All American Kids

Something like 7 or 8 years ago I sat in my dad’s living room with an old friend of my parents’ and American Graffiti came on the TV. I casually mentioned that I hadn’t seen it and was strongly urged to get on the stick immediately! This was the story of Uncle D’s teen years and I was missing a crucial piece of history by not having watched this film. Eight years is sort of immediately, isn’t it? It’s immediacy-adjacent at least. No? Well, OK, you’re probably right.

I finally watched American Graffiti last night. It’s directed by George Lucas (his second such endeavor) and when the powers that be told him he needed a big name attached he asked if perhaps Francis Ford Coppola as producer would fill the blank. Given that The Godfather was coming out they conceded that it would do in a pinch. Casting went on forever and eventually a movie was born. A movie that stars, among others, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips, Richard Dreyfuss, Suzanne Somers, and Harrison Ford.

It’s a small town movie, a little coming of age story, an ensemble flick, if you will. You’ve seen it a hundred times, maybe more, so why would you watch this old film? First you’d watch it because of that cast I mentioned. Ever seen Ron Howard play an asshole? Want to? American Graffiti can help! Then you’d watch it because if Coppola and Lucas thought it was worth doing then it’s likely worth your time. Furthermore you’d watch it because there’s a high probability that all those small town, coming of age ensemble flicks you’ve already seen owe a debt of gratitude to American Graffiti.

The story doesn’t delve deeply into any one issue and it isn’t riddled with high velocity crises the way a movie like, say, Adventureland, is today. (Did I tell you to see Adventureland? I should have if I didn’t. Go on, see it!) The shape and form of the film are that of its subject. If you’ve ever spent time wandering the streets of a small town in the middle of the night not knowing where you need to go or how to get there despite knowing every square half inch of the place then you’ll recognize this place and these people and, I think, you’ll immediately (in far less than 8 years anyway) drop into this world and enjoy your stay. If you love music from 1964 (or have a soft spot for Wolfman Jack) you’ll be in seventh heaven. Lucas wrote a draft of the script with a stack of his sister’s old 45s by his side, building each scene to the music that inspired it. If you remember what it was like to be a teenager and you worry about teenagers today you’ll be both comforted and terrified by this wholesome group of numb nuts. Finally, if you’re an actor, or ever hoped to be one, watch the film, then watch the special features and I will be flat out amazed if you don’t wet yourself in an embarrassing fashion over what a glorious opportunity this movie was for these young actors and how well they took advantage of it. I love movies but, as an actor, am drawn to theatre. This movie, these stories, that process made me want to run right out and act in movies now and forever.

I wasn’t riveted by American Graffiti. It’s not a perfect film by any stretch. I did some dishes and a crossword and ate some pudding while I watched and I don’t feel bad about it. It touched me, though. Even writing about it makes me feel a pang of regret that I won’t be going home to watch bits over again. Not to mention the pang of regret over bygone walks through a small town making bad choices and being lucky enough to live to tell the tale.

Elsewhere

I wrote a little something about a movie over on my personal blog. Since it’s somewhat politically charged I decided not to do it here. We’re not that type of site, right?

11 Seconds

This post is going to contain spoilers for season 5  of Rescue Me through episode 5, Sheila. Please be careful and do not continue to read unless you are ready for that kind of information. I had a recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy spoiled for me and, while it wasn’t the end of the world of course, it sure did ruin the punch line.

I am a faithful watcher of Rescue Me. It’s about the only 9/11 related media I tolerate and, while I’m not sure why, I do know that I’ll take a lot more from these guys than I do from anyone else trying to process post-demolition NYC on screen. This year, however, they’re testing my boundaries. Until they showed it I hadn’t watched any footage of the crashes or the buildings collapsing since about November of 2001. Apparently if Denis Leary and Peter Tolan say it’s time then I watch. Despite my seemingly slavish devotion I don’t follow unquestioningly. As I read previews of the season I wondered how they could pull this off and for all 4 of the previous seasons I’ve been a little baffled about how they manage to go so over the top emotionally, to a place almost slapstick, and still honor their subject matter and move many of their viewers.

