Ten After Almost Ten

NUMBER TWO: "Round up the usual suspects!"

2013-02-05T16:49:00.001-08:00

NUMBER TWO: CASABLANCA

Just one of the movies that went into production on the Warner lot that year, CASABLANCA was part of the movie-making machinery of its day. Made up of a cast and crew that consisted of oodles of contract entertainment industry workers, the movie – in so many ways – was intended to keep pace with an audience hungry for stories about the triumph of good and love over evil.

I have to believe they knew they had something pretty good, but that they had no idea just how good. For one the script wasn’t anywhere near finished when they started the production…and the production was scheduled to take a week. It was only in a cab rushing to the lot that writers Julius and Phil Epstein thought of the line, “Round up the usual suspects,” as a way to end the story they’d written.

And because they’d never really had an ending to the story when they started, both Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart had no idea if they’d end up together when the curtain fell. And they had to play it like they really didn’t know what would happen because, frankly, no one could tell them.

It’s also a peculiar genius that Michael Curtiz – who was known for action films like ROBIN HOOD and gangster flicks such as ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES was called in to direct this fast-moving love story. He managed to move all the many parts in the right direction while keeping what’s arguably the best sad ending in cinema to ever come along.

But all these things are artifacts, ways to get into how it was assembled and inspired. Hundreds of other films have stories about how strange and unlikely it was that they would get made or become a hit. Ultimately, as Martin Scorsese has said many times, I can only respond to the films that move me deeply. And this one always has.

It’s a story about millions of people on the run from tyranny, oppression and loss and their unrelenting push toward hope. These people are coming to Casablanca to find a way – any way under the sun – to get to America and the promise of a new life. Despite the obvious parallels, it was only years after seeing this film that I finally understood how much this story reminded me of what my parents when through as children because of World War II.

Maybe my favorite scene in the film is the one I’ve posted here. The simple defiance of just singing a song associated with a free state sets so much of the story in motion. And ultimately frees both Rick and Ilsa of their past regrets.

NUMBER THREE: "Meeting in the middle of the desert always made me nervous. It's a scary place."

2013-01-30T15:27:00.001-08:00

NUMBER THREE: CASINO

From the moment that credit sequence at the beginning starts to roll, you know you're in for an epic tale of Shakespearean proportions. You're looking at three people who've pulled themselves up through a brutal world by their wits, talent and muscle...and then they're given the keys to the kingdom, a way out even. But they are who they are. And therein lies the rub.

Ginger is a hooker with more of a broken heart than one made of gold. She can never escape the pimp who first conned her and taught her how to be a great con herself. Nicky - a thug who is sent to watch over the skims from the Tangiers - can't tell when he should turn off the force and use his brain. And Ace - cool-headed Ace - actually finds himself magnetically drawn to the one woman who is the least sure thing going in Vegas.

For me, these are the performances of a lifetime for these three actors and the finest Scorsese has ever made. Despite being a hard core East Coast guy, there's something about the tension of having this story take place in the vast blasted moonscape of the Nevada desert that creates a unique vibe I've never seen this filmmaker duplicate since the release of Casino.

My favorite moment in the film comes during a meeting between Ace and Nicky in the middle of that desert. Something about the dust flying off Nicky's car as he speeds toward Ace and Ace himself growing nervous waiting for his old friend. And then there's that wickedly huge shot of the desert, backed by a thoughtful, somber score and the composited image of Nicky's car in the lenses of Ace's sunglasses.

It's all more than just a little magical.

NUMBER FOUR: In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

2013-01-26T19:51:00.003-08:00

NUMBER FOUR: THE THIRD MAN

It's one of those things you can't avoid. The more you try to run from something in your past, the more likely it is to follow you and turn up when you least expect (or want) it to be there. All the characters in this movie are haunted and running in the shadows from the things that spook them.

This movie - already excellent on its own in every way, IMHO - moved me because it so clearly reflected the kinds of stories my parents used to tell about post-World War II Europe. After struggling to survive for years and years, as one army would march out and another would march into town, most people had a host of secrets and cloaked alliances they used to get by and get on with their lives.

After the war, nearly everyone had something to hide. My mom told me that once they knew the war was over - really over - her father when out into their backyard and either buried or destroyed everything associated with his service as a soldier in the German army. He didn't want anyone to know where he'd served or what he'd done. To this day, I don't know most of the details. I doubt if I ever will.

When my father and his father were released from a concentration camp, they both struggled to find a way to make a living while waiting for my Uncle Howard - who had already immigrated to the U.S. - to get them passage on a boat to the Port of New Orleans. Eventually, they found their way into dealing in black market commodities like sugar and flour, which were strictly regulated at the time. My father - who was normally willing to talk openly about just about anything - only told me about his illicit days in the sucrose game late in his life, when he was sure he could no longer be arrested for it. Despite the passage of time, he still lived with a kind of fear about being found out.

But we all live with secrets to some degree or another, I think. And the fear associated with them does something to the person who keeps the secret, if they consider it something truly bad, shameful or ugly. This movie comes just about the closest I've ever seen to showing the long term toll on the hearts and minds of some who tried to find a way to live again despite their secrets.

NUMBER FIVE: "What have you done with her?"

2013-01-23T13:45:00.001-08:00

NUMBER FIVE: REAR WINDOW

After spending a very long time in a cast with little but a high powered lens at his disposal, Jimmy Stewart finds himself peeping in on the lives of his neighbors, across the way through their windows. He sees their desperation, loneliness, celebration along with overhearing the intimate details of their erotic lives and relationships. It's a kind of reality television decades before the genre took off and became what it is now.

