fi premise run amok).  With Face/Off he was able to find the sweet spot between the visual splendor of his action sequences and the Melville-esque brooding of his police and gangster characters.  The result is a rousing action spectacle that never forgets the complicated human beings at its center.  When is the last time an action movie co-existed with a blistering vivisection of a marriage in the same film?  Face/Off.  That’s when.  

  

The Big Lebowski

365 Films

Entry #128

The Big Lebowski (1998)

Directed by Joel Coen

There is so much to be said about The Big Lebowski that it seems futile to attempt to contain it within a single blog.  Case and point, the volumes of text that have been created in its wake, everything from documenting the philosophy of the film to the cult that was birthed by it, The Big Lebowski has become more of a religion than a singular film.  In some instances, this has its drawbacks, the most undeniable being that the film now has a reputation to live up to as opposed to being the undiscovered gem it once was.  To those people, I literally have nothing more to say other than, your loss.  The Big Lebowski was the highly anticipated follow up to the Coen brothers Oscar glorified Fargo released the previous years.  That they would follow up such a highly acclaimed work with a seemingly throwaway Chandler meets Cheech and Chong meets Busby Berkeley mystery-detective-farce that literally goes nowhere is in an of itself a commendable act.  That they would create and enduring legacy in cinematic comedy, one as fresh and innovative today as when it debuted some fifteen years ago, is another thing entirely.  As melodramatic as it sounds, I feel like I need to bookmark my cinematic education (in the comedy realm anyway) as existing between two periods BD (before dude) and AL (after lebowski.  The Big Lebowski changed my concept of what a comedic film was capable of in terms of maintaining a freewheeling madcap logic while also being brilliantly structured and maximized down to every last stutter and utterance of dialogue.  The thing is just a marvel of comedic writing to behold is the plainest way of putting it.  I also had not encountered a comedy that remained as line-by-line funny as The Big Lebowski was and continues to be.  The way I’ve always put it to newbies is that for me, The Big Lebowski is like a classic Simpsons episode; I can watch it over and over and over again and still laugh at all the same jokes.  The Big Lebowski is also incredibly special for me because it initially existed as a private little in-joke amongst my family and a few friends.  I don’t want to get all territorial about the love for a film that has grown astronomically beyond my control (such an act would be pointless, obviously) but I would be remiss not to mention one tiny detail that actually separates my family from a fairly substantial majority of Lebowski devotees: we were there first.  I remember every little detail about our first viewing of The Big Lebowski, right down to the fact that it was on a Sunday afternoon at Cinemark Movies 10 on West Newport Pike in Wilmington, Delaware and that we all went together as a family.  I remember the unanimous favorable opinion of the film (although I believe it was most strongly felt between my Dad, my Brother, and Myself but the other accountable parties are more than welcome to correct this statement if need be) and the subsequent befuddlement that followed when the rest of the world did not conform to our views.   That was the procedure for the next five or so years, The Big Lebowski was like a secret language we spoke with each other and every fresh viewing brought on a potent new analysis that had to be shared immediately.  I suppose I should be glad that the Lebowski fests that sprung up over time have only validated how prescient our taste was even in the infancy of the film’s existence.  At the same time, I can’t help but mourn the fact the little film that was once ours and ours alone that has now turned into the baby from Honey I Blew Up The Baby.  I guess if I wanted to be a jackass about it, I would feel that way.  Instead, I believe I’ll choose to see our story as the story that began every Lebowski fest since its inception.  One that began in coded references and grew into a mutually shared utopian vision of humanity bound together by one incredibly funny, Zen-silly, and in the end, touchingly heart-warming piece of cinema.  