There are moments when they lay the answers to my questions out clear as a fire engine’s siren and last week’s episode closed with one of those. Callie Thorne’s Sheila Keefe is perhaps one of their most outlandish characters. She’s brassy and loud and her entire character is a string of bad choices made with near operatic voice and gesture, if you’re in the habit of watching your opera performed by the Sopranos. I find her storylines often hard to watch and her raw emotion too much to be believed even when I can’t tear my eyes from her.

Last week’s episode ended with a monologue by Sheila Keefe about the end of her husband’s life and, in a sense, her own. I transcribed it below because I want to know I can always come back to it. It is not a perfect piece of writing, though I mistook it for one initially, but it has the charactaristic unflinching honesty of the series. In point of fact I spoke the final line aloud to my living room before the character did and I still can’t decide whether that means I’m unnaturally in tune with the writers or they’ve become lazy. What is perfect is Ms. Thorne’s delivery. She gives us these words as a Sheila we’ve never seen before which, in many contexts would mean that the writers had lost their grip and veered so far off character that the show was jumping the shark. Not so here, though, here the change is deliberate, skillful and riveting. In four plus seasons we have glimpsed here and there moments of containment, of rational strength and of the woman Sheila was on September 10, 2001. They were just moments, though, in the ocean of thrashing, screaming, naked firestarting madness that consumes her. Last week Thorne delivered a nearly 5 minute monologue that rips your heart right out of your chest and hands it back to you with a polite nod and a smile and she does it without either raising her voice or shedding a single tear. It is not what she says so much as, of course, how she says it. Just watch her eyes in the moment before she speaks the final line. Your mileage may vary but my blood ran cold.

Having watched Callie Thorne for nearly five seasons here and caught episodes of her in other favorite shows I suspected she was a force to be reckoned with. Now my suspicions have been confirmed.

“My husband was a firefighter when we met in high school…in his mind. His uncle Mike, Tommy’s dad, had been a firefighter, his Uncle Teddy. He and Tommy, that’s the only thing they ever thought of being. So when I saw that new footage of Jimmy it made me happy. I can’t explain it but I knew that he didn’t, that he wasn’t in the first building. Do you know that feeling you get when you just ever so barely escape a car crash? You know, someone suddenly stops short or races in front of you at an intersection and you think to yourself for a second like right as you slam the brakes like, “Uh oh oh OK this might be it.” And all the air skips out of your lungs and your heart feels like it’s going to explode with fright and your skin sits up real tight…on your bones and there’s this huge rush of breath and blood and… That shiver just shot right through me but not when the 1st building fell, it was during the second. I knew that Jimmy was gone during the second collapse. I stopped breathing. My eyes, I couldn’t blink, my hands froze up like claws and I thought to myself, “Oh we’re never going to finish the kitchen,” because you know, we were working on the kitchen. New counters and cabinets and stuff. And as those first floors began to tumble down, in like, I don’t know, however long it took, like 11 seconds my whole life, my love, the way I wake up in the morning every day, the way I go to sleep every night, all of that just changed, forever. Floor by floor I just…disappeared. When you lose the one person that you, you know, were meant to be with for the rest of your life so unexpectedly and so soon I don’t kn.. I can..it’s like who can walk into your….real love? Is just gone. Talk, touch, sex, breakfast. It’s funny you know, I totally thought that I was gonna just go fetal and curl up in a ball and cry but I didn’t. I made arrangements. I carried my husband’s helmet to the funeral. I listened to the mayor and the chief and Tommy talk about my husband. I buried him. I held my son as he cried against my shoulder and I tucked him in that way every night for months. And then I went fetal. For 5 years. Among many other things I uh, I completely zeroed in on Tommy because he was the closest thing that I could find on this entire earth to replace Jimmy. I cursed Tommy, I slept with Tommy, I blamed Tommy, I made Tommy breakfast, Tommy finished my kitchen…I know that Tommy is haunted by Jimmy’s death, literally. And I, I, I think that sometimes Tommy wishes that Jimmy had lived and that he had died in Jimmy’s place. And so do I.”

What Makes A Classic?

Cookiemaker and I just finished having this conversation literally minutes ago. See, the AMC (American Movie Classics) network has long been showing movies that just don’t come even close to my definition of the word “classic.” Some are blatantly obvious. I mean, my god, even being as big a fan of Steven Seagal as I am, I know that no movie of his should ever, EVER, be considered a classic, yet some of his flicks are shown by AMC.