Jimmy Stewart becomes so entangled in the details of their lives - and the arguments between a husband and a wife who live near him - that he begins to suspect the husband of murder once he goes a few days without seeing the wife make an appearance.

This provokes a detective friend of Stewart to make an incisive observation as he casts multiple shades of doubt on Stewart's theories: "People do all kinds of things in private that they couldn't possibly explain in public."

REAR WINDOW becomes more delicious and troubling every time I watch it. Of course I get why Jimmy is watching. We're all curious about the people around us, perhaps more than we'd like to admit. People wonder what others are doing, how they're living and see maybe just glimpses of their lives here and there and make an assumption, fill in the details and run with them based on whatever is haunting their own cerebral cortex. There's an entire GOSSIP SHOW INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX to fill our need to look into the lives of the famous.

And now there's Facebook. I can't help but think the social media site is so successful because it - in part - makes it possible to look in on the lives of others without necessarily having to participate, react, etc. We become silent digital voyeurs - albeit to the extent that someone invites us in with their posts - scrolling through our feeds.

It's certainly not all bad. I can tell you personally that nothing's easier than sharing an important moment like Stella's birth through Facebook. I was downright thankful to be able to invite friends and family into the experience in an instant, rather than having to stage a time-consuming upload to Shutterfly when Rob and I were both exhausted.

But there can be something else there. Sometimes lives viewed through the Facebook rear window look much, much better than they really are. Few people post about the brain numbing difficulties of their daily lives or even the major challenges. So, there can be a high gloss on what you see and I'm not sure if that makes you feel closer to someone or further away.

In any case, we know we all like to watch. And sometimes we go out of our way to be watched as well.

NUMBER SIX: "The story of life is this: Static."

2013-01-17T16:37:00.001-08:00

Becoming a mom makes this movie even more visceral, important...and terrifying. My own mom spent a lot of time choosing her words very carefully so as not to allow stereotyping and bias into our lives. To be honest, I'm not sure it always worked. It's hard to fight American culture and the assumptions that travel with it. But, at least, my mom did something to bring on a little awareness and sensitivity. If I'm able to do that for Stella, I'll be able to check something off in the "Good Mom" column.

Given all this, "Do the Right Thing" jumped to number six on my list.

The original post:

In the long line of pretty damn amazing Spike Lee Joints, DO THE RIGHT THING stands alone for me. The movie summons up a community of people - from Sal, the owner of a local pizza parlor, to Sweet Dick Willie, a street corner poet of sorts - who feel the forces of a hotter than hell New York summer and simmering racial tensions. All of them struggle in some way with their own prejudices and the prejudices others hold against them. And the whole thing errupts into some of the most alternately disturbing and hilarious writing ever done for film, IMHO. Maybe the height of it all is a kind of hate speech montage that outs everyone for their biases. And - in turn - their speeches are undercut by the rants of others which are full of the biases held against them:

Mookie: Dago, wop, guinea, garlic-breath, pizza-slingin', spaghetti-bendin', Vic Damone, Perry Como, Luciano Pavarotti, Sole Mio, nonsingin' motherfucker.

Pino: You gold-teeth-gold-chain-wearin', fried-chicken-and-biscuit-eatin', monkey, ape, baboon, big thigh, fast-runnin', high-jumpin', spear-chuckin', three-hundred-sixty-degree-basketball-dunkin' titsun spade Moulan Yan. Take your fuckin' pizza-pizza and go the fuck back to Africa.

Stevie: You little slanty-eyed, me-no-speaky-American, own-every-fruit-and-vegetable-stand-in-New-York, bullshit, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Summer Olympics '88, Korean kick-boxing son of a bitch.

Officer Long: You Goya bean-eating, fifteen in a car, thirty in an apartment, pointed shoes, red-wearing, Menudo, meda-meda Puerto Rican cocksucker. Yeah, you!

Sonny: It's cheap, I got a good price for you, Mayor Koch, "How I'm doing," chocolate-egg-cream-drinking, bagel-and-lox, B'nai B'rith Jew asshole.

Mister Senor Love Daddy: Yo! Hold up! Time out! TIME OUT! Y'all take a chill! Ya need to cool that shit out! And that's the double truth, Ruth!

These rants are poignant because they show how absolutely ridiculous it all is. I remember Spike Lee being criticized by some members of just about every community for this language. And - years later - Sacha Baron Cohen found himself defending the same kinds of artistic choices at a press conference after winning the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical for his performance as Borat.

People kept asking Cohen how he could have something like "The Running of the Jew" in his movie when he himself is a Jew. After making a few flip comments he got around to explaining that the point for him was to show that prejudice is a delusion - a delusion that others are different and a delusion that you are better than someone else for no real reason at all.

Now, I'm not sure that Don Rickles - a.k.a. "Mr. Warmth" - would describe his standup as some sort of hyper-intellectual deconstruction of prejudicial language...but that won't stop me from doing that here. I think he makes people uncomfortable - and laugh - because he holds a kind of linguistic mirror up to people and the odd, complicated beliefs that might be hiding in the folds of their cerebella.

DO THE RIGHT THING was released during the height of the academic movement we've all come to know as political correctness and I think that's pretty important. Originally "Political Correctness" was a term flung as insult during the Marxist revolution in Russia. It meant someone who'd ceased to think for themselves and just given into the party line...on everything.

