My desire to be alone is something I've dealt with for a long time. I think "struggled with" may be too strong, but there were certainly times when I tried to fight it. This is mostly due to outside influence. I've always been very comfortable by myself. When I was very young, I usually played by myself, not because I couldn't make friends, or even because I didn't want to, but because it didn't occur to me to. I was perfectly satisfied by myself. This is one of the ways I've always identified with Calvin (of "& Hobbes" fame), and found that strip to be a pretty accurate, if stylized, depiction of my early childhood. I was even blonde back then! The difference was just that I didn't have one Hobbes, but many. Since Bill Watterson is a Pynchon level hermit (and come to think of it, even Pynchon was on the Simpsons), I'm sure he spoke from experience.
Later, when I'd have to wait an hour or so after school to be picked up, there were a few times when my dad would show up and they told him I wasn't there. I was. I'd be in the back aisle of the library, reading. I went back there because I'd be left alone. Nothing annoys me more than being bothered while I'm reading. There's been a few times (thankfully not many) when I've been reading and someone will attempt to start a conversation with me, and actually say "I'll talk to you so you don't have to read." But this isn't another of my book loving posts, so I digress.
The point is, people tend to think there's something wrong with wanting to be by yourself. They think there's something inherently wrong with it, and they also think that people like this don't want to be that way. They think we're emotional cripples who just can't deal with other people, or at the very least, need coaxed "out of our shell" and will be grateful when it's done. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a lie that many introverts buy into, and I think it results in a lot of unhappiness. If I want to be alone, and I am happy being alone, then by all means, leave me alone.
Introvert is a key word here. There are introverts and extroverts, and even if they don't think in these terms, extroverts believe that they are behaving correctly and that introverts have a problem. There's nothing wrong with being an extrovert, if that's who you are. One of the fatal flaws of our culture and civilization (and I use "fatal flaw" quite literally, it will eventually kill us) is the belief that everyone must act in the same way. However, most of the great art, great literature, great scientific discoveries... these predominantly come from introverts. It's just a personality type. For example, consider Stephen Hawking. His disability is very unfortunate, but if he was going to be rendered completely immobile as he has been, it is fortunate that he can have a wonderful time (as his wife once said) inside his head. I could imagine a different sort of man being driven to suicide.
Introvert doesn't mean shy, nor awkward. I'm not sure how much overlap there is, as I can only speak from personal experience; although I did go through a shy phase as a young kid, I am neither of those things. There was a period in my early twenties when I took a personal assessment and realized I had almost no friends. This seemed like a bad thing, because I was listening to the world. Telling someone they don't have friends is calling them a loser. So I tried to make friends, and every friend I made... I didn't particularly like. I had to realize that not having friends doesn't make you a loser. I'm not going to judge someone else, but needing to have a lot of friends might mean you're not comfortable with yourself. Not having friends means you don't want or need people in your life just to have them. If I connect with someone, that's great, but it's probably not going to happen. Most people I meet like me, but I can count the close friends I've had in my life on one hand. And this is not a failing on my part, I'm just not wired to have a lot of relationships. I'm happy that way.
I have been married, and I wouldn't be opposed in principal to being in a one to one pairing like that again, but I don't think I need to be. I don't believe that man is an island, and I wouldn't be happy being completely cut off from all human interaction. Not at all. I just require much, much less of it than a lot of people, and I definitely need a fair amount of time when I'm completely alone, more than most people. I don't like being around people all the time. We're all different. And I say let us be different. Be yourself, and take what you need from life, no less, no more.
It's taken me a long time to come to a sort of understanding of these things, but I'm glad I have, I think I'm going to be much happier in life for it. I would like to own some land far from any cities, and live mostly by myself. I don't want to be a hermit, and I don't want to never interact with anyone. There should be a town I can drive to. I just don't want any neighbors. I can have someone living there with me or not, depends on if they're the right kind of person. I can be happy either way. I don't want to live off the land. I think it's important to know how to do that, but there's no reason to do it just to do it. I just think there might come a time when we have to, and it's knowledge worth having. I don't want an isolated existence, nor a social existence. I want a life that is custom fit for me. Don't we all?
Monday, July 22, 2013
Sunday, July 21, 2013
"There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life." - Fellini
Here is my list of my ten favorite films of all time. I've done top ten lists many times before, and no two were the same. There are a few films which always make it, but this list is alive, and I wouldn't have it any other way. My ground rules: I am making this list for myself, and no one else. That means the perception of the list doesn't enter into it. I will not exclude a film because it's lowbrow, or popular, nor include one to impress anyone. Nor will I shy away from the obscure and the elevated. I even had to break my standard rule of "no repeats" to honestly compose this list. Second, this list is only going to be for fiction films. I alluded in an earlier post about films which have changed me, but in truth, most of these are documentaries. I love documentaries and fiction films about equally, and I will certainly write a similar blog in the future with my ten favorite documentaries.
So, without further ado, my ten favorite films, listed alphabetically:
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)
I believe this was the first of Werner Herzog's fiction films I saw, and it was definitely the first time I saw Klaus Kinski. It follows the travels of a legion of 16th century Spanish conquistadors down the Amazon river in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. It is largely based on fact. This film is haunting, beautiful, ugly, absurd and insane. It truly, perhaps more than any other film, captures the madness of the human condition. There are so many unforgettable scenes and images.
It opens with the conquistadors slowly making their way down a narrow, winding mountain path through the jungle, with the mountaintops shrouded in mist. They are dressed in full armor, carrying cannon. Their women, dressed in finery, are born along in sedan chairs. Thus adorned for the royal court, they descend into the heart of the jungle. The music, by progressive German band Popol Vuh (named for the Mayan mytho-historical narrative, including the Creation and the Deluge) is eerie and ethereal.
The expedition is taken over by the madman Aguirre. Aguirre's legendary monologue:
"I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be stamped on until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water more than his ration, will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees... then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of god. The earth I pass will see me and tremble."
Perhaps the most unforgettable scene for me is when the expedition encounters a native, who gestures vaguely down the river when asked where the city of gold is. They are prepared to part on good terms, when the monk halts them. "Wait." he says "We must tell him about the Lord." He is shown a Bible and told it is the word of God. He holds it to his ear and says he doesn't hear anything. They kill him for blasphemy. If there is a better encapsulation of the absurdity of our civilization, I haven't seen it.
There is a horse, also adorned in royal colors, aboard their raft. Aguirre becomes enraged, punches it in the face, and throws it over the side. I can never forget the image of the horse, standing motionless on the riverbank, seen from the perspective of the raft, slowly drifting out of sight and being swallowed by the jungle. On the commentary track, Herzog says that this shot is an example of why he is a filmmaker: that this shot is a type of art which you could not duplicate in any other art form. Only in film could this exist.
The film depicts madness, and it was madness. During filming, the notoriously unstable Kinski jumped up screaming in the middle of the night, enraged at a loud card game in the neighboring tent, and began blindly firing a rifle through the tent wall. He threatened to walk off the film many times, and this was no empty threat, as he had done this several times before and shut down several productions. Bear in mind here the incredible amount of pain and effort that had already gone into the intensely difficult shoot. By his own admission, Herzog could have shot the film a day or so outside the capitol, but he believes in "the voodoo of location", so they were really shooting in the heart of the jungle, really experiencing what the characters were experiencing. The famous story is that Herzog forced Kinski to continue filming at gunpoint. On the commentary track, Herzog says it did not happen exactly like this, he only threatened to shoot Kinski and was not holding a gun at the time. But, he notes, he was not joking. He absolutely would have shot him. "And somehow the bastard knew I'd do it."
Slowly, the river claims them. Men fall dead, hit by arrows from the riverbanks, the attackers unseen. Finally only Aguirre is left, and he declares he will impregnate his own daughter and found the purest dynasty the world has ever known. The raft is overrun by tiny screeching monkeys, and the film ends with the camera spinning around and around the raft, while Aguirre stumbles like a drunk, covered in monkeys.
"That man is a head taller than me. That may change." - Aguirre
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Bully (2001)
Would you care to see my teenage years? Here they are. Never has a movie spoken to me so personally. None of the events or characters are parallel, but the lifestyle, the attitudes, and the feeling is my life. I could have been a character in this movie. If I had to pick one, Michael Pitt as Donny is the closest to me. This is set in central Florida, where I grew up, and although it's in a much more affluent area than I'm from, I knew every one of these kids. Especially Donny, and especially Heather, as she's from the wrong side of the tracks anyway. I knew a lot of Heathers.
Remember the line from Fight Club "Our Great Depression is our lives."? That was the theory. This is the practice. This is one of two movies I can say define nihilism (the other being Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone), and I know that because I lived it. This depicts a life with no ideals, no beliefs, no ambitions, no convictions, no anything but a bottomless emptiness. You satisfy this emptiness on a moment to moment basis, with drugs, sex, cruelty, violence... anything to make you feel something, just for a moment, because there's nothing to feel. Watch the parents in this. None of them are bad parents, except that they are oblivious. They know nothing of their children or their children's lives, but they sleep soundly, because the truth is out of their sight. Until it isn't. That's so true to life.
Ironically, the only one who seems to have a parent who cares and takes an active interest in his life is Bobby, the titular bully. He's played by Nick Stahl, and it's truly one of the great unheralded villain performances I can think of. I like bullies as characters, when they're young. They're very emotionally complex characters. Kiefer Sutherland as Ace Merrill in Stand By Me is probably my favorite cinematic bully, but Nick Stahl here as Bobby Kent is right up there. He's such a perfect bastard, but Stahl wisely makes him, if not exactly likeable, at least charismatic. There must be some reason these people even associate with him. I would say he's undeniably funny, usually at others' expense. And in the scenes with Bobby's dad, you get a sense of another side of him. People are very, very rarely just one thing, and this film shows that.
When the idea of murder comes up, it's treated with no more significance than anything else. This emptiness is real. That's what scares people about this story (which is true), but as someone who's been there, I can tell you it's just telling the truth. This could have easily happened to me, and the only reason it didn't, is that it didn't. It's a serious, disturbing film, but elements of it are also very funny. Leo Fitzpatrick is frankly hilarious in this, playing another character who I absolutely knew in real life: someone who is 100% full of shit. The soundtrack is full of rap glorifying violence, sex and money, and it, like everything else in this film, is totally accurate. The break comes with the use of Fatboy Slim's "Song For Shelter", which closes out the film. This is one of the best uses of an existing song on a soundtrack I've ever seen. The way the sound juxtaposes with the images, and the dialogue which is slowly overcome by the music until all you hear is the closing crescendo, and the significance of what you're seeing and what you have seen sinks in. It's one of the most powerful endings to a film I can recall, made more so by the fact that all of the dialogue in the final scene is totally factual, from the actual court transcripts. It's all a game until someone gets hurt... except I don't think it was ever a game.
"I don't even know what the fuck I'm doing here, I didn't do shit, I don't know what I'm fucking here for..." - Donny Semenec
Con Air (1997)
I saw Con Air in the theater six times. Still a personal record. I love action movies; I am Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz. I am a lover of the cinema, what can I say, and I love genre films. Really overblown, over the top action films are comic books come to life. They are living cartoons. They are such a joy to watch because they are so true to themselves, so unpretentious. There's a very fine line with films like this, a subtlety that doesn't become clear until you watch as many of them as I have. I don't want my action films too serious, because then you lose the fun and escapism that brought you in the first place. I don't want them too self aware, because I'm not watching these films ironically, and I don't need them to be self-deprecating. I appreciate these films on their own terms. Con Air balanced that better than any movie I've ever seen, and I don't think there's a time or a place I couldn't sit down and watch this from beginning to end.
Con Air is a perfect comic book come to life. The characters have supervillain aliases: Cyrus the Virus, Diamond Dog, Billy Bedlam, Johnny 23, Swamp Thing, Pinball. The cast in this movie is unreal. How they assembled such a collection I don't know, but wow... Con Air was either the first time I saw, or made me a fan of, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Danny Trejo, and Dave Chappelle (I didn't connect him back to Men in Tights until years later). And at the center of it all is Nicolas Cage, Hollywood's stopped clock, who's right twice a day. He's out of his mind, but when he's good, he's good.
Steve Buscemi as Garland Greene ("the Marietta Mangler") is probably the most interesting character. A charming psychopath, he's clearly Hannibal Lecter inspired. He even wears the bite mask (has anything like this ever been used in real life? Even in the novel, Hannibal wears a standard catcher's mask). I love madmen and serial killers, and if you ask me, Steve Buscemi is a better actor than Antony Hopkins (I think Hopkins is one of the most overrated actors. He's done a lot of good work, but he overacts, phones it in, and picks bad roles a lot too. Brian Cox in Manhunter is the definitive film version of Hannibal, for my money). Garland Greene is presented as a totally sympathetic character, and when he "gets away" at the end, the audience cheered all six times. Funny that letting one little girl live is sufficient penance for butchering "thirty-some people up and down the eastern seaboard". But that's just a testament to Buscemi as an actor and the writing/directing team of Scott Rosenberg and Simon West. I do like the idea that a nationally famous serial killer is presumed to be able to escape detection on the Las Vegas strip, which is crawling with more cops than two seasons of Law and Order.
Regarding West and Rosenberg, neither one of them did a single other thing I'm a fan of, which kind of goes to show just how hard this sort of thing is to do right. West later directed The Expendables 2, which is a textbook example of an action film being too self aware. It thinks it's funny, and it thinks it's clever, and it is neither. I make no claims to Con Air being great art, or a great film, but it is great at what it does, and if it wasn't on this list, this list would be a lie.
"This is your barbecue, Cyrus, and it tastes good!" - Cameron Poe
The Dark Knight (2008)
I don't care if it made a billion dollars, this movie was made for me personally. Batman enjoys popularity resurgences every generation, which I think demonstrates that there's something in the very roots and essence of the character that speaks to people. He's gone through many permutations. The Adam West TV show, despite being awful and ridiculous to the point of flat out stupidity, was an accurate depiction of the comics at the time. When I got into Batman comic books, I was fortunate enough to have a guide, someone who could tell me the best stories to read. Batman got really, really good in the 80s. Comics were getting very dark during that time period, and also getting much, much better, because certain visionary writers were raising the bar. Chief among them were Alan Moore with Watchmen and Frank Miller with The Dark Knight Returns. So Batman was right at the center of this comics renaissance, helping to define it. Batman had some good stories in the 70s, but I think Frank was able to tap into that core of what makes Batman really connect with people, and because Frank Miller is Frank Miller, write an absolutely brilliant, twisted story with it. Something else that grew out of this period was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, which became the definitive Joker story. Joker is, in my opinion (and probably most people's opinion) the greatest comic book villain of all time. The Killing Joke set the standard for Joker stories; if you want to write the Joker, you're going to have to aim high.
