Today, I want to lay out the movies that Fucked Me Up. I'm not talking about gross-out flicks or movies that sport The Usual Suspects-style plot twists. I'm talking about movies that seized my Expectations, nailed them against the wall and slapped them around. That's right. These movies knocked me out of the Tree of the Mainstream and showed me there was more to movies than bullwhip-wielding archeologists, aliens in the suburbs, or romantic comedies where pretty women mate with men too witty to survive Real Life.
NOTE: I kinda fucked up and wrote descriptions for six movies instead of five and now I can't bear to part with any of them. So, you're stuck with a bonus film... lucky you.
#6... no, 5 (ack!)
Desperate Living
Background: No matter how many movies a person watches, he'll never see them all. I read a profile on Quentin Tarantino and the gazillion movies that he's watched at the rate of something like 3 or 4 a day. It's no frigging wonder that his movies are references-of-references-of-references nowadays. His daily exposure to Real Life has got to be about 15 minutes, tops. I gave up trying to be the Film Know-It-All. It's too damn exhausting. I haven't watched more than a couple Fellini films. I never "completed" Scorsese by tracking down a copy of Boxcar Bertha. I still haven't seen Pandora's Box. So, there. Deal with it.Until a couple years ago, I hadn't watched a single John Waters film except Pink Flamingos-- the perfunctory, shock-film that every first-year, film student has to watch the second he moves away from his parents. A friend of mine gasped in horror when I confessed this dirty little secret and immediately lent me every DVD of John Waters that he owned.
The Movie: The John Waters film that rocked the hardest was Desperate Living. Made five years after the infamous Pink Flamingos, this movie feels almost relaxed in its offensiveness. This is, perhaps, the most quotable movie on the planet. Where else could one possibly hope to find such memorable lines as "Go home to your mother! Doesn't she ever want you? Tell her this isn't some communist daycare center! Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!" The opening credits are over the serving of a cooked rat on a dinner platter. One character cuts of his/her penis with a pair of scissors. As for the Queen Charlotta... well, I don't want to spoil it for you.
What it Did: Desperate Living blew me away because of how comfortable and casual John Waters' ensemble cast pull it all off. Fuck Sid & Nancy. This movie IS Punk- absolute freedom. This movie looks like the most fun a filmmaker could hope to have with no budget (a.k.a. every film I've ever made). It felt like I was peeking in on this degenerate ensemble of misfit filmmakers having the time of their lives... and I longed to be a part of it.#5
Nashville
Background: This film came in the end of my film school years. About this time, my fellow students and I were scampering along the streets of Iowa City with a Bolex in one hand and a Nagra recorder in the other. We were blowing wads of cash on film processing and learning the fundamentals of filmmaking. We learned how it's standard practice to start a scene with an establishing shot, then shot/reverse shot setups and a medium shot for transitions. As for sound editing, the One Thing you didn't want was overlapping dialogue- you can't get consistent volume levels, it limits your editing options, etc.
The Movie: Robert Altman throws 13 main characters into the city of Nashville. Characters talk over one another. Long, establishing shots are held through entire scenes. An audience often has to decide which conversation to listen to, then filter it from the one or two other conversations going on at the same time. The story had characters wandering from one meeting/party/encounter to another with no, clear, establishing incident or rising tension. Only the drama of Barbara Jean's nervous breakdown tried to carry an escalating plot.
What it Did: Showed me that I'd wasted a ridiculous amount of money on film school. Here's your film school, right here-- 1) Story dictates style, 2)Look at the world around you 3)Now, go make a movie - $20,000, please. I've watched this movie a dozen times and gotten something different out of it Every Time.#4
Annie Hall
Background: Any movie nominated for an Academy Award should be automatically disqualified from this list, but fuck it. Before Annie Hall, I had seen Bananas, Sleepers, and Take the Money and Run so this might explain why I was completely confused when the the pratfall guy in glasses suddenly started talking like an adult.