In the 1980s and 1990s, I think the reinvention of "political correctness" as a means to treat others with respect and kindness by establishing sensitivity in language was genuinely noble. It fell apart for me when members of the "political correctness" movement on campus attempted to suppress any dissent or discussion about what exactly that meant and targeted DO THE RIGHT THING as destructive and tried to ban it from playing at the campus movie theatre where they did a kind of second run/discount house combo operation that allowed students to see amazing films for just $1 each. They argued they were only trying to protect (?!) college students from the language.

The most wonderfully brave thing in this film is its ambiguous, painful third act. For those of you who haven't seen it yet - SPOILER ALERT. The next few paragraphs are all about specific plot points.

When Mookie stands outside Sal's and watches the crowd start to broil into a near murderous frenzy he makes a decision. I think it's a decision that saves the lives of Sal and his sons. Mookie realizes *something* must happen and the resigned way in which he marches over picks up a trash can and throws it through the glass window at the pizza place says to me he'd rather see the crowd take it out on the building than on Sal. It's a beautifully muddy and heartbreaking moment.

Radio Raheem gives a spotlight speech about the fight inside of every person (symbolized by the rings he wears) between their better and lesser instincts - the struggle to (you guessed it) DO THE RIGHT THING. For me these words are the best part of the film and the reason it hits the nine spot on my list. I hope you dig 'em:

"Let me tell you the story of "Right Hand, Left Hand." It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: It was with this hand that Cane iced his brother. Love: These five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man. The right hand: the hand of love. The story of life is this: Static. One hand is always fighting the other hand; And the left hand is kicking much ass. I mean, it looks like the right hand, Love, is finished. But, hold on, stop the presses, the right hand is coming back. Yeah, he got the left hand on the ropes, now, that's right. Ooh, it's the devastating right and Hate is hurt, he's down. Left-hand Hate K.O.ed by Love. "

NUMBER SEVEN: "That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go."

2013-01-16T14:23:00.001-08:00

Somehow, this movie hung onto its original slot on the list. In the original post I didn't mention the crucial moment when Yoda lifts Luke's damaged ship out of the waters after the young Jedi cannot do it himself. Yoda uses only his badassed powers and barely lifts a finger in the process. When Luke looks on at what's happened he says he can't believe it. And then Yoda comes on with one of the best lines of the film:

"That is why you fail."

I think so much of that exchange now and I think about it so much more than Luke going into the cave. Yes, we've all got demons and dragons to stare down from time to time but, over the last two years the random happenings of my life have convinced me that believing you can pass through the cave of doubt/evil/bullshit is ultimately so much more important than what happens to you while you're in the cave.

And on to the original post:

NUMBER SEVEN: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

For anyone born between the mid-1960s and all the way into the early 1980s, STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK AND RETURN OF THE JEDI are cultural touchstones. Few works of art have been more successful at articulating a kind of belief or faith held amongst a generation that didn't depend necessarily on organized religion so much as it did on each person's own empirical and highly personal quest to walk their own path and discover their own meaning in this life.

Part of walking that path is confronting your own shit - some of it rad and some of it not so rad. So I would say just as Luke enters a cave in search of his own identity, so does everyone. The cave can be anything - a quest real or imagined, dealing with some random insanity that seems to fall into your life from nowhere - but Yoda's words will always be the same when one of us enters:

Luke: There's something not right here... I feel cold. Death.

Yoda: That place... is strong with the dark side of the Force. A domain of evil it is. In you must go.

Luke: What's in there?

Yoda: Only what you take with you.

This movie is also eternal for me because it's just so much fun - even amongst all the muck of horrible discoveries and carbon freezing. There's almost nothing better than Han's reply to being told his tauntaun will freeze ("Then I'll See You in Hell!") or Han's farewell to Leia (Leia: I love you. Han: I know.). It's wonderful writing used to tell a story that means something on the screen when you watch it and then means something even more when you think back on it later. The people working on everything from the puppetry of Yoda to the visual effects that set a standard still rarely equalled also made this film the iconic thing it is. Part of the magic of cinema - I think - is that when you have an enormous group of people moving in the same direction with all their creative energies you really do come away with something that is so much more than the sum of its parts.

NUMBER EIGHT: "I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see."

2013-01-15T16:02:00.004-08:00

It probably seems impossible that a film like NETWORK could drop a few places on anyone's list, but it did. Hopefully it'll all make sense once the list is up here in full. In the meantime, here's my number eight (formerly number six).

Somewhere Paddy Chayefsky is truly laughing his long dead ass off. When NETWORK opened in 1976 people looked at it as a kind of prophetic farce, from what I gather in the reviews written about it at the time. Great art. But, no, things aren't that bad. And isn't this a great warning of how bad things could get if we aren't careful. The headlines from the L.A. Times over the last year must have a horrible, delicious taste to Mr. Chayefsky, wherever the cranky bastard might be right now.

Though nearly every word in this screenplay is golden to me, one speech by Howard Beale feels especially important lately. If you switch out a few of the words (maybe change "Russians" and replace it with "terrorists") you see we're where we've always been as Americans, television viewers and bad citizens of the world:

Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

Before things get too down, I have to talk about Faye Dunaway. She was not just a fabulous babe of the day. She was a real badass. Look at her choices: CHINATOWN, BONNIE AND CLYDE, NETWORK. Damn. Can you imagine having a haircut as fine as the one she had in BONNIE AND CLYDE and being able to run circles around Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson? IMHO, her work here as the ruthless programming executive with an emotional maladjustment no episode of Oprah could solve is her best...and certainly among the best I've ever peeped - actor or actress - on the screen. She's so good you begin to feel sorry for someone who is fundamentally a hollow, selfish a-hole. And then, in my case, you wonder where she bought those amazing boots.