Huh?!

But just what does make a classic? Clearly the quality of the film has a lot to do with it, but for some reason I think age factors into the equation. For example, as great as Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List were, I don’t think they’re ready to be called “classics” yet. On the other hand, I might be willing to hand Platoon that title. So maybe at least 20 – 25 years need to elapse? What do you folks think?

On a slightly different note, what makes for a great leading man or lady? Again, I think acting talent is a huge requirement, but I also think box office draw plays a role, too. For example, actors like Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Laurence Olivier were not only gifted thespians, but also made people come to see their movies simply because they were in them. Do we have an actor like that today? Is there any current actor that you would equate with the ones I just listed? George Clooney? Matt Damon? Brad Pitt? Ian McCellan? Sean Connery? Harrison Ford? Morgan Freeman? Mel Gibson? Tom Cruise? Tom Hanks? Viggo Mortensen? Johnny Depp? Somebody I haven’t mentioned?

And what about actresses? I think the cupboard is even barer there. Who do we have that equals Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Bette Davis, Deborah Kerr, or Grace Kelly?  Cate Blanchett? Julia Roberts? Glenn Close? I’ve only named three and I’m alread struggling to come up with others. Anne Archer? Sela Ward?

What do you all think? What makes a classic movie? A great actor? A great actress? Do we have and classic movies today? Great actors? Great actresses?

ENG 644: Special Topics. Film and Literature

I’m working on putting together a college course on film and lit. and I’m wondering if I can get some of your input on my thinking.

I’m writing the course in sections (I’m getting through about a week in a sitting) and am posting my ideas as soon as I get them onto paper and in a format that actually makes sense outside of my own head. The first installment of the class is here.

If you’ve got the time and the inclination, I’d really love it if you’d stop by and add your proverbial two cents. Be creative, ask questions, rip it to shreds; I’m good with critique and I really want to get this at least really good – if not entirely fantastic – in the next month or two, so I’m eager for as much help as I can get. I’m hoping to shop it to some local institutions of higher learning and wow them so much that they can’t NOT hire me.

Name Change

Years ago my friend, Miflohny, was looking for company to see a selection of movies at the first annual Sundance at BAM week. I signed on for one movie and we ended up seeing something called Stephanie Daley. It starred Tilda Swinton, who I had loved for a while, and Amber Tamblyn who I had only recently begun enjoying on Joan of Arcadia.

I loved the movie. It’s an intricate little study of honesty and morality in a small mountain town and the performances are, from top to toe, exquisite. We heard from the writer/director after the screening. She was a young mother living in Brooklyn who had developed both the script and the final movie through Sundance programs. I envied and worshipped her. Just a little. I waited with bated breath for the movie to come out on more screens.

That never happened but today I was flipping channels and I saw Amber Tamblyn in something that looked wildly familiar. I couldn’t place it until SWINTON appeared and it was Stephanie Daley! Only now they’re calling it What She Knew and it’s playing on Lifetime. Please set your TiVOs! Don’t let the channel fool you, this movie is worth your time.

Yesterday

Have you ever seen a film in the Zulu language?

Yesterday is the first one ever to be made all the way back in 2004 by Darrell Roodt, the director of Cry, The Beloved Country. It’s about a beautiful woman named Yesterday who works very hard to get some very bad news. Then what happens? Then she deals with it.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter what happens, though her story is important. The meat of the matter is this sunny, brilliant woman who moves through her life with surety and grace the belie the complete impossibility of her tasks. I think you will fall in love with her. I certainly did.

The Skinnies

Normally, you know me, I would never report on something unless I’d watched it beginning to end. What you don’t know is that often I’ll sit in a movie theatre and see a scene or hear a line and start crafting my post right away. Of course, if the movie is post-worthy something will happen that drags me away from drafting and makes me watch the rest of it. In this case we’re talking small screen and Netflix and my weird insistence on ordering my queue to alternate between a TV disc and a movie disc. I’ve watched 1 disc, 4 episodes, of BBC’s Skins and I can’t wait to tell you about it.