Then we got Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman. It was good. It wasn't great. It was dark and gothic, but that was just Tim Burton being himself. He was going for the 60s Batman, that was all he was familiar with. And it was a gigantic blockbuster. Batman was everywhere that summer, on every t shirt, every lunch box, people had the bat symbol shaved into their hair. It was insane. And then came Batman Returns which was also good, but while simultaneously being darker than the first, you can also see how it's closer to the Adam West Batman. And then two more movies, the less said about the better, which killed the franchise dead, so far as movies. Or so I thought. Batman the Animated Series came out, and that was as good as a lot of the comics. It's truly an amazing show and I can't praise it enough. I was satisfied with that. And for the cinematic version of Batman, we had the Burton films. Better than we had any right to expect really. So that was Batman, and I was happy with that. It wasn't the comics, but it didn't have to be. I had my comics, and my animated series, and my Burton films, and life was good for a Batman fan.
Then Batman Begins came out. And it was really serious, and really sincere. I was a fan of Christopher Nolan, although for his smaller films, and I guessed he just didn't have the chops to do that kind of blockbuster just right, but Batman Begins was really good. It wasn't perfect, but I put it together with my comics and my animated series and my Burton films, and I was glad that Nolan understood that Batman was a serious character who should be taken seriously.
The hype for The Dark Knight began months and months before it came out. I remember hearing that Heath Ledger was going to play the Joker and losing all confidence in the project. I went on a long, in hindsight embarrassing rant about how Christopher Nolan didn't understand the characters after all. And I was wrong.
I was wrong.
As more information leaked out, I started to get more and more excited for The Dark Knight. I saw the opening bank scene, and the chase sequence. I heard the amazing Hans Zimmer score. I knew this was going to be good. I came to understand that Heath Ledger understood the Joker better than anyone who had ever played him before. And then he died. "Yes!", I said "That's it! That's it! The Joker is such a great villain he can kill you if you play him in a movie! That's how crazy he is!" And yes, while I'm sad Heath Ledger is dead, I still believe that. I believe Heath Ledger literally killed himself to give me The Killing Joke, the Joker as he truly is, in the comic books.
My expectations could not have been higher. I was a fanboy who expected this movie to live up to Alan Moore and Frank Miller. And it fucking did. Heath Ledger was the Joker, the self described Agent of Chaos, the laughing nihilist. There's nobody who didn't see this, so I don't need to detail to you how good it is, but maybe that can help you understand what it meant to me. It was the one in a million shot where it all came together, and what Batman movies could be was changed, what super hero movies could be was changed, and what comic book movies could be was changed. A dead man won an Oscar for playing the Joker. I cried watching this, and I still can to this day.
To make one such movie is a miracle. Christopher Nolan did it again. The Dark Knight Rises is as good. It can't have quite the emotional impact as The Dark Knight because of the experience I've described, but think about this: Nolan had an impossibly high standard to meet with The Dark Knight, and he did it. And then, after clearing that bar, he had to get up there again. He had to cram that lightning back into the bottle. I fully expected Dark Knight Rises to suck. I really did. And he proved me wrong again. Thank you, Christopher Nolan. And thank you Heath Ledger.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We are tonight's entertainment!" - The Joker
Ed Wood (1994)
Ed Wood is a loving tribute to many things very close to my heart. It's also a great film, and a great story. It is very, very funny, and although there's no straight comedies on this list, this is probably the closest. It's not a comedy because, among other things, it's true. The tragically ludicrous? The ludicrously tragic? Ed Wood (the man) as depicted here reminds me of John Waters crossed with Fred MacMurray.
I am attracted to outsiders. They are my people, and the only place I've ever been able to fit in is with people who don't fit in. Ed Wood is about people like that. I think that's the key to why I love it. Every character in this movie is a freak in one way or the another, but so what? If you asked me to pick a favorite from this cast, I'd have a hard time doing it. Probably the funniest scene in this movie is Bela Lugosi wrestling with a non-functioning mechanical octopus. It stands well for Ed's films in general.
Ed Wood is just a very well done film about a man following impossible dreams. I am a fan of the real Ed Wood, and I don't find his films funny. They were too earnest to be funny. You just can't watch them as films, you have to watch them as the evidence of the making of a film, and that's what Ed Wood is about. It's about a guy who does what he does because he just has to do it. So what if he's no good at it? So what if he can't catch a break? So what if everybody laughs at him? Ed wants to make movies, so Ed makes movies. There's something about that which speaks to me.
I also love black and white films, and I'm glad I was able to include one on this list, even if it was done as a stylistic choice. I love old Hollywood, I love that sort of 1950s sensibility; just the way people talked and carried themselves back then. It's fascinating to me. I love these characters and I love this story, because, like me, they're freaks and outsiders and they're fine with it. I think Werner Herzog or Harmony Korine or John Waters would have gotten along really well with Ed and his friends.
There's an interesting undercurrent of alternative sexuality here which I like, too. Ed is completely unashamed of his transvestism (as was the real Ed, by all accounts), and Bill Murray gives one of my favorite smaller roles of his career here, as the camp queen Bunny Breckinridge. I identify with his contradictory sexuality. He's part of a group of characters I connect with in that way, who I always thought would make a good group of tattoos. Bunny, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, Eli from Let the Right One In, maybe Eddie Izzard. After the amazing scene with Bela and the octopus, I think my favorite moment in this movie is Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as Orson Welles. He delivers a line worth taking to heart.
"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?" - Orson Welles
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
It seemed contradictory to my impulses to have two Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski films, but I simply cannot have this list without either of these films. They are masterpieces. In a way, they can be seen as companion pieces: they tell the story of a madman who has an impossible dream, and against all odds and no matter the cost, he will not stop until he achieves it.
Fitzcarraldo is the story (based on fact) of an opera lover who wants to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle, and hire Caruso to sing in it. He needs money. Fortunes are made on rubber in this part of the world, so he sets out to become a rubber baron. He discovers an unclaimed parcel of rubber trees, determined to be worthless because they are made inaccessible by treacherous river rapids. He discovered another tributary which comes within several hundred meters of the rubber trees, separated by a mountain. He leases the parcel from the government, and sets out to drag a ship over the mountain into the neighboring river system.
This is a story of madness, of determination. It speaks of quests, of dreams. It is a record of man's foolishness, man's pride in the face of nature, man's ambition and vision... all those things which make us human. There is no other film like it. Because to make this film, Herzog knew that he had to really drag a real ship over a real mountain. Like Aguirre, but even more so, the film itself is the message of the film. It is not enough to tell the story. Herzog has to live the story to truly tell it. If he used a plastic ship, the audience would know it was plastic. No one else in the world could have made Fitzcarraldo besides Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski.
Funnily enough, filming started with Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo, with Mick Jagger as his goofy sidekick. Robards dropped out after becoming sick with dysentery, and Jagger soon followed. In desperation, Herzog turned to his friend and one time collaborator, Klaus Kinski. This saved the film, in my opinion, because while Jason Robards could certainly play a madman, Klaus Kinski was a madman. This movie is what it is because it is real. The film is more real than the story it depicts, as the real Fitzcarraldo disassembled his ship before transporting it over the mountain. Fitzcarraldo's determination to get his ship over the mountain and make his rubber fortune is Herzog's determination to get his ship over the mountain and make his film. Fitzcarraldo's madness and erratic behavior is Kinski's madness and erratic behavior. When Herzog says that his documentaries are fiction and his fiction are documentaries, Fitzcarraldo is the film the proves the second half of that statement true.
Fitzcarraldo is not a perfect film. It may be disjointed and slightly overlong. It is the reality that makes it perfect. In the same way as I said David Foster Wallace's The Pale King was a perfect book, in that a book about depression was his suicide note, so too is Fitzcarraldo. A film about an impossible dream was Herzog's impossible dream. And it is spectacular.
Fitzcarraldo should not be viewed on its own. You must watch the companion documentary, Burden of Dreams, about the making of the film. They are a two part work, you need each to appreciate the other. I won't discuss it too much, because it will be included when I do a list like this for documentaries, but I will give you one quote, and one image from it, and that is Fitzcarraldo:
Herzog : "If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project."
The image: Herzog sunk thigh deep in mud, physically pulling his leg out each time he has to take a step forward.
"I want my opera house! I want the opera house! This church remains closed until this town has its opera house. I want my opera house! I want my opera house! I want my opera house!" - Fitzcarraldo
Jaws (1975)
I did this list alphabetically because I can't order my favorite films, but I can pick my single favorite movie, and it's Jaws. Jaws is a perfect film. Every frame, every second is right. It is everything I want from a movie, and for sheer entertainment, it has never been equaled. It's scary, it's funny, it's interesting, it's suspenseful, I like the actors, I like the characters, the music is incredible. Jaws has it all.
Let's start with the score. Jaws probably has one of the most famous scores of all time, and it deserves to. The deceptively simple score has been reused and parodied so many times, it's more or less the definition of "ominous dread". This was before John Williams ran out of ideas. I've seen clips of Jaws with the music removed, and while I do still find it scary (natural sound is always scary to me in a movie), I can definitely acknowledge the major contribution that score makes to the film.
Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw are all perfect. Jaws is one of the few examples of a movie that's better than the book, and these three central roles are most of why. If you've read the book, you know that Hooper and Quint and unlikable assholes, just unpleasant to be around. The book is much darker, but it almost feels like I'm reading Cujo, a story about how sometimes the world will just decide to kick your ass for no reason at all. That's true, and there's a place for that, but I think every single change Spielberg made was for the better, and now I'd say Quint, definitely, is one of my favorite film characters of all time.
My favorite character in the movie, however, is Mayor Vaughn. I want his blazer with the little anchors on it more than anything, and he has the best lines in the film. "Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody goes 'Huh? What?' You yell shark... we've got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July." "Now why don't you take a long, close look at that sign. Those proportions are correct." "Love to prove that, wouldn't ya? Get your name into the National Geographic?" And even though I just used it yesterday, I have to include my favorite line in this film (or maybe any film): "Fellows, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock."
The shark, despite the fact that it barely worked, goes down as one of the scariest movie monsters of all time. Put him up there with Dracula, Freddy, Pennywise, I don't care who, and I would bet you Bruce has caused as many nightmares as any of them. Each kill is terrifying. The opening scene, with the unfortunate Chrissy, was recently determined to be the single most frightening scene in any film, ever. I disagree, but I won't call it a bad choice.
I'm amazed and somewhat jealous that Spielberg could make this when he was only 23. The craftsmanship he put into the film is incredible. For example, the scene where Brody is chumming off the back of the boat and you get your first good look at the shark. It's lost impact over time, but back in the 70s, people would still giggle at profanity, so Brody's line to "Come down here and chum some of this shit." was designed to get nervous laughter, and then, bam, he hits you with the shark when you're not expecting it at all, and the laughter is caught in your throat. He gives the audience a second to catch their breath and then delivers the most famous line in the film: "You're gonna need a bigger boat." That's film-making.
Another great example is when Hooper pulls the tooth out the hull of the fishing boat, but drops it when the head floats into view. It's an eerie scene, with the murky green water, and you know something is going to happen. It's a false scare, just a jump, but Spielberg tried several different ways of timing it. He had the head float out as soon as Hooper found the tooth, he tried it with a long pause, and finally settled on just a split second pause. He tested the audience each time, and found the short pause freaked them out the most. Stuff like that, that's why I love Jaws, and it's what made Spielberg a real auteur.
Everything from when the three leads head out on the Orca until the end is gold, but Quint's story about the Indianapolis is probably my favorite scene in the film. Quint's death has to be one of the greatest film deaths ever, as well. In the novel, he gets his leg tangled in a rope, is pulled under and drowns. A nice Moby Dick allusion, but again, Spielberg made it better. And "Smile, you son of a bitch!" How great is that? Jaws didn't make a single mistake, and that's why it's my favorite movie.
"Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three; for fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for this vicinity." - Quint
The Little Mermaid (1989)
So I love Disney movies, and really, when it comes to picking my favorite one, it's not hard at all. Dumbo, Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland would all easily be included among a general list of my favorite films, but when it comes down to it, nothing comes close to Little Mermaid. Where to begin?
I remember vividly the first time I saw this. I didn't see it in the theater (when it was new, although fortunately I was able to have a theatrical experience with it years later). I remember seeing it as an in store play at Stars and Stripes Video, the local video store in Jacksonville, Illinois. I was mesmerized. I had to rent it, and soon bought it, and it's been with me ever since.
The Little Mermaid is part of Disney's second Golden Age. I have no idea if there is such a ranking for Disney films (probably), but here I'm referring to my personal assessment. The first Golden Age is Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. Then we enter the Silver Age, which lasts until either The Jungle Book or The Aristocats. The Aristocats is definitely the border between the Silver and Bronze ages, but I'm still not sure which era to rank it in. But from there, the first certain Bronze Age film is Robin Hood, and that lasts until Oliver and Company. Then The Little Mermaid ushers in the second Golden Age, which also consists of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, all of which were as good as anything Disney had ever done. The Rescuers Down Under got in there somehow too, but it's the exception that proves the rule: firmly Bronze Age.
The animation in Little Mermaid is beautiful. The songs are amazing (both my favorite serious and my favorite fun Disney song are from this film, "Part of Your World" and "Under the Sea", respectively). The supporting characters are great. Sebastian and Flounder are classic, but I have to give it up to Scuttle on this one. Scuttle cracks my shit up. Everything from his "dinglehopper" "snarfblat" bullshit, to the way he holds his head to Eric's foot and sadly says he can't make out a heartbeat, to the way he tries to bust in on "Kiss the Girl", Scuttle is hilarious. Ariel is probably the prettiest Disney princess. I love her red hair. And Eric is a very dashing, and down to Earth prince (he reminds me a little of Aladdin, which is a good thing). And the villian... oh, the villain. Ursula is the Disney villain to end all Disney villains. I won't say she's better than the Wicked Queen or Maleficent, but those just aren't the same kind of characters. Ursula is one of the best Disney characters ever. She's based on Divine. I could just stop there and my point is made. A merperson with an octopus body is genius. I don't know if Disney invented that, but I had never seen it before. Her song, "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is amazing (there's really not a bad song in the movie). She's funny but just cruel enough to be scary. And her henchmen are evil eels named Flotsam and Jetsam. That's the best thing I've ever heard in my life.