I didn't see this movie until many years after its release. Our advisor to the Arizona Daily Wildcat - a seasoned journalist who'd worked all over for Sports Illustrated and the daily papers in Arizona - insisted one day that I watch it before I decided to work any longer even as just a student journalist. More than anything I remember one particular moment in the movie which seemed to foreshadow a horrible trend in journalism - newspapers becoming corporate properties rather than being run by local upstarts with a sense of making some small difference in their community - and I still wonder today how it's all gonna shake out based on this speech:

Arthur Jensen: It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. THAT is the natural order of things today. THAT is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU WILL ATONE. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

NUMBER NINE: "If you think that Mick Jagger will still be doing the whole rock star thing at age fifty, well, you are sorely, sorely mistaken."

2013-01-10T13:23:00.001-08:00

When I first started the list, this film landed at number eight but...time changed things. And I think one of the reasons I had so much trouble bringing this list to a close over and over again was that I knew it would shift and changed dramatically over time. But instead of doing a procrastination tailspin over the the thing, from now on I'm just going to have to revise it every year.

Though this film drops a spot, it's my love of live music that would make knocking it off the list nearly impossible. The night Rob and I went to see Travis in Anaheim after winning tickets and "Meet n' Greet" passes on KCRW will always be a favorite memory (they even posed for a picture with "the cow" who makes many appearances in our photos). But then I'm so very lucky to oodles of live music memories and the friends who went to see the bands with me.

The original post follows with some revisions/hindsight.

NUMBER NINE: ALMOST FAMOUS

It's the vibe of this poster. It told me instantly that this film was going to get everything right.

The traveling circus environment that lives around a live show going from town to town. The beyond insane obsession that some fans come to own and live as they follow the music. And the bizarre relationship between reporters and artists under uncomfortable and unnatural setups that result from story assignments. Most of all this movie speaks to the love of music and just how much fun it is to be around other people who happen to love the same music.

For me the setup here works for a lot of obvious reasons. There's an innocence that happens when you start to dig any art form and when you start to make your way to your own art/career. Our main character is "deflowered" on a number of levels but his first moments backstage remind me of my feelings about concerts before the evil ticket-pricing scandals of the last few years and my belief in journalism before business models the destroyed the living wage for many journalists came on the scene.

Philip Seymour Hoffman turns up at just the right time to foreshadow all these trials. His world-weary rock journo reminds me so much of the guys at the Houston Chronicle when I interned there. The guys were genuinely amused when I came in all freshly scrubbed and ready to blow the lid off the new album by Morrissey. They both kept telling me not to stop loving the music when the musicians or the business of music became a disappointment.

Thanks to that advice, I still love film and music equally, if differently. Cinema may be the world's dominant art form but music is its hippie, drop-out, butterfly-tattooed sister. More ephemeral. Harder to pin down. But she can smoke you out - literally or figuratively.

I've always thought live music - the kind with a huge stage show and some over-the-fucking-top production values - does what religion keeps claiming it can do. It brings people together for a positive, common experience. It creates a sense of community and sometimes even purpose. And the amount of the requested donation continues to go up at a near inexplicable rate. But mostly it's the first two things.

I'm unbelievably fortunate to count so many music lovers amongst my peeps. There will always be something fabulously covert about either being hipped to a new artist by someone or doing the hipping yourself. I also love so much that I married someone who had larger CD collection than mine and then asked if he could be the one to maintain, buff and Goo Gone it.

Lucky me.

It's the perfect compliment to my skill set. You know, I'm really so much better with the TicketMaster.com thing. Or talking my way past security. Someone else should always be there to put my CDs back in their place. But I'm always great at getting myself - and others - to show.

NUMBER TEN: "Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really... pressure and time. That and a big goddamn poster."

2013-01-09T15:04:00.000-08:00

This morning, Stella took a very long nap. I had to walk longer than I normally do with the stroller to lull her to sleep but, once she went down, she went waaaay down. She even remained asleep while I put the key in the lock, gave Disco a treat and unpacked the basket that glides along on the bottom of our UppaBaby Vista.

And, it occurred to me that after having watched a screener of a movie that I absolutely couldn't stand (but got amazing reviews) and seen a screening of a movie that I loved (but Roger Ebert loathed) this film season, I had to finish this list.

Most of it was written out by hand...but it's finally done. Some of the films I originally listed in this half-finished blog held their places. Some did not.

This one did so I'm reposting the original from (gulp) almost four years ago.

NUMBER TEN: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION

Putting this list together lead me to realize - as I'm sure it did all of you who finished your lists eight years ago - that the films that made the repeated cuts were ones that moved through my life with a lot of baggage attached. They were all excellent in their own way but something in them seemed to capture a time, a place or even some larger ideas I had about the world at the time. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION occupies a very specific time, reminds me of a distinct place and repeatedly seems to speak to something personal at once.

I think Andy's hopeful and relentless march towards escape is so satisfying because we've all had our eyes on the arms of a clock at one time or another and silently begged for them to move faster. Maybe it's a shit job. You might even have a boss with a touch of the Warden in him. And I think we've all imagined our destination - the place we'd like to land - after proverbially or literally crawling through shit.

SHAWSHANK also resonates because of the stories my dad used to tell about surviving a concentration camp. He used to say that thinking about trying to make it for months or weeks or even days was too much so he'd focus on living another hour or another morning. Andy's painful and incremental path to escape reminds me of those stories and the hope it takes for anyone in that kind of situation to come out alive on the other end.

