So people keep asking me if I even like movies that come out now. They want to know if watching all of these great old movies has spoiled my ability to enjoy new stuff. Not at all.
And to prove it, a contemporary interlude with five movies that changed my life from the last four years.
Hot Fuzz (2007)
My friend Zach Walter, with whom I discovered Hong Kong cinema at the old UC in Berkeley, CA, teases me mercilessly for my outrageous love of Michael Bay’s Bad Boys. Bad Boys does what Michael Bay does best: make shimmering kinetic action out of nothing. There’s a sequence in Bad Boys that lasts something like ten minutes that would have lasted ten seconds in real life. Bay achieves this by forgetting about time, space, and logic.
Hot Fuzz, written with laser precision by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright boils down everything I love about 90s action movies, adds a layer of British satire, and lets fly. Watching it, I realized that while I’d seen parodies of 80s action movies, I’d never seen a parody of a 90s action movie. I also realized that Zach’s cruelty notwithstanding, there are a whole lot of people who love Bad Boys as much as I do. So there, Zach.
My Winnipeg (2007)
I come from a theater background, and I’m here to tell you that when it comes to art, there is nothing worse than bad theater. And in the world of bad theater there is nothing worse than bad autobiographical one-person shows. Nothing. I have spent nights where I wanted to gnaw off my own arm. The same thing can happen to anyone who can’t tell their own story without whimsy and craft.
My Winnipeg’s an autobiographical tale with a difference. Nominally an autobiographical history of Winnipeg, director Guy Maddin soon reveals himself to be an unreliable narrator, mixing real history with flights of fantasy. My Winnipeg is funny, sad, and filled with beautiful surreal imagery that reveals far more than facts alone could ever manage.
Once (2006)
Once casually revolutionizes the movie musical by telling a wonderful little love story between an Irish busker and a Czech immigrant in Dublin, weaving in an album’s worth of songs written for the occasion by the movies stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.
The line on musicals is that when the characters are so full of emotion that they can’t talk anymore, the break out into song. Once inverts that. The songs articulate all the things the characters can’t say to each other, using the raw power of Hansard’s music to reveal the churning emotion that lurks beneath the surface of the lo-fi, naturalistic style of the movie.
It’s a movie that’s a perfect album, and the feel of it continues to inspire me.
Let the Right One In (2008)
Vampires register as zero in my psyche. I don’t find them scary or sexy or interesting. Maybe I just can’t quite find the metaphor they seem to hit with other people. I dunno. Anyway, when my friend Rebecca Jane Stokes dragged me to the Swedish vampire movie, Let the Right One In I expected to have enjoyed the popcorn and not much else. Which is fine. Popcorn is one of my three favorite foods.
What I got was one of the most satisfying pieces of horror I’ve ever experienced. Instead of leaning on faux Gothic sexuality, Let the Right One In focuses on the loneliness of youth, on that feeling of not quite fitting in, and exploits it for all its worth. The longing between the two main characters unfolds as a love story that could only happen between an alienated 12 year old boy and an eternally lonely creature of the night.
Also, it’s scary as hell.
Southland Tales (2006)
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Richard E. Kelly drone. Donnie Darko is okay, but I fell fast asleep during a screening of The Box — even though my buddy Ryan really liked it.
But Southland Tales? It makes no sense. It’s naïve beyond all measure. Its science is childish. It’s got some of the most shameless stunt casting of all time. It also might be the most beautiful disasters I have ever seen, and I saw it three times in the movie theater.
Only in Southland Tales could I see Justin Timberlake lip-synching to The Killer’s “All These Things That I’ve Done”, Jon Lovitz chewing the scenery as a psychotic cop, Sarah Michelle Gellar say “Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted,” Wallace Shawn invent Liquid Karma, Seann William Scott end the world with his glowing stigmata, and hear The Rock say “I am a pimp. And pimps don’t commit suicide.” Rent it. It will change your life, I promise.
Next week: Jack Benny makes with the funny.
