All The Real Girls

365 Films

Entry # 155

All The Real Girls (2003)

Directed by David Gordon Green

In honor of my brother’s birthday today, it seemed only fitting to pick a film that he holds as near and dear as I do.  All The Real Girls is a difficult film for me to summarize, much less perform any kind of critical analysis on its filmmaking techniques.  So ingrained are some of the moments into my own memories not just of the time when I first saw it, but also images from my own life, that it seems trivial to even attempt any kind of objective distance.  Therefore, I will cop-out with my usual sentiment of suggesting that if you are not familiar with All The Real Girls that you drop everything and go see it no matter how inconvenient it is for you to do so and make up your own mind.  The best I can do, and how I will attempt to tie this all into a celebration of Nate’s birthday is explain the context and story behind why this film has become so important to the both of us.  It was a frigid February weeknight back in 2003 (at least I think it was a weeknight, Nate feel free to correct if I am wrong).  I was in the second semester of my freshman year at NYU and Nate was just a few months away from wrapping up his four year stint at NYU as well.  A bit of back-story for the back-story, as a freshman at the NYU film program (back then at least) did not involve any actual filmmaking.  You take a bunch of introductory classes and don’t get your hands on a physical film camera until the following year.  The importance of this is that I was not yet equipped with the experience of being in the “shit” at NYU, Nate had been fully immersed in it for the past three years.  Without getting into any specifics, mainly because that’s Nate’s story to tell and I do not wish to dredge up any unpleasant memories in too much sordid detail, Nate was a little frustrated with the creative progress he was making at that particular moment in his college education.  The reason I bring this all up is because he knew little to nothing about the film All The Real Girls before we sauntered into the basement of the Angelika that night to see it.  I knew very little about it as well except for the fact that the film’s director, David Gordon Green, had previously made George Washington a film for which my deep and everlasting love has already been well documented on this site.   That name being listed in the credits was reason enough for me to check out anything regardless of the content (an edict that would come back to bite me in the ass a few years later with a few of Mr. Green’s films).  I remember Nate was hesitant and I don’t think he had yet seen George Washington, but he was not entirely sold on this based on the usual marketing materials.  He was interested for sure, otherwise he just wouldn’t have gone, but to say he went in wanting to love it would be an overstatement.  The reason I’m attempting to catalogue these seemingly innocuous details is because collectively, they make his reaction to the film afterwards all the more joyous.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen my brother react to a film so instantaneously the way he did for All The Real Girls.  It was as if the film gave him a dozen shots of pure creative adrenaline, which subsequently gave him a sense of clarity in regards to the creative struggles he was having with school at that time.  I just remember walking back to our dorms in Union Square and Nate was almost unable to stop talking about what he had just seen.  People sometimes (myself included) describe the primary pleasures to be taken from watching a movie as those of the escapist variety.  You watch a movie to be transported “somewhere else” and flee the boring reality of day-to-day existence.  Movies like All The Real Girls spin that very notion on its head and in fact, offer the exact opposite.  The feeling Nate and I had that night was one of personal engagement with the larger world; we felt a pure sense of connection with not only the film and its creators but also the fact that we lived in a universe where such a film could be made in the first place.  As absolutely eye-roll worthy as it sounds, this film gave us both a collective sense of hope.  When you hear the stories about films that changed people’s lives on first viewing, they are usually associated with epics or large scale pieces that offer a “game-changing” approach towards technique and craft.  Not to diminish that sentiment and surely I’ve experienced that with those films as well.  But there is something to be said for the films that seem to be made just and only for you.  There is something to be said for the fact that even the most restrained releases of films solely being shown in sparsely crowded, subterranean cinematic pits such as the Angelika still offer us the chance to step back out into the world feeling as if we’ve just witnessed something remarkable.  Even to this day, All The Real Girls fails to retain the qualities it needs in order to be a lifeless object to me.  It grows with me and each viewing offers the chance to be opened up to a new sense of understanding with the purity of its cinematic sincerity.   It is not something to be necessarily studied or poured over detail by detail (the film is certainly dense enough for that, I just don’t have the ability to do it).  It’s more like checking in with an old friend that you haven’t seen in a very long time.  You laugh at the same goofy moments and marvel at the emotional understandings you still share after all this time.  Personally, I think there’s something else going on in my mind every time I sit down to watch this film, a feeling that perhaps lords over even the very specificity of the film itself.  Even ten years later, I can’t help but be reminded of the look on Nate’s face and the passion in his voice when he spoke that night about a film that truly and deeply moved him.  It’s a beautiful thing to witness a piece of art lift someone up like that, perhaps even more so when it is someone for whom you happen to care a great deal.  And that person in turn, imbues the film with a sense of life that will last far beyond its run in the theaters.  I don’t want to speak for Nate on this, but I know that for myself, if I ever forget why this field is worth pursuing in the first place, I simply think of that film and that night. 