One of the real gifts in my biz is the opportunity to have conversations with some incredible people. When I had the chance to speak with Morgan Freeman he was there to talk about one of his many other projects but there was no way I was leaving the room without getting some Shawshank dish. I asked him if while he was working on the movie he had any idea what it would become. The answer was really a lesson about instincts, I think. He told me loved the script but he really just had no idea the movie was going to be that good but that he sensed instantly that Frank Darabont was brilliant and he went with it.

This movie stands on hallowed ground for those of us to who watched it close the run of late shows at The Plaza movie theatre in Westwood just before the digits rolled over to 2000. And now that some time has passed I simply have to put it down to some kind of divine intervention by the Cinema Gods that while we were all mourning the loss of our beloved late shows we were being shown a film about the power of hope for the future.

Twenty Years Later – Looking at “DO THE RIGHT THING” Through Today's Lens

2009-07-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

Most things show their relevance and real nature in retrospect. Film is absolutely not an exception. This Summer I’d been thinking about “Do The Right Thing” because it’s on my top ten list and because it has been a nice round number – 20 years – since its theatrical release. I remember thinking at the time the media and public reaction was equally as bizarre at that for “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which came out just a year earlier.

The response that was most odd to me was the assertion that by just exploring the sources of racial and gender bias and misconception, you’d ignite a firestorm that could actually spill over into the physical. There seemed to be this strange consensus that if you just didn’t talk about it, didn’t confront all the messy truth, it would recede and we’d all go to bed safe that night in our conspiratorial silence.

The truth simmering just underneath it all was this: A film about inequality isn’t as likely to provoke violence and unrest as – say – actual prejudice. If there was going to be a riot or a demonstration that didn’t stay peaceful it was going to be because there were actually problems that hadn’t been solved.

So, I was absolutely struck by a statement Spike Lee made in a recent CNN.com article about this film on its twentieth anniversary (http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/20/spike.lee.right.thing/index.html?eref=rss_showbiz): "It's not like this thing has disappeared because {President Obama} is in the White House," he said. Some things have improved, particularly the atmosphere in New York itself, he said. But, "We've got a lot of work to do."

He’s basically saying we’re not living in a post-racial America now that Obama is in the President. And after reading a story about a Harvard professor who was charged with disorderly conduct after police confronted him when he was trying to get into his own house (http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/07/21/massachusetts.harvard.professor.arrested/index.html?eref=rss_topstories) I can only think how little – despite the election of Obama – has actually been accomplished. The same questions people asked after the first theatrical showing of DO THE RIGHT THING are still the ones we’re asking now:

How long will we deny prejudice based upon race, gender and oodles of other things still exists?

What will it take to address these problems with sensitivity and respect?

And – please, oh please - when will this film be more of historical significance that a current reflection of where we are with how we view race?

Before there was"Fear Factor" there was just Fear

2009-04-20T15:49:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite teachers in high school was my AP Freshman English maven, Mrs. Eberly. She used to say all the time that we’d be the same people we were right then in five years except for the people we met, the books we read and the movies we went to see. I’d add that you almost never know what form the change will take until long after it’s happened.

At some point in 1978 or 1979 I went to see the Michael Crichton thriller COMA with my parents. I remember really wanting to see it because the trailers were simultaneously hypnotic and terrifying and I remember my mom and dad thinking the themes and story might be a bit much. When my ferocious pre-teen whining won out, I’m not so very sure I won in the end. I can tell you – without a doubt – the remnants left by this film, sandwiched between the folds of my cerebellum, are the main reason I was so freaky freakersoned out before having my recent surgery. My residual fears lived on like so many popcorn nubbins left in the folds of the seats at The Village.

In case you haven’t seen this movie, let me issue a huge SPOILER ALERT right now. What follows below pays creepy homage to Crichton’s delightfully macabre and wickedly imaginative storyline. In this film, oodles of perfectly healthy patients (amongst them a young Tom Selleck and Lois Chiles) come in for routine surgeries and mysteriously all fall into comas. They’re then all sent a long-term care facility where only their exterior husks are preserved so their loved ones can visit them from time to time. Unbeknownst the patients’ families, THE ORGANS OF THESE HEALTHY MEN AND WOMEN ARE HARVESTED AND SOLD (holy crap!).

At the time the idea seemed nearly impossible to me. But – because it was just likely enough to happen – my paranoia neurons fired like it was the Fourth of July. Bam! Pow! The world – and the authority figures in it – were never quite the same for me.

Besides upending trust I had in doctors, Crichton was also pretty slick in his choice of main character. The rockstar whistleblower in this film is an unconventionally foxy female doctor (Genevieve Bujold). When her own doctor boyfriend (Michael Douglas) doesn't believe her and the evil, guilty male doctors around her try to paint her concerns and suspicions as “hysterical” it makes them look, well, like the manipulative a-holes they are and in the process makes her passionate outcry look like the noble act that it is.

Wherever Michael Crichton is now I’d like to invite him to suck it for making me so afraid of my own routine surgery…and say thank you for creating a female character so dynamic she’d still be a trailblazer if her kind appeared in a film thirty years after COMA.

My Oscar Predictions...