There’s a problem, though, it might be awful. It’s a Brit One Tree Hill, but no the writing is better, it’d have to be! It’s a Brit 90210 I suppose, except that I never watched 90210 religiously so I can’t say. Let’s say it’s a Brit Dawson’s Creek because I love Dawson’s and I love these guys and they refer to DC in their pilot episode (never mind that Brit TV doesn’t use the stupid pilot system and please stay tuned in the coming days for my thoughts on the British television nurturing system vs. the American one).  I know that none of these comparisons make the show necessarily appealing to adults or mark it as valuable in any way. Just bear with. Mmkay?

A gross generalization would be to say that Brit TV is better than American. Then you tie me to a chair and make me watch Britcoms for a couple of hours and I gouge my eyes out with the pen I’m using to write “All TV is the BAD” a thousand times. I do think, though, that British TV has a looser set of federal restrictions on the airwaves that give shows a chance to explore topics more fully, to perhaps be more realistic but certainly to be quite raw which, on the subject of teenagers, is often one and the same.

Observe my favorite Skins character, Cassie, at left (played by Hannah Murray). The general overview of the show is a bunch of relatively smart, entirely risk….(what’s the opposite of risk averse? risk adjacent?) embroiled high school age kids in a generally average school get up to hijinks. In the episodes I’ve watched so far we’re mostly meeting the kids. Cassie is part slut, part addict, part airhead with a keen emotional sense and a debilitating eating disorder. In her introductory episode we don’t see her in a vacuum or only in school. Her disorder does not crop up suddenly in one episode and she is not miraculously cured with a cheeseburger and an invitation to the dance. We get to see her in all her crazy, deluded glory and that is frightening because it is so endearing. We also get to see her family and her friends and her slot in this life, all the reasons she is who she is and all the other reasons that becoming someone else is nearly impossible.

What I’m saying is, it’s a teen show with a shock factor and a rather glossy end-tying-up veneer but if you like that sort of thing it’s one of the best of its kind and well worth your time. And if you’re a character junkie, as I am, it’s must-see DVD*.

*This reviewer recommends watching on DVD as opposed to BBC America where American broadcast regulations may edit content in a detrimental way.

Please Forgive Me

I try to keep my movie musings to this space because I love that we have a little celluloid nest over here and I want to contribute as much as possible. Honestly, though, I needed to put photos in my post and I simply couldn’t stomach the hellaciousness of working out the WordPress system when I know the Blogger one. So, please forgive me for being weak and posting a thought about last night’s Oscars over at my own blog. I’ll come back here soon when I have the strength to learn something new. I hope you’ll take a field trip and check out what I have to say.

Inside (2007)

Don’t watch this movie.  Seriously.  Don’t watch it.  It’s revolting.  It’s horrible.

It’s also kinda brilliant.

You would be hard-pressed to find a movie more violent (seriously, it’s disgusting).  But, as violent as it was (not kidding, unbelievably gory), at the end it didn’t leave me with the empty feeling I had after sampling the twin titans of the “torture porn” genre, “Saw” and “Hostel”.  This movie was actually made by people with some talent and love of movie-making.

The plot concerns a very pregnant widow on Christmas Eve who is poised to give birth the next day.  A strange woman breaks into her house with the intention of taking what’s inside of the not-so-merry widow.

Bad things happen.  Awful, unspeakable, incredibly upsetting things.  The violence is way over the top (really, just a bloodbath, literally).  But, before the blood starts gushing and the heads start exploding, there is actual suspense and a spooky sense of dread.

Béatrice Dalle (pictured) plays the unnamed interloper who will not be denied with a great mixture of coolness and intensity.  She’s stunning to look at in her funereal black dress.  She has a gap in her teeth that is wider than David Letterman’s and Lauren Hutton’s combined, but she’s oddly sexy, even as she’s attempting to kick down the bathroom door and administer an unauthorized c-section.

Even a semi-observant filmgoer will figure out just who this strange woman is long before it’s revealed near the end of the film, assuming you even get that far.  But this shouldn’t detract from the tension and the gore (sweet jesus, it’s gross).

Undoubtedly, one of the most disturbing films I’ve ever seen.  If you are pregnant or have ever been pregnant, it will disturb you even more.  That is, if you actually have the nerve to watch it.  And I’m telling you that you shouldn’t.  Really.  Not kidding.  It’s vile.

But if you have the stomach for it…