Bringing Out The Dead

365 Films

Entry #127

Bringing Out The Dead (1999)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Bringing Out The Dead opened with an underwhelming whimper in the fall of 1999.  The heavily hyped (for some people) re-teaming of screenwriter Paul Schrader with director Martin Scorsese seemed like a can’t possibly lose situation.  Then the film was released, audiences shrugged their shoulders, and the film quickly vanished from public consciousness.  One of the movie events of the fall turned into a dud quickly outflanked by the likes of American Beauty and End of Days.  1999 is often heralded as one of the last recent renaissance years for American film and sadly, in my opinion, Bringing Out The Dead is never held in as high esteem as some of the other titles from that year (although I’m sure most people consider it superior to End of Days…right?)  The reason I am choosing this particular film as the beginning of the Scorsese filmography is because this is the first Scorsese film with which I truly connected.  1997’s Kundun was a visual marvel but I believe I was simply too young to understand any of the elements outside of that and I do hope to revisit the film specifically for this blog.  Bringing Out The Dead was the film he made directly after Kundun and is, in a way, almost a perfect primer for his unique and completely cinematic filmmaking sensibilities.  This is something that a lot of its detractors chose to target the film for, considering it shares a lot of its tone and content with Schrader and Scorsese’s sanctified 70’s masterpiece, Taxi Driver.  To me, this rings as false as the critical stones lobbed at Casino upon its release for being too identical to Goodfellas.  I gotta stop bringing up discussions to be had for future blog entries, so I’ll make an attempt to cut to the chase with this one.  I’ve always considered Bringing Out The Dead to be a hopeful vision of the existential crisis that is life from two men who grown in the twenty plus years since they last tackled the subject.  That’s not meant to imply that the film is somehow mushy in its execution, but that it is clearly not the product of two angry young men in the same way that Taxi Driver was and remains to be (not a slam against that film, as you will see in a future blog post).  One of the things I love most about Bringing Out The Dead is that its conception of New York is that of a recurring nightmare.  It’s an amazing balancing act that Scorsese and company pull of because they manage to make the Pre-Giuliani Hell’s Kitchen of the early 90’s as claustrophobic as any depiction of the Big Apple that I can recall.   Yet, at the same time there is this incredibly comforting sense of how familiar everything seems.  The night, the skyline, and the lights seem to have inexorable pull over the EMS teams we witness cycle through a three night period of the week.  It’s the kind of perspective that could only come from people who have spent their entire life in New York and watched it change along with them.  I would also be remiss not to mention Nicolas Cage’s remarkable performance and one for which he is all too often forgotten when people wish to turn him into Nicolas Cage the freak show rather than the actor.  It’s a wonder to me that Cage and Scorsese had not collaborated prior to or since Bringing Out The Dead because they seem to be so perfectly in sync.  Cage is the perfect vessel for Scorsese (and Schrader’s) perpetual thematic fascination with, as critic Glenn Kenny wrote, “men who can’t stop hurting themselves.”  He is by turns here frightening, funny, and pathetic in equal measure and he truly anchors the film and gives it a genuine emotional core around which, the insanity and mayhem of Scorsese’s visuals and the supporting actor’s performances may orbit.  This is a powerful, humane, and caustically funny piece of work about finding transcendence in a city and a profession that seems diametrically opposed to the idea.   

Millions

365 Films

Entry #126

Millions (2004)

Directed by Danny Boyle

Millions occupies a somewhat mystifying spot in directory Danny Boyle’s list of credits.  Where his previous entries (and subsequent as well) mixed his amphetamine fueled editing style with nihilistic tales of selfish, amoral people doing horrible things to each other, Millions keeps the hyperactive but responds with something resembling innocence and hope.  Granted, Mr. Boyle would go on to repeat this trick with his Oscar sweeping hit Slumdog Millionaire, but it has always been my contention that Millions if the film he should have won for.  It is, far and away, his best film and the fact that it seems to have faded quietly from existence has always been a point of contention between the movie going populace and myself.  Essentially taking the “group of friends find a bag of lost money” and inverting it to the world of childhood, Millions is almost a lullaby corrective to another 365 entry, A Simple Plan.  Following this idea to its natural conclusion, Boyle and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce posit that main character Damien (Alex Etel) would naturally seek to do as much good for the world at large with the money as humanly possible.  Anonymous donations and rounding up homeless people for a free lunch occupy most of Damien’s free time while his older brother Anthony primarily seeks to attain status and style while using the money to create more money through sound real estate investments.  In other words, this isn’t a story of two greed-obsessed children who kill everybody in their path in order to hoard their stash of ill-gotten gains.  After that writing that sentence, I have to admit that movie actually sounds kind of interesting, I’ll offer that as my act of forgiveness towards the movie going populace, you’re welcome.  Millions is a movie about how childhood lends us the natural inclination to respond to inner despair with outward hope.  Essentially it is the moment when we realize (at whatever age) that we are not just ourselves on this planet, but citizens of the world along with everybody else.  It sounds like a heavy concept ripe for opportunities of over powering sentiment but Boyle does something really interesting here.  He makes a movie about childhood that doesn’t talk down to or demean the children it is depicting.  His restless visual vocabulary does not come off as a shameless grab for attention, but rather a genuine attempt that depicting the world the way a child would see it.  I would also be remiss not to mention the certifiably astounding performance from Mr. Etel, surely one of the great child performances of the last decade (maybe even last half century).  The ability he possesses at conveying a true sense of wonderment, while all the while allowing that ever so slightly devious Cheshire cat grin to take over his smile is a thing of beauty.  It’s so gracefully natural a performance, never once stooping to precocious child actor tics or begging for our sympathies with a nauseating display of cuteness.   In fact, that is the film’s most endearing quality and what makes it stand out in what is all too often a completely rotten field of movies aimed at children: it never sells us anything.  It’s more like an invitation to share in a personal remembrance about something, something neither party can quite recollect exactly but both understand completely.   

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

365 Films

Entry #125

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

Directed by Joseph Sargent

I could blather on and on about how The Taking of Pelham One Two Three encapsulates everything great, grimy, and glistening about New York as represented by Hollywood cinema in the 1970’s.   

I could do that…

I’d rather show you the final shot of Pelham and maybe you can pin point the exact moment I fell in love with this movie.  I’d administer a spoiler warning but I don’t think this scene will make much sense if you haven’t seen what preceded it. 

Enjoy! 

  

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

365 Films

Entry #124

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000)

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

My path towards the cinematic output of Jim Jarmusch began with 2000’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.  It combined Jarmusch’s deadpan wit with my then (must emphasize the past tense use of that word) love of on screen bloodshed.  In a way, Ghost Dog is almost the best primer for a complete Jarmusch newbie,  it is, by far, one of his most accessible efforts yet the indescribable strangeness of his vision pervades every shot in this film.  As hard as it is to believe now there was a time when the presence of Forest Whitaker in a lead role provoked a sense of excited anticipation rather than quizzical confusion.  There was a time (before the Oscar sadly) when he was an unknown quantity and his hulking mass mixed with his lullaby whisper voice to produce an incredibly fascinating screen presence.  Ghost Dog is the movie he should have won the Oscar for and Ghost Dog is hands down the career capping performance for him thus far.  This is one of those movies where it becomes abundantly clear from frame one just how in sync the director and actor are together in pursuing this particular cinematic vision.  Just observe how beautifully Whitaker and Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankolé play their relationship together as hitman and casual acquaintance Raymond, the ice cream man.  Neither one can understand a word the other is saying but their body language indicates years of easy camaraderie.  In keeping with Jarmusch’s delightfully absurdist view of humanity, the manner in which he depicts the Hip-Hop influence in a predominately white institution like the mafia is done with such tenderness and affection that it never becomes a hectoring sermon a la James Toback’s Black and White (released the same year).  Jarmusch’s combines playfully comedic sight gags and character moments with a genuine sense of moral seriousness to produce one of the strangest and most satisfying gangster/existential hit man hybrid movies ever made.