2009-02-22T17:17:00.000-08:00

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE - SEAN PENN
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE - HEATH LEDGER
ACTRESS IN A LEAD ROLE - KATE WINSLET
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE - VIOLA DAVIS
ANIMATED FEATURE - WALL - E
ART DIRECTION - THE DARK KNIGHT
CINEMATOGRAPHY - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
COSTUME DESIGN - THE DUCHESS
DIRECTING - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE - TROUBLE THE WATER
DOCUMENTARY SHORT - THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN
FILM EDITING - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM - WALTZ WITH BASHIR
MAKEUP- THE DARK KNIGHT
MUSIC (SCORE) - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
MUSIC (SONG) "Jai Ho" SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
BEST PICTURE - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
SHORT FILM (ANIMATED) - OKTAPODI
SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION) - SPIELZEUGLAND (TOYLAND)
SOUND EDITING - IRON MAN
SOUND MIXING - THE DARK KNIGHT
VISUAL EFFECTS - THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
WRITING (ADAPTED SCREENPLAY) - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
WRITING (ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY) - IN BRUGES

SHOW ENDS AT 8:29 PM PST

Well, Sh*t

2009-02-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

As it turns out - while thinking about this year's Oscars - I decided to look up the actual day Eric Stormoen sent out his top ten list near the close of the last century and it turns out it was May Freaking 6. The ten year anniversary of that date is LESS THAN 100 DAYS AWAY. Now it may sound to you like that's more than enough time to get through the second half of a top ten list but you must understand that for me this means working at a ferocious pace. I have - after all - taken roughly nine years and two hundred and sixty some odd days to get this far. I'm starting to think all those years writing on deadline make it easier to do it that way and nearly impossible to do it without one breathing down my neck. So I'll be seeing all of you *very* soon with some new posts post-haste.

THE CANDIDATE wants to be your eleventh choice

2008-06-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

After taking a few months off from the blog/list, I've found another film to compete for eleventh place. But first, I've got the tell you about something. The other night something happened on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." I can't stop thinking about it because it goes to the heart of how I feel about politics right now.

Everywhere I go people seem to be talking about the elections. They're full of hope. They're full of dread. They want things to change. They're afraid things will change too much. They're all trying to figure out how to make it work between $5.00/gallon gas and what's happening to basic costs like food and health care.

As we say in Arizona, this isn't my first rodeo. I've seen a crappy economy (late 80s/early 90s) and I've seen someone ride into town and promise to fix it all (you know who) and then make a few miscalculations (I don't have to say it, do I?) in how to handle some issues both personal and professional. So the street cred and the policy wonk status of some key players dipped and something huge - health care - was never worked out before we reached the critical mass of now.

So that thing I mentioned at the beginning - that moment on The Daily Show that stays with me - happened a few weeks ago after Jon Stewart had done an interview with Barack Obama. The answers Obama gave were stellar and even Stewart made fun himself and how much awe he felt during the interview. And then the interview ended and Stewart went to commercial. When he came back Barack was gone and Stewart looked into the camera and asked impishly, "I wonder, how *will* he break our hearts?"

As much I love the philosophical focus of Obama's campaign and even though I voted for Obama in the California primary, I can't help but wonder if there's something waiting around the corner for those of us who want to believe. Turning myself in these mental knots reminded me of another political film favorite, "The Candidate." It's pure 1970s Redford - Idealistic guy looks to change the system and he does...but he also walks away from the fight with the goo of the system all over him.

Before I go further I have to issue a spoiler alert for the coming paragraphs. If you haven't seen the movie and plan to catch it, you may want to stop here.

The best part of this film for me was watching the campaign itself spin out of control. Robert Redford's character quickly loses control of the message and content of his platform as more and more political pr types show up when his candidacy begins to look real and feel solid. In short, when he looks like a possible, everyone wants what they believe to be their own piece of him.

Redford's character stumbles along the way, too. He's not without a dalliance here and there and in the end he's not sure why he ran or what he'll do next. It's sort of shocking to think of how prescient this film was at the time. And the irony of why I watched this film at such a young age - my mom had a huge crush on Redford - is not lost on me. I imagine there were all sorts of people who paid $2.75 to see Redford's hotness and came away with a deep and maybe even unwanted reflection on the U.S. political process.

As It Turns Out, I Like To Watch

2008-04-02T18:56:00.000-07:00

Today while I was working I found myself looking out of the window of our upstairs guest bedroom/office. The window faces the upstairs windows of half a dozen townhomes near us and overlooks the walkways that slither between them.

During the late morning, I overheard two arguments, one declaration of love, someone's toddler fall down while trying to pet a local stray cat and someone on the HOA order the groundskeepers to pay closer attention to the newly planted Magnolia trees. If only I could have witnessed or overheard a murder. Instead, I'll have to tell you all about how this reminds me of another favorite film that *also* ranks eleventh - the classic Alfred Hitchcock film REAR WINDOW.

If you're the sort of person who just thinks it's just too rude to listen in on the conversation at the booth next to you, please run from this blog entry now. I'm listening to everyone I can - Pee Wee Herman style with a giant plastic ear. There are millions of little and big dramas happening all around, us all the time. It's my belief that in every life there are moments grand love, heartbreaking devastation, magical hope and grinding angst. And if you're lucky enough you're able to catch a glimpse of a few of them happening around you.

REAR WINDOW is one of my favorites for both its lurid, tawdry minx side and for its compassionate, human depth. Jimmy Stewart flies a freak flag with his binoculars as he peeps his neighbors. His motivations are floating just above illegal for some time. Then he crosses over and finds himself compelled to become involved when something goes terribly wrong for one unlucky lady.

When I first caught REAR WINDOW at a revival screening in Tucson, the decency of Stewart's character really struck me because I'd just read about that horrible Kitty Genovese murder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Genovese) in a Sociology class. Fundamentally Genovese's murder has become a case study in why people do not become involved when a crime or murder is committed in front of them.