Happy Birthday Nate. 

Duck, You Sucker!

365 Films

Entry #154

Duck, You Sucker! (1968)

Directed by Sergio Leone

Let me just start off immediately by pointing out that Duck, You Sucker! is an AWESOME title for a movie.  It's not the only one this one has and by far the one that makes the least sense, but it's still pretty damn awesome.  In certain territories it's also known as A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon A Time In..The Revolution.  The last title makes a lot more sense considering this is the second entry in Leone's "Once Upon A Time..." trilogy, but that's neither here nor there.  I think my favorite part about the Duck, You Sucker title is, as Keith Uhlich wrote in Slant for the subsequent DVD review: "It is rumored that Leone's original title for Duck, You Sucker was Once Upon a Time…The Revolution, which it did eventually, and appropriately, go under during its French release. Frayling explains in an accompanying video interview that the English title is both a loose translation of the original Italian, Giù la Testa (literally: "Keep your head down, balls") and the result of a mistaken assumption on the part of Leone, who was convinced that "Duck, you sucker!" was a common phrase of American slang."  I don't know, that shit makes me laugh.  The film opens with what must be the only example of a an introductory shot announcing itself to us with a close up shot of piss.  Leone's capacity for stripping his environments down to their grubbiest, most base components gets a good exercise with the first section of this film.  In one of the most nauseatingly disgusting sequences ever committed to film, Rod Steiger's  Juan Miranda, a mexican outlaw gets picked up by a wagon carrying the worst examples of the white race within a 1,000 mile radius.  The group proceeds to berate Juan and his countryman (along with any other group on the planet that isn't white and christian) for being grotesque savages.  Leone visualizes their brutal words literally with a devastating montage of oral close-ups as they sloppily stuff their faces and spew racial bile at record speed.  For my money, it's one of the most memorable sequences Leone's ever committed to film, especially considering there's not a gun fight in sight.  To be fair, the scene's exclamation point does come in the form of a gunshot to the head, but it's definitely the ONLY way that sequence could have ended.  The reason I'm spending so much time waxing over this particular opening is that it sets up the overwhelming sense of cynicism that not only courses through so much of this film, but through all of Leone's work.  We are introduced to the hero of Duck, You Sucker and he is a vile, misogynistic sadist who also happens to be dedicated to his comrades and family (including the children from several different women to which he lays claim).  His eventual partner in crime is James Coburn's John Mallory, an early IRA explosives expert on the run from the British.  The point being that these two rise to the top like cream when the rest of the world is as shitty as the one run and ruled by the white institutions represented by the wagon in the form of money, violence, and religious hypocrisy.  And what Miranda and Mallory learn is that in order to destroy those institutions, they have to play by their rules and that is what sets apart Duck, You Sucker from so many other films of its type.  Leone has no romantic ideals about revolution and does not for one second see them as anything remotely glorious and cinematic as his filmmaking brethren.  For him, the founding of this country and fateful meeting between civilization and the frontier were not tidy nor orderly affairs.  Much like the trail of death left in the way of the railroad in Once Upon A Time In The West, the characters in this film are dragged kicking and screaming through the idea of progress and nobody comes out clean in the end. 