The Movie: Best-written movie. ever. It's staggering to believe that the man who wrote this was the same person who befouled celluloid with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Annie Hall is a staggering series of narrative rule-breaking. Alvie Singer (Woody Allen) steps in and out of the narrative. He talks to other characters (in and out of the context of the scene) . He speaks directly to the camera. He effortlessly switches from present tense to past, then back again. He takes characters on tours of his character's memories. He's all over the fucking place and even falls into animation for one scene. This is the Unteachable Script. It violates just about every rule of screenwriting and Sensible Filmmaking.
What it Did: There are great novels and plays out there and better overall films, but there is no equal from a writing standpoint. If one's passion is strong enough, all the rules can go fuck themselves. This is a singular effort of vision. I don't care if he married his step-daughter and tanked his career in the late 90s-- this is a Great movie.#3
Trainspotting
Background: I was living in Los Angeles at the time and I was dreaming of being the next Hal Ashby/Orson Welles/Kurosawa (I was young). This was a couple years after Pulp Fiction when Hollywood was in the midst of an embarrassing attempt to replicate the coolness of Pulp Fiction (Tarantino included), but what they were producing was pap next to this.
The Movie: It's slickly-made, has a perfect-- and APPROPRIATE-- soundtrack, and the best opening sequence in cinema. Ewan McGregor could do nothing but shitty films the rest of his career (Star Wars what?) and I would still admire the fuck out of him. Irvine Welsh's novel is brilliant, but I don't know what crazy fuck thought that it could be made into a movie-- thick, Scottish accents, drug abuse, AIDS, underage sex, and a baby death. And the movie still manages to end with something resembling a happy ending. Are you fucking kidding me? Robert Carlyle's turn as Begbie is as good as it gets.
What it Did: Made me realize that I was in the wrong fucking country for making movies. It tore through innumerable clichés of drug abuse by showing druggies as people, why they do heroin and why the fuck they would keep doing it. It put four fantastic actors and a great novel on my radar and showed me that even the most insufferable characters are likable if you've got the right actor and a personal-enough story. I could sit down and watch this movie Any Time/Any Day. It's hardwired to my film sensibility, now.
Liquid Sky
Background: I watched this movie at the Bijou Theater- the University of Iowa's tiny, movie theater and the polar-opposite environment of this movie. I went because I liked the name of the title but stayed for an absolute head-fuck, particularly for a film student who was living in the heart of the American Midwest.
The Movie: There's nothing like a transsexual, NYC, early-80's, science fiction film directed by a Russian filmmaker to fire the imagination. Liquid Sky is one of those typical, underground movies that wallows in it's terrible plot and odd characters but works because there's something real, pushing beneath the surface and making it come together. It also has the best lesbian rape scene ever.
What it did: It floored me to realize that there was this amazing, dark, heroin-based, music culture in New York City that I'd heard nothing about and a it took a movie like this to show it to me. The acting is terrible, the special effects are laughable, but it got made. The sucker got made. It was also sported the angriest, most-nihilistic characters I'd ever seen. Unlike John Waters' menagerie of Cult, I found that I DIDN'T want to join this group of bitter folks, but I loved to watch.#1
Requiem for a Dream
Background: I had just moved to New York City and was eager to see a film that took place near my new home. I remember thinking, "Oh, cool! It takes place in Coney Island- that's at the end of my subway line here in Brooklyn! It's from that guy who did Pi and has that hottie from Labyrinth! This should be fun!"
The Movie: If Lou Reed wrote a crystal meth version of "Heroin", set it to the musical cacophony of Oasis's "Champagne Supernova" then convinced Iggy Pop to perform it, then that would be a musical equivalent to this movie. It is brutal, unrelenting, and incredibly-written. Jennifer Connelly pulled a performance that's on par with McGregor's in Trainspotting. When she goes to see Big Tim (Keith David) and he gives her the line "I know it's purty baby, but I didn't take it out for air", you can feel the bottom drop out. Ellen Burstyn is the engine that drives this baby, though, and she pushes it hard and right off the cliff.
What it Did: This is a Breen-era, cautionary tale with no brakes and no censorship. It's a tale with virtually no hope from the beginning, then it gets worse, and I couldn't stop watching it. I still pull it out just to watch some of the phenomenal scenes. I was one of the first to buy it on DVD, but I've never been able to watch it a second time in one sitting. Not since Schindler's List have I seen a movie that I enjoyed more yet never wanted to see again.
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