In addition to broad Sociological concepts, this movie reminds me of handbags. Not just any handbags. Fabulous damn handbags. Ones that are not just for a wallet and keys but ones that can become overnight cases and hide all kinds of treasures.

Grace Kelly makes a sublime Hitchcock blond if you ask me. She holds the line between fire and ice better than any of the others and manages to reveal a rich intelligence in the way she plays the part of a spoiled socialite.

And of course there's Hitch. Few directors can handle their subject matter with such deceptive ease. Every single time I watch this movie I marvel at his ability to glide between sexual tension, voyeuristic obsession and the good old fashioned creeps. He was a technical master and one of my favorite dark humorists.

Care for a kiss from Ms. Kelly?

A Note To Paul: "Birthday...RIGHT AHEAD!"

2008-03-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

I still covet the TITANIC souvenir cup Paul Suarez bought at the Plaza movie theatre with the wrong release date on it. Can you even imagine how much a cup like that - in mint condition - might fetch on eBay today?

It really doesn't matter because I'd give him twenty lashes with a wet noodle if he ever sold it. TITANIC (HEAT being a close second) is probably the movie that I associate most with Paul. When it came out - more than ten years ago now - we instantly started running lines from the film just about every time we ran into each other whether it was at the Plaza for the midnights or anywhere else. And when Paul escorted me down the steps at La Venta Inn on my wedding day, he even found the perfect line from the movie to whisper to me just before we started walking.

I tried to find my favorite TITANIC moment on YouTube - the moment when Rose looks up at the Statue of Liberty after she's survived everything and is on her way to safety - but it was nowhere to be found. It's funny - and more than a little ironic - that moment contains no dialogue whatsoever but still manages to capture the grandeur, hope and tragedy in the movie for me.

When Dave was running the movie over at The Village he'd let us slip in and watch parts of it here and there. No matter what point I entered the film I was immediately taken up into its story. And there's nothing quite like being able to share something like that with other people who love movies just as much as you do.

Happy Birthday, Paul.

P.S. At least the trailer was online:

Movies in 5 Minutes - A Personal Fave

2008-03-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

You've probably all seen the different versions of movies in fives minutes created by a YouTube user. Just thought I'd share my fave of them all:

Having A Movie Moment: "Do I Look Like I'm Negotiating?!"

2008-03-28T13:33:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I'm out in the world I long to fling a line as finely written as those in some of my favorite movies. Lately, one of my eBay transactions is recalling a triumphant moment in MICHAEL CLAYTON.

You see, I wanted to buy this limited edition Starbucks MLB Chicago Cubs Bearista for Rob for Valentine's Day. They've been "out of print" for years and there are two versions of the bear. I already have one. Some...person...on eBay still has the other one even though I paid her for it on February 7.

I've sought to come so some kind of agreement for more than a month and I've finally taken it to the next level through PayPal by asking them to launch an investigation of the transaction and get my money back. I only wish I could have sent that email to the seller with a video clip of George Clooney from MICHAEL CLAYTON.

The key line comes about 3:15 into it:

Martin Scorsese Shines A Light

2008-03-27T18:31:00.000-07:00

I've been bad today. The internet helped me. A nice story about Martin Scorsese's SHINE A LIGHT made it even more fun:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/28/bfscorsese128.xml

How about some trailer porn?

Festival of Books - On Page & Screen

2008-03-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

A blogger named Ron Hogan who I met after he and Tom McLean did a panel on (you guessed it) blogging at Comic-con will be moderating a panel at The LA Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 27. The panel will be about books and the film industry and according to the Festival of Books website it's scheduled as follows:

PANEL 2021
10:30 AM
On Page & Screen
Moderator Mr. Ron Hogan
Mr. Tom Epperson
Mr. Mark Frost
Mr. Gary David Goldberg
Mr. Chris Miller

Check back closer to the event for location/room info if you plan to attend:
http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/2008program_panels_sun.html

His blog is: http://www.beatrice.com/

Still Hanging At Eleven: "Voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain."

2008-03-27T13:50:00.000-07:00

This morning has been a little doomy and gloomy because I was reading the Wall Street Journal online and then a column over at Yahoo!Fianace
(http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/richricher/69637). This whole business of economic yaya in a voting year made me think of another film that ties for the eleven spot - REDS.

I know. I know. Again with the journalists! But this one has has history, tragic romance and exotic foreign travel during wartime. It is also one of the most beautifully written, heartfelt and fantastically acted films I've ever seen.

This film is thick with the romanticism of thinking you can make a difference in an impossible situation (Russia at the beginning of the last century)and ride out an ill-fated romance (Jack Reed and Louise Bryant) no matter what at the beginning. As things devolve, all the characters sink along with their ideals.

It's Diane Keaton's face in the picture above - as she looks out of the train she's taken to see Russia's real internal struggles - that says she knows she's gone too far but there's no going back now.

REDS seems so timely now because it's also about the passion for political change that will really help people. The movie calls into question whether Americans are really capable of making real forward progress in their politics in one clever, clever line -

Emma Goldman: Voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain.

I'm hoping we do much more than deaden the pain this coming November.

Correction: Kittens are very cute

2008-03-27T11:00:00.001-07:00

A funny thing happened on the way to posting this post. I meant merely to do a "quickie" in which I seconded the observation by Eric - our charming and talented friend - that "...kittens are cute." In fact, I meant to enhance his statement by saying I felt they are/were *very* cute.

But before all of that happened I reached for my Sobe Lean and somehow brushed the keys of the laptop in the process and WHAMMO. I had published a post with absolutely NOTHING in it.