Flotsam and Jetsam are probably the sleepers of this movie. Rare for Disney henchmen, they are completely competent. They accomplish everything Ursula asks of them, and only get killed by Ursula herself, by accident. I also love that she mourns them ("My babies!"). I like twins who are identical except for one defining characteristic, in Flotsam and Jetsam's case, their mismatched eyes. (Is there an answer on which one is Flotsam and which one is Jetsam? Who has the right yellow eye and who has the left? I never found this out) The scene where they are spying on Ariel, and their white eyes join together to form Ursula's scrying glass... that is really fucking cool.
The scene where Sebastian is escaping the chef is likely the funniest scene in any Disney movie. That guy seemed way too into his job. I could just go on describing each element of this film and why I love it, but I think my point is made. However, probably the most important, and why it's unquestionably my favorite, is how I relate to it. I identify with outsiders, as I mentioned, and I can really relate to someone wanting to belong to a world that they are not a part of. That's why I love "Part of Your World" and it can make me cry sometimes, because the lyrics are almost completely applicable to me (at some points in my life). It's about wanting to be a part of a bright, sunny world where people are laughing and dancing, but you're singing it alone at the bottom of a dark cavern. I can relate to that.
"You'll have your looks... your pretty face... and don't underestimate the importance of bo-dy lan-guage! HA!" - Ursula
No Country For Old Men (2007)
It took me a while to acknowledge to myself how much I love this movie. I don't know why. Maybe because it got so much praise? It came out right around the same time as There Will Be Blood, a movie which I also love, and for a long time, I would have told you I liked better. I don't. No Country is a perfect film. It says things about the human condition I hold dear to my heart. It has scenes that are so good I don't want them to stop. It has more great lines than maybe any other movie on this list. It is a masterpiece. It's not the Coens' first. Hopefully not their last. But it's the one that speaks most personally to me.
Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, I don't think the film is better, but I'm going to call them equally good. Cormac McCarthy is one of the most respected authors living today, both by me and the public at large, so that's a strong statement to make, but I'm making it. Anton Chigurh is not a villain so much as he is just Fate. He is the sharks in Open Water. He is the exploding derrick in There Will Be Blood. He is the taiga in Letter Never Sent. He is the jungle in Aguirre. Llewellyn Moss is Man who says to the universe "Sir, I exist." and the universe replies "That has not created in me a sense of obligation." Ed Tom Bell is the Watcher, who sees all this and tries to make sense of it. In the end the best he can do is "I don't know."
I don't think there's sense to be made. That's what I take away from No Country For Old Men. It's a story about how the world is not a nice place, and how there isn't any reason for that to be so, because there's no reason for anything. Things just are. We can accept it or reject it, and the consequence of our choice is zero. If you've been following my blog, you'll know I agree with that, totally. And that's why No Country is on my list. It presents this story, and this lesson, within a flawless film, filled with amazing performances. It's too elemental a story to say much about, and I could just quote it all day, so I'll just leave it alone. I think I've said my piece. I'll give one quote from the novel, used in the film, and one other literary quote that I think sums it up.
"You can say that things could have turned out differently. That there could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way." - Anton Chigurh
"To me the Universe was all void of Life, or Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O vast, gloomy, solitary Golgatha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?" - Thomas Carlyle
"Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter."
"Where do you want me to put it?"
"Anywhere not in your pocket. Where it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is." - Anton Chigurh
RoboCop (1987)
RoboCop had been passed around and rejected by almost every big name director in Hollywood. Paul Verhoeven threw it away after the first couple of pages, thinking it was another dumb action movie. His wife finished the script and convinced him it wasn't. It isn't. Few people are willing to approach RoboCop on the proper terms. I can sort of understand that. It seems like a dumb action movie at first (after all, it's called RoboCop. Objectively, that's a less promising title than Time Cop). But it's so much more. It is a brilliant satire wrapped in a sci-fi action movie, and it has real human emotion on top of that. It's wonderful.
One of the definitive scenes of RoboCop: "PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY." If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about: the corporate suit throws down his gun immediately, ED-209 doesn't seem to recognize this, and in twenty seconds shreds the guy to paste, at which point the old man tells Ronnie Cox's character "Dick... I am very disappointed." "I'm sure it's only a glitch". That scene says it all. RoboCop is a skewer of bureaucracy and corporate thinking. The police force is privatized by Omni Consumer Products, and that goes about as well as you could expect.
RoboCop is a spiritual successor to Chaplin's Modern Times and Gilliam's Brazil. It's the world we live in followed to its natural conclusion, and it is hilariously frightening. RoboCop is also just a great movie. It has two great villains: the aforementioned Ronnie Cox as boardroom string puller Dick Jones, and Kurtwood Smith as the street level gang leader Clarence Boddicker. Clarence is one of my favorite film villains of all time, and a large part of the reason RoboCop is one of my favorite films. Kurtwood Smith is always good. He's a fairly under-appreciated actor, although he is getting more and more recognition. When he enters a room where his target Bob Morton is cavorting with a couple of floozies/prostitutes, the first thing out of his mouth is "Bitches leave." which has become an internet meme. But everything Clarence says and does in this film is great.
Probably the best scene in the film, in terms of showcasing Kurtwood Smith's skills, and really of the nature of the film itself, is when Clarence and his gang torture Murphy to death. This is a scary scene, because it's played realistically, and it's very cruel, but at the same time, Clarence is laugh out loud funny. Watching this, I'm disturbed and I can't stop myself from laughing at the same time. It's a skilled film that can do that. Just the way he delivers his deadpan "You probably don't think I'm a very nice guy." makes me laugh. The scene peaks when Clarence is tracking the shotgun over Murphy's body with his "Ne ne ne ne ne..." sound effect, and then he blows his hand clean off. It's a brutal effect, absolutely cringeworthy, and then Clarence immediately follows it up with "Well give the man a hand!" It's jerking you around like I talked about Spielberg doing with Jaws. It's great.
One of my favorite scenes in the film is when RoboCop breaks into the cocaine plant and shuts that shit down. Kurtwood Smith is in top form in this whole scene, he has many great lines. ("Guns, guns, guns!" "Come on, Sam! Tigers are playing! To-night!"), but it's also a good example of why he's one of my favorite villains period: even when his dialogue isn't particularly interesting, he delivers it in such a way that I just find it memorable. Two of my favorites quotes in the movie are from this scene, and they're that way. When RoboCop is throwing Clarence through a bunch of plate glass and Clarence starts pleading with him, I've always loved the way he says "Listen to me! Listen to me, you FUCK!" and then when he delivers him to the police station and Clarence spits blood on the forms and says "Just give me my fuckin' phone call."
Kurtwood Smith is the highlight of the cast for me, but there's a lot of great performances here. Peter Weller is perfect as Murphy/RoboCop, which is amazing, considering he was cast pretty much because he was thin enough to fit into the suit. I don't know all the actors names, but I really like the rest of Clarence's gang too, especially the guy who robs the gas station, Emil. That whole scene is great. "I'm a good shot! I can shoot you in the eye from here!" and then the eerie "You're dead! We killed you! We killed you!" That guy gets the best death in the whole movie, driving a truck into a fucking vat of toxic waste like it's Axis Chemicals. Then he's melting and howling and begging for help (this is another scene that turns my stomach and cracks me up at the same time, when his buddy is like "Waaaah, don't touch me, man!") and then just gets split in half by Clarence's car. Why don't they make movies like this anymore?
RoboCop is another film with an absolutely perfect ending. First, I have to say I love Clarence getting stabbed in the throat, because as soon as you saw that spike come out of RoboCop's hand earlier in the film, you were just waiting for him to stab somebody with it, so it was great that he saved it for the second to last bad guy. Then Dick getting fired and blown out the window was an amazing climax. He could have ended the movie there, but the old man asking RoboCop his name, and when he turns around and says "Murphy.", it's just too perfect. Another tears in the eyes moment. What a great movie.
"I'd buy that for a dollar!" - Bixby Snyder
So, without further ado, my ten favorite films, listed alphabetically:
I believe this was the first of Werner Herzog's fiction films I saw, and it was definitely the first time I saw Klaus Kinski. It follows the travels of a legion of 16th century Spanish conquistadors down the Amazon river in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. It is largely based on fact. This film is haunting, beautiful, ugly, absurd and insane. It truly, perhaps more than any other film, captures the madness of the human condition. There are so many unforgettable scenes and images.
It opens with the conquistadors slowly making their way down a narrow, winding mountain path through the jungle, with the mountaintops shrouded in mist. They are dressed in full armor, carrying cannon. Their women, dressed in finery, are born along in sedan chairs. Thus adorned for the royal court, they descend into the heart of the jungle. The music, by progressive German band Popol Vuh (named for the Mayan mytho-historical narrative, including the Creation and the Deluge) is eerie and ethereal.
The expedition is taken over by the madman Aguirre. Aguirre's legendary monologue:
"I am the great traitor. There must be no other. Anyone who even thinks about deserting this mission will be cut up into 198 pieces. Those pieces will be stamped on until what is left can be used only to paint walls. Whoever takes one grain of corn or one drop of water more than his ration, will be locked up for 155 years. If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees... then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of god. The earth I pass will see me and tremble."
Perhaps the most unforgettable scene for me is when the expedition encounters a native, who gestures vaguely down the river when asked where the city of gold is. They are prepared to part on good terms, when the monk halts them. "Wait." he says "We must tell him about the Lord." He is shown a Bible and told it is the word of God. He holds it to his ear and says he doesn't hear anything. They kill him for blasphemy. If there is a better encapsulation of the absurdity of our civilization, I haven't seen it.
There is a horse, also adorned in royal colors, aboard their raft. Aguirre becomes enraged, punches it in the face, and throws it over the side. I can never forget the image of the horse, standing motionless on the riverbank, seen from the perspective of the raft, slowly drifting out of sight and being swallowed by the jungle. On the commentary track, Herzog says that this shot is an example of why he is a filmmaker: that this shot is a type of art which you could not duplicate in any other art form. Only in film could this exist.
The film depicts madness, and it was madness. During filming, the notoriously unstable Kinski jumped up screaming in the middle of the night, enraged at a loud card game in the neighboring tent, and began blindly firing a rifle through the tent wall. He threatened to walk off the film many times, and this was no empty threat, as he had done this several times before and shut down several productions. Bear in mind here the incredible amount of pain and effort that had already gone into the intensely difficult shoot. By his own admission, Herzog could have shot the film a day or so outside the capitol, but he believes in "the voodoo of location", so they were really shooting in the heart of the jungle, really experiencing what the characters were experiencing. The famous story is that Herzog forced Kinski to continue filming at gunpoint. On the commentary track, Herzog says it did not happen exactly like this, he only threatened to shoot Kinski and was not holding a gun at the time. But, he notes, he was not joking. He absolutely would have shot him. "And somehow the bastard knew I'd do it."
Slowly, the river claims them. Men fall dead, hit by arrows from the riverbanks, the attackers unseen. Finally only Aguirre is left, and he declares he will impregnate his own daughter and found the purest dynasty the world has ever known. The raft is overrun by tiny screeching monkeys, and the film ends with the camera spinning around and around the raft, while Aguirre stumbles like a drunk, covered in monkeys.
"That man is a head taller than me. That may change." - Aguirre
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Would you care to see my teenage years? Here they are. Never has a movie spoken to me so personally. None of the events or characters are parallel, but the lifestyle, the attitudes, and the feeling is my life. I could have been a character in this movie. If I had to pick one, Michael Pitt as Donny is the closest to me. This is set in central Florida, where I grew up, and although it's in a much more affluent area than I'm from, I knew every one of these kids. Especially Donny, and especially Heather, as she's from the wrong side of the tracks anyway. I knew a lot of Heathers.
Remember the line from Fight Club "Our Great Depression is our lives."? That was the theory. This is the practice. This is one of two movies I can say define nihilism (the other being Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone), and I know that because I lived it. This depicts a life with no ideals, no beliefs, no ambitions, no convictions, no anything but a bottomless emptiness. You satisfy this emptiness on a moment to moment basis, with drugs, sex, cruelty, violence... anything to make you feel something, just for a moment, because there's nothing to feel. Watch the parents in this. None of them are bad parents, except that they are oblivious. They know nothing of their children or their children's lives, but they sleep soundly, because the truth is out of their sight. Until it isn't. That's so true to life.
Ironically, the only one who seems to have a parent who cares and takes an active interest in his life is Bobby, the titular bully. He's played by Nick Stahl, and it's truly one of the great unheralded villain performances I can think of. I like bullies as characters, when they're young. They're very emotionally complex characters. Kiefer Sutherland as Ace Merrill in Stand By Me is probably my favorite cinematic bully, but Nick Stahl here as Bobby Kent is right up there. He's such a perfect bastard, but Stahl wisely makes him, if not exactly likeable, at least charismatic. There must be some reason these people even associate with him. I would say he's undeniably funny, usually at others' expense. And in the scenes with Bobby's dad, you get a sense of another side of him. People are very, very rarely just one thing, and this film shows that.
When the idea of murder comes up, it's treated with no more significance than anything else. This emptiness is real. That's what scares people about this story (which is true), but as someone who's been there, I can tell you it's just telling the truth. This could have easily happened to me, and the only reason it didn't, is that it didn't. It's a serious, disturbing film, but elements of it are also very funny. Leo Fitzpatrick is frankly hilarious in this, playing another character who I absolutely knew in real life: someone who is 100% full of shit. The soundtrack is full of rap glorifying violence, sex and money, and it, like everything else in this film, is totally accurate. The break comes with the use of Fatboy Slim's "Song For Shelter", which closes out the film. This is one of the best uses of an existing song on a soundtrack I've ever seen. The way the sound juxtaposes with the images, and the dialogue which is slowly overcome by the music until all you hear is the closing crescendo, and the significance of what you're seeing and what you have seen sinks in. It's one of the most powerful endings to a film I can recall, made more so by the fact that all of the dialogue in the final scene is totally factual, from the actual court transcripts. It's all a game until someone gets hurt... except I don't think it was ever a game.
"I don't even know what the fuck I'm doing here, I didn't do shit, I don't know what I'm fucking here for..." - Donny Semenec
Con Air (1997)
I saw Con Air in the theater six times. Still a personal record. I love action movies; I am Nick Frost in Hot Fuzz. I am a lover of the cinema, what can I say, and I love genre films. Really overblown, over the top action films are comic books come to life. They are living cartoons. They are such a joy to watch because they are so true to themselves, so unpretentious. There's a very fine line with films like this, a subtlety that doesn't become clear until you watch as many of them as I have. I don't want my action films too serious, because then you lose the fun and escapism that brought you in the first place. I don't want them too self aware, because I'm not watching these films ironically, and I don't need them to be self-deprecating. I appreciate these films on their own terms. Con Air balanced that better than any movie I've ever seen, and I don't think there's a time or a place I couldn't sit down and watch this from beginning to end.
Con Air is a perfect comic book come to life. The characters have supervillain aliases: Cyrus the Virus, Diamond Dog, Billy Bedlam, Johnny 23, Swamp Thing, Pinball. The cast in this movie is unreal. How they assembled such a collection I don't know, but wow... Con Air was either the first time I saw, or made me a fan of, John Malkovich, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Danny Trejo, and Dave Chappelle (I didn't connect him back to Men in Tights until years later). And at the center of it all is Nicolas Cage, Hollywood's stopped clock, who's right twice a day. He's out of his mind, but when he's good, he's good.
Steve Buscemi as Garland Greene ("the Marietta Mangler") is probably the most interesting character. A charming psychopath, he's clearly Hannibal Lecter inspired. He even wears the bite mask (has anything like this ever been used in real life? Even in the novel, Hannibal wears a standard catcher's mask). I love madmen and serial killers, and if you ask me, Steve Buscemi is a better actor than Antony Hopkins (I think Hopkins is one of the most overrated actors. He's done a lot of good work, but he overacts, phones it in, and picks bad roles a lot too. Brian Cox in Manhunter is the definitive film version of Hannibal, for my money). Garland Greene is presented as a totally sympathetic character, and when he "gets away" at the end, the audience cheered all six times. Funny that letting one little girl live is sufficient penance for butchering "thirty-some people up and down the eastern seaboard". But that's just a testament to Buscemi as an actor and the writing/directing team of Scott Rosenberg and Simon West. I do like the idea that a nationally famous serial killer is presumed to be able to escape detection on the Las Vegas strip, which is crawling with more cops than two seasons of Law and Order.
Regarding West and Rosenberg, neither one of them did a single other thing I'm a fan of, which kind of goes to show just how hard this sort of thing is to do right. West later directed The Expendables 2, which is a textbook example of an action film being too self aware. It thinks it's funny, and it thinks it's clever, and it is neither. I make no claims to Con Air being great art, or a great film, but it is great at what it does, and if it wasn't on this list, this list would be a lie.
"This is your barbecue, Cyrus, and it tastes good!" - Cameron Poe
I don't care if it made a billion dollars, this movie was made for me personally. Batman enjoys popularity resurgences every generation, which I think demonstrates that there's something in the very roots and essence of the character that speaks to people. He's gone through many permutations. The Adam West TV show, despite being awful and ridiculous to the point of flat out stupidity, was an accurate depiction of the comics at the time. When I got into Batman comic books, I was fortunate enough to have a guide, someone who could tell me the best stories to read. Batman got really, really good in the 80s. Comics were getting very dark during that time period, and also getting much, much better, because certain visionary writers were raising the bar. Chief among them were Alan Moore with Watchmen and Frank Miller with The Dark Knight Returns. So Batman was right at the center of this comics renaissance, helping to define it. Batman had some good stories in the 70s, but I think Frank was able to tap into that core of what makes Batman really connect with people, and because Frank Miller is Frank Miller, write an absolutely brilliant, twisted story with it. Something else that grew out of this period was Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, which became the definitive Joker story. Joker is, in my opinion (and probably most people's opinion) the greatest comic book villain of all time. The Killing Joke set the standard for Joker stories; if you want to write the Joker, you're going to have to aim high.
Then we got Tim Burton's 1989 film Batman. It was good. It wasn't great. It was dark and gothic, but that was just Tim Burton being himself. He was going for the 60s Batman, that was all he was familiar with. And it was a gigantic blockbuster. Batman was everywhere that summer, on every t shirt, every lunch box, people had the bat symbol shaved into their hair. It was insane. And then came Batman Returns which was also good, but while simultaneously being darker than the first, you can also see how it's closer to the Adam West Batman. And then two more movies, the less said about the better, which killed the franchise dead, so far as movies. Or so I thought. Batman the Animated Series came out, and that was as good as a lot of the comics. It's truly an amazing show and I can't praise it enough. I was satisfied with that. And for the cinematic version of Batman, we had the Burton films. Better than we had any right to expect really. So that was Batman, and I was happy with that. It wasn't the comics, but it didn't have to be. I had my comics, and my animated series, and my Burton films, and life was good for a Batman fan.
Then Batman Begins came out. And it was really serious, and really sincere. I was a fan of Christopher Nolan, although for his smaller films, and I guessed he just didn't have the chops to do that kind of blockbuster just right, but Batman Begins was really good. It wasn't perfect, but I put it together with my comics and my animated series and my Burton films, and I was glad that Nolan understood that Batman was a serious character who should be taken seriously.
The hype for The Dark Knight began months and months before it came out. I remember hearing that Heath Ledger was going to play the Joker and losing all confidence in the project. I went on a long, in hindsight embarrassing rant about how Christopher Nolan didn't understand the characters after all. And I was wrong.
I was wrong.
As more information leaked out, I started to get more and more excited for The Dark Knight. I saw the opening bank scene, and the chase sequence. I heard the amazing Hans Zimmer score. I knew this was going to be good. I came to understand that Heath Ledger understood the Joker better than anyone who had ever played him before. And then he died. "Yes!", I said "That's it! That's it! The Joker is such a great villain he can kill you if you play him in a movie! That's how crazy he is!" And yes, while I'm sad Heath Ledger is dead, I still believe that. I believe Heath Ledger literally killed himself to give me The Killing Joke, the Joker as he truly is, in the comic books.
My expectations could not have been higher. I was a fanboy who expected this movie to live up to Alan Moore and Frank Miller. And it fucking did. Heath Ledger was the Joker, the self described Agent of Chaos, the laughing nihilist. There's nobody who didn't see this, so I don't need to detail to you how good it is, but maybe that can help you understand what it meant to me. It was the one in a million shot where it all came together, and what Batman movies could be was changed, what super hero movies could be was changed, and what comic book movies could be was changed. A dead man won an Oscar for playing the Joker. I cried watching this, and I still can to this day.
To make one such movie is a miracle. Christopher Nolan did it again. The Dark Knight Rises is as good. It can't have quite the emotional impact as The Dark Knight because of the experience I've described, but think about this: Nolan had an impossibly high standard to meet with The Dark Knight, and he did it. And then, after clearing that bar, he had to get up there again. He had to cram that lightning back into the bottle. I fully expected Dark Knight Rises to suck. I really did. And he proved me wrong again. Thank you, Christopher Nolan. And thank you Heath Ledger.
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We are tonight's entertainment!" - The Joker
Ed Wood is a loving tribute to many things very close to my heart. It's also a great film, and a great story. It is very, very funny, and although there's no straight comedies on this list, this is probably the closest. It's not a comedy because, among other things, it's true. The tragically ludicrous? The ludicrously tragic? Ed Wood (the man) as depicted here reminds me of John Waters crossed with Fred MacMurray.
I am attracted to outsiders. They are my people, and the only place I've ever been able to fit in is with people who don't fit in. Ed Wood is about people like that. I think that's the key to why I love it. Every character in this movie is a freak in one way or the another, but so what? If you asked me to pick a favorite from this cast, I'd have a hard time doing it. Probably the funniest scene in this movie is Bela Lugosi wrestling with a non-functioning mechanical octopus. It stands well for Ed's films in general.
Ed Wood is just a very well done film about a man following impossible dreams. I am a fan of the real Ed Wood, and I don't find his films funny. They were too earnest to be funny. You just can't watch them as films, you have to watch them as the evidence of the making of a film, and that's what Ed Wood is about. It's about a guy who does what he does because he just has to do it. So what if he's no good at it? So what if he can't catch a break? So what if everybody laughs at him? Ed wants to make movies, so Ed makes movies. There's something about that which speaks to me.
I also love black and white films, and I'm glad I was able to include one on this list, even if it was done as a stylistic choice. I love old Hollywood, I love that sort of 1950s sensibility; just the way people talked and carried themselves back then. It's fascinating to me. I love these characters and I love this story, because, like me, they're freaks and outsiders and they're fine with it. I think Werner Herzog or Harmony Korine or John Waters would have gotten along really well with Ed and his friends.
There's an interesting undercurrent of alternative sexuality here which I like, too. Ed is completely unashamed of his transvestism (as was the real Ed, by all accounts), and Bill Murray gives one of my favorite smaller roles of his career here, as the camp queen Bunny Breckinridge. I identify with his contradictory sexuality. He's part of a group of characters I connect with in that way, who I always thought would make a good group of tattoos. Bunny, Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs, Eli from Let the Right One In, maybe Eddie Izzard. After the amazing scene with Bela and the octopus, I think my favorite moment in this movie is Vincent D'Onofrio's cameo as Orson Welles. He delivers a line worth taking to heart.
"Visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?" - Orson Welles
It seemed contradictory to my impulses to have two Werner Herzog/Klaus Kinski films, but I simply cannot have this list without either of these films. They are masterpieces. In a way, they can be seen as companion pieces: they tell the story of a madman who has an impossible dream, and against all odds and no matter the cost, he will not stop until he achieves it.
Fitzcarraldo is the story (based on fact) of an opera lover who wants to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle, and hire Caruso to sing in it. He needs money. Fortunes are made on rubber in this part of the world, so he sets out to become a rubber baron. He discovers an unclaimed parcel of rubber trees, determined to be worthless because they are made inaccessible by treacherous river rapids. He discovered another tributary which comes within several hundred meters of the rubber trees, separated by a mountain. He leases the parcel from the government, and sets out to drag a ship over the mountain into the neighboring river system.
This is a story of madness, of determination. It speaks of quests, of dreams. It is a record of man's foolishness, man's pride in the face of nature, man's ambition and vision... all those things which make us human. There is no other film like it. Because to make this film, Herzog knew that he had to really drag a real ship over a real mountain. Like Aguirre, but even more so, the film itself is the message of the film. It is not enough to tell the story. Herzog has to live the story to truly tell it. If he used a plastic ship, the audience would know it was plastic. No one else in the world could have made Fitzcarraldo besides Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski.
Funnily enough, filming started with Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo, with Mick Jagger as his goofy sidekick. Robards dropped out after becoming sick with dysentery, and Jagger soon followed. In desperation, Herzog turned to his friend and one time collaborator, Klaus Kinski. This saved the film, in my opinion, because while Jason Robards could certainly play a madman, Klaus Kinski was a madman. This movie is what it is because it is real. The film is more real than the story it depicts, as the real Fitzcarraldo disassembled his ship before transporting it over the mountain. Fitzcarraldo's determination to get his ship over the mountain and make his rubber fortune is Herzog's determination to get his ship over the mountain and make his film. Fitzcarraldo's madness and erratic behavior is Kinski's madness and erratic behavior. When Herzog says that his documentaries are fiction and his fiction are documentaries, Fitzcarraldo is the film the proves the second half of that statement true.
Fitzcarraldo is not a perfect film. It may be disjointed and slightly overlong. It is the reality that makes it perfect. In the same way as I said David Foster Wallace's The Pale King was a perfect book, in that a book about depression was his suicide note, so too is Fitzcarraldo. A film about an impossible dream was Herzog's impossible dream. And it is spectacular.
Fitzcarraldo should not be viewed on its own. You must watch the companion documentary, Burden of Dreams, about the making of the film. They are a two part work, you need each to appreciate the other. I won't discuss it too much, because it will be included when I do a list like this for documentaries, but I will give you one quote, and one image from it, and that is Fitzcarraldo:
Herzog : "If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project."
The image: Herzog sunk thigh deep in mud, physically pulling his leg out each time he has to take a step forward.
"I want my opera house! I want the opera house! This church remains closed until this town has its opera house. I want my opera house! I want my opera house! I want my opera house!" - Fitzcarraldo
I did this list alphabetically because I can't order my favorite films, but I can pick my single favorite movie, and it's Jaws. Jaws is a perfect film. Every frame, every second is right. It is everything I want from a movie, and for sheer entertainment, it has never been equaled. It's scary, it's funny, it's interesting, it's suspenseful, I like the actors, I like the characters, the music is incredible. Jaws has it all.
Let's start with the score. Jaws probably has one of the most famous scores of all time, and it deserves to. The deceptively simple score has been reused and parodied so many times, it's more or less the definition of "ominous dread". This was before John Williams ran out of ideas. I've seen clips of Jaws with the music removed, and while I do still find it scary (natural sound is always scary to me in a movie), I can definitely acknowledge the major contribution that score makes to the film.
Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw are all perfect. Jaws is one of the few examples of a movie that's better than the book, and these three central roles are most of why. If you've read the book, you know that Hooper and Quint and unlikable assholes, just unpleasant to be around. The book is much darker, but it almost feels like I'm reading Cujo, a story about how sometimes the world will just decide to kick your ass for no reason at all. That's true, and there's a place for that, but I think every single change Spielberg made was for the better, and now I'd say Quint, definitely, is one of my favorite film characters of all time.
My favorite character in the movie, however, is Mayor Vaughn. I want his blazer with the little anchors on it more than anything, and he has the best lines in the film. "Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody goes 'Huh? What?' You yell shark... we've got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July." "Now why don't you take a long, close look at that sign. Those proportions are correct." "Love to prove that, wouldn't ya? Get your name into the National Geographic?" And even though I just used it yesterday, I have to include my favorite line in this film (or maybe any film): "Fellows, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock."
The shark, despite the fact that it barely worked, goes down as one of the scariest movie monsters of all time. Put him up there with Dracula, Freddy, Pennywise, I don't care who, and I would bet you Bruce has caused as many nightmares as any of them. Each kill is terrifying. The opening scene, with the unfortunate Chrissy, was recently determined to be the single most frightening scene in any film, ever. I disagree, but I won't call it a bad choice.
I'm amazed and somewhat jealous that Spielberg could make this when he was only 23. The craftsmanship he put into the film is incredible. For example, the scene where Brody is chumming off the back of the boat and you get your first good look at the shark. It's lost impact over time, but back in the 70s, people would still giggle at profanity, so Brody's line to "Come down here and chum some of this shit." was designed to get nervous laughter, and then, bam, he hits you with the shark when you're not expecting it at all, and the laughter is caught in your throat. He gives the audience a second to catch their breath and then delivers the most famous line in the film: "You're gonna need a bigger boat." That's film-making.
Another great example is when Hooper pulls the tooth out the hull of the fishing boat, but drops it when the head floats into view. It's an eerie scene, with the murky green water, and you know something is going to happen. It's a false scare, just a jump, but Spielberg tried several different ways of timing it. He had the head float out as soon as Hooper found the tooth, he tried it with a long pause, and finally settled on just a split second pause. He tested the audience each time, and found the short pause freaked them out the most. Stuff like that, that's why I love Jaws, and it's what made Spielberg a real auteur.
Everything from when the three leads head out on the Orca until the end is gold, but Quint's story about the Indianapolis is probably my favorite scene in the film. Quint's death has to be one of the greatest film deaths ever, as well. In the novel, he gets his leg tangled in a rope, is pulled under and drowns. A nice Moby Dick allusion, but again, Spielberg made it better. And "Smile, you son of a bitch!" How great is that? Jaws didn't make a single mistake, and that's why it's my favorite movie.
"Here lies the body of Mary Lee; died at the age of a hundred and three; for fifteen years she kept her virginity; not a bad record for this vicinity." - Quint
So I love Disney movies, and really, when it comes to picking my favorite one, it's not hard at all. Dumbo, Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland would all easily be included among a general list of my favorite films, but when it comes down to it, nothing comes close to Little Mermaid. Where to begin?
I remember vividly the first time I saw this. I didn't see it in the theater (when it was new, although fortunately I was able to have a theatrical experience with it years later). I remember seeing it as an in store play at Stars and Stripes Video, the local video store in Jacksonville, Illinois. I was mesmerized. I had to rent it, and soon bought it, and it's been with me ever since.
The Little Mermaid is part of Disney's second Golden Age. I have no idea if there is such a ranking for Disney films (probably), but here I'm referring to my personal assessment. The first Golden Age is Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi. Then we enter the Silver Age, which lasts until either The Jungle Book or The Aristocats. The Aristocats is definitely the border between the Silver and Bronze ages, but I'm still not sure which era to rank it in. But from there, the first certain Bronze Age film is Robin Hood, and that lasts until Oliver and Company. Then The Little Mermaid ushers in the second Golden Age, which also consists of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, all of which were as good as anything Disney had ever done. The Rescuers Down Under got in there somehow too, but it's the exception that proves the rule: firmly Bronze Age.
The animation in Little Mermaid is beautiful. The songs are amazing (both my favorite serious and my favorite fun Disney song are from this film, "Part of Your World" and "Under the Sea", respectively). The supporting characters are great. Sebastian and Flounder are classic, but I have to give it up to Scuttle on this one. Scuttle cracks my shit up. Everything from his "dinglehopper" "snarfblat" bullshit, to the way he holds his head to Eric's foot and sadly says he can't make out a heartbeat, to the way he tries to bust in on "Kiss the Girl", Scuttle is hilarious. Ariel is probably the prettiest Disney princess. I love her red hair. And Eric is a very dashing, and down to Earth prince (he reminds me a little of Aladdin, which is a good thing). And the villian... oh, the villain. Ursula is the Disney villain to end all Disney villains. I won't say she's better than the Wicked Queen or Maleficent, but those just aren't the same kind of characters. Ursula is one of the best Disney characters ever. She's based on Divine. I could just stop there and my point is made. A merperson with an octopus body is genius. I don't know if Disney invented that, but I had never seen it before. Her song, "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is amazing (there's really not a bad song in the movie). She's funny but just cruel enough to be scary. And her henchmen are evil eels named Flotsam and Jetsam. That's the best thing I've ever heard in my life.
Flotsam and Jetsam are probably the sleepers of this movie. Rare for Disney henchmen, they are completely competent. They accomplish everything Ursula asks of them, and only get killed by Ursula herself, by accident. I also love that she mourns them ("My babies!"). I like twins who are identical except for one defining characteristic, in Flotsam and Jetsam's case, their mismatched eyes. (Is there an answer on which one is Flotsam and which one is Jetsam? Who has the right yellow eye and who has the left? I never found this out) The scene where they are spying on Ariel, and their white eyes join together to form Ursula's scrying glass... that is really fucking cool.
The scene where Sebastian is escaping the chef is likely the funniest scene in any Disney movie. That guy seemed way too into his job. I could just go on describing each element of this film and why I love it, but I think my point is made. However, probably the most important, and why it's unquestionably my favorite, is how I relate to it. I identify with outsiders, as I mentioned, and I can really relate to someone wanting to belong to a world that they are not a part of. That's why I love "Part of Your World" and it can make me cry sometimes, because the lyrics are almost completely applicable to me (at some points in my life). It's about wanting to be a part of a bright, sunny world where people are laughing and dancing, but you're singing it alone at the bottom of a dark cavern. I can relate to that.
"You'll have your looks... your pretty face... and don't underestimate the importance of bo-dy lan-guage! HA!" - Ursula
It took me a while to acknowledge to myself how much I love this movie. I don't know why. Maybe because it got so much praise? It came out right around the same time as There Will Be Blood, a movie which I also love, and for a long time, I would have told you I liked better. I don't. No Country is a perfect film. It says things about the human condition I hold dear to my heart. It has scenes that are so good I don't want them to stop. It has more great lines than maybe any other movie on this list. It is a masterpiece. It's not the Coens' first. Hopefully not their last. But it's the one that speaks most personally to me.
Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, I don't think the film is better, but I'm going to call them equally good. Cormac McCarthy is one of the most respected authors living today, both by me and the public at large, so that's a strong statement to make, but I'm making it. Anton Chigurh is not a villain so much as he is just Fate. He is the sharks in Open Water. He is the exploding derrick in There Will Be Blood. He is the taiga in Letter Never Sent. He is the jungle in Aguirre. Llewellyn Moss is Man who says to the universe "Sir, I exist." and the universe replies "That has not created in me a sense of obligation." Ed Tom Bell is the Watcher, who sees all this and tries to make sense of it. In the end the best he can do is "I don't know."
I don't think there's sense to be made. That's what I take away from No Country For Old Men. It's a story about how the world is not a nice place, and how there isn't any reason for that to be so, because there's no reason for anything. Things just are. We can accept it or reject it, and the consequence of our choice is zero. If you've been following my blog, you'll know I agree with that, totally. And that's why No Country is on my list. It presents this story, and this lesson, within a flawless film, filled with amazing performances. It's too elemental a story to say much about, and I could just quote it all day, so I'll just leave it alone. I think I've said my piece. I'll give one quote from the novel, used in the film, and one other literary quote that I think sums it up.
"You can say that things could have turned out differently. That there could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way." - Anton Chigurh
"To me the Universe was all void of Life, or Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility; it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O vast, gloomy, solitary Golgatha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your God?" - Thomas Carlyle
"Don't put it in your pocket, sir. Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter."
"Where do you want me to put it?"
"Anywhere not in your pocket. Where it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is." - Anton Chigurh
RoboCop had been passed around and rejected by almost every big name director in Hollywood. Paul Verhoeven threw it away after the first couple of pages, thinking it was another dumb action movie. His wife finished the script and convinced him it wasn't. It isn't. Few people are willing to approach RoboCop on the proper terms. I can sort of understand that. It seems like a dumb action movie at first (after all, it's called RoboCop. Objectively, that's a less promising title than Time Cop). But it's so much more. It is a brilliant satire wrapped in a sci-fi action movie, and it has real human emotion on top of that. It's wonderful.
One of the definitive scenes of RoboCop: "PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE TWENTY SECONDS TO COMPLY." If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about: the corporate suit throws down his gun immediately, ED-209 doesn't seem to recognize this, and in twenty seconds shreds the guy to paste, at which point the old man tells Ronnie Cox's character "Dick... I am very disappointed." "I'm sure it's only a glitch". That scene says it all. RoboCop is a skewer of bureaucracy and corporate thinking. The police force is privatized by Omni Consumer Products, and that goes about as well as you could expect.
RoboCop is a spiritual successor to Chaplin's Modern Times and Gilliam's Brazil. It's the world we live in followed to its natural conclusion, and it is hilariously frightening. RoboCop is also just a great movie. It has two great villains: the aforementioned Ronnie Cox as boardroom string puller Dick Jones, and Kurtwood Smith as the street level gang leader Clarence Boddicker. Clarence is one of my favorite film villains of all time, and a large part of the reason RoboCop is one of my favorite films. Kurtwood Smith is always good. He's a fairly under-appreciated actor, although he is getting more and more recognition. When he enters a room where his target Bob Morton is cavorting with a couple of floozies/prostitutes, the first thing out of his mouth is "Bitches leave." which has become an internet meme. But everything Clarence says and does in this film is great.
Probably the best scene in the film, in terms of showcasing Kurtwood Smith's skills, and really of the nature of the film itself, is when Clarence and his gang torture Murphy to death. This is a scary scene, because it's played realistically, and it's very cruel, but at the same time, Clarence is laugh out loud funny. Watching this, I'm disturbed and I can't stop myself from laughing at the same time. It's a skilled film that can do that. Just the way he delivers his deadpan "You probably don't think I'm a very nice guy." makes me laugh. The scene peaks when Clarence is tracking the shotgun over Murphy's body with his "Ne ne ne ne ne..." sound effect, and then he blows his hand clean off. It's a brutal effect, absolutely cringeworthy, and then Clarence immediately follows it up with "Well give the man a hand!" It's jerking you around like I talked about Spielberg doing with Jaws. It's great.
One of my favorite scenes in the film is when RoboCop breaks into the cocaine plant and shuts that shit down. Kurtwood Smith is in top form in this whole scene, he has many great lines. ("Guns, guns, guns!" "Come on, Sam! Tigers are playing! To-night!"), but it's also a good example of why he's one of my favorite villains period: even when his dialogue isn't particularly interesting, he delivers it in such a way that I just find it memorable. Two of my favorites quotes in the movie are from this scene, and they're that way. When RoboCop is throwing Clarence through a bunch of plate glass and Clarence starts pleading with him, I've always loved the way he says "Listen to me! Listen to me, you FUCK!" and then when he delivers him to the police station and Clarence spits blood on the forms and says "Just give me my fuckin' phone call."
Kurtwood Smith is the highlight of the cast for me, but there's a lot of great performances here. Peter Weller is perfect as Murphy/RoboCop, which is amazing, considering he was cast pretty much because he was thin enough to fit into the suit. I don't know all the actors names, but I really like the rest of Clarence's gang too, especially the guy who robs the gas station, Emil. That whole scene is great. "I'm a good shot! I can shoot you in the eye from here!" and then the eerie "You're dead! We killed you! We killed you!" That guy gets the best death in the whole movie, driving a truck into a fucking vat of toxic waste like it's Axis Chemicals. Then he's melting and howling and begging for help (this is another scene that turns my stomach and cracks me up at the same time, when his buddy is like "Waaaah, don't touch me, man!") and then just gets split in half by Clarence's car. Why don't they make movies like this anymore?
RoboCop is another film with an absolutely perfect ending. First, I have to say I love Clarence getting stabbed in the throat, because as soon as you saw that spike come out of RoboCop's hand earlier in the film, you were just waiting for him to stab somebody with it, so it was great that he saved it for the second to last bad guy. Then Dick getting fired and blown out the window was an amazing climax. He could have ended the movie there, but the old man asking RoboCop his name, and when he turns around and says "Murphy.", it's just too perfect. Another tears in the eyes moment. What a great movie.
"I'd buy that for a dollar!" - Bixby Snyder
Saturday, July 20, 2013
"I'm not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock." - Mayor Vaughn
Sharks are some of my favorite animals. They look awesome, some of them are scary as all hell, and they're miracles of evolution. Some of them are unchanged since the time there were dinosaurs wandering around. They are perfect machines. All they do is swim, and eat, and make little sharks.
Since that's two Jaws references now, I'll also point out that Jaws is my favorite movie of all time. It's not my favorite movie because there's a monster shark in it... but it helps. Since I've got my dinosaur tattoos, I need a shark one now. Probably go for something from Jaws, and that way it will be dual purpose, like how my dinosaur tattoos are also Calvin and Hobbes tattoos. Here are my favorite sharks, in no particular order.
Great White Shark - Look at that thing. That would scare Pennywise the Clown. Jaws actually does appear in IT, as one of IT's shape shifts. A kid sees Jaws in the canal and he tell Bill Denbrough the fin was nine feet tall. ("Do you understand what I'm saying? Just the fin was that big.") In short: Great Whites are the scariest things on Earth. They are majestic, monstrous animals, in the full sense of those words. They are truly awesome, and not like a hot dog, I mean they fill me with awe.
Great whites fill me with a complex stew of emotions that I rarely feel towards anything else. Awe, respect and fear almost equally. I love their eyes. ("Black," as Quint says "like a doll's eye.") Great whites are Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God. In truth, great whites actually are pretty intelligent, and socially sophisticated, but holy shit, they're just... primal.
I would love to do a cage dive with great whites. My heart would be in my throat the entire time and I'd be operating on pretty much pure adrenalin, but that's why I want to do it. To be able to get in close with an animal I have such strong feelings about. The apex predator of apex predators (well, that would actually be man. But you know what I mean).
Makos are strong and fast. They have killed a few people, but sadly they have much more to fear from us than we do from them. That's true of all sharks, but especially makos because they're highly prized game fish. That's because they'll fight you. Sometimes if you hook a mako, he'll even get pissed and jump right into the boat.
I think Deep Blue Sea was genius to make super Makos (more or less a melding of Makos and Great Whites). Pound for pound, they're probably the nastiest shark you'd ever want to deal with. Sort of a fishy version of Kevin from Sin City. Also worth noting: most sharks don't do well in captivity, but Makos do the worst. The longest anyone has been able to keep one alive is five days.
Hammerhead Shark - Hammerheads are actually a group of several species of shark, but this blog is hardly a scientific journal, so we'll keep it simple. Easily the most famous of the freak sharks, I think a hammerhead is probably one of the most recognizable fish in the sea. It's that head! It gives them total vision both above and below them at all times.
That's the other thing I love hammerheads for. They school, which most sharks don't. It's one of my favorite images in nature. They will only school during the day time, in groups of up to 100, and during the evening return to solitary hunting.
Three of the over twenty species of hammerhead have attacked humans, but no one has ever been killed by a hammerhead.
Thresher Shark - Look at that tail. They whip that thing around, slap fish with it, and stun them before eating. Incredible. Threshers are very solitary, heavily migratory sharks. They're not dangerous to humans at all, although some instances of divers being accidentally cut by a tail whip have happened. There is one story, almost certainly false, of a fisherman being decapitated by a breaching thresher's tail whip. I wish so badly that it were true.
Since great whites, makos and threshers can all completely clear the water, I may be creating the impression that this is common behavior for sharks. It isn't. Very few of them can, it's just that three of those few happen to be some of my favorites. Threshers are also at risk from humans, which is too bad, because if you actually get a good look at their face, they're really cute.
They look like little Precious Moments sharks.
Goblin Shark - Another cutie! I like the Goblin Shark because look at that fucking thing. It looks like something from Lovecraft's aquarium. The goblin shark is rare and little is known about it, but it's a good example of the fact that there are some very, very weird sharks.
They have been caught alive, but goblin sharks live in such deep waters that they and humans pose no danger to each other. They're pretty big, bigger than a human diver, so we should probably be grateful they live so deep that nobody would ever run across one. Whether they'd attack a human is kind of a moot point. I'd probably just have heart attack. Life in the very deep ocean might as well be from another dimension, and I'm sure there's plenty of sharks down there we've never even seen.
The goblin shark is something from a nightmare, but he's probably just a small sample of what's really going on down there. They aren't even from the true fathomless depths (they bottom out around 4,000 ft, although there's some evidence they can live as far as 5,000 feet down), and they have lived in aquariums as long as a week.
Basking Shark - The basking shark is one of three filter feeding sharks (the other two are the whale shark and the very rare megamouth shark). It's a pretty freaky animal. For one thing, they are enormous, up to forty feet long and nineteen tons. That makes them the second biggest fish, after their cousins the whale shark, and it's pretty close. They physically resemble some of the dangerous shark species, so there's been many instances of an "Everybody out of the water!" situation, because from the surface (particularly if their dorsal fin is sticking out), it looks like you're seeing a double size Jaws. And that huge, gaping mouth is pretty strange looking.
It's certainly big enough to fit in, but basking sharks only eat plankton, and they're very slow moving, so no danger of getting sucked in like a bird into a jet engine. They're found all over the world. They're very commercially important, but are being overfished (common theme here). I would love to swim with basking sharks one day, and unless we fish them to extinction, that's a pretty reasonable goal. A great place to do it is around the British Isles. I'd be a little freaked out just by their appearance and huge size, and the fact that the waters there are so murky, but nothing on the level of cage diving with great whites.
Some interesting cultural notes about basking sharks: they are featured prominently in Robert J. Flaherty's 1934 psuedo-documentary Man of Aran, about life on Ireland's Aran Islands. It shows islanders fishing for basking sharks using premodern techniques, and although these scenes were fabricated, it was a representation of the way basking sharks had been fished by Aran islanders in the past, and very interesting for that reason. Basking sharks got their name because of the way they appear to "bask" in warm water, but I must have heard about them around the same time I saw the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall classic Big, because I've always associated Hanks' character Josh Baskin with basking sharks, and for a long time assumed they had been named by a scientist named Basking.
Basking sharks are also responsible for a lot of sea monster legends. Both by being big, fuck-off fish, and because of the fact that when they die, they tend to rot in a way that makes them look like monsters. Ever seen this one?
That was a basking shark.
Those are my favorite sharks, but one last note before I go. Since I love movies, and I love sharks, and Jaws is my favorite movie, I want to mention one other shark movie.
Open Water - This movie is scary. Not scary like Jaws, which is just a great film, Open Water is a pure horror film, and a pure shark film, with the sharks filling the role of oblivion. Open Water is troubling, on a psychological level. It was made for almost no money, with minimal cast and crew. It's just frightening and disturbing. So much so that I would say don't watch it if you only watch movies to be entertained. It goes somewhere in the human psyche that, thankfully, most of us never have to confront. It's one of my favorites.
Since that's two Jaws references now, I'll also point out that Jaws is my favorite movie of all time. It's not my favorite movie because there's a monster shark in it... but it helps. Since I've got my dinosaur tattoos, I need a shark one now. Probably go for something from Jaws, and that way it will be dual purpose, like how my dinosaur tattoos are also Calvin and Hobbes tattoos. Here are my favorite sharks, in no particular order.
Mako Shark - Makos are raptors to the Great White's T-Rex (In Spielbergian terms, I know that's totally inaccurate scientifically). They're quick, athletic little bastards. Well, not really all that little, more like ten feet long. They're the fastest shark. They can swim 31mph consistently and do short bursts of up to 46mph. They can jump 30 feet in the air.
"Jordan!"
Come to think of it, I don't want to sell great whites short, since they're also amazing jumpers.
"Shaq!"
Some interesting cultural notes about basking sharks: they are featured prominently in Robert J. Flaherty's 1934 psuedo-documentary Man of Aran, about life on Ireland's Aran Islands. It shows islanders fishing for basking sharks using premodern techniques, and although these scenes were fabricated, it was a representation of the way basking sharks had been fished by Aran islanders in the past, and very interesting for that reason. Basking sharks got their name because of the way they appear to "bask" in warm water, but I must have heard about them around the same time I saw the Tom Hanks/Penny Marshall classic Big, because I've always associated Hanks' character Josh Baskin with basking sharks, and for a long time assumed they had been named by a scientist named Basking.
Basking sharks are also responsible for a lot of sea monster legends. Both by being big, fuck-off fish, and because of the fact that when they die, they tend to rot in a way that makes them look like monsters. Ever seen this one?
Those are my favorite sharks, but one last note before I go. Since I love movies, and I love sharks, and Jaws is my favorite movie, I want to mention one other shark movie.
The sharks in Open Water are totally real, by the way. They're Caribbean Reef Sharks.
Pretty.
Friday, July 19, 2013
"IT'S MY HEAD!" - John Malkovich
When I was younger, I used to get cluster headaches. From wikipedia:
"The pain of cluster headaches is remarkably greater than in other headache conditions, including severe migraines; experts have suggested that it may be the most painful condition known to medical science. Female patients have reported it as being more severe than childbirth. Peter Goadsby, a neurologist and headache specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, has commented:
Cluster headache is probably the worst pain that humans experience. I know that's quite a strong remark to make, but if you ask a cluster headache patient if they've had a worse experience, they'll universally say they haven't. ... Women with cluster headache will tell you that an attack is worse than giving birth. So you can imagine that these people give birth without anaesthetic once or twice a day, for six, eight or ten weeks at a time, and then have a break."
I wasn't aware of this condition until much later in life, years after I had stopped getting them. I'm glad I found out about it, because it helps me to put some things into perspective. I'm also glad I didn't know about it at the time, as that probably made it easier to deal with. I always thought they were migraines, but that's only because I thought migraines were the worst headache a person could get. I told the doctor I had migraines and he took me at my word. Both kinds of headache can be localized behind the eye. That's how it was for me: I felt it right behind my right eye.
Cluster headaches are sometimes called "suicide headaches" because some people who have them commit suicide. That's what I mean about being glad I didn't know about cluster headache back when I had them; a lot of people get migraines, and while it's awful, you just kind of deal with it. I figured if everybody else was, I could. If I knew this was the kind of pain that drove people to suicide, I might have considered it, particularly since I had no reason to believe they were ever going to stop. I got them about once every two or three days, and they lasted from forty minutes to an hour. Sometimes I'd go as long as week without. A very small percentage of people with cluster headache have a permanent headache. If that had happened, there's no question I'd have killed myself, and rightfully so.
When I read about the cluster headache symptoms, everything matched. When I'd get my attacks, I'd rock back and forth (like Mankind used to do), my face would start to sweat, and my nose would run. As to the feeling, allow me a literary allusion. When I read A Million Little Pieces, the notorious root canal passage really hit home, because it was what my headaches felt like. Since James Frey actually didn't have a root canal without anesthesia, I give him credit as a writer, because this is what I tried to convey and never got across quite so well:
"The electric pain shoots and it shoots at a trillion volts and it is white and burning. The bayonet is twenty feet long and red hot and razor sharp. The pain is greater than anything I've ever felt and it is greater than anything I could have imagined. It overwhelms every muscle and every fiber and every cell of my body...
At the point of penetration, a current shoots through my body that is not pain, or even close to pain, but something infinitely greater. ... My brain is white and it feels as if it's fucking melting. I cannot breath. Agony. ... I give up and I give in and I am consumed by the whiteness and the agony and I am there for what seems to be eternity. The whiteness and the agony. The whiteness and the agony. The whiteness and the agony.
If there was a God, I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell him my soul to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled our individual fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you Motherfucker. Please end. Please end. Please end."
That's pretty much how I felt, every other day or so. The problem with thinking these were just migraines was that I really felt like I was overreacting. Knowing that it has been said "That actually is the worst pain anyone can feel." is really so gratifying. I'm not going to break down and cry Will Hunting style, but no, it wasn't my fault.
The line about spitting in God's face is spot on. I became first an atheist, then a nihilist, largely because of the experience of those headaches. I still had this nagging fear of Hell (which I escaped by reading The Selfish Gene, as detailed in an earlier post), but, not for nothing, the worst Hell could do is just not give me a break between my headaches. They were that bad.
And then they went away. I don't remember when it happened. I don't remember the last one, or if they tapered off gradually or all at once. I just know that one day I realized I didn't get them anymore. Today, ask anyone who knows me what I'm like, and you will invariably hear some variation of "laid back". And why not? I was given respite. I almost don't think it would be too dramatic to say a second chance.
I have experienced a lot of pain in my life, of all kinds. Just limiting it to physical pain, though, besides the cluster headaches, I've gotten migraines too, really intense tension headaches, burns, broken bones, a torn ACL. Some others. Honestly though, after the cluster headaches, probably the worst I've felt was during some of my more intense hangovers. For a heavy drinker such as myself, who wouldn't shy away from cheap brown liquor, they were a perfect storm of headache, nausea, disorientation and self loathing. Still, it's empowering to be able to say you've taken the worst.
I think this may be taking a left turn, but I don't always know where these are going to end up. A lot of my life has been spent trying to prove things. I wanted a lot from life. I wanted to be important, or, failing that, at least notorious. I failed at a lot of things, and I went through a lot of hardships. I couldn't be a good person, so I set out to be the best bad person I could be. Nothing new. I dove headlong into the abyss. I couldn't have the dizzying highs, so I settled for all terrifying lows. It's a sad cliche, but when I look back on it, I never realized how well I did it. I wanted to do the most drugs, have the most sex, play the loudest rock and roll. We were all just losers trying to outdo each other, see who could be the craziest, be the sickest.
And now, I'm reminded of what David Foster Wallace said while talking about Kafka. I'm going to apply it to myself. You spend your whole life pounding on a door, trying desperately to get in, clawing at the frame, screaming to be let in. And then, before you die, the door opens... but it opens inward, and you realize you've been inside the whole time. My door has opened. I'm glad it wasn't right before I die. I see now that I have nothing to prove. I have no pride in what I've done, but I have no shame either. I can't, and what would the point be? Fun is fun, and done is done.
I guess how I'm connecting that with the headaches is this: when you've taken the worst pain, there's not much left to fear. You can put some perspective on things. There's nowhere to go but up. And when you've gazed into the abyss and you don't have anything to prove, you can start living. I did what I was trying to do a long, long time ago, and it almost killed me. I got the downside. I can cross that off the bucket list. I need the upside now. I think it's rare that a person can have both, but I think you need both to truly be free. I have never been able to be myself. Now, I don't have to prove anything or do anything or explain anything. I can just be me.
“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. ”- Heidegger
"The pain of cluster headaches is remarkably greater than in other headache conditions, including severe migraines; experts have suggested that it may be the most painful condition known to medical science. Female patients have reported it as being more severe than childbirth. Peter Goadsby, a neurologist and headache specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, has commented:
Cluster headache is probably the worst pain that humans experience. I know that's quite a strong remark to make, but if you ask a cluster headache patient if they've had a worse experience, they'll universally say they haven't. ... Women with cluster headache will tell you that an attack is worse than giving birth. So you can imagine that these people give birth without anaesthetic once or twice a day, for six, eight or ten weeks at a time, and then have a break."
I wasn't aware of this condition until much later in life, years after I had stopped getting them. I'm glad I found out about it, because it helps me to put some things into perspective. I'm also glad I didn't know about it at the time, as that probably made it easier to deal with. I always thought they were migraines, but that's only because I thought migraines were the worst headache a person could get. I told the doctor I had migraines and he took me at my word. Both kinds of headache can be localized behind the eye. That's how it was for me: I felt it right behind my right eye.
Cluster headaches are sometimes called "suicide headaches" because some people who have them commit suicide. That's what I mean about being glad I didn't know about cluster headache back when I had them; a lot of people get migraines, and while it's awful, you just kind of deal with it. I figured if everybody else was, I could. If I knew this was the kind of pain that drove people to suicide, I might have considered it, particularly since I had no reason to believe they were ever going to stop. I got them about once every two or three days, and they lasted from forty minutes to an hour. Sometimes I'd go as long as week without. A very small percentage of people with cluster headache have a permanent headache. If that had happened, there's no question I'd have killed myself, and rightfully so.
When I read about the cluster headache symptoms, everything matched. When I'd get my attacks, I'd rock back and forth (like Mankind used to do), my face would start to sweat, and my nose would run. As to the feeling, allow me a literary allusion. When I read A Million Little Pieces, the notorious root canal passage really hit home, because it was what my headaches felt like. Since James Frey actually didn't have a root canal without anesthesia, I give him credit as a writer, because this is what I tried to convey and never got across quite so well:
"The electric pain shoots and it shoots at a trillion volts and it is white and burning. The bayonet is twenty feet long and red hot and razor sharp. The pain is greater than anything I've ever felt and it is greater than anything I could have imagined. It overwhelms every muscle and every fiber and every cell of my body...
At the point of penetration, a current shoots through my body that is not pain, or even close to pain, but something infinitely greater. ... My brain is white and it feels as if it's fucking melting. I cannot breath. Agony. ... I give up and I give in and I am consumed by the whiteness and the agony and I am there for what seems to be eternity. The whiteness and the agony. The whiteness and the agony. The whiteness and the agony.
If there was a God, I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell him my soul to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled our individual fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you Motherfucker. Please end. Please end. Please end."
That's pretty much how I felt, every other day or so. The problem with thinking these were just migraines was that I really felt like I was overreacting. Knowing that it has been said "That actually is the worst pain anyone can feel." is really so gratifying. I'm not going to break down and cry Will Hunting style, but no, it wasn't my fault.
The line about spitting in God's face is spot on. I became first an atheist, then a nihilist, largely because of the experience of those headaches. I still had this nagging fear of Hell (which I escaped by reading The Selfish Gene, as detailed in an earlier post), but, not for nothing, the worst Hell could do is just not give me a break between my headaches. They were that bad.
And then they went away. I don't remember when it happened. I don't remember the last one, or if they tapered off gradually or all at once. I just know that one day I realized I didn't get them anymore. Today, ask anyone who knows me what I'm like, and you will invariably hear some variation of "laid back". And why not? I was given respite. I almost don't think it would be too dramatic to say a second chance.
I have experienced a lot of pain in my life, of all kinds. Just limiting it to physical pain, though, besides the cluster headaches, I've gotten migraines too, really intense tension headaches, burns, broken bones, a torn ACL. Some others. Honestly though, after the cluster headaches, probably the worst I've felt was during some of my more intense hangovers. For a heavy drinker such as myself, who wouldn't shy away from cheap brown liquor, they were a perfect storm of headache, nausea, disorientation and self loathing. Still, it's empowering to be able to say you've taken the worst.
I think this may be taking a left turn, but I don't always know where these are going to end up. A lot of my life has been spent trying to prove things. I wanted a lot from life. I wanted to be important, or, failing that, at least notorious. I failed at a lot of things, and I went through a lot of hardships. I couldn't be a good person, so I set out to be the best bad person I could be. Nothing new. I dove headlong into the abyss. I couldn't have the dizzying highs, so I settled for all terrifying lows. It's a sad cliche, but when I look back on it, I never realized how well I did it. I wanted to do the most drugs, have the most sex, play the loudest rock and roll. We were all just losers trying to outdo each other, see who could be the craziest, be the sickest.
And now, I'm reminded of what David Foster Wallace said while talking about Kafka. I'm going to apply it to myself. You spend your whole life pounding on a door, trying desperately to get in, clawing at the frame, screaming to be let in. And then, before you die, the door opens... but it opens inward, and you realize you've been inside the whole time. My door has opened. I'm glad it wasn't right before I die. I see now that I have nothing to prove. I have no pride in what I've done, but I have no shame either. I can't, and what would the point be? Fun is fun, and done is done.
I guess how I'm connecting that with the headaches is this: when you've taken the worst pain, there's not much left to fear. You can put some perspective on things. There's nowhere to go but up. And when you've gazed into the abyss and you don't have anything to prove, you can start living. I did what I was trying to do a long, long time ago, and it almost killed me. I got the downside. I can cross that off the bucket list. I need the upside now. I think it's rare that a person can have both, but I think you need both to truly be free. I have never been able to be myself. Now, I don't have to prove anything or do anything or explain anything. I can just be me.
“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself. ”- Heidegger
Thursday, July 18, 2013
"I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot." - Werner Herzog
Books are my true love, but life is empty without books, films and music. One distinction of films versus books is that films only take an hour or three to watch, so you can generally get through a lot more of them. I watch at least one movie a day, and sometimes more; typically I'll watch one before bed (I get interesting dreams this way). I'll probably do a blog about the most profound films of my life, similar to my books post, but I don't feel up to that kind of introspection today, so I'm just going to give a little blurb about some good stuff I've seen lately. Watch them.
Red State
I like that poster. Oddly, I didn't realize this was meant as a horror film. I would have called it more of an action film, with some horrific scenarios, but a lot of action movies have those. This movie was just a lot of fun to me, since religious extremism is kind of a hobby of mine. The cast was great fun (Ben Affleck, by his own admission, stole half of them for Argo based on liking this film). John Goodman is one of my all time favorites (and hey, my dad looks just like him!). He and Michael Parks are go-to workhorses. I've never seen a bad performance from either of them, even in bad films. Both Skyler and Badger from Breaking Bad are in this, sort of fun. This is one of those movies with lots of Deep Blue Sea deaths. You know the kind I mean: out of nowhere, WTF kills of characters you had every right to expect to live through the whole thing.
Probably as good as the film itself is the story behind it, which you can hear Kevin Smith discuss in his Q&A Kevin Smith: Burn in Hell. Both are available to stream on Netflix. I love Kevin Smith. I may not love all his work, but I love him as a person. (I'm a big fan of Mallrats, Dogma, and all his lectures and Q&As. I'm a medium fan of Clerks and the Clerks cartoon. The rest I could take or leave or haven't seen). Every time I think he's losing it, he totally brings me back. In Burn in Hell, he totally justifies Cop Out. Both his motivations for making it (the short version: integrity. I know, I know, just hear him out), and also this: he tried to get Red State made for years with no success, until one day a producer says "Nah, I don't want to read the script, I don't care about that." "Why?" "I saw your name on a poster next to Bruce Willis's name, so I know you know how to make movies. How much do you need?" Also, in Burn in Hell, he discusses how part of his motivation to make Red State was his friend Malcolm Ingram's documentary...
Small Town Gay Bar
Finding community in a community that wants nothing to do with you. I love stuff like this, as it's pretty much a practical end to the argument of homosexuality being a choice. If it were, these people would not make that choice. Some of them, anyway, as that's another thing I like about it. Some of the people in this movie really are freak nasty, because yeah, some gay people are like that. It's honest, there's no agenda. Fred Phelps himself is interviewed in this. He's a very charming guy, and, not to justify his actions, I truly don't believe they're coming from a position of hatred and prejudice. They're rooted in a legitimate belief, and he'll tell you straight up they just want attention. They make their signs as awful as they do because they want cameras on them. He'll say that straight up. As I've said for many years, if you want those people to go away, quit paying attention to them. That's what I think of Fred himself, but as with a lot of extremists, it's his followers you have to worry about. He just attracts the absolute scum of the Earth to him like a magnet. One guy in this movie makes one of the best/funniest justifications for being gay I've ever heard: "I like dick, men happen to have 'em." Preach on, brother!
In the Family
Another film about gay issues. This is such a beautiful movie. This is one of the best movies I'll see all year, and if you see one movie I talk about in this blog, it should probably be this one. It's not flawless, but it's one of those films that's so well done and so meaningful that the flaws don't really matter. This is about a gay couple raising a young son in Tennessee. The boy's biological father is suddenly killed in a car accident, and his sister makes the decision to take the child from his other dad, basically cutting them out of each others lives. It goes from there, dealing with the man's struggles to get his son back. I like this because it takes a very contentious political issue, and makes it a purely human story. None of the politics matter here, this is just about a dad and his son.
This is a debut feature from Patrick Wang. He wrote, directed, starred and produced, and based on this, we're looking at a major talent. I think Roger Ebert once said everyone has one great film performance in them: playing themselves. Patrick's performance as Joey is so real, I actually kind of suspected that this was a fairly autobiographical film. Among other things, his Tennessee accent is spot on. Nope. Ethnically Chinese, Patrick Wang is from New York, and graduated from MIT. I guess this was just a story he wanted to tell, and it's a story worth telling. If someone's mind needs changing about gay parents, this is probably as good as it's going to get. If you can watch this and not be moved by it, I don't think you're going to be moved.
Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices
I'm about to hit you with a lot of Herzog. I've been making an effort to make my way through his entire filmography, which has been an absolutely wonderful, rewarding experience. So, in case you get Herzog overload, I'm starting with my strongest recommendation. If you watch one Herzog film I mention, I recommend this one. Carlo Gesualdo was a 16th century Italian prince and composer. He's known for composing madrigals which used a chromatic language which would not be rediscovered in music for another 300 years. He was also something of a madman. Legends abound of his bizarre personality and behavior, and he famously murdered his wife and her lover. His castle is cursed. This film about him goes absolutely off the deep end. You will see: the preserved corpses of his murdered wife and her lover on display in a chapel, as he injected them with some kind of strange poison (no one to this day knows what) that preserved their intravenous system. Patients of a mental hospital fritting about Gesualdo's ruined castle, claiming to be the ghosts of he and his wife. Bizarre artifacts which none can explain and caused Gesualdo to lose months of sleep.
Parts of this film are so strange, I started to doubt the veracity of it as a "documentary", and after one scene in particular (which I won't reveal), I decided "No way. That's staged." And sure enough, it was. When I looked into it later, a lot of this film was made up by Herzog, and learning that really helped me to understand him as a filmmaker. I learned that he has released documentaries which he fabricated entirely, and even his serious documentaries often includes a scene or two thrown in for dramatic effect. He's said that his documentaries are fiction and his fiction are documentaries, and after that, I gained a whole new appreciation for him as a filmmaker. As he said about Death for Five Voices:
"Most of the stories in the film are completely invented and staged, yet they contain the most profound possible truths about Gesualdo. I think of all my 'documentaries', Death For Five Voices is the one that really runs amok, and it is one of the films closest to my heart."
I can't give it a higher recommendation than that.
Huie's Sermon
Pictured is the German title. The majority of these Herzog films I'm discussing are German language, from early in his career. They're not widely available in commercial release, but easy enough to find online with embedded subtitles. This one needs no subtitles, and is one of Herzog's documentaries with no fiction, as it's really less a documentary than a document. It's just a sermon by Huie Rogers at The Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. That's it. Single camera, nothing else except some footage of the very run down neighborhood cut into the middle (I believe while Herzog was reloading his camera). Huie is one of those rantin' and ravin', hootin' and hollerin' type of black preachers I love so much. If you think of James Brown in The Blues Brothers (which came out the same year as this), that's pretty much him. Just a man doing what he does. Make of it what you will.
God's Angry Man
Another film about a preacher. This time he's a televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott. Televangelists, in my estimation, are usually either frauds or insane, but based on this, I don't find Gene Scott to be either. Well, ok, maybe he's a little insane, but even though he screams for money on a nightly basis, his heart seems to be in the right place. That's the most interesting aspect of this film. Herzog always seems to find the most interesting people to profile. Scott had a long career, but we're seeing him here in 1981. It's something to behold, just on a level of the hair and the suits and the smarm, because this is late 70s/early 80s televangelism at its funniest. The (again) screaming and anger about sending money, the rock bottom fashion sense and the atrocious singing are all here. If you want to hear the corniest songs you've ever heard in your life sung by the greasiest rubes this side of Mayberry (and this is in Los Angeles), look no further. Scott also liked to rant against the FCC and has a band of wind up monkeys he uses to do so, so uh, there's also that.
(Side note: these German language films about English speakers have a unique element. The people speak English, Herzog dubs voiceover in German, and I read subtitles in English. It's an odd way to take in dialogue, but what are you gonna do?)
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck...
Sorry for the white text on black, but that is the title screen, and there's no DVD cover. This is about the 1976 world livestock auctioneer championship. By Herzog's standards, this is approaching a fluff piece, but there are still some of his signatures here. He discusses his horror at the language of auctioneering, a language so extreme, but simultaneously musical, and how only capitalism could produce such a beautiful, horrible language. The championship is held right in the heart of Amish country, and he contrasts the way a championship of capitalism conflicts with the Amish lifestyle, who are not competitive or capitalistic at all. He notes how in the Amish dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, there isn't even any way to say "world championship". Since Pennsylvania Dutch was originally rooted in German, he is curious if they will understand him if he speaks German to them. They don't. (As a side note, I would really love to see Herzog do a whole documentary about the Amish, but I know they wouldn't want to be filmed, or have attention drawn to them). There's a little of that, but most of this film is just documenting the contestants doing their thing. All the people who get one on one interviews are characters. I had to smile a bit at the guy who ends up winning the whole deal (he's Canadian, of all things), and how overjoyed he is. He's achieved a dream he's wanted since he was six years old. It's a great feeling. Then he says he can't think of a single other profession where they get the best together and have a world championship. No?
Wings of Hope
This is absolutely essential, but better to watch if you're already familiar with Herzog's work. This is about Juliane Koepke, the sole survivor of Peruvian LANSA flight 508, after it disintegrated in midair following a lightning strike. At 17, she free fell into the Peruvian jungle, and trekked her way to safety over twelve days. It's an incredible story of the human spirit. Juliane is really something else. She and Herzog return to the crash site 27 years later, examine the wreckage of the plane, and retrace her journey out of the jungle. She's very detached about the whole thing, but I guess you have to be, after surviving something like that.
The reason it's better to come to this with some knowledge of Herzog is for context. He wanted to make this film for years, he just had some trouble tracking Juliane down, as she tended to shun publicity after the crash. The reason he needed to make it is that he was almost on the doomed flight himself, and was only saved by a last minute itinerary change. He was location scouting for Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and in fact, while he and his crew were making their way through the Peruvian jungle, the 17 year old Juliane was no more than a couple of streams away from them, fighting for her life.
The jungle will eat you alive. As Herzog said about it: "In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel." Juliane was not an average kid. Her parents were both biologists and she had grown up in the jungle. She knew it, and she knew how to survive in it already. There's absolutely no way she'd have lived otherwise. She grew up to be a biologist herself, and married another (Her husband is a wasp expert. Just the existence of such things is interesting to me). She observed bats in a hollow tree for a year for her master's thesis. These things would probably be interesting enough for a film on their own, but oh yeah, let's not forget that she fell out of the sky and clawed her way through twelve days of hell on Earth when she was a kid.
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
Okay, back to the modern era with Herzog. This one's available to stream on Netflix, and I think it's another one of his best. Like Grizzly Man (probably Herzog's most famous documentary), this is assembled from footage that Herzog didn't shoot. That's good, in it's way, as it means he was so moved by what he saw that he had to make a film of it. He's a great editor, and his narration adds a lot to any film. For my money, forget Morgan Freeman. If someone was going to narrate my life, I'd want it to be Werner Herzog (with Rutger Hauer a close second). This was a moving sort of film to me, because, based on the writings of Daniel Quinn and some other things, I got very into the idea of living off the grid. Being totally self reliant, and living off the land. These people are doing it, for real. And they are, as the title suggests, happy. Make no mistake, it's a hard life, because this is Siberia. Rule number one about Siberia: you do not fuck with Siberia. But they're still making it work.
I think that also provides an interesting contrast between the young Herzog and the old Herzog. Young Herzog was bleaker than bleak. He never completely lost that. I'm reminded of this quote from Grizzly Man: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.", or his comment that Into the Abyss (a film which made me change my opinion on the death penalty) would actually be a good title for all of his films. But there's a positivity to his narration here that I wouldn't expect. The young Herzog might have painted this as harsh existence with little reward, but he doesn't. It all depends on how you look at it, and if you want to see this as an idyllic way to live, you can. I sort of did... until I saw what the mosquitoes were like in the summer. Oh... dear god, no.
Letter Never Sent
Rule number two about Siberia: you do not fuck with Siberia. This is a 1959 Soviet film about a geological expedition that runs into trouble. Scenarios include an all time "Oh shit..." moment as it goes from bad to worse for these poor bastards. I watched this based on a recommendation from a friend, which was based on my recommendation of Happy People; generally about how the taiga can just annihilate people like the parasites we probably are. That comes across, definitely, but this is a really good film. It's a good story, the actors are likeable, and it's really well shot. There are some truly beautiful shots in this. The one they used for the Criterion cover there is one of them, but there's no shortage. The camera work is very innovative, particularly for the 50s. It's, for lack of a better word, intimate, almost like you're the fifth member of the team, but subtle enough that your attention isn't really being drawn to it, except in the very opening scene, where it's used entirely appropriately. I was just really, really impressed with the quality of filmmaking overall.
I know very little about Soviet films. This is only the second one I've ever watched. The other was Battleship Potemkin, which is one of the most well made movies in history. If you haven't seen that, the whole thing is on YouTube, so check it out. You'll recognize so much of it from other movies you've seen, it's been alluded to and stolen from so many times; like the first time I watched Citizen Kane I recognized half of it from The Simpsons. Battleship Potemkin is like that, but even more so. It's a Communist propaganda film, so you should probably bear that in mind, but it deserves to be seen.
I like that poster. Oddly, I didn't realize this was meant as a horror film. I would have called it more of an action film, with some horrific scenarios, but a lot of action movies have those. This movie was just a lot of fun to me, since religious extremism is kind of a hobby of mine. The cast was great fun (Ben Affleck, by his own admission, stole half of them for Argo based on liking this film). John Goodman is one of my all time favorites (and hey, my dad looks just like him!). He and Michael Parks are go-to workhorses. I've never seen a bad performance from either of them, even in bad films. Both Skyler and Badger from Breaking Bad are in this, sort of fun. This is one of those movies with lots of Deep Blue Sea deaths. You know the kind I mean: out of nowhere, WTF kills of characters you had every right to expect to live through the whole thing.
Probably as good as the film itself is the story behind it, which you can hear Kevin Smith discuss in his Q&A Kevin Smith: Burn in Hell. Both are available to stream on Netflix. I love Kevin Smith. I may not love all his work, but I love him as a person. (I'm a big fan of Mallrats, Dogma, and all his lectures and Q&As. I'm a medium fan of Clerks and the Clerks cartoon. The rest I could take or leave or haven't seen). Every time I think he's losing it, he totally brings me back. In Burn in Hell, he totally justifies Cop Out. Both his motivations for making it (the short version: integrity. I know, I know, just hear him out), and also this: he tried to get Red State made for years with no success, until one day a producer says "Nah, I don't want to read the script, I don't care about that." "Why?" "I saw your name on a poster next to Bruce Willis's name, so I know you know how to make movies. How much do you need?" Also, in Burn in Hell, he discusses how part of his motivation to make Red State was his friend Malcolm Ingram's documentary...
Finding community in a community that wants nothing to do with you. I love stuff like this, as it's pretty much a practical end to the argument of homosexuality being a choice. If it were, these people would not make that choice. Some of them, anyway, as that's another thing I like about it. Some of the people in this movie really are freak nasty, because yeah, some gay people are like that. It's honest, there's no agenda. Fred Phelps himself is interviewed in this. He's a very charming guy, and, not to justify his actions, I truly don't believe they're coming from a position of hatred and prejudice. They're rooted in a legitimate belief, and he'll tell you straight up they just want attention. They make their signs as awful as they do because they want cameras on them. He'll say that straight up. As I've said for many years, if you want those people to go away, quit paying attention to them. That's what I think of Fred himself, but as with a lot of extremists, it's his followers you have to worry about. He just attracts the absolute scum of the Earth to him like a magnet. One guy in this movie makes one of the best/funniest justifications for being gay I've ever heard: "I like dick, men happen to have 'em." Preach on, brother!
Another film about gay issues. This is such a beautiful movie. This is one of the best movies I'll see all year, and if you see one movie I talk about in this blog, it should probably be this one. It's not flawless, but it's one of those films that's so well done and so meaningful that the flaws don't really matter. This is about a gay couple raising a young son in Tennessee. The boy's biological father is suddenly killed in a car accident, and his sister makes the decision to take the child from his other dad, basically cutting them out of each others lives. It goes from there, dealing with the man's struggles to get his son back. I like this because it takes a very contentious political issue, and makes it a purely human story. None of the politics matter here, this is just about a dad and his son.
This is a debut feature from Patrick Wang. He wrote, directed, starred and produced, and based on this, we're looking at a major talent. I think Roger Ebert once said everyone has one great film performance in them: playing themselves. Patrick's performance as Joey is so real, I actually kind of suspected that this was a fairly autobiographical film. Among other things, his Tennessee accent is spot on. Nope. Ethnically Chinese, Patrick Wang is from New York, and graduated from MIT. I guess this was just a story he wanted to tell, and it's a story worth telling. If someone's mind needs changing about gay parents, this is probably as good as it's going to get. If you can watch this and not be moved by it, I don't think you're going to be moved.
I'm about to hit you with a lot of Herzog. I've been making an effort to make my way through his entire filmography, which has been an absolutely wonderful, rewarding experience. So, in case you get Herzog overload, I'm starting with my strongest recommendation. If you watch one Herzog film I mention, I recommend this one. Carlo Gesualdo was a 16th century Italian prince and composer. He's known for composing madrigals which used a chromatic language which would not be rediscovered in music for another 300 years. He was also something of a madman. Legends abound of his bizarre personality and behavior, and he famously murdered his wife and her lover. His castle is cursed. This film about him goes absolutely off the deep end. You will see: the preserved corpses of his murdered wife and her lover on display in a chapel, as he injected them with some kind of strange poison (no one to this day knows what) that preserved their intravenous system. Patients of a mental hospital fritting about Gesualdo's ruined castle, claiming to be the ghosts of he and his wife. Bizarre artifacts which none can explain and caused Gesualdo to lose months of sleep.
Parts of this film are so strange, I started to doubt the veracity of it as a "documentary", and after one scene in particular (which I won't reveal), I decided "No way. That's staged." And sure enough, it was. When I looked into it later, a lot of this film was made up by Herzog, and learning that really helped me to understand him as a filmmaker. I learned that he has released documentaries which he fabricated entirely, and even his serious documentaries often includes a scene or two thrown in for dramatic effect. He's said that his documentaries are fiction and his fiction are documentaries, and after that, I gained a whole new appreciation for him as a filmmaker. As he said about Death for Five Voices:
"Most of the stories in the film are completely invented and staged, yet they contain the most profound possible truths about Gesualdo. I think of all my 'documentaries', Death For Five Voices is the one that really runs amok, and it is one of the films closest to my heart."
I can't give it a higher recommendation than that.
Pictured is the German title. The majority of these Herzog films I'm discussing are German language, from early in his career. They're not widely available in commercial release, but easy enough to find online with embedded subtitles. This one needs no subtitles, and is one of Herzog's documentaries with no fiction, as it's really less a documentary than a document. It's just a sermon by Huie Rogers at The Bible Way Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. That's it. Single camera, nothing else except some footage of the very run down neighborhood cut into the middle (I believe while Herzog was reloading his camera). Huie is one of those rantin' and ravin', hootin' and hollerin' type of black preachers I love so much. If you think of James Brown in The Blues Brothers (which came out the same year as this), that's pretty much him. Just a man doing what he does. Make of it what you will.
Another film about a preacher. This time he's a televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott. Televangelists, in my estimation, are usually either frauds or insane, but based on this, I don't find Gene Scott to be either. Well, ok, maybe he's a little insane, but even though he screams for money on a nightly basis, his heart seems to be in the right place. That's the most interesting aspect of this film. Herzog always seems to find the most interesting people to profile. Scott had a long career, but we're seeing him here in 1981. It's something to behold, just on a level of the hair and the suits and the smarm, because this is late 70s/early 80s televangelism at its funniest. The (again) screaming and anger about sending money, the rock bottom fashion sense and the atrocious singing are all here. If you want to hear the corniest songs you've ever heard in your life sung by the greasiest rubes this side of Mayberry (and this is in Los Angeles), look no further. Scott also liked to rant against the FCC and has a band of wind up monkeys he uses to do so, so uh, there's also that.
(Side note: these German language films about English speakers have a unique element. The people speak English, Herzog dubs voiceover in German, and I read subtitles in English. It's an odd way to take in dialogue, but what are you gonna do?)
Sorry for the white text on black, but that is the title screen, and there's no DVD cover. This is about the 1976 world livestock auctioneer championship. By Herzog's standards, this is approaching a fluff piece, but there are still some of his signatures here. He discusses his horror at the language of auctioneering, a language so extreme, but simultaneously musical, and how only capitalism could produce such a beautiful, horrible language. The championship is held right in the heart of Amish country, and he contrasts the way a championship of capitalism conflicts with the Amish lifestyle, who are not competitive or capitalistic at all. He notes how in the Amish dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, there isn't even any way to say "world championship". Since Pennsylvania Dutch was originally rooted in German, he is curious if they will understand him if he speaks German to them. They don't. (As a side note, I would really love to see Herzog do a whole documentary about the Amish, but I know they wouldn't want to be filmed, or have attention drawn to them). There's a little of that, but most of this film is just documenting the contestants doing their thing. All the people who get one on one interviews are characters. I had to smile a bit at the guy who ends up winning the whole deal (he's Canadian, of all things), and how overjoyed he is. He's achieved a dream he's wanted since he was six years old. It's a great feeling. Then he says he can't think of a single other profession where they get the best together and have a world championship. No?
This is absolutely essential, but better to watch if you're already familiar with Herzog's work. This is about Juliane Koepke, the sole survivor of Peruvian LANSA flight 508, after it disintegrated in midair following a lightning strike. At 17, she free fell into the Peruvian jungle, and trekked her way to safety over twelve days. It's an incredible story of the human spirit. Juliane is really something else. She and Herzog return to the crash site 27 years later, examine the wreckage of the plane, and retrace her journey out of the jungle. She's very detached about the whole thing, but I guess you have to be, after surviving something like that.
The reason it's better to come to this with some knowledge of Herzog is for context. He wanted to make this film for years, he just had some trouble tracking Juliane down, as she tended to shun publicity after the crash. The reason he needed to make it is that he was almost on the doomed flight himself, and was only saved by a last minute itinerary change. He was location scouting for Aguirre: The Wrath of God, and in fact, while he and his crew were making their way through the Peruvian jungle, the 17 year old Juliane was no more than a couple of streams away from them, fighting for her life.
The jungle will eat you alive. As Herzog said about it: "In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel." Juliane was not an average kid. Her parents were both biologists and she had grown up in the jungle. She knew it, and she knew how to survive in it already. There's absolutely no way she'd have lived otherwise. She grew up to be a biologist herself, and married another (Her husband is a wasp expert. Just the existence of such things is interesting to me). She observed bats in a hollow tree for a year for her master's thesis. These things would probably be interesting enough for a film on their own, but oh yeah, let's not forget that she fell out of the sky and clawed her way through twelve days of hell on Earth when she was a kid.
Okay, back to the modern era with Herzog. This one's available to stream on Netflix, and I think it's another one of his best. Like Grizzly Man (probably Herzog's most famous documentary), this is assembled from footage that Herzog didn't shoot. That's good, in it's way, as it means he was so moved by what he saw that he had to make a film of it. He's a great editor, and his narration adds a lot to any film. For my money, forget Morgan Freeman. If someone was going to narrate my life, I'd want it to be Werner Herzog (with Rutger Hauer a close second). This was a moving sort of film to me, because, based on the writings of Daniel Quinn and some other things, I got very into the idea of living off the grid. Being totally self reliant, and living off the land. These people are doing it, for real. And they are, as the title suggests, happy. Make no mistake, it's a hard life, because this is Siberia. Rule number one about Siberia: you do not fuck with Siberia. But they're still making it work.
I think that also provides an interesting contrast between the young Herzog and the old Herzog. Young Herzog was bleaker than bleak. He never completely lost that. I'm reminded of this quote from Grizzly Man: "I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.", or his comment that Into the Abyss (a film which made me change my opinion on the death penalty) would actually be a good title for all of his films. But there's a positivity to his narration here that I wouldn't expect. The young Herzog might have painted this as harsh existence with little reward, but he doesn't. It all depends on how you look at it, and if you want to see this as an idyllic way to live, you can. I sort of did... until I saw what the mosquitoes were like in the summer. Oh... dear god, no.
Rule number two about Siberia: you do not fuck with Siberia. This is a 1959 Soviet film about a geological expedition that runs into trouble. Scenarios include an all time "Oh shit..." moment as it goes from bad to worse for these poor bastards. I watched this based on a recommendation from a friend, which was based on my recommendation of Happy People; generally about how the taiga can just annihilate people like the parasites we probably are. That comes across, definitely, but this is a really good film. It's a good story, the actors are likeable, and it's really well shot. There are some truly beautiful shots in this. The one they used for the Criterion cover there is one of them, but there's no shortage. The camera work is very innovative, particularly for the 50s. It's, for lack of a better word, intimate, almost like you're the fifth member of the team, but subtle enough that your attention isn't really being drawn to it, except in the very opening scene, where it's used entirely appropriately. I was just really, really impressed with the quality of filmmaking overall.
I know very little about Soviet films. This is only the second one I've ever watched. The other was Battleship Potemkin, which is one of the most well made movies in history. If you haven't seen that, the whole thing is on YouTube, so check it out. You'll recognize so much of it from other movies you've seen, it's been alluded to and stolen from so many times; like the first time I watched Citizen Kane I recognized half of it from The Simpsons. Battleship Potemkin is like that, but even more so. It's a Communist propaganda film, so you should probably bear that in mind, but it deserves to be seen.
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