        

Once Upon A Time In The West

365 Films

Entry #153

Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

Directed by Sergio Leone

Once Upon A Time In The West is a strange place to start my Sergio Leone retrospective, but then again, it's sort of strange for me to be doing a Leone retrospective in the first place.  It really is apropos of nothing; no anniversaries, no commemorative screenings, not even an exhibit at LACMA.  Then again, I should say my appetite was re-whetted after seeing The Lone Ranger a month ago and just relishing the obvious passion Gore Verbinski displayed for Leone in the film, which, along with his previous film Rango should play as a double bill Leone tribute for some enterprising repertory theater someday.  My personal interest in Leone came from a bit of fanboy marketing on the part of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino back in 2003 upon the release of Rodriguez's Once Upon A Time In Mexico.  The story goes that Tarantino pointed out how Rodriguez had inadvertently made his own version of Leone's Dollars Trilogy with El Mariachi and Desperado, all he had to do now was make his The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.  Thus, Once Upon A Time In Mexico was born.  I can also remember my brother, while I was still in high school, talking about a class he was taking at NYU that was entirely focused on Spaghetti Westerns.  A term that all at once baffled and delighted me in that I thought it referred to some kind of cinematic cross breeding between a splatter/slasher movie and the western (I thought Spaghetti was referring to tomato sauce, as in the color of blood gushing all over the screen, it wasn't until later I learned it meant Italian filmmakers making westerns).  With all of this cross-pollination of information, my interest piqued somewhere around January of 2004 and I eventually made the momentous decision to rent a bunch of movies from the video store.  Oh shit, I almost forgot, Kill Bill came out in the fall of '03, didn't it?  Yeah, that definitely played a part, what with Tarantino's liberal cribbing of Morricone's music for the film and its corresponding advertising.  In any event, I remember a sort of week long splurge of every Leone film I could get my hands on.  Lucky for me, all of Leone's major achievements were available on DVD by that point with the exception of Duck, You Sucker.  The only problem was, I had to make due with a tiny television set in my college dorm room, which was absolutely fine for every other purpose it served, it just couldn't make Leone that memorable.  I remember being very fond of the films, but none of them really hit me the way I wanted them to.  It wasn't until I had the opportunity to see Once Upon A Time In The West at the Egyptian theater here in Hollyood a few years back.  All I can say is: holy, fucking, shit.  It was a transcendent experience, and if you don't believe me, try watching that film on a giant screen and just wait until Claudia Cardinale makes her entrance.  When the camera soars majestically over the train station building and takes its very first view of the blossoming town nestled within and Morricone's score kicks into high gear, I dare you not to be a big blubbering mess by the end of it.  I can now say with utmost certainty that not only is Once Upon A Time In The West my personal favorite of Leone's, but it is definitely in my top five of films ever made (maybe even top three).  Sure, there are minor quibbles to be had, most of them involving Leone's complicated (to put it mildly) treatment of his female characters.  That's a discussion I'm not really equipped to have in this particular forum but I will point out that I acknowledge it and still love the film in spite of it.  It just seems down right nutty to ignore the indescribable majesty of the rest of the film.  And I would also argue that Claudia Cardinale turns in an extraordinary performance that delivers some much needed shading to a precariously sketched character.  Everything about this film from the chill-inducing score (I honestly can't think of a more successful and mind-blowing collaboration between director and composer than Leone and Morricone) to the stellar performances from Bronson, Fonda, and Robards (all outstanding, particularly Fonda), to the unbelievably operatic scope of the thing.  I hate making statements like this but I'm going to do it anyway, there is a part of me that thinks if you don't like Once Upon A Time In The West, you might as well stop watching movies because clearly you just can't vibe with what they are pedaling.  This was the first in what would later be known as Leone's second trilogy (since un named) after the Dollars or Man With No Name Trilogy.  It was to be his final pure western and the beginning of a three film examination concerning the brutal beginnings of this country.  As a swan song that evocatively captures the mythic qualities of a vanishing western genre (and way of life) while simultaneously under cutting every single one of those romantic qualities with shocking and punishing reminders of the violence inherent to the American character, Once Upon A Time In The West reminds us that the western, (or any forgotten genre really), regardless of knee jerk reactions to current popularity can be re-vitalized and say something bold and relevant about the society which created it.  We could really use another Once Upon A Time In The West really soon as far as I'm concerned.  We could use more filmmakers like Leone too.