It turns out - YES - you can do that.

On the Express Train to Dorktown,

The Kitten
P.S. You can read Eric's full post here:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=70641915&blogID=370739842

This One Also Goes to Eleven and Might Even Go All The Way To China

2008-03-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

I can't walk away from talking about films with journos that I love without mentioning THE CHINA SYNDROME. It's another one that fell off the list but still deserves a mention, I think, because it shows the evolution of the mistrust of government in the 1970s. And it kicks ass.

It's more than half a decade after ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. No one is shocked any longer when there are accusations that a large company is trying to cover up some kind of evil deed. But adding the complication that women in the workplace were still fighting stereotypes (Jane Fonda plays a reporter who always gets assigned the "Fluffy the Cat" story) and so the accusations of Fonda's character were not immediately taken seriously ups the cultural ante in a pretty interesting way for me.

This is more a story about what we're willing to believe depending on who says it to us - and our own prejudices about that person - than it is about journalism or anything else. I must give mad props to Michael Douglas for producing it, James Brooks for directing it and Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda for acting the crap out of it.

And, in case you're wondering, the writing - done by Mike Gray, T.S. Cook and Brooks - isn't bad either:

Jack Godell: What makes you think they're looking for a scapegoat?
Ted Spindler: Tradition.

This clip really only shows the opening credits of the movie and some great shots of SoCal roads in the late 1970s. I'm including it just as much for the time capsule it provides. I was astonished to see all those freeways with almost no one on them.

Deep Throat Says Our Lives May Be In Danger...or Another Installment of "This One Goes to Eleven."

2008-03-24T17:03:00.001-07:00

One of the best things about doing a couple of internships at some big daily papers (The Houston Chronicle and The Dallas Morning News) was working with some of the old guard, hard-drinking journos who had a knack for keeping politicians and any shady business types on their toes. There was a relentlessness and an idealism about them and they were very fond of repeating the rules - about conflict of interest, about fighting the good fight and most of all about giving a crap about every story no matter how small.

Because I heard those speeches over and over again, I assumed everyone heard them from someone with a drink in one hand and an AP Style Manual in the other at some point in their professional development. Oh, how very, very wrong I was.

It's safe to say we live in more of a NETWORK world than an ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN world. But the first time I watched the latter (fullscreen VHS, no less) was the moment the importance of accurate, trustworthy information and the role of journalists in providing it started to seem incredibly meaningful to me.

This movie perfectly captures a generation in a sort of free-fall of disillusionment. The way the two reporters stumble onto clues that reveal the story is far bigger than they could have imagined says a lot about how much the public has come to distrust government in the last 35 or so years. At the time this movie was made the full extent of the scandal was still shocking to most people.

And given the timing of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and the state of the country and the world at the time, it makes perfect sense Woodward gave his primary secret source the name of a legendary porn film. I'll let you make up your own joke about "stripping" away illusions here.

It's also magical that Robert Redford used his youthful hotness powers for good through this movie. I'm sure there were plenty of people who went to see the movie to spend two hours with the Cute Cuterson of the day. Hopefully they came away with a greater understanding of the Constitution and the powers who have little or no interest in guarding it.

Awhile ago I realized that since we're in a digital, webby world I'll never be able to fulfill my fantasy of yelling "Stop the Presses!" If I ever uncover something so scalding hot it has to get out there right away some code monkey will just update the site linked to the print version.

I know it's immediate. It's just not very sexy.

Hoping you'll dig this original theatrical trailer:

NUMBER SIX: "I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see."

2008-03-18T16:52:00.000-07:00

Somewhere Paddy Chayefsky is truly laughing long dead ass off. When NETWORK opened in 1976 people looked at it as a kind of prophetic farce, from what I gather in the reviews written about it at the time. Great art. But, no, things aren't that bad. And isn't this a great warning of how bad things could get if we aren't careful. The headlines from the L.A. Times over the last year must have a horrible, delicious taste to Mr. Chayefsky, wherever the old, cranky bastard might be right now.

Though nearly every word in this screenplay is golden to me, one speech by Howard Beale feels especially important lately. If you switch out a few of the words (maybe change "Russians" and replace it with "terrorists") you see we're where we've always been as Americans, television viewers and bad citizens of the world:

Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

Before things get too down, I have to talk about Faye Dunaway. She was not just a fabulous babe of the day. She was a real badass. Look at her choices: CHINATOWN, BONNIE AND CLYDE, NETWORK. Damn. Can you imagine having a haircut as fine as the one she had in BONNIE AND CLYDE and being able to run circles around Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson? IMHO, her work here as the ruthless programming executive with an emotional maladjustment no episode of Oprah could solve is her best...and certainly among the best I've ever peeped - actor or actress - on the screen. She's so good you begin to feel sorry for someone who is fundamentally a hollow, selfish a-hole. And then, in my case, you wonder where she bought those amazing boots.

I didn't see this movie until many years after its release. Our advisor to the Arizona Daily Wildcat - a seasoned journalist who'd worked all over for Sports Illustrated and the daily papers in Arizona - insisted one day that I watch it before I decided to work any longer even as just a student journalist. More than anything I remember one particular moment in the movie which seemed to foreshadow a horrible trend in journalism - newspapers becoming corporate properties rather than being run by local upstarts with a sense of making some small difference in their community - and I still wonder today how it's all gonna shake out based on this speech:

Arthur Jensen: It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. THAT is the natural order of things today. THAT is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU WILL ATONE. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

And Ned Beatty is really not to be missed in his role as Arthur